Sexuality and marital status of Jesus
In first century Judaea, sexual immorality in Second Temple Judaism included incest, impure thoughts, homosexual relations, adultery, and bestiality.
[5] Mainstream Christian thinking typically assumes Jesus to have remained celibate and without a defined sexuality, living a pious life free from sins such as lust or fornication.
[note 1] The early Christian writer Origen who was purported to have interpreted Jesus' words literally, was alleged to have castrated himself as an act of devotion.
[7] The early Church Father Tertullian wrote that Jesus himself lived as a "eunuch",[note 2] likewise encouraged people to adopt this practice.
The Circumcision is a major event of the early Life of Jesus, originally described in Luke[9] as taking place shortly after the Presentation at the temple in accordance with the Jewish law followed by Mary and Joseph.
[10] Beginning in the 13th century, European art would break with Christian tradition of hiding Jesus's genitalia using clothing and composition, instead depicting Christ with a visible or even physically erect phallus.
[12] The non-canonical 3rd-century Gospel of Philip, using Coptic variants of the Greek κοινωνός (koinōnos), describes Jesus' relationship with Mary Magdalene.
[16] Kripal writes that "the historical sources are simply too contradictory and simultaneously too silent" to make absolute declarations regarding Jesus' sexuality.
"[31] Frederick the Great wrote to similar effect in his 1748–1749 poem Palladium, which includes the lines: "This good Jesus, how do you think He got John to sleep in his bed?
Robinson's claim has been criticized, including by David W. Virtue, who editorialized by calling it an "appalling deconstructionism from the liberal lobby which will spin even the remotest thing to turn it into a hint that Biblical figures are gay".
"[36] Theologian Ismo Dunderberg argues that the absence of accepted Greek terms for "lover" and "beloved" discounts an erotic reading.
[42] The separate and non-canonical Secret Gospel of Mark—fragments of which were contained in the controversial Mar Saba letter by Clement of Alexandria, which Morton Smith claimed to have discovered in 1958—states that Jesus during one night taught "the mystery of the kingdom of God" alone to a youth wearing only a linen cloth.
[47] A number of Christian sects such as the Brethren of the Free Spirit instead took to describing salvation through Christ as an intimate or erotic union with Jesus, although this interpretation is widely condemned in mainstream theology.
[52] The 1976 fictional poem The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name by James Kirkup speculated what it would have been like if Jesus had had several sexual encounters with other men – including with Pontius Pilate, and a graphic description of Jesus' sexual encounter with a Roman soldier; Christian opposition to the poem's suggestions resulted in the Whitehouse v Lemon court case, a famous blasphemous libel trial.
