Was Jesus Gay?

Was Jesus gay? While most Christians treat this as a scurrilous allegation, it is a question that Christians must deal with.

Why? Because there may have been a version of the Gospel of Mark suggesting Jesus had intimate physical contact with a naked disciple.   Which would suggest that Jesus was gay or bi.

All evidence of that lost gospel depends on the following: In the 20th century, Morton Smith claimed to have found a copy of a letter written by Clement in the second century, quoting quite disapprovingly from a version of the Gospel of Mark that stated the above.

1. Did Morton Smith really find a copy of such a letter? Or did he forge it?

2. Assuming Smith did find such a letter, did someone else forge it?

3. Assuming the letter was a true copy of a letter by Clement of Alexandria, was the version of Mark he quoted itself doctored?

So belief in Morton Smith's thesis of secret initiation ceremonies http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vd3d3LnJlbGlnaW91c3RvbGVyYW5jZS5vcmcvY2hyX21pc3M1Lmh0bQ==, hangs by a tenuous thread. Most have attacked Morton Smith as a forger as the simpest way to dispose of a troubling dissonance.

Biblical Archaeology Review has just sent out an email with links to articles suggesting that if there was a forgery, Morton Smith may not have been the forger. http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vd3d3LmJpYi1hcmNoLm9yZy9zY2hvbGFycy1zdHVkeS9zZWNyZXQtbWFyay5hc3A=. The publisher, Herschel Shanks, has weighed in with some observations: http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vd3d3LmJpYi1hcmNoLm9yZy9iYXIvYXJ0aWNsZS5hc3A= ... ticleID=07

Now my view. There are three possibilities, assuming there was such a person/being as Jesus.

1. Jesus was non-sexual
2. Jesus was heterosexual, and most likely, married. Possibly with children. As a Jew, he would ordinarily have been married. To have not been married would have invited criticism and speculation that he was homosexual or that something was physically wrong with him.
3. Jesus was homosexual.

IMVHO, a person who taught as Jesus taught might well have been homosexual, because homosexuals bring a different perspective to things. Jesus' concern for the poor and disadvantaged and disparaged might well be associated with homosexuality. Jesus said there are neither male nor female in heaven, a revolutionary concept at the time, and even in America well into the 20th century.

It was Paul who said that women are the weaker vessel and that they should keep silence in the churches. Paul was a hard-nosed conservative who wrote most of what has guided churches and Christian dogma for 1900 years, and always he seemed ignorant of or uncaring about any teachings of Jesus himself. If he had read or heard anything like a gospel, he did not quote from it or use it in his writing. For Paul, it was as though Jesus did not exist except as a lamb intended for sacrifice.  For Paul, it was as if the words of Jesus were non-existent or carried no weight of authority.

Which is all very strange, considering that Jesus and Paul were near-contemporaries, that Paul was a follower of a prominent rabbi in Jerusalem and surely had his ear to the ground, and that all kinds of stories about Jesus, precursors to the gospels, would have been rampant in the region if the gospels are to be believed.  [Some have seen in this strangeness evidence that there was in fact no Jesus at all, or that Jesus was based on a person known in Rome but not in Judea -- the "one Chrestus" that Tacitus referred to.]

Paul was only interested in Jesus as a sacrifice and not as a teacher or person. So Christianity is not really based on Jesus (except for Jesus' dying as a sacrifice) or the teachings of Jesus but on Paul. It should be called "Paulinism."

So. I am receptive to the possibility of Jesus gayness, but like the existence of Jesus, the jury is still out.   Not that it will ever be anything else.