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Easter Baskets, or, The Passion According to Kink Bingo
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kink_bingo is running, for the second year in a row, an April mini-challenge based around themed gift baskets. Of kink.I was kind of surprised to find that in two years, they hadn't done the obvious and made an Easter basket! So I asked if they'd avoided that on purpose because religion, and the mods replied, no, they just honestly hadn't thought of the possibility as they don't celebrate Easter, and I was welcome to do one if I wanted.
....this is one of the cases where my cultural blinkers become readily apparent and I am suddenly smacked in the face by the fact there are lots of people in this world, even who grew up in a culture superficially like mine, who don't realize that the Passion story is made of kink. Basically, all the cultural influence that would later become Christianity looked into its id and pulled out all the most powerful bits, and then 2000 years of repressed clergy and sacrilegious laity embellished it into something with twisted unplumbable depths, and as a result millions and millions of people over history have first discovered that they really liked thinking about certain things while being encouraged to adore an image of a naked man with fresh whip-marks and piercings and dripping blood and an expression of exalted serenity.
Lalala.
None of the above is me having a dirty mind, by the way, that's just Christianity.
The below is me having a dirty mind. Because I set out to make an Easter themed mini-bingo card and realized I couldn't do just one because I'd have to leave too much out. So here is the Passion story in five kink bingo minicards, complete with Biblical references. (The references are heavy on Matthew and John because that's where most of the kinkiest wording is, and also because I'm too lazy to properly cross-reference. Also I was trying not to repeat any kinks, so sometimes I ended up using one that wasn't quite the ideal - several of them recur over and over in the story.)
(Um, do I need to still warn that this isn't a very nice story, and a lot of the kink in it is very not safe or consensual? Although a surprising amount of it is.)
| BI | N | GO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| John 12:1-8 Orgies/Decadence |
John 12:12-13 Worship |
John 13:3-5 Foot Fetish |
|
| John 13:12-16 Service |
John 13:34 FREE SPACE |
John 13:8-11 Wet Messy Dirty |
|
| Matthew 16:21-24 Danger |
Matthew 26:26 Food |
Matthew 26:27-28 Bloodplay |
In the Garden of Gethsemane
| BI | N | GO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Matthew 26:39-42 Begging |
Matthew 26:39-42 Obedience |
Matthew 26:40-41 Sleepy/Unconscious |
|
| Matthew 26:47 In Public |
Matthew 26:50 Free Space |
Matthew 26:48-49 Oral Fixation |
|
| Matthew 26:48-49 Possession/Marking |
Matthew 26:51-52 Blades |
John 18:15-18 Anonymity |
The Trial
| BI | N | GO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Matthew 27:1-2 Authority Figures |
John 18:22 Smacking/Slapping |
John 18:24 Bondage |
|
| Matthew 27:12-14 Silence |
Matthew 27:19 Free Space |
Matthew 27:30-31 Humiliation |
|
| John 19:1 Whipping/Flogging |
Matthew 27:28-29 Dressup |
John 19:2 Silk/Velvet/Feathers/Furs |
The Crucifixion
...yeah so a lot of these just go under crucifixion, generally, but there's a reason crosses are a dungeon staple.
| BI | N | GO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| John 19:17-18 Exposure |
John 19:17-18 Piercings/Needleplay |
John 19:17-18 Suspension |
|
| John 19:17-18 Painplay |
John 19:37 Free Space |
Luke 23:39-41 Penance/Punishment |
|
| John 19:19-22 Writing on the Body |
John 19:23-24 Uniform/Military Fetish |
John 19:34 Object Penetration |
The Resurrection
| BI | N | GO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mark 15:46 Medical Kink |
Mark 16:1-2 Washing/Cleaning |
Matthew 28:1-5 Emotion Manipulation |
|
| John 20:14-16 Domestic/Tradesman Kink |
Luke 24:29 Free Space |
John 20:16-17 Body Alteration/Injury |
|
| Luke 24:39 Bodies and Body Parts |
John 20:20 Scars/Scarification |
John 20:24-27 Fisting/Stretching |
...and finally, because I admit that was kind of overkill, here's the Best of the Passion Kink Basket:
| BI | N | GO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Suspension | Whipping/Flogging | Bloodplay | |
| Humiliation | Obedience | Begging | |
| Painplay | Piercings/Needleplay | Penance/Punishment |
This does, of course, use the kink_bingo + fandom definition of kink which doesn't necessarily involve active sexuality, it just involves things that grip on a level below conscious control, viscerally, cathartically. Serious discussion of the theology involved strongly encouraged. ^_^
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Unless I have it wrong and that part of Mark is not where the Secret Gospel goes. *is not actually a Christian, sorry*
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(I have to confess that every instinct I've got has always told me the Secret Gospel letter was a fairly modern fake - it's just such an interesting coincidence that the only quotations that survive are the ones best tailored to appeal to the prurient interests of the second half of the 20th century, and it was discovered in the second half of the late 20th century by a scholar who was invested in the idea of Christ as libertine who then mysteriously lost track of the original. That does not make it less amusing a fanfic though.)
I have always had a deep affection for the Nag Hammadi secret gospels, though. The gnostic philosophy/sayings of Christ parts are usually interesting, and then there are the bits of them that read like the fossilized remains of a juvenile shipwar - "John was the disciple Jesus loved and went off alone with at night and whispered secrets to!" "No, Thomas was!" "No, James was!" "No, Peter was, and you're all stupidheads!" ...and then there's the Gospel of Mary Magdalene where they all get together and admit it was her. You come to the inescapable conclusion that he must have been juggling all of them on alternate nights. :D
And the infancy gospels are brilliant crackfic, especially Thomas! I also like some of the books that tour Heaven and Hell, like the books of Enoch. They make no sense but there were definitely some frustrated SF writers out there.
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Scholarly analysis
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but this is pretty epic. =)
I'm all for learning the 'for realz' behind the stories, since a lot of the stories got 'prettied up' for church.
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funny thing is - i still have ppl who don't believe me when i tell them that all 4 of the gospels tell the same story, just from different dudes. XD
my parents were always all 'you should pay attn' and i was always 'but it's BORING and i've heard this all before - it's the same as sunday school, but with more words and no coloring!'
church and i are not friends... plus, i somehow ended up w/ more drama at church than i ever did at school
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YOU
YOU ARE MY FAVORITE PERSON RIGHT NOW
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One could definitely do one for bunnies and overeating and silly hats and hidden eggs, though. It would be... interesting. Let's see. Plushies, animal play, food, dressup, drugs/aphrodisiacs (for the chocolate); orgies and decadence (for the overeating of the chocolate); silk/velvet/feathers/furs (for the silly hats); writing on the body (for decorated eggs); wet messy dirty (for trying to find the eggs, because it always rains at some point); and... I don't actually know what to use for "let's play find the easter egg". One of the sex toys ones, though.
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(...I can't teach any Sunday School lessons to kids with a straight face, which is why Mom now lets me stay out in the hall and write fic and only come in to help with the crafts and snack. :P )
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Being a pastor, I don't really have that choice. (Although teaching songs is my best part of working with kids, I have to do everything, or be able to train others to do it.)
And you *really* should not have missed the naked (or possibly nekkid*) guy in Mark. There's a poem by Robert Cording that I heard back in 2003 that is my favorite Christian poem about that passage. (The Man Running Naked Into the Dark)Have you ever read the "secret Gospel" stuff?** A professor in seminary found out I liked that poem and read the "secret Gospel" excerpts aloud to the class. I had trouble keeping anything resembling a straight face. It was slashier than anything in Scripture, even more so than David and Jonathan, and hearing a middle aged professor read it in the middle of class was ... gah. I mean, you don't need slash goggles, you need straight goggles to see it as anything other than slash. I am always surprised that nobody in fandom has taken it yet and ficced it. Though I am grateful; I can read a lot of other sacrilegious stuff and not be bothered, but I Do Not Want to read about Jesus having sex. With anyone, of any gender. Just, no.
*One of my seminary professors (originally from Texas, with a Southern accent that came and went depending on what he was talking about), used to say that "naked" is being without clothes. "Nekkid" is being unclothed with intent
**fragments of a letter of a leader of the early church denouncing the use certain pieces of a "secret Gospel of Mark" were being put to. I don't know enough about the letter and the guy who found the copy of it to decide whether it was a forgery, but if it is genuine I don't believe the "secret Gospel" itself is genuine. It was probably a Gnostic attempt to insert their own beliefs (i.e. that there is secret knowledge that only the enlightened have, and that's the way to enlightenment/salvation, and it's hidden from the world) into the Gospel least hospitable to them. The entire idea of a "Secret Gospel" is a perfect example of a Gnostic idea--their name means "secret knowledge!"--and Mark has the least gnostic overtones of any of the Gospels. (Sure, he's got the "messianic secret", but not much "only the inner circle can understand this" because by and large the disciples in Mark consistently misunderstand *everything* even when Jesus is explaining things plainly. Also, the gnostics believed matter was evil, therefore in their interpretation Jesus wasn't really human, he was a spirit that looked human, but Mark's gospel is consistently the earthiest of the four gospels.) I mean, if it were supposedly fragments of, say, John, with all its erudite theology and spiritual discourse, I would be much more accepting.
The gnostics were an Eastern syncretic religion/philosophy floating around the Ancient Near East, particularly from the first or second century or so BCE to about the 7th or 8th century CE. They were prone to taking whatever the religion of the area was and arranging/reinterpreting it to fit their beliefs. There were quite a lot of "Christian" gnostics, who appropriated the stories of Jesus, so that's what we tend to focus on today, but there were also quite a lot of, say, traditional Egyptian religion gnostics, and traditional Greek pagan gnostics as well. (In fact, most "Christian" gnostics started out as Egyptian-gnostics and just added in Christian ideas and stories to the mix.) And the majority of Christians were quite consistent about denouncing gnosticism as heretical, far more consistently than just about any other heresy I can think of. Mostly because several of the main tenets of gnosticism mean that some of the critical aspects of those stories are interpreted just about exactly opposite of what Christians believe. Which is why the current fascination with gnosticism annoys me; it is not and never was Christian! If you like it as a philosophy, that's fine--just don't try to tell me it was the true religion of the ancient Christians that got suppressed in a huge conspiracy by evil church leaders.
RANT: The people who subscribe to any of the great Christian Conspiracy theories have no clue a) how diverse the river of Christian tradition really is, b) how many different branches of it there are and have been since the very beginning, and c) how incredibly unlikely it is that they would have been willing to cooperate together to suppress anything effectively, given their historical and theological disputes. I mean, the Roman Catholic church from about 900-1500 might have been able to get away with that in Europe. But even that's not a given, considering how much infighting there was, and the various Orthodox branches and the younger Protestant churches have never been anywhere near unified or hierarchical enough to do it. Given all of that, if just about every major Christian leader from every branch of the tradition who had to deal with a particular issue said "that's not Christian, no matter what stories of ours you appropriate," it's not a conspiracy, it really isn't Christian. Also, conspiracy implies secrecy, and these battles were fought out in the open for everyone to see, with publicly circulated letters and lots of sermons on the subject.
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I've always found the Gnostic texts sort of appealing in the way that I find most mystical texts appealing, and I would buy that there was a certain amount of gnostic influence in very-early-Christianity, even outside the specifically gnostic sects (after all, there's no need to denounce something consistently unless people keep doing it) but, uh, yeah, anybody who thinks there's ever been "one true Christian religion" clearly knows very little about the history of the Church.
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I'd never heard of the secret Gospel of Mark (canon slash!) I'd once commented to a friend with a strong Biblical theology background (master's degree in it plus a ton of independent reading) that maybe Jesus was intersex and she said "there's evidence for that." That could blow the slash theory but leads to a fascinating array of theological and sociological issues...
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And it has to keep saying that over and over because people don't want their gods to be human!
I'd heard of the Secret Gospel of Mark, I think, but it kind of hits my embarassment squick for some reason, so it's not on my list of "favorite apocryphal gospels." ^_^ Of course there's evidence for pretty much anything somewhere in the Christian writings.
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As to the intersex thing, well, I had a professor of the Old Testament that claimed that one of the reasons for prohibiting statues of God was to prevent too-strict gender identification of the divine. I mean, there are a surprising amount of gender-neutral or feminine metaphors for God in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, when you consider how incredibly patriarchal, sexist, and misogynist their society was. Her phrase for it was "It's about he-ness, not the penis." I don't think there's enough evidence one way or the other about Jesus' sex/gender, and frankly there are more important battles to be fought regarding sexuality and identification in the church (Sodom and Gomorrah don't mean what you think they mean, no really). But it is interesting to speculate about.
Just, please, if you fic it, don't put explicit sex in. Or if you do, clearly state that ahead of time and don't link me to it. I can accept that Jesus being "truly human" would include sexuality, but I don't really want to know about it. Which perhaps has something to do with the fact that I'm an Ace, and thus what it means for me if Jesus was a sexual being is just about opposite to what it means for most people. (I.e. it wouldn't be unifying/provide closeness, it would be distancing.)
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Re: the actual bingo cards (which are brilliant) there is also maybe sensory deprivation, when John 20:17 has Jesus telling Mary not to touch him?
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I was thinking of sensory deprivation for the darkness that covered the Earth, actually! But I didn't have space on the Crucifixion card so I took it off the list. It would work for that too though! But there's lots of other ways this could be done.
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