This little story tickled me yesterday, it's about some remarks made by that gay icon and tempestuous pop legend Elton John who apparently made a comment in an interview to celebrity news along the following lines,
"I think Jesus was a compassionate, super-intelligent gay man who understood human problems. On the cross, he forgave the people who crucified him. Jesus wanted us to be loving and forgiving. I don't know what makes people so cruel. Try being a gay woman in the Middle East -- you're as good as dead,"
The funny bit is not what he said but the reaction to it from a rag bag selection of religious fundies, the odious Bill Donohue of the Catholic league (in the USA) said that Jesus couldn't have been gay because that would mean he was a sexual deviant, our own Stephen (bird-shit) Green from the Christian voice said that "the bible says Jesus was without sin and that rules out homosexuality" There were other comments, mostly along the same lines.
A delicious shard of irony runs through the centre of this, the fact that none of these so called (devout) religious pundits have any more authority or evidence on this subject than a pompous old, cocaine addled pop icon (sorry Elton fans..) The historicity of Jesus is "scratchy" to say the least, we have a couple of comments penned by a couple of Roman historians decades after the event and even those are disputed, then we have the gospels themselves inconsistently written by many different people 2nd and 3rd hand many years AD by people with vested interests in perpetuating the stories, hardly watertight. Even if there were someone called Jesus alive then (wandering guru's were in vogue at the time) the Stephen Green's and Bill Donohue's of this world couldn't even tell you if he had a beard and owned a donkey let alone his sexual preferences. The literary evidence (such as it is) suggests that Jesus was unmarried into his 30s, this is very unusual for the society and might point to something along the lines that EJ is suggesting, the one thing that's for sure is that no religious person can prove otherwise, and (forgive the pun) they really don't like it up em...
4 comments:
This post is right up my street, so to speak.
However the Bible does offer some hints as to the possibility of the personality of the historical figure of Jesus (the NT is a pretty good source text for a social history of a revolutionary period - if you accept it as accurate, that is).
The background and upbringing of the 1stC individual in question is still a very contended issue and is a illustrative example of the facts and practices at stake in the ethno-cultural mix of the time.
So really it's probably best to see the Jesus figure as a blank canvass onto which individuals project their own preferred ideal, encompassing all our own personal prejudices.
It could actually be argued that the lack of specific information about Jesus has been the biggest strength of Christianity because this resists any attempts to pin him down and thereby enables continuous reinterpretation which transforms the gospel stories into the stuff of universal appeal. And therefore it is quite easy to say that the Jesus character is transcendent.
Maybe a couple of decades ago Elton John would've claimed Jesus was a massive dopehead...
OP, you could be right about that, vagueness about important stuff and pedantry about what species of fish can be consumed on which days seems to be an inherent property of this genre. Its a shame the Jews didn't subcontract a reliable Roman or Greek to write their stories down on parchment that could be carbon dated and stored somewhere safe!
I understand your point about flexibility being a strength, from a certain point of view that is true, but looked at from the perspective of the victims of literalism and selective "interpretation" over the years, you could argue that this lack of specifics has been the biggest curse on our species for the last 2000 years as well.
My judo sensai once taught me an important piece of wisdom - your greatest strength is your greatest weakness, and I think that holds true here too.
Even within the bounds of truth - you touch on the important point that there is not only one form of truth. The biggest problem being that the telling of any story can only be done from a specific perspective which is a matter of choice.
Add all the different sides of the story together and it becomes possible to build a picture, but the whole truth is still unapproachable.
It is impossible to escape the problem of interpretation whatever means anyone tries.
Which brings me back to my sensai. I questioned him about the statement and he said that knowledge of our own limitations gives us the means to expand them.
I took it that he was propounding trial and error as a means of improvement, that getting things wrong provides the examples by which we learn and teaches us how to get them right at a later date.
So you might also say the biggest curse on the last couple of millenium will prove to be the greatest blessing of the next thousand millenia.
But it's unfair to demand accurate historical perspectives from the lives we've yet to live, I guess the important questions are how to get there and what will it look like when we do?
However that changes the matter from what life after our death will be like for us, to what the life after death will be like for those who outlive us, and in doing so crosses the selfishness divide from talking about religion to talking about politics.
Jesus isn't exactly scratchy historically - we have at least 7 or 8 Gospels as well as the passing remarks from Josephus and Tacitus.
But his sexuality is of no real consequence. He must presumably have been a sexual being - although in that environment it doesn't imply he had any sexual relationship.
I'd just bracketed Sir Elton's comments alongside Paul Daniels' claim a few years ago that he did tricks, just like Jesus. Unlike the two of them, it's fair to say we have no evidence that Jesus ever resorted to hair pieces.
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