-1- Eunuchs and the Postgender Jesus: Matthew 19:12 and ...

-19-
...they belie their sex and are affected with effemination, [they] debase the currency of
nature and violate it by assuming the passions and the outward form of licentious
women. For [the Law] expels those whose generative organs are fractured or mutilated,
who husband the flower of their youthful bloom, lest it should quickly wither, and
restamp the masculine cast into a feminine form. (Special Laws, i.324-325)
When he comments upon pederasty, the description of and the condemnation he makes
about the passive partner slowly slides down the sex-gender scale to its inevitable result:
eunicism. Arising from sexual passivity in a pederastic relationship, the disease of
effeminacy works itself out first through adornment and the pursuit of womanly, youthful
beauty, eventually leading to the desire for castration.
These persons are rightly judged worthy of death by those who obey the law which
ordains that the man-woman who debases the sterling coin of nature should perish
unavenged...And the lover of such may be assured that he is subject to the same
penalty. He pursues an unnatural pleasure and does his best to render cities desolate
and uninhabited by destroying the means of procreation...The reasons is, I think, to be
found in the prizes awarded in many nations to licentiousness and effeminacy.
That he is also clearly talking about eunuchs as priestly functionaries, is quite clear:
Certainly you may see these hybrids of man and woman continually strutting about
through the thick of the market, heading the processions at the feasts, appointed to
serve as unholy ministers of holy things, leading the mysteries and initiations and
celebrating the rites of Demeter. Those of them who by way of heightening still further
their youthful beauty have desired to be completely changed into women and gone on
to mutilate their genital organs... (both quotes Special Laws iii.37-42)
These concern parallel exactly the problems conservative Roman Christian males had with
eunuchs of later Imperial era. 63 It is also the issue that informs Paul’s condemnation in
63 Cf. in this regard Kuefler, The Manly Eunuch, 166-170, where he rightly explores the issue of masculinity
as the topos to which most later Christian moralists turned.