Was Jesus Gay?

Extract from Barbelo – The Story of Jesus Christ, by Riaan Booysen

The physical intimacy between Christ and John would have raised many eyebrows if witnessed today and the idea that Christ may have been homosexual has been suggested by several researchers (hotly contested, of course). In Chapter 8 of Barbelo I argue that even though Christ as a young man may have had normal sexual desires, his physical appearance, being short and deformed with a scary face, prevented him from having such relationships. The constant ridicule he had to suffer as a child and as a young man must have fostered an unfathomable hatred in him towards the upper classes of society and in particular towards attractive women. However, through his eloquence and revolutionary ideas he was able to attract and impress many young men, like John, who eventually succumbed to Christ’s sexual advances. When Mary Magdalene eventually fell for him, he dropped John like a hot potato.

In this extract I will present some of the allegations of sexual misconduct against Christ and his disciples.

1.The most infamous suggestion of a sexual relationship between Christ and a young man (Lazarus, in this instance) comes from the disputed text The Secret Gospel of Mark,

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.…After these follows the text, ‘And James and John come to him,’ and all that section. But ‘naked man with naked man,’ and the other things about which you wrote, are not found.

2.In a sequence of events that could be labelled ‘The Seduction of John,’ Christ managed to finally destroy any resistance John might have offered to his advances, as John describes towards the end of his life:

O God Jesu,…You who have kept me also till this present hour pure for yourself and untouched by union with a woman; who, when I wished to marry in my youth, appeared to me and said ‘John, I need you’; who prepared for me also an infirmity of the body; who on the third occasion when I wished to marry prevented me at once, and then at the third hour of the day said to me upon the sea, ‘John, if you were not mine, I would have allowed you to marry’; who blinded me for two years, letting me be grieved and entreat you; who in the third year opened the eyes of my understanding and gave me back the eyes that are seen; who when I regained my sight disclosed to me the repugnance of even looking closely at a woman; … who made my love for you unsullied; … who inspired my soul to have no possession but you alone.

 3. Probably the best evidence from the New Testament itself is Peter’s denial of Christ. Assuming that what the Gospels report in this respect is true, Peter was quite upset that Christ doubted his loyalty. Christ’s words ‘you will deny three times that you know me’ more likely were something like ‘one day you will reject me.’ Peter was the disciple who attacked one of those who came to arrest Christ. Following his arrest, however, Peter was accused by a servant maid as being one of Christ’s followers, which the brave and fearless man denied three times. Realizing that Christ’s prediction had come true, he wept bitterly.  The most likely explanation for Peter’s denial lies in yet another curious event immediately following the arrest of Christ. According to Mark, ‘A young man, wearing nothing but a linen garment was following Jesus. When they seized him, he fled naked, leaving his garment behind.’ This young man could very well have been John, and it is more than likely that Peter, the leader of the now shattered group, would have been instructed by Christ to look after the others who may or may not have been in on the conspiracy at that stage (John would not have known about the plot to have Christ crucified and removed from the cross). When he saw John fleeing, he must have followed him for that reason, and it must have been then that John blurted out the true nature of his love for his master. It must have been John who was with Peter when he ‘denied’ Christ.

What was the denial like? Peter swore that he did not know Christ and burst into tears. This behaviour, if anything, indicates that Peter was shocked and sickened by what he had just learned, for he had not realised before what had been going on between the two men. He then must have understood Christ’s prediction that he (Peter) would sometime in the future turn his back on him. The story of the cock crowing immediately after Peter had denied knowing Christ for a third time and Peter bursting into tears when he remembered Christ’s prediction, would have been invented in an attempt to disguise the true reason for Peter’s denial.

Reading between the lines, more biblical evidence is to be found suggesting that Peter’s denial followed his shocking discovery of Christ’s affair with John. We learn of the miraculous fish catch early in the Gospels, when the calling of first disciples took place. Then, quite surprisingly, John relates the very same event when the risen Christ appears to his disciples on the beach. Peter reacted (in John’s account) by jumping overboard when he realised it was Christ. Would this not have been the reaction of a man who did not know if he could ever face his former master again? John’s placing of the miraculous fish catch here can only be a rationalization of the true reason why Peter jumped from the boat (in an attempt to get away from Christ). If John’s description of Peter’s ‘reinstatement’ is a true reflection of the atmosphere at that moment, Peter’s resentment of John is almost tangible:

     Peter turned and saw that the disciple whom Jesus loved was following them. When Peter saw him, he asked, 

        ‘Lord, what about him?’

Christ replied:

 'If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? You must follow me.'

4.Is there any proof of the above hypothesis about Simon Peter? When the Templar Knights were arrested, they were accused of having practised blasphemous rituals and teachings.  New members were required to deny Christ three times, to spit on the cross three times (some were instructed to trample or urinate on the cross), and most notably, the newly induced knight was instructed to undress completely and was kissed three times by his initiator on the base of his spine (the anus), his penis, his navel, and his mouth. Many of the initiates were informed that Christ was a false prophet. They were not to tell about the initiation rites on pain of death or imprisonment.

The Templar Knights had excavated under the ruins of the Temple between 1118 and 1128 CE and older rituals of Freemasonry state that these knights found documentation under the ruins of the Temple in Jerusalem and brought them to the St Clair estates in Kilwinning, Scotland, in 1140 CE.  The most likely conclusion is that the Templar Knights had found Peter’s notes as referred to in The Secret Gospel of Mark, or at least copies of these notes, causing them to reject Christ as their Saviour and introduce initiation rituals to reflect their abhorrence of him. The denial of Christ three times, exactly as Peter did, and the simulated homosexual act could not have had any other origin than that Peter (or someone else) had written about Christ’s homosexuality, recounting Peter’s disgust when he discovered the fact.

5. The Templar Knights were also accused of having worshipped a head with three faces called Baphomet. The name can be translated for Hebrew as ‘(He who) desired the mouth for himself’, a clear reference to oral sex. In Barbelo I argue that ‘Christ’ was originally known as Simon Magus, but that his inner circle later began to refer to him as the Saviour (Jesus Christ) to distance him from his identity as Simon Magus, and that he had adopted the alias Paul of Tarsus after his crucifixion, which he had survived.  There is no other logical explanation why the Knights would have ‘worshipped’ a head with three faces. The head my in fact have been the physical, embalmed head of Paul (Jesus Christ).

6.Even Simon Magus is recorded to have had a sexual relationship with a boy. An obscure story from the Toledot Yeshu relates how Simon Magus had fashioned himself a boy from air, which he kept ‘where his bed is,’ to ‘assist him in his performances.’

7.    In another obscure event Christ and Judas supposedly flew up into the air, where Judas ‘defiled’ Christ.

In May 2015 the waterfordwhispersnews reported that an almost 2 000-year-old manuscript, unearthed in the Vatican Vaults, claimed that Judas was a “raging homosexual” who had made sexual advances on his fellow apostles and even Christ himself. The director of the Holy See Press Office, Federico Lombardi, speculated that it was Christ’s rejection of Judas’ advances which caused him to betray Christ. However, as discussed in Barbelo Section 4.4, The Gospel of Judas claims that Christ himself had instructed Judas to betray him (with a kiss). This was an essential part of Christ’s crucifixion conspiracy – the soldiers had to know which man to arrest.

Will we ever see a copy of this 2 000-year-old document? How many more such documents have been discovered, but have not been revealed to the public after being banned by the Vatican?

Judas having ‘defiled’ Christ in the air suggests that he did, in fact, have a sexual relationship with Judas, like he had with James and John. That would explain why Christ told Peter that he would one day deny him three times. Why three times specifically? Would one not normally say “You will one day betray me”? What Christ was most likely telling Peter was “You will one day discover that I have three young lovers in our group”, namely James, John and Judas.

8.  Christ had no qualms with appearing naked before his disciples, and revelled in his appearance. John records that Christ ‘riseth from supper, and laid aside his garments; and took a towel, and girded himself’, and in another instance, Christ was asked by his disciples, ‘When will you be revealed to us and when shall we see you?’, to which Christ replied, ‘When you disrobe without being ashamed and take up your garments and place them under your feet like little children.’ The so-called ‘transfiguration on the mountain’ also suggests that Christ was naked, and, in fact, with another man (from The Acts of John):

Then I, since he loved me, went quietly up to him, as if he could not see, and stood there looking at his hinder parts, and I saw him not dressed in clothes at all, but stripped of those that we usually saw upon him, … he, turning about, appeared as a small man, … and I saw another like him coming down …

The ‘transfiguration on the mountain’ event ended with Christ performing some kind of dance for his disciples – in the nude?

9. An indignant Epiphanius  relates a variant of the ‘transfiguration on the mountain’ story which he had obtained from a Gnostic group:

They claim that he [Christ] reveals it to her [Mary] after taking her aside on the mountain, praying, producing a woman from his side, beginning to have sex with her, and then partaking of his emission, if you please, to show that ‘Thus we must do, that we may live.’

The woman in question would have been of the flesh-and-blood type, not a ‘creation’ by Christ. Read more about unfortunate women like this one in Chapter 10 of Barbelo.

10.Epiphanius recorded numerous other allegations of misconduct brought against the Christians and Christ.

 By the Stratiotics and Gnostics:

 And once they recognize each other from this they start feasting right away—and they set the table with lavish provisions for eating meat and drinking wine if they are poor. But then, after a drinking bout…they get hot for each other next. And the husband will move away from his wife and tell her ‘Get up, perform Agape with the brother.’ And when the wretched couple has made love…to lift their blasphemy up to heaven, the woman and man receive the man’s emission on their own hands. And they stand with their eyes raised heavenward but the filth on their hands and pray…and offer that stuff on their hands to the true Father of all, and say, ‘We offer thee this gift, the body of Christ.’ And then they eat it partaking of their own dirt, and say ‘This is the body of Christ; and this is the Pascha, because of which our bodies suffer and are compelled to acknowledge the passion of Christ.

And so with the woman’s emission when she happens to be having her period. .. And ‘This,’ they say, ‘is the blood of Christ.’…But although they have sex with each other they renounce procreation. It is for enjoyment, not reproduction, that they eagerly pursue the seduction.… They come to climax but absorb the seeds of their dirt, not by implanting them for procreation, but by eating the dirty stuff themselves.

 By the Phibionites:

Offer their shameful sacrifices of fornication…in 365 names which they have invented themselves as names of supposed archons, making fools of their female partners and saying, ‘Have sex with me, so that I may offer you to the archon.’…And until he mounts, or rather, sinks, through 365 falls of copulation, he starts back down through the same acts…Now when he reaches a mass as great as that of a total number of 730 falls—I mean the falls of unnatural unions…then finally a man of this sort has the hardihood to say, ‘I am Christ, for I have descended from on high through the names of 365 archons.

 By the Carpocratians:

Carpocrates…his character is the worst of all.…And he says that Jesus our Lord was begotten of Joseph, just as all men were generated from a man’s seed and a woman. .. Hence these victims of this fraud’s deception have become so extremely arrogant that they consider themselves superior even to Jesus. ...  The plain fact is that these people perform every unspeakable, unlawful thing, which is not right even to say, and every kind of homosexual union and carnal intercourse with women, with every member of the body, and they perform magic, sorcery, and idolatry and say that this is the discharge of their obligations in the body…

In fact, the Gnostics claimed that Christ himself had revealed the above obscenities to them.

Perhaps the best description of the practices of the early followers of Christ is given by Minucius Felix in his work Octavius, in which he presents the accusations brought against the Christians through the voice of an attacker of the Christian faith:

And now, as wickeder things advance more fruitfully and abandoned manners creep on day by day, those abominable shrines of an impious assembly are maturing themselves throughout the whole world. Assuredly this confederacy ought to be rooted out and execrated. They know one another by secret marks and insignia, and they love one another almost before they know one another. Everywhere also there is mingled among them a certain religion of lust, and they call one another promiscuously brothers and sisters, that even a not unusual debauchery may by the intervention of that sacred name become incestuous: it is thus that their vain and senseless superstition glories in crimes. Nor, concerning these things, would intelligent report speak of things so great and various, and requiring to be prefaced by an apology, unless truth were at the bottom of it. I hear that they adore the head of an ass, that basest of creatures, consecrated by I know not what silly persuasion—a worthy and appropriate religion for such manners. Some say that they worship the virilia of their pontiff a and priest, and adore the nature, as it were, of their common parent. I know not whether these things are false; certainly suspicion is applicable to secret and nocturnal rites; and he who explains their ceremonies by reference to a man punished by extreme suffering for his wickedness, and to the deadly wood of the cross, appropriates fitting altars for reprobate and wicked men, that they may worship what they deserve.

So, to conclude, was Jesus gay? Judging from the circumstantial evidence in the New Testament, the narratives in various apocryphal texts and outright accusations against Christ and his followers, the answer is an overwhelming ‘yes’. And not only that – he appears to have been obsessed with sex.

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