Matthew 8:5–13 tells the story of Jesus healing at a distance due to the humble request of a Centurion1 as follows:
When Jesus entered Capernaum, a centurion came to him, urging him and saying, “Lord, my boy is lying paralyzed at home, horribly tormented.” Jesus said to him, “I will come and heal him.” The centurion replied, “Lord, I am not worthy so that you should come under my roof, but only say the word, and my boy will be healed. For I also am a man under authority with soldiers under me, and I say to that one, ‘Come,’ and he comes, and to another, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to my slave, ‘Do this,’ and he does.”
And when Jesus heard this, he was amazed and said to those who were following, “Truly I say to you, I did not find such great fidelity with anyone in Israel! And I say to you that many will come from east and west and will recline with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, but the sons of the kingdom will be cast out into outer darkness; there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth there. And Jesus said to the centurion, “Go, as you have trusted, it will come about for you.” And the boy was healed in that very hour.
The word I’ve rendered “boy” here is the Greek word παῖς (pais), which is an ambiguous term that can refer to a “child/boy/girl,” a “slave/enslaved person” (often of higher status than the less ambiguous δοῦλος, “slave”),2 or in some instances the inferior partner in a pederastic relationship.
In recent years, some have argued for the third option in this passage,3 leveraging this passage to demonstrate Jesus’ approval of homosexual relationships. This reading should be rejected on several grounds. First, there are no sexual connotations present in the narrative, and no ancient readers—native speakers with a more natural sense of the contextual meaning of a potentially ambiguous term than modern readers—ever understood this passage in that sense. Second, the fact that such an interpretation only emerged in the last few decades is strong evidence of interested eisegesis, reading things into a passage for specific aims rather than interpreting the passage as it stands.
Finally, even if we do choose to work from an interested theological perspective like those endorsing such a reading have, this reading would mean Jesus not only approved homosexual relationships but pederasty/pedophilia and/or rape (since an enslaved person had no autonomy over his body or legal capacity not to consent). That Jesus endorsed such things is both an extremely unlikely conclusion given the default (and widespread) condemnations of such behaviors in both Judaism and Christianity in this period, and surely (hopefully) a conclusion modern interpreters likewise find unacceptable.
One of the things that makes this passage especially interesting is that each of the parallel passages in other gospels takes the sense of the term in opposite directions.
In Luke 7:1–10, the passage makes it clear at the start (7:3), in a message relayed through Jewish elders, that the individual in question is the centurion’s “slave” (δοῦλος). The quotation in the mouth of the centurion himself is more directly parallel to Matthew, using παῖς (boy/slave; 7:7), while the narrator’s report of the healing reverts back to “slave” (δοῦλος; 7:10).
On the other hand, in John 4:46–54, the narrator tells us of a “royal official” (βασιλικός) approaching Jesus on behalf of his sick “son” (υἱός; 4:46, 47), though again the official himself uses παῖς in the directly quoted portion. Since there were no garrisons of Roman troops in Galilee at the time of Jesus, the centurion in Matthew and Luke was surely a (gentile) mercenary in the employ of Herod Antipas or local auxiliaries. John’s choice of βασιλικός therefore clarifies this status—exactly what one might expect from the “fourth Synoptic Gospel.” In any case, in contrast to the official’s own words, Jesus says, “Go, your son (υἱός) is alive” (4:50). But when the man’s “slaves” (δοῦλος) meet him along the way, they inform him that his παῖς (boy/slave) is alive (4:51).
How then should this circle be squared? One option, of course, is that these discrepancies are merely that—discrepancies in a story all three Gospel writers knew but about which they disagreed on the details. But if Luke knew Matthew and John knew both (as I think was the case), that complicates the situation, since the differences among the passages would likely have been deliberate.
There is, however, a viable option that may explain all three readings: this pais was the centurion’s/official’s own son from a woman to whom he was not legally married, likely a lower-status or enslaved woman.
If this centurion were Roman, he would have been officially forbidden to marry (legionaries and auxiliaries alike) during his term of service, though in practice the authorities often looked the other way, with soldiers in long-term localized service often having unlicensed/unofficial families while still on duty. In such cases, there was a chance the soldier could formally adopt the previously legally unrecognized children after his service was complete.
But this centurion was surely in the employ of Herod Antipas, whose troops were composed of local Galileans, Idumaeans, and other foreign mercenaries, so the imperial law against Roman soldiers marrying while on active duty would not have applied to him. Nevertheless, the same principle would apply: a child with a lower-status woman might not be named a “son” (υἰός), which is a word that denotes a legitimate male descendant.
In this context, Jesus’ response in John 4:50 (“Go, your son (υἱός) is alive”) carries additional corrective weight: rather than calling the boy pais, Jesus elevates the status of the boy to “son” (υἱός), a subtle and gentle rebuke of the situation as a whole. Essentially, “that ‘boy’ is your son.” This reading also reinforces a core theme of the Gospel of John as a whole: the divine adoption of those who follow Jesus as legitimate sons and heirs.
That this pais is the son of the centurion and an enslaved/low status woman thus seems to me the best reading for all three Gospels, explaining the centurion’s deep concern along with the specific language used in this episode across the Gospels.
“Centurion” is a Roman word for the commander in charge of one hundred men (“century” = 100; Greek ἑκατονάρχος), though in practice Roman centurions usually commanded eighty rather than a hundred soldiers, likely due to twenty support staffers (often enslaved) also being under the centurion’s command. As explained in a moment, this centurion, however, was almost certainly not a Roman, since Rome did not have a garrison of troops in Galilee at the time of Jesus.
This is similar to the English word “boy,” which has sometimes functioned as a derogatory slur or word of diminution when directed toward an adult male, either in the context of slavery or racially charged contexts since then.
The earliest example of this reading of which I am aware is Michel Mayer, “Le procurateur de Judée: Suite à la manière d’Anatole France,” Arcadie 134 (1965): 63–71, which is a fictionalized conversation involving Pontius Pilate. This was then followed by J. Martignac, “Le centurion de Capernaüm,” Arcadie 255 (1975): 117–28. Others include Tom Horner, Jonathan Loved David: Homosexuality in Biblical Times (Westminster Press, 1978); Daniel A. Helminiak, What the Bible Really Says about Homosexuality (Alamo Square Press, 2000); Robert E. Shore-Goss, Queering Christ: Beyond Jesus Acted Up (Pilgrim Press, 2002). Theodore W. Jennings and Tat-Siong Benny Liew, “Mistaken Identities but Model Faith: Rereading the Centurion, the Chap, and the Christ in Matthew 8:5–13,” Journal of Biblical Literature 123 no. 3 (2004): 467–94; T. W. Jennings, The Man Jesus Loved: Homoerotic Relations in the New Testament (Pilgrim Press, 2003). For a brief but devastating response to Jennings and Liew’s argument, see Denis B. Saddington, “The Centurion in Matthew 8:5–13: Consideration of the Proposal of Theodore W. Jennings, Jr., and Tat-Siong Bennie Liew,” JBL 125 (2006): 140–42. For a relatively recent critical survey of scholarship on this reading, see Christopher B. Zeichmann, “Rethinking the Gay Centurion: Sexual Exceptionalism, National Exceptionalism in Readings of Matthew 8:5–13//Luke 7:1–10,” The Bible & Critical Theory 11 no. 1 (2015): 28–41. See also Zeichmann’s Bible Odyssey article on this passage for a short critical discussion.
The Chosen goes the same route with the Centurion/illegitimate son thesis in season 4. It's really well done.
You make a compelling case, Jason. Excellent.