The Gay Gospels by Keith Sharpe (O-Books, 2011), 203 pp.
A “self-help manual” from a Gscene writer claims we’ve been kept in the dark about Bible passages that “celebrate homoerotic desire and relationships”. Sharpe “uncovers” what he calls “open and hidden affirmations of LGBT lives in the Bible” and he urges readers to “learn [his] arguments by heart.” Sadly, whoever does so will be as ill prepared to handle refutation of this sophistry, as one who must handle refutation of Earth’s being but 10,000 years old or the experiential refutation that “ex-gay” hype is a hoax. The misled may then throw the baby out with the bathwater – something Sharpe says he wants to prevent.
As human experience and understanding – including that of gender and sexuality – is constrained by and conforms to culturally constructed meaning, Sharpe rightly admits that, “ ‘homosexuals’ [is] a concept or category completely unknown in Ancient Israel”. However, anachronistically and repeatedly, he speaks of “LGBT people” in the Bible and throughout the past two millennia.
His book is full of specious arguments. Sex acts can and do bring on predictable, but unintended, consequences. Sharpe, though, argues that “only intent to harm renders a sexual act impure”, asserting, “by definition same sex love cannot at the same time be an intention to harm [so] it is the gay marchers rather than [antigay] Christian protesters who are seeking to fulfil Christ’s commandment to love.” But do such Christians intend harm or love? “Can the church prove that mutual caring, loving same sex relationships are damaging to the partners?” Polemic pitched to the conflicted neglects Romans 14: If we do what we think is wrong – even if it’s not – we sin. Violating conscience is damaging. And blame games can’t undo the damage. An honest hermeneutic can.
Sharpe fails to appreciate hyperbole, so he holds, for example, that the “radical Jesus” disparaged marriage by demanding that men “hate” their wives in order to follow him. He claims Jesus required the “divesting of … the institution of heterosexual marriage”. What about LGBT efforts to institute same-sex marriage? He says that, in discussion of divorce, Jesus didn’t uphold a “holy estate of matrimony”. How so? Jesus said “male and female”, not “husband and wife”. “Queering” the Bible requires queer reasoning! He contends that, “before the advent of same sex marriage [gay liaisons were] privileged in the eyes of God in the sense that they represent a form of pure love unsullied and uncontaminated by involvement in patriarchal systems of domination, characterized by subordination (and often ownership).” What “gay world” does he live in? Homosexuals can be as abusive as heterosexuals.
Before launching into his “discovery” of the Bible’s “LGBT people”, Sharpe explains “Textual Abuse”, which he says is “the deliberately selective interpretation or misinterpretation of isolated biblical texts to give them a decontextualised prejudicial contemporary meaning.” Right. But this describes his textual abuse! He, too, reads the ancient texts from today’s mindset. He, too, “ignores the surrounding social, linguistic and cultural context in which the text was written.” He, too, “select[s] solely on the basis of its usefulness in demonizing a particular group of people [in his case, the antigay]. And the meaning is contemporary because it arises from the present situation in which the church [or, in his case, his LGBT activism] seeks to use it, and not from the past situation in which it originally arose.”
Tumbling into the wake of Dan Brown’s clueless codes of conspiracy, Morton Smith’s sham, T. W. Jennings’ “simply presuppos[ing] that queerness exists, at least in readers [!], and that this provides a way of illuminating the [Bible’s] texts”, together with a neo- Gnostic mix with an oddly essentialist Queer Theory, Sharpe tries to out the Bible’s “LGBT people”. He features Jesus and his beloved disciple. He says their “gay” relationship is “obvious” when, on the cross, Jesus “explicitly puts the man he loved in ‘an adoptive relationship’ with his mother. What conclusion can we draw from this other than that this disciple whom Jesus loved is, in modern terminology, his significant other? … He tells his mother to care for this disciple as a son (in-law). We know Jesus had brothers. His concern here is therefore not for Mary. She has other sons to care for her. She is being asked to take on another, for his benefit rather than hers. This also confirms that the special relationship between Jesus and the disciple whom he loved was open and acknowledged rather than clandestine and hidden.” Sharpe expands on this “homoerotic bond”. See, there’s “bodily intimacy” at the Last Supper! Later, the beloved disciple’s “behaviour is what you would expect from a lover [who’d] witnessed the cruel torturing to death of his partner.” Sharpe asserts: “Jesus’ fundamental erotic orientation is towards this same-sex lover. He is the ‘driver’, the dominant partner, in the relationship.” It’s “blindingly obvious … Jesus was obviously a gay man”. And Sharpe cites John for backup – Elton John! Now really, who are the obviously blind decoders?
Sharpe comes up with another “gay relationship” for Jesus – with Lazarus (“whom Jesus loved”)! Get it? And there’s still another: the rich young man who, “looks intently at Jesus and loves him, reciprocating the love expressed by Jesus”, who, Sharpe claims, had a “gay eye”! There’s yet another “lover”: the naked youth who flees Gethsemane. Sharpe tries to bolster this last outing by resorting to Smith’s fabricated “Secret Mark”, but Stephen Carlson’s scholarly Gospel Hoax, 2005, demolished this fake of the 1950s. Strange, Sharpe missed the fleeing naked warriors in Amos 2:16!
He repeats the tired gaffes on David and Jonathan and Ruth and Naomi. Joseph is a transvestite – that coat was a dress! Elijah’s a pedophile behind closed doors, mounting a dead boy, “channel[ing] life force into the boy’s body by some kind of implied carnal engagement”. The “sexual awakening” of another dead boy is read into his sneezing-seven-times-response to Elisha’s “erotically charged” behavior in “bending over” him.
Well, enough Bible queering nonsense! Whether gay or straight, LGBT-affirming or not, all deserve enlightened biblical exposition, not concocted conspiracy theories, non sequitur, anachronistic projection and special pleading.