attraction or sexual practice existed, but the way in which these were understood, thought about, poeticized, and so on was in quite different terms—whether same-sex sexual attraction and practice were regarded as obligatory, preferable, permissible, odd, or prohibited.
In the modern period, persons who are drawn to same-sex erotic relations are often presumed averse to “heterosexual” relations. This presumption clearly does not reflect the view of most cultures and historical epochs for which we have data. Moreover, the contemporary model of same-sex relationships in our society emphasizes relations between peers. But for Greek antiquity, medieval Japan, and tribal Melanesian society, cross-generational or pederastic structures were normative.
For our study, we should not read back into the sources stereotypes from our own culture concerning sexual structures, practices, or preferences. At the same time, we must use some language to identify the point of contact we wish to make with another epoch or culture. Extreme relativism can produce only the silence of cultural solipsism. The difficulty we face here is not different in kind from the difficulty of speaking about “marriage” or “family” or “the poor” or “justice.” In each case, modern ways of understanding these categories differ markedly from those of other epochs and other cultures. Thus, without either ignoring or being paralyzed by cultural and historical differences, the “point of contact” with the text that we seek to illumine is the love of one man for another that is “more” than friendship and which does not foreclose erotic attraction or sexual expression.2
With these qualifications in mind, let us turn now to the texts to see how a homoerotic reading makes sense of the data that the Gospel of John presents.
Intimacy
The disciple Jesus loved makes his first appearance in chapter 13. The Gospel sets the scene: “Now before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were with him in the world, he loved them to the end” (13:1).
With this begins the story of Jesus’ last meal with his disciples (“his own”), which remains the setting of the narrative until the end of chapter 17. Five chapters (about 20 percent of the Gospel as a whole) are thus concerned with this farewell dinner and discourse of Jesus with his disciples.
The theme for this section of the Gospel is the love of Jesus for “his own.” This theme is made concrete in the dramatic symbolic action of washing the feet of the disciples. In this action Jesus strips to perform this menial and intimate service, an action that runs against both class and gender roles.3 Jesus offers this action as a pattern for the disciples’ behavior toward one another (13:15ff). For Jesus, such an action is the concrete form of love.
Subsequently Jesus talks about the meaning of love in his farewell discourse to the disciples (chapters 14 and 15). Throughout this section of John’s narrative, what is at stake is the love that binds Jesus to the disciples and binds them to one another.
Precisely in this context we meet “the disciple loved by Jesus.” We do so in the only segment of this material that bears even superficial resemblance to the accounts of Jesus’ last meal with his disciples in the other narratives of the New Testament, the so-called “Synoptic Gospels.” In those texts, the emphasis falls on the bread and wine and the apparent institution of a commemorative meal by which the death of Jesus is to be remembered and his return anticipated. Nothing of this emphasis appears in John. In its place we have the action of foot washing and the discourses.
But this account is connected to the synoptic (and Pauline) accounts by the motif of Jesus’ impending betrayal at the hands of “one of the twelve.” The impending betrayal is already anticipated in 13:2 and is developed, following the foot washing, in 13:21–31. Here, for the first time, we encounter the figure of the beloved.
The context in which the man Jesus loved is introduced is striking. As we have seen, this whole section of the Gospel is devoted to the love of Jesus for his disciples and the way Jesus’ love serves as a model of their love for one another. This love is expressed in intimate fellowship, mutual service, friendship, shared understanding, a common fate, and destiny, which together characterize Jesus’ relationships to all these disciples and to those who through them are to become disciples.
That one disciple is singled out in this context as the disciple loved by Jesus is striking. Jesus loved all the disciples in the most intimate friendship and in sacrificial solidarity. The singling out of one who is loved by Jesus makes clear that some kind of love is at stake other than the love that unites Jesus to the rest of his disciples. The text itself suggests that we should recognize here some form of love that certainly does not contradict the more general love of Jesus for all, but which does set it apart from this general love. A reasonable conclusion is that this difference points us to a different sphere or dimension of love: love characterized by erotic desire or sexual attraction.
This impression is immediately strengthened when we consider how the narrative describes this love: “one of the disciples of Jesus—the one Jesus loved—was reclining in Jesus’ lap. . . . Falling back thus upon the chest of Jesus, he said to him . . .”
In antiquity, the normal posture for dining together among friends was that of reclining on mats or pillows. Thus all the disciples—we are not to think here of just the twelve but of a larger group, perhaps including women4—are lying about in this way. But one of them is lying in (on) Jesus’ lap—that is, snuggled up to Jesus. The disciple leans forward to hear Peter’s question and then falls back (onto the chest of Jesus) to relay the question.
The text thus depicts the relationship of love in terms of physical closeness and bodily intimacy. This feature is expressed twice here (lap, chest) and is reiterated in the final scene of the Gospel when the beloved is pointed out as the one who had lain on Jesus’ chest (21:20). The Gospel draws particular attention to this gesture of affectionate intimacy as the dramatic representation of what it means to say that this disciple was in some special way “loved by Jesus.”
Jesus’ love for all his disciples is a love to the end, an intimate friendship, yet at the same time Jesus has a different love for one of them. The mark of that difference is the posture of bodily intimacy. This physical intimacy differentiates Jesus’ love for this disciple from the intimacy of friendship expressed in Jesus’ discourse on love and even from the physical intimacy expressed toward all the disciples in the foot washing. The text marks one of the disciples as “more than a friend,” though he is a friend as well. He is the beloved, one for whom the appropriate expression of love is that of physical closeness and bodily intimacy.
The narrative also suggests that this relationship is one that Peter accepts and acknowledges. Thus Peter assumes that the beloved would be privy to Jesus’ intimate thoughts in a way that neither he nor the others would. Peter signals the beloved with a nod. The beloved leans forward out of his nest to hear Peter’s question and then falls back on Jesus’ chest to ask him in more privacy, “Who is it?”
Instead of responding directly, Jesus instructs him to watch who receives the piece of bread that Jesus dunks in the gravy. The scene appears as a small moment of intimate conspiracy and shared confidence. Hardly any other interpretation makes sense of the narrative as it stands.5
Consider: Peter assumes the beloved would know, if anyone did, the identity of the betrayer. Why should Peter assume this? Because Jesus is intimate with this disciple in a way different from his intimacy with the others, an intimacy depicted as that of bodily intimacy. Peter draws the understandable conclusion that this bodily intimacy entails a superior
