Was Jesus Gay?

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

After the Supreme Court's historic ruling on gay marriage, it seemed like all the proudly homophobic Christians came out of the woodwork to talk about how much they still hate gay people. As a straight Jew, the homophobia amongst Jesus's followers has always struck me as a bit of a surprise: Worshipping at the feet of a ripped, hung man, seems at least a little homoerotic. But it's Jesus himself who lights up my gaydar like a Christmas tree. He's a skinny young otter-like guy, flocked by a mess of dudes, telling everyone to love and care about each other, who later gets the shit beaten out of him by a bunch of closed-minded conservatives who are terrified of change.

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.

# # #

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.

Say What?

http://www.bilerico.com/2014/04/jesuss_sex_life_on_the_down_low.php

Jesus's Sex Life: On the 'Down Low'
Rev Irene Monroe | April 19, 2014 1:00 PM |

While many biblical scholars have ignored non-canonical texts like the gnostic and apocryphal gospels that suggested Jesus had a wife, they are now not ignoring the 2012 discovery of a faded fragment of papyrus that suggests he did.

According to this month's New York Times article, "Papyrus Referring to Jesus' Wife Is More Likely Ancient Than Fake, Scientists Say" the papyrus is now known as the "Gospel of Jesus's wife."

This discovery, however, disrupts the Christian church's depiction of Jesus for many reasons.
The Church doesn't want to say that Jesus had a wife because his evangelizing with twelve disciples clearly points to the fact that he wasn't a family man.

Also, the Church doesn't want to accept that Jesus might have been married to Mary Magdalene - the second most important woman in the New Testament scriptures after Mary, the mother of Jesus - because the misogyny written in the patriarchal narratives of Jesus's ministry cast her as a whore.

New evidence suggests that Mary Magdalene may have been one of Jesus's disciples, may have bankrolled his ministry, may possibly have been his wife, and that Mary Magdalene was clearly Jesus's go-to-girl for a lot of things.

This discovery, also, reopens the "down-low" secret about Jesus' sexuality that not only attacks the pillars of Christianity, but also profoundly plays into the oppression that women as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people face today in both church and society.

That open secret about Jesus' sexuality - suggesting that he was gay or married, not that the two are mutually exclusive if Jesus was on the "down low" - points to the cultural war issues we are wrestling with today, namely the institution of marriage, women in the church, and gay clergy.

However, the debate about Jesus' sexuality takes him from his mother's womb to his tomb. The Christian depiction of Jesus as that of a life-long virgin who had no sexual desire and who never engaged in sexual intercourse raises anyone's suspicion, because by today's sexual standards, Jesus' homosocial environment of 12 men suggests, according to the law of averages, that at least one out of the bunch was gay.

Given the nature of compulsory heterosexuality playing in Jewish marital laws during Jesus' time, Jesus might have been forced to be on the "down low" if gay.

Encrypted in Leonardo Da Vinci's 1498 painting "The Last Supper" is a spiritual and sensual narrative about both the sacred feminine and homoeroticism found in religious life. While many Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals find Da Vinci's sensuous painting blasphemous, Da Vinci's gay male homoerotic subtext pries open the door to the alluring quality about the Catholic Church that gay men find both rabidly homophobic and ravenously homoerotic.

When asked in 2002 during the Catholic Church sex scandal why so many gay men are attracted to religious life and the priesthood, Mark D. Jordan, then professor in the religion department at Emory University and author of The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism, told The Boston Globe:

     "Homoeroticism is written into the Catholic imagination and its institutions. Many gay believers feel a strong calling to the priesthood or religious life. The call doesn't seem to deny same-sex desires; it seems instead to complete them. It is a call to act out your manhood against social expectations, outside heterosexual marriage and in the company of other unmarried men.

     "They are promised an exchange of their 'disordered' identity as outsiders for a respected and powerful identity as an insider. They want to remain in the beautiful, sexually ambiguous space of liturgy. They are drawn to public celebration of suffering that redeems [and] they want to live in as gay a world as the Catholic Church offers." 

The scriptures talk about Jesus's beloved disciple John. A hermeneutic of suspicion clearly begs the questions how did Jesus love John, and equally as important how did John love Jesus.

And let's not forget the theological significance and homoerotic overtones in ritual kissing that was a vital part of worship during the early centuries of the Christian Church, as passing the peace with a hug and/or handshake is a vital part of worship in today's Christian churches. Kissing on the lips was a way of binding a community together and it always followed the communal prayer, the Eucharist, or rites of baptism and ordination; it was only permitted among those of the same gender.

Homophobia in today's Christian churches is antithetical to the early Church. It is unlikely, given Jewish marital customs, that Jesus was not married, and he probably was assigned a wife long before he became an itinerant preacher and met up with male and female disciples on the road.

And as an itinerant rabbi with a gang of twelve horny men I refuse to believe they were virgins, celibate and not married.

# # #