Thank you, BrainGlutton for equating my sexual orientation with bestiality, and essentially calling it dirty. :mad:
I feel no moral or esthetic disapproval of homosexuals or of homosexuality, Hamish, but the fact remains: Gay sex is dirty, just like straight sex, only more so. And gay sex is funny, just like straight sex, only more so. Always has been funny, always will be. Why do you think a thread like this gets so much attention? I find it hard to believe all the posters are chiming in out of piety!
Ignoring most of BrainGlutton’s hilariously over-the-top post, he does have a definite point. I’ll deal with it below.
First, with regards to the “gender” of God – Judaism and Christianity have always held that He is something Other, beyond human categories. However, the necessities of language demand that we conceptualize Him in terms that match the realities of secular experience.
Accordingly, the Hebrews and later the Jews, products of a patriarchal, monarchic culture, pictured Him as the ultimate patriarch and monarch – and threfore, of necessity, equivalent to the male patriarchs and monarchs with which they came into contact. The rare ruling woman was not within their ken – Hapshetsut had ruled and died and her reign was erased from memory by the time Joseph went down into Egypt, according to the most common dating; Athaliah, who reigned over the Northern Kingdom fairly late in their independent history, was quite the antithesis of anything they were taught to emulate. Inevitably the image of God as male grew.
Jesus subtituted for the monarchical image the one of the Heavenly Father, demanding of His children and yet loving and compassionate. How much the Virgin Birth story contributed to this imagery and how much it’s a product of it is debatable, but it served to reinforce the male imagery. And of course Jesus was Himself a male human being – so the Father/Son portrayal tended to continue the masculine imagery.
The two things which might have served to temper this masculinism never had a strong influence. As noted above, God’s Glory was referred to by the feminine noun Shekinah, but this was merely an attribute, never personalized and anthropomorphized until the rise of Kaballah in early medieval Judaism. The Hebrew and Greek terms for His Spirit, which was in Christianity distinguished as a separate Person of the Godhead, wre likewise feminine nouns, ruakh and pneuma, but for Jews this was merely another attribute, and Westrn Christianity used the Latin spiritus, a masculine noun, for it. Too, the function of the Spirit as the begetter of Jesus on Mary (not to be gross, but to phrase it in traditional creedal language) served to counteract the grammatical gender and render it too as a masculine concept.
Ergo, there was no room for a feminine conceptualization in the mental picture of God in either faith tradition, no matter how much teachers would stress that God was not human and not to be grasped in human terms.
Now, with relation to Jesus’s putative sex life: Contrary to all the controversy of late, there is absolutely no indication at any point in Scripture or Orthodox tradition that Jesus was ever sexually active. He appears to have been a celibate itinerant preacher. Kazantzakis, Corpus Christi, Holy Blood/Holy Grail and all the nutball modern explorations of His seuality to one side, the clear testimony of Scripture and Tradition is that he was crucified as a virgin.
However, some things need to be contemplated:
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Hebrews 4:15 says that Jesus “was tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin.” The orthodox insistence on the manhood of Jesus – that He was truly God and truly man – means that he obviously had a sexuality, was subject to sexual temptation. And it’s a commonplace of human experience that some men are homosexual or bisexual in their orientation. Are they subject to temptations that Jesus never felt? Not according to Hebrews.
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Ignoring sexuality for a moment, almost all human beings feel a need for emotional intimacy with another – to have someone who loves them and whom they love, on whom they can rely for emotional strength.
Jesus was a human being, and a rabbi in a culture where rabbis were expected to settle down and marry. His ministry, however, was one of itinerancy, of moving from place to place with a group of male disciples whom He taught. While Mary Magdalene seems to have attached herself to this group for at least a part of His ministry, there is absolutely no evidence in Scripture or Tradition that she occupied any role beyond that of (female) disciple.
On the other hand, St. John the son of Zebedee was the youngest of the Twelve, in his teens when he followed Christ’s call to leave his boat and follow Him. And he either wrote most of the Fourth Gospel or it was founded on his memories though written by his followers.
In that Gospel, John does not call himself by name once. The only John so named in the text with any significant role is Jesus’s cousin the Baptist. Rather, John makes reference to himself as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” He was the one who reclined on Jesus’s breast at the Last Supper. Now, what does this phrase mean? Certainly not the agapetic love John celebrates Jesus as showing to the world – that was His feeling towards all men, not one in particular. Rather, I se it as Johjn filling for Jesus the role of emotionally intimate companion, which a married man might find in his wife, a soldier in his brother in arms, etc. – the person in whom one may find closeness and emotional strength, and feel fulfilled in giving the same back. There need not be anything overtly sexual in such a relationship, simply the single person in whom one finds and to whom one gives love in a special way. And that John was that special person for his Lord and Savior was his proudest boast, and one he stresses in his own account of Jesus.
Hamish, does that help to answer the question I left hanging?
Thank you. It did answer that question, and quite a few others besides.
Posted by Polycarp
Polycarp, when you say “Scripture,” are you referring only to the canonical books of the Bible? Because I believe there are some “apocryphal” or “Gnostic” gospels (which I have not actually read) that ascribe to Mary Magdelene a very different role in Jesus’ life. And who can say the authors of those books knew any less of the real story than did Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?
Yes. Because they’re what are accepted as Scripture by Christian churches. Even the Mormons, with three other sacred books, define the New Testament identically with the rest of Christianity.
Not being an expert on non-canonical gospels, I cannot dispute this, though I cannot affirm it either. Perhaps I, Brian, who has looked into them, will happen on this thread and can comment.
Well, for a start, the Fathers of the early church, including my namesake, were quite familiar with the various stories, and they were the ones who originally opted for those four and no more. And I might point out that it’s documented fact that St. Polyucarp, at least, was St. John’s disciple, and in a position to know the truth about what John did and did not say – and he used and quoted the MMLJ quartet and not the others.
Then every church has found occasion to define the canon of the Nw Testament as normative for its beliefs, and stood by those four as opposed to the others. Further, scholars, including those without a denominational axe to grind, are unanimous as considering the four canonical Gospels as relatively more reliable than the apocryphal ones on a variety of grounds including internal textual criticism, manuscript source material, etc.
To give you a parallel, if we were debting Constitutional interpretation, we’d both agree that reference to the Federalist Papers, the writings of Marshall, Taney, Hoklmes, Brandeis, Black, etc., and the Harvard Law Review, would be significantly more reliable sources than a website by someone in Montana with an obvious bug up his ass about the Second and Sixteenth Amendments, or an obscure book by the Mayor of Joplin MO in 1835 in which he attempts to prove the reliance of the Bill of Rights on the writings of Huldreich Zwingli and the thought of an 18th century French provincial writer that there is no evicdence Madison ever heard of.