Last Updated on January 7, 2024 by Kittredge Cherry

“Man Bearing a Pitcher” by Tissot

A queer person led the disciples to the Upper Room for the Last Supper with Jesus, according to LGBTQ-affirming Bible interpretations.

The story of the water carrier will be read at many churches worldwide during Holy Week, but most overlook this gender-variant bit player who makes a brief but important appearance.

Some progressive Bible scholars embrace the water carrier as a transgender ancestor or “trans-cestor” because he was seen as a man doing women’s work. His gender transgression was so obvious that he stood out in a crowd.

Jesus say to follow “a man carrying a jar of water”

The gospels of both Mark and Luke describe how the disciples asked Jesus where to prepare the Passover meal that would turn out to be his Last Supper. Jesus gave unusual instructions:

“Go into the city, and a man carrying a jar of water will meet you. Follow him. Say to the owner of the house he enters, ‘The Teacher asks: Where is my guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?’ He will show you a large room upstairs, furnished and ready. Make preparations for us there.”
(Mark 14:13-15; see also Luke 22:9-11)

Jerusalem was crowded for Passover, so how were the disciples supposed to pick out this particular water carrier? Even standard commentaries explain that he stood out because usually only women carried water pitchers. Jesus told his disciples to follow a gender nonconformist.

Christ trusted a queer man to lead them to the next stop on their spiritual journey, to the room where the disciples share his Last Supper and later received the Holy Spirit on Pentecost.

An alternate theory is that the water carrier was a member of the Essene community, an ascetic Jewish sect.  They were mostly celibate and the men did work traditionally done by women. Of course, the water carrier could have been both Essene and queer.

The water carrier rarely appears in art. A wonderful exception is shown here: “The Man Bearing a Pitcher” by 19th-century French painter James Tissot. He artfully portrays the shock of bystanders when they saw a queer man disrupting gender roles for Jesus on the way to the Upper Room.

Scholars claim water carrier as a queer ancestor

In an interview on “Finding queer Bible characters,” scholar and performance artist Peterson Toscano explained, “Transgression of gender led to Upper Room, Last Supper and Holy Communion today.”

A chapter by Lewis Christopher Payne in “Transgendering Faith: Identity, Sexuality, And Spirituality” poses some valuable and enlightening questions:

“Take a moment to think why this man might be a water carrier, why he might have a traditional female job. Could he have chosen this job because he felt more comfortable with a female role? Perhaps he identified himself as female? Or perhaps he used to identify himself as female, but now lives as male.

Just maybe the water carrier is a transgender person right at the heart of the story, which we do not even notice. Could he be a male-to-female person or a female-to-male person or an intersex person?”

In the article “Queer Bible Stories: The Backstory of the Upper Room” at philpercs.com, B.P. Morton went on to speculate about the relationship between the water carrier and the householder who owned the house with the upper room. Morton concludes that the two men were likely a “queer couple” who had access to the large upper room during the busy Passover season because their biological family rejected them due to their relationship or “the water-carrier’s public non-standard gender presentation.”

Morton states the ramifications clearly:

It looks like what is being portrayed here, in the New Testament, without condemnation, are two queer people who are choosing to be a family of their own to each other, rather than parts of their original family. If this isn’t a full on same-sex marriage, it is at least in the neighborhood as it were….

Seen through my queer eyes, the water-carrier was probably a trans-cestor, and Jesus chose this person as his family, over his own mother, before the crucifixion. The great spiritual moment of the Last Supper, when the body and blood of sacrificial lamb was shared out, to “all of you” happened where it did probably because some queer folk’s families rejected them and didn’t want to celebrate with them. And so the room was open at the last minute…. In all likelihood, there was a transperson at the Last Supper, probably helping to serve Jesus and the disciples.

Some believers go on to speculate that the queer water carrier the same person as the unnamed naked man who ran away when Jesus was arrested in Mark 14:51-52. That mysterious figure was at the center of the controversy over the Secret Gospel of Mark.  He is often identified as John the Beloved Disciple, Lazarus of Bethany or Mark himself.

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Top image credit:
Detail from “The Man Bearing a Pitcher” by James Tissot (Brooklyn Museum)

This post is part of the LGBTQ Saints series by Kittredge Cherry. Traditional and alternative saints, people in the Bible, LGBT and queer martyrs, authors, theologians, religious leaders, artists, deities and other figures of special interest to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people and our allies are covered.

This article was originally published on Q Spirit in March 2019, was expanded with new material over time, and was most recently updated on March 20, 2023.

Copyright © Kittredge Cherry. All rights reserved.
Qspirit.net presents the Jesus in Love Blog on LGBTQ spirituality.

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