The Gospel of John is of particular interest to queer people of faith for its repeated references to the "beloved disciple", or to "the disciple that Jesus loved". These references make clear that whoever he was, this disciple had a relationship with Jesus of particular intimacy. There's the well-known scene from the Last Supper where he rests his head on Jesus' breast (or lap), and at the crucifixion, he is the only man standing among the women at the foot of the cross. He is the one to whom Christ entrusts the care of his mother - rather as a surviving spouse in marriage would assume some responsibility for the care of a mother-in-law. The existence of this special relationship provides much of the argument for the proposition that Jesus' sexual orientation may have been what we call "gay".
, the reputable biblical scholar Theodore Jennings mounts an extended argument that Jesus himself was actually gay and that the beloved disciple of John's Gospel was Jesus' lover. To support this provocative conclusion, Jennings examines not only the texts that relate to the beloved disciple but also the story of the centurion's servant boy and the texts that show Jesus' rather negative attitude toward the traditional family: not mother and brothers, but those who do the will of God, are family to Jesus. Jennings suggests that Jesus relatives and disciples knew he was gay, and that, despite the efforts of the early Church to downplay this "dangerous memory" about Jesus, a lot of clues remains in the Gospels. Piecing the clues together, Jennings suggests not only that Jesus was very open to homosexuality, but that he himself was probably in an intimate, and probably sexual, relationship with the beloved disciple. 