Was Jesus Gay?

And does the Secret Gospel of Mark hold the answer?

Cops Arrest Rabbi in Park with Naked Teenager!

A gripping headline, maybe one you’d see in the New York Post. It’s also how Biblical scholar Morton Smith described one of the strangest passages in the Gospels. It appears only in Mark and is mentioned nowhere else, and it happens as Jesus is being arrested after the Last Supper.

As Jesus gets taken the disciples all flee. And then there’s this:

A certain young man was following him, wearing nothing but a linen cloth. They caught hold of him, but he left the linen cloth and ran off naked.

Say what?

This is truly a weird passage. Who is this young man? What’s with the nudity? What on Earth was Jesus and the disciples doing just before the arrest?

There has been a lot of talk about the sexuality of Jesus over the years; it got mainstreamed with The DaVinci Code, a blockbuster predicated on the idea that Jesus secretly married Mary Magdalene and had kids. It’s pretty wild that this movie was a huge hit while Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ - which only featured Satan tempting Jesus with a vision of his life married to Mary Magdalene - was so controversial someone drove a fucking truck into a theater showing it.

In the Gospel Jesus has no sexual or romantic relationships at all (maybe! More on that later). It’s slightly unusual that a man of his age in his time would be single, but unlike what you may have read it’s not crazy. It happened. But was Jesus perhaps gay?

Let’s get this out of the way immediately: no. Which is not to say that Jesus did not engage in homosexual relationships or activities. What it means is that at the time of Christ there was no concept of gayness as we have it today. The very idea of sexual orientation is a relatively recent invention, and back when Jesus was walking the sands it wasn’t something anyone considered.

This isn’t to say that there wasn’t homosexuality. There was a lot of it, but the general understanding of it in the Greco-Roman world was different than today. Back then the problem wasn’t having gay sex, it was being a bottom. That was what was looked down upon - you could fuck, but you could not be fucked. This is a kind of homophobia rooted in misogyny: the one who receives is the weaker one.

But what about Mosaic Law? Leviticus makes it seem pretty clear that both participants in homosexual sex are sinning:

You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.

Here we run into some interesting questions about Jesus’ adherence to Mosaic Law. He says that he has not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it, and yet he breaks the law himself more than once. He heals on the Sabbath, he seems to say that the dietary laws are bullshit (“Don’t you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them? For it doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of the body.").

Some people will say that Jesus is just getting rid of/violating traditions made by men and not the laws of God, and they say that the moral laws of Moses are kept intact. But if we go back to the woman caught in adultery, the "let he who is without sin" story we talked about yesterday, we see Jesus pretty blatantly breaking the law. This woman is caught in the act and is hauled out to be stoned to death, which was the correct legal response according to Leviticus, the same book that says lying with a man as with a woman is an abomination. And yet Jesus stops the crowd from fulfilling the moral law. This woman should, rightfully, be put to death. So it seems as if Jesus is definitely not all that interested in following all of the moral laws, either.

There’s a story in Matthew and Luke that is pretty interesting in this context. It’s known as the healing of the Centurion’s servant, and just like it sounds, it involves a Roman Centurion. In this story the Centurion comes to Jesus and says that his young servant is home sick and paralyzed, and that he would like Jesus to heal the boy. Jesus offers to come to his home and do the healing, but the Centurion insists he doesn’t deserve having Jesus under his roof, and that Jesus’ word of authority should be enough to do the job. Jesus loves this, and says that this guy, who is not a Jew, shows more faith than all the rest of the Jews. The servant is healed. (It’s important to realize that the servant in this case is a slave)

What’s this got to do with homosexuality? The Centurion uses two Greek words to describe his servant - pais and duolos. Duolos is the word that is most standard Greek for servant, but pais… it’s a weirder word. Again, context is really critical when trying to understand what this stuff means, but a lot of scholars translate this use of pais to mean ‘boy.’ So the Centurion is calling this slave ‘my boy.’

Why would a Centurion be so concerned about the health of a slave? And why would he call him his boy? Some people think maybe the slave was his son; soldiers had been banned from getting married since 13 BC, however. Now, a child out of wedlock isn’t impossible, but is it likely here?

Other people believe that the Centurion had a sexual relationship with the boy, which would not have been out of the ordinary at the time. I’m not going to get into all of the complexities of Roman sexual norms, but a freeborn Roman man having sex with an underage non-Roman slave boy would have been absolutely acceptable and not questioned.

Several scholars have posited that this is exactly what was happening, and that perhaps there was a client/servant relationship between the Centurion and the boy. One of my favorite interpretations from a scholar is that the Roman didn’t want Jesus over to his house because he was worried the boy would be too into the itinerant preacher. At any rate, if this was a sexual relationship, and if the language used clued Jesus into it, this is a remarkable story. Here Jesus does not condemn a homosexual but raises him to an example of faith. He heals the boy, no questions asked. This feels akin to the woman caught in adultery - Jesus just isn’t all that worried about the moral laws here.

This is all stuff about attitudes, but what about the actual question in the headline of this article? There isn’t much in the Synoptic Gospels to answer this question either way… but then the Gospel According to John enters the chat.

This is the most idiosyncratic of the four Gospels, and also the one written the latest. It has lots of stories found nowhere else, and they’re pretty famous stories, including the aforementioned woman caught in adultery as well as changing water into wine. In the Synoptic Gospels Jesus tends to speak in soundbites, but in John he gives discourses. John also opens in a really unusual way, with a deeply spiritual and poetic verse:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

It’s unusual not just for the Gospels but for John - this style isn’t really found in the rest of the book. It’s likely this was added after the original, much as the finale of Mark was added in later years.

At any rate, the Gospel of John is supposedly written from the testimony of “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” or the beloved disciple, a truly mysterious figure. This person is never named, and is only mentioned six times. The beloved disciple is at some major moments - he’s present at the crucifixion with the Marys, and he goes to the empty tomb, and he’s at the Last Supper - but there is no disciple in the other Gospels who maps onto these things well. Some people think he’s John the Evangelist, who they also think wrote Revelations (he didn’t), but scholars are certain that isn’t the case.

There is a theory that the beloved disciple is Mary Magdalene, even though he’s referred to as he a number of times. The argument here is that the book was rewritten to distance the Magdalene for political reasons. It’s not the worst theory.

At any rate, when we say that this was the beloved disciple boy do we mean it. Here’s how the King James version describes his role at the Last Supper. This happens right after Jesus informs everyone that he will be betrayed:

Now there was leaning on Jesus' bosom one of his disciples, whom Jesus loved. Simon Peter therefore beckoned to him, that he should ask who it should be of whom he spake. He then lying on Jesus' breast saith unto him, Lord, who is it?

That’s like, weird, right? Leaning on Jesus’ bosom? Lying on his breast? This is a very intimate way to be having dinner, frankly. It’s no surprise that many people have jumped on this, as well as the repeated descriptions of this disciple as the one whom Jesus loved, as evidence or a romantic or sexual relationship. It’s pretty hard to explain the bosom-leaning otherwise. Like, didn’t Jesus have any personal boundaries?

Let’s go back to the naked young man. It’s hard to know what to make of this odd passage. The Gospels were likely not written by just a guy sitting there and coming up with stuff - they were collections of oral traditions about Christ. Some of the stuff in the Gospels may have been copied from documents that circulated in the Christian community that contained Jesus’ sayings or lists of miracles. It’s possible the naked young man is some kind of weird vestigial element of some version of the arrest story that made absolutely perfect sense to the community in which that story was told but is now as stripped of context as that young man was stripped of his linen cloth.

Or maybe it’s a hint at something larger.

We opened with Morton Smith, and that wasn’t random. Smith was a well-respected scholar who, in 1960, revealed something that could turn our entire understanding of Christianity upside down: the Secret Gospel of Mark.

I’ll spare the details but here’s the gist: he found what purported to be a copy of a letter written by early Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria some time around 200 CE. In this letter Clement talks about Mark writing a secret Gospel, one that Mark had written only for the most enlightened Christians, containing Christ’s true spiritual teachings. The Gospel is lost to us today, but Clement quotes from it, and what he quotes is explosive.

Or is it? There’s a lot of back and forth about whether this letter is a forgery, and if it’s a forgery whether it’s a modern one perpetrated by Smith or an ancient one. The history of Christianity is littered with Gospels and letters purporting to be from one figure or another, and it was a very common practice back in the day to just put the name of a famous person on your writing to get more attention. Smith, who is now dead, believed that it was legitimate - a true letter written by Clement, quoting a suppressed and long missing Gospel.

There are two sections quoted in the letter, but the longer one is what interests us:

And they come into Bethany. And a certain woman whose brother had died was there. And, coming, she prostrated herself before Jesus and says to him, "Son of David, have mercy on me." But the disciples rebuked her. And Jesus, being angered, went off with her into the garden where the tomb was, and straightway a great cry was heard from the tomb. And going near Jesus rolled away the stone from the door of the tomb. And straightway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him, seizing his hand. But the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him. And going out of the tomb they came into the house of the youth, for he was rich. 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. And thence, arising, he returned to the other side of the Jordan.

This reads, at least to modern eyes, like Jesus raised a guy from the dead and then spent a week… hanging out with him. And at the end of the week the young man, described quite similarly to the young man in existing Mark, comes to him at night mostly nude and is initiated into the mysteries of the kingdom of God. He remained with Jesus that night. The uh, implications seem obvious.

If this is real - and for more on that I cannot recommend a new book called The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Controversial Scholar, a Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, and the Fierce Debate over Its Authenticity by Geoffrey S. Smith and Brent C. Landau enough. It’s a really well-written exploration of all the controversy around the Gospel and Smith himself - then it paints a shocking picture of Jesus. Even if we don’t take the homoerotic undertones at face value (but like, how could you not?) what we see here is Jesus initiating a follower into a mystery school of some kind, transmitting secret knowledge. This is not unusual at the time, but it is not what we know of Jesus at all.

Was the naked young man in Mark caught in the middle of such a ceremony? And what does the ceremony consist of? Is it sexual union? Seems like it might be sexual union. That’s certainly what the guy Clement is writing to thinks - Clement is answering his question of whether or not a secret Gospel that mentions “naked man upon naked man” exists. Clement says no, this is a diabolical lie…. buuuuut there is a Secret Mark with some stuff in it that might have been turned into that. That’s the context for the quote.

Now, this could have just been a Gospel some gnostic group wrote that was floating around (although Clement seems certain it’s real, and mentions there is a fake one), and like many of the apocryphal books of the Bible it is what it is - not canon and thus not really impacting Christianity. But if it is real, if the same guy who wrote Mark wrote this…

At any rate, the question of Christ’s sexuality, which will likely remain unanswered, is not new. I mentioned yesterday that there is no out there, edgelord theory you could hold that was not held hundreds, if not thousands of years ago - recently revealed documents from the 1590s show Christopher Marlowe believed that Jesus was in a sexual relationship with the beloved disciple. It’s plausible that such theories were floating around in early Christianity.

And I have to say that the Gospel of John makes a compelling case for it. That scene at the Last Supper - I don’t know how you read that except as incredible physical intimacy. Even setting aside the scandalous nature of the naked young man in Mark, the tender, loving and clearly physical relationship between Jesus and the disciple whom Jesus loved seems to speak for itself.