InsaneJournal

In Defense of Bible Slash



If there is something that makes a lot of fanfiction reading Christians violently angry, it is Bibleslash. I am always surprised at how upset it makes people. The first time I ever encountered the concept of Jesus slash, I was kind of offended, but that didn’t last long. I still don’t read it but that’s more because I’m a rabid Jesus/MM shipper than anything else. But the search for proof that homosexuality is no sin (due to being bi myself) showed me how non threatening the whole concept of Bibleslash really was.

Now I write Bible fic all the time, especially David/Jonathan slash. Boy do I get some nasty flames. I’ve been told I’m going to Hell, urged to become born again, and told that I am not a real Jew, by someone who is probably also not a real Jew. Most of the angry replies are concentrated on my subject matter, there’s no discussion of the story itself. I was recently rather rudely defriended by someone who said my Bibleslash “appalled” them. The automatic assumption from these people is that I a) do not know what I’m talking about, or b) am doing this to offend them because I hate Christianity and/or God.

Well, all my profiles contain links to where any reader can look up my background if they wanted to.

I try to understand that not everyone wants to read this stuff, but it would help if they could understand that no one is forcing them to. I get the whole “omg I just found this horrifying thing and I know it’s my responsibility to put a stop to it by yelling at the author in their Fanfiction.net review box” but it’s not your job to do so. And it really doesn’t affect me much. And everyone else already knows about it.

What are some reasons for disliking Bibleslash?

It’s defiling the Bible by having the characters have all sorts of explicit, sometimes even kinky, sex

That would be reasonable, if no one in the Bible ever had sex. Leaving aside the fact that most people who are married, especially those with children, have had sex and there are many married characters in the Bible, there’s all sorts of interesting other stuff. References to sexual intercourse, nudity, erotic poetry (read the Song of Solomon), sexual insults (even God makes a couple of rather filthy sexual references, like accusing Israel of being a ho that cheats on him with Egypt because Egyptians have huge male appendages), sex with prostitutes, sex between people who were not married, ordinary rapes, gang rapes, infidelity, sexual slavery, sexual mutilation, polyamory anddrunken group incest.

I’m not saying whether those things are bad or good, or whether the Bible condones them, I’m just pointing out that they are there, and if someone didn’t know that, then they really need to read their Bible again and pay attention this time.

But the Bible didn’t say what you’re writing about happened

Yes, but that’s true of quite a bit of fanfiction for other source material as well. There are no descriptions of sex in Harry Potter, but we can all infer that people are having it, that’s what fanfiction writers do. How many popular ‘ships out there for how many fandoms are not actually canon? Even het ships- Snape/Hermione is no more legitimate than Snape/Draco. Scenarios that have nothing to do with sex, that did not happen in the source material are also not canon, and yet no one throws a fit about those fics.

Actually, lots of stuff we all just assume happened in the Bible is “fanon” that grew up over time. Does that mean I can’t write about Mary and Joseph’s donkey, or Mary Magdalene’s red hair?

Yeah, but only perverts on the internet think about it

So, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Oscar Wilde, Gladys Schmidt, Alan Massie, Thomas Burnett Swan, Stephen Schecter, Anita Diamant, Donna Jo Napoli, Margaret George, Christopher Moore, Marek Halter, Rebecca Kohn, Eva Etzioni-Halevy, India Edghill, Nikos Kazantzakis, Leonard Bernstein, and Belle and Sebastian (and assorted other people) are all perverts on the internet. Not all of those authors and artists have used the pairings I use, but they’ve all speculated on the sex lives of Biblical characters.

They’re not highly respected Biblical scholars though.

I have a lot of books written by very well respected scholars that make the same claims. They don’t say that those specific incidents happened, but they do make great cases for the pairings that I write. These books are written by people who know a great deal more about this stuff than the kind of person who usually gets upset by Bible slash.

No one in the Bible was gay

Um…right. The span of the book is from the beginning of humanity to the last days of pagan Rome. Of course, the real meat of the stories start with Abraham and take place over a span of only two or three thousand years-give or take. Most of the stories involve an entire nation of people. The nations surrounding it and the ones who conquered or fought with Israel had a documented tradition of homosexual prostitution or acceptance of homosexual couples. Especially Canaan, the land that is, you know, now Israel. They were big with the gay (you wanna hear about the Phoenicians, and Philistines?). Do not get anyone started on the Greeks, Romans and Turkish (Paul and Timothy lived in Turkey, btw).

It is not possible for that entire book to not contain one gay person. It’s just not. Especially not when you consider how many post Biblical saints were gay.

If they were married to someone of the opposite sex, they weren't gay

Yeah. Anti RPS people try to use that one too. Even when dealing with RPS characters who spent their teens, twenties and half of their thirties in a haze of drugs and booze, sleeping with anything human, adult, willing, alive and reasonably attractive. Who met their wives through both sleeping with the same guy, and said "I am bisexual" and made out with guys in public.

There's this thing, called bisexuality. It means you can have sexual desire for both genders regardless of who you choose to partner with for life. There is also this thing called "a marriage of convenience". And the reality of life in Biblical times was that you got married regardless of whether you were gay or not unless you could produce some reason why not to.

Making them gay is disrespectful

Why? Why? Is being gay bad?

No, no, I didn’t say that! It’s just that making Bible characters gay is-

Because being gay is acceptable for flawed, sinful, normal people, since it’s really a sign of moral failure on some level, but saints and other holy figures can never be gay, since that would imply that they were not perfect? Biblical figures are all too holy to want to have sex with people of their own gender.

Cheat on their multiple wives with a neighbor, boink the maid, murder people, get smashed, destroy property, coordinate armed uprisings, lie around doing drugs, forcibly circumcise two hundred men, steal stuff, cheat their brothers out of an inheritance, trick men into marrying their daughters, use their miraculous powers to call down a curse on some children who made fun of them, sure, but never stoop to gay sex.

Because homosexuality is the WORST SIN EVER. It says so right in the Bible. So all that other stuff is sinful, but a character being gay is too much to handle, even from the point of view that it is a sin, it’s a sin that is so terrible that no heroic character in the Bible could possibly have indulged in it. Don’t even suggest it!

Right. That makes total sense. And you are not at all homophobic.

No, no, I’m not saying that!

Oh, you mean, “it’s okay to have the feelings as long as you never act on them.” Because it’s homosexuality, or because it’s sex, and sex is a distraction and if we were truly pure and holy we’d never need or want sex?

Because it’s sex, and sex is a distraction and if we were truly pure and holy we’d never need or want sex.

I didn’t know you were a Gnostic!

Anyway, you’re just writing it to offend Christians, Muslims and Jews

Uh…try again. I write my stories from a perspective of love. Love for the stories, the characters, the faith, and love for romantic stories. I’m not doing it to demean them, I’m doing it because David/Jonathan is one of the most powerful love stories in its genre. And Jesus/Mary Magdalene, even though it’s het, is…omg, it is everything.

Here is a wonderful Bibleslash site, with informative links.

http://www.geocities.com/hannatuk85/davidslash/davidslash.html