Man Jesus Loved. Theodore W. Jr. Jennings
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to use “gay” as a generic term to include gay men, lesbians, and bisexual and transgendered persons. The term “queer,” which has been used in more recent discussion, is actually much better in the sense of inclusivity but it still has the tendency to block rather than facilitate understanding among readers, both “gay” and “straight,” of my own generation.
I tend to use “same-sex” rather than “homosexual,” and to use “crosssex” rather than “heterosexual,” in order to break with some of the intellectual baggage that attends the more familiar terms.
The manner of designating a relationship that may very well be mediated sexually but about which mediation we can, in the nature of things, have no direct knowledge can present a bit of a puzzle. Of course such assessment is true for virtually all relationships that we imagine may be sexual. My friends tend not to be guests on talk shows and thus do not generally say whether or how they have sex, for example, with their spouses or life partners. And since I’m not an avid watcher of such shows, I am as generally incurious about my friends’ sex lives as they are about mine. The point isn’t to bash talk shows but to say that in general we don’t know much about who has sex with whom or how, even in relationships that we presume to be, in some way, sexually mediated or expressed. In general I have identified as “erotic” relationships in which sexual mediation may be supposed to be a feature of the relationship. I am not presuming knowledge of whether or how the people involved “had sex,” but rather that the relationship is the sort in which we may suppose, in analogous circumstances, that some or another sexual practice would be involved. We suppose that sex is or would be a “natural” or likely extension (in private presumably) of what offers itself to be seen in public. In this sense I call the relationships between Jesus and the man he loved (and that between the centurion and his “lad”) “homoerotic.”
1. Derrick Sherwin Bailey, Homosexuality in the Western Christian Tradition (London: Longmans, Green, 1955). Although Bailey’s work exploded the alleged biblical basis for sodomy statutes, the U.S. Supreme Court appears not to have noticed (Bowers v. Hardwick). Then as now, the reading of the Bible has important consequences for civil society as a whole.
2. See the discussion of relevant texts in chapters 10 and 11 below.
Part One
THE MAN JESUS LOVED
AT THE VERY LEAST, THE QUESTION, “was Jesus gay?” means that we are concerned with Jesus’ personal relationships with other people. This question is seldom raised, in part because of a Christian erotophobia that implicitly regards erotic relationships as incompatible in some way with the image of Jesus as “without sin” or even as “divine.” Even when the possibility of an erotic relationship does arise, this question is usually confined to imagining that Jesus’ partner would have been female. The popular Jesus Christ Superstar supplied Mary of Magdala as a potential partner for Jesus as did Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ. Some early Mormon speculation has even proposed a different Mary (of Bethany) and her sister Martha as spouses for Jesus. The response on the part of mainline Christianity to these suggestions has generally been negative and even vehement.
However, if Christianity were to suppose that sexuality is not incompatible with sinlessness, then no reason in principle can be supplied for rejecting erotic attachments for Jesus. Then the question simply becomes whether the traditions concerning Jesus as they come to us in early Christian literature and especially in the four Gospels of the New Testament contain evidence of intimate relationships between Jesus and other people.
One way of approaching this question would be to ask whether Jesus is ever said to actually “love” another person in these documents. Terms for love occur surprisingly rarely in the traditions about Jesus. Indeed the only text in which they occur with any frequency is the Gospel of John. This fact by itself may be astonishing to people who have been inculcated with the belief that love is at the heart of the New Testament witness, a view that I do not dispute. Perhaps even more surprising is that, with a single exception, the only Gospel in which Jesus is said to love someone—even God, let alone another human being—is the Gospel of John.
To be sure, the “love” of Jesus for other people is expressed in a number of concrete ways in the other Gospels: in his attention to the poor, the hungry, the crowds, the sick, the demon possessed, and so on. But, for the most part, this expression is compassion for strangers and is never called “love” by the other narrators. Only in the Gospel of John do we have much material that bears on Jesus’ relationship with those people who are close to him, with what we may term “interpersonal” relationships.
In this context, Jesus is said to love other persons. In two cases (13:1; 14:21), Jesus is said to love all his followers. In one case, Jesus is said to love a group of three people: Mary of Bethany, her sister (Martha), and their brother Lazarus (11:5). In two other cases, the reader is told that, in the view of other people, Jesus loved Lazarus (11:3, 36). However, no fewer than five times (13:23; 19:26; 20:2; 21:7, 20) the reader is told of a (male) disciple who is called simply the one whom Jesus loved.
Clearly then, a consideration of Jesus’ strong personal relationships with other people must begin with an investigation of this relationship, even if we were not using the question, “was Jesus gay?” as a starting point. We should begin here even if we were concerned quite generally with Jesus’ personal relationships or with the issue of Jesus’ erotic attachments to anyone. Of course most people do not begin here, for homophobia and heterosexism conspire to direct attention away from the one person who is explicitly described as Jesus’ beloved.
Because tradition and prejudice have conspired to hide from the reader’s gaze the most obvious candidate for an erotic connection between Jesus and another human being, we have to develop the gay-affirmative reading of this relationship with some care.
In chapter 2, I attempt to show that the texts from the Gospel of John that deal with the disciple Jesus loved may be read quite “naturally” as indicating a homoerotic relationship between Jesus and another man. I seek to show that this reading is the least forced approach to these texts and that such a reading makes the best sense of the text as it stands. Subsequent chapters of part 1 deal with a number of issues that arise from such an interpretation of the text.
In chapter 3, I deal with a question that tradition and scholarship have addressed in this connection, the question of the identity or role of the “disciple Jesus loved.” The chapter reviews a number of possible candidates for this identity and role and enables us to get a sense of the remarkable number of interpersonal relationships that are present in this narrative. No other Gospel provides us with such a wealth of interpersonal detail in the depiction of the life and mission of Jesus. But this multiplicity of interpersonal relationships also makes it difficult to decide the question of the beloved disciple’s identity.
While, in the nature of the case, we often cannot know for sure whether or how a specific erotic relationship is mediated or expressed sexually, we can at least discover whether the context within which such a relationship is reported is one that makes sexual mediation unthinkable or unlikely. In chapter 4, then, I turn to a consideration of the thought world of the Gospel of John to see whether good reasons exist for rejecting the possibility of sexual mediation for this relationship. I argue that they do not.
Because this interpretation of the relationship between Jesus and the man he loved may seem so unprecedented, in chapter 5 I survey some of the ways in which