Jesus was a Gay Black Hippie Jew

Jesus was a Jew till the day he died
And his followers too for many years beside
Till going to Damascus Saint Paul decides
That the gentiles ought to come along for the ride.

Jesus was a gay black hippie Jew,
And if you hate that then I guess he will forgive you.
Jesus was a gay black hippie Jew;
Some say he was a secret Buddhist too...

With his sandals and his beard and his messy hair
He'd be shunned by rednecks everywhere
And he'd turn the other cheek if you hit him there
Yet a pacifist Christian is pretty rare.

The folks in the region of Palestine
Were mostly fairly dark-skinned in Bible times
Yet he's straight-haired and blue-eyed in our painters' minds
Making god in our own image is a telling sign.

Christ always preferred the company of men
And he never was ashamed of his love for them
There are some who think Saint John was his 'special friend'
But many more the idea would just offend.

 

 

 

    
     

So... okay, Jesus may not literally have been a gay black hippie Jew - but then again, maybe he was. He was certainly a Jew, although there are sections of the Old Testament he doesn't seem to have taken very seriously; this is why modern Christians have abandoned so many of the old laws, notably those in Leviticus. Based on archaeological and historical records, Jesus was almost certainly a good deal darker-skinned than the Christ we are familiar with from Christian iconography, and very likely dark enough to be considered black by today's standards.

Whether he was a hippie obviously depends on how you define your terms; but he was certainly a pretty laid-back peace-lover with a dress sense which would have fitted in better in 1960s Haight-Ashbury or Carnaby Street than the Bible belt America of today, and there are several reasons (none of them entirely compelling) to suspect that he may have used ganja. There is also circumstantial evidence - some would say downright implausible evidence - that he spent some time travelling in India, where he flirted with Hinduism and later Buddhism - tales are told there of a Saint Issa closely matching his description, who is said to have left Israel in a merchant's cart in order to escape an arranged marriage...

Which brings us on to the question of Christ's sexuality, about which opinion is very much divided. One widely-held traditional view is that he was celibate. Certainly the Bible never makes any explicit reference to him having sexual relations with women, although there are hints that he was intimate with Mary Magdalene - indeed, many believe that she married Jesus and bore his children, and that the wedding feast at Cana may even have been theirs. The fact that this is not made clear in the canonical books of the New Testament may say more about misogyny in the early Church than it says about Christ's relationships with women; it is hard to be sure.

On the other side of the coin, there are several references in the Gospel of John to Jesus's 'beloved disciple', and a disputed fragment supposedly coming from a fuller version of the Gospel of Mark than the canonical one describes an incident in which a youth came to Jesus 'wearing a linen cloth over his naked body' and 'remained with him that night'. Even leaving aside dubious extra-canonical fragments and ambiguous references from John, many have felt they detect homoerotic undertones in the relationships of Jesus and the Apostles; I leave it to the reader to judge the accuracy of this perception.

Whatever the truth in all of this, Jesus was undoubtedly one of the all-time great teachers of tolerance - which for me, at least, makes it hard to imagine him approving of the oppression of Jews, homosexuals, blacks and assorted hippie types which has been perpetrated in his name over the years.

You can download an imperfect, unaccompanied mp3 of this song here.

Selected links:

© Fergus Ray-Murray
      
       

 

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