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the depths of fragmentation and death, and into life. Moreover she also constructs and includes a liturgical resource based in the Church of England (Anglican) tradition that takes the needs of victims/survivors and their community to heart.

      Shanell T. Smith writes a raw and powerful account entitled ‘“This is My Body”: A Womanist Reflection on Jesus’ Sexualized Trauma During His Crucifixion from a Survivor of Sexual Assault’. Smith is a womanist New Testament scholar and writes a personal reflection on the ongoing legacy and pain of sexual abuse and the questions that remain in relation to Jesus’ experience in the light of her own. This chapter reflects Smith’s 2020 publication touched: For Survivors of Sexual Assault Like Me Who Have Been Hurt by Church Folk and for Those Who Will Care.

      The volume concludes with ‘Seeing His Innocence, I See My Innocence’, written by Rocío Figueroa and David Tombs, who are fellow co-editors for this volume. Their chapter reflects the findings from a qualitative research project with women who served in religious orders and were victims/survivors of clergy sexual abuse. Figueroa and Tombs present responses from several women as to what acknowledging Jesus as a victim of sexual abuse means for them and how helpful that acknowledgement may or may not be in relation to their own personal experience.

      We have formatted the notes and referencing in a way that makes the scholarship as accessible as possible in order to facilitate further learning and research. Readers will note a diversity of sources. The work here is not limited to academic and biblical scholarship but also takes into account public sources such as news media, podcasts, TV series, poetry, fiction and other ‘everyday’ sources that help us make sense of what we encounter on a daily basis.

      We believe that understanding Jesus as a victim of sexual abuse matters in ways that might not be obvious at first. This is partly because truth matters, and this truth has been hidden for too long. It is important to be honest in naming the things that over 2,000 years of Christian tradition have largely not been named. However, we believe that naming this truth does more than just correct a historical record about the past. It is a truth that matters in the present because it can make a practical difference. For the wider Church, it can help to expose and challenge the stigma that many in the churches mistakenly impose on survivors of abuse. Some survivors feel a personal sense of solidarity and practical support in seeing that Jesus experienced sexual abuse. Other survivors report that Jesus’ experience should be acknowledged as historical fact but they do not take comfort in this as survivors. They say the concern for practical consequence should be directed at the wider Church rather than being seen as a help to survivors. It is important to hear these different responses and understand the experiences behind them. Understanding Jesus as a victim of sexual abuse will mean different things to different people. Diverse voices need to be heard and we hope this volume will lead to a deeper understanding of Jesus’ experience and further conversation on how and why this experience matters.

      Our hope is that with this volume the reader is challenged, encouraged and given tools to reconsider the story of the cross and what these reconsiderations mean not only for victims and survivors of sexual violence but also the Church as a whole. Ultimately, what makes this work distinctive and constructive is its commitment to testing whatever theological constructions and new forms of knowledge are made by setting them alongside the lived experiences of victims and survivors of sexual violence and abuse. The following chapters offer new opportunities to question assumptions in received traditions and to think anew about the passion story, and they provide new tools and reading practices that work toward liberation, justice, healing and life.

      Notes

1 See also David Tombs, ‘Crucifixion, State Terror, and Sexual Abuse’, Union Seminary Quarterly Review 53:1–2 (Autumn 1999), pp. 89–109; Elaine A. Heath, We Were the Least of These: Reading the Bible with Survivors of Sexual Abuse (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2011); Wil Gafney, ‘Crucifixion and Sexual Violence’, HuffPost, 28 March 2013, www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-wil-gafney-phd/crucifixion-and-sexual-violence_b_2965369.html; Michael Trainor, The Body of Jesus and Sexual Abuse: How the Gospel Passion Narrative Informs a Pastoral Approach (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2014); Chris Greenough, The Bible and Sexual Violence Against Men (London: Routledge, 2020).

2 See especially John Neafsey, Crucified People: The Suffering of the Tortured in Today’s World (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2014).

3 Indeed there has been very little serious discussion of the historical Jesus in relation to any form of sex and sexuality. Church traditions have sustained an association of sex with impurity, maintained a long-standing taboo around Jesus and sex, and implied Jesus had no sexuality. See William E. Phipps, The Sexuality of Jesus: Theological and Literary Perspectives (New York: Harper & Row, 1973); Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983); Robert Beckford, ‘Does Jesus have a Penis? Black Male Sexual Representation and Christology’, Theology & Sexuality 5 (1996), pp. 10–21.

4 The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Oecumenical Council of Trent, ed. and trans. J. Waterworth (London: Dolman, 1848), pp. 235–6.

5 Mark Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York: Review Books, 2004).

6 Jessica Delgado, ‘Response to Papers on Sexual Violence and Religion’, Joint Symposium of the Center of Theological Inquiry and Center for the Study of Religion, Princeton, NJ, 7 December 2018.

7 Tombs, ‘Crucifixion, State Terror, and Sexual Abuse’, pp. 89–109. See also Fernando F. Segovia, ‘Jesus as Victim of State Terror: A Critical Reflection Twenty Years Later’ in Crucifixion, State Terror, and Sexual Abuse: Text and Context, ed. David Tombs (Dunedin: Centre for Theology and Public Issues, University of Otago, 2018), http://hdl.handle.net/10523/8558.

8 Jayme R. Reaves and David Tombs, ‘#MeToo Jesus: Naming Jesus as a Victim of Sexual Abuse’, International Journal of Public Theology 13:4 (2019), pp. 387–412.

9 Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 260–1.

10 Roxanne Gay, Bad Feminist (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), p. 135.

      Part 1: Biblical and Textual Studies

1. Crucifixion and Sexual Abuse1

      DAVID TOMBS

      Introduction

The Bible is always read with a context in mind. Assumptions are made about the original social context of the text and these are most often derived – consciously or otherwise – from the current social context of the reader or critic.2 In recent decades the positive value of recognizing these connections has been advocated by contextual theologies in Latin America and elsewhere. Although some critics have rightly cautioned against temptations to superficially equate contemporary social contexts and the biblical world, those committed to a contextual approach have maintained that, when used appropriately, a serious engagement with

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