ABSTRACT
A review of a historical timeline of events from Jesus’s day to the present day highlights the ways in which the Christian church shifted Jesus’s original message of acceptance, egalitarianism, and self-empowerment to one of gender hierarchy, and rigid, fear-based rules around sex and the body. A case can be made that the themes in the early church however included aspects of relational egalitarianism, gender inclusion, and self-empowerment. At the root of these conflicting narratives in Christendom is the belief that Jesus is both fully human and fully divine, which has been interpreted by some with a focus on his humanity and by others with a focus on his divinity. Such an ambiguous teaching, never successfully resolved, still plays a significant role in the current tension between the body and the spirit.
