Natural Eunuchs

Ask most people what a eunuch is, and they will describe a castrated man: a harem guard, a palace servant, a figure from a world long gone. Few realize that Jesus spoke of eunuchs who were never castrated at all.

Matthew 19:10–12

He did so in a conversation about marriage. The Pharisees had come to test Him on divorce, and He answered by going back to the beginning, to what God has joined (Matthew 19:3–9). His disciples found the standard so high that they concluded, “If such is the case of the man with his wife, it is better not to marry” (Matthew 19:10). Jesus replied:

“All cannot accept this saying, but only those to whom it has been given: For there are eunuchs who were born thus from their mother’s womb, and there are eunuchs who were made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He who is able to accept it, let him accept it.”

(Matthew 19:11–12)

Jesus names three kinds of eunuchs. Some were castrated, made eunuchs by others. Some chose celibacy, making themselves eunuchs for the kingdom’s sake.

But the first were not made at all. They were born.

Who were they? And what would Jesus’ hearers have understood by eunuchs “born thus from their mother’s womb”?

The Eunuchs Jesus Knew

Jesus was not making up terms. He was naming people His hearers already knew. Eunuchs were a recognized class, among the ancient world’s sexual minorities, and both Jewish and Roman law knew more than one kind.

Jewish law named two: the saris adam, the castrated eunuch, and the saris ḥammah, the eunuch from birth. In the rabbis’ words, the first was made so “by the hands of man,” the second “by the hand of Heaven” (Mishnah Yevamot 8:4; Talmud Yevamot 80b). The distinction is beautiful. Not made by human hands, but by the hand of God.

The difference was more than a matter of anatomy; it carried legal weight, especially in marriage (Mishnah Yevamot 8:2; Talmud Yevamot 75b). What marked the eunuch from birth was perceived infertility. He was thought incapable of procreation, not of sex (Yevamot 80a–b). To put it bluntly, for many, their equipment still worked.

In the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures made centuries before Jesus, saris became eunouchos, the word Matthew uses and a word the whole Roman world knew.

Roman law drew the same line as the rabbis, in practical terms. A eunuch who had not been castrated could marry, and he could leave his estate to a child not yet born, “since neither age nor sterility is an impediment.” A castrated man could do neither. In the slave market, too, the law counted the uncastrated eunuch healthy and the castrated one diseased. Lawyers were already ruling this way in Jesus’ own day, and the law recognized both classes: eunuchs “by nature” and those made eunuchs by others (Digest 21.1.6–7; 23.3.39.1; 28.2.6; 50.16.128).

Ordinary Romans were less polite, and less precise. They called a eunuch a semivir, a half-man (Juvenal, Satires 6.513). Martial, a first-century poet who made his name with short, biting verses about Roman life, puts it crudely. In one poem, a eunuch and an old man take a young woman to bed together, and neither can perform. She lies between them, unsatisfied, and prays to Venus, the goddess of love, for herself and the two poor wretches: make the old man young again, and make the eunuch a man (Martial 11.81).

The law was careful to tell eunuchs apart. The street simply laughed at them.

Eunuchs from Birth

Read together, the ancient sources point to three kinds of eunuch by nature: those born infertile, those born intersex and those born without desire for women.

Those Born Infertile

The first was the man born unable to father children, and recognizing him mattered. Marriage existed to carry on a man’s name. Without children, he would leave no heir, and his name would die with him. With no medical science to test fertility, the rabbis had only what they could observe. They looked for signs that a young man’s body had never matured: no pubic hair by the age of twenty, no beard, smooth skin, a voice that could not be told from a woman’s, thin, watery semen and urine that did not foam. They weighed these signs carefully and debated how many were needed (Talmud Yevamot 80b).

It was careful work within the limits of their knowledge, but the eye test can only tell you so much.

Those Born Intersex

The second was the person born with a body that was neither clearly male nor clearly female.

Jewish law recognized several sexual minorities beyond male and female, and gave each a name. There was the androgynos, born with both male and female characteristics, and the tumtum, whose genitals were hidden so that their sex could not be determined. Beside them stood the eunuch from birth and his female counterpart, the aylonit. A tumtum later found to be male was to be treated as a eunuch (Mishnah Yevamot 8:6; Talmud Yevamot 80b).

An early Jewish commentary on Genesis, compiled some centuries after Jesus, records the teaching that Adam was created androgynos, both male and female in one body (Genesis Rabbah 8:1). It is pure speculation, but it shows a mindset: intersex people were not beyond God’s design, since the first human being could be imagined as intersex.

The Romans called intersex people hermaphrodites. Roman law classed each one as male or female according to whichever sex their body showed more clearly (Digest 1.5.10). Ptolemy, the great astronomer of the second century, believed the stars at a child’s birth shaped its body. Among the bodily injuries and diseases he lists, side by side, are children born “eunuchs or hermaphrodites” (Tetrabiblos 3.12). Like the rabbis, he put the two in the same category.

Augustine wrote of them too. It was customary, he noted, to give them “a masculine name, as the more worthy” (City of God 16.8). In his world, standing, rights and public life belonged to men. When a person’s sex was in doubt, custom gave them the more privileged status.

Many intersex people, unable to father children, would have been counted among the eunuchs from birth. The theologian Megan DeFranza has written on this with real care, and her podcast conversation The Bible and Intersex Believers is an excellent place to start.

Those Born Without Desire for Women

The third were men who showed none of the signs the rabbis looked for. Their bodies were those of ordinary men, and they could father children. What set them apart could not be seen: they had no desire for women. Today we would call many of them gay. The ancient world had no such word and sorted desire differently from us, but it recognized these men and linked them with the eunuch.

The earliest known interpretation of Jesus’ words names them among the eunuchs from birth. In the second century, the followers of Basilides, a Gnostic Christian teacher in Alexandria, explained Jesus’ saying this way: “Some men, from their birth, have a natural sense of repulsion from a woman; and those who are naturally so constituted do well not to marry” (Stromata 3.1.1). Their words survive because Clement of Alexandria, a leading church father writing around AD 200 and a fierce critic of the Gnostic sects, recorded them without objection (Stromata 3.1.3).

Their reading fit the thinking of their world. Greek writers believed some men who desired men were born that way. A work on natural science, attributed to Aristotle, asks why certain men desire to take the woman’s part with other men. It answers that some are this way by habit and some by nature, and it traces the natural cases to a bodily condition it also finds in eunuchs (Problemata 4.26). Ptolemy counted such desire among the diseases of the soul, but he too thought the stars at a man’s birth could shape it, just as they could make him a eunuch (Tetrabiblos 3.12, 3.14).

Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish philosopher and a contemporary of Jesus and Paul, also connects the eunuch to men who took the woman’s part with other men. Some, he records, “have desired wholly to change their condition for that of women, and have castrated themselves” (Special Laws 3.41). This comes from a hostile witness. Philo wanted these men put to death (Special Laws 3.38); he had no reason to grant them any standing. He reports the link as fact, not as a favor. Society had a recognized place for the eunuch. For a man who took the woman’s part, it had only insults, such as cinaedus, a sneer at effeminate men. In becoming eunuchs, these men found a place.

Ordinary Romans made the same connection, and Martial, our crude poet, turned it into a joke. Among the eunuchs of Rome were the galli, priests of the goddess Cybele who castrated themselves in her service. A gallus was expected to pleasure men, not women, and Martial mocks one who still used his tongue on women: “Why was your manhood cut off with a shard of pottery, if you liked women that much? It is your head that needs castrating. Below the waist you may be a eunuch, but you are cheating Cybele: with your mouth you are still a man” (Martial 3.81).

The earliest known interpreters of Matthew 19:10–12, ancient science, a Jewish philosopher and the Roman street all point the same way. Long before anyone spoke of sexual orientation, men born without desire for women stood among the eunuchs from birth.

Eunuchs & Celibacy

If Jesus likened those who choose singleness for the kingdom to eunuchs, aren’t eunuchs then supposed to live a life of singleness and celibacy?

No. Jesus said there are eunuchs “who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake” (Matthew 19:12). He likened kingdom singleness to the eunuch, not the other way around. He took what the eunuch stood for, a place outside the marriage their world expected, and applied it to those who would choose that place for the kingdom. He did not redefine the eunuch by the choice some would make.

A category is not defined by one of its parts. Seedless grapes are still grapes, but no one concludes that all grapes must be seedless. Those who chose singleness for the kingdom were one kind of eunuch. Their choice does not bind the rest.

To insist that every eunuch must remain single and celibate is to make Jesus say something He did not say.

The Eunuchs God Names

When Jesus spoke of eunuchs “born thus from their mother’s womb,” His hearers needed no explanation. Among the eunuchs from birth were the man born infertile, the person born intersex and the man born without desire for women. Each was a category that stood outside the marriage their world expected: a man and a woman raising heirs to bear his name. The rabbis inspected their bodies, Roman law weighed their worth and the street laughed at them.

God’s heart had gone out to them long before. Through Isaiah, He answered the eunuch’s deepest ache. He would not let him call himself “a dry tree,” a tree that bears no fruit, a man with no one to carry his name (Isaiah 56:3). Instead, He promised more than the eunuch had lost:

“To the eunuchs who keep My Sabbaths, and choose what pleases Me, and hold fast My covenant, even to them I will give in My house and within My walls a place and a name better than that of sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.”
(Isaiah 56:4–5)

Jesus spoke from the same heart. Where others saw a defect or a joke, He saw people born that way, and He named them in the same breath as those who choose singleness for the kingdom. Every eunuch from birth stands within His recognition.

If you see yourself among them, these words are for you. You are not a dry tree. Father God loves you. He welcomes you and affirms you, just as you are, just as He made you.

There is room for you in His house, and a name for you that will never fade.

For the rest of us, who have always enjoyed acceptance and welcome in the Father’s house, we now are in a position to do what followers of Jesus in His day could not. Inspired by the Father’s heart, we can be part of making room for eunuchs to share every blessing we have taken for granted.