Latest Real Jesus Discovered!

Turns out that in addition to being a robust heterosexual who married Mary Magdalene, he was also gay. Various “evidence” is adduced and rigidly filtered through contemporary obsessions with homosexuality devoid of contact with the biblical text beyond a couple of proof texts, Johannine theology, or the Church’s entire tradition (Jesus was unmarried. There was a disciple Jesus loved. QED!). Nobody asks what Jesus’ celibacy meant to 2000 years of Christian teaching, nor why Jesus constantly talks about the kingdom of heaven as a wedding feast, nor why John habitually speaks of Jesus as the Bridegroom of the Church, nor does anybody question why the rest of the married apostles, all Jews, would have overlooked Jesus sexual liaisons with John when the attitude of Jews was famously summarized by Tertullian–“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”). That’s because the *real* core passage of the whole essay has nothing to do with the “evidence” but with the narcissism of the author:

After much reflection and with certainly no wish to shock, I felt I was left with no option but to suggest, for the first time in half a century of my Anglican priesthood, that Jesus may well have been homosexual.

Mhm. Reading the self-congratulatory narcissism of the piece, I am overpoweringly reminded of the Episcopal Ghost talking to the Blessed Saint in C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce:

EG: “I preached my famous sermon. I defied the whole chapter. I took every risk.”
BS: “What risk? What was at all likely to come of it except what actually came-popularity, sales for your books, invitations, and finally a bishopric?”

Quelle courage! Who could possibly have foreseen that a gay-obsessed Episcopalian clerical culture would find this hitherto lost Christianity? What joy to be living in such an age of discovery! What a hero for bravely facing the applause of his peers and the media.

Shea’s First Iron Law of “Jesus Studies”: Every Latest Real Jesus at variance with the constant tradition of the Church is always a reflection of the obsessions of the discoverer, not a revelation of who Jesus really was.