Queer Readings of the Centurion at Capernaum: Their History and Politics

Since the 1950s, homoerotic readings of the pericope in which Jesus heals a Roman centurion's slave have been built upon the specific Greek word pais, which can refer to youth, slave, or the junior partner in a sexual relationship between two men; Luke's characterization of the young man as "dear" (entimos) to the centurion; and commonplace homoeroticism in the Roman army. In this book Christopher B. Zeichmann traces shifts in queer readings of the text and the influences of the sexual, political, and theological discourses of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.