The "Down Low" Sex Life of Jesus

When I was relatively new to blogging I was lucky enough to be invited to the LGBT Blogger Summit orchestrated by Mike Rogers and underwritten in part by Progressive Insurance and Microsoft.  Among the bloggers I got to meet was Irene Moore, an ordained minister and someone who resisted the anti-gay message so often associated with American Christianity.  As a woman, she also found the patriarchal structure of Christian churches less than appealing, not to mention inconsistent with the true history of early Christianity before that history was rewritten to fit the agenda of those seeking power over and control of the Church's message.  Irene has an interesting piece in the San Diego Gay & Lesbian News that uses the recent stories on the apparent antiquity of the so-called "Gospel of Jesus' Wife" to review the Church's historic problem Jesus' sexuality.  Here are some highlights:  

While many biblical scholars have ignored non-canonical texts like the gnostic and apocryphal gospels that suggested Jesus had a wife, they are now not ignoring the 2012 discovery of a faded fragment of papyrus that suggest he did.

According to this month's New York Times article, "Papyrus Referring to Jesus' Wife Is More Likely Ancient Than Fake, Scientists Say" the papyrus is now known as the "Gospel of Jesus's wife."

This discovery, however, disrupts the Christian church’s depiction of Jesus for many reasons. The Church doesn't want to say that Jesus had a wife because his evangelizing with 12 disciples clearly points to the fact that he wasn't a family man.

Also, the Church doesn't want to accept that Jesus might have been married to Mary Magdalene -- the second most important woman in the New Testament Scriptures after Mary, the mother of Jesus -- because the misogyny written in the patriarchal narratives of Jesus's ministry cast her as a whore.

New evidence suggests that Mary Magdalene may have been one of Jesus's disciples, may have bankrolled his ministry, may possibly have been his wife, and that Mary Magdalene was clearly Jesus's go-to-girl for a lot of things.

This discovery, also, reopens the “down-low” secret about Jesus’ sexuality that not only attacks the pillars of Christianity, but also profoundly plays into the oppression that women as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people face today in both church and society.

And that open secret about Jesus’ sexuality — suggesting that he was gay or married, not that the two are mutually exclusive if Jesus was on the “down low” — points to the cultural war issues we are wrestling with today, namely the institution of marriage, women in the church, and gay clergy.

However, the debate about Jesus’ sexuality takes him from his mother’s womb to his tomb. The Christian depiction of Jesus as that of a life-long virgin who had no sexual desire and who never engaged in sexual intercourse raises anyone’s suspicion, because by today’s sexual standards, Jesus’ homosocial environment of 12 men suggests, according to the law of averages, that at least one out of the bunch was gay.

Given the nature of compulsory heterosexuality playing in Jewish marital laws during Jesus’ time, Jesus might have been forced to be on the “down low” -- if gay.

Encrypted in Leonardo Da Vinci’s 1498 painting “The Last Supper” is a spiritual and sensual narrative about both the sacred feminine and homoeroticism found in religious life.

And while many Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals find Da Vinci’s sensuous painting blasphemous, Da Vinci’s gay male homoerotic subtext pries open the door to the alluring quality about the Roman Catholic Church that gay men find both rabidly homophobic and ravenously homoerotic.

It is unlikely, given Jewish marital customs, that Jesus was not married, and he probably was assigned a wife long before he became an itinerant preacher and met up with male and female disciples on the road.

I refuse to believe that an itinerant rabbi with a gang of 12 horny men, they were virgins, celibate and not married.
- See more at: http://sdgln.com/commentary/2014/04/18/down-low-sex-life-jesus-comes-light#sthash.FOvFWaGS.dpuf

I refuse to believe that an itinerant rabbi with a gang of 12 horny men, they were virgins, celibate and not married.

 I am in agreement with Irene.  Like so much else in the Bible, the true story - if Jesus really existed - was revised and modified to meet the needs of fallible men who were motivated by a desire for power and most importantly control over others. 

 - See more at: http://sdgln.com/commentary/2014/04/18/down-low-sex-life-jesus-comes-light#sthash.FOvFWaGS.dpuf

Gay Jesus Christ Superstar

“Corpus Christi,” which depicts a gay Christ-like figure and 12 gay apostles has returned the stage in New York City and this time without protests and bomb threats as occurred in 1998 when the play first premiered. The plays producers at the time described the play as recounting the tale of a young gay man named Joshua on his spiritual journey,'' in which the audience becomes acquainted with ''the twelve disciples who choose to follow him. Not surprisingly, professional Catholic victim, William A. Donohue, president of the perpetually whiny Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, called the play an act of bigotry. I guess no one knows more about being a bigot than Donohue who routinely seeks to trample on the civil rights of others, particularly gays. Here are some story highlights from the New York Times:

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Not one angry protester showed up at the first performance of the New York revival of Terrence McNally’s notorious “Corpus Christi.” There was no talk in the aisles of free speech or the First Amendment. I didn’t even walk through a metal detector. Times have certainly changed.

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Only a decade ago this fragile, heartfelt play, which portrays Jesus as a young gay man, sparked hysterical protests from religious groups, leading to bomb threats at the Manhattan Theater Club, which canceled the show. Outrage ensued, and before you knew it, a culture war had erupted, before anyone had seen one scene. When the production finally opened, it turned out that it was an earnest and reverent spin on the Jesus story, with some soft-spoken, gay-friendly politics thrown in.

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One wishes the playwright had delved deeper into the love story between Joshua and Judas (Steve Callahan), who is the most interesting of the apostles here. A soulless yuppie, he’s starved for Joshua’s attention and love, and bitter when unable to get them.

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At one point, two men ask Joshua to marry them. When he agrees, they want him to be sure, bringing up the scriptural passage that says man shouldn’t lie with man. Joshua responds, “Why would you memorize such a terrible passage?” Later he strikes a priest for denouncing him, and a follower asks about turning the other cheek. “Do not take everything I say so seriously,” Joshua replies, revealing a wit rarely seen in the Bible.
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The play clearly does not appear overly threatening, but then again, it takes very little to rattle the fragile, artificial, form over substance faith of most Bible beaters.