So literally saying “They-God created humans in God’s male and female image.”
So in terms of the OP post - always has been.
The problem was Hebrew was a binary gendered language. Words were either male or female. No ‘parent’ just ‘mother’ or ‘father’ - so ‘he’ or ‘father’ didn’t necessarily reflect the intent of the message so much as the limitations of the medium.
This topic of getting rid of gender distinctions even came up in the early Christian apocrypha:
Jesus said to them, “When you make the two into one, […] and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, […] then you will enter [the kingdom].”
Gospel of Thomas saying 22
This part of Genesis 1 was a large contributing factor to Philio’s first century hermaphroditic “first Adam” and the later hermaphroditic “original man” among Gnostic sects or Adam Kadmon in Kabbalah.
Basically, the very opening of the Biblical text is pretty unequivocally clear there’s an original creation of humankind that’s both male and female in the image of a plural God, and then various groups had a myriad of juggling interpretations to make sense of it.
(The historical reality is likely that this connects back to the age of the worship of a divine couple which gets sloppily rewritten following monotheistic reforms, but that’s a comment for another day.)
It even uses the plural Elohim here.
So literally saying “They-God created humans in God’s male and female image.”
So in terms of the OP post - always has been.
The problem was Hebrew was a binary gendered language. Words were either male or female. No ‘parent’ just ‘mother’ or ‘father’ - so ‘he’ or ‘father’ didn’t necessarily reflect the intent of the message so much as the limitations of the medium.
This topic of getting rid of gender distinctions even came up in the early Christian apocrypha:
This part of Genesis 1 was a large contributing factor to Philio’s first century hermaphroditic “first Adam” and the later hermaphroditic “original man” among Gnostic sects or Adam Kadmon in Kabbalah.
Basically, the very opening of the Biblical text is pretty unequivocally clear there’s an original creation of humankind that’s both male and female in the image of a plural God, and then various groups had a myriad of juggling interpretations to make sense of it.
(The historical reality is likely that this connects back to the age of the worship of a divine couple which gets sloppily rewritten following monotheistic reforms, but that’s a comment for another day.)