“Do not be afraid, for behold: I bring you glad tidings of great joy.” Gospel of St. Luke
A recently-reported controversy involving a New Zealand church that sponsored a billboard campaign that announced, “It’s Christmas. Time for Jesus to Come Out” is stirring old arguments about the sexuality—if any—of Jesus Christ.
The billboards, sponsored by the Church of St. Matthew in the City in Auckland, depict an image of the baby Jesus, lying in the manger and wreathed in a rainbow halo.
The church’s pastor, Rev. Glynn Cardy, said the message of the billboards is to “lift” Jesus’ humanity.
Cardy told reporters that the question for believing Christians is whether it changes anything for them if Jesus had been gay. “The fact is we don’t know what his sexual orientation was,” Cardy said.
His associate pastor, Rev. Clay Nelson noted that, “There is almost nothing in the record of his teachings about sexuality, while there is plenty about the perils of being rich. Certainly he always supported the marginalized in society.”
Clay added, “Some scholars have tried to make the case that he might have been gay. But it is all conjecture. Maybe gay, maybe not: Does it matter?”
Maybe not. But the subject has legs, even after all these centuries (approximately 20 of them).
Many faithful Christians take their cues to Jesus’ sexual identity—or rather, lack of one—by the words of the New Testament’s Letter to the Hebrews 4:15, which says, “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.”
If we flip our Scriptures to the Gospel of John, things start to get murky when the text makes reference (John 13:23, 19:26, 21:7, 20) to the “disciple whom Jesus loved.”
It recounts the “beloved disciple’s” presence at the crucifixion of Jesus. Biblical scholars agree that this reference is a bit of self-promotion by the Gospel’s author—regarded traditionally to be the Apostle John—who identifies himself in John 21:24, and essentially inserted himself in the narrative.
In “St. John and Jesus at the Last Supper,” the 17th Century French Baroque painter Valentin de Boulogne depicts the “beloved” disciple as practically sitting in the Messiah’s lap (clearly there were no separate checks in this instance).
The 12th Century theologian and Roman Catholic saint Aelred of Rievaulx not only cast ambivalence to the wind, he threw the closet door wide open in “Spiritual Friendship,” a work that refers to Jesus and John’s relationship as a “marriage.”
That example was apparently noted by the first Stuart monarch of Great Britain, King James I, who foisted onto us the Bible edition that bears his name, much as he foisted onto the nobles of his court his own relationship with the barely-out-of-his-teens Duke of Buckingham, arguing with religious, and royal, authority, “I wish to speak in my own behalf and not to have it thought to be a defect, for Jesus Christ did the same, and therefore I cannot be blamed. Christ had his son John, and I have my [Buckingham].”
The Canonical (that is, official) Gospel of Mark (14:51–52) gives fleeting—and tantalizing—reference to “A young man, wearing nothing but a linen garment, [who] was following Jesus. When they seized him, he fled naked, leaving his garment behind,” and in front of Jesus’ mother, no less.
The Secret Gospel of Mark—an apocryphal text, and possibly a hoax—includes the suggestion that Jesus provided one-on-one tutoring into the “secrets of the Kingdom of God” alone one night to a partially-clothed youth.
In the same vein, Bob Goss, who wrote “Jesus Acted Up: A Gay and Lesbian Manifesto” and “Queering Christ: Beyond ‘Jesus Acted Up,’” said that Jesus and John exemplified “a pederastic relationship between an older man and a younger man. A Greek reader would understand.”
Scholarship and theology on the subject has continued right into the last decade and ours. In 2003, Australian theologian Rollan McCleary wrote “Signs for a Messiah,” a book that considers “the theological implications of the sexuality of Jesus.”
McCleary goes so far as to draw up Jesus’ astrological chart, in which the planet Uranus prominently figures, something he says is common for many gay people. (Okay, maybe not so much with this guy.)
Religious people who condemn homosexuality often cite two Biblical passages: Leviticus 18:22 (“You shall not lie with a male as with a woman. It is an abomination,” and Romans 1:27, in which St. Paul rails against “men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due.”
Of course, Leviticus also calls it an “abomination”—and suggests you murder the girl!—if your daughter wears garments made from blended fibers, and Paul himself never says a word against slavery or polygamy (although his “natural use of the woman” remark leaves no doubt as to his feelings about feminism).
A review of Chicago Theological Seminary Professor Theodore Jennings’ book, “The Man Jesus Loved: Homoerotic Narratives From the New Testament” refers to the theologian/author’s assertions that “the Bible affirms and even celebrates homosexual relationships.”
In 2005, the openly-gay Episcopalian Bishop of New Hampshire, Rev. Gene Robinson, sermonized about the possibility of Christ’s homoerotic tendencies.
Still, not everyone is convinced, and the reality is that we will never know if Jesus’ vocabulary included “the love that dare not speak its name,” even it was spoken with an Aramaic accent.
On the other hand, from cradle to grave, the New Testament’s Superstar enjoyed an extremely close relationship with his mother (“Mary!”), he was bedecked from birth in gold and myrrh and had a penchant for burning frankincense, and his closest female friend was a hooker.
Biblically, I would call it a wash.
