UCC scholar
writes that Jesus was actively gay

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Critic says he is misinterpreting, misunderstanding Bible

Saturday, May 31, 2003

By RICHARD N. OSTLING writing for Associated Press

The campaign to have U.S. Protestant churches normalize homosexual activity takes a radical new turn with a scholar's claim that Jesus not only approved same-sex relationships but was involved in one himself.

Many will find his actively homosexual Jesus "blasphemous," acknowledges Theodore W. Jennings Jr., who makes the assertion in a book, The Man Jesus Loved: Homoerotic Narratives From the New Testament. Jennings heads gay and lesbian studies at Chicago Theological Seminary, a school of the Cleveland-based United Church of Christ whose Pilgrim Press published the book.

The book fits the United Church's policy of "extravagant welcome" toward gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, and the pride it takes in ordaining a pioneer gay minister in 1972. Jennings, though, is a minister of the United Methodist Church, which officially opposes same-sex activity.

Jennings says the opponents can cite only "five isolated verses" in the Bible. Preferring simplicity to credibility, he ignores those verses and the weightiest American treatment of them: The Bible and Homosexual Practice (from the Methodists' Abingdon Press) by conservative Presbyterian Robert A.J. Gagnon of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.

Asked about Jennings's theory, Gagnon says "the idea that Jesus was a homosexual or engaged in homosexual acts is complete nonsense" and no "serious biblical scholar" has ever proposed this.

Although Jennings belittles a mere five verses, he largely depends on just a few biblical words concerning the disciple "lying close to the breast of Jesus" at the Last Supper (John 13:23,25, 21:20). This unnamed follower "whom Jesus loved" is often thought to be the writer of the Gospel of John or one of his sources.

As Jennings imagines it, this disciple was "lying in (on) Jesus's lap - that is, snuggled up to Jesus." Jesus "loved" all his colleagues, but Jennings thinks this one friendship was "expressed by physical and personal intimacy - what we might today suppose to be a homoerotic or a 'gay' relationship." Most likely it was "sexual in character," he says, though the Bible doesn't describe the "specific practices" the pair used to "celebrate" physical intimacy.

Gagnon says Jennings misunderstands ancient culture. Banquet guests would recline while eating, so the man "lying close to the breast" was simply located next to Jesus, with no homoerotic implication.

A gay Jesus was preached in a non-scholarly 1992 book by J. Robert Williams, now deceased, who was ordained by Bishop John Spong as the Episcopal Church's first actively homosexual priest. And there's a fictional gay Jesus (called Joshua) in Terrence McNally's 1998 play Corpus Christi. But Jennings is apparently the first professorial proponent.

Jennings's related contention that Jesus approved same-sex couples stems from the healing of the centurion's servant (Matthew 8:5-13). Jennings contends that the servant was the centurion's "boyfriend" and Jesus didn't denounce their relationship. Episcopal priest Thomas Horner argued this in Jonathan Loved David (from the Presbyterian Church book house).

Gagnon responds that there's no reason to suppose Jesus endorsed the centurion's lifestyle and it's unlikely he was homosexual, since the parallel account (Luke 7:1-10) says Jewish elders commended the centurion.

Jesus endorsed only heterosexual marriage (Matthew 19:3-6, Mark 10:6-9), Gagnon says, but Jennings thinks Jesus was advocating loyalty in those verses.

Jennings also cites a suggestive phrase from an 18th-century copy of a letter supposedly written around A.D. 200 that quoted a "Secret Gospel of Mark." But few consider this authentic material about Jesus.

The book illustrates Mainline Protestant "liberation theology." While other scholars promote the interests of women, minorities or the poor, Jennings uses "gay-affirmative" interpretations against "homophobic and heterocentric" church tradition.

Incidentally, Gagnon thinks the top pro-homosexual scholar is Finland's Martti Nissinen, whose Homoeroticism in the Biblical World is published by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America book house.

Was Jesus gay?

Missing Fragments from St. Mark's Gospel

published by: http://www.globaltown.com Feb.1998

Most people claim it would not affect their religious beliefs if historians discovered that Jesus was gay, according to a phone poll on London's Talk Radio on Sunday 14 December. Fifty-one percent said revelations of Christ's homosexuality would not affect their religious belief; 49 percent said it would.
The phone vote was part of a debate on the James Whale Show. which asked the question: "Was Jesus Gay?". In the hot seat was Peter Tatchell of OutRage!.
Tatchell noted that one version of St. Mark's gospel --which is still the subject of academic dispute-- alludes to Jesus having a homosexual relationship with a youth he raised from the dead.
According to the U.S. Biblical scholar, Morton Smith, of Columbia University, a fragment of manuscript he found at the Mar Saba monastery near Jerusalem in 1958, showed that the full text of St. Mark chapter 10 (between verses 34 and 35 in the standard version of the Bible) contains a passage which includes the following text. --
"And the youth, looking upon him (Jesus), loved him and beseeched that he might remain with him. And going out of the tomb, they went into the house of the youth, for he was rich. And after six days, Jesus instructed him and, at evening, the youth came to him wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the Kingdom of God".
Tatchell says there is scant information about Jesus's sexuality: "We don't know for sure whether Jesus was straight, gay, bisexual or celibate. There is certainly no evidence for the Church's presumption that he was heterosexual. Nothing in the Bible points to him having desires or relationships with women. The possibility of a gay Christ cannot be ruled out.
"Since there is no proof of the heterosexuality of Jesus, the theological basis of Church homophobia is all the more shaky and indefensible.
"Jesus was born a man and therefore presumably had male sexual feelings. But there are no references in the gospels to his sexuality. Large chunks of Jesus's life are missing from the Biblical accounts. This has fuelled speculation that the early Church sanitised the gospels, removing references to Christ's sexuality that were not in accord with the heterosexual morality that it wanted to promote", said Peter Tatchell.

reference this paper on the secret Gospel of Mark