Jesus Had A Boyfriend

“Certainly, the most controversial same-sex couple in the Christian tradition comprised Jesus and… the beloved disciple. The relationship between them was often depicted in subsequent art and literature as intimate, if not erotic.” John Boswell, historian

“For centuries, the beloved disciple has remained a powerful metaphor for homoerotic friendship and love, and even today gay men intuit an identifiable love relationship between Jesus and the beloved disciple.” Robert E Goss ‘The Beloved Disciple’ in Take back the Word : a queer reading of the Bible

Eusebius, writing in the fourth century, recorded in his Church History, a letter which he believed to have been written by Polycrates of Ephesus (c. 130s–196) in the second century. Polycrates believed that John was the one “who reclined upon the bosom of the Lord”, suggesting an identification with the beloved disciple.

Augustine of Hippo (354–430 AD), in his Tractates on the Gospel of John, also believed that John was the beloved disciple,

Saint Aelred of Rievaulx, in his work 12th century work De Spiritali Amicitia (“ On Spiritual Friendship”), referred to the relationship of Jesus and John the Apostle as a “marriage” and held it out as an example sanctioning friendships between clerics.

Francesco Calcagno, a friar of Venice was tried and executed in 1550 for claiming that “St. John was Christ’s catamite”.

In his 1593 trial for blasphemy English playwright Christopher Marlowe was accused of claiming that “St. John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom, that he used him as the sinners of Sodoma.”

English King James I responded in Parliament to criticisms of his relationship with his favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, saying “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 George.”

Frederick the Great of Prussia 1749 poem Palladium includes the lines: “This good Jesus, how do you think He got John to sleep in his bed? Can’t you see he was his Ganymede?”

The disciple whom Jesus loved is mentioned six times in the Gospel of John:

• He is the disciple who, while reclining beside Jesus at the Last Supper, asks Jesus who it is that will betray him, after being requested by Peter to do so
• “Near the cross of Jesus stood His mother and her sister, as well as Mary the wife of Clopas and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw His mother and the disciple whom He loved standing nearby, He said to His mother, “Woman, here is your son.” Then He said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” So from that hour, this disciple took her into his home.” John 25–27
• When Mary Magdalene discovers the empty tomb, she runs to tell the beloved disciple and Peter. The two men rush to the empty tomb and the beloved disciple is the first to reach it.
• In John 21, the last chapter of the Gospel of John, the beloved disciple is one of seven fishermen involved in the miraculous catch of 153 fish and is the first to recognise Jesus on the beach.
• Also in the book’s final chapter, after Jesus implies the manner in which Peter will die, Peter sees the beloved disciple following them and asks, “What about him?” Jesus answers, “If I want him to remain until I come, what is that to you?”
• In the Gospel’s last chapter, it states that the very book itself is based on the written testimony of the disciple whom Jesus loved.

Jesus had a boyfriend, a beloved male friend — nothing shocking there — it’s what educated men did in the ancient world. Marriages with women were seen as functional, not passionate — it was love of man for man that was viewed as reaching to the heavens. The greatest love stories of the ancient world were those of Zeus and Ganymede, Apollo and Hyacinth, David and Jonathon, Hadrian and Antinous.

In the Gnostic text, the Book of Thomas the Contender, Jesus is even quoted as saying, “Woe to you who love intimacy with womankind and polluted intercourse with them.”

English Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham wrote, around 1785, an essay on “Paederasty.” The essay, which runs to over 60 manuscript pages, is the first known argument for homosexual law reform in England, but he did not publish it because of the virulence of the prevailing attitude towards sex between men. In the essay Bentham advocates the decriminalization of sodomy, which in his day was punished by hanging. He argues that homosexual acts do not “weaken” men, or threaten population or marriage, and documents their prevalence in ancient Greece and Rome. Bentham opposes punishment on utilitarian grounds and attacks ascetic sexual morality.

Regarding Jesus and the Beloved Disciple, Bentham wrote:

“If the love which in these passages Jesus was intended to be represented as bearing towards this John was not the same sort of love as that which appears to have had place between David and Jonathan, the son of Saul, it seems not easy to conceive what can have been the object in bringing it to view in so pointed a manner accompanied with such circumstances of fondness. That the sort of love of which in the bosom of Jesus Saint John is here meant to be represented as the object was of a different sort from any of which any of the other of the Apostles was the object is altogether out of dispute. For of this sort of love, whatever sort it was, he and he alone is in these so frequently recurring terms maintained as being the object.” Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832)

“Bentham points out that Jesus nowhere condemns relations between men. He adumbrates modern criticism by dismissing Christ’s frequent references to the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah as irrelevant; in none of these gospel passages “is any the slightest allusion made by him to the propensity in question [as] the sin by which the calamity is produced… Jesus seems instead to identify the sin of Sodom with inhospitality and the mistreatment of strangers; repeatedly he compares cities that reject his apostles with the cities of the plain. In doing this, Bentham thinks he is merely following the true emphasis in the original story in Genesis 19. There the relations referred to are not consensual homosexuality but a mass rape whose threatened enormity was compounded by its gross violation of the laws of hospitality so important in primitive societies.” Louis Crompton, Homosexuality and Civilisation

“In the acts and sayings of Jesus, had any such mark of reprobation towards the mode of sexuality in question been found as may be seen in such abundance in the epistles of Paul-in a word, had any decided marks of reprobation been found pronounced upon it by Jesus, in the eyes [of a] believer in Jesus could any such body of evidence as here presents itself be con- sidered as worth regarding? But when the utter absence of all such marks of reprobation is considered, coupled with the urgency of the demand for the most pointed and decided marks of reprobation in a new system of religion promulgated by supernatural authority and by supernatural means, the practice in question being universally spread not only over the vast region of the East in which Judaea formed a part, but in the metropolis of the empire and on and about the throne.” Bentham.

Also, Jeremy Bentham “thought the naked youth in a ‘linen cloth’ who alone stood by Jesus when the other disciples fled as he was seized by soldiers at Gethsemane (Mark 14:51) was a boy prostitute and that his devotion was a consequence of Jesus’ sympathy for his outcast status.” Louis Crompton, Homosexuality and Civilisation. Bentham called the young man a ‘stripling clad in loose attire’.

In 1958 American historian Morton Smith discovered what has become known as the Secret Gospel of Mark in ancient monastery near Jerusalem. This text, the authenticity of which has been disputed, depicts Jesus spending the night with a young man he’d raised from the dead:

“The youth, looking upon [Jesus], loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him…And after six days Jesus told him what to do and in the evening the youth comes 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.”

Smith theorized that “Secret Mark” portrayed a private baptism that Jesus reserved for his closest disciples: One by one and at night, he contended, Jesus may have initiated these men through a sexual act — a “completion of the spiritual union by physical union.”

Hugh William Montefiore (12 May 1920 – 13 May 2005) was an English Anglican bishop and academic, who served as Bishop of Kingston from 1970 to 1978 and Bishop of Birmingham from 1978 to 1987.

In a paper read at the Conference of Modern Churchmen in 1967 titled “Jesus, the Revelation of God,” Montefiore suggested that Jesus’ celibacy was due to his homosexuality: he argued that Jesus was not aware of his vocation as Messiah until approximately age thirty, therefore this vocation cannot explain his celibacy. Apart from the Essenes, celibacy was not a common practice in Jewish life. Montefiore suggest we might need to look for a non-religious reason to explain the celibacy of Jesus:

Men usually remain unmarried for three reasons: either because they cannot afford to marry or there are no girls to marry (neither of these factors need have deterred Jesus); or because it is inexpedient for them to marry in the light of their vocation (we have already ruled this out during the ‘hidden years’ of Jesus’ life); or because they are homosexual in nature, in as much as women hold no special attraction for them. The homosexual explanation is one which we must not ignore.

Montefiore finds the explanation that Jesus was homosexual consistent with his identification with the poor and oppressed:

All the synoptic gospels show Jesus in close relationship with the ‘outsiders’ and the unloved. Publicans and sinners, prostitutes and criminals are among his acquaintances and companions. If Jesus were homosexual in nature (and this is the true explanation of his celibate state) then this would be further evidence of God’s self-identification with those who are unacceptable to the upholders of ‘The Establishment’ and social conventions.