Did Jesus Have a Secret Sex Life?
The author of OUR SECRET SEX LIFE speculates about one of history’s best-kept secrets.
by I. J. Weinstock, author of THE SECRET SEX LIFE OF ANGELS series — an epic quest exploring the mystery that we call “sex.” This essay was adapted from his recent book, OUR SECRET SEX LIFE: The Key to Humanity’s Destiny.
It may surprise people how much of a role sex plays in Christianity’s origin story. Or rather, the lack of it.
Thousands of years after Adam & Eve’s Expulsion from Paradise for eating the “forbidden fruit,” the rejection of sex becomes fundamental to Christianity’s origin story of an “Immaculate Conception” and “Virgin Birth” unsullied by that “Original Sin” in the Garden of Eden.
But that’s just the beginning. According to the Gospels, Jesus remained celibate throughout his life. And even his death became an implicit repudiation of sex since his martyrdom was to redeem humanity’s Original Sin.
It’s ironic that despite Christianity’s millennia-long anti-sex bias, the religion began with so much emphasis on sex. Explicitly—No sex! Implicitly—It’s all about sex!
And why is Jesus presented as having no sexuality at all? Born of a virgin, he remains a virgin himself. Or so the Church would have the world believe.
Such repeated and emphatic denials of sex seem suspect. To quote Shakespeare, “the Lady doth protest too much.” Did the Church propagate the idea that Jesus was celibate because the opposite is true? Could Jesus’ sex life be one of the world’s best-kept secrets?
I’m not a historian nor a religious scholar, but while writing THE SECRET SEX LIFE OF ANGELS series — an epic quest exploring the mystery we call “sex” — I did some research and found it inconceivable that Jesus had no sex life.
According to the Jewish tradition of his time, Jesus must have been married and had a sex life. An unmarried man would have been considered incomplete or, worse, disobedient to God. So if Jesus had refused to either get married or consummate that marriage, he would have disobeyed the commandment “to be fruitful and multiply.”
Furthermore, to teach as a rabbi, Jesus had to have consummated a marriage and sexually known a woman. Had he not, he would have been forbidden from teaching. Even his disciples would have questioned him about this sin.
In the Gospels, Jesus says, “A man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” So why isn’t it reasonable to imagine Jesus living according to his own teaching and becoming “one flesh” with a woman?
It seems reasonable that Jesus had a sex life. And it also seems plausible that it wouldn’t have been a typical one. Of all people, Jesus would have infused his sex life with the sacred. He would have searched out the secret teachings, which were known at the time as the “Sexual Mysteries” of the Goddess. If anyone in the world would have explored the sacred possibilities of sex as a vehicle for communing with the Divine, wouldn’t it have been the Son of God?
We cannot understand what these ancient “sexual mysteries” might have been without rethinking our ideas about sex.
In the Beginning, There Was a Goddess
According to the archeological record, humanity’s first concept of a deity was female. Countless female stone figures have been discovered across Europe, the Middle East, and India dating back to 25,000 BC. The archeological evidence confirms that our earliest belief systems venerated a female deity as the Supreme Creator.
Our Judeo-Christian patriarchal civilization has kept us ignorant of the rich history of female-centered religion that humanity celebrated for thousands of years. Though called by different names — Inanna, Nut, Ishtar, Isis, Au Set, Asherah, Attar, and Hathor, to name a few — the Queen of Heaven or the Great Goddess was worshipped throughout the ancient world.
If we weren’t so blinded by our immersion in Western Civilization’s patriarchal matrix, we’d see how obvious and natural it would be to envision the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe as female. Women bleed with periodic regularity like the moon, ripen with pregnancy like fruit in Spring, give birth to new life, and then nurture that life with milk from her breasts. Magical. Miracle. Mother of Us All.
And the mystery at the heart of all these miracles of life is sex, which Goddess-worshipping civilizations viewed as the Original Blessing.
In Sumer, the biblical Babylon, they celebrated the Epic of Gilgamesh, written on stone tablets pre-dating the Bible. It’s a record of the Goddess sending her High Priestess into the wilderness to sexually initiate a wild man named Enki and thus raise him from bestiality to humanity. Keep in mind that Sumer, like ancient Egypt, was a civilization that lasted thousands of years.
In her groundbreaking book, When God Was a Woman, historian Merlin Stone writes, “The legend of Innana and Enki listed the sacred sexual customs as another of the great gifts that Inanna brought to civilize the people.” As Stone points out, this form of sexual worship was widespread. “The sacred sexual customs of the female religion offer us another of the apparent ties between the worship of the Divine Ancestress as it was known in Sumer, Babylon, Anatolia, Greece, Carthage, Sicily, Cypress, and even in Canaan. Women who made love in the temples were known as ‘sacred women’.”
The Goddess Was Worshipped Through Her Sexual Mysteries
The difference between ancient Goddess-worshipping civilizations and our own is not just their veneration of a female deity. That source belief generated a fundamentally different civilization.
Women were viewed as embodiments of the Goddess and held in the highest esteem. Since Goddess-worshipping cultures revered sex as the Original Blessing, holy sexual communion with a representative of the Great Goddess, her priestess, was an act of religious devotion. Such mystical sexual rites — Sexual Mysteries — played a central role in the temple worship and sacred rituals of the Goddess.
Those ancient Goddess-worshipping cultures revered sex as the “root” of the Tree of Life from which civilization grows. They understood that sex is the hidden, underground root system of how women and men relate and society functions. The temple priestesses taught mastery of the “sexual mysteries” to harness, expand, and refine the sacred energies of the life force. These “sexual mysteries” — the gift of the Goddess — were considered to be a form of “worship” and “prayer” and the most direct and powerful way to commune with the Divine.
The Lost Gospels
In 1945, ancient texts buried since the time of Jesus were discovered in the sands of Nag Hammadi in Egypt. They included many gospels that had been banned and excluded from the official canon that became the New Testament because they portray a somewhat different picture of Jesus, one that stresses his humanity instead of his divinity, which included his sexuality.
Take the Gospel of Philip. In it, Jesus is quoted as saying, “Those who truly pray to Jerusalem are to be found only in the Holy of Holies…the bridal chamber.” Here Jesus is talking about the lovers’ bed, the place where a man and woman unite sexually with each other.
In another passage, Jesus is reported to have said, “The mystery which unites two beings is great; without it, the world would not exist.” This sounds like a reference to sex being the root of the Tree of Life.
In yet another passage, Jesus says, “When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner as the outer, and the upper as the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male shall not be male, and the female shall not be female…then you will enter the Kingdom.”
From these passages, it seems as if Jesus is saying that uniting flesh with spirit was a way to know the Divine.
But his message was ultimately banned. Why?
The Demonization of Sex
It became an anathema to speak of Jesus’ sex life. Anyone who did was put to death. The early Church Fathers had lots of reasons to suppress Jesus’ sexuality. Aside from the obvious ones based on their cultural and patriarchal biases, there was a marketing need. The new religion had to distinguish itself from the Jews and the pagans of Rome. The one thing that would do that was celibacy!
To quote one of the Church Fathers on celibacy: “There is nowhere else that it can be found among living beings.” In marketing terms, that’s called finding your unique brand or niche.
Eventually, Church Father Augustine shaped Christianity’s view of sex. Outraged that his spontaneous erection was his body’s betrayal of the spirit, he condemned the evils of the flesh and idealized celibacy as the most spiritual way of life. For Augustine, sex was not only the source of sin but the work of the devil. So what had been a path to Heaven for the ancient Goddess-worshipping religions became the gateway to Hell for Christians.
Who Was Mary Magdalene?
In the early phase of Jesus’ ministry, Mary Magdalene accompanied him everywhere, which would have been viewed as sinful if she wasn’t married to him.
The case has been made by both historians and novelists that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ wife…and maybe she had his kids, too.
I suggest that she might have been more than his wife.
Why did the Apostles call Mary Magdalene a prostitute?
Besides probably wanting to downplay her role in Jesus’ life, they may have called her a prostitute for another reason.
It may seem unthinkable, but perhaps Mary Magdalene was called a “prostitute” because she was an initiate of the forbidden Sexual Mysteries of the Goddess.
In the Bible, God outlawed the Goddess. It’s the first commandment— “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.” So everything about the Goddess, slandered in the Bible as the Whore of Babylon, was demonized, especially her Sexual Mysteries. In the eyes of the Apostles, that made Mary a whore.
But perhaps there’s another interpretation. The Temple Priestesses of the Goddess were not only teachers of the Sexual Mysteries, they were also revered as healers of the sick. And not only were they healers, they were also considered seers. The Hebrew word zonah, which today means a “prostitute,” has an older original meaning — a prophetess.
The Apostles were typical Jews of their time and would have referred to an initiate or priestess of the Whore of Babylon as a zonah.
And if Mary Magdalene was a priestess, then Jesus — who wasn’t a typical Jew — might have been an initiate.
One of those recently rediscovered banned gospels says that Jesus “loved her more than all the other disciples and that he often kissed her on the mouth.”
If Jesus was willing to break with many of the old traditions, isn’t it plausible that he might have secretly searched out those forbidden teachings of the Goddess?
Jesus and the Sexual Mysteries
From the age of 13 to 29, there is no record of Jesus’ whereabouts or activities. This period is known as The Lost Years. Some say he went to India; others say he was in Egypt. Wherever he was, those years prepared him for his mission. Isn’t it possible that during that time, Jesus was initiated into the Sexual Mysteries of the Goddess? And that it was Mary Magdalene who initiated him?
Consider the possibility that initiation into the Sexual Mysteries revealed to Jesus the Divine Truth and gave him the ability to perform miracles, as well as the vision and courage to live out his destiny.
Incredible as it may seem, the Sexual Mysteries of the Goddess may have played a secret and formative role in the life and passion of Jesus.
Re-reading Jesus’ statements in those banned Gospels from this new perspective, it seems quite plausible they were inspired by initiation into the Sexual Mysteries of the Goddess.
“When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner as the outer, and the upper as the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male shall not be male, and the female shall not be female…then you will enter the Kingdom.”
“Those who truly pray to Jerusalem are to be found only in the Holy of Holies…the bridal chamber.”
“The mystery which unites two beings is great; without it, the world would not exist.”
The Best-Kept Secret
It’s not generally known that early Christian sects promoted “free love” and believed in what they called the “mystery of the bridal chamber.” Those early Christians who engaged in “love feasts” that involved “sacramental sex” must have based their beliefs and rituals on the example of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.
However, when the Council of Nicea chose the four official Gospels and banned the rest, that sacramental view of sex was condemned as heresy.
Could Christianity’s anti-sex doctrine have been a reaction to the sexual secret at the heart of Jesus’ passion?
Believing sex to be the source of sin, the Church declared celibacy — the most unnatural way of being — the most spiritual way of life.
Tragically, when the sacredness of sex is denied, the poisoned “root” of the Tree of Life ultimately bears bitter “fruit,” like medieval Christian monks castrating themselves and, more recently, celibate priests sexually abusing children.
Despite its anti-sex dogma, sex plays a significant shadow role in Christianity with catastrophic consequences for the world.
Contemplating the possibility that Jesus had a secret, sacred sex life may help bring that shadow into the light to be healed.
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I. J. Weinstock is the author of THE SECRET SEX LIFE OF ANGELS series — an epic quest exploring the mystery that we call “sex.” This essay was adapted from his recent book, OUR SECRET SEX LIFE: The Key to Humanity’s Destiny.
I. J. Weinstock’s recent articles on sex and society include:
— “Questioning Sex #8: Is Sex a Public Health Crisis?”
— “Questioning Sex #7: What Is Our Sexual Potential?”
— “Questioning Sex #6: Is the ‘Inner Fire’ of Sex Humanity’s Promethean Dilemma?”
— Controversial Book Probes the Mystery of Sex to Sound an Urgent Alarm
— “Sex, January 12th, Howard Stern & Me”
— “The Fantasy of Dreams Can Reveal Our Sexual Secrets”
— “Questioning Sex #4: Is the Porn-ification of Puberty and Sex Ed a Ticking Time Bomb?”
— “Questioning Sex #2: Is a ‘Pussy’ By Any Other Name the Same?”
— “Questioning Sex #1: WTF Is It?”
— “Women’s Sexual Empowerment Can Save the World!”
— “A Conversation with OpenAI’s ChatGPT About Artificial Intelligence & Sex”
— “A New ‘Theory of Relativity’ Could Shake Up the World Again. But This Time It’s About Sex!”
— “Is Sex the Missing Piece of the Puzzle?”
For more information: www.IJWeinstock.com
Contact: DreaMasterBooks@gmail.com