Just speculation, but since we’ve gone over the whole “no wife/GF, no kids” (contested, but widely enough believed) thing a few times, it seems that it should be considered as a serious possibility.
Disclaimer: This is not meant to be inflammatory toward gays, as I’m personally bisexual.
Let’s look at the facts.
The washing of the disciples’ feet thing. Honestly, how many straight guys would really give a bunch of other men foot sponge-baths? Would you? Would your priest? (altar boys don’t count)
Fashion sense. Common depictions of him show flowing robes, sandals, and long hair. Not very “masculine” by today’s standards, although it may very well have been the common garb in Biblical Israel. But that just lends further weight to the case - gay men are notorious for being on top of the latest fashion trends.
Water into wine. I suspect a majority of straight men, unless they are trying to impress someone by looking sophisticated, would rather turn water into beer or liquor.
Lack of a father figure. This may not mean anything, but it has been argued that many gay men do not have strong relationships with their fathers, thus contributing to a desire for relationships with other men.
Plenty of compassion and empathy. In other words, emotionally-oriented.
Again, no female companion (of course, M.M. is rumored to have been a love interest, but AFAIK the church still officially and fervently denies this), and spent most of his time surrounded by men.
In this thread asking ladies if they would date Jesus, most said no. So he seems to be lacking some essential quality, that something-something necessary to attract females in the first place.
OK, I’m not saying it’s a fact, but I think we ought to consider it as a possibility. What do you say?
I read years ago that it’s a common theory in Europe that he was gay, especially since he’s reported to have had a “special love” for one of the Apostles ( John ? ).
Now, my personal theory is, Not Enough Data. He’s been dead too long, with too much mythologizing to be sure of anything about him.
I mean, maybe there are some arguments to be made in support of the notion that Jesus and/or other biblical figures were homosexual, or otherwise deviant from the prevailing sexual norm, but the OP isn’t making any of those arguments, only weird jokes.
There was a lot of reference to the fact that Jesus may be gay because John referred to himself as the Apostle that Jesus loved, but since John isn’t here to explain it one can think what they want to. Not too many years ago the word Gay just meant Happy, so over the years words have had many different meanings. And we do not have 100% proof that the man we now call Jesus ever existed, any more than Osiris.
I’m assuming we can dismiss the first three claims out of hand as an attempt at humor. So this leaves us with:
How does Jesus lack a father figure? Seems to me he may have too many. Certainly he had a (step)father, Joseph, who lived with his mother before his birth and lived on after Jesus’ death. Then there was that Jehova dude, who seems like a pretty hands-on father in those days. And, of course, what 'n the heck does lacking a father figure have to do with being gay, Mr. Freud?
:dubious: And what does this have to do with being gay? I’m sure you can come up with some substantial proof that gay men are more “emotionally-oriented” than straight men, whatever “emotionally-oriented” means.
This, IMHO, is probaby the best “evidence” we have, but even that is really, really muddy. First of all, lots of people for lots of years have believed that Jesus was a husband and father, and anything that said so was edited out of the Bible. I don’t have a real informed opinion on that one way or the other, but maybe **Polycarp **or **tomndeb **or someone else does.
My understanding is that, in the time period we’re talking about, most Jewish men were expected to marry and produce children as part of their spiritual lives, and that men weren’t really considered full grown men capable of studying Torah until they were heads of families. So something must have been pretty important or illuminating for Jesus to step aside from this tradition and actually advocate for celibacy. Could it have been homosexuality? Perhaps. Could it have been an Eastern influence in his philisophical training? Perhaps. Could he have been asexual? Perhaps. Could he have had a funny looking willy? Who knows?
Uh…are you saying that Jesus sets off the gaydar? 'Cause I don’t know any women who have actually met him, in the physical sense. If you’re saying that women are not attracted to the written description of Jesus, I don’t see what that has to do with anything, really. He wasn’t written as girly-porn.
The impression I get is that John’s usage of ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’ is just some kind of weird tension between thinking he’s the most special one, but being too modest, or too afraid to say it explicitly. (if indeed he is actually referring to himself at all by the term.
In any case, New Testament Greek has several different words that are all rendered ‘love’ in English, but have distinct meanings in Greek. The word in question here is not eros (erotic/romantic/sexual love), but agape - a term supposedly meaning unconditional, selfless, deliberate love.
There used to be some evangelical connotation to the expression “foot washing Baptists.” In my childhood, I was forced to sit through three services in which the pastor and elders actually washed the feet of the parishioners. It was supposed to teach us something valuable about humility, IIRC. It taught me something about humiliation.
I’ve heard all sorts of interpretations (from all kinds of sources, including non-Christian documentary) of the account of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. None of them even remotely suggested it was some kind of sexual thing. It’s just a preposterous presumption.
The OP asks “how many straight guys would really give a bunch of other men foot sponge-baths?”
OK, how many gay guys would give a bunch of other men foot sponge-baths? I have to confess ignorance of many aspects of homosexual behaviour, is foot-washing a long-standing and prevalent tradition in the gay community?
It was a custom in the Mid East during that time (and may still exist in some areas.) It was part of hospitality to one’s guests, which was something taken very seriously by the cultures in that region.
One of the stranger examples of it was when Mary Magdalene washed Jesus’s feet with perfume and her hair.
There was an interesting situation about this in the case of the “SEcret Gospel” of Mark that Morton Smith claimed to have found in the monastery f Mar Saba. Smith found the fragment copiedonto the back pages of an 18th century book, presumably copied from a crumbling mansuscript. The document was a letter from a Church Father (I forget which one), quoting a “hidden” portion of the Gospel of Mark that followers of Harpocrates/Carpocrates claimed to have. The fragments are interesting, because they look like a synoptic version of the Raising of Lazarus. Smith claimed that some of the lines suggested gay relations between Christ and his disciples.
1.) I’ve read the lines, and it seems as if he’s reading an awful lot into that text to get that interpretation.
2.) a lot of people are suspicious about his text – a citation of a text that was itself copied into a printed book, and one which now apparently cannot be located.
3.) At least one book has been published suggesting that Smith forged the whole thing, including an intentional gay reference.
I find the last one a bit hard to believe – Smith published not only a popular book on this, but technical reports that went into respectable journals and a serious book. It’s hard to believe that he’d risk imploding his professional career for a minor point.
Nope. Psychological/personality testing cannot differentiate between men of different sexual orientations. Be assured that the military would be using anything that did (it’s what Scale 5 of the MMPI was intended to do, but doiesn’t do). The only reliable way to know a person’s sexual orientation is to ask them about their sexual orientation. “Close-binding mother, distant father” has been dismissed by mainstream psychology as an explanation of the etiology of homosexuality for decades.
Rigamarole, a lot of your “evidence” that Jesus was gay is that he didn’t behave in a way typical to late 20th/early 21st century american males, at least as they are portrayed in advertisements for beer, cars, and body-sprays. There’s a much simpler explanation for most of your evidence, namely that Jesus wasn’t a 21st century American male. In fact, he was a first century male, residing in the middle east.
For instance, in the water into wine story Jesus was at a first century wedding, not a twenty-first century kegger, so turning water into wine (whatever “wine” meant in the Bible) was the logical thing to do.