New Testament genderswap

New Testament genderswap—Saint Peter Petra

Petra, he calls you, the rock on which he will build his church. You are the daughter of fishermen and the wife of a shipwright, a mender of nets and a gutter of silver-scaled fish—yet the Son of HaShem presses the keys of Heaven into your pitch-rough hands. He promises you a priesthood and a temple; he promises you a crown and a city. He looks to you with eyes full with stars, and says such infinities will be yours to command.

You are not sure what he means you to do with them.)

I am not worthy, you finally say to him one night, when the heavens are bright and the fire is burning down to embers. Choose Johanna, she has a scholar’s mind—or Andreia, who is my blood, and first knew you for what you were. Even James has a courage and a fire that I do not. You are a poor builder, Rabboni, if you would use such shifting sand as your foundation.

Yeshua’s eyebrows lift. You walked on water at my word, he reminds you gently. You have seen me work miracles, and named me the Son of the Living God. Do you begin to doubt me now, Shimeah?

(I followed my sister, you do not say, though the words are heavy on your tongue. She came to me with wild eyes, babbling excitedly about the Messiah, one to whom the Baptist had knelt, and I followed her because she would forget even her sandals if they weren’t laced on. I left my youngest daughter to tend the fire, left my husband to his trunnels, left, left, left—I am no princess, Rabboni, no keeper of the keys, no high priest. What crown would you give to one who abandoned the children she bore, and may forsake you in turn?)

You speak nothing, throat aching. At your sides, you can feel your nails digging into your palms.

Or perhaps it is not me you doubt, he says, more quietly. Oh, Petra…Gently, the Master takes you by the wrists and uncurls your fisted hands, touching the angry red marks your nails have made. You doubt all things but me, and then call yourself unworthy to be mine.

I am only the  daughter of fishermen, you whisper. The wife of a shipwright, and I forsook my hearth to follow my sister into the wilderness. I am nothing special, nothing worthy, nothing—

He looks to you with eyes full of stars, the stars he has promised to you, and something in you hungers for the strangeness and greatness of him. (You know you are not worthy of the keys of Heaven; it does not mean you cannot want them.)

Petra, he laughs, and the name sounds like a benediction. Oh Petra. What place should I build, but on the rock whose true strength is in the Lord?

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New Testament genderswap--the apostle and betrayer Judas Judith

Her father named her for a story. After a woman who strode into the enemy camp for the sake of her people, armed with honeyed words and a silver sword; a woman who returned to her people clad in enemy blood, carrying the general's head as a trophy. And she was called most blessed, among all the women of the earth.

Judith does not know what lesson she was meant to take from the tale. The one she gets is: Someday, Adonai will send you a battle. Be ready to wield the sword.

But no one will give an adolescent girl a sword, so she makes do with a pair of sharpened daggers hidden beneath her cloak. The Sicarii teach her to stab, quick and clean as a needle, and then retreat, melt away into the crowd. No one suspects the demure Jewish girl, and she hides behind her mitpachat the way her namesake hid behind her ornaments.

All the Sicarii ask in return is that she hate the Romans, and that is easy enough--the brutish centurions, with their filthy stares; the fatted merchants with their greasy smiles and false devotion in temple; the Herodians, who must be nearly bent double in order to wrap their lips around Rome's thick--

(And woe to the nations that rise up against her kindred.)

Judith is out walking when one of the many prophets in the square catches her eye. She does not know why she stops for him--there is nothing remarkable about his face, nor his speech. His is the same empty rhetoric of repent, repent, the kingdom of Heaven is at hand. (Why do they say "at hand," she wonders, when it always seems to hover, a little out of reach? And why do the prophets merely speak of it, rather than fighting for it, shedding blood for it?)

She is about to walk on, to leave him. But then the dust-roughened prophet looks straight at her, a smile playing about his lips. I am the way, the truth, and the life, he says, his voice almost--almost--lost in the bustling square. No man come unto the Father, but by me.

Judith's heart pounds, her ears ringing with the sound of distant trumpets. Adonai has called her forth, and Judith is finally ready to draw her sword.

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New Testament genderswap—the apostle John Johanna

You were called the daughters of thunder, once. Your sister (Jakova, run through by Herod’s sword; the first of the Twelve to fall) had a voice like a Roman tuba and a temper like summer lightning; you had contented yourself with a bladed tongue and the dangerous habit of sketching out Greek letters in the dirt. You liked them, the strangeness and carefulness of them, so different than the sharp Roman lettering--but sister to Aramaic, the way you and Jakova are sisters.

(Were sisters. Were sisters.)

You think that was when you first loved him--Yeshua, your wandering prophet, the son of Elah. If you had any doubt in him, it vanished like mist over the mountains when he bent before the assembled crowd and the sharp stones in their hands, and traced strange characters in the dirt. You could not read them (Hebrew has always been the province of men) but you loved him for it, all the same. He was not the first dusty prophet on the road to Jerusalem to know the power of words--or even the tenth, the hundredth--but he bent. That was important to you.

You were never lovers. The nameless, faceless slanderers like saying that, though no one agrees whether it was you or Mordecai Magdalene, a man so beautiful that people often mistook him for the Son of God. (No, no, you had explained too often. He is the one with the patchy beard and the wheezing laugh, the sticky child tugging on his robe and a mouth full of earth-worn parables.) The whispers are unfounded, of course--Mordecai was chasing divinity, not the Son of Man, and you were hungry for words, not flesh; Yeshua had Elohim whispering prophecy in his ear, and power issuing from his hands. Your eyes were fixed on the Kingdom.

But not being lovers does not mean you did not love.

(Petra called you "the beloved disciple" once, with a great sadness in her eyes--she was a wife and mother, then, and you think she knew. Could imagine what terrible price must be paid, for loving a prophet. But you were lost in a haze of glittering words, vines and silverfish and light coming into the world, and when you called him the Son of Man he smiled like the dawn. You were in love and beloved, and all was possible in Adonai.)

You watched him die on a wooden cross, holding his mother as she sobbed and screamed. (She had traveled so far, all the way from Nazareth, just to be there and stand before her firstborn, God-promised child as he bled and gasped and suffered, and you thought oh, what a terrible price must be paid, for loving a prophet.)

You wish you had faith enough to say that his is not one of the faces that haunts you. You watched him rise, watched him ascend, but they all haunt you--Jakova's trumpet-laugh falling on your numbed ears, Petra's fire-licked corpse lingering in the shadows of your fading vision, Mordecai stoned and bleeding, his eyes still turned to the heavens. You outlived them all, until they were only stories themselves.

It becomes your gift to them. With arthritic hands you grasp the stylus. In the beginning, you write carefully, painstakingly, was the Word.