In thinking that Jesus may possibly have been Gay?

[nativitywreck]

I suggested this in another thread and the effect was like a fart at a funeral; it cleared the room!
It's not so far fetched though. He was 33 when he died, and never married. I would imagine that in the year Dot most people were married by the age of 18, so that is one confirmed bachelor.
And then there is the 'tache'n'beard, the sandals and the twelve guys he hung with..

Hello all. This thread is great!

'hating' your family in Luke - yes, definitely. Interesting that Matthew has the same saying as 'love more than your family' - so Luke's version is harsher than Matthew's. It might well be part of Luke's tendency to imitate the language of the Greek 'Old Testament' - in the Greek of Genesis, one verse has Jacob loving Rachel more than Leah (Gen. 29:30), and the next verse goes on to say (in Greek, obv!): 'when the Lord God saw that Leah was hated...' - so the preferring of Rachel over Leah equated to 'hating' Leah.

So with the family thing in Luke - it's about (IMHO) preferring the new community of faith over your own natural family. I keep harping on about the martyr stories, but they are / were massively influential in forming a distinct Christian identity, and many have these tussles in which the martyr's family try desperately to stop the martyr from being killed, by offering the sacrifices to the Caesar, and the martyr prefers the Christian community over the natural family (and so dies). So I'd see it in those terms.

As for 'mastering' the Bible - a tutor I know said recently 'I start with one simple question and end up with seven or eight complex ones'. A bit like htis thread really!

And yes, historians / theologians do dispute the dating of the Gospels, although most agree that Mark was written first, before 70CE. AFAIK no-one (no academic biblical scholar, that is) thinks they were 'much' later. Depends what you mean by 'much', really.

I don't know Hebrew, so not sure about this, but I did read a website saying that Biblical Hebrew doesn't really use the word 'hate' the same way we do, because the vocabulary doesn't make much distinction between 'hate' and 'dislike' (just as modern French uses the same word for both 'like' and 'love'). That said the Greek word is pretty unambiguous and strong, so I like the idea that Luke might be echoing the Old Testament, as that would get him 'off the hook' a bit.

Given there's nothing about what Jesus was doing between the prime ages of 12 and 30 ( obviously he dies three years later ) , it's impossible to know one way or the other what his sexuality was.

So who are these "many historians" disputing the dates the Bible was written? HolofernesesHead is right.

(that was to hackmum)

Yes that's what I had in mind, HolofernesesHead.

"the Bible itself warns against distorting its message"

I was thinking of Revelation 22:18-19
?For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book:? ?And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and [from] the things which are written in this book?.

Really great to see the level of interest in this and the very thoughtful/knowledgeable input.

We might not go to church much any more, but nor are we unspiritual and thoughtless either.

I for one rather appreciated David Cameron saying 'this is a Christian country'. For much of our culture and our laws is based on IMO vital, rational Graeco-Roman-Judeo philosophical thought, not moral relativistic ideas.

I think the most likely explanation why Jesus didn't marry is because most of his neighbours thought he was illegitimate and would have considered it a disgrace to let any of their daughters marry him. According to the bible, he didn't break the law, so he can't have got up to anything naughty with either sex, but i think it does say he was "subject to every temptation" so he may well have had "gay" desires! So yes he was, or no he wasn't, depending on your definition of gay.

Anothermincepie: So who are these "many historians" disputing the dates the Bible was written?

If you do a quick Google, you'll find that there is lots of disagreement and uncertainty about the dates when the Gospels were written. There's a reasonable account in Wikipedia.

Abitwobblynow: " For much of our culture and our laws is based on IMO vital, rational Graeco-Roman-Judeo philosophical thought, not moral relativistic ideas."

As opposed to all those other countries that have laws based on morally relativistic ideas, of course.

No Jesus was obviously Irish. Lived at home into his thirties, had lots of men friends, thought his mother was a virgin and his mother thought he was the Son of God.

Disclaimer - Raised Irish Catholic and lots of experience about how IC mothers raise their children. My Mum was a year younger than her brother and used to have to ASK him and her father to raise their feet while they were watching television so that she could hoover as a child

sorry

Winter - my dad is from Irish Protestant family and knows the same joke!

mince - yes, but what I initially didn't follow (all those many pages ago) was the claim that 'any' Christian scholar would find it 'sinful' to be less than interested in 'accurate' translation. I think the presence of different books in different traditions is clear evidence 'accuracy' is not quite the right word here, as are the obvious contradictions within the literal sense. I think we're talking a bit cross-purposes ... what you're quoting is a warning that cannot make sense for the different canons, it can only apply to one. It requires the reader to take it literally and apply it literally to the exact copy of the Bible he or she has ... and the only people who would do that are people who take the Bible, well, literally.

I do think there is a pretty important place for more than 'accuracy' when we're looking at these words and I think focusing just on accuracy actually results in losing a lot of the importance of the text.

Hackmum, don't be right-on and relativistic about this now. Contrary to popular leftist belief, it doesn't show your moral superiority it shows something else. I suggest you read Niall Ferguson 'The West: Killer Apps' as to WHY the West currently triumphs (although not for ever). Things like: The Rule of Law, Property Rights etc - directly based on our inheritance of the Classical past - predominate, as opposed to, say, Africa, the Middle East etc. where they DON'T have this inheritance.

What does the Middle East have then? I would have thought Islamic law has quite a lot on property rights and so on ... and it did used to under Greco-Roman rule some of the time didn't it?

Does the book get into when the differences started cropping up?

Islamic law forbids any interest charges on loans which I find rather interesting ( excuse the pun )

Thruaglassdarkly Tue 20-Dec-11 04:03:26
"We know he didn't marry himself."

What makes you think you know that?

I think the argument that there is a clear distinction between "Graeco-Roman-Judeo" values, which are absolute, and everything else is essentially self-defeating; the very reference to a certain cultural provenance in this phrase contradicts its claim to universality. Of course classical Hellenistic thinking and the Judaic tradition are not the same thing either, though I will happily agree that Christianity was shaped by both.

In my opinion it is also erraneous to claim that the kinds of rights you refer to do not exist in the Middle East especially. The Islamic tradition borrows very heavily from Christianity and Judaism; in fact it sees itself as their natural heir, so to speak. You most certainly do have a very detailed framework regarding property rights, law and order etc. in Islamic jurisprudence. And, unsurprisingly perhaps, those who subscribe to it as a normative framework will frequently claim for it universality and label dissenting claims "morally relativistic".

IMO there are some moral values that are absolute. However, as an atheist I would not agree that we derive those from religious authority - hence the reason that no society, regardless of its religion and culture, tolerates random violence towards or within it's "in" group. It's not good for society and people pretty much anywhere and at all times seem to have realised that. (Violence towards the "other", whether within or without, is another matter entirely; I can't think of any tradition that has not found ways and means of justifying that.)

hackmum there is some dispute but still the vast majority of those who have studied the old material come to a reasonably similar conclusion.

"In my opinion it is also erraneous to claim that the kinds of rights you refer to do not exist in the Middle East especially. The Islamic tradition borrows very heavily from Christianity and Judaism; in fact it sees itself as their natural heir, so to speak. You most certainly do have a very detailed framework regarding property rights, law and order etc. in Islamic jurisprudence."

Why then, Dude, with the world's most precious resource under their feet do their economies not boom? And why does the voting with the feet (migration) occur one way? How often does a poor man in those countries, sue a Sheik (or Pakistani land owning class) over an injustice? PS as an aside I actually see quite a lot of merit in some aspects of Sharia, over our method of due process. If, for instance, our rioters/joy riders/fighting drunks/shoplifters and petty thieves were taken straight out of court and given a fukken good pubic hiding and then it was over and done with (until the next time, I think they are given 3 chances and then the punishment gets seriously nasty), not only would be be a shamefilled deterrent but it would be a lot cheaper too. There is no coincidence that the retributive punishment still practised in the ME results in a far lower crime rate than the rehabilitative punishment theories of the West.

This is not a diss. But we in our culture spend way too much time playing down what are huge strengths. And we need to stop it.

Oops! PUBLIC!

Sounds very like imperial Rome, though.

I think what you're describing has more to do with practice than where people got their legal systems from.