Jesus was likely a victim of sexual assault. This may seem an outrageous or surprising claim, yet as I will show, it’s one that is consistent with the biblical text and historical context. But more importantly, it is a claim that opens up possibilities for healing. Acknowledging that Jesus was likely a victim of sexual assault is, in some sense, good news for other victims and for those of us who aim to build trauma-informed, survivor-centered communities.
I cannot stress strongly enough the immensity and immediacy of this issue. As I type this, horror after horror is being enacted in Gaza and too many other parts of the world. Amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza, photographs and videos have emerged of dozens of male detainees stripped to their underwear and kneeling in lines against walls. Their hands are cuffed behind their backs, and patrolling soldiers surround them. Some media reports allege that these are dangerous military-age men who were found in areas that should have been evacuated, whereas family members deny any links to Hamas, and some of the pictured individuals appear to be boys and youths.[1] As I see these images and read these stories, I think about how victims of violence and sexual assault are not silent—they are actively silenced—and I wonder how reconsidering the identity of Jesus might change how we approach crises like the one in Gaza.
The Sexual Characteristics of Crucifixion
If Jesus experienced sexual violence, it is unsurprising it is not described in the biblical text or other sources. The womanist biblical scholar Mitzi J. Smith indicates that out of the more than thirty thousand people crucified by the Romans, we only reliably know the names of about twenty victims. But although the historical record of the sexual violence that specific victims experienced is sparse, we have a much clearer sense of the general context. According to David Tombs, who researches gender-based violence, sexual abuse, and torture at the University of Otago, Christ’s murder was a sexually violent act that, judging by how imprisonment and crucifixion worked at the time, likely involved forms of bodily terror like sexual humiliation, stripping, mocking, naked exposure, or even impalement through the genitalia. Roman incarceration and capital punishment were designed to control through dehumanization, embarrassment, and pain. Crucifixion ended not only a victim’s life but also their standing as human in the eyes of society. To emphasize their victims’ lack of humanity, soldiers would humiliate them publicly, torture them sexually, and crucify them naked in rituals designed to make it impossible for those victims to die with honor. Forcibly stripping a person publicly, especially repeatedly, would tear away their sense of physical and psychological security.[2] When it comes to these ritualized murders, sexually abusive dynamics were the rule, not the exception, and this was most likely the case for Jesus as well.
These scenes of Roman abuse are all too similar to the ones we have observed in the current genocide in Palestine; we’d just need to substitute tanks for crosses. Tombs does an excellent job explaining the presence of sexual overtones in the descriptions of the crucifixion:
The Gospels themselves indicate that there was a high level of sexual humiliation in the way that Jesus was flogged, insulted, and then crucified. From evidence of the ancient world it seems that flogging the victim in public while naked was routine. Mark, Matthew, and John all imply that this was also the case with the flogging of Jesus. Likewise, as noted above, crucifixion usually took place while the victim was naked and there is little reason to think that Jesus or other Jews would have been an exception to this. If the purpose was to humiliate the victim, full nakedness would have been particularly shameful in the Jewish context. . . . Based on what the Gospel texts themselves indicate, the sexual element in the abuse is unavoidable. An adult man was stripped naked for flogging, then dressed in an insulting way to be mocked, struck, and spat at by a multitude of soldiers before being stripped again (at least in Mark 15:20 and Matt. 27:31) and reclothed for his journey through the city—already too weak to carry his own cross—only to be stripped again (a third time) and displayed to a mocking crowd to die while naked. When the textual presentation is stated like this, the sexual element of the abuse becomes clear: the assertion is controversial only insofar as it seems startling in view of usual presentations.[3]
So, as we can see, the historical context and Gospels strongly suggest some level of spiritual assault. Even beyond the Gospels, though, Paul also may suggest that Jesus was sexually assaulted. He never says this directly, but the apostle strongly emphasizes the shame and humiliation of Jesus’s crucifixion, which “provides a matrix within which the sexual abuse of Jesus may be implied.”[4] For example, the book of Hebrews speaks of the shame—not the pain—of the cross; it speaks of enduring the cross and the death and of disregarding the shame.[5] Shame, especially sexual shame, is not an aspect often discussed in reference to the cross.
Oppressing the Oppressed and the Oppressors
Let’s be clear: people are assaulted not because of anything they do or are; they are assaulted because people assault them. And, a space where one is considered the harbinger of one’s own trauma is not a safe place for dealing with that trauma.
The American church, then, has not been a safe place. We do not tend to treat female sexual violence survivors with much kindness, especially women of color or women with intersecting and differing disabilities, neurodivergence, mental illnesses, or minoritized gender and sexual identities. Nor do we have a good track record of standing up for the boys and men who have been harmed sexually within the church walls. Some churchgoers see sexually violated individuals as ruined or no longer valuable or even deserving of judgment, marginalization, and rejection, and this stigmatization of sexual harm is often compounded for males.[6] Others tend to not believe the victim or to believe that the victim is responsible for not taking steps to change the outcome. “This is especially true if a man is raped,” writes Rachel Starr, “Since, in the dominant framing of sexual activity, rape places him in the position of the receptive partner.” These misunderstandings of agency then contribute to victims blaming themselves for their own trauma and seldom reporting sexual assault or seeking (and, thus, receiving) the help they need, even if they are fortunate enough to have access to help in the first place. Male victims of sexual assault, for example, often remain quiet due to possible harmful reactive fear of “being disbelieved, blamed, exposed to other forms of negative treatment and/or concern that such disclosure might interfere with one’s masculine self-identity.”[7] These harmful attitudes sneak into theologies that then lead to more social, spiritual, or emotional violence against people in these marginalized groups.
Of course, this is not a new phenomenon. Over hundreds of years, the people of the church have enacted violence on the sexual and general bodily autonomy of marginalized people, and we have created theologies to support this. The abolitionist Camille Hernandez points out that “Western Christianity has conducted sexual violence against marginalized peoples as a tool in perpetrating forms of oppression including, but not limited to, colonialism, enslavement, genocide, and ecoterrorism.”[8] Note how her verb—conducted—rightly suggests a level of intentionality and unbalanced hierarchical control.
America’s enslavement of African people was seen as natural, normal, and holy. It was described as the right to strip others of their autonomy and to harm their bodies, with the enslaved people first described as the cursed descendants of Ham and then later as the descendants of an entirely different Adam, such that assimilation between white people and Black people would be impossible or unnatural. Many scholars have done brilliant work connecting the crucifixion and US enslavement, including the Black liberationist theologian James H. Cone in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, the womanist biblical hermeneutic scholar Mitzi J. Smith in “He Never Said a Mumbalin’ Word,” and the Black poet Countee Cullen in “Christ Recrucified.” Like those murdered on crosses, people under the thumb of US enslavement knew “exactly how it felt to be cruelly tortured and killed—all without the ability to speak a word in their own defense.”[9] The torture hasn’t ended; these historical ways of dehumanizing and silencing people of color contribute to our systems today, in which Black women now experience higher mortality risks than other women do from heart disease, stroke, kidney disease, breast cancer, cervical cancer, HPV, and pregnancy-related issues.[10]
Understanding the insidious way in which our cultures and histories contribute, even within the church, to our oppression of those who have been marginalized and harmed might also help us understand, though certainly not excuse, how some people come to abuse other people. We might see that those Romans who sexually abused Jesus then, or those who have socially and often violently colonized his name in more recent times, may have been the perpetrators of this violence but not necessarily its ultimate source. Although it is important not to equate their suffering to that of their victims or scrub away their consequences, it is also important to state that sexual violators also suffer from these systems. The empire also oppressed the Romans—although they collectively had almost unlimited power, they were individually far enough down the chain of command that they often suffered resentment, aggression, and violence. Indeed, as Tombs suggests, “The desire to take out the frustrations and brutalities of military life through sexual violence has given rise to atrocities throughout history.”[11] The soldiers were caught in a system of dominating violence that harmed them as well as those they violently dominated, and this is the same pattern we see with many abusers today.
Toward Spiritual Liberation, Bodily Autonomy, and Integrity
Seeing the crucifixion as a sexually violent story gives us the ability to retell it as one of spiritual liberation for all who have been harmed sexually—for Jesus and the Romans, and for us today. Like many American victims of sexual assault, even Christ couldn’t save himself from abusive power. The church’s collective understanding of a sexually violated person’s experience—its instinct to blame the victim—needs to shift, and viewing Jesus’s death in the context of his abuse invites us to do so. The innocence of survivors is something that the church should already embrace, and public statements are often made to this effect.[12]Although sexual victimization of any kind inspires shame and self-hatred, Jesus showed that absolutely nothing within victims’ or victimizers’ stories, nothing within their bodies, has ever lain “outside the reach of the healing powers of God.”[13] Salvation finds even the Divine’s broken parts, showing that it can also find survivors again and that, thereby, they can know more closely the goodness within and between themselves and others. That could help us build a new kind of community within the church.
Of course, not all churches cause active harm to survivors of sexual assault, and not all survivors find liberation in this mindset. Seeing Jesus as a survivor of sexual assault may be difficult for today’s survivors for many reasons. For example, unlike many victims today, Jesus got a trial, and he didn’t have to stick around for the arduous healing of his body and social position following his assaults.[14] Many of today’s survivors take on this healing alone, and they often become more harmed in doing so. The stigmatic shame surrounding sexual harm breeds “other maladies—hostility, self-hatred, anger, depression, anxieties, toxic relationships, toxic community secrecies that go ignored, or even further permitted ongoing sexual violence and assault.”[15] I believe Jesus’s body still bleeds with and for ours, but following his excruciating suffering, he got a three-day healing that, though his body bore signs of his wounds, in some ways saved him from some of the more immediate bodily, material, and cultural consequences of the attacks that others experience.
Some Christians may be skeptical of describing Jesus as a survivor of sexual assault because, as I suggested previously, they subconsciously or consciously associate experiencing sexual assault with weakness, and they do not want to attribute that same weakness to Jesus. Even if they don’t explicitly blame victims, these Christians see portrayals of Jesus as “damaged or lessened” as less of a “savior” and more of a victim who has been “irreparably diminished.”[16]
But what if survivors like Jesus were seen not as feeble for their supposed weakness but sacred for their obvious strength? Really, what is a victim if not a survivor who hasn’t been freed? More room for strength within Jesus’s assault opens up more room for strength within ours. Indeed, seeing the sexual violence in Jesus’s crucifixion has direct implications for our individual bodily autonomy and integrity.[17] To take away someone’s power is to take away their agency and, therefore, to take away the possibility of restoring and healing once-violated bodies.
To move from the church’s response toward the personal, engaging sexual trauma directly, has the possibility of healing how we the church respond to people who have experienced sexual assaults, and our responses to those stories can also change the story for those people. Affirming the truth of the stories and the pain will not bring people out of immediate danger from their violators, but it can help to protect them from themselves. Smith describes how the covering up of sexual violence “compounds the trauma and increases feelings of abandonment. Many victims self-medicate, engage in risky harmful behaviours and/or commit suicide.”[18] Acknowledging sexual trauma can turn us into agents of healing, helping people who have experienced sexual violence avoid these troubling outcomes.
And this is why we must not shove sexual assault under the rug in Jesus’s story. The enfleshed Lord’s sexuality has gotten so diminished over time that most of us have gradually become desensitized to the depictions of his naked body. Even so, many images of Jesus portray him wearing a loincloth, which likely suggests more bodily control than he was permitted. The womanist Hebrew Bible scholar Wil Gafney posits that Jesus’s sexual abuse “is so traumatizing for the Church that we have covered it up—literally—covering Jesus’s genitals on our crucifixes.”[19] Many have spoken of how the loincloth suggests a fixing of dignity, community, or hope—these may have some value, yet they obscure the likely events.[20] In the story itself, no part of this man’s body remained unexposed or retained agency; God’s hips could not hold up a cloth. What validation could that hold for other survivors who were helpless to stop or end their torment?
Confronting Sexual Violence
Too many survivors report experiencing their communities’ responses to their trauma as even more traumatizing than the original harm itself, for those responses often span a longer amount of time and involve the prejudice and judgment of many more people.[21] Figueroa and Tombs put it bluntly: “Either explicitly and overtly, or indirectly and through judgmental silence, both wider society and the Church frequently convey blame and stigma against survivors.”[22] Although people pity survivors of sexual assault, purity culture allows many churchgoers to blame survivors at the same time. Indeed, even when we believe the story and offer empathy to a survivor, our biases may affect how we respond. For example, we may believe that the assault would not have occurred had the victim not allowed themselves into a sexual situation, and therefore, we unintentionally blame the survivor. To work with the image of Christ that I discussed earlier in the essay, we put loincloths on people’s assault stories—we believe they had a say in their victimhood. The consequence is that victims frequently remain silent, ignored, or both.
When I told a person at my childhood church about the abuse I had experienced, they responded by saying they couldn’t imagine such a horrible thing happening to their child and by asking if my parents were OK. They did not address my pain, and they did not call me back after that conversation to check how I was doing. It felt like my experience was being swept under the rug and like I was the one responsible for what had occurred. Covering my pain like that also made it harder for me to love.
Engaging with trauma is important, but it is also risky. Engaging sexual trauma can individually and collectively harm survivors when handled without intentional, long-term care. People who have been victimized often cannot help but desolately wonder where God was when they were abused. I am a hearty proponent of liberationist theology, but gentleness is key rather than an intense liberationist justice theology—the victim’s body has been told a starkly different story about itself than anyone’s words or actions can correct. We must remember to put away our apologetics hats and just hold space for people who are hurting. We must give survivors our time and patience, two attributes that Jesus never runs out of. Real healing is more than ideology, and the process of healing shows how Jesus’s experience lives in people’s bodies, communities, and the larger world. We must also separate people from those who abuse them before we try to learn the whole story. Then, we must make sure to hold people accountable, and we must do so delicately.
When it is time to write essays like this or preach about Jesus as a victim of sexual abuse, we must be thoughtful about our approach and carefully consider whether our words will empower victims or add to their silence. We must not preach about this lightly or link Jesus’s suffering with silence. He was not silent; he was silenced. That difference is key because it can inform approaches to all silenced people. We must not displace survivors’ experiences with abstract icons of Jesus’s torture. We must not focus on the crucifixion over the resurrection, which invites the glorification of suffering, or conversely, focus on the resurrection over the crucifixion, which provides reassurance without acknowledging suffering.36 We must not turn Jesus’s sexual abuse into an opportunity for evangelism.
It’s also key to remember that being trauma-informed is not a box to check off, a goal to be reached, or a label to be possessed; it is an ongoing process with no prescribed ending. We cannot walk people through a short-term, year-long program, pat them on their heads, and send them on their way. And we must acknowledge that no faith community can provide the psychological care needed to truly heal from trauma. We can, however, come alongside that care, walking with, not in front of, the person who has experienced trauma as much as possible, always remembering that that person both always knows more about their story than anyone else ever could and can always be separated by that knowledge by their trauma.
Many churches have started fostering responses to sexual violence that heal rather than blame the victim or cover up the crime, and many have done so for a while, which has expanded into society at large. The church as a whole is no longer as rigidly opposed to these kinds of conversations as before. Including sexual violence in the story of the cross invites all of us to engage this uncomfortable idea in a new way, to “have joy in the uncanny effect of a familiar form becoming strange.” Moreover, this kind of response has helped more people embrace the other in a way that has built bridges with the religiously unaffiliated and invited “interreligious dialogue.”[23] Who knows what ripples these shifts could cause in the future?
And so, what might it look like for the church to offer healing to survivors of sexual violence? Healing requires spaces with balanced power dynamics that involve people whom survivors can trust. Such spaces are characterized by a lack of victim-blaming and the active protection and advocacy of those who cannot protect or advocate for themselves. They are spaces free of shame for survivors who stay with or return to their partners, free of the rush for survivors to be healed, free of the assumption that survivors can articulate their trauma as it happens, free of unhelpful beliefs about agency, free of the image of a Jesus who had control in his victimhood, and free of the assurances that God will make it OK. People need not only to tell their own stories of trauma but to hear the stories of others; the potential for resurrection needs to be visible beyond Easter Sunday, throughout the entire year. How can the church know that anything, much less sexual assault, can be healed or redeemed if it hasn’t been taken on by Christ?[24] Just like shame silences, these truths can spread and shine when given the room to do so.
Many find refuge under different ideas of what the cross meant and why, and many survivors of sexual assault do so in the specific story of a man who was ripped of bodily dignity and agency, slaughtered in front of mockers by a colonizing nation, and raised to new life. This is the identity Jesus assumed. As a survivor, he debunked “beliefs in the sinfulness of survivors, that they have lesser value, are not to be trusted, and are deserving of what happened. Jesus as a survivor explains how a person can experience sexual violence through no fault of their own, and that such a person remains a valuable, good, worthwhile human being.”[25]
Christianity has squeezed every ounce of meaning possible out of Jesus’s nonsexual suffering, but insisting that Jesus’s death served a greater good often leads to the justification for more violence.[26] The pain of a sexually abused Jesus has historically gone and currently goes largely unnoticed, just like the pain of sexually abused people who are told they must stay secret, hidden, and shrouded with shame: this is a continued form of violence. This keeps people silenced. On The Allender Center Podcast, Rachael Clinton Chen describes how many sexual survivors of sexual assault avoid the topic of healing their sexual assault because “their imagination, in and of itself, is disordered, and they think, ‘This is the place that God cannot heal. You can come only so far, God, but this is the place you cannot see.’ And Jesus is saying, ‘I’ve already been there, and I’ve already healed you.’”[27]
The church has the power and responsibility to change this narrative while seeking out abusers and all those who use power to inflict intentional harm upon the innocent. We can hold them accountable with empathy and a desire for the healing of all, regardless of whether those abusers are from Rome, still-colonizing white nations, the State of Israel, Hamas, within a church, or anywhere else. And we must center our efforts more around the protection of those who cannot protect themselves.
Meaning Making
It may seem a bit ironic, however, to wonder about the implications of Jesus’s torture and death for survivors of sexual assault because the defining aspect of their trauma is its needlessness. Retraumatization is common when we try to make meaning out of the suffering of others. As Christians, we do this with Jesus—we develop theologies and ideologies to explain his suffering—and then we extend this same pattern to people who are suffering. But what if, as survivors are forced to wonder, there is no point to the suffering? What if it serves no greater purpose? Perhaps we can just be appalled and disgusted at its infliction.
That said, perhaps, for the sake of this essay, we can find some meaning in what Jesus did. What if what he did on the cross and what he’d previously promised he would do at the Last Supper were connected, but not just by sunken flesh and spilled blood? What if his experience draws together other binaries as well? Hernandez notes that at the table, Jesus’s metaphorical image of spilled blood drew not only “from the male-centered images of torturous murder” but linked it to “the feminine imagery of giving life to food and feast.” Perhaps meaning lies in the life that put an end to death by making an eclipse of his tombstone, the restoration that transforms. Jesus recapitulates violence, sexual or otherwise, into new life, showing that violence cannot claim the essence of life, combating a “traditionally patriarchal pursuit of conquest” with “a blood flow that cannot be controlled or contained.”[28]
Jesus’s being a survivor of sexual assault does not justify anything about sexual assault; it was not “for the best.” To be clear, “There is no divine plan where the end (resurrection) justifies the means.” On the contrary, Jesus’s solidarity with victims showed that, yes, the most unbearable weight is unbearable and that, yes, some harm cannot be undone. The world’s torture broke the body of the Divine. The empire claimed and drained Jesus’s body. This narrative provides two messages that are especially crucial for victims to hear: that they were neither alone nor to blame.
Heartbreak and the Horrors in Gaza
One cannot feel the full impact of the resurrection without first acknowledging the horrors of the crucifixion. The possibility that these horrors included sexual assault is not a stepping stone to salvation or any kind of victory. It is the kind of thing that makes one’s heart wither. It is terrible to see God break, to look up at Jesus and want to pull him down off the cross. It is also terrible to break alongside him.
We must look upon the horror and break with those who break. Just as we must look at Jesus, we also cannot ignore the men and women in our communities and congregations who suffer, nor can we ignore the suffering of those who suffer throughout the world. This means acknowledging the sexual violence allegedly committed by Hamas against Israeli civilians and hostages both during the October 7, 2023, and in the months since. It means acknowledging the sexual torment, the oh-so-creative “torture without remorse,” that the State of Israel, which is partly funded by US tax dollars, has allegedly used to reinforce its dominance following those attacks, including allegedly rounding up, humiliating, sexually shaming, beating, and killing Palestinians. The strategy director at Geneva’s Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, Maha Hussaini, suggests that this is the State of Israel’s “way of portraying victory in the absence of real images of victory against Hamas during the war”; it is the latest incarnation of the Roman instrumentalization of abuse. These brief allusions to the ongoing sexual violence in Israel and Gaza only begin to capture the atrocities there, and to look away is to desensitize the full image of Christ on the cross. Likewise, I believe Jesus would stand with Hernandez when she says of marginalized folx (specifically Black and non-Black women of color), “We are the givers of life and receivers of brutality.”[29]
To see that brutality is unwelcome, but the cross may offer a way forward. It can be a liberating, terrible gift to see the cross and all its associated harm and suffering lose its power. Paul was careful to say that resurrection was not just the revival of life but a transformative “restoration of dignity and an affirmation of human worth in the face of degradation.” By raising the crucified to life, Paul suggests that God shows “that nothing could stand as a barrier to God’s love.”[30] Some might find strength in Jesus’s lying down, but others may find themselves able to stand only when watching him do the same.
Jesus calls every one of us to help each other climb off our crosses, to clothe those who have been stripped, to scream when others have been ignored or made quiet, to subvert empire, and to hold gentleness where violence has raged. He gives agency to the lowly, and they see both the might and the folly of power. If we engage the sexual aspects of Jesus’s pain differently, perhaps we will also find other ways of engaging with the pain of others. Within many stories of survivors of sexual assault we hear of those who are forced into mental soldierhood and find themselves to be knights; we find those who are forced into violence and find themselves still, somehow, alive, whether or not they want to be or feel they deserve to be. What has more room for liberation, what has deserved more careful handling than that? I hope it isn’t too late to change, to reorient ourselves around the victims of our world’s (and, honestly, our) violence. The dominoes have fallen, and it is time to find out whether or not the telling and holding of accountability for sexual abuse, Jesus’s or not, will liberate.
Abused Christ, Abused People
Acknowledging Jesus’s more-than-likely experience of sexual assault puts him in revolutionary solidarity with survivors of sexual assault, who have disproportionally less access to safety than those of us who have not been assaulted: from colonized communities, like the Palestinians who live in Gaza, to those who bear marginalized identities based on intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, citizen status, mental illness, neurodivergence, class, and ability.[31]
Opening ourselves up to the accumulated pain of the cross also means doing so for the violated Earth, a planet whose ongoing assault Jesus also witnesses. After all, his death had an impact on the world around him—the biblical text says that the ground shook, rocks were rent apart, the dead rose from their hatching graves, and the sun went dark. Astronomical history has backed up at least the last of these claims. Earth deserves the kind of liberation that every oppressed person does, and we make her suffer instead. In their essay “Why Do We See Him Naked?” R. Ruard Ganzevoort, Srdjan Sremac, and Teguh Wijaya Mulya tie Earth to this discussion of violence inflicted upon the marginalized:
All of them together—the vicious circle of poverty situated in the economic dimension of life; the vicious circle of power situated in the political dimension of life; the vicious circle of racial, cultural, and sexual violence situated in the cultural dimension of life; the vicious circle of industrial pollution situated in the environmental dimension of life—culminate in a testimonial vicious circle of meaninglessness and God-forsakenness, situated in the sphere of lived religion.[32]
We have become accustomed to seeing and imagining Jesus half-naked on the cross. It’s an image that we may have come to revere. Therefore, the theologian Mmapula Diana Kebaneilwe suggests that identifying him as sexually violated might seem “hideous given the sacredness associated with Jesus’s death on the cross.” It is shocking to imagine afresh that his crucifiers stripped Jesus naked, flogged him, passed his clothes around, and then displayed him naked.47 However, this interpretation of the crucifixion holds liberation for every person who has been violently dominated by structures of unbalanced hierarchy.
Liberation comes from knowing that life is not found in taking or exerting power but in laying it down and using it to serve. Jesus’s words, life, death, rebirth, and ascension exemplify this. One does not heal from sexual abuse by taking back or exerting power over others, even over those who wielded violence first; one heals by subverting that violence, by turning what power one might restore into something that helps to protect and support the thriving of other victims of that violence.
Author, professor, and priest Pamela Cooper-White points out that “something deep in our psyche as Christians derives more joy and satisfaction out of trying to redeem an offender than trying to protect and vindicate a victim.”[33] This must change. The church must stop the cycle of violence that caused Jesus to draw a last breath, must make free all of the chained truths. The church cannot do the psychological work necessary to heal trauma, but we can work to recognize it, report it, and take care of those who have been harmed. We must honor the identities, experiences, and stories of survivors so that our activism can expand from how deeply they were hurt to the perpetrating people and systems that hurt them so deeply. By contextualizing sexual assault within crucifixion, we learn that this freeing must include fighting for the narratives, agency, and lives of violated victims, traumatized survivors, corralled innocents, slaughtered hospital patients, and bombed citizens.
[1] Nidal Al-Mughrabi, “Israeli Images Showing Palestinian Detainees in Underwear Spark Outrage,” Reuters, December 8, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/hamas-condemns-israel-over-images-showing-semi-naked-palestinian-prisoners-2023-12-08/.
[2] See Smith, “‘He Never Said a Mumbalin’ Word’: A Womanist Perspective of Crucifixion, Sexual Violence, and Sacralized Silence,” in When Did We See You Naked? Jesus as a Victim of Sexual Abuse (London, UK: SCM, 2021); Tombs, “Crucifixion, State Terror, and Sexual Abuse,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 53, nos. 1–2 (1999): 100; Jeremy Punt, “Knowing Christ Crucified (1 Corinthians 2.2),” in When Did We See; Tombs, “Crucifixion and Sexual Abuse,” in When Did We See; Monica C. Poole, “Family Resemblance: Reading Post-Crucifixion Encounters as Community Responses to Sexual Violence,” in When Did We See; and Tombs, The Crucifixion of Jesus: Torture, Sexual Abuse, and the Scandal of the Cross (Routledge Focus, 2023), 9.
[3] Tombs, “Crucifixion and Sexual Abuse,” 19.
[4] Punt, “Knowing Christ,” 91–109.
[5] See Tombs, The Crucifixion of Jesus, 1.
[6] See Elisabet Le Roux, “Jesus Is a Survivor: Sexual Violence and Stigma within Faith Communities,” in When Did We See.
[7] Rachel Starr, “‘Not Pictured’: What Veronica Mars Can Teach Us about the Crucifixion,” in When Did We See, 165–177.
[8] Hernandez, The Hero and the Whore: Reclaiming Healing and Liberation through the Stories of Sexual Exploitation in the Bible (Westminster John Knox, 2023), Kindle location 93.
[9] Jeneva Wright, “Soul Songs: Origins and Agency in African-American Spirituals,” paper presented at the Southeast Regional Seminar in African Studies, September 28, 2013, 8. Also, see Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Orbis Books, 2011); Smith, “He Never Said a Mumbalin’ Word”; and Cullen, “Christ Recrucified,” in The Black Christ and Other Poems (Harper and Brothers, 1929).
[10] See Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (Nation Books, 2017); and “Perspectives on Advancing NIH Research to Inform and Improve the Health of Women,” National Institutes of Health, March 1, 2022, https://orwh.od.nih.gov/sites/orwh/files/docs/ORWH_WHC_ExecutiveSummary508.pdf.
[11] Tombs, “Crucifixion and Sexual Abuse,” 50.
[12] See Smith, “‘He Never Said a Mumbalin’ Word’”; and Rocio Figueroa and Tombs, “Seeing His Innocence, I See My Innocence,” in When Did We See, 531.
[13] Chelle Stearns in Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton Chen, hosts, The Allender Center Podcast, “The Vulnerability of Christ,” March 26, 2022, https://theallendercenter.org/2022/03/the-vulnerability-of-christ/.
[14] See Tombs, The Crucifixion of Jesus, 76.
[15] “The Global Scale of Child Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church,” in Al Jazeera, October 5, 2021, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/5/awful-truth-child-sex-abuse-in-the-catholic-church.
[16] Tombs, The Crucifixion of Jesus, 67.
[17] See Punt, “Knowing Christ,” 186.
[18] Le Roux, “Jesus is a Survivor,” 334; and Smith, “‘He Never Said a Mumbalin’ Word,’” 100.
[19] Gafney, “Crucifixion and Sexual Violence,” in Womanists Wading in the Word (blog), March 28, 2013, https://www.wilgafney.com/2013/03/28/crucifixion-and-sexual-violence/.
[20] See Tombs, The Crucifixion of Jesus.
[21] See Tombs, The Crucifixion of Jesus, 69.
[22] Figueroa and Tombs, “Seeing His Innocence,” 530.
[23] Sara Ahmed, “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 4 (2006): 569.
[24] See Beth R. Crisp, “Jesus: A Critical Companion in the Journey to Moving on from Sexual Abuse,” in When Did We See, 453; and Allender and Clinton Chen, “The Vulnerability of Christ.”
[25] Le Roux, “Jesus is a Survivor,” 330.
[26] See Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (Orbis Books, 2015).
[27] Allender and Clinton Chen, “The Vulnerability of Christ.”
[28] Hernandez, The Hero, Kindle location 25.
[29] Shereen Hindawi-Wyatt, “What Israel Soldiers’ Display of Palestinian Women’s Lingerie Reveals about the Zionist Psyche,” Middle East Eye, March, 14, 2024, https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/what-israeli-soldiers-display-palestinian-women-lingerie-zionist-psyche; ); Hussaini quoted in Mina Aldroubi, “Dozens of Palestinian Men Stripped and Paraded by Israeli Military in Gaza,” National (UK), December 7,2023, https://www.thenationalnews.com/mena/palestine-israel/2023/12/08/dozens-of-palestinian-men-stripped-and-paraded-by-israeli-military-in-gaza/; and Hernandez, The Hero, Kindle location 29.
[30] Tombs, The Crucifixion of Jesus, 75–76.
[31] See “Black Women and Sexual Violence,” National Organization for Women, February 2018, https://now.org/resource/learn-more-black-women-and-sexual-violence/.
[32] Sremac Ganzevoort and Wijaya Mulya, “Why Do We See Him Naked? Politicized, Spiritualized, and Sexualized Gazes as Violence,” in When Did We See, 195–209; italics in original.
[33] Cooper-White, The Cry of Tamar: Violence against Women and the Church’s Response, (Fortress, 2012), 291.