The Man Who Outed Jesus

He studied the messiah’s sexuality. What about his own?

When I got interested in Bible scholarship, trying to find a path to a loving God, I noticed The Man Jesus Loved, a 2003 book that outs the Christian messiah. For the first time in my life, I was amazed by a Methodist seminary professor. Theodore W. Jennings, Jr. went to war with a religious tradition, and it seemed to me he won.

I kept saying, ‘That can’t be true. Jesus isn’t gay.’ Then I realized it wasn’t evidence objecting, just training, taboo, and maybe threats. When it comes to Christianity and the deity’s sexuality, let’s face it—there are mobs.

Jennings noted he was attacked on talk radio and protested for years outside Chicago Theological Seminary where he taught, as “organized by some of the most notorious homophobes in the United States.”

I wondered what his personal story was.

I’m sure he’d consider himself a man of peace, but his sex writing feels like a battleground.

And he’s on the offensive. I love a blog review by Evangelical bigwig Albert Mohler, Jr., subtly titled, “Homosexuality and Heresy: Liberal Theology Loses its Mind.” —

[Jennings’] book is not only an assault upon traditional Christian sexual ethics, but upon the person of Jesus Christ. His work is properly identified as heresy because it is explicit denial of the true humanity and true deity of Christ. Furthermore, it is an obscene and pornographic slander against the character, holiness, and sinlessness of the incarnate Son of God.

‘Obscene’ — to be gay? Mohler doesn’t seem aware that Jennings was pushing back against the Evangelical assault on gay people. Nor does he deal with the actual evidence Jennings cites.

Perhaps it’s not easy to do so?

The gospels, after all, are about an unmarried guy who wanders with friends, repeatedly saying he loves them. Jesus keeps dismissing biological family, and he has a rather special encounter with a young man.

Christian tradition dealt with the problems anxiously, first by the contrivance of Acts of John, a second century fiction that purports to be the Beloved Disciple explaining to Jesus why he didn’t marry.

O thou who hast kept me until this hour for thyself and untouched by union with a woman: who when in my youth I desired to marry didst appear unto me and say to me: John I have need of thee . . .

Okay, whatever you say, “John.” But if the gospel narratives themselves weren’t surrounded by the barbed wire of tradition, what you’d read, as Jennings notes, is a same-sex love story.

Let’s admit it. Even later Christian tradition isn’t so not-gay. This is a spiritual practice whose clerics tend to be men in dresses. The most sacred room in Christianity is rather overdecorated by fucking Michelangelo. For help visualizing Jesus, Leonardo da Vinci steps in.

Really, Christianity?

To be super-duper Christian you might nestle up with poetry like St. John of the Cross’ famous “Dark Night of the Soul”:

Upon my flowering breast which I kept wholly for him alone . . .

I see. Note the Catholic poet John Donne in his “Holy Sonnet” (c.1610), begging Jesus to “o’erthrow me,” “bend your force,” “take me to you” and “ravish me.” The narrator is not identified as female.

That’s how Christians seem to like it? Hard ass rape by Jesus. And they’re not even married. I mean, really.

I love all the weirdness, like the Anglican George Herbert’s poem “To John Leaning on the Lord’s Breast,” with the narrator protesting to the boy snuggled up at Jesus’ side that he wants his turn nursing from the milky messianic breasts. Am I making this up? No.

He also shed his blood for me, And thus, having rightful Access to the breast, I claim the milk Mingled with the blood.

I love Catholic priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins getting up in 1879 to give a homily about Jesus’ being damn sexy. “In his body he was most beautiful . . . moderately tall, well built and tender in frame, his features straight and beautiful, his hair inclining to auburn . . .”

I see. Christian tradition, if you think about it, is a long, long story of a deeply closeted man begging for action, and not from his wife. Who can forget? “Calvin lived in marriage about nine years in perfect chastity.”

The Catholics aren’t too far behind. I love the beautiful Francesco Mangiacapra, hustler to the priests of the Vatican who compiled a 1200-page dossier on them. An encyclical on actual Catholic views of sexuality? I pronounce it infallible.

I love so many very definitely not-gay Christian stories. Like Evangelical hero Jim Elliot writing dreamily, in 1951, not of his girlfriend, a sex shrew, but of Jesus: “if only I may see Him, smell His garments, and smile into my Lover’s eyes, ah, then, not stars, nor children, shall matter — only Himself.”

But say anything about Jesus himself looking pretty ass-fucking gay—

Oh my God. The shit hits the fan. And I’m back to wondering about Jennings, and the story he kept private. The one about himself.

In the preface to The Man Jesus Loved, he writes: “I began work on this project many years ago and had in fact written much of the material in part 1 when I was interrupted by other projects and responsibilities.”

I’d understand that to put the timeline of the book’s conception in the 1980s. I’m thinking: AIDS?

He comments on himself briefly in a 2010 video he did for the “It Gets Better” campaign, telling a story of a young man named Jimmy he seems to meet around 1980 and who “did me the astonishing honor of falling in love with me”—but Jimmy was haunted by Christian judgement, drifted off into mental illness, to die of AIDS in terror at promised divine punishment.

That seems to have radicalized Jennings, as he summoned his skills as a Bible scholar to launch at Christian tradition in a very extreme way.

His colleagues weren’t too eager to help out.

I looked for scholarly reviews of The Man Jesus Loved and found none at all. Unless I’m missing something, he was—well . . . stonewalled.

It’s not because of the lack of evidence he presented. It’s because of it.

He notes the famous French critic Hélène Cixous heard out his case and “replied with a shrug, ‘yes, but we have always known this’.”

Even the great Evangelical attack dog on gender issues, Robert Gagnon, only sniffs at Jennings, as in a 2003 newspaper review: “the idea that Jesus was a homosexual or engaged in homosexual acts is complete nonsense” and “no serious biblical scholar” has ever proposed so.

In 2008, I see, Gagnon has a later dismissal in a footnote: “Jennings is a theologian, not a biblical scholar, who teaches at a small UCC seminary, Chicago Theological Seminary, that is ‘in partnership with the Metropolitan Community Churches,’ a denomination for self-avowed homosexual persons.”

I can’t stop from dishing. In 2017, Gagnon would be fired from his own seminary, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, under circumstances not discussed publicly. A story in the local newspaper has a commentator offering: “It is known that the professor was not always fair in regard to students of a certain sexual orientation.”

All of Christianity’s secrets . . . tucked into bed and put to sleep.

The rather quirky Bible scholar Roland Boer did a 2011 blog review of The Man Jesus Loved, its only public assessment that could be read as positive . . . but which questioned if there was really a real Jesus.

We might as well just go ahead and argue, Boer suggests, not for an authentic, historic Jesus, but just “that images of Jesus that are not sexist, homophobic, economically exploitative, racist and so on are ethically and theologically more desirable.” Jennings shows up in the comments. “I completely agree that the texts we have both permit and provoke multiple ways of (re) constructing a portrait of Jesus.”

Jennings wasn’t done. Jesus is gay, and Yahweh is too?

He got a little more scholarly response to his 2005 follow-up, Jacob’s Wound: Homoerotic Narratives in the Literature of Ancient Israel.

His language in this book becomes pretty colorful—David is a “fancy dancer,” the prophets are “male groupies” and Jerusalem a “size queen”—but it’s all based on real biblical references. The prophet Ezekiel rants against Jerusalem loving guys from Egypt with huge penises. I mean, that did happen.

There are so many odd narratives in the Bible! Jacob’s strange ‘wrestling’ with the angel. Like he’s alone one night and a guy from heaven shows up and wants to wrestle. Hmm. Then the sissy boy Joseph, whose brothers sell him into slavery. History’s first hate crime. He goes on to save the world.

To read Jennings now is to be able to fill in many blanks with scholarship done since. As Robert A. Harris details in a 2019 paper, “Sexual Orientation in the Presentation of Joseph’s Character in Biblical and Rabbinic Literature,” Joseph is a very feminine presence in the text, ‘beautiful’ like his mother, and read in Jewish tradition as effeminate to transgender.

This is the boy who seemed to be near God’s heart. Then again with the beautiful David, whose name means ‘Beloved’, and who dances for God. He’s never said to love anyone else, much less a woman.

From Jacob to Joseph to Moses to David, God keeps falling for boys identified as ‘beautiful’, as seems to come to fruition in the romance of Jesus and the Beloved Disciple. Yet at the time, Jennings’ case was perplexing, without context. A series of shimmering insights and facts—but in the context of Christianity, just motes of strangeness, floating in the globe of Bible scholarship.

By now he had retired and was in his upper 70s.

I worked up the courage to write him in July of 2019, asking if he’d be up to contributing some thoughts to a curation of scholarly resources I was planning for people who might want another way to read the Bible . . . as a radically pro-love, pro-woman, pro-gay, pro-human text.

That was before I realized: people don’t read scholarly material. And that includes scholars. A vast pile of facts and insights just sits there.

He replied!

“I might be able to help a bit from time to time but my travel schedule makes much of that difficult. In any case be happy to hear more about your project.”

I was, however, re-thinking my approach. Maybe I could advance the idea that biblical spirituality would make you a better lover. Everyone might be interested in that. And isn’t that the teaching? Love one another. So maybe the Bible could help you out sexually. The Bible contains many prompts to openness, being naked, truthful, unashamed. A Christian should be an amazing lover. Really legendary, with incredible sexual skills. But to my knowledge . . . that hadn’t been very widely understood.

I wrote and asked if he could provide some guidance on using the Bible as a means of becoming a better lover. I never heard back. I learn recently he had a stroke in March, and died in April.

Thinking to write a little appreciation of him as a “Pride icon,” I tried to get a little more info. I found hardly any photos or videos of him online, and little discussion of his life beyond his own scanty comments, a WikiPedia page, and a brief eulogy from his seminary.

I wrote Ken Stone, a colleague of Jennings who himself often writes on gay themes, asking for some information about his life. I was, at that point, thinking Jennings was gay, although in retrospect that was never said. And he is listed as married. The references to his wife are a little unusual.

“Those of us who knew Ted well were aware that his queer life was complicated,” Stone replied. “I don’t feel that I can say more than that. But he was fiercely committed to a pro-LGBTQ theology.”

Theodore W. Jennings, Jr. — the man who outed Jesus, whose last book was An Ethic of Queer Sex: Principles and Improvisations—wasn’t gay?

I felt like somebody slapped my face, and I’m not into that.

What about that Jimmy thing?

Stone kindly replied to my next email: “Ted may not have identified as gay but I don’t think it is improper to say that Ted was openly bisexual.”

I see. I looked over his books and found no statement of his personal sexuality. He seems to tell no personal stories, except, in the preface to Jacob’s Wound, speaking of watching nameless men die of AIDS, in spiritual terror, and his own growing resolve that the Bible is “too wonderful and important a treasure for it to be used as a weapon of mass destruction against the vulnerable and defenseless.”

And so he set out on his mission.

As hard as his books can seem to have failed, I keep wanting to write more storylines into the margins. There are so many studies to be done!—that scholars won’t do. I’m entranced by the early 2nd century figure of Epiphanes, son of Carpocrates of Alexandria, a charismatic teenage theologian who argued for Christian free love, then died young. I didn’t hear about him in church for some reason.

He’s described by the horrified ‘church fathers’ Clement and Irenaeus, and was the subject of Kathy Gaca’s exciting 2017 paper, “The Fornicating Justice of Epiphanes” that hasn’t been discussed anywhere.

Jennings writes of the free-lovin’ Carpocratians in An Ethic of Queer Sex, “We may be able to glimpse here the ‘road not taken’ — at least not so far.”

Yes, it’s another Christian tradition—another Christianity, blocked or terminated at that early point. But the moral of this story is how the pieces survive, like seeds, implanted eventually, and blooming.

How beautifully that’s illustrated in the truly bizarre history of “Secret Mark,” which Jennings treats seriously, though traditional Bible scholars try to pretend it away. This is a text discovered by Morton Smith, a (gay) Bible scholar, in 1958. The set-up is that, early in the 2nd century, the Carpocratians learn about a fuller version of the gospel of Mark, containing an account of the nights Jesus spent with the resurrected Lazarus.

The Carpocratians mounted a stealth effort to get the text from its Christian captors, and succeeded. The letter Smith produced was a 17th century copy of Clement explaining, embarrassed, about why the text was concealed. He starts out with a personal attack on the Carpocratians, those “slaves of servile desires” who’d nabbed what he’d thought was safely buried.

Carpocrates, instructed by them and using deceitful arts, so enslaved a certain presbyter of the church in Alexandria that he got from him a copy of the secret Gospel, which he both interpreted according to his blasphemous and carnal doctrine . . .

Surely, I reflect, for the delicate mission of extracting this manuscript from a Christian cleric—the skills of Epiphanes himself were required. His later book, On Righteousness, survives in slivers, and reflects, Clement suggests, a meditation on the full copy of secret Mark. But On Righteousness is radically pro-sex.

Free love. Free. Love.

The road not taken . . . was bombed by the anti-sex Christianity, but it couldn’t be destroyed. As many bombs as were thrown, there was always a path through the rubble. As wide as a sliver.

What freedom in Jesus.

He often tells the disciples he loves them. Indeed, in his final scene in John 21, he seems intent on making Peter respond in kind.

The third time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?”

But it wasn’t Simon Peter son of John that he loved, but the mysterious person who seems, later, to go by the name ‘John’, and might be a hunted Lazarus in disguise—smuggling, in himself, to the world, the heart of Jesus’ gospel to humanity: ‘Love one another.’

The references to this relationship are so bold.

Jesus looked at him and loved him.

The Christianity that wanted to see itself as a culture of male domination, family, and childbearing, had hitched its wagon to a messiah who rejected human family, and who does seem to make a special project to love males. Women too, but men in some unusual way.

If Jennings’ case for a gay God had seemed inexplicable, I continued thinking about it as I’d moved on to studying the Dead Sea Scrolls, which do tend to fixate on a strange scene in Genesis 6: when “Sons of God” or “gods” seize women as wives.

And I realized: the other deities only value females.

God—the God of love—comes in and says: I’ll take the discarded, the trashed, dismissed, rejected. I’ll take the boys.

How did Paul put it? “God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong” (1 Cor 1:27).

Males weren’t functioning very well as spirit beings and needed extra help. God comes in and slathers on the love. It’s not particularly a compliment to men. It’s more like a Special Ed class.

For all the misogyny blamed on it, the Bible bears witness that men are mostly incredibly dumb.

Women, over and over in the narratives, have far greater natural spiritual ability. Sarai is praised for beauty and wisdom; Abraham is not praised at all. Samson’s mother sees an ‘awesome’ angel; his father sees a man. Hannah is in an ecstatic state as the priest thinks she’s drunk.

It goes on and and on. As Judaism understands, women are spiritually superior to men.

The (male) disciples, for all Jesus’ efforts, never seem to understand him. They provoke, notes Leif E. Vaage, “a growing sense of frustration at their unflagging failure to grasp what he embodies and displays before them.”

But the Beloved Disciple — that one special, strange connection — comes to understand.

Christianity set out to to use the narratives to assert male clerics (on no references), and impose, violently, kooky misreadings, mistranslations, malign fantasies—and yes, changes to the text itself.

And against that — were Bible scholars.

It wasn’t a great set up.

As evilly as it’s been used, the Bible has often been the only force that stood against the rampaging psychotic evil that men do.

Trying to remind them . . . they are human.

I mean, it’s really not easy.

I browse the final pages of An Ethic of Queer Sex, Jennings’ last public writing, finding him suggesting that churches be turned into sex clubs.

Unfortunately, it is very difficult to imagine Christian churches or congregations being the sort of contexts in which it would be possible to engage in non-judgmental, open exploration of sexual lifestyles.

And that’s why we need dreamers! More might realize that listening to a cleric bark out another lecture on the Bible is useless. How about you turn to each other, and love each other?