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© 2016 John D. Brey.

In his (one of many) masterpiece, Circle in the Square, Professor Elliot R. Wolfson wrote an essay called, Crossing Gender Boundaries:

Prior to the sin of Adam and Eve there was no sexual lust, because male and female were not separate entities. Adam and Eve were in the pattern of androgyny above. In the ideal state there was no gender bifurcation, no distinction between that which gives and that which receives. The locus of masculinity and femininity was in the phallus . . . The task of homo religiosus is to restore the feminine to the masculine, to unite the two in a bond that overcomes gender differentiation by establishing the complete male who embodies masculine and feminine. Ontologically, there is only one gender in kabbalistic theosophy, for the female is part of the male.

Professor Wolfson's statement forms the backdrop from which to understand something I said in response to the claim that Jesus is a "transitional object" mediating between God and man, for spiritually immature men and women, unable to establish a more formal, mature, Jewish, relationship with God; an unmediated relationship, no transitional object, no transitional (traditional) mediator. ----- At the time I responded with the statement:

The phallus, which, up until the Abrahamic covenant, is fancied the permanent "mediator" between the groom and the bride, and thus an emblem of the mediation between God and man (in kabbalah "Yesod"), is found out, through the Abrahamic covenant (established through brit milah, ritual emasculation), to be merely a "transitional object," and not, after all, a permanent mediator, as formerly supposed.

Taken together with Professor Wolfson's statement about the return to androgyny, the quotation above forms the bizarrely apropos idea that the phallus' very existence appears extremely problematic since its very appearance, and being, creates the gender dichotomy the destruction of which is fancied a return to the idyllic realm of prelapsarian Eden (the androgynous man). Professor Wolfson's statement, that the task of the religious-man (homo-religiosus) is to return the feminine to the masculine, to restore the original androgyny, appears to presuppose the removal of the phallus, which, phallus, is the very organ both creating and mediating between the gender-dichotomy its removal would make unnecessary. ----Into this ante-phallic spirit comes the outrageously fitting statement of Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan:

If Adam would have been worthy and would not have sinned, then all of his descendants would have been worthy of the Torah. If not for Adam's sin, all mankind would have had the status of Israel. . . To some degree, circumcision restored Abraham and his descendants to the status of Adam before his sin. . . Through Milah it would be possible to return to the level of Adam and Eve before the sin. In other words, mankind would again have direct access to the spiritual dimension.

Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, Handbook of Jewish Thought, p. 39, 47; Inner Space, p. 166.

Professor Wolfson's claim that: "The task of homo religiosus is to restore the feminine to the masculine, to unite the two in a bond that overcomes gender differentiation by establishing the complete male who embodies masculine and feminine," leads directly into the pertinent question answered by Rabbi Kaplan: What would be a more fitting ritual, or sign-creating act, to signify the fore-going (so to say), then, (clearing throat), the fore-going . . . i.e., brit milah ----ritual circumcision, ritual emasculation, cutting and bleeding the transitional object, which those not yet spiritually mature can't bring themselves to dispense with?

This leads straight to the "Cross" in Professor Wolfson's "Crossing Gender Boundaries." -----It brings us there forthwith, and without the foreskin, since those antinomian Jews who considered themselves to have left the immaturity of the old covenant, the covenant of the flesh, immediately put forth the unfounded proposition that their messianic leader, ruler, was, get this, born without the services of the "transitional object" that's disposed of as a mediator between male and female in the act establishing the Abrahamic-covenant.  In other words, those Jews who thought of themselves as having disposed of the transitional object necessary only in the old covenant, the first covenant, the covenant for the immature, claimed their firstborn Jewish messiah to be the first Jewish firstborn (peter rehem) born in a manner all the foregoing suggests (and even the foreskin going suggests) is the very point of Abraham's ritual circumcision: the elimination of the transitional object, the mediator of gender-dichotomy, which will, in the Kingdom age, ruled over by Messiah, come to an end: it (the transitional object) will be finished, will have birthed enough, its reign will be complete.

Adding insult to the injury of their immature brothers and sisters these new covenant Jews claimed that far from their messianic leader alone, or singularly, being born of a pregnancy that gives life to the dead rituals, rather, they too are, "born-again," reborn as it were, out of the body of death, the fleshly body conceived in sin, the sin being the mediation of a gender-dichotomy inconceivable (so to say) prior to the creation of the transitional object mediating between the fleshly division its arrival creates. The new covenant Jew fancies himself born-again through a form of procreation that restores to the tongue, i.e., the breath of life, the life-giving power that fell, so to say, when the serpent rose, if you will, and most of you have, for the first time. The serpent rose in order to act as the fore-skene of the original sin, the Fall, into gender duality, mediated by the fleshly transitional object, which immature Jews still consider a permanent-mediator for a permanent gender-dichotomy, based on a permanent need, for a scroll, whose very genesis, requires the criminalization of all flesh, associated with the crime, that arises through the presupposed natural mediation of gender-dichotomy.

The Jewish gnosis as expressed in the Bahir and developed further in subsequent works of kabbalah is predicated on a notion of redemption that signifies a return to an original unity in the divine pleroma. In this unity, sexual differentiation is transcended, but only as a result of the feminine being absorbed into the masculine, and not because gender difference is completely obliterated so that there is neither male nor female, in the famous locution of Paul.

Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, p. 165.

Professor Wolfson’s statement can be taken to imply that in the fallen realm (outside Eden), gender differentiation, which, as something not originally designed by God, and thus not intended for the human (the adam), inevitably leads to the original sin, and thus the expulsion. ----In the minds of the kabbalist, sexual union represents the temporary re-absorption of the female into the male. The female literally becomes attached to the male (united with the male) by means of the very organ which signifies masculinity, and thus, through its creation [Gen. 2:21], gives rise to the very division it's thereafter used to remedy. The phallus both creates gender dichotomy, and then, is used to temporarily fill the fissure, the division, the void, that would have been avoided had the phallus never risen in the first place (the Garden).

Heterosexual bonding is the mark of partial and temporary redemption in an unredeemed world; in the moment that redemption [full redemption] is consummated, however, the female is so totally contained in the male that there is no longer the need for the union of two distinct entities.

Ibid.

The foregoing brings up a number of important insights illuminating not only the division between male and female (which Paul's theology dissolves) but a secondary division Paul would see disappear: the distinction between Jewish and Gentile believer:

"When Eve was still in Adam, death did not exist. When she was separated from him death came into being. If he enters again and attains his former self, death will be no more" [Gospel of Philip (68:22-25)]. In a second passage from this work (70:10-20), it is again emphasized that the cause of death in the world was the separation of female from male, a remarkable rendering of the scriptural narrative of the sin of the first couple in the Garden of Eden. The task of Christ, accordingly, is "to repair the separation which was from the beginning" by joining together male and female in the bridal chamber.

Ibid.

Professor Wolfson’s quotation from the Gospel of Philip contextualizes Rabbi Kaplan's claim that to some degree circumcision restores the Jew to the status of the adam prior to the division, and its phallic-resolution, associated with the original sin. In other words, Jewish believers typically find it difficult to swallow the concept of original sin since, per Rabbi Kaplan's insight, they're ritualistically born into a situation that symbolizes, visualizes, the "Jew," as a prelapsarian adam, a prelapsarian human-being, a still androgynous male. Jews don't typically teach "original sin" since in the original ritual that situates their theo-logical existence they're born prior to the original sin such that for them it doesn't exist.

That said, what could possibly stand out more clearly than the fact that the very ritual that situates the Jew as prelapsarian flesh, pre-lapse humanity, is the ritual elimination of the very organ whose creation makes the lapse, the original sin, even possible. Abraham's ritual emasculation makes the Jew's attitude toward "original sin" a fore-gone (so to say) conclusion, while Professor Wolfson's quotation of the Gospel of Philip makes the foregoing doctrinal. We can say this since according to the Gospel of Philip, "death" doesn't exist until Eve is pulled from the androgynous adam. In other words, the pulling of Eve from the adam's body, which results in the suture known as the penile-raphe (Gen. 2:21), is the very creation of "death," simultaneous to, and with, the creation of the phallus; the phallus Gentile believers associate with the angel of death, the serpent in the Garden, and the transference of the original sin through the act the phallus makes possible, inevitable.

The Gospel of Philip speaks of fixing of the fissure, the reparation of the broken covenant between God and mankind, as the joining of male and female in the "bridal chamber": a holy union, holy matrimony, performed, and consummated behind a closed door, a closed membrane, a closed veil, the intact veil of the "bridal chamber," which Rashi equates with the Holy of Holies in the temple (see also Wolfson, L.E.B, p. 134), which the Gospel of Philip equates with the intact membrane on the temple of the female body.

This is all to say that just as the Jew has no conception of original sin, precisely because ritual emasculation situates him theologically prior to the original sin, so too, here, we see that having been conceived prior to the original sin, and thus having been ritually emasculated, brit milah, no organ of death on his body, the Jew stands there scratching his head about "original sin" and the virgin birth of a redeemer to fix the original sin, precisely because, ritually speaking, the Jew is the prototype of the Jewish redeemer, both of them being conceived without the organ of death (the Jew prior to, the Christ after its removal), such that the entire epoch circumscribed within Gentile-Judaism (Christianity), i.e., the fall and subsequent redemption, doesn't exist in the epistemological foundation of the prelapsarian mind and body of the Token Jew.

Professor Wolfson read's the Gospel of Philip to imply that if Adam enters again into the "bridal chamber," then death will be eliminated; Adam will return to the pristine state of Eden. In Jewish mythology, the "bridal chamber" (which is symbolized by the most holy place of the temple), represents not only the "bedchamber," where God and his bride unite, but also the Garden of Eden. This most holy place of the temple, the Holy of holies, and always with an intact veil, represents Eden, the place where God and his bride consummate their marriage (i.e., the "bedchamber" of the supernal Groom and Bride).

In Professor Wolfson’s words: The task of Christ, accordingly, is "to repair the separation which was from the beginning" by joining together male and female in the bridal chamber. ----The writer of the Gospel of Philip, and presumably Professor Wolfson as well, imagine Adam entering back into the womb (John 3:4), the "bedchamber" and or "bridal chamber," thereby repairing the damage done in the Fall. The mechanics of this re-entry into the Garden are predicated on bris milah, ritual emasculation, being situated as a wedding ritual, as etymology would have it, since then, the statement in the Gospel of Philip, as read by Professor Wolfson, takes on its rather weighty meaning.

If Adam's prelapsarian existence in the Garden of Eden is androgynous, and the separation of the female creates the very organ (Gen. 2:21), the phallus, that symbolizes the destruction of the idyllic period in the story of Eden (literally the "death" of that epoch), then the phallus becomes both the mark marking the destruction of androgyny and also the means of temporarily repairing the broken androgyny, through phallic-sex, which (phallic-sex), is the ushering in, so to say, of the original sin (if you will, and most of you have). The original sin is the phallus entering the Garden, the "bedchamber" from the outside in, in an always failed attempt at fixing what its very arrival on the scene, its rising in the fore-skene erected in Genesis, broke in the first place.

This highly reasonable reasoning results in the rather ridiculously apropos acknowledgement of the ante-phallic-logic involved in the foregoing: e.g., a male/female androgyny (prelapsarian Adam) existing in a closed-womb/garden, a womb not as yet entered by either the angel-of-death, who brings about gender dichotomy --- Gen. 2:21, nor the organ the angel-of-death creates in his image, precisely to cause fission to the previous androgyny his segregation desecrates. His act of desecration is the creation of the flesh, representing masculinity, the phallus, whose existence on the human body belies the androgynous idyllic state of Eden that appears contrary to everything postlapsarian biological-logic would have us look for or even expect.

We should never expect, nor even imagine, up until the scripture speaks of Mary expecting what she could never expect, her imagining what she could never imagine, that in the actual Genesis, male and female were actually united in the Garden, in the womb of God, a closed place at the time, closed until the arrival of the serpent, the angel-of-death, whose arrival created the rupture, thereafter used as the exit, through which he affected the removal of the sexually active man and his wife.

It would be difficult to exhaust the power of this idea since it's fitting in so many ways.

For instance, in biology, the default gender of the ovum is female, such that to become a male requires the addition of the y chromosome, which doesn't exist in the womb, until the phallus separates the female flesh (the labial flesh), in order to deposit the chromosome (y) that creates a chain-reaction of mutations in the ovum, which in turn turns the default human body (female) into a phallic-simile, a facsimile, of the father of this very sin (the phallus, the fleshly father of masculinity). ----If the phallus doesn't enter the "bed-chamber," tearing the veil in the process (i.e., desecrating the temple on the way in), then at best, assuming the ovum could develop without the phallus, we should expect a female body (the default body), to develop in the womb. . . This is to say that part and parcel of the outrageous nature of a non-phallic conception and birth (as portrayed in the Gospels) is the fact of the product of this non-phallic conception being male as opposed to female.

The Gospel of Philip, and presumably the canonical Gospels too, play on the idea of male and female flesh existing --- united --- in a closed-womb. In other words, typically, you can't have male and female in the womb, the Garden, the "bedchamber," until the phallus (the male-flesh) opens the veil and enters the womb. It's then, and only then, that the phallus, by desecrating the temple (tearing the veil of its sanctity) and thereby uniting male and female flesh, the groom and bride, the ovum and the semen, creates the only possibility of the unification of male and female in that particular sanctuary.

If a male is found to exist inside a closed-womb, then that male body must by default (and not the fault of the phallus) be androgynous (male and female) since the female body is default flesh, implying that something must happen to the ovum, female flesh, in order for it to be transformed in a manner that allows it to produce, male-flesh. And if that something isn't the "union" of male and female, produced through phallic-sex, post Fall matrimony (the failed attempt to fix what the rise of the serpent broke), then in this particular case, the phallus isn't the mediator of this unity, suggesting its existence on this apparent pre-lapse body, in no way suggests of a division of gender, therein implying, and implicating, this phallic-human body, as neither male nor female, but some concatenation of the two: androgyny.

This suggests that the existence of the phallus on the typical post-lapse body is always, every time, the inevitable, and biologically sound result, of the fact that the very phallus found on the developing body in the womb (male-flesh that really shouldn't be found there since the ovum is female flesh) is in fact found there precisely because the phallus producing this particular flesh previously "united" gender distinct flesh, male and female, in the manner (phallic-sex) that produced the Fall into gender-dichotomy in the first place.

If a phallus exists on a body, produced from an ovum, prior to, without, phallic-sex, then the existence of the phallus on that body is not the logical and biological result of the unification of male and female flesh through phallic-sex (since that's not how it came to exist). This means that it's neither a phallic-simile nor a facsimile of that particular gender-division, and or reunification, such that seeing it on that particular body, in the closed-garden, can't be used to distinguish male and female as it does in every other case. This implies that that flesh, that organ, on that body, as it were, and was, and is, is the only truly circumcised phallus (the androgynous phallus) that ever was, or will be, since the first Adam didn't originally have a phallus (it was created in Gen. 2:21), and since every other human with one, acquired it through phallic-sex, which, is only ritually, symbolically, removed, even in the case of  A Token Jew.  

The foregoing implies that should a firstborn male be conceived from an ovum still ensconced safely behind an intact veil, and should this “male” child be considered male by reason of the fact that he has a fleshly phallus where biologically it shouldn’t be possible, then this first born male can only be the original first born of creation, born late, no doubt, having had his status as the firstborn of creation preempted no doubt, by various usurpers no doubt, but the firstborn of creation all the same. His arrival and birth is the most fitting picture of the idyllic realm of Eden where prior to the arrival of the serpent, God breathed his very blood into the first human, impregnating that human, in order to bring (out of what became the post-lapse dis-order) the first born male ----- born from female androgyny, where that male was peacefully and quietly gestating (The Zohar, Be-Reshit, 1:66b.).

He blew into his nostrils the breath of life (Genesis 2:7). The word is inclusive, but He blew into his nostrils the breath of life---into that dust, like a female impregnated by a male, for they join and this dust is filled with all [Kol]. With whom?

The Zohar, Pritzker Edition, Be-Reshit, 1:49a.

Here we’re speaking of a unique body marked as it is with the organ associated with the Fall, but having nothing whatsoever to do with the fault associated with the Fall (phallic-sex). This flesh, existing in the likeness of the sinful-flesh, the phallus, consummates a union of male and female inside the still sanctified precinct of the Garden of Eden, the "bedchamber," where God and his bride unite are united in genuine holy matrimony. The "genuineness" and "holiness" of the matrimonial-union being predicated on the existence of male-flesh (the phallus) in the womb, the garden, prior to the male-flesh, the phallus, ever having been previously in the womb, ever having been in the Garden.

When this firstborn male leaves the Garden, it’s by his own hand, and not the command, “be fruitful and multiply,” given by the serpent, who both preempts and usurps God's original design by destroying the sanctity, and the closed nature of, the Garden, by his very presence. The sacredness of the true holy matrimony is based on both the existence of male-flesh in a closed-female (Jer. 31:22; Isa. 66:7-9), and secondarily the intact sanctity of the Garden, the "bedchamber," where the existence of this flesh is first registered (Ex. 13:2).

Since, in the old covenant the womb contains only female chromosomes, until it's opened by the phallus, the only time a sealed-womb (a virgin-womb) is legitimately allowed to be opened by the phallus, is at the necessary, but evil, consummation of the union termed "holy matrimony," which is the union of the male and the female under the chuppah. This is the ceremony which is consummated, made real, in the "bedchamber," when the phallus opens the womb, so that male and female can unite in the "bedchamber," the Garden of Eden, creating the first . . . born . . . male, who ends up signifying the bastard nature of his conception by becoming the first-born sinner, the first born murderer.

On the other hand, the Gospel of Philip plays on the fact that if a Jewish woman's first, born, child, is male, and if the ritual unmanning of her husband under the chuppah, i.e., ritual circumcision, goes further than the mere ritual (see, Perpetual Virginity) then her pregnancy must similarly go further than mere ritual. The sealed nature of her womb, rather than being merely symbolic of sanctity, a holy temple, and thus a holy unity, actually, if it produces male-flesh, a phallus, represents a higher order of "holy matrimony" (a renewed covenant between God and man, or the renewal of the original covenant between God and man [R. Hirsch]), since male and female are united in this closed-womb, male and female are married in this closed-womb, when no man "enters to couple them" (The Zohar, Aharei Mot, [3:66a]).

Playing on the rituals where these things play out sacerdotally, specifically on Yom Kippur, The Zohar, Aharei Mot, 3:66a, explains that when the supernal Bride and Groom unite in the most holy place of the "bedchamber," on Yom Kippur, no male-flesh shall be present. The veil must remain intact, and the high priest must be circumcised (representing the fact that he's unmanned). No man, no phallus, is, nor can be, present, when the sacred union occurs, when the true holy matrimony takes place. The most holy place must have an intact veil, membrane, separating the Garden of Eden, "the bedchamber," of Groom and Bride, from the realm outside the Garden, where male and female are always, every time, united by the man, the phallus, entering behind the veil it tears, in order to couple the male and female its very presence separated in the first place, the Garden.

It's difficult to exhaust the power of this idea since the rituals and symbols speak of Eden as a place where the union is affected, male and female are united, in one body (androgyny), in one womb (virgin conception), without the separation of the female body (represented by phallic-sex), which leads not only to the expulsion from the Garden, but which, by forcing the expulsion, leads to a realm outside God’s original plan, where no union of male and female ever occurs again (save one), without the jus primae noctis of the male-flesh (the phallus), which caused the rupture of the sealed-Garden in the first place. From Adam, to the second Adam, it’s the case that no human being is ever produced through the original holy matrimony, which is the unification of male and female in a closed-womb, a sealed-garden, the Garden of Eden, where androgyny (a non-phallic union of male and female) is the order of the day.