Most will resent the imputation of sexuality of any sort to Christ as sacrilege, demanding the asexual tag with no ifsands-or-buts. It is true that the image that has come down to us of him, as well as of his mother, is an image of remarkable purity (although nothing in the scriptural account of his life forces us to presume sexual abstention, and surely his mentioned brothers were not assumed to have been virgin-born) however, it is an illusion to suppose that the concept of purity is not itself a sexual image or symbol. The notion of purity is in fact one of the most highly developed, and most stimulating, of all sexual symbols.

Christ is generally assumed to have been pure, on the scriptural thesis that all sex is sinful, that we are born in sin, and that he of all men was sinless, both by his non-sexual birth and his own presumed abstinence. However, his own admission to doing those things which earned him a reputation as "a winebibber and a glutton" casts in shadow the latterday claims as to his purity. Many theologians believe that until his baptism, that is, during the unaccounted period from his twelfth to his thirtieth year, he may have been indeed like other men, neither pure nor even aware of his mission.

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At any rate, the Gospels present him as a figure standing as it were between the sexes, or aloof from sexual position. His rarified attitude toward sin, sex and the family, his remarkable approach to women, his extreme gentleness (broken but occasionally by outbursts of anger more demonstrative than violent), and his oft-mentioned special affection for the young John, "the disciple whom Jesus loved," his scorn for the "solid things" that count with most people, his very spirituality, are all traits that in any person not considered a divinity (therefore immune to analysis) would be marks of effeminateness, narcissism or even a restrained homosexuality. His makeup contained more of the qualities considered

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feminine than the so-called masculine virtues. The Freudians have dwelt on this, and Nietzsche denounced Christianity as a soft effeminate cult.

ut the Church passed quickly from Christ to Paul. We have in the latter a different sort of man. Many authorities have considered Paul a repressed homosexual, with homoeroticism quite near the surface, and with unmistakable misogynistic traits. His rigid strictures against women are certainly as alien to the Christ as is his act of sending back a runaway slave to his master, or his inordinate pride in his Roman citizenship. Yet how effusively affectionate he could be toward young men such as Timothy. The evidences of a strong homosexual impulse are so evident in Paul, and he so seems to protest-too-much when cursing sodomy, that many scholars surmise that this was likely the dark secret he referred to as the "thorn in his flesh" a weakness he admitted to having not overcome.

The old Judaism had been a most masculine religion. Its prophets were "angry men" very unlike the softer ascetics who became the typical saints of the new Church. Patriarchal and aggressive, anxious to set themselves apart from and above their neighbors, the early Hebrews had come to put harsh strictures on male effeminateness and homosexuality, although the latter had had an important part in the origins of their religious ritual. (Kinsey traces the ban on homosexuality in modern Western legal concepts to the wave of nationalism that affected the Jewish people after their Babylonian captivity.) Via Paul (as Kinsey notes) however, Judaism's narrow proscription against overt secular homosexuality came into Canon law, and a religion that was essentially effeminate (yet puritanical) in its ideals, dogma and ritual, came to demand an exaggerated (but presumably asexual) masculinity in its adherents, in all their activities other than religious service.

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