Man Jesus Loved. Theodore W. Jr. Jennings

refer to the author by the traditional name of John, since some name must be used and any other would be both conjectural and confusing.

      2. We attend a bit more to this text when we discuss the issue of gender role nonconformity in the Jesus tradition (chapter 9).

      3. Throughout I have used the IRS’ but with modifications where necessary to give a more literal sense of the Greek text.

       Chapter 2

       The Lover and His Beloved

      While the question of the identity of the beloved disciple and his role in the text is a not uncommon feature of commentaries on the Gospel of John, little is written about the nature of the relationship between Jesus and this person. A conspiracy of silence seems to surround this question. Yet the Gospel itself places all the weight on the nature or character of the relationship between Jesus and his beloved, rather than the disciple’s name or his “function.”

The text makes clear that among so many to whom Jesus had strong personal ties, one particular disciple was Jesus’ beloved. Along with Jesus’ teaching concerning the nature of God’s love and human love, and Jesus’ demonstrating and awakening of this love, one person was simply “the disciple he loved”—the beloved one for whom Jesus was the lover. When all is said and done, the fact that the text does indicate that Jesus was in this most definite and concrete and intimate sense a lover with a beloved is itself quite remarkable, even apart from the added information that this beloved was also another male. However, this added information has served to “hide” the relationship wherever homophobic or heterosexist presuppositions have prevailed. Indeed the erotophobic presuppositions of much traditional exegesis would have made it difficult to see Jesus as a lover with a beloved even if the beloved were female. But the taboos constructed by homophobia and heterosexism have rendered a reading of the relationship between Jesus and his beloved virtually impossible.¹

      In this chapter, I attempt what may be called a homoerotic reading of the relationship between Jesus and his beloved. The aim of such a reading is to see what sense it makes of these texts to read them as suggestive of what we might today label a homosexual or gay relationship.

      Apart from the controversial nature of such a reading, two qualifications must be observed. First, I will not suggest what sexual practice, if any, served to mediate or express this relationship. As is true for other relationships, whether same-sex or cross-sex, the data in all but pornographic texts typically does not intrude into this sphere. In this chapter, the gay reading is not meant to foreclose the question of sexual practice one way or the other. This issue will occupy us in chapter 4.

      The other qualification concerns the much vexed question of the “construction of homosexuality.” The suppositions concerning homosexual relations that are present in contemporary society cannot simply be read back into other cultures or periods of history. The term “homosexual,” as adjective or noun, is only a century old. As a noun, the term generally refers to persons who are disposed to find sexual fulfillment in relations with persons of the same biological sex as themselves. Cultural and historical study has shown that the classification of persons as either homosexual or heterosexual (or, more recently, bisexual) has virtually no precedent in premodern culture. Certainly knowledge of same-sex sexual attraction or sexual practice existed, but the way in which these were understood, thought about, poeticized, and so on was in quite different terms—whether same-sex sexual attraction and practice were regarded as obligatory, preferable, permissible, odd, or prohibited.

      In the modern period, persons who are drawn to same-sex erotic relations are often presumed averse to “heterosexual” relations. This presumption clearly does not reflect the view of most cultures and historical epochs for which we have data. Moreover, the contemporary model of same-sex relationships in our society emphasizes relations between peers. But for Greek antiquity, medieval Japan, and tribal Melanesian society, cross-generational or pederastic structures were normative.

For our study, we should not read back into the sources stereotypes from our own culture concerning sexual structures, practices, or preferences. At the same time, we must use some language to identify the point of contact we wish to make with another epoch or culture. Extreme relativism can produce only the silence of cultural solipsism. The difficulty we face here is not different in kind from the difficulty of speaking about “marriage” or “family” or “the poor” or “justice.” In each case, modern ways of understanding these categories differ markedly from those of other epochs and other cultures. Thus, without either ignoring or being paralyzed by cultural and historical differences, the “point of contact” with the text that we seek to illumine is the love of one man for another that is “more” than friendship and which does not foreclose erotic attraction or sexual expression.²

      With these qualifications in mind, let us turn now to the texts to see how a homoerotic reading makes sense of the data that the Gospel of John presents.

       Intimacy

      The disciple Jesus loved makes his first appearance in chapter 13. The Gospel sets the scene: “Now before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were with him in the world, he loved them to the end” (13:1).

      With this begins the story of Jesus’ last meal with his disciples (“his own”), which remains the setting of the narrative until the end of chapter 17. Five chapters (about 20 percent of the Gospel as a whole) are thus concerned with this farewell dinner and discourse of Jesus with his disciples.

The theme for this section of the Gospel is the love of Jesus for “his own.” This theme is made concrete in the dramatic symbolic action of washing the feet of the disciples. In this action Jesus strips to perform this menial and intimate service, an action that runs against both class and gender roles.³ Jesus offers this action as a pattern for the disciples’ behavior toward one another (13:15ff). For Jesus, such an action is the concrete form of love.

      Subsequently Jesus talks about the meaning of love in his farewell discourse to the disciples (chapters 14 and 15). Throughout this section of John’s narrative, what is at stake is the love that binds Jesus to the disciples and binds them to one another.

      Precisely in this context we meet “the disciple loved by Jesus.” We do so in the only segment of this material that bears even superficial resemblance to the accounts of Jesus’ last meal with his disciples in the other narratives of the New Testament, the so-called “Synoptic Gospels.” In those texts, the emphasis falls on the bread and wine and the apparent institution of a commemorative meal by which the death of Jesus is to be remembered and his return anticipated. Nothing of this emphasis appears in John. In its place we have the action of foot washing and the discourses.

      But this account is connected to the synoptic (and Pauline) accounts by the motif of Jesus’ impending betrayal at the hands of “one of the twelve.” The impending betrayal is already anticipated in 13:2 and is developed, following the foot washing, in 13:21–31. Here, for the first time, we encounter the figure of the beloved.

      The context in which the man Jesus loved is introduced is striking. As we have seen, this whole section of the Gospel is devoted to the love of Jesus for his disciples and the way Jesus’ love serves as a model of their love for one another. This love is expressed in intimate fellowship, mutual service, friendship, shared understanding, a common fate,