When being tested by the Pharisees on the topic of divorce (Mark 10:1-12; Matthew 19:1-12), Jesus includes an unnecessary quote from Genesis 1:27 (‘male and female he created them’). But those words – while perhaps formally redundant – are very helpful to us as we consider some contemporary debates. That’s the case I made in a previous blog post, on that occasion looking at the debate over same-sex marriage in the Church. 

But I think Jesus’s use of Genesis 1:27 also helps us understand how he would answer another question, one of the most contested questions of our day: what does it mean to be a man or a woman?

One popular view in our culture says that to be a man or a woman is to feel like a man or a woman. Our bodies don’t reveal who we really are; only our internal experience of gender can do that. A popular move on this view is to make a separation between the terms male/female – which are thought to refer to body types – and man/woman – which refer to true identities, based on internal realities. So, you might be born with a male body, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a man. Only you can know who you are. What really matters is what you feel inside.

But Jesus’s words here show us that he sees no division between these two sets of terms. He places Genesis 1:27 – using the terms ‘male’ and ‘female’ – alongside Genesis 2:24 – using the terms ‘man’ and ‘woman’ – side by side, taking for granted that they refer to the same thing.1 Jesus saw no distinction between males/females and men/women. For him, to be a male is to be a man and to be a female is to be a woman.

God determines who we are and communicates that to us through the body he gives us.

And we can be confident that Jesus would have understood these words to refer to primarily bodily realities. In Genesis 1, the creation of humans as male and female (Genesis 1:27) flows immediately into the command to procreate (‘be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth’, Genesis 1:28). Why? Because to be male or female means to have a body that is structured towards playing one of two roles in procreation. The Bible points to the same definition of maleness and femaleness as that used by biologists to classify creatures across the species.2

This means that Jesus’ words on marriage also offer us his perspective on one of the most contested questions of our day. What does it mean to be a man or a woman? For Jesus, it means to have a male or a female body. God determines who we are and communicates that to us through the body he gives us.3

Jesus offers us answers to the biggest questions of our day. Followers of Jesus need look no further than Jesus himself to find clear guidance on what marriage is and who we are as men or women. The implications of how we live this truth out may be a little more complex, but the truths themselves are made clear by Jesus, and all through a redundant quote from the Old Testament. Maybe Jesus knew his words wouldn’t prove to be redundant after all.

This post has been adapted from a blog originally published at thinktheology.co.uk

1. In Mark 10:7 and Matthew 19:5, the word translated ‘wife’ is the standard Greek word for ‘woman’ which, in certain contexts, can take on the meaning ‘wife’. The same is true of the Hebrew word used in Genesis 2:24.
2. Lawrence Mayer & Paul McHugh, ‘Sexuality and Gender Findings from the Biological, Psychological, and Social Sciences’, The New Atlantis 50 (2016) 10-143: ‘There is no other widely accepted biological classification for the sexes’ (p.90).
3. This remains true even when we acknowledge the reality of intersex conditions or differences of sexual development (DSDs). In most intersex conditions, an individual is clearly male or female with their body exhibiting only minor variations from the expected pattern. In cases where there is genuine ambiguity over biological sex, this is best understood as a very small number of people being a blend of both sexes. Importantly, there is no third body structure that can play a role in reproduction and so there is no third sex. For more, see Preston Sprinkle, ‘Intersex and Transgender Identities’, Living Out.