Last Updated on March 23, 2024 by Kittredge Cherry
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 (or “hydrophorus” in Greek)? 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.
Artists seldom show the water carrier
The water carrier rarely appears in art. A wonderful exception is shown at the top of this post: “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.
“The Man with a Pitcher of Water, Luke 22:10” by Tobias Haller (2023)
New in 2024: The water carrier was sketched with deliberate gender ambiguity by Tobias Haller, an iconographer, author, composer, and retired vicar of Saint James Episcopal Church in the Bronx, still assisting at a parish in Baltimore, Maryland. Haller enjoys expanding the diversity of icons available by creating icons of LGBTQ people and other progressive holy figures as well as traditional saints.
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 23, 2024.
Copyright © Kittredge Cherry. All rights reserved.
Qspirit.net presents the Jesus in Love Blog on LGBTQ spirituality.
The entire basis for your argument that this water-carrier was “queer” – your assumption that Jewish men in that era never carried water jars – simply isn’t true at all, especially at Passover (which is what this Biblical passage deals with) when tradition required the male head of household to bring water from the nearest well. All men therefore had to do it during Passover if they were the head of their household. The Essenes additionally routinely carried their own water since they weren’t allowed contact with women. Men taking care of their elderly mother or other relatives would also routinely need to carry water themselves since elderly or crippled women would not be able to do it. Therefore there were many mundane cases in which a man would carry water, especially at Passover, but you’re glossing over all these routine cases in order to claim that this guy was somehow “queer” or “transgender”, which is not indicated anywhere in the text and is essentially the least likely of all possible explanations in terms of mathematical probability, especially at Passover when numerous men would have been carrying water from the closest well.
Those are all fine examples, but none of them indicate a man fully engaged in employment traditionally relegated to women.
This man is not acting on behalf of a household, or caring for a family member, he is working for the owner of the room where the last supper was taking place.
The ‘entire basis’ for your argument is flawed conjecture. Instead of creating a complicated structure of improbabilities, entertain the possibility that the water carrier’s role here was gender non conforming, and please, do it with joy.
This is a reply to Peter Veitch since I still can’t do it directly (I thought that was supposed to have been fixed)? Peter Veitch said: “he is working for the owner of the room where the last supper was taking place”, but nowhere does the text say that. It doesn’t say why he was carrying water to that house or what arrangement he had with the owner of the house; and none of this would have any possible relation to transgenderism anyway since the man is never described as identifying as a woman but instead it merely says he was carrying a container of water. I already outlined many cases in which men in that society carried water especially during Passover. If a man today is a chef – doing the cooking which was once done mostly by women – does that make him transgender? Are all male chefs transgender then?
My dear Rev. Kitt…
Thank you!
Dear Rev. Kitt and Q-spirits, Nice to see the Water Carrier discussion back again. Last time, I made a case for the Water Carrier being Mark himself. The African Alexandrian Coptic traditions about Mark make this claim, along with the claim that Mark’s mother Mary owned the Upper Room where the Last Supper, the disciples hiding-out, Pentecost, etc. took place. (Was this Mary the same wealthy woman who also had a place in the Jerusalem “suburb” of Bethany? If so, Mark would be the nephew of Martha and Lazarus who had connections to the High Priest.) Let’s consider and take the African memory of Mark further: IF Water Carrier Mark was (1) in some way(s) queer (trans and/or gay-male); and remembering (2) that his full name was John Mark; and (3) that some traditions attach the name “John” to the Beloved Disciple; and (4) that John Mark was to become a travelling companion to Paul, (5) with whom he then had a falling out that has never been explained; and (5) that many speculate Paul himself was in some way gay or queer… well, there you go! Just maybe Paul and Mark were lovers and then broke up. And just maybe John Mark gave Paul the example of being “neither male nor female in Christ”. And just maybe, after Mark left Paul and returned to Jerusalem (“Mama’s Boy”?), Paul might have taken up with one or more of his other later travelling companions. And if Morton Smith was on to something, just maybe the secret mystic initiation that Jesus gave to the Naked Youth (i.e., to John Mark) was later conferred by Mark onto Paul. Could Paul have first met Mark through Lazarus — since Paul was himself an agent of the High Priest? And could Paul’s possible initiation by Mark have been a catalyst for Paul’s conversion, from hating and persecuting the Nazarene Essenes, to loving and joining them? Perhaps the initiation was the occasion of Paul’s being “trans-ported” to the Third Heaven “whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows.” And what really happened on the Road to Damascus? Pure speculation — but queer eyes can see and connect the dots that to other eyes remain unseen. Best wishes for Passover and Pascha, Triduum and Easter!
Excellent article. Thank you.
This is quite consistent with several other references in Scripture to LGBTQ people and relationships.
Some are summarised here:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-07-20/austin-homosexuality-and-the-bible/4143802
You’re welcome. And thanks for the link to your own excellent article. You cover many Biblical relationships that are also in my LGBTQ Saints series. But Daniel and Ashpenaz are still on my “to-do” list for a future article.
I am buying this picture from Amazon shortly. However, I think I mentioned that another interpretation of the male water carrier was Jesus attachment to the Essene community and that they would recognize that only an Essene male would be carrying the water: not that these interpretations exclude either.
You’re right that some believe the water carrier was an Essene. I will add that possibility to my article. Thanks for your comment and I’m glad that you appreciate the artwork!
Bless you, thank you so much for this perspective.