A bold experiment!

Our Bible study class at Guilford is going to attempt a bold experiment. We will do a readers theater presentation of the gospel of John on Ash Wednesday evening. But it will not be an ordinary reading. We're going to switch the genders of several of the characters in the gospel. So Jesus will become Yeshua, a woman. Yeshua will confront a Samaritan man at the well and raise Martha from the dead while Lazarus looks on. Etc. Why? Mainly to nudge people into thinking about how gender identity affects how we think and feel about things. The idea evolved especially out of discussions on post-modernist interpretation of the Bible and a study of the role of women in the Gospel of John. it is also the case that almost all the readers are women. So why not have them be women characters? it should be interesting, and we are ending with a discussion period, so people can express how it affected them.

I am evidently not the first person to have the idea of a female Jesus.