Jesus & Sex by William Edelen Recently I read an article written by a Christian fundamentalist about the joys of celibacy, and how their Jesus was pure as the son of God, never having been contaminated by sex. The article went on to blast the movie The Last Temptation of Christ and other literary and visual material of a similar nature. Poor things. They can hardly get out of bed in the morning without knees knocking, hands shaking and lips quivering. The world they have to face each day is so full of fantasized ghosts, dragons, goblins, devils, Satans, demons, evil spirits and bogeymen. There are so many books out there that they do not want us to read: so many movies they do not want us to see; so many newspaper columns they do not want us to read. In Hitler's Germany, they called it book-burning and burned a lot of books. Any thought, or suggestion, that their sweet GEE .... sus was a sexual human being throws them into total trauma, head in the sand, with quaking and shivering. Jesus was a Hebrew male, a man in the fullest sense and a sexual human being in the same sense that all men are sexual human beings. Judaism, in his time, valued married life highly. Plural marriages were sanctioned and polygamy with concubines, handmaids, and secondary wives was normal. They disdained celibacy. There are no instances of lifelong celibacy in the entire Old Testament, Apocrypha, Qumran scrolls, the Mishnah or the Talmud. The issue here is the sexual attitude of first-century Judaism, and it is recorded that Jesus traveled in intimate companionship with a group of women, including Mary Magdalene. The duty of becoming betrothed shortly after puberty was axiomatic. Marriage was a religious duty. The Gospel of Mary, discovered in Egypt, leaves no doubt about the matter, suggesting that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married. In the Gnostic gospel of Philip, one pan reads: "there were three who walked with Jesus at all times. Mary, her sister Salome, and Magdalene who is called his partner." Mary Magdalene is called the spouse of Jesus, and tells how he kisses her often. In the gospel of Philip are these words: "the companion of Jesus is Mary Magdalene. Jesus loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on the mouth. Jesus said to the other disciples, 'Why do I not love you as I love her?"' Do remember that the Gnostic gospels include traditions that are older than our New Testament gospels. This is not a new theme, really. Martin Luther faced this issue squarely, saying in his Tabletalk that Jesus probably had sexual relations with Mary Magdalene as well "as other women." Luther was not alone in his robust attitude toward sexuality. Pope Julius II by a papal decree established a sacred brothel in Rome that flourished under his successors Leo X and Clement VII. The earnings of the brothel supported the Holy Sisters of the Order of St. Mary Magdalene. (Church history is not as dull as you might think. It has some good spicy reading.) D.H. Lawrence made the issue of the sexuality of Jesus central in two of his works, as did Nikos Kazantsakis. Let us not forget that one of the most haunting and beautiful songs to come out of Jesus Christ, Supers-tar was the tender rendition of "I Don't Know How To Love Him" sung by Mary Magdalene to Jesus. A magnificent book, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion from Columbia University, won the College Art Association of America annual award a few years ago. "God is love," we have been told at least ten million times by Christians of all sizes, shapes and colors. And so perhaps, yes perhaps, Jesus making love to Mary Magdalene . . . could save the fundamentalists. Save them from their arrogant and dogmatic judgments . . . and the fearful and insecure hours that fill their days. What a blessing that would be. William Edelen is a newspaper columnist and symposium speaker. The Apollinarian Heresy by William B. Lindley In The Book Your Church Doesn't Want You To Read (Appendix B, p. 440) there is a definition of heresy: Opinion or doctrine at variance with the orthodox or accepted doctrine, especially of a church of religious system. An example is the attempt to block the movie The Last Temptation of Christ, which portrayed Jesus Christ as both fully divine and fully human, the orthodox Christian belief. Shock and outrage at the explicit portrayal of Jesus' humanness nudged some self-styled Christians into the Apollinarian heresy, condemned in 451 C.E. I'd like to expand on this a little, and add a kind word for the heretics. Christians have had trouble with the idea of Jesus as fully human from the earliest days right up to the present, especially because he was equated with God in a couple of Gospel verses. The Docetic heresy denied that Jesus' material body was real. This was condemned (I John 4:2,3 and 2 John 7) and labeled the Antichrist. But, with the help of the Gnostics, it kept going for two more centuries. Then there were the Monophysites, who believed that the divinity and humanity of Christ were "amalgamated in essence." This idea was condemned at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 C.E. In between these two periods was Apollinaris of Laodicea (c.300-390). For the most part he was orthodox, but then he denied that Jesus had a human soul, thinking that the divine could cover both aspects. He modified this a little, taking up the idea that the person has three things, body, soul, and spirit, and Jesus lacked only a human spirit. Still, he got into trouble and was condemned at the first council of Constantinople in 381, posthumously taking more flak in 451 and 553. The point here is that again and again, people just couldn't swallow the idea that their Lord and Master was fully human, just like themselves. And the "again and again" goes right up to the present time. Kazantzakis mace The Last Temptation the idea that Jesus, fully divine, had the power at the time of crucifixion to come down from the cross and, fully human, take up a normal family life, including the conjugal sexual pleasure that goes with it. He resisted this Last Temptation, and the story continues as recorded in the Gospels. Apollinaris couldn't buy this idea in the fourth century, and the protesters of the movie couldn't buy it in the twentieth. The protesters, self-righteous Christians all, thus committed heresy. I haven't changed my mind on the holier-than-thou hypocrisy and religious illiteracy of the protesters, but I've softened a little on Apollinaris himself. Fully divine is infallible, inerrant; fully human is fallible, errant. "Can God make mistakes? I can. "Well,Jesus was the sort of person, according to orthodoxy, who could and could not make mistakes. A flat contradiction.