Sunday, December 21, 2025

Why Was Jesus A Man?

To physically manifest in the incarnation, unless he was to have an intersex body or a newly created gender, Jesus could only have been either a man or woman.  There would be no other options without combining the basic categories (as is the case with intersex people) or introducing a new human gender.  Of course, gender is nothing but a type of physical body, especially as reflected in the very different genitalia of men and women.  A person's psychological characteristics like their worldview, moral character, and personality, as well as their mental or physical skills, are unrelated because the physical body is not the same as any of these things.  It does not logically follow, therefore, that a male or female body requires any specific traits in the separate categories.  Moreover, that one man/woman has a given personality or other such characteristic does not mean another will, and the idea to the contrary is rooted in the metaphysical and epistemological fallacy of composition.

Further still, if there was such a thing as masculinity and feminity, there would be no social experience that would deviate from gender stereotypes [1]—which would in turn have to be the exact same across all cultures, or else the idiotic stereotypes would not reflect any true masculinity or feminity, which would be the same for all men and women if it existed.  Gender stereotypes at the philosophical level would be prescriptive on a complementarian moral framework (though something that is good or evil and that can be done regardless of one's genitalia would by necessity have to be good or evil for all), but they would still supposedly be rooted in some inherent psychological orientation of men and women.  It is just that the logical necessity of one person not being the same as another and of a trait like aggression or kindness not following from having a penis or vagina render social experience entirely secondary in demonstrating the falsity of gender stereotypes: logic is true independent of all else.

In accordance with these necessary truth of reason, the Bible teaches that men and women have a metaphysically equal and positive status as bearers of the divine image (Genesis 1:26-27, 5:1-2), as well as the same moral obligations (which follows from the doctrines of the aforementioned verses and is taught directly or indirectly in many passages, including Numbers 5:1-7).  Biblical philosophy is neither patriarchal nor matriarchal, but egalitarian, and it could not even be logically possible otherwise, since consistency with necessary truths is a prerequisite for possibility.  Although it is an issue of extraordinarily minor significance in one sense precisely because gender does not dictate personality or moral obligations—save for those of a very small handful of Biblical commands literally having to do with anatomy itself, like male circumcision—why was Jesus a man and not a woman?

First of all, it is not as if there is any sexism in a pseudo-divine being (Jesus is not Yahweh [2] and is very seemingly presented as a created being in verses like John 3:16) incarnating as one gender or the other.  Jesus being a man is not due to sexism in itself or because of anything else in the Christian worldview, but if his gender was brought about simply by virtue of him being male, the opposite would not do away with this problem.  The alternative would entail the exact same flaw if this was so.  If Jesus taking on a male body is sexist because he was not a woman, then so would taking on a female body instead, because he would not have been a man.  He had to be one or the other outside of the alternate possible circumstances described above, and since gender egalitarianism is a basic Biblical doctrine, there is nothing contrary to egalitarianism in Jesus incarnating as either gender.

The gender of Jesus is not something that any doctrine hinges on.  There is no special closeness that Christ has to the Father, who has no gender as an immaterial being (Genesis 1:1, Deuteronomy 4:15-20, John 4:24) and thus is not truly male, because of his male physicality, and he has no psychological characteristics that are specific to men because no such thing exists.  Most importantly, psychological masculinity and feminity are logically impossible; Biblically, no such thing is ever taught, making the Bible consistent with reason.  Jesus is also not distant from the Father because of his gender: women are not morally superior or more spiritually attuned compared to men, despite what some people who claim to be Christian or secular egalitarians think.  All of these traits are possessed on an individualistic level and have nothing to do with one's genitalia, secondary physical sex characteristics, or chromosomes.



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