the question as thus posed allows us to focus attention on texts that have been largely ignored in the discussion, above all the material with which this study begins: the relationship between Jesus and the man identified as the disciple Jesus loved in the Fourth Gospel. As we shall see, the least forced reading of the texts that concern the “beloved disciple” is one which supposes that they refer to a relationship of love expressed by physical and personal intimacy—what we might today suppose to be a homoerotic or a “gay” relationship. Because this reading has been so marginal in the history of interpretation, and has in fact been virtually silenced by homophobia and indeed by erotophobia, some care is needed in developing the interpretation. This is the task of part 1.
In part 2, we turn to additional evidence from the traditions about Jesus from other Gospels. Thus we will look at material in the Gospel of Mark that seems to confirm what we have seen in the Gospel of John: that Jesus was remembered as having an erotic relationship with another man. While other Gospels do not reflect this strand of the material, we see that Matthew and Luke do suggest that Jesus was accepting, even approving of, a person whose chief characteristic is his love for his “boyfriend.” Finally we see that the Gospels agree in suggesting that Jesus was not troubled by the gender role issues that are sometimes used to discredit same-sex relationships. Thus, in various ways, the Gospels present us with considerable evidence of the “dangerous memory” of Jesus as one who both accepted and modeled the intimate love of persons of the same sex.
In part 3, we turn to an issue that in the modern period has often been used to discredit same-sex relationships. In contemporary homophobic Christian rhetoric, homosexuality is regularly opposed to “marriage and family values.” Same-sex relationships are said to undermine these key values of civilization, and allegedly of Christianity. While this claim would have been absurd to most people of antiquity, it nevertheless merits particular attention today because of the way it is used to assert that biblical values are destroyed by the acceptance, let alone celebration, of same-sex relationships. In this section, I simply demonstrate what is obvious to any reader of the Gospels: that Jesus, far from defending marriage and family values, was adamantly opposed to the institution of the family. The contemporary arguments about the importance of marriage and family values or the older notion that sex is proper only for procreation cannot be used to obfuscate the evidence concerning the Jesus tradition.
Such then is the outline of our study as it has been directed and organized by the leading question, “was Jesus gay?” This question helps to demonstrate that homophobic appropriations of the Bible depend upon blindness to the homoerotic elements of biblical narratives, especially the narratives concerning Jesus. On the other hand, reading the biblical narrative as “gay friendly” not only does no violence to the text, but actually illumines it in the sense of making good sense both of the episodes in question and also of the general point of view of the narratives as a whole. Indeed this approach may permit the Bible to be read as it was intended to be read by at least many of its authors: as good news for all, but especially for all those violated by the prestigious and the powerful.
Terminology
A brief word about terminology is in order. I have tended to use “gay” as a generic term to include gay men, lesbians, and bisexual and transgendered persons. The term “queer,” which has been used in more recent discussion, is actually much better in the sense of inclusivity but it still has the tendency to block rather than facilitate understanding among readers, both “gay” and “straight,” of my own generation.
I tend to use “same-sex” rather than “homosexual,” and to use “crosssex” rather than “heterosexual,” in order to break with some of the intellectual baggage that attends the more familiar terms.
The manner of designating a relationship that may very well be mediated sexually but about which mediation we can, in the nature of things, have no direct knowledge can present a bit of a puzzle. Of course such assessment is true for virtually all relationships that we imagine may be sexual. My friends tend not to be guests on talk shows and thus do not generally say whether or how they have sex, for example, with their spouses or life partners. And since I’m not an avid watcher of such shows, I am as generally incurious about my friends’ sex lives as they are about mine. The point isn’t to bash talk shows but to say that in general we don’t know much about who has sex with whom or how, even in relationships that we presume to be, in some way, sexually mediated or expressed. In general I have identified as “erotic” relationships in which sexual mediation may be supposed to be a feature of the relationship. I am not presuming knowledge of whether or how the people involved “had sex,” but rather that the relationship is the sort in which we may suppose, in analogous circumstances, that some or another sexual practice would be involved. We suppose that sex is or would be a “natural” or likely extension (in private presumably) of what offers itself to be seen in public. In this sense I call the relationships between Jesus and the man he loved (and that between the centurion and his “lad”) “homoerotic.”
1. Derrick Sherwin Bailey, Homosexuality in the Western Christian Tradition (London: Longmans, Green, 1955). Although Bailey’s work exploded the alleged biblical basis for sodomy statutes, the U.S. Supreme Court appears not to have noticed (Bowers v. Hardwick). Then as now, the reading of the Bible has important consequences for civil society as a whole.
2. See the discussion of relevant texts in chapters 10 and 11 below.
Part One
THE MAN JESUS LOVED
AT THE VERY LEAST, THE QUESTION, “was Jesus gay?” means that we are concerned with Jesus’ personal relationships with other people. This question is seldom raised, in part because of a Christian erotophobia that implicitly regards erotic relationships as incompatible in some way with the image of Jesus as “without sin” or even as “divine.” Even when the possibility of an erotic relationship does arise, this question is usually confined to imagining that Jesus’ partner would have been female. The popular Jesus Christ Superstar supplied Mary of Magdala as a potential partner for Jesus as did Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ. Some early Mormon speculation has even proposed a different Mary (of Bethany) and her sister Martha as spouses for Jesus. The response on the part of mainline Christianity to these suggestions has generally been negative and even vehement.
However, if Christianity were to suppose that sexuality is not incompatible with sinlessness, then no reason in principle can be supplied for rejecting erotic attachments for Jesus. Then the question simply becomes whether the traditions concerning Jesus as they come to us in early Christian literature and especially in the four Gospels of the New Testament contain evidence of intimate relationships between Jesus and other people.
One way of approaching this question would be to ask whether Jesus is ever said to actually “love” another person in these documents. Terms for love occur surprisingly rarely in the traditions about Jesus. Indeed the only text in which they occur with any frequency is the Gospel of John. This fact by itself may be astonishing to people who have been inculcated with the belief that love is at the heart of the New Testament witness, a view that I do not dispute. Perhaps even more surprising is that, with a single exception, the only Gospel in which
