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 might be a bit late to this party, but........

No! Of course Jesus wasn't gay! Because 'being gay' is using the language of ontology to describe sexual stuff, and no-one back in Jesus' day talked / thought / wrote (either in Latin, Greek or Aramaic) about sex in ontological terms. Sex was what you did, not what you were. Really important disinction. Talking about sexual ontology is an etirely modern / postmodern construct, and Jeus / the Gospel writers were not modern.

So, onto the next question; if sex is what you do, what did Jesus do? Obviously, the Gospels don't tell us anything of this. We know (if we trust the sources) that Peter was married. What we do know is that part of the very earliest Christians' reputation among their baffled Judeo-Hellenistic neighbours was that as well as meeting in private and doing weird things involving drinking blood (i.e. the Eucharist), they had very high standards of sexual behaviour. A quick glance at the sexual standards for office-holders in the early church makes that clear. One early martyr story extols the virtues of the martyr on the basis that he didn't have sex with boys. The CHristian (v. early) belief in the resurrection of the body made it very clear that what you do with your body matters hugely, because it's your body that will be resurrected. So sex mattered hugely to early Christian, and expressing sexuality in a Christian way was a hallmark of Christianity from the start.

I might think of more later...(am a New Testament / early Christianity postgrad student so this is my area!)

Sory, just to add, 'ontology' = what you are in essence

We'll find out when The Bible 2 comes out.

This is the best Christmas themed thread I'm on [fmsile]

Come back please HolofernesesHead - we've got loads of outstanding questions on camels, hemp, rich people and small narrow gate in Jerusalem that need input please. Also am interested to know more about DartsAgain post and the Herod connection to JC if you've come across that.

Interesting psychological link to keeping your body complete/healthy for the resurrection because you would actually need it after death and the discussion about how risky sex was way back when because of STDs - blindingly obvious now you say it but that has just never occurred to me before because more modern christian theology seems to focus on the soul/at-one-ment with God etc. and less about an actual fleshly return.

Revelations and The Song of Solomon deserve their own entire threads imo.

Yes, you see Ruder, I have offainded everybody ever, but am learning so much theology in the process!

Yes, I reckon he was a big old bender, and Mary Magdalene was definitely his fag hag!

HH, I don't think being gay does just describe what you do. It describes somebody who has sexual and/or romantic feelings for somebody of the same sex.

I'm also not convinced by the sex was what you did not who you were in Greek anyway. A catamite is a category of person, and had a an equivalent term in Greek. There are also other terms for people who had a particular sexual role in same sex relationships. But perhaps I misunderstand your point.

I'm also not convinced by the description of early Christian ideals of sex. I think that early on, certain Christian groups tried to discredit other Christian groups (Gnostics being the obvious example) by making out they were up to something sexual, and we have no way of knowing whether or not those slurs were indicative of what Christian groups really did or not.

Yiddish has many more words for categories of people than English-in fact you can't really translate them into English because there are no equivalents really.
They describe quite subtle distinctions of personality and proclivity.
I wonder if this was true of the language of the ancient Jews? (Aramaic?)

The fact that there is a word for one category of person that defines them by who they have sex with, does not prove that all sexual acts have a corresponding category of person associated with them.

The word 'sodomite' has been around for a very long time, but IMO it there really have been times when people did not believe homosexuality was a state of being, as we would think of it. I would also say that 'homosexual' doesn't define the person by the act - you could be homosexual without acting on it; you couldn't be a catamite or a sodomite without the activity. I think that is a big difference in terms of vocabulary.

Well okay then, Ruder!

The camel / needle thing: the saying is in Mark, Matthew and Luke, so a) it's pretty early, and b) all three writers agreed it was important (not always the case), so c) it was almost certainly part of an agreed Jesus-tradition.

But there's no real evidence that it can be 'explained' by reference to something in Jerusalem. IMHO, people who say this are (maybe unwittingly) trying to soften what is actually a really hard saying. If you take it as a hyperbole along the same lines as the the one that says 'if your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out', what the hyperbole is still saying is that wealth makes it incredibly difficult to 'enter the kingdom.' So Jesus is really on the side of the poor, which is hard to take if you are rich (which most of us in the UK are, by global standards).

I quite like what Sebastian's mother in 'Brideshead Revisited' says though (can't remember her name, sorry!); she says that the Gospel says that it is impossible for the rich to be saved, but then the Gospel is full of impossible things (which is quite similar to what Matthew's gopel says).

Btw: I love Revelation! And the Snog of Snogs!

onefatcat and a few others have come on this thread merely to cause massive offence. Nice to see that you are keeping true to the Christmas spirit by going out of your way to anger, annoy and upset many religious folk. You must be so proud of yourselves. So funny too

Holofer - I'd be interested to know what you make of the Matthew quote then because as you said, no-one really talked about their sexuality as we do which is why there were no words to describe someone's sexual orientation. Therefore when Jesus spoke of "eunuchs" he obviously raised a few eyebrows and it's not beyond the realms of possibility that he did in fact mean homosexual men - men who could not bear children or marry because they were gay and not necessarily because they had been castrated.

I think the problem with that is that in some socities where people talk more about the act than the 'sexuality', they don't always acknowledge or even believe gay men can't have children or marry - in earlier times plenty of gay men were married with children (Oscar Wilde, for example). I have no idea about the society at that time, though.

LRD, so I would consider Jesus could have been gay in the modern sense. He could have had a loving, romantic bond with John. That wouldn't give him a sexual label in terms of what sexual acts he did or did not carry out.

And that categorisation of personal identity through feelings would not have been given. That would be dealt with in the words used to describe the nature of their love, and the different kinds of love, perhaps? So that human experience would exist but not be given as an identity.

But gay in the modern sense would imply he didn't or couldn't have the same bond with women. I don't find that plausible.

I take your point about the distinction between existence and identity.

(Sorry, I have a rotten cold which is at the stage where you feel slightly floaty and detached from everything, with cotton wool where your brain should be, so although I am very interested I may not be making much sense, pleese forgive me.)

Why don't you think it is plausible? Because of the way relationships are described between him and certain women, or because you don't think it would be in his nature to have a romantic preference for one sex over the other?

I am having a little giggle to myself the someone with the pseudonym Cliff Richard is posting on the thread in his defence :o

Hackmum many historians do not dispute the dates the gospels were written. Why would they? Various of the writings still exist as documents on paper, whether or not you find anything in their meaning or not.

BBC article on the history of the Bible

Jesus also had a bond with Peter and Mary Magdalene and Martha and so on. I don't think that pointing to his close friendships with people proves or disproves anything about his sexuality.

The word 'love' is used a lot in the Bible by Jesus towards many of his close friends but to put a modern interpretation on that would be wrong. After all Jesus preached love, forgiveness, tolerance, peace and so on. He told people to love their enemies and preached on how easy it is to do good for one's family but how much harder it is to do good for a stranger or even an enemy.

I don't think there is any evidence in the Bible as it stands to point to a sexual relationship of any sort between Jesus and anyone else. My own personal belief is that he foresook any kind of sexual identity in order to serve his father and preach to the people. Any kind of relationship would have been a diversion for him.

FioFio - do you like my festive name?

LRD because I said scholars (translators, copyists etc.) would want to know what the Bible said and not wish to make it incorrect. You replied "only scholars who are Biblical literalists".

So that would imply that only literalists would be interested in accuracy

I hate the fact that I have to keep dipping in and out of this discussion, but the kids are off school, I'm having to work and last minute Christmas stuff means I can't hang around, sorry. Can someone take my place? You can't have my name though, I've already bagged it.

A Jewish guy at that time would have more than likely been married and I believe that he was married to Mary Magdalene and there are decendents of them living today.

Anothermincepie: "Hackmum many historians do not dispute the dates the gospels were written."

And many do. I don't understand what your point is.

Cliff (Oh how I hate to think of Cliffy sucking eggs in hell! Remember that Wimbledon when it rained and he sang to the crowd?)

Anyway, Cliff, eunuchs! (goes off on reverie thinking about Sir Cliff as modern day eunuch...)

the main, obvious thing about eunuchs was that they could not reproduce, hugely important in society that put them outside the norm. So people didn't quite know what to make of them; Plato for eg thought that they were neither maler female but both male and female (eh??!!) Bear in mind though, that 'gender' is a v. socially constucted thing; quite a few martyr stories have male martyrs 'becoming men' at the point of martyrdom, and also use very female birthing imagery of martyrs, and female martyrs becoming men so gender is interestingly thought of all round in early christianity, and ofte nin v. idealisd terms. The commonest strand of thought re. eunuchs is that they are asexual, not homosexual. I'd love to study them more though! There's definitely a PhD in there for someone!