In the Lap of Jesus: The Hermeneutics of Sex and Eros in John's Portrayal of the Beloved Disciple

In the Bible, the Gospel According to John depicts Jesus during dinner in intimate repose with a disciple who appears as the special object of his love: "One of his disciples was reclining in the lap [ἐν τῷ κόλπῳ] of Jesus, the one whom Jesus loved" (13:23). Peter prompts this disciple to inquire about the identity of the betrayer whom Jesus has recently foretold: "That one, then, leaning back this way on the chest [ἐπὶ τὸ στῆθος] of Jesus says to him, 'Lord, who is it?'" (13:25). Near the end of the gospel these details resurface when the narrator identifies "the disciple whom Jesus loved" with a retrospective reference to him as the one "who also leaned back at the dinner on the chest [ἐπὶ τὸ στῆθος] of Jesus" (21:20).¹ What do these narrative details mean? What should reclining in the lap of Jesus be taken to imply? For answers scholars refer to well-known and muchrecycled comparanda from the Septuagint (the earliest Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures) and early Christian literature.² In the Septuagint a depiction of a mother or nurse holding a child in the lap or bosom suggests breastfeeding.³ In Luke 16:22 and 16:23, Lazarus reclines in the lap of "father" Abraham, which suggests parental cradling, fatherly warmth, and benevolence.⁴ Elsewhere in the Septuagint a man holds his precious sheep in this way, and in Greco-Roman literature parents hold children in their laps and wealthy Romans their pets.⁵

The purpose of this article is to introduce a whole new set of comparanda from literature describing reclining at banquets in the Greco-Roman world. Most of this evidence is unknown in scholarly interpretations of John. These texts make references to dining, reclining, laps, chests, lap-holding pairs, and love. They thus provide more precise parallels to the reference to the "lap of Jesus" than the parallels that scholars have cited in order to interpret the phrase. As I will show, when this posture appears in literature depicting couch sharing, reclining, and dining, it is in nearly every case part of a broader characterization of lovers and thus brings with it a range of complex cultural expectations about and reactions to the sexual identities and gender performances of the lap-holding pair. Reclining in the lap during dinner repeatedly functions as one topos in a concatenation of sexual features, traits, actions, and preferences. Lap holding thus can be shown to evoke broader and culturally specific organizations of sex and gender. Insofar as lap holding almost always plays out in particular performances of certain definite types of sexual style and action, I will show how ancient writers repeatedly tie descriptions of beloveds in laps to a variety of broader erotic morphologies or practices. My broadest claim is that this much-overlooked evidence must somehow be accounted for when interpreting John's portrayal of the beloved disciple. What role do sex and eros play in John's portrayal of Jesus's relationship with the beloved? By drawing attention to fresh evidence, I shall demonstrate that this is a question that can no longer be glossed over, dismissed out of hand, relegated to the scholarly fringe, or considered a topic of disrepute.⁶ The question of sex and eros lies at the heart of what is at stake here, that is, a relational practice and an experience of love that frustrate, indeed almost elude, contemporary sensibilities.

Method and Prior Scholarship

In analyzing these texts, I will write of ancient sexual "morphologies" or "practices." This permits a freedom of description that is as unmoored as possible from contemporary sexual categories and norms and thus enables an analysis that takes seriously, to use David M. Halperin's words, the possibility of "radically different experiences of erotic subjectivity" in the premodern cultures of Greece and Rome.⁷ Halperin writes of "sexual morphology" when he is analyzing the figure of the cinaedus, whom I will also discuss.⁸ But he also writes of the need to recognize that...