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..

I did assume you were speculating about historical-person Jesus or fictional character Jesus.

I get that the sandals thing was a joke ... but to be fair, the fact your brother wouldn't be offended by the comments (not just yours) about gay people being identifiable by their clothing isn't really the point. Some people would be.

I have to say, I'm not mad keen on the whole 'ho, ho, the pope wears a dress and is unmarried, he must be gay' thing, because like a lot of people I think the Pope and homosexuality aren't especially funny as a combination, and to some people it's making a joke out of a man/an institution that's caused a lot of hurt.

But that's just how I see it. I wasn't offended by your OP myself, and certainly not as a Christian.

Ah....so it might not be a reference to an actual gate at all. I always think of the mistranslation of Cinderella's slipper of FUR when trying to understand strange things from the bible - not as pretty as glass but a lot warmer and a lot more practical - but running off at midnight leaving one of your Uggs behind doesn't seem quite so romantic! Potentially whiffy as well! (ahem...speaks only for myself there obviously)

They were translating from Hebrew and Aramaic into Greek and then into Latin, now into the vernacular, so the bible as we know it must be packed full of these kinds of mistranslations as per interesting discussion re eunuechs upthread - even when words are translated correctly literally we lose the cultural/historical/political context.

I have a really bizarre image of Edward Cullen in a sort of iconographic pose and dripping in gold leaf now ... need I head over to the twisluts threads?!

Thanks nativitywreck

Gosh ... thanks fabby, way to bring down the thread.

ruder - agree about the translations and the context. My hunch would be that people didn't really think of homosexuality as something you could separate from homosexual sex, but I could be wrong.

Methinks you have lit a serious flame here, nativity wrecker

Oh God, no, it's not the Pope's dress! Its the bling! (I know, I'm sorry.)

In fact, there was,apparently, ( backed up by no citations so let fly with your biscuits) a fairly liberal attitude within the Vatican towards relations between men in the olden days.

In the same way, I once visited a medieval nunnery in Oxon, and there was a long sign all about how the nuns used to get local village boys up to the nunnery and have their way with them.

What the flock are supposed to believe and what actually goes /has gone on are often two wildly unrelated things.

FabbyChic I do agree the current Pope's response to the horrific abuse of children at the hands of Catholic priests has been disgusting and not what I would expect from a person of God but apart from that no one can know can they? The only thing we can say for sure about the current Pope is that he was definitely in the Nazi Youth. But people were forcibly conscripted from 14 onwards.

Did you beat up a donkey too? Much lolz

Why not throw a whole new light on it? Obv I don't believe. But some author will pick up the idea??

Ooh, which medieval nunnery? Was it Godstow by any chance? That's supposed to be haunted by the ghost of a woman who was put there because she was sleeping with the king.

I've heard that if you look at what people make laws against, it's a pretty good clue about what people are doing a lot of! As in, you wouldn't bother with the law unless lots of people were doing whatever it is was made illegal. So all the stuff about not having sex/not having gay sex ... it must have been going on a lot I think!

LRD - I'd posit another theory which is that early Christianity really took off when spread through the Hellenic network (prior to adoption by Constantine under roman empire - I think at the time Greek was the 'learned' language/Latin was more practical every day lingua franca) and in the context of Hellenic culture - which has an illustrious history of homosexuality and the tradition of older men taking younger men under their wing it is unlikely that all greek converts would have rejected this practice and so there was a tacit "we don't need to speak about that too much" until eventually the early church fathers with their obsession with ascetism (rejection of all sexual activity as being of the flesh/non-spiritual) changed the church's beliefs to reject or try to control all sexuality. Early Christianity was very good at assimilating (it had to be to spread - e.g. the handy adoption of previously pagan festival days as christian holy days) in that way.

I can't remember-twas a long time ago, but I remember thinking that I had been around then, I definitely would have become a nun!

So would I nativitywreck! I've often though that would have been the only way I would have survived if I'd been born in any other time. Ironically, it gave women a lot of freedom and relative power at a time when they had none.

It could well be that people in the early church didn't feel the need to talk about it much - have you come across the cult of Sergius and Baccus? (I hope Ive spelt that right!). They're saints who some people think were gay, in the early church.

I'm not sure Greek culture has all that widespread a conception of homosexuality as a state of being rather than a practice, though - that claim that there might be three sexes (ie. lesbians, gay men, and heterosexuals) is meant to be a big surprise, not a description of widespread views.

Like I say ... I could be wrong, but I think seeing being a gay man as something to identify yourself as, is quite modern. We may be agreeing here, in that I think that different attitude would very naturally lead people not to comment much on who they had sex with.

nativity - I dunno, have you seen teenage boys in Oxfordshire?

I know what you mean though ... I have a book that's a medieval religious writer telling people all these scary stories about bad things that happen to sinners, and it sounds as if nuns had a good time of it TBH.

VV good ruderbarracuda

LRD No I agree with your view on Greek culture way back when and being gay...I may be wrong but I kind of view it as a bit like playing golf or joining the Freemasons now...a form of exclusively male networking (apart from the lovely Sappho I know nothing about ancient greek gay women and whether there were any similarities for lesbians at all) that didn't have any stigma attached, so some men did, some men didn't. I don't even think for a lot of men it would have had any particular sexual attraction, it was just something you did to get on in the world and for others it would have been a very definite sexual attraction - but there was no concept of "being gay" as a sexual status. Much more fluid and accepting than we have now! Ah those greeks. So civilised!

Will have to look Sergius and Bacchus up! Never heard of them! You learn something new everyday on MN...I tells ya.

Yes, that makes sense ruder.

I have read that the OT prohibitions on men sleeping with men are partly to do with people being worried about anal sex - so it could be as much a practical issue in a primitive society, as anything else. Not because anal sex is inherently unhealthy, but you could legitimately be concerned about spreading diseases if you live in society that doesn't understand how to make sex safe and doesn't understand how infections spread. It would also explain why people are so keen to restrict heterosexual sex.

Cross-post. My info on Sergeius and Bacchus (I'm sure that is the right spelling, thanks!) is slightly skew, because it comes from Russian Orthodox people who're keen that their church should radically change its attitude towards homosexuality. But they told me that although these two saints are often understood just as close male friends, some people think they were lovers and that the later texts whitewashed their homosexual relationship. There's a theory that the early church had a ceremony for blessing homosexual couples, even.

I really like the idea, even though I think they're saints who probably never existed!

By the by, I was once at a party where there were a bunch of Greek guys, some of whom were obviously trying to pull girls.
Everyone took an E, and after a while all the Greek boys were snogging each other!
So maybe there is still a residue of that fluidity even now (or should I say ten years ago-not taking E now!)