WAS JESUS GAY?

Doctoral candidate: Jesus was 'gay' (WorldNetDaily via Protocols)
Posted: May 28, 2003
5:00 p.m. Eastern


� 2003 WorldNetDaily.com

A doctoral candidate in Australia was paid $51,000 in public funds to research Jesus' sexuality, declaring unequivocally that the founder of Christianity was homosexual.

According to a report in the Adelaide Advertiser, Rollan McCleary, who himself is homosexual, earned $17,000 a year for three years to work on his thesis on homosexual spirituality. The grant came from the University of Queensland.

McCleary will be awarded his doctorate tomorrow and in the future hopes to make "gay spirituality" a separate academic discipline.

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According to the Advertiser, he claims Jesus' astrological chart, clues in the Scriptures to which churches had been blind and accurate biblical translations all played a part in his conclusions.

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McCleary says he is an Anglican and is described by the Advertiser as a "qualified reader of astrological charts."

I would really like to believe that this story has been distorted in its filtering through two news outlets. Would the University of Queensland really grant a doctorate for something like this? But let's just take what's described as it is in this article, without any assumption that someone in academics was really arguing it. And set aside the astrological nonsense. Specialists run up against things like this all the time. It's not that I could care less whether Jesus was a homosexual or not � actual information on his personal life would be extremely interesting, whatever it was. The thing that tells me the argument is bogus is that I know very well what our sources are about Jesus. It is extremely difficult and problematical to extract any useful information about him from them, let alone data about his sexual orientation. His culture regarded homosexuality officially as a capital offense, so presumably Jewish homosexuals in first-century Palestine would have been pretty discreet. But even if popular culture was more tolerant, as it may have been, there is nothing in our sources that tells us about his love life. We simply don't know things like that, nor will we ever unless unlooked-for new information comes to light.

UPDATE: Evidently Dr. McCleary's statement about Jesus being gay was a passing comment in a thesis on something else. His "astro-theology" website is no longer up, but here is the Google cache copy.