If Jesus existed, it would have been a scandal for a grown Jewish man at that time not to have taken a wife. Was he or wasn't he? Did he or didn't he? Who knows. Fun story either way . . .
http://www.vice.com/read/was-jesus-gay-702
Was Jesus Gay?
by Jules Suzdaltsev
July 6, 2015
As it turns out, this is not a unique theory. Dr. Reverend Bob Shore-Goss, an openly gay senior pastor, has written several books on the subject, including Queering Christand Jesus ACTED UP: A Gay and Lesbian Manifesto. He holds a doctorate degree in Comparative Religion from Harvard, and he serves on the National Advisory Board of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion. Oh, and he believes that Jesus was gay. I got in touch with Reverend Goss, who laid out the Biblical evidence and explained how his theory plays out.
VICE: Was Jesus Christ gay?
Bob Shore-Goss: I would hope he is. I would project that he is. For my own spirituality, I would love to jump into bed with Jesus. At the very least, Jesus was queer. That is to say: He broke the rules of his culture, of heteronormativity. He subverted masculinities and gender codes in his culture. Queer doesn't necessarily mean sexual orientation, but it can include that. St. Paul, I would say, would probably be described as a closeted homosexual today, but they didn't have those words at the time.
How was homosexuality perceived in Jesus's time?
There was no concept of sexual orientation, but there was a concept of gender. So, in the Bible, when a man sleeps with another man like with a woman, it's an abomination. See, the emphasis is on a man betraying his status: He has feminized himself. So it's a gender violation as opposed to a sexual violation. The code of masculinity is very strong in the ancient world. Now, homoerotic relationships in the ancient world are really common, especially in the Greek and Roman worlds.
Does Jesus himself ever address that?
As a matter of fact, one of Jesus's miracles is the healing the Centurion's boy. It's in Matthew and Luke. Matthew uses the word "pais"—you get the word pederasty from it, it means youth—to describe this boy, who is essentially a concubine to the Centurian. It's an erotic relationship. He comes to Jesus and asks for his boy to be healed. And Jesus asks if he should heal him, and he says, "I'm not worthy that you should come under my roof, but say the word and my boy will be healed." Jesus says about the faith of the Centurion, who is in a homoerotic relationship, that "there is no greater faith than I've encountered in Israel."
What's great about that is that every time you go to communion on Sunday, millions of Catholics say, "Lord, I'm not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed." They're uttering this homoerotic phrase that was uttered by a Centurion in an actual homosexual relationship with a youth. We've just sanitized that and forgotten those sort of things in the meantime. But a church of the second century would understand that this is a homosexual relationship and it wasn't a big deal.
So what evidence is there in the bible of Jesus's homosexuality?
There's hints of it, and then there's readings into it. The hints come from John's Gospel with the "beloved disciple." He and Jesus have an intimate relationship, although there are questions as to who the disciple actually is. Anyhow, the beloved disciple is lying on the chest of Jesus at the last supper and is supposedly in his "inner tunic," which is what we would call underwear today. It's a very intimate gesture, and it's a special gesture of affection between the two.
I would imagine Jesus loved all of his disciples, I mean he told everyone to love their neighbor. So, singling out a particular person as "beloved" seems significant.
Yes. Jesus only calls one other person beloved and it is Lazarus. There was also an excerpt that was discovered in the 1960s by a professor of history and ancient studies, Morton Smith, a very good scholar. He found an inscription that hints at a secret gospel, that people are dating back to sometime in the late part of the first century. There is a fragment that describes a naked boy who comes to Jesus very late, and spends the night for an "initiation." The fragment has been disputed, of course. But what this has to say is that there was some sort of homoerotic relationship, a love relationship.
It seems that, like anything else in the Bible, you can draw your own conclusions, including that Jesus was gay. I mean, he's this queer figure, never married—
That is actually significant. Jesus was a rabbi, a teacher, and pretty much every rabbi at the time was married. But there's no testimony of Jesus's marriage. There are some interesting theories, Jesus could have been bisexual and carried on a relationship with Mary Magdalene and the beloved disciple. Perhaps he was intersex or trans, because he was born without a father, and therefore was born female and took on the phenotype of a male. Virginia Mollenkott argues that in her book, Omnigender. It's a fun sort of argument. What I'm saying is that people see this as really important. I once had a lesbian student tell me, "Jesus wasn't gay, he was perfect." So what does that say about how she views her sexuality? The Catholic position says that Jesus is perfect, so therefore he is intrinsically good and intrinsically ordered. Now what they say about gays is we are intrinsically evil and intrinsically disordered. Even evangelicals will say that Jesus was perfect so that, in order to be saved for evangelicals, you must be heterosexual to be saved.
But if Jesus was gay, and he was perfect, then really it's only the gay people that are going to heaven, right? That's so deliciously ironic.
You know, I think there's a greater picture about how universal Jesus is. Jesus had sexuality. I used to think that everything about Jesus was perfect. Then in my first year of school, I was reading a book by John A.T. Robinson, an Anglican bishop and New Testament scholar, The Human Face of God, and there was a little footnote there that really disturbed me. It said that Jesus farted. And I said, "Oh my god!" And then I thought, Well, OK. He was human. And that led to, "If he was also human, did he have an erection at night? Did he have a nocturnal emission? All males experience that." So that was kind of an eroding of my sort of Catholic fundamentals around Jesus. And I went the next step by saying, "Was Jesus sexual?" And then, "With whom?" Then I thought, "Does it really matter?" And I think it does.
If Jesus was fully human, he must have been fully erotic. That would mean that sexuality was a positive thing, because we need to reclaim the fact that sexuality is a great and good thing, whatever sexuality that you are. So, you see where I'm coming from? I want to say that all sexualities are an original blessing because we're made in the image of God.
What I'm getting from this the most is that Jesus, as a queer human individual, could at least relate to the struggle of gay men—feeling like outcasts, having violence perpetrated on them for their queerness, whatever it may be.
Yeah, I'd say that you're absolutely on solid ground with your statement.
Even if Jesus wasn't gay, I imagine he'd certainly feel more kinship with the minority of homosexuals than the heteronormative Christians who preach hate.
It's funny, because fundamentalists go back and misread these things and get hysterical about it because they do not understand the historical context. They misuse it and they misrepresent their own ideology. And often times they're vehement about it because they have so much internalized homophobia, which indicates to me that they have those same attractions to the same sex that they need to stamp them out in other people. Jesus was not a fundamentalist. He's not a literalist. He spoke in parables and metaphor and story.
Was Jesus a top or a bottom?
Versatile.
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P.S. I don't buy the word "queer" being forcibly applied to all dudes who have sex with their buddies. It's kinda like -- no, exactly like the "N" word being applied to people of color by other people of color. Sucks. And not in the good way.
6 comments:
Jesus was absolutely NOT a "skinny young otter guy." His profession was that of a house carpenter; what we today would call a stone mason, as in that time and place the basic building material was stone. Working with heavy stones and without any power tools, he must have been ripped.
Also as you suggest Jesus' culture was extremely hetero-normative. This was not Greece. Marriage was more than expected. Hebrew males were betrothed at a young age to even younger girls. If Jesus had not been married in the period prior to his ministry, that would have been so unusual that it surely would have been mentioned in at least one of the gospels. Thus it's very likely that, like other boys his age, he was betrothed (via "Kettubah") at about age 12. The marriage was consummated perhaps five to seven years later (the "Chuppah"). However, inasmuch as the gospels give no hint of the wife being present during Jesus' ministry, she must have died before it began.
As to John the Beloved, I agree that he had a close physical relationship with Jesus. Doesn't mean that sex as such was involved.
Incidentally, the Levitical prohibition on sex between men actually doesn't cover all sex between all men, but only sex with the temple prostitutes of the cult of Baal. Specifically, the "zakhar" in Lev. 18:22 is a reference not to men in general but to the male prostitutes of the Canaanites. See http://epistle.us/hbarticles/leviticus4.html.
You do realize I'm not the author of the article I quoted. I also tried to indicate in the intro that it was a bit funny. I'm actually a believer in the scholarship of Dr. Barbara Thiering, author of "Jesus the Man."
Yes. When I said "you" I was addressing the author, but since the convention on comments is to address them to the blog owner I agree that I should have used the third person.
Righty-O.
Barbara Thiering (born 1930) is an Australian non-fiction writer, historian, theologian, and Biblical exegete specialising in the origins of the early Christian Church. In books and journal articles, she challenges Christian orthodoxy, espousing the view that new findings present alternative answers to its supernatural beliefs. Her analysis has been rejected by many scholars in the field. She obtained an external B.D. degree from the University of London, a M.Th. degree from Melbourne College of Divinity, and a Ph.D. degree from the University of Sydney in 1973. From her specialty, studying the Dead Sea Scrolls, their semiotics, and their hermeneutics, she has propounded a theory arguing that the miracles, including turning water into wine, the virgin birth, healing a man at a distance, the man who had been thirty-eight years at the pool, and the resurrection, among others, did not actually occur (as miracles), as Christians believe, nor were they legends, as some skeptics hold, but were "deliberately constructed myths" concealing (yet, to certain initiates, relating) esoteric historic events. She alleges that they never actually happened (that is, that the events they chronicle were not at all miraculous), as the authors of the Gospels knew. They wrote, according to her interpretation of the methods of PESHER, which she discovers in the scrolls, on two levels. For the “babes in Christ,” there were apparent miracles, but the knowledge of exact meanings held by the highly educated members of Gnostic schools gave a real history, of what Jesus actually did. In view of her research publications in academic journals, she was invited to lecture at Sydney University, at first in the Department of Semitic Studies, then in the School of Divinity (now the Department of Religious Studies) where she continued until her retirement. During this time she was a member of the Board of Studies in Divinity and the Board of Continuing Education, and served for twelve years as a lay member of the New South Wales Equal Opportunity Tribunal. When her work became known in the United States, she was made a fellow of the Jesus Seminar. In 1990 a documentary film about her research, Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls, was shown by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Jesus the Man: New Interpretation from the Dead Sea Scrolls, re-issued in paperback with foreword by Barbara Thiering (Simon and Schuster, New York; November 2006; ISBN 1-4165-4138-1).
Thanks for the info. Maybe I'll read up further on Ms. Thiering's theories. However, at this point I'm not persuaded. Jesus was neither an Essene nor a Gnostic, imho. Of course Gnosticism is a book-length subject. But in my view its roots are to be found in Docetism, which was denounced in (among other places) Ignatius' letter to the church in Smyrna, circa 110 AD.
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