If one surfs the Internet, one may find a number of sites through key words like “gay Jesus.” But does that suggestion have any solid biblical support? This book is an attempt to carefully and patiently explore texts from the Gospels that suggest something about Jesus’ own erotic attachments and the attitude toward same-sex relationships that may be fairly extrapolated from the traditions about Jesus. What emerges is evidence for the “dangerous memory” of Jesus as the lover of another man and as one whose attitudes toward such relationships, as well as toward gender and what are today called “marriage and family values,” are incompatible with modern heterosexism and homophobia. I hope that this study will provide support for continuing attempts to produce significant and enduring change in church and society toward the affirmation of gay, lesbian, transgendered, and bisexual people.
I began work on this project many years ago and had in fact written much of the material in part 1 when it was interrupted by other projects and responsibilities. Many people—especially James Creech, who read that early draft, and Ronna Case—encouraged me to return to this project to complete it. How good to recall that both were there to encourage me when I undertook to write my first book more than two decades and several books ago. Friendship is truly life’s greatest blessing.
I am grateful to the Chicago Theological Seminary, which not only invited me back to teach more than ten years ago but also has been strongly supportive of my attempt to develop a program of gay and lesbian studies as an integral part of the seminary curriculum. Within that program I have had the opportunity to teach several seminars, but the one that has most affected this study is one on “Homosexuality and Hermeneutics.” The students in that seminar have made invaluable contributions to the work that I have undertaken—listening to my ideas, challenging them, and offering ideas and suggestions of their own. I am deeply grateful to them. The manuscript has also benefited from the careful reading and thoughtful suggestions of several of my colleagues on the faculty, including now President Susan Thistlethwaite, Dow Edgerton, and Ken Stone.
An earlier version of chapter 2, “The Lover and His Beloved,” appeared in the Chicago Theological Seminary Register (vol. 91, no. 3, 2001), and the discussion of Markan texts on marriage and family in chapters 10 and 11 is based on earlier work on the Gospel of Mark to be published as The Insurrection of the Crucified: “The Gospel of Mark” as Theological Manifesto. I am grateful to Scott Haldeman of CTS, the editor of the Register and of Exploration Press, for permission to adapt these materials. I am grateful to Timothy Staveteig of Pilgrim Press for his willingness to take on this project and to Bob Land and John Eagleson for their diligence and alacrity in copyediting the manuscript. I am also grateful to Mark Charon for the depiction of Jesus and the disciple he loved that he created for the cover of this book.
For years Ronna Case, to whom I have had the good fortune of being married for nearly thirty years, has exclaimed upon discovering some or another writing project upon which I was engaged, “Oh dear, we’ll have to pack!” Of late she has been keeping an especially close eye on the luggage. Although I don’t plan on going anywhere, it has been my joy to play Ruth to her Naomi.
Chapter 1
Homosexuality and Biblical Interpretation
In the course of the last quarter century, the churches have been engaged in a protracted debate concerning homosexuality. At the heart of this debate has been a set of questions concerning the interpretation of the Bible. Issues of interpretation are hotly contested because some biblical passages appear to condemn at least some same-sex relationships or erotic practices.
An initial phase of the debate was couched in the context of the “sexual revolution” at the end of the 1960s. To a certain extent, the question of “homosexuality” was the leading wedge of an attempt to enable the church to confront in a new context the issues of sexual ethics.
The debate as originally posed had to do with the presupposition that certain persons were congenitally or at least irreversibly oriented toward finding sexual satisfaction among persons of their own gender. This “discovery,” based on the Kinsey report, warranted for some a revision of the proscription of same-sex erotic practices.
An early attempt to argue this case came in the context of the revision of civil statutes criminalizing same-sex erotic practices in England, a revision in which the official Church of England was engaged (through the Wolfenden Commission). Derrick Sherwin Bailey’s landmark study titled Homosexuality in the Western Christian Tradition was primarily concerned with the emergence of the legal criminalization of same-sex practices, but the work paid significant attention to the biblical texts that were supposed to be the foundation of such laws.1
Bailey’s work demonstrated that a great many biblical passages that nineteenth-century legalists had assumed entailed a proscription of homosexuality were in fact not pertinent. That is, Bailey succeeded in greatly limiting the number of texts that were deemed relevant to the discussion.
We were then left with two verses from Leviticus and three from the New Testament that seemed to require additional work, for these texts appear to proscribe same-sex genital practice among males (and, in one case, among females). What, if anything, should be made of these texts?
One hermeneutical strategy has been to disqualify these texts on the grounds that in no way do they deal with homosexual orientation, which is indeed true; neither the term nor the category was known much more than a century ago. Persons were not classified according to sexual orientation prior to the late nineteenth century. Before that time, only behavior was noted: who has sex with whom. The much vexed question about whether some persons actually had exclusive orientation to, or preference for, same-sex erotic satisfaction was not the issue. The hermeneutical strategy employed by some people today is to say that some persons are exclusively homosexual in orientation. For these persons, same-sex practice cannot be understood as unnatural and thus should be accepted, whatever the Bible says about those others of us for whom it is presumably unnatural.
This hermeneutical strategy of disqualifying of the pertinence of biblical texts for legislating a phenomenon not yet understood in the first century has certain limitations. In the first place, this latter approach accepts without question the modern category of homosexuality without dealing at all with the no-less-established category of bisexuality. But we are in a period when the very idea of homosexuality is itself questioned within the gay academy of theoreticians. The debate between constructivists and essentialists has rendered moot the whole category of homosexuality.
The attempt to finesse the question of practice by way of appeal to a category of persons who are innately homosexual must be regarded as resting upon shaky conceptual/theoretical foundations and, in any case, as having too limited a scope to deal with the issues of sexual practice that are at stake.
A further difficulty is involved in the kind of discussion that has predominated over the last quarter century. The focus has been on the question of accepting persons who either engage in or are attracted to the practice of same-sex erotic practices. “Homosexuals” have been petitioners who seek admittance to the ecclesial or social sphere. The question then has to do with toleration of difference and with widening the sphere of this tolerance to include “homosexuals.” The move to toleration has proceeded in such a way as to leave in place the presumption that the sexual values, and especially the marriage and family values, of
