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

Biblical Bludgeoning

One aspect of coming out for those brought up in non-gay friendly religious traditions that I have talked about before is the need to educate one's self on the fact that there are other traditions that are gay affirming if not out right fully accepting of gays. If the religion of your birth is toxic to your mental well being, LEAVE it and find a different one that allows you to embrace spirituality without the poisonous side effects of self-hate and frustration of not being able to buy into the "change myth" so prevalent still in many denominations. I've recommended books before and the Washington Blade has a story on a book, “Jesus, the Bible and Homosexuality,” that looks like it might be useful too. (The boyfriend has me headed to Barnes and Noble today to pick up books for him, so I will look for it). Here are some highlights from the Blade story:

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Jack Rogers, a theology professor and nearly lifelong Presbyterian, didn’t want to get involved with the issue of homosexuality. He’d been opposed to the ordination of gays within his denomination, but was implored by a friend in 1993 to sit on a task force at California’s Pasadena Presbyterian Church to study the issue thoroughly.

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“It was just not a problem I wanted to take on,” Rogers writes in his book “Jesus, the Bible and Homosexuality,” re-released this week in a revised and expanded edition by Westminster John Knox Press. Rogers, who’s straight, has become an advocate of full inclusion of gays in both the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the Christian church in general.

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“I want you to know that I believe the Bible, properly understood, looking at it through the lens of Jesus’ redemptive life and ministry, is very positive toward equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people,” Rogers says during a Blade phone interview. “There are a lot of people who are eager to hear that message.”

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In the book, Rogers traces how his denomination previously used scripture to justify slavery, policies that prevented women from being ordained and divorced and remarried Christians from fully participating in the church. Rogers argues that the scriptures that are used against gays (he calls them the “seven or eight clobber texts”), are no different than those used in previous church disagreements.

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“A literal, proof-texting way of reading the Bible is wrong,” he says. “You’re going to come to wrong conclusions. You have to read it as a whole. It’s a book with a long history and at the center of it is Jesus … who was not the kind of person to knock people down and exclude them. Yes, Jesus sets ideals, but he also picks people up and gives them a second chance.”

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He says conservative Christians and fundamentalists who argue that the Bible is free of error and should be taken literally, do their own selecting and interpreting. So if the mainline denominations have sound answers to this and other issues, why are they dwindling while independent evangelical churches such as those led by Joel Osteen and Rick Warren are thriving? Rogers says it’s because those pastors give people “what they want to hear.”

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“It’s all about wearing your Hawaiian shirt to church and taking your coffee in with you,” he says. “And then preaching a feel-good, prosperity gospel and appealing to the current prejudice. It’s pure cultural mish-mash in my judgment. The way you grow in the culture is to adopt the cultural attitudes. There’s not a lot of orthodoxy when you look at (these megachurches). It’s more, ‘Hey folks, we’re going to give you what you want to hear.’”

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Rogers is hopeful about the future of gays in the church. “I know the church as an institution cannot change in a major way unless people feel that the Bible, which is their primary source of authority, permits it ... I’m presenting a biblical case. I’m saying if you go to the Bible with scholarship that looks at it in depth, it is not anti-gay.”