Objects In The Mirror

I often find myself looking at ancient texts not through a lens of faith—I am not a religious person—but through the lens of human experience. Having grown up in a religious family, I have long struggled to reconcile my identity as a gay man with the realities of the early Christian church.

If we strip away centuries of modern progressive theological projection, it is a historical fact that an “out and proud” gay identity simply did not exist in antiquity. In first-century Judea, a mature man exclusively seeking romantic and sexual partnerships with other adult men on equal terms was entirely outside the conceptual framework of the culture. Had I traveled back in time to present as something close to my authentic self, there is no historical reason to believe that Jesus, his disciples, or Paul would have validated or embraced a same-sex relationship. Paul, after all, went so far as to synthesize a brand-new Greek compound word—arsenokoitai (ἀρσενοκοῖται), drawing from the Greek translation of Leviticus—to explicitly codify men who sleep with men as part of the moral decay of the pagan world.

And yet, if we look closer at the raw street-level language of the ancient world, a different, deeply human connection emerges.

The Escalation of Verbal Violence

Consider Matthew 5:22. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus famously warns against the escalation of insults, moving from an Aramaic term to a Greek one.

He notes that whomever says Raca (ῥακά, a transliteration of the Aramaic reqa, meaning “empty-headed” or “worthless”) is answerable to the Sanhedrin community council. But whomever says Mōros (μωρέ, the Greek word for “fool,” implying moral and spiritual bankruptcy) risks the fires of Gehenna.

When you translate the social frequency of these ancient words into modern linguistic comparisons, they map out an uncomfortable but familiar hierarchy of degradation:

• Raca operates like the modern internet slur “cuck.” It is an attack on a man’s capability, agency, and social dominance, reducing them to a weak, hollow bystander.
• Mōros operates like the most toxic, dehumanizing modern slurs (such as “faggot”). It moves the target from simple weakness into the territory of being completely un-human, unnatural, and spiritually abominable—an attempt to totally exile the victim from the human community.

A Shared Experience of Derision

But here is where the conversation gets interesting. Jesus was an unmarried, unbetrothed itinerant priest in his early thirties. He abandoned his family trade, wandered from town to town, slept outdoors, and relied on the financial backing of women. To the rigid, patriarchally strict world of first-century Judea, this lifestyle invited intense suspicion.

Jesus undoubtedly knew what it felt like to have weaponized words whispered behind his back and hurled at his face.

• His detractors attacked his lineage by sneering, “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?” (Mark 6:3)—a deliberate street-slur implying illegitimacy (mamzer), as a Jewish man was never named after his mother unless the father was unknown or scandalous.
• They targeted his manhood and lifestyle, calling him a “glutton and a drunkard” (Matthew 11:19), declaring “He is out of his mind” (Mark 3:21), and shouting to his face, “You have a demon!” (John 7:20).

To regular society, Jesus and his ragtag band of male followers looked highly eccentric, if not outright dangerous. They lived as a deeply misunderstood, marginalized subculture.

Empathy Without Endorsement

If I were to present myself to Jesus, I do not believe he would have validated my choice of sexual partners. Like his interaction with the woman caught in adultery in John 8, his baseline framework was structurally conservative, and his parting advice would likely remain, “Go, and sin no more.”

But I firmly believe he would have saved me from the stoning. More than that, based on his own strict prohibition against terms like Raca and Mōros, Jesus and his most ardent followers would have fiercely decried the use of weaponized language directed at me.

We would not have shared an ethical framework, but we would have shared an experiential vocabulary. However much they might have denounced my lifestyle, they knew intimately what it was like to be viewed with contempt, to be treated as freaks and social degenerates, and to live under the constant threat of societal violence.

In the end, you don’t have to rewrite ancient history to fit modern progressivism to find value in it. You just have to recognize that the experience of being an outsider is a universal human thread—one that Jesus of Nazareth intimately understood, deeply felt, and actively championed against the mob.

It is natural, many would argue, for a person my age to begin examining religious texts for edification on life’s most difficult unanswered questions. I have been a quiet student of some religious texts, of what they posit from a moral and ethical perspective, and what they reveal about the very human condition of mortality. I couldn’t go much further in that journey without first finding some reason to believe that my intellectual and actual presence among some of Christianity’s earliest leaders would not likely have been met with the derision, scorn, or even violence that a gay man might face even today. I might not have any intellectually honest reason to believe that I would have found easy acceptance of my identity as a gay man then, especially given the anachronistic nature of that identity with little in the way of ancient equivalency. But I can also know with relative assurance that those early leaders would have been the first to decry, or prevent if they could, violence, linguistic or physical, against me. Moreover, had I the ability to look in their eyes, I have reason to believe I might see empathy in them, if for no other reason than the scorn many themselves faced as people who did not always conform to their society’s expectations.

That is a place to start.