The Christmas When All the Sodomites Died

The Life and Significance of a Strange Medieval Legend

Authors

  • Michael David Barbezat Australian Catholic University

Abstract

This article explores the life of a strange medieval legend which maintained that all the sodomites on earth died just before Christ’s birth. Many medieval saints and scholars believed this story to be fact, citing the genocide of the world’s sodomites on the first Christmas as part of their arguments against homosexual sex. These authorities attributed the claim to the authority of Jerome and Augustine. This attribution is wrong. Both saints, in fact, never made any such assertion. This article uncovers the legend’s emergence in thirteenth-century Christian biblical commentary within the circle of Peter the Chanter, attributing its origin, for the first time, to the commentaries of Stephen Langton. It traces some of the uses the legend’s medieval and early modern wielders found for it. It concludes with a consideration of the legend’s contemporary life as either an icon for Christianity’s perceived intolerance or as a statement of far-right traditional values. These two modes of persistence illustrate wider aspects of contemporary queer people’s experience, especially regarding their contact with religious traditions.

Far beyond a mere curiosity, the history of this legend is significant because of what it represents. The legend’s story is one of erroneous claims and the impact of these claims over time. The legend’s association with the great saints and theologians of the medieval and early modern past makes the central weaknesses of their traditional condemnations of sodomy more visible. The legend of the Christmas genocide shows us that the saints were frequently wrong, and that their errors are now woven into what seem to be our traditions. As global efforts to eradicate members of the LGBTQ+ community are increasing, attention to medieval imaginings of a Christmas genocide of sodomites will help to illuminate the deep, and often erroneous, roots of contemporary destructive impulses.

Author Biography

  • Michael David Barbezat, Australian Catholic University

    Burning Bodies: Communities, Eschatology, and the Punishment of Heresy in the Middle Ages (2018)

    I am an historian of medieval European intellectual, religious, and cultural history. My work focuses on connections between religious ideologies and conceptions of society, geography, violence, and identity in the Middle Ages. In particular, I am fascinated by how the boundaries drawn between spaces, ideas, and states structure individual experience. My work to date has interrogated the relationships between matter and spirit, reality and the imagination, language and meaning, and the historian and the past. My current work explores the ways that ideas of Hell, Purgatory and the Apocalypse influenced medieval conceptions of the experience of minority groups.

Published

2025-05-27

Issue

Vol. 34 No. 1 (2025): January

Section

Studies