Jesus as Victim of Sexual Humiliation & Assault: Preliminary Thoughts with Tombs and Bonhoeffer
“Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the governor’s headquarters, and they gathered the whole cohort around him. They stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him […] They spat on him, and took the reed and struck him on the head.”
The passion narratives describe not only the physical torment of Jesus but also a dimension of humiliation that scholars like David Tombs have urged us to confront: the sexual abuse of Christ.
In his 1999 essay Crucifixion, State Terror, and Sexual Abuse, Tombs argues that crucifixion in Roman Palestine cannot be understood apart from the systemic use of sexual humiliation as a form of state terror. Drawing parallels with Latin American torture regimes of the 1970s and 80s, Tombs suggests that Jesus’s passion, like the torture of political prisoners, involved symbolic and potentially literal acts of sexual violence—meant to degrade, shame, and dehumanize. In that context, the stripping, mocking, flogging, and public exposure of Jesus—described in all four Gospels—take on renewed significance.
As Tombs notes, Roman practices of crucifixion were designed not only to kill but to dishonor. Victims were routinely flogged while naked. They were crucified without clothing, their bodies made objects of spectacle. This would have carried particular shame in a Jewish cultural context. That Jesus was handed over to an entire cohort of Roman soldiers (Matthew 27:27; Mark 15:16), stripped, spat on, struck, and mockingly crowned and robed before being stripped again, suggests not incidental humiliation but a ritualized degradation of his body.
Tombs is careful: the Gospels do not explicitly describe sexual abuse in the narrow sense. But that silence, he argues, may reflect the deep cultural taboos around naming such acts, just as we see in modern testimonies of survivors who were brutalized behind closed doors. “There may have been a level of sexual abuse in the praetorium that none of the Gospels immediately discloses,” he writes. And even if no physical violation occurred beyond the naked exposure of Jesus, Tombs and other theologians argue this alone constitutes a form of sexual violence.
Recent scholarship has built on this argument. The volume When Did We See You Naked?: Jesus as a Victim of Sexual Abuse, edited by Tombs, Rocío Figueroa, and Jayme Reaves, foregrounds this “scandalous claim.” Their contention is straightforward but provocative: that Jesus was a victim of sexual abuse, and that acknowledging this offers powerful theological and pastoral possibilities. “Sexual abuse,” they write, “points to what is speakable – and what is unspeakable – in the suffering Jesus experienced.”
In one of the volume’s essays, Michael Trainor observes that Mark’s Gospel gives us not a triumphant Christ but an abused, forsaken, and silent one—abandoned by God and man alike. This portrait, Trainor argues, would have resonated with early Christian communities navigating their own experiences of violence and social marginalization in the Roman world. Mitzi J. Smith further notes that the Gospels depict Jesus as a falsely accused victim whose clothes are taken and whose body is subjected to public shame. The soldiers’ grotesque performance—clothing Jesus in a mock royal robe, striking him, and casting lots for his clothing—was not merely physical abuse, but theatrical humiliation. It was the violence of the amphitheater, the cruelty of empire turned into entertainment.
Why, then, has the church been so hesitant—even scornful—toward this interpretation? The idea of a sexually humiliated or abused Jesus is still met with discomfort or outright dismissal in many theological circles. But perhaps this reaction says more about our own taboos than the historical plausibility or theological richness of the claim.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing in Ethics, condemned the church for its silence in the face of injustice:
“It has witnessed oppression, hatred, and murder without raising its voice for the victims… It has become guilty of the lives of the weakest and most defenseless brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ.”
Bonhoeffer’s critique remains disturbingly relevant. Today, the church is not merely silent but often complicit in perpetuating sexual violence. To confront the possibility that Christ himself was sexually humiliated—perhaps even abused—is to force a reckoning not only with scripture, but with our theology of suffering, dignity, and solidarity.
Tombs’s argument is not merely academic. He insists that the pastoral implications are vital. Recognizing that Jesus may have endured sexual abuse could offer deep solidarity to survivors:
“The acceptance that even Jesus may have suffered evil in this way can give new dignity and self-respect to those who continue to struggle with the stigma and other consequences of sexual abuse.”
In this way, the passion of Christ is not just a narrative of redemptive suffering. It is a site of radical identification. Christ, who bore the rage of the world in his body, bears too the indignity of its violence. He is not detached from the lived realities of abuse, torture, and shame. Rather, he knows them intimately.
As my friend Henry Wallis once observed, the passion fulfills the arc of redemptive history. In contrast to Genesis 19, where angels are spared sexual violence through divine intervention, Jesus in Matthew 27 is handed over to the mob. He is not spared. He is violated. And yet, in this violation, we encounter the very mystery of reconciliation.
Bonhoeffer writes:
“The love of God for the world does not withdraw from reality into noble souls detached from the world, but experiences and suffers the reality of the world at its worst. The world exhausts its rage on the body of Jesus Christ. But the martyred one forgives the world its sins. Thus reconciliation takes place. Ecce homo.”
Sexual violence exhausts its rage on the bodies of the most vulnerable. Survivors live daily with scars—seen and unseen—that bear witness to the world’s cruelty. In the cross, they find not only a symbol of pain but a companion in it. Jesus, humiliated and broken, is with them. And perhaps, if we dare to look again at the texts we thought we knew, we will see him more clearly.
Substantial revision: March 26, 2025
