Christianity
Lesser Puzzles of Jesus’s Ministry
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, November 20, 1998
Fishers of Men
Jesus has to start to assemble God’s army. He gathers disciples who apparently were fishermen, hardly surprising by the Sea of Galilee, you might think, but references to Galilee are not to be trusted. The phrase by the sea of Galilee in verse 1:16 reads very strangely in the Greek and is considered by many scholars to be an addition, whether by Mark or an editor is unknown. Nearly all of the little stories called pericopes which make up Mark have no indications of time or place other than what is required internally by the story and when they otherwise appear they have been added by the author to provide a spurious connection with a previous passage. Here the indication of by the sea of Galilee looks particularly odd and has evidently been added because the men being recruited were supposedly fishermen. Since this is probably a misunderstanding, deliberate or otherwise by Mark, the recruitment might well have happened elsewhere. Again a reference to Galilee is probably false.
The code used by Mark should be read here, especially since the gospel explicitly says: I will make you fishers of men. The disciples were never fishermen but all were fishers of men whatever their jobs beforehand.
The imagery of people caught in a pit, a net or snare is common in the scriptures. The net is most often a fowler’s net—fish nets are less commonly used in this context—but the meaning is the same. In Ezekiel 32:3 and Jeremiah 16:15-16, God fishes for those he wishes to judge that He might bring them into His land:
Thus saith the Lord God; I will therefore spread out my net over thee with a company of many people; and they shall bring thee up in my net.
And I will bring them again into their land that I gave unto their fathers. Behold, I will send for many fishers, saith the Lord, and they shall fish them.
The people of Israel were already caught in the net of the oppressor. We find in Habakkuk 1:14-17 a little diatribe against colonialism using the simile of the people captured by foreigners as the fishes of the sea caught in a net:
And makest men as the fishes of the sea, as the creeping things, that have no ruler over them? They take up all of them with the angle, they catch them in their net, and gather them in their drag: therefore they rejoice and are glad. Therefore they sacrifice unto their net, and burn incense unto their drag; because by them their portion is fat, and their meat plenteous. Shall they therefore empty their net, and not spare continually to slay the nations?
One of the scrolls is a commentary on Habakkuk. The oppressor, who in the original work was the Chaldaeans, becomes the Kittim, the imperial Romans, according to professor G R Driver, because they sacrifice to their standards and worship their weapons of war—the soldiers of republican Rome had not then had the idea of worshipping their standards. The sign that the Essenes took to inaugurate the end time might well have been the imperial standards that Pilate allowed the legions to bring into Jerusalem, especially if they were taken into the temple. Pious Jews of all denominations would have seen this as an Abomination of Desolation, the signal which started the Maccabaean uprising, and which in Daniel was a sign of the end.
In Ecclesiastes 9:12 the sufferings of the people in an evil time are compared to fish caught in an evil net—the evil net of Belial of the scrolls:
For man also knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.
The net in Essene code means profanation of the temple but the Essenes considered that the temple was profaned partly at least by the gentiles—the court of the gentiles and the polluted gifts which came from Jews of the Diaspora.
Looked at this way the disciples were called fishermen because Jesus had selected them as fishers of men. They were God’s fishermen saving the chosen people from the nets of the foreigner because the day of judgement was nigh. Luke dramatizes the fishing at this point (Lk 5:6) with an account of the miracle of the huge draught of fish representing all the children of Israel who would be saved from evil and foreign oppression—it was no miracle but part of Jesus’s apocalyptic speech, signifying the expected success of the mission of winning over the simple of Ephraim. Matthew’s parable about a dragnet, which exactly illustrates the point here, is left until much later (Mt 13:47-50):
The kingdom of heaven is like unto a net, that was cast into the sea, and gathered of every kind, which, when it was full, they drew to shore, and sat down, and gathered the good into vessels, but cast the bad away. So shall it be at the end of the world: the angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the just, And shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.
It occurs also in John but after the crucifixion in a gentile Christian context. In John 21:11 the number of fish caught is recorded precisely as 153, not because anyone bothered to count them but because that was the supposed number of nations in the world to a gentile (to a Jew it was seventy). John is saying allegorically that the Christians would convert the whole world not only the Jews.
Jesus’s fishers were always metaphorical ones.
There is a passage in Ezekiel’s vision of the temple where the prophet describes (Ezek 47:1-10) a wondrous stream of water flowing from the alter of the perfect temple eastward into the Dead Sea and as it flowed toward the Dead Sea it got deeper and deeper. The waters of this river were healing waters which eventually entered the Dead Sea and restored it to life—resurrected it!
And every thing that liveth, which moveth, whithersoever the rivers shall come, shall live: and there shall be a very great multitude of fish, because these waters shall come thither: for they shall be healed; and every thing shall live whither the river cometh. And the fishers shall stand upon it from Engedi even unto Eneglaim; they shall be a place to spread forth nets; their fish shall be according to their kinds, as the fish of the great sea, exceeding many.
A river flowing east from Jerusalem would enter the Dead Sea at Qumran. The two places mentioned in the vision seem to denote the coast of the Dead Sea along which the Essenes had their wilderness settlements. Engedi, the spring of the kid, is in the south, a few miles north of the natural fortress of Masada where the Zealots held out against the Romans, and Eneglaim, the spring of the heifers—an unidentified place—seems to be near the mouth of the Jordan. Besides the coincidence that the stream flows out in Essene country, it is a stream of healing waters which would revive the Dead Sea, and the Essenes were great believers in the purifying power of water. Since they identified spiritual purification with physical healing in their metaphors, their baptismal waters have exactly the powers of Ezekiel’s magical river.
Engedi and Ain Feshka, close to Qumran, are both oases at the edge of the Dead Sea with bubbling fresh water supporting colonies of croaking frogs in season and even palm trees. It seems possible that the Essenes saw these springs as the first trickles of Ezekiel’s magical river.
The Essenes considered themselves the perfect priests, the Sons of Zadok, of Ezekiel’s perfect temple, and it seems that they identified themselves also with Ezekiel’s fishers of the magical waters. Sure enough in the scroll of the Thanksgiving Hymns we find, referring to the quotations above: Thou hast caused me to dwell with the many fishers who spread a net upon the face of the waters. The hymn writer goes on to tell us that he dwells with the fishers because God put him there for justice and to confirm the counsel of truth in his heart and the water of the covenant for those who seek it. The fishers are the Essenes!
The hired servants of Zebedee are mentioned to show that even wealthy people were willing to give up their material wealth to follow Jesus in his campaign for the kingdom of God. In our restoration we omit the mention of the ship as an unwarranted extension of the metaphor.
In calling people from their work to be disciples, Jesus was effectively calling on them to strike. Since the day of God’s vengeance was due, work had no further purpose to them, though we can be sure that their employers would have been displeased as wealthy employers always are when those who are not slaves exercise their right as freemen not to work. The first Christians were expecting the judgement day to be soon but, displaying his cynicism, Paul the apostle rebuked those (2 Thes 3:10-12) who believed they could give up work to wait for the coming of the Lord—if 2 Thessalonians is to be attributed to Paul.
Capernaum
Capernaum is considered to be the town where Jesus did his main work of preaching. Indeed, there are suggestions in the gospels that Capernaum was his home town. It is an important centre in the gospels; a customs post in Matthew 9:9, a garrison town in Matthew 8:5, and a place where noblemen live in John 4:46. Yet Josephus wrote that Capernaum was insignificant.
In a biblical atlas Capernaum is boldly marked near the Sea of Galilee, but the truth is that no one knows where Jesus’s Capernaum was. Franciscan monks have excavated a mound and found a third century synagogue which they claim is the one described in 385 AD as being at Capernaum, but the only evidence is that it was approached by many steps. The excavations revealed four steps at one end of a verandah and fourteen at the other. Is that many? The Franciscan idea of excavating was to discard anything that did not support their preconceived idea that they had the synagogue. No modern techniques were used, no proper startification sequence was recorded, and a find as important as a cache of thousands of coins was suppressed for forty years because they refuted their assumption.
In any case was the Capernaum of 385 AD the Capernaum of Jesus? If Josephus was wrong and Capernaum was a town and not just a spring then it was laid waste early enough to be recorded thus in Matthew 11:23. If it existed in 385 AD it must have been rebuilt after Matthew had written his gospel and later destroyed again so thoroughly that it was lost for another 1520 years. It is easier to believes that Josephus was right—Capernaum was always insignificant, Matthew couldn’t find it and assumed it had been laid waste and the Capernaum of 385 AD was probably a suitable site newly named, as Nazareth was, when pilgrims found it did not exist.
On examining the meaning of the word Capernaum we find that it does not simply mean village of Nahum as commentators claim but has a suspiciously appropriate meaning.
Kapar occurs frequently in the Jewish scriptures. It relates to “kippur” meaning atonement, as in the name of the Jewish holiday “yom kippur”, day of atonement, the only day of the year when the high priest could enter into the presence of God in the holy of holies to make atonement for the people of Israel. Literally, it means covering, but figuratively it means covering with the blood of a sacrifice to atone for a sin—from the ritual of sprinkling the sacrificial blood by the priest in atonement for a sin. The physical life of the sacrificial animal was required in exchange for the spritual life of the worshipper—an innocent life given for a guilty life!
Naum is “nahum” denoting a change of the heart or of purpose. It is found in scriptural proper names such as Nehemiah, Nahum, and Menehem. Nahum is often translated as to repent, but meaning God’s repentance not man’s. God repents—or relents as in Jeremiah 18:8:
If that nation, against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them.
God often only repented because His chosen had repented or a prophet had interceded on their behalf. Moses pleaded:
Turn from thy fierce wrath, and repent of this evil against thy people.Exod 32:12
Nahum also means to comfort or to be comforted—a word well known to every pious Jew living in exile as he recalled the words of Isaiah:
Comfort ye, comfort ye my people.Isaiah 40:1
God indicated that He would comfort Jerusalem with the restoration of Israel, as a mother comforts her offspring (Isa 66:13). As a noun it means compassion.
Thus the connotation of the word Capernaum is that God will repent or show compassion for His people through an atoning sacrifice. John’s gospel seems to identify the Jesus of the Parousia with a comforter, evidently drawing upon the idea of the atoning sacrifice of Jesus making him a comforter from God, and Lo! this word is actually translated in some ancient Greek gospels as Paraclete. So by one of those miraculous coincidences of the gospels, the man who is a sacrifice to induce God’s repentance, carries out his ministry in a place called God will show compassion for His people through an atoning sacrifice! Now if this is intended as evidence of God’s plan, one wonders why it is never observed upon. Possibly it is because rational people would see in it not a real place but a poetic choice of name by the gospel writer.
Capernaum has either been given a spiritual or religious name by the evangelists or it is a holy name for some place of special note to the Essenes. If it is the same as the Capernaum described by Josephus as a spring, it seems fairly safe to assume it was a place chosen by Essenes for preaching to the simple of Ephraim and baptizing those who repented. In the Community Rule, the elect had to atone for the land and pay the wicked their due. By so doing they invited God’s repentance of the evil Israel suffered.
Origen, much closer to the events than we are now decided that these places were symbolic ones as their names showed. Though he was active at Caesaria, and made a point of walking in the footsteps of Jesus, he could not find Capernaum.
However since Matthew tells us that Capernaum no longer existed—it had gone down unto Hades—it seems possible that Capernaum was really a coded name for Jerusalem which had been destroyed by the Romans.
Bethany, Bethabara and Bethphage
The Bethany of the synoptic gospels is just outside Jerusalem, at 15 stadia, according to John 11:18. The stadium being the Roman furlong, it is about two miles distant. Yet, it is not mentioned in the Jewish scriptures, or by any classic commentator including Josephus. Moreover, John 1:28 says Bethany is much further away “beyond Jordan”, east of the river. To explain this biblical contradiction, even in early Christian times, Church authorities claimed John 1:28 meant a place called Bethabara not Bethany, but Bethabara is also mentioned nowhere except the New Testament.
Yet another town unknown to history except in the gospels is Bethphage, supposedly, like Bethany, a village on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho near the Mount of Olives. Bethany and Bethphage are places where Jesus, in Mark and Luke, intructs his men to pick up the colt he would use to ride into Jerusalem and fulfil the prophesy of Zechariah 9:9. Matthew, in its version omits Bethany at this point, so that Jesus gets the colt at Bethphage. In these gospels, Jesus lodges overnight at Bethany at the end of the day.
Bethany is a village near Jerusalem today, but Bethphage does not exist at all. In fact, they were probably the names for wayside inns that Essenes kept for travellers. Bethany supposedly means House of Dates and Bethphage means House of Figs. In Mark 12:13-14, it is when Jesus is leaving Bethany on the next day that he sees and curses the fig tree. These parallel passages are the only ones where Bethphage is mentioned at all, so the cursing of the fig tree might have been a cursing of the lodging house, Bethphage, Jesus evidently choosing to lodge at its rival Bethany. If so, it suggests that the Essenes were not united in their support of Jesus, some still considering him mad.
Even Origen only 200 years after the gospel events was unfamiliar with these places. He had tried to find them but could not, but noted that their names were curiously appropriate to their circumstances. He read Bethabara as House of Preparation, the preparation necessary being baptism, and Bethany he reads as House of Obedience, presumably because Jesus was obedient in doing his Father’s will. Origen thought these names had to be understood to understand the symbolism of the gospel stories.
Father And Son
The Christian theological idea of the Son of God was initially developed by Paul and the author of John. To the Greeks it denoted a being who was part god, a man with supernatural powers or apparently godlike, notionally the product of an Olympian’s desire for mortal women. But for Jews it signified initially the people of Israel in general (Exodus 4:12, Hos 11:1)—all of the Chosen People were sons or daughters, that is, children of God.
More especially a son of God to the Jews was a saviour king (2 Sam 7:13) of the seed of David and therefore any king (Ps 2:6-7) or leader, like a priest appointed by God because God’s will might be that they should become great. But did Jesus think of himself as having a divine relationship with God as His son conferring on him the qualities of a god?
He habitually spoke of God as my father and elsewhere we have argued that the robber who was said to have been exchanged for Jesus in the four gospels was really Jesus himself, necessarily distinguished falsely from Barabbas, literally the Father’s son, because the church was desperate to prevent anyone from knowing that Jesus was a robber, a robber in the gospels not simply meaning a thief but a rebel.
Christians argue that he did think of himself as the son and cite the parable of the wicked husbandmen as evidence. Now plainly Jesus was referring to himself in his role of saviour king in this parable because he was justifying his kingly act of clearing out the wicked priests, the husbandmen, from ruling Israel, the vinyard. But it does not signify that Jesus thought of himself as a god or demi-god.
The particular evidence favoured by Christians is Matthew 11:25-27 paralleled in Luke 10:21-22. The passage is poetic and has the style of an Essene thanksgiving hymn with its intimation of hidden things which are revealed. For the Christians’ idea of filial consciousness the important stanzas are:
All things have been delivered unto me of my father;
And no one understands the Son, save the Father;
Neither does any know the Father, save the Son;
And he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him.
The special understanding of the Father and Son pair is evident. The manuscript confirmation of these passages is almost unanimous and the close verbal agreement between Matthew and Luke is also taken to indicate that the passage is reliable. However the only early manuscript which differs does so in a remarkable way: it omits the Father understanding the Son, and quotations of the passage in early polemics suggests that the poem was not as polished as it now appears. The Son’s knowledge of the Father is often quoted before the Father’s knowledge of the Son. The inference is that the Son’s knowledge of the Father was added as a gloss.
All things have been delivered unto me of my father;
And no one understands the Father, save the Son;
And he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him.
The sense of the poem supports this idea in that it is thanking God and therefore concerned with human understanding of the Absolute and not with the Absolute understanding man, however exalted. Furthermore there are grammatical reasons why the two phrases cannot be used as they are. The conclusion is that this is not a didactic point of self revelation but a simple song of praise to God for some important success.
The earlier verse refers to babes meaning simple folk, certainly those called, by the Essenes, the simple of Ephraim. It must be a prayer of thanks on an occasion when many people converted or when the converts achieved a great success. However, telling against this is that the whole hangs together as a typically Jewish poem in which rhymes are replaced by repetition of elements in different words and poetic parallels and contrasts.
Links with Ecclesiasticus
In fact, the form of the whole passage in Matthew is that of Chapter 51 of Ecclesiasticus, an apocryphal book. It could almost be a much shortened and reworked version of the same. Some of the wording is almost identical.
Draw unto me, ye unlearned.Ecclesiasticus 51:23
Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden.Mt 11:28
Put your neck under the yoke and let your soul bear the burden.Ecclesiasticus 51:26
Take my yoke upon you and learn of me…Mt 11:29
Behold with your eyes how I laboured but a little and found for myself much rest.Ecclesiasticus 51:27
For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.Mt 11:30
For I am meek and lowly in heart; and ye shall find rest unto your souls.Mt 11:29
At the end, the mention of ”soul” in Matthew and ”myself” in Ecclesiasticus draws the identity closer because they are the same word in Hebrew as any educated Jews would have known. Of course, it could still have been Jesus who did the revising of Ecclesiasticus but it suggests that there might have been a tradition in which God was thanked for revealing a mystery and men were urged to learn from it.
Similar stanzas occur in the Hermetica though with the revelation appearing first. In fact the ”these things” of verse 25 refer to nothing that we have been told about and might indicate that the revelations of verse 27 are misplaced. Furthermore since the urge to unburden of verses 28-30 are absent from Luke, the original threefold nature of Matthew’s poem night not have held in Q.
Overall the evidence that the origin of the piece in Matthew is Essene is reasonably strong but verse 27 still looks odd, seemingly more appropriate to John’s gospel than Matthew’s. The solution might have been given by J Weiss who felt it signified the moment when Jesus had the revelation that God had destined him to be the messiah and he gave thanks.
In our terms, Jesus had hitherto not been well received but then he had this flash of insight that he had to take on the full role of the messiah and lead the people against their traditional enemy, without having to win over all of the simple of Ephraim. The simple would rally to him in the course of the struggle, but meanwhile the secret was for only the few to whom he revealed it, the band of Nazarenes who remained loyal.
But Jesus says:
Come unto me all ye that are weary and heavy laden.
Who are they but the put upon Children of Israel hoping to have the yoke of oppression lifted from them? The parallels of 27 have to be reversed for this to make sense. Jesus as the Son of God knows he is the champion of the poor and the burdened.
In Matthew, it is placed after the return of the disciples with the news that many towns had rejected them, leading to the woes of Jesus on those towns, and also the rebuke of the generation which had rejected John the Baptist and Jesus. It therefore seems out of context but Matthew might have regarded this as another poetic contrast to emphasise that the rejection led to Jesus’s inspiration.
An interesting point is that it implies that the wise did not understand this. The wise might have meant the Essenes and the passage suggests that by taking on the role of messiah before the mass of the people had rallied to the cause, he had been rejected by the Essene leadership, or some of them.
If Matthew 11:27, stems from genuine Nazarene tradition it is odd that it did not seem to influence the early church. It seems that the importance of sonship had to wait for the gospel of John to really catch on. Since it became such an important aspect of Christianity, it seems odd that it was not considered important at first, especially since it was supposed to have been uttered by Jesus himself.
The reason might be that it was not really part of the document Q but was something imported into both Matthew and Luke at a later date. However it seems to be genuinely Jewish tradition and not a Greek import.
The Wisdom literature plainly influenced the passage and the whole concept of knowing God is important to the later prophets (Jer 31:34; Hos 4:1, 6:4) and the reason is that they are the Chosen People, the only people God has known of all the people on earth (Amos 3:2). Furthermore Matthew was at pains to make his prophet the equal of the first prophet Moses, and Moses the Lord knew face to face (Dt 34:10).
Adoptionism
Some Christians argue that the gentile Christians, unfamiliar with the Jewish notion of the Son of God as a reverent title for a human king or priest, would have believed from the outset that the Son of God was a supernatural being, at least partly a god from the outset, but not a mere man. Reverend A E J Rawlinson (The New Testament Doctrine of the Christ) says the apostles had to work out the incarnationist theology which ”alone was capable of providing an adequate interpretation of the meaning of Christianity” and therefore prevailed—quite honest stuff for a Christian scholar.
Evangelists like Mark certainly relied on the Greek concept of a Son of God as a divine or semi-divine being but the Greeks were also familiar with apotheosis as Rawlinson concedes. The idea of a man becoming a god was familiar and reasonable to the Greek mind, and so this was easily understood in its day—an exceptionally good man could become a god. It fitted the synoptic gospel accounts and John’s gospel was not yet widely accepted.
Those who believed in Christ’s apotheosis—Jesus was a man who became a god—were believers in ”Adoptionism,” a heresy current in Rome at the end of the second century. Though miraculously born of a virgin, Christ was a man, Jesus, elevated by the Holy Ghost of God at his baptism, after proving himself throughout a pious life, and at his death raised from the dead and taken into God’s presence.
Eusebius tells us the Adoptionists claimed that theirs was the original teaching of the apostles and had been the accepted teaching in Rome, but by the time of Pope Victor (190-198 AD) the church was ready to excommunicate the leader of the Adoptionists, Theodotus of Byzantium.
The Christology of the Shepherd of Hermas is thought by many scholars to be mainly Adoptionist, and some believe that Romans, Hebrews, 1 Peter, 1 Clement and Mark’s gospel are all Adoptionist in outlook. Jesus was the divine messenger of God (Mal 3:1) chosen and appointed as a man in whom the spirit of God could dwell to appoint the apostles as the foundation of the church.
Scholars accept that Adoptionism was the idea originally held in respect of the Sonship of God. Paul in Romans 1:4 says that the resurrection was proof of Jesus’s Sonship but in Acts 13:23-25 he traces Jesus’s appointment by God to John the Baptist. In the most ancient tradition of Christianity, Jesus was adopted as the Son of God at Jesus’s baptism when the voice from heaven declares him to be the Son (Mk 1:11) and the spirit descended upon him.
In Luke 3:22, the phrase ”in thee I am well pleased” is really a deliberate corruption of ”I have begotten thee this day” the original adoption formula from Psalm 2:7. Subsequently the church carried back the holy appointment to the actual birth rather than the ritual rebirth and then to the beginning of time when Jesus as the Word pre-existed at the creation.
Plainly the earliest tradition was that Jesus was made the Son at his baptism. As an Essene prince, he was! The baptism was an Essene ceremony. Initially, therefore, Jesus was regarded as a man—a special man certainly, but nevertheless a man. His followers were Jews though many had been Hellenised. When he seemed to be the first of the resurrected, he was considered to have been enthroned with God according to Jewish tradition. Thus he seemed to Hellenised Jews to have undergone apotheosis.
Among the gentiles both those who accepted the idea from the Hellenised Jews that Jesus had been made a god and the idea that he was always a god held sway among different sections. Ultimately the church preferred the idea that Jesus was God and declared Adoptionism, which reflects the truth of history, a heresy.
Truthfully, it is doubtful that the first missionaries to the gentiles were that bothered precisely how their converts regarded these mysteries. After all clergymen do not pay much attention to how the faithful think of Christ today as long as the offerings continue to come in.
Was Jesus Homosexual?
Jesus’s sexuality is utterly ignored by Christians. Why are Christians—like those represented by the Christian Coalition International Canada Inc—so upset to think that their incarnated God, Jesus, might have been homosexual? Though the gospel image of Jesus is that of a tolerant pacifist, a large proportion of Christians do not recognize this as Jesus, certainly in the way they think and behave themselves. Of course, the gospel image of Jesus is most likely concocted by the early Christians, but literal biblicists are supposed to believe in the bible literally read, and the bible literally read is ambiguous about the sexuality of Jesus. Indeed, the impression given of Jesus is that he had no interest in sex at all, and if that were so then he must have been a god, because no normal man could possibly not be sexually inclined.
If God appeared incarnate on earth as a true man, and not just the appearance of a man, then he had all the characteristics of a man—all of them. Jesus had to eat and drink. In other words he had a penis and an anus, and they were not just for appearance's sake, they were true human organs that worked. The idea of it shocks many Christians who never actually think about their so-called beliefs. Beliefs they never think about, or draw inferences from. They are so trained into believing impossibilities that they believe a god can be a true man while being simultaneously a god. Jesus was a “true” man but because he was a god, he did not need to defaecate, urinate or have orgasms! This denial of the humanity of Christ is at the root of Christian homophobia.
The Bible tells us that Jesus was born a man and therefore presumably had male sexual feelings. It would have been more or less impossible, biologically, for him not to have an element of erotic arousal—even if only having the normal male response of waking with an erection.Peter Tatchell
Jesus could not have been homosexual because he was not a true man but a god disguised as a man. Christians, in short, do not think of their Christ as ever being a man, and so human suffering he seemed to endure could not have applied to him. It was a sham, if Christ remained a god. That, of course, Christians also cannot accept, so it remains a mystery of God, another impossibility to believe, and be resolved by ignoring the humanity of Christ as too awful to imagine.
Of course, a man can eschew sexual activity in practice, but he cannot suppress it completely, mentally. The obvious historical explanation of Jesus not being sexually active is that he was a member of the order of Essenes, one branch of which did not indulge in sexual activity because it was considered to be symptomatic of humanity and not the angels, who were not sexual creatures, being immortal. The Essenes aspired to be angels, and so gave up sex. Thus they believed they were purer, more perfect and more adjusted to the heavenly life.
Now, it is possible that even this concept of sexual purity did not prevent the Essene monks from indulging in homosexuality. The reason is that they could have justified homosexuality as being non-procreative, and the angels were asexual because they had no need of procreation. Humans needed sex to procreate the human race because immortality had been denied them by God as a consequence of primeval sin, probably seen as sexual activity anyway. Let the punishment fit the crime, was God’s principle in this reasoning. The human race were condemned to being sexual so that they could propagate themselves. A forbidden pleasure, stolen contrary to God’s wishes, had led to sex being a necessity with all the anguish it produced. Homosexuality was not a necessity however. It was not part of the punishment because it was not for procreation.
It is quite irrelevant to argue that most men are heterosexual and so Jesus was unlikely to have been queer. Christianity has always frowned upon heterosexual sex as well as homosexual sex, and for that reason—the tradition of the Essene monks carried on into Christianity—the most pious of men and women eschewing sex, and the chaste state being the one praised by such men as S Paul, for whom marriage and sex was the lesser of the options. Even though sexuality is perfectly natural, pious people abstain from it.
Equally, the Essene monks might well have been predominantly heterosexually inclined but they suppressed it for their own theological reasons. But they need not stop homosexuality, and most men, forced to abstain from heterosexual relations will subvstitute homosexuality. That is why matelots were traditionally considered to be homos. So, even if Jesus was an average man and normally heterosexual, he could have been forced into satisfying his sexual urges in a celibate community by adopting homosexuality, just like traditional sailors. It is therefore no argument to say that the likelihood from population statistics is that Jesus was not homosexual.
Nor is it any argument to claim that none of Jesus’s critics accused him of being queer. It was probably well known that Jesus was an Essene, and, indeed, he is always called a Nazarene—not “of Nazareth”—and that was apparently a type of Essene, so the accusations would have seemed absurd. Homosexuality was accepted by the Greeks in the east, and Greek culture—Hellenism—was the overwhelming culture of the time and place.
Although the Romans were Hellenized in culture, homosexuality was one aspect of it they did not like. Romans liked to be men, as coarse and brutal as they come, not nancy boys like Greeks, so the authors of the gospels, whose aim was to spread their novel religion in the Roman empire, would not have been ready to include any allusions to homosexuality. It is quite different from drinking and feasting that Romans were fond of, so Jesus was readily depicted as a drinker and a glutton, even though the drink and food spoken of was as sure as certain the very meal that Christians still ritually practice—it was a sacred repast of bread and water (called new wine)!
Nor is it a valid criticism to say that Jesus was an orthodox Jew, and they were required to marry and to have children. Jesus was not an orthodox, Jew, if, indeed, anyone at the time could have had any such description. The evidence is strong that he was an Essene, and only Christians, determined that he was God’s revelation, will deny it, and, as we have seen, Essenes at the senior level of Jesus were celibate monks. The Essenes had no interest in the additional laws that the Pharisees introduced to safeguard what they considered to be the law of Moses. They had their own interpretation of the Mosaic law and homosexuality might have been a part of it, allowed perhaps as the lesser of two evils. Nor is it an argument that Jesus said:
What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.Mark 10:2-12; Matthew 19:3-12
Jesus is making a point that has nothing to do with marriage. It is that God and Judah are a metaphorical betrothed or married couple, and yet the Romans were putting them asunder by taking over the governance of the country meant to be God's own. His general point is not that people must marry, but that when they do, or even commit themselves to it, no one should stand in their way. It is their own decision to marry, but the implication is equally that those who chose not to should have their view respected too, and that was the Essene view.
Nor is it a fact that Jesus must have accepted the Mosaic law in the sense that modern Christians and some Jews would like to, in that homosexuality is banned. To pretend that homosexuality was an unthinkable crime is like pretending adultery was unthinkable. Proof is the self-same quotation by Jesus about the permanence of marriage. Jews certainly allowed divorce, except for the sect that Jesus belonged to—the Essenes, if Jesus’s advice on marriage is anything to go by. In other words, if Jesus could differ from the Pharisees on divorce and marriage, then he could certainly differ with them on the legality of homosexual sex.
Nor is the supposed sexual involvement of Jesus with Mary Magdalene anything to go by. The evidence for any close sexual relationship is non-existent, certainly in the canonical gospels. Some later gospels suggest otherwise, but they are also full of all sorts of fancies that are hardly credible, and difficult to see in the context of the time. The explanation is that they were written later and were meant to create legends suitable to the many different sects that sprang up on the back of the death of Jesus. It might be very romantic to think that Jesus sired sons and heirs out of Mary Magdalene but the evidence for it is entirely mythical.
Some of the myths are pretty obviously propaganda too. Kings and heroes always wanted to show they were exceptional because they were demi-gods, and that gave them a right to found a dynasty. Hellenistic heroes, like Alexander, Julius Caesar and subsequent caesars, claimed descent from the gods or even to be gods themselves. Later, European monarchs tried to establish themselves as sons of God by being sons of Jesus, and Mary Magdalene was the obvious choice of wife. So the legends of Mary Magdalene getting to the south of France by boat with her daughter were invented, and the Merovingian dynasty claimed descent from that young girl. Every proper historian knows this and discounts the likelihood of any truth in such myths, especially as the Essenes at top level were strict about their celibacy and chastity in respect of heterosexual sex.
Of course, to claim that if Jesus were a homosexual he would have nothing at all to do with the opposite sex is absurd. Most women like homosexuals and most homosexuals like women. Nothing suggests they could not or would mix in each other’s company, then or now, especially if the company was of a Jewish sect that recognized homosexuality as being necessary for angelic men.
The evidence for Jesus even having a typical family is negligible. The evidence far better fits a man living in a brotherhood. But just as the same sex communities of Christians that followed were for both men and women living separately, so too it probably was for the Essenes. They are believed by many historians to have been connected with the Therapeutæ, who had such monastic communities for both sexes. The members of such communities call each other brother and sister.
Moreover, evidence can be read to suggest that even then Essenes came of age within the community by a “born again” ceremony requiring a surrogate mother. Many of the men in the Essene camps were waifs and strays, abandoned kids who never knew any family, but they had a ceremonial mother. This might be how the Mary’s came into the story legitimately. There are so many of them among the few women mentioned that it is most likely a title, the equivalent of Lord—in other words, Lady. Jesus had no natural family, but he had a brotherhood and a ceremonial mother, and out of allusions to these, the authors of the gospels have given the illusion that he was a family man, even though he had no wife or family, or even a father. Joseph is a sop to the Samaritans.
Nothing can be deduced from the stories about Mary Magdalene attending the cave tomb, as if acting as a wife. If she were his wife, why should the gospel writers have hidden it? The alleged jealousy of the apostles cannot be relevant. The gospels were written over forty years later, and by then it was far more important to bring women into the story because it was the women of Rome who were most impressed by the myth. To have given Jesus a wife would have been helpful to the acceptance of the stories. So, we can be sure Jesus had no wife, and as a top Essene he could not have had. The women went to the cave to embalm Jesus in the story, and women went again on the Sunday morning, led by Mary Magdalene, if the stories are to be believed. What this suggests is that senior Essenes would not want to get near a corpse, and the women members of the order had the task of washing and emblaming, and so on.
So, all of the Da Vinci Code speculation spawned by The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail offer poor responses by Christians to the accusation that Jesus was homosexual. And to try to ameliorate the idea by suggesting that he might have been bisexual but not homosexual is patently silly. A bisexual is homosexual—he enjoys sex with men!
The evidence of a homosexual Jesus is rather better than the evidence that Jesus was married. John speaks often of “a disciple whom Jesus loved”. In John 13:23 the beloved disciple reclines on Jesus’s breast. John was written in Greek, experts think in the Greek city of Ephesus. As everyone must know, homosexuality was not disgusting to a Greek, rather, scholars took pretty, clever young boys under their wing to teach them. A “beloved disciple” suggests just this sort of relationship. Now, from the time of Alexander the Great almost 400 years before Jesus, Palestine had been Greek, and many Macedonians of Alexander’s army and Greeks subsequently had settled there. Just across the river Jordan from Judæa was Decapolis, a confederation of ten Greek city states, and Jesus in the gospels is even noted as visiting there. Jesus might have been thoroughly opposed to Greek rule, but after 400 years many aspects of Greek culture had been absorbed. Perhaps homosexuality was one.
Moreover, people did not sit on chairs to dinner, but the rich reclined on sofas around a table, and the poor reclined around a mat on the floor. Either way, if a disciple had his head on his master’s chest (John 13:23), the two were reclining together. We also read:
And a young man followed him, with nothing but a linen cloth about his body, and they seized him. But he left the linen cloth and ran away naked.Mark 14:51-52
It is a puzzling and somewhat embarrassing passage for Christians, especially those strongly opposed to homosexuality. This naked youth might have been the same “disciple whom Jesus loved” in John. The US Biblical scholar, Morton Smith, of Columbia University, found at the Mar Saba monastery in 1958, an unknown fragment of Mark, which read:
And the youth, looking upon him, loved him [Jesus] and beseeched that he might remain with him. And going out of the tomb, they went into the house of the youth, for he was rich. And after six days, Jesus instructed him and, at evening, the youth came 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.
It seems to enlarge upon the two verse story of the fleeing youth, looks extremely suggestive of homosexuality, but at the same time says nothing explicit. As the well known British homosexual campaigner, Peter Tatchell, writes on his website:
The standard, accepted biblical narrative gives us no information at all about Jesus’s sexuality.
It seems careful not to. What is certain is that this cageyness leaves open the possibility that Jesus was homosexual, and, if Christians are to accept with Paul that there should be neither Greek nor Jew, then the whole point of it might be to suggest that Jesus, like the Greeks, might have been homosexual, or at least indulged in homosexual practices, and Jews ought not to sweat about it. It is not relevant when the central message is that everyone should love one another, the very message that modern evangelicals have forgotten or never noticed in the first place.
Since nothing in the Bible points to Christ having erotic feelings for women, or relationships with the female sex, the possibility of him being gay cannot be discounted.Peter Tatchell
There is evidence that Jesus was homosexual, but, like the evidence for his being married, it is circumstantial. All you can say is that his circumstances as an Essene fit better with his being homosexual than with his being married. If he were one of the village Essenes that did marry, then plainly he could have done, but then he could not have been an Essene leader. If anything, the implication is that the Nazarenes were converts to Essenism from other forms of Jewry or apostasy, and it was the Nazarenes who might have been the village Essenes of Josephus. They accepted Essene teaching, but were not willing to put up with the hard celibate and monastic regime of the devout Essene leader. The really pious Essene leaders, like Jesus were, but could not indulge in heterosexual activity, something given by God as a punishment and which made people impure. Homosexuality did not lead to procreation, and so could not be regarded in the same way.
