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Holy Spirit Mother and Intersex Jesus: Turning Point Nicene Creed
Ally Kateusz
Abstract: Some Jesus followers described Holy Spirit as Mother and female in the same way that Father was male. Some also remembered Jesus as androgyne, or intersex, with both male and female genitals. The femaleness of Holy Spirit and Jesus appears to have provided theological justification for female ministers, who often were paired in leadership with male ministers. What happened to these three early Christian phenomena—divine Mother, intersex Jesus, and gender parallel officiants? The hypothesis in this interdisciplinary essay is that their origins were in Second Temple Judaism, and their near disappearance was due to the theological innovations of the Nicene Creed. This creed and its subsequent amendments redefined Jesus and Holy Spirit as one substance with the Father, a male. Their masculinization undermined the ancient unification of the sexes seen in Gen 1:27 and Gal 3:28, which had theologically justified gender parallelism, both male and female, in the ritual.
Keywords: Holy spirit, Mother, Androgyne Christ, Intersex, Nicene Creed, Women priests, Liturgy
Holy Spirit as female and Mother
In Hebrew, the Spirit of God was feminine gendered, just like women were feminine gendered, and this was not mere grammatical serendipity. A study of the Hebrew language in the Dead Sea Scrolls demonstrates that in Hebrew, the grammatical gendering of “spirit”—ruah—and the gender of any associated adjective and verb, depended upon context. Thus, when “spirit”referred to the spirit of Belial, a demon, it was usually masculine gendered. When it meant, literally, “breath,” it was sometimes masculine and sometimes feminine. When it referred to the Spirit of God or to the Spirit of the people, however, it was almost always …
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S/HE: An International Journal of Goddess Studies Volume 1 Number 1 (2022)