Christology teaches that Jesus, a Jewish male, brings salvation also to non-Jews and to women. Is either maleness or Jewishness an essential aspect of salvation?

In our confession that Jesus is the Christ we confirm that there is a divine dimension within the reality of Jesus of Nazareth . But is his essential humanity, as found intertwined with his innate deity, essentially Jewish and male? Could Christ have come as a woman, or a gentile, and still have been Christ? Could the Sophia-Second-Person, incarnate as “Joshua Messiah”, instead have come as “Judith Hokmah” or “Julius Sapientus” and shared our humanity to the same effect? The formal, ancient creeds of the Church hold that our salvation requires a human mediator, and we are assured by the testimony of the gospels that Jesus lived under human conditions , but how were those conditions influenced by the form of his appearing?  Sobrino argues that any talk of salvation is a complex concept since it depends on the multiple oppressions and wants from which human beings need to be saved, so how might our faith be different if God had become incarnate in a different human way?

As a historical account of the ministry of Jesus or the life of the early churches the Bible does not tell us how it actually was but how its religious significance was understood.  According to Richard Horsley there was no religion of “Judaism” in the time of Jesus; only Judean culture which included a divine aspect. The separation of a religion out of this national culture came much later in history. This immediately raises questions about how we define Jewishness as an apparently necessary quality of the universal saviour, or even as a defining context of the story. Would a Judaism-derived form of Christianity have followed the temple-driven forms of Jesus’ day? Might there have been a Christian hajj in the stead of the great pilgrimage traditions of Judaism had Vespasian not attacked Jerusalem? Is this what God wanted, or is Jesus’ “necessary” Jewishness merely cultural? Alongside questions of religious context, how would a female Christ have been subversive to the patriarchal family and social structures of the time? Jesus as a first-born son had duties which he apparently laid aside to go preaching on the road. Would this have been easier as an unmarried daughter/sister? Jesus was seen as a drunkard, would even a virginal Judith have been seen as a slut? It is the women in Mark’s passion narrative who understand the true nature of Jesus’ work as an act of service . Jesus’ activities seem more easily understood by women, it is female disciples who are the true witnesses and ministers of grace and they are enabled to do so specifically because they are women.

Grey said that redemption encapsulates the yearning of the whole universe for integrity and healing where women have been engaging in the work of redemption for all of humanity through their maintenance of relationships with natural processes . In a similar vein Gutierrez views Creation as the first salvific act and the redemptive work of Christ as both re-creation and new creation . This new creation fulfils the promise of Israel and Judah’s prophets and creates a new chosen people consisting of all humanity. Jesus is a Jew, drawn from the Exodus people, and as such demonstrates the honour of God’s faithful promise. The Chosen are not un-Chosen as God continues to reveal Godself to all of Creation through them: it is important that God chose to use a descendent of Abraham as the incarnated actor of universal salvation. Jesus was born into real history , significant history, and his nationality was a significant aspect of that reality. With divine adherence to the covenants God made with Jesus’ ancestors Emmanuel was engineered to be a descendent of David, (and therefore of Abraham), born in the Promised Land. God’s choice was a cultural decision, not a religious one, and therefore it holds no particular significance for salvation. Jesus had to be a Judean in fulfilment of the promises of God to the Jewish nation, but he did not have to be a follower of Judaism for salvation to take effect.

The personhood of Jesus was important to the first generation of church . The replacement for Judas Iscariot had to come from someone who had known and been with Jesus since the beginning, who knew the story of his life because he had been an eye-witness to the events and present to hear the teaching first-hand. With a move toward creedal faith in later generations the teaching of Jesus became less important and it was his death that was all that anyone needed to know. In the patristic age, where theology was written by pastors, Christology was able to generate the life, faith, praxis and mission of the community at the deepest level of its being . The Jewishness of Jesus was non-essential as his transformative example was interpreted into new cultures from earliest times even though he had to be Jewish for his example to be effective among his own people in his own day. This leads us toward the second question, that of the necessity of Jesus’ gender for the work of salvation, in that we can ask whether Jesus’ masculinity make it easier to interpret the gospel into new cultures. After all no man in leadership at the time of Jesus would want to listen to a woman, especially a foreign woman. Perhaps a woman could have died as universal saviour for all mankind, but would Gentile or Pagan men have wanted to listen to her ideas? Johnson has argued that Christology is the doctrine most used to suppress women in that the imperial tradition that assimilated Christology is patriarchal in nature.

 If in a patriarchal culture a woman had preached compassionate love and enacted a style of authority that serves, she would most certainly have been greeted with a colossal shrug. Is this not what women are supposed to do by nature? But from a social position of male privilege Jesus preached and acted this way, and herein lay the challenge....Jesus’ preaching about the reign of God and his inclusive lifestyle lived and breathed the opposite to patriarchy, creating a challenge that brought down on his head the wrath of religious and civil authority .

The heart of the problem for modern women seeking to identify with the story of salvation is not that Jesus was a man but that too many of his male followers have not followed in his footsteps insofar as patriarchy has defined men’s self-identity and their relationships. Strobel suggested that the cross is a detrimental symbol for women in that the self-sacrificing love of Jesus apparently sets an example for womanly submission and meekness in the face of oppression. How much more would this have been the case had the saviour been female? The cross is seen to warrant the exploitation of all women, yet most if not all Feminist writers argue that it is not Jesus’ maleness that is doctrinally important to the work of salvation but his humanity in solidarity with the whole suffering human race, including women. In contrast to the psyche of men Grey notes that a woman’s identity is wrapped up in her relationships, (who is she if not mother/wife? ) and her role in the redemptive work she performs to redeem others . She raises the question of Dostoevsky’s Sonia who enters prostitution to provide for her family and then follows Raskolnikov into exile. She saves them, but who saves her? Christ emptied himself to come to earth for the salvation of the world, but isn’t that what women are supposed to do? The actions of redemption might have been unchanged with a female Christ, but our language around it might be different.

The intent of the Christological doctrine was and continues to be inclusive , even though as an individual Jesus had the particular qualities of masculine gender and Jewish nationality. If Jesus Christ takes the place of humanity as the ultimate sacrifice, then his body becomes a site of multiple identities and the question whether what is not assumed is not redeemed is moot as all is assumed at the cross even if not in life. Indeed Cheng argues that the atoning work of Christ on the cross is actually the end of scapegoating , the blaming and elimination of the innocent outsider by the insiders. The resurrection is God’s emphatic No! to the dynamic of ‘insiders’ versus ‘outsiders’ , including women and non-Jews. The work of Jesus Christ is significant for human beings of all sexes, races and historical conditions. Jesus’ ability to be Saviour does not reside in his maleness but in his loving, liberating history lives in the midst of the powers of evil and oppression. According to Fiorenza it is Gnostic and patristic texts which subordinate women to the role of having to “become male” for salvation, not Paul or Jesus. Paul’s call to the “higher work” of celibacy in ministry actually freed women from the social conventions that a woman must be married to have identity and purpose . Wives should submit culturally to their husbands, even if those husbands are pagan, but single women are freed to submit only to Christ’s law. The gospel of Jesus Christ, a Jewish man, is liberation to all humanity, even Greek women.

Neither Jesus’ maleness nor his religious Jewishness is an essential aspect of our salvation in Christ; however each was a necessary part of the work of Jesus of Nazareth in his life as a prophetic teacher in Roman Occupied Judea. That God became incarnate in the form of a boy in a first century Galilean village makes it important for those of us who are not male or Jewish to understand how the ministry and sacrifice of Jesus of Nazareth relates to us, but ultimately the gospel can be seen to be a message of liberation and restoration for all of God’s creation, human and non-human, male and female.