Before I go any further, none of the following is intended to be judgemental or discriminatory against Christians or homosexuals. I am trying to analyse a question here, and when I use labels, it is only for the purpose of drawing distinctions in this single post.
Was Jesus gay?
In order to answer this, we need to define two terms: "Jesus" and "gay".
We could define Jesus as:
- Historical Jesus: the man who actually existed. A person, known as Jesus/Jesu/Joshua/Yeshua (etc.) who lived approximately 4BC to 30AD, who became a preacher, and who was crucified.
- Legendary Jesus: a real person plus some stories and details that have attached to him in the centuries since. All of (1) above, but whose biography only loosely matches that given in the gospels. (Compare this with the way that Little John, Maid Marion, etc. accrued to the Robin Hood story.)
- Official Jesus: the one the gospel writers wanted us to believe in. The character as described in the gospels, based on a real person, but with the caveat that many of the stories and sayings attributed to him were deliberately fabricated by the writers to further their own agendas. (Compare this with Plato's version of Socrates, or Shakespeare's version of Richard III.)
- Divine Jesus: the literal son of God, who worked actual miracles, and rose from the dead etc.
(I suspect most of us broadly accept 1, and accept 2 to a greater or lesser degree. Most will at least accept that 3 is a consideration. There is substantial disagreement about 4, which we won't explore here!)
This is important because:
- A real historical person may or may not have engaged in homosexual activity, and this may or may not be susceptible to proof.
- A figure who has been presented to us by someone with an agenda, may be presented with the intention of promoting one point of view or another. The historical Jesus' sexuality may have been misrepresented or suppressed by the gospel writers for whatever reason suited their purposes.
- If Jesus really were the son of God, then if he was homosexual, that would directly contradict the views and laws attributed to God in the Old Testament. However, this is not susceptible to proof or disproof.
So in short, are we taking about the historical, legendary, official or divine version of Jesus?
What about "gay"?
I would start by saying that no one was "gay" before the late 19th century when the term began to be used.
Solely for the purpose of analysing this question, I think there is a useful distinction between:
- Homosexuals People who prefer homosexual sex and intimate relationships to heterosexual sex and intimate relationships, whether or not they act on these preferences.
- Gays. Homosexuals who consider themselves to be part of a distinct community and culture with other homosexuals. Part of the "gay scene".
- People who engage in homosexual activity for other reasons. This may be cultural reasons (the ancient Greek upper classes), power transactions (prison rape), experimentation (boarding school dormitories), lack of heterosexual opportunities (sailors on long voyages).
"Gay" in this sense is a social construct. The gay scene started as an underground culture when homosexuality was illegal, and then became associated with protesting and campaigning for the freedom to be openly homosexual, and then became just a scene: a subculture that in the main happily coexists alongside mainstream culture. Without the history of criminalisation, discrimination against homosexuals, and the later relaxing of the law and wider social acceptance of homosexual relationships, there would have been no "gay scene".
What we know as the gay subculture did not exist in Jesus' time, so in this sense he cannot have been
gay.
The
historical Jesus may or may not have been
homosexual, but he is not presented as such in the
legendary or
official versions.
Of course, it is possible that in Jesus' time there was some form of underground subculture for homosexuals, but if so it would have been different from the one we know as "gay".
To my mind, it is counterproductive for any community or pressure group to try to adopt historical figures to promote their own agendas. I do not agree with "Jesus was gay" any more than I agree that "Jane Austen was a feminist," or that "Othello was a victim of institutionalised racism." or "Holmes and Watson (or Laurel and Hardy's onscreen characters) were subtextually homosexual" or any of a hundred other examples. They were then, we are now.