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, which is why modern Christians have abandoned so many of the old laws, notably those in Leviticus. Based on archaeological and historical records, Jesus was probably black, or at least a good deal darker-skinned than the Christ we are familiar with from Christian iconography.

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. The fact that she is almost universally believed to have been a prostitute almost certainly has more to do with misogyny than scripture.

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've read the song, now buy the t-shirt! http://www.cafepress.com/secretbuddhist

Selected links:

• Fear of a Black Jesus?: http://www.indyweek.com/durham/2000-08-30/triangles2.html
• Was Jesus Gay?: http://www.salon.com/feature/1998/04/cov_10feature.html
• UK Fatwa for 'gay Jesus' writer: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/493436.stm
• Gay Jesus film petition: http://hoaxinfo.com/gayjesus.htm
• Jesus 'healed using cannabis': http://www.guardian.co.uk/drugs/Story/0,2763,869358,00.html
• Jesus as the First Hippie: http://www.woodstocknation.org/links.htm
• 'The Real Face of Jesus' (or rather, what forensic anthropologists think the average guy in that region might have looked like back then): http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/research/1282186.html

Yes, I wrote the song myself.
Give it a fat bassline and call it reggae, sing it round the campfire and call it folk, play the guitar loudly and call it rock, clap and wave and call it gospel.
Or help me get it into the charts, and call it pop. Musicians wanted now!* :)

*seriously.

One of these statements is true. The other three are dubious or meaningless. I will discuss each one of these assertions in turn, and then discuss whether the idea behind the idea holds any weight at all. But first I will talk about the factual case for each of these four statements.

To truly settle any of these questions, of course, would take a degree of expertise in archaelogy, history, and several different ancient Languages. Lacking these skills, I can point out some of the more obvious holes using only a slight bit of common knowledge.

So, in order:

1. Black. Was Jesus Black? If you see the world in terms of black and white, and in the late 20th century world view that history is the progression of the conquering white hordes against the helpless darker hued people of the world, you could say that Jesus was black. Jesus was not a European. But Jesus was not a sub-saharan African. While the Jewish people were not the same culturally or racially as the Roman or Greek peoples (and, of course, were sometimes extremely antagonistic to them), they were intergrated into the Mediteranean world much closer than they were into the African world. So to say Jesus is black may be a dubious statement, or it may be a meaningless statement. "Black", as a racial and cultural identity, was created in the last few hundred years, as a result of the slave trade in North and South America. Jesus' possible darker skin tone does not mean he would share cultural features relating to events that happened thousands of years later.
2. Gay. Possibly the most baseless assertation, and quite possibly the one that depends the most on modern people projecting our modern concerns and attitudes into the past. While we have much writing on the views of the Roman, Greek and Jewish people's views on sex, there was not always a consistent attitude; and we can't always tell what the common people's attitude towards sex was. I think that most people would agree on this: that the Romans and Greeks had different attitudes towards homosexuality than we did, and in general were fairly permissive towards homosexuality. Jewish society was in general, especially in the prophetic tradition very much less inclined to sensuality. However, Jewish society, to this day, does not look upon celibacy as a positive thing. The questions about Jesus' sexuality, then, if they were to take a more scholarly tone, would be as to why and where Jesus, his followers, and later Christianity split from the Jewish tradition on this matter. However, just as there was no "black" people in the ancient world, there was no "gay" people. Homosexuality wouldn't be invented for another 1800 years, or so. So I think taking dubious evidence to assert something meaningless means this second item is doubly struck down.
3. Hippie . This is, by far, the most meaningless assertion. What, exactly, constitutes a hippie? I know many people who in some way or another share traits that might be attributed to hippies, although few would describe themselves as such. Some people may look at to the hippie movement as exemplars of simple, upright living, concerned more with spiritual matters than the rules of society. Others may see hippies as a bunch of self-indulgent, self-righteous losers passed out on a pile of beanbags with their hands in a bag of Doritoes. The truth may lie somewhere in between, but I can say that what may have been called a hippie in London in 1967, in San Francisco in 1968, and in New York City in 1969 would have been three very different people. To project this amorphous subcultural label, only valid for the past thirty or forty years in parts of the Western World, two thousand years into the past, is meaningless. For the sake of argument, Jesus believed in a communal society that set itself against the dominant society. Does that make Jesus a hippie? Maybe, but if we say Jesus is a hippy for those reasons, maybe Jesus was a Juggalo.
4. Jew Jesus was most definetly a Jew. No argument there.

So, having shown that most of these statements as unsupported, or more importantly, as meaningless, I will state the statement that was trying to made in the original: Jesus was not a member of the dominant culture of the time, and would probably not fit in in the dominant culture of the present day. This radical idea has already occured to others. The problem that Euopean culture has been trying to wrestle with, with not a terribly good rate of success, for about 1500 years now, is the fact that they are trying to base a solar culture on a lunar culture. Roman society, and the European culture that followed them, used a solar calendar. Jewish society followed a lunar calendar. This is more telling then it might seem: in the natural world, the moon reflects the sun, but in the world of culture, it often goes the other way. The bright, outgoing world of European culture, whether in the form of the Roman Catholic Church, or in the form of modern day secular humanism, knows that its promise of supremacy relies on what is hidden. As the Solar reflects the Lunar, Being reflects Non-Being. To say that Jesus was a modern category of outsider may be inaccurate, but to say that the fact that European society has based itself on a man who is not a European, and that that same society cruelly murdered, is all too true. This is something that is again and again impossible to integrate.

Jesus