Was Jesus Gay?

Here is an email I received in response to one of my essays.

Was Jesus Gay?

Dear Sir,

On reading this essay, I was shocked by the complete lack of thinking put into it.

You start off by stating that the essay discusses whether Jesus was gay or not, but all your evidence paragraphs are about whether Jesus would be labeled as gay. These are two entirely different issues.

You are completely correct. Unlike you, most Kristians don’t seem to understand the difference. The goal of my essay is to point out to Kristians, that if Jesus were alive today they would viciously persecute him for his alleged homosexuality. My goal is to get Kristians to loosen up. Since Jesus was most likely a character of fiction, whether he actually had sex is really a meaningless question.

I know some people who I would swear were gay, yet I know they’re not. I also know gay people whom I was shocked to discover they were gay.

Then you start siting the bible quotes where we are told that Jesus and his apostles were physically intimate. Yes they kissed and hugged. I have done that with my close friends on many occasions and there are many people who will vouch that I am not gay. Also when you site these as evidence of Jesus’ homosexuality, you have to put it in context of 1st century Judaism. The Hebrew culture was one of physical intimacy anyway. Just as you go into a bar and meet up with your mates saying Hi, maybe pulling a hi-5 or shaking someone’s hand.

Exactly. The problem is not with Jesus’s behaviour or his society, but with Kristians freaking out over normal physical contact and normal male-male intimacy.

Also, while looking at your evidence of Jesus’ homosexuality, exactly how many homosexuals do you know who spend their time with hookers???

Moving on, I commend you on your bravery for putting in that bit about the missing part of the text. However, there are virtually no guarantees that what you put up was in the original scroll. No, not even if a professor said it was.

And when you start talking about Jesus being found with a naked youth in a park, you’re completely twisting the words. The bible says that a man in a cloth robe followed Jesus and when they [the guards] grabbed him, he ran away and the cloth tore. He wasn’t naked till he ran. If you’re thinking of using the whole but he wasn’t wearing anything underneath the cloth argument, have you ever been to Judea and felt the heat? I’ll give you a clue, its mainly desert.

The Kinsey scale shows how any given person can be anywhere between homo and heterosexual, I have no idea where you get your 1 in 10 statistic from.

You must be young. Every child of my generation knew that Kinsey statistic. Most modern estimates use a lower number. You can get whatever number you want simply by relaxing or tightening the definition.

Even so, Kinsey was performing social studies in the 1940s, not the 10s. Using that statistic to predict the number of homosexuals in the bible is similar to going to Chernobyl, using a giga-counter and proving that South Wales is majorly radioactive.

There is some evidence homosexuality increases slightly in times of war, but it is essentially stable. It is part of our genes which don’t change. You may be confusing orientation with sexual activity. Homosexuality is a measure of sexual orientation — which gender are you primarily attracted to. The amount of suppression in a given society determines how much sex happens and how openly, but the ratio of people primarily attracted to the same sex will not change.

However, as if that wasn’t foolish enough, you then proceeded to try and identify the homosexuals using the same method you are using to try and convince us that Jesus was gay. Since you haven’t finished your essay, you cannot assume that anyone is yet convinced and so cannot apply the methods to anyone else for an argument. It’s like describing a car as a car-shaped object.

As we start into the But isn’t homosexuality a sin part of your essay, I start to agree with you. Yes, homosexuality is accepted and it is more about the sodomy (and I shall explain what sodomy is when you site the Sister Sodomy part) than being attracted. Yes it is diehard bigots whom believe that we should purge the earth of them, but remember not all the diehard bigots are Christian. However, you go and ruin the good work you just did with that direct quote.

I know you Kristians love to claim that anal sex is the sin that get God’s tail most in a knot but the bible says otherwise:

Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fullness of bread and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.
~ Ezekiel 16:49

Ah, here we go, the bit with Sister Sodom. To start with you are quoting Ezekiel. I assume you have read the rest of the bible and have realised that Ezekiel, as a biblical prophet, speaks more in metaphors than in plain words. Having realised this, you would have surely have realised that Sodom and her daughters were filled with the 7 deadly sins.

So, like a typical Kristian, when the bible says something you don’t like you make up some feeble excuse to ignore it. Oddly, you don’t bestow that same privilege on anyone else to ignore the silly crap in Leviticus that you relish for justifying your lording it over homosexuals.

However, the technical meaning of sodomy is oral, anal or bestial sex of any kind (yes even with a woman).

Reading Lots story, you seem to have got confused as to where the rape was. The only mention of the word know is when the mob in the street were calling Lot to send the other men out. After that happens (assuming you haven’t read it) he offers his daughters instead but the men break into his house and blind the men, it’s after this that the rape occurs.

The word know means know in almost every other place in the bible. One day I went through the entire Bible and counted to be sure. You silly Kristians decide to pick this one instance and let your smutty minds concoct a preposterous story, solely for the purpose of jusifying your persecution of homosexuals. The much more plausible explanation and the one reiterated in the Qur’an, is that Lot was harbouring strangers at night in a walled city and the townsfolk were suspicious of them and wanted to get a look a them. I read about the translations and apparently the ambiguity goes back prior to the King James Version.

Then you go on to site the 144000 virgins in Revelations. Again I feel you haven’t read the bible, only the little bits favoured by the conspiracy theorists.

Unlike most Christians, I have read it cover to cover, as I have the Qur’an and various other holy texts. I don’t see how you could possibly read the entire bible and remain a Christian. It is a ridiculous document. It could not possibly be the work of God unless God is a drooling idiot.

Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.
~ Isaac Asimov (1920-01-02 1992-03-06 age:72) Russian-born American scientist and prolific writer

Revelations is a very weird book, written by a prophet and I’ve told you what that means already. Revelations is full of some very weird sequences, maybe because John lacked the words to describe, or maybe because he was speaking metaphorically. Either way, it doesn’t excuse what you say next.

If you believe that the only way to be a virgin is to be too young or gay, then you have lived a life away from society. There are many people, religious or otherwise, who for whatever reason are still virgins, also (and I presume when you speak of virginity, you mean hasn’t had normal sex) there are, all the time, people who are married and have had kids who turn around and say Actually… I’m gay. If you’re about to tell me that they’re virgins I’m afraid I will no longer be able to take you seriously. However, it’s not just this specific type of homosexual who won’t be a virgin. Many people are confused in their youth and try different things. So the probability is that the homosexual community will have as many virgins, relatively, as the heterosexual community.

And finally, your conclusion.

For starters you haven’t shown that Jesus was (to use your own metaphor) quacking or that he had webbed feet. If God send down a Holy Polaroid, then we would have to accept that Jesus was gay, which would mean that a minority of Christians either backtrack or break off to form their own cult. The rest of the Christian community would hastily change a few rules, to allow the ordination of openly gay clergymen. However, I doubt homosexuals would be allowed to marry, as it’s expressly stated that marriage is between a man and a woman. Then you give us bible verses reminding us that Jesus was a lowly carpenters son. Again, you need to remember the context. He’s kind of the equivalent to Ikea/Argos. If you don’t know what they are just think of a large flat packed furniture provider.

The next bit is confusing. You remind us of the parable of the Good Samaritan. What exactly do you expect to gain with this? All I can see it as is a reminder to be nice to homosexuals. However, the idea behind this parable is nothing to do with that. It’s simply to emphasise the Love your neighbour rule.

And the last paragraph is just as odd. If we accept that Jesus was born a lowly carpenter, why do we have to accept he chose to be born as a lowly homosexual? Being born as a carpenter meant that he was a common man, not an actual king because men in high power often want more, so a king saying I am the son of your God. Do as I say and you go to heaven! lacks credibility. Whereas a man with no power whatsoever hasn’t got the taste for greed and power.

Also what makes you think that all homosexuals are lowly? In this modern world where prejudice is apparently a thing of the past, although there are still problems, one of the things we have managed to achieve is removing the stigma of gays. A homosexual can achieve the same when they are out of the closet as when they are still in because we recognise that they are people.

You Kristians treat us gays as the lowest of the low, so surely then Matthew 25:40 applies to us particularly. Your persecution is irrational. It is based on deliberate misreading of the bible which you claim to be orders from God even though there is not a speck of evidence to back that up and a ton of evidence it could not possibly be true. The only evidence you Kristians ever present is quoting the bible as if it were established axiomatic authority, in circular reasoning. With those lax standards you can prove any holy book is the definitive word, simply because it claims to be.

And finally The bible you have put on the net as you’re reference is as you are aware, a King James Bible. I would hope you are also aware that that Bible was modified after the Bible itself was created in Rome and thus your quoting and personal ideas may be even more warped and inaccurate.

I would have hoped that would be obvious from the ESV (English Standard Version) and Crosswalk links in the introduction to the bible study guide.

Kristians say weird thing bout the King James, If it was good enough fer Jaysus, it’s a good enough fer me. It is the document of choice that Kristians claim as authorative. So that I what I use in my argument to try to free them of their delusions and cruelties.

I hope you haven’t taken offence at this essay. It was meant to criticise your comments or thoughts that you would like to share with me.

Your opening line was insulting and you went to patronising from there. What a hypocrite!

There would be utterly no point in a private conversation. You are dyed in the wool. I am not about to change my mind either. However, a public debate may be of interest to others not so set in their ways.

Sol Pyro

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