Swan...There is another interesting text about eunuchs in the NT that seems pertinent:
"For some are eunuchs because they were born that way; others were made that way by men; and others have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it" (Matthew 19:12).
This text is related to Gospel of Thomas 22:4: "When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside ... and when you make the male and the female one and the same, so that the male not be male nor the female female ... then you will enter the kingdom" (cf. Thomas 114:2, Galatians 3:28, 2 Clement 12:2-3). In the cultural context, this is connected with celebacy and resisting one's procreative function (especially in the context of proto-gnosticism, cf. 1 Timothy 4:3), but the attitude towards eunuchs in Matthew is quite striking. There is also a passage in Josephus about eunuchs that is quite striking, both in terms of its negative attitude (as opposed to the Matthean Jesus) and the similarity with the making-the-outside-like-the-inside motif of Thomas:
"Shun eunuchs and flee all dealings with those who have deprived themselves of their virility and of those fruits of generation, which God has given to men of the increase of our race; expel them even as infanticides who withal have destroyed the means of procreation. For plainly it is by reason of the effeminacy of their soul that they have changed their body also (hós tés psukhés autois tethélusmenés metekosmésanto pros touto kai to sóma). And so with all that would be deemed a monstrosity by the beholders. You shall castrate neither man nor beast" (Josephus, Antiquities 4.8.40).
In other words, they have changed or "modified" (metekosmésanto) their "body" (soma) on account of their "female, womanish" (tethélusmenés) "mind, soul" (psukhé). This was abhorrant to Josephus, whereas Jesus in Matthew says to emulate them (tho not necessarily literally, as Origen woefully did).