Objects In The Mirror

I struggle to place myself among the people and places mentioned in first-century CE Israel. But I began pondering Jesus’ use of the word “fool” in Matthew as an example of behavior he called a sin. As a gay man 65 years old as I write this, something resonated with me about Jesus’ emphasis on demeaning language meant to other and estrange people from society, or even the human family, having heard my share of it over the years and experienced it firsthand.

Another reason it is difficult for me to place myself in that time is simpler: I had no known counterpart in much of the ancient world, certainly not in ancient Israel.

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. On the contrary, Paul, according to the scholarship of some, 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.

Yet, if we look more closely at the raw, street-level language of the ancient world, a different, deeply human connection emerges.

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

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

The first word scorns a man’s mind. The second tries to put him outside the human community.

A Shared Experience of Derision

Jesus was an unmarried, unbetrothed itinerant teacher in his early thirties. He abandoned his family trade, wandered from town to town, and relied on women’s financial backing. To the rigid, patriarchally strict world of first-century Judea, this lifestyle invited intense suspicion.

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

• 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).
• His detractors attacked his lineage by sneering, “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?” (Mark 6:3)—a phrase some scholars, but by no means all, read as a street slur of illegitimacy (mamzer), since a Jewish man was never named after his mother unless the father was unknown or scandalous.

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

If I were to present myself to Jesus, I do not believe he would have validated my choice of sexual partners. Like the familiar story of the woman caught in adultery in John 8—whatever one makes of that passage’s textual history—his framework was structurally conservative. His parting word would likely have been “Go, and sin no more.”

But I firmly believe he would have saved me from the stoning. He would not have blessed the life. He would have stopped the stones. That is safety and dignity, if not identity.

It is natural, at my age, to begin examining religious texts for the questions that remain unresolved. I have been a quiet student of some of them: what they posit morally, and what they reveal about mortality. I could not go much further in that journey without some reason to believe that my presence among Christianity’s earliest leaders would not have been met with the derision, scorn, or violence a gay man can still face.

I have no intellectually honest reason to think they would have accepted my identity as a gay man. That identity barely has an ancient equivalent. But I can know, with relative assurance, that they would have been among the first to stop linguistic or physical violence against me. If I could look in their eyes, I think I might see empathy there — if only because so many of them knew the scorn reserved for people who did not conform.

That is a place to start.