Let's attempt a little thought experiment. Let’s assume that the entire three pages represent an ancient correspondence and draw from an ancient “longer” and “more spiritual” version of Mark. Let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that this longer gospel was known to Clement of Alexandria. Let’s further imagine that (according to the tradition Clement inherited in the late second century) this version of Mark was associated with Peter’s “notes” and Mark’s visit to Alexandria. In other words, let’s swallow the whole story put forth by the supposed “Clement” in this letter to “Theodore.”
If ancient, this letter is more significant than any
innuendo present in "Clement’s" excerpt from Secret
Mark. If from the pen of "Clement", this
letter offers the first suggestion of “naked man with
naked man” rumors connected to Jesus. The "portion" of the letter that survives is entirely devoted to contradicting
this “blasphemous and carnal opinion”. According to the author,
these carnal rumors can be traced to Carpocrates of Alexandria.
Within this context, the text quoted from Secret Mark is meant to refute these early accusations of homoeroticism. Rather, according to “Clement”, what supported homoerotic behavior to Carpocrates’ dirty mind, was truly spiritual in nature. This of course has parallels elsewhere (Quis dives 5.2). What is unique here—in fact one of the few unique things about the content—is that Jesus was rumored to be homosexual.
According to the author of this letter, the contents of "Mark" provide a rebuke of those who would encourage “naked man with naked
man” relations. The Jesus of Secret
Mark is spiritually engaged with the young man. The linen is then meant to emphasize that the young man was indeed clothed. According to “Clement”, it would require a demonic mind to read this story as an endorsement of carnal homosexuality—but this
is exactly what the Carpocratians have done.
If this document represents an ancient correspondence, and
if "Clement’s" interpretation is followed, Secret Mark provides the only repudiation
of homosexual practice in the Jesus tradition.
Now then, this leads me to wonder: if this story has
germinated from seeds planted in the early second century (or earlier, if Smith’s
portrait is adopted) why is it necessary to remember a story about a Jesus who
most certainly does not (according to
Clement) engage in homoerotic activity? What purpose did this memory serve?
It is precisely here where I find the document—the climax of
the document, one might say—especially fascinating. Clement tells Theodore that the guy-on-guy thing is untrue. This,
of course, assumes that the rumors exist (!).
And this is what gets the memory theorist in me salivating. That there are two possible ways to interpret
Jesus’ esoteric slumber party betrays two distinct memory trajectories.
On this branch, we have the “carnal” interpretation; on that
branch we have the “spiritual” interpretation.
This prompts me to ask, what possible
social memory best explains both trajectories? The answer, of course, is
exactly what both Clement and Theodore assume: some early followers of Jesus thought that he was gay. If I was convinced
that this document was from the pen of Clement, this is the conclusion that I
would be forced to draw.
Of course, the way that the document is constructed, this
information is not supposed to be preserved. Ironically (and the irony is ingenious) "Clement" betrays the very rumor that he is so interested in keeping secret.
Tune in on Monday for my next installment.
I know nothing about the subject, but find it very interesting. Hot Potato, discussed by experts. Personally, I'd like to see the experts discuss this, as in the previous post. Hope there are many comments. People that call the gnostic movement in 100AD insignificant, seem to miss the point that there must have been many followers, otherwise why so many "against XXX" by the established clergy. If the beliefs had few followers, why waste valuable time and writing efforts (which means money) against it. (Emphasize I imply many followers of various beliefs, not that they are necessarily true). The sexual undertone of this, along with others like G of Thomas (making Mary male to get to heaven), and the celibacy many pushed in the clergy, seem to have many unanswered questions as to why?
ReplyDeleteAnthony, following a lengthy series of "assume thats" and "what ifs", you identify two possible memory trajectories and conclude that both trajectories can be explained by a single social memory: that "some early followers of Jesus thought that he was gay".
ReplyDeleteI feel something like Eeyore with these comments of mine. But I don't know that anyone in the first century would identify anyone as "gay" or "homosexual". This is not an area where I have any particular expertise ... but I don't think the ancient world thought in terms of sexual orientation. To be certain, the ancient world distinguished between homosexual and heterosexual activity, but I don't know of any evidence that ancients thought of particular people as inclined in different ways to participate exclusively or predominantly in one or another form of sexual activity.
In other words, I don't think you can say that people thought Jesus was gay, or not gay. I think you can say that people thought Jesus engaged in this or that kind of sexual activity (or as we've discussed, in no form of sexual activity).
I'm digesting the entirety of this post. But I'm very surprised to hear so many people taking this "Secret Gospel" seriously. I love learned scholarship as much as the next guy, but if anything deserves a "blink" reaction, it's this "discovery".
This is something of a proof-text and pages and pages have been written about this, but I think that a simple flip to 1 Cor 6:9 shows that at least one person in first-century Judea was willing to categorize according to sexual orientation. Indeed, Paul goes so far as to draw a distinction between active and passive participants in the act as if "homosexual" and "effeminate" inclinations represent two different categories.
Delete-anthony
Yikes! I know that this is a complicated area, not that I understand all of the complications. That's why I wrote the comment. In order to evaluate your argument, I'd need some idea of what it meant in Jesus' context to think that someone was "gay". I'm pretty sure that, whatever they were thinking back then, we're not thinking that now.
DeleteI don't see anything in 1 Cor. 6:9 that corresponds to my present-day understanding of sexual orientation. I see words that describe sexual immorality, and that describe certain people in terms of sexual misconduct -- in the same way that I might be called a "thief" if I habitually stole things. Then again, my NRSV does not contain the words "homosexual" or "effeminate". (Thanks, New American Standard Bible!)
When we use the word "gay", we commonly mean an identity separate from activity, so that it would be possible to be gay and celibate. I don't think Paul would condemn gay celibates. I suspect that in the ancient world, "gay celibate" would be an oxymoron. That is, if it makes any sense to use the word "gay" in an ancient context, which I doubt.
Not to say that I think Jesus engaged in ANY sort of sexual act, but if you're looking for a social memory to explain this purported letter of Clement, why not a memory that Jesus purportedly engaged (or better, was rumored to have engaged) in a homosexual act?
Larry,
DeleteI suppose two things come to mind: (1) I'm not even sure that you an I have the same conception of what "gay" means. You live in LA and I live in the Bay Area... two different planets, really. That you grew up in New York complicates matters further. You're probably all messed up.
(2) Translation is always tricky business. My guess is that you prefer rigidly formal equivalence in lieu of dynamic translations. I try to do a bit of both. I guess I felt that I used the phrase "naked man with naked man" more often than even I feel comfortable with... honestly, I don't even like to look at myself naked.
-anthony
Regarding (1): mix in my 4 years in Berkeley in the 70s, meaning that whatever it is I am, I am pissed off about it. Then three years in law school in Washington, D.C., which accounts for my brevity and common touch.
DeleteDon't get me wrong, I love rigid formality as much as the next guy. But my real preference is to understand text in its literary and social context. Call me a crazy dreamer.
Naked man with naked man? The Pauline expression that makes me most uncomfortable is "circumcision party". I'm OK with a bris, but for adult parties I prefer charades.
Looking at some of the comments below, I feel compelled to point out that in the ancient world, no discussion of a competing religious sect was complete without some accusation of sexual misconduct. Even if Smith presented us with something truly from Clement, I don't trust the letter's portrayal of the Carpocratians.
Translating μαλακοὶ and ἀρσενοκοῖται as "effeminate" and "homosexual" is a bit of a stretch, especially in the latter case, since Paul seems to have made the word up. Whatever he was talking about, it wasn't some kind of sexual identity, any more than "adulterer" is a sexual identity, or "drunkard" is a profession. (Well, ok, maybe for some of us...)
DeleteOne could argue of course that the Jewish tradition understands Jesus to have been sodomized (= 'defiled') by Judas in the Toledoth Yeshu. The term is usually understood to imply that Judas urinated but this isn't necessarily so.
ReplyDeleteThat the Carpocratians engaged in homosexual practices is already part of the report about their sect in Epiphanius. Lawlor and others have noticed that Epiphanius's language often betrays that he is copying verbatim a more original source (= Hegesippus).
If the Carpocratians were understood to have engaged in homosexual rituals the tradition stands very close to the report in Tertullian's Apology where pagans accuse Christian 'brothers' of being sodomists and other second century material.
Indeed if we take matters one step further, given that the Philosophumena conforms that a longer gospel of Mark did indeed exist (= the Marcionites used Mark with added mystical bits from Empedocles 7.18) what exactly are the implications of their interesting in Empedoclean philia? If you look closely at that report you will see that they not only said that the philia brought by Jesus united souls but moreover that they denied 'marriage' and childbirth.
Was Empedoclean philia understood as a divinely sanctioned male love for another male? I can't for the life of me think of how the philia of the Marcionite longer gospel of Mark could be heterosexual as this was centuries before birth control. Any thoughts?
Sexually ecstatic worship is well at home in middle-platonic culture(s). We know this. What we do with accusations and rumors is the question. If we believed every rumor spoken about Christians we'd think that they were Jewish Jew-hating, celibate orgy attenders, and ascetic gluttons who occasionally ate human flesh.
DeleteI don't doubt that some sects of Christianity manifested libertine theology in ways that included sexually ecstatic worship. But it's always difficult to parse the difference between misunderstood metaphors and the physicalizing of symbols.
-anthony
Anthony, Larry is right. And if you've read Dale Martin on 1 Cor. 6:9, I'm assuming you weren't persuaded?
ReplyDeleteAnyway, here's part of why this matters, or might matter: the "memory" being preserved wouldn't be that some said "Jesus was gay." It might have been "Jesus had sex with a man" or "Jesus engaged in homoerotic activity with a man,"
since scholarship on sex in antiquity sometimes use "homoeroticism" without importing modern assumptions about sexual orientation.
This might seem like nit-picking, but it isn't. The issue isn't just avoiding anachronistic ideas. The issue is what exactly is being remembered: that some said Jesus had sex? that some said he had sex with a man? that some said he played the "passive" role with a man? It gets more precisely at the scandalous nature of the memory: was it that he used his authority to seduce and corrupt young men? or that he himself was prone to "unmanly" passions?
Eric
No doubt you're right, Eric. Probably better to stick with the "naked man with naked man" activity sort of language... just gets old to keep typing that. I'm not entirely sure that "gay" (as it is employed in LGBT) is entirely misleading, but it probably is. More importantly, it's impossible not to project culture onto culture to some extent. And it is even more difficult when you're not sure that the document in question wasn't written in the twentieth century.
DeleteAnd I suppose that you weren't convinced by Dale Martin's statements regarding anachronism?
-anthony
FWIW, I do think (as Martin does) that "effeminate" is as good a translation as any of makalos... not sure what to do with arsenokoites: sexual favors? sexual coercion?
DeleteEither way, my point is the same. At least one first century man (androcentrism implied) was willing to distinguish between the mere activity and the character that might lead one to such a label... This is to say nothing of the economic/greed implications of this terminology. Like I said, it's only one text and only a brief comment about it. This is simply to suggest that the idea of "orientation" might not be anachronistic.
-anthony
Yeah, I can see where the repetitiveness gets old. "Sex with a man" or "homoeroticism" are workable substitutes, no?.
ReplyDeleteAnd agreed, that it is impossible to avoid projecting culture onto culture to an extent. The issue, in this particular instance though, is not just whether the modern term conceals as much as it illuminates. It is the ideological effect of the chosen modern term. Can't go into it further at the moment, but I think Martin would understand.
Looking forward to the next post!
Eric
Anthony:
ReplyDelete“Clement tells Theodore that the guy-on-guy thing is untrue. This, of course, assumes that the rumors exist (!). . . . This prompts me to ask, what possible social memory best explains both trajectories? The answer, of course, is exactly what both Clement and Theodore assume: some early followers of Jesus thought that he was gay.”
Given the factual circumstances presented in the “letter,” it appears that the “early followers” who thought Jesus was gay were second century Carpocratians apparently engaging in an early example of the time-honored practice of re-interpreting Jesus to serve contemporary mores, beliefs, practices, and agendas. This seems especially clear if we, as you suggest: “swallow the whole story put forth by the supposed “Clement” in this letter to “Theodore.” The “letter” states, in pertinent part:
After this, it adds, “James and John went to him,” and all that section, but “naked man with naked man” and the other things about which you wrote, are not found.
“Clement” is claiming that Carpocrates has forged scriptural text to support his practices, in addition to misinterpreting Secret Mark. I don’t see how this reliably takes us to first century rumors about Jesus. (While you do not say that the “rumors” are first century in origin, it seems to me that only rumors circulating during or shortly after the end of Jesus’s life would have real force, as otherwise we have hearsay with no limiting principle.) Again, swallowing the whole story, the phrase “naked man with naked man” is a second century forgery. That leaves us with Carpocates’s take on the passages from Secret Mark, which “Clement” advises is misinterpretation designed to authorize his contemporary practices. Moreover, this interpretation is by someone who sees fit to augment it with forged textual material.
I understand your point about all of this being part of historical Jesus memory and useful in learning more about the people who created it, which seem to belong to the second century. But I don't see it as useful in learning more about the first century historical Jesus. Swallowing the whole story seems to present a distinct problem in evaluating such trajectories. Is it reasonable for the historian – “Clement” in this case – to defend the Jesus memory tradition against false trajectories – false in the sense of forged material and agenda-driven interpretation? (“Clement” advocates combating lies with lies under oath!) If that is reasonable, then it seems that what we are looking at are not reliable memory trajectories about Jesus, but quite the opposite.
This problem seems related to the one you discussed in another recent post about 19th century Mormon interpretations of Jesus as a polygamist. I understood you to be saying that that interpretation, woefully unsupported and meritless from a scholarly point of view, did not actually provide any reliable first century Jesus memory, but only Jesus memory unique to the specific community that produced it. That is where I come down on the “letter.” It provides Jesus memory unique to the specific second century Gnostic community that produced it. This community's thinking (wishful, it appears) about Jesus's sexual orientation has no reliably demonstrated ties with first century rumors or traditions from those communities with direct access to Jesus. Wouldn’t we take the same approach in evaluating the interpretations and trajectories of David Koresh or Jim Jones, even twenty thousand years out when they have seem so much older?
Niccolo
I see where you are coming from, but the thing about the letter that strikes me as suspiciously modern is the underlying premise that anyone would assume that shared nudity between males would be sexual in the first place. Shared male nudity was ubiquitous in the Greco-Roman context, and while Jews seem to have been a bit more modest, that wasn't Clement's audience. I don't think readers of his era would have found anything more scandalous in the content of "Secret Mark" than they did in the OTHER naked man from Mark 14:51-52.
ReplyDeleteFascinating post, Anthony. On the question of rumours of this nature in antiquity, there is some contradictory evidence from Clement. See Strom. III, 6, 49:
ReplyDelete“There are those who say openly that marriage is fornication. They lay it down as a dogma that it was instituted by the devil. They are arrogant and claim to be emulating the Lord who did not marry and had no earthly possessions. They do not know the reason why the Lord did not marry. In the first place, he had his own bride, the Church. Secondly, he was not a common man to need a physical partner. Further, he did not have an obligation to produce children; he was born God’s only son and survives eternally." (See further Christopher Jones, "Clement of Alexandria and the Celibacy of Jesus", http://www.academia.edu/2021164/Clement_of_Alexandria_and_the_Celibacy_of_Jesus).
What is interesting is not only that there is no hint of any untoward rumours when the undoubtedly authentic Clement is discussing sex and marriage, but also that celibacy is entirely configured for Clement in terms of heterosexual sex within marriage.
Thanks for this Mark. I'll have to have a look at Jones. I'm inclined to see this as another oddity of the letter to Theodore. My knee-jerk reaction also warns me against a strict boundary between the purposes of marriage and other sorts of sexual expressions. Surely, it was not unheard of in Hellenistic culture to seek and maintain a marriage relationship to fulfill one sort of social obligation and then rotate in and out of other sorts of relationships for entirely different reasons and with various social dynamics/expectations attached. Of course, these would be second-century projections (and perhaps elitist) onto an evolving legacy and not categories that tell us much about early perceptions of Jesus.
Delete-anthony