The Bible/Ho Yay

• Though, Your Mileage May Vary since the Bible shows themes that are against homosexuality (mostly by modern English mistranslations anyways), so whatever is listed below can also be interpreted in a different, straight way.

---

• Not even The Bible is Ho Yay free - see David and Jonathan for the boys and Ruth and Naomi for the girls. It says a lot that the dialogue between Ruth and Naomi is occasionally used at wedding services.
  • Seeing as Naomi was Ruth's mother-in-law, wouldn't that mean...
  • Oddly enough, the knee jerk hand wave to the former is it's Not What It Looks Like, meaning it apparently even looks like Ho Yay even to conservative Christians.
    • Rabbinical essays on the love between David and Jonathan have pointed out that the translators of the King James Bible made some pretty slick changes to the original story to make it less homoerotic. In one scene, David sees Jonathan after a long journey and, shall we say, achieves priapic splendor - at least in the Hebrew. In English he just "exceeds" - which scholars claim means he cried a lot.
      • Except, the context makes it clear that they are right, he WAS crying a lot. Unless you think he randomly got a boner in the middle of telling Jonathan goodbye when Saul was planing to kill him. Referent Passage here: [1]
        • Yes, because it's not like they might have wanted one last encounter or anything...
• Jesus was always surrounded by a dozen men all the time, and several counts of men kissing each other. True, that was the typical greeting at the time, but taken out of context:

Genesis 27:26- Then his father Isaac said to him, "Come here, my son, and kiss me."

• • This troper panicked and tried to describe the disciples thing as "They're Jesus' sidekicks. They're like Batman and Robin." Which only made my church youth director give me a look and say, "Are you sure you don't want to rephrase that? Find a different example, maybe?" Uh, oops.
  • John's gospel in some versions has him speak in third person. His name for himself? "The one Jesus/He loved." Now, sure, Jesus loves everyone, but when you give yourself the title of THE one he loved, maybe there's a little possessiveness there . . .
    • Ancient Greek had four different words for Love, so there's no reason for it to be ambiguous. If someone knows Greek, it shouldn't be too hard to figure out what was meant.
  • It needs to be noted that many women traveled with Jesus as well. The writers of the Gospels just didn't consider them important enough to warrant more than few mentions of them, and Mary Magdalene was the only one mentioned by name.
    • (Actually, there's Mary & Martha of Bethany, Mary the wife of Clopas, Joanna...to name but a few).
  • The Romans clearly read the subtext concerning early Christians - they took their custom of greeting each other with kisses regardless of gender or relation to indicate huge incestuous orgies by nightfall.
  • Apparently, according to Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe shipped Jesus/St John...
• Jesus and Judas. The song 'The Garden' by P. J. Harvey seems to be about this particular pairing, or a least to invike them in describing two other characters...
  • Refrence: [2]
• God and Abraham. Think about it. A special relationship...involving Abraham's penis. Considering what God is, it's kind of wierd.

---

Back to The Bible