Change sex, go to heaven

Sit up and listen, all you transphobes. For I’ve made a startling discovery that proves you are all heathen reprobates.

It’s especially you, so-called Christians, who are in for a shock of your miserable lives. You keep using Scripture as an offensive weapon against saintly people who transition from one sex to the other (or rather another, for, as every decent person knows, there exist 76 of them, at latest count).

Your problem is that you read Scripture selectively, starting with the kind of Scripture you select to read. That’s indeed your problem, but it’s not all your fault.

It’s the fault of that awful institution, the Church, which arbitrarily picked just four Gospels out of many lower-case gospels in circulation. The intention behind that legerdemain is clear: to dupe the masses into believing in the loving Jesus who led people to salvation by inviting them to believe in him and imitate his own goodness.

That’s why the Church suppressed many other gospels painting a different and therefore true picture, two of which were written by St Thomas the Apostle. The first one dealt with Jesus’s infancy, the second with his mature years.

And let me tell you, Jesus was one naughty brat (I’m choosing a mild adjective not to offend anyone). If another child upset him in any way, little Jesus would use his divine powers to smite him on the spot. Still think he was all lovey-dovey? Think again.

However, it’s the second Gospel of St Thomas that’s relevant to today’s topic, the divine nature of transsexuality. Behold:

“Simon Peter said to them, ‘Mary should leave us, for females are not worthy of life.’ Jesus said, ‘Look, I shall guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter heaven’s kingdom’.” (Gospel of St Thomas 114)

What are we to make of this passage? First, Simon Peter was a rank misogynist on speed. Implicitly, he felt that all women should be exterminated.

Contextually, this also makes that bedrock of Christianity a champion of homosexuality. After all, men would only have one another if every woman were killed. So let’s just make a mental note that Peter wasn’t totally out of synch with our time and press on.

The same context also suggests that Jesus agreed with Peter’s premises. But, being divine, he didn’t just identify the problem. He also offered a solution.

A woman may save herself from the extinction she richly deserves by transitioning. Even though Jesus was omniscient, he mentioned no specific procedures involved in that metamorphosis. Not a word about surgery, transplants, hormone treatment and so on. But hey, this is Scripture, not a medical manual.

Note that Jesus didn’t even mention the possibility that a man also might wish to transition, in the opposite direction. The thought that some men might be that way inclined didn’t even occur to him.

This casts doubt on his omniscience, but that’s a subject for another day. Perhaps I’ll ask my friend Richard Dawkins for a comment, he’s up on the Church’s sharp practices.

Meanwhile, let’s stop this levity and express a sombre regret that some people still give credence to the ‘lost’ apocryphal gospels. They weren’t lost. They were rejected for the obvious sinister fakes they were.

Many of those gospels have been discovered relatively recently, in my lifetime. But Fathers of the Church repudiated them directly those forgeries appeared, from the second century AD onwards.

They immediately identified the true authors of the apocryphal gospels as Gnostic heretics, not the apostles whose authorship was claimed. Thus, for example, Irenaeus of Lyons: “They adduce an unspeakable number of apocryphal and spurious writings, which they themselves have forged, to bewilder the minds of foolish men, and of such as are ignorant of the Scriptures of truth.”

Since then, Gnosticism has expanded from the domain of spurious religious knowledge to enter one of equally spurious secular claims. But it appeals to essentially the same types of men: foolish, ignorant, seeking simplistic solutions to complex problems.

The most obvious illustration is helpfully provided by assorted conspiracy theories, all based on claims to secret knowledge off limits to hoi-polloi.

Jews get together with Masons, the Bilderberg Group, the CIA, MI6, and NASA hoaxers who faked the moon landing. They then murder Kennedy and Diana, blow up the World Trade Centre, spread Covid – and in general conspire against whatever our modern Gnostics hold dear.

The appeal of such theories is easy to understand. Life has a tendency to throw up an endless variety of challenges, many of which present serious factual, moral or intellectual problems. That doesn’t make them unsolvable, but it does mean that solving serious problems requires serious study and analysis.

Alas, most people are unable, or at least unwilling, to make such efforts. They look for quick, simple, or rather simplistic, solutions, and well-wishers are always on hand to provide them.

Those well-wishers are in possession of secret knowledge vouchsafed to them by those who can’t be named for security reasons. But being well-wishers, they are ready to share those gems with you – and they won’t even have to kill you afterwards.

“Everything secret will become manifest,” taught real Scripture. It also taught something else: “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.”

Beware, in our secular life, of promulgators of false knowledge, out to inject venom into people’s brains. They have no real secrets to share, except those of their true aims.

And speaking of Peter Hitchens…