Christian Texts and History • What was a beloved disciple?

Associated with statements that x was the pupil of y, we frequently find, in Greek biography, the aside, 'whose beloved he is said to have been'. We have seen that this was a type of statement that the critic of the Socratics quoted by Athenaeus objected to. Whether such gossip is always to be thought of as malicious in intent is another matter. Clearly, invective is one possible source for it. However, we do have to remember the strong evidence, from the popularity of kalos names on 5th century pottery, for instance, and from the dialogues of Plato, that the love of men for youths was thought a perfectly honorable thing in classical Greece, at least in some circles. How long it was before this attitude died out completely is difficult to say, and it is possible that it was shared by some of the writers who were responsible for what has been called the erastes-paidika motif in Greek biography.

A man who sells his favours for a price to anyone who wants them is called a catamite; but if anyone forms a love-attachment with someone whom he knows to be truly good, we regard him as perfectly respectable.

An older man, called the lover, would be interested in a boy (boyfriend, beloved or the loved one)...

Therefore, Socrates’s discussion of love and lust being reserved for homo-sexual relationships is due in part at the time to Greek women’s lesser education and political power, with marriage being perceived primarily for reproductive purposes (Amir, 2001; Plato, 1991). Socrates therefore reinforces Pausanius ideal of love but within a non-sexualised relationship (Gill, 1999). ...

This suggestion of man not only as a “pleasure chaser” but a pro-creator of ideas also appears in Phaedrus where the spoken word immersed within the soul of the listener becomes metaphorically, like the speaker’s own son (278a6, Halperin, 1990). ...

In so doing, Socrates comes down to the very nature of what love means and does not mean in Athenian culture (Rowe, 2005), when speech turns to an unforced love being just, because mutually consenting love seeks similar qualities of both lover and beloved (196-7c). ...

For Socrates, the philosophical discourse was not only a pursuit of wisdom but also an erotic narrative of beauty (Halperin, 1992). ... Hence, the regeneration and procreation of the narrative of desire ensures Socrates immortality in the afterlife (Halperin, 1990).

Once ἀνακείμενος…ἐν τῷ κόλπῳ is translated as
“reclining in the lap,” the intimacy of the physical relationship between the student
“whom Jesus loved” and his teacher, taken together with what we know about the
ubiquity of pederasty in elite Greek and Roman culture and its close association in Greek
culture with education, suggests that at least some of the Gospel’s ancient readers would
have understood the relationship between Jesus and his beloved student as pederastic.
This reading of John 13:23 is supported, first of all, by the sexualized uses of the phrase
ἐν τῷ κόλπῳ in Classical and Hellenistic Greek. For Classical Greek we have the scene
in Aristophanes Ecclesiazusae where a young man says to a young woman, “I want to be
in your kolpos, trading blows with your ass” (963-5); Henderson 1991 has convincingly
argued that Aristophanes is using kolpos in a double sense here, to mean both “lap” and
“vagina.” In the Septuagint, the phrase is frequently associated with marital love, in the
common expression “to be in the lap of one’s husband” (Deut. 13.7, 28.54, 2 Kings 12.8)
or, less often, “the lap of one’s wife” (Deut. 28.56). Its use in John 13:23 assimilates the
beloved student to a wife. The connotations of ἐν τῷ κόλπῳ become even clearer, when
we consider the use of the name Encolpios or Encolpos in Roman imperial culture, a
name clearly derived from the phrase ἐν τῷ κόλπῳ and meaning “the one in the lap.” The
Latin literary evidence for this name (Petronius Satyricon; Martial 1.31, 5.48; Pliny Ep.
8.1; Vita Alexandri (Severi) 17.1), the majority of which comes from the same period in
which the Fourth Gospel was composed (the late 1st or early 2nd century AD), makes it
clear that Encolpios/Encolpos was a common name in elite Roman circles in the imperial
period for a puer delicatus or beloved male slave. The most famous bearer of this name
from antiquity is the narrator of the Satyricon, but the two poems of Martial make the
pederastic connotations of the name particularly clear: Martial prays that Encolpos, the
slave and amor of a centurion named Pudens, may develop facial hair slowly; once he
can grow a beard, the young slave will have passed the ideal age for the beloved in a
pederastic relationship undertaken according to Greek models. Elite Roman readers,
fluent in Greek, who read the phrase ἐν τῷ κόλπῳ in John must have instantly associated
it with the common slave name Encolpios/Encolpos and its unmistakable sexual
connotations.

In an early third-century CE narrative about emperor Elagabalus, Dio
Cassius describes him as sharing a couch with Aurelius Zoticus, an athlete
renowned for his beauty and large penis: “After immediately bathing with
Aurelius, and growing still more lustful when he stripped, since Elagabalus
found Aurelius to match his reputation, Elagabalus reclined on Aurelius’s
chest and in his lap took dinner just as a beloved woman.”21 The emperor
Elagabalus takes the inside position on the couch, where he “reclined”
specifically ἐν τοῖς στέρνοις (on the chest) and ἐν τοῖς κόλποις (in the lap) of
Aurelius—a near match to the wording in John 13:23, 13:25, and 21:20.22
It is also significant that the two were intimately entwined at a “dinner.”

In Juvenal’s Satire 2, a cinaedus named Gracchus reclines on the inside
of the couch and is portrayed as a bride on her wedding night:
Four hundred thousand sesterces Gracchus gave as dowry
to a horn blower, or maybe he played a straight horn;
with the contracts signed, “blessing” spoken, a huge company
seated at the dinner, the new bride reclines in the lap of her husband.34
Though the fact that it is written in Latin makes lexical comparison impossible, this text, written sometime within the first fifteen years of the
second century CE,35 remains an important parallel to John 13:23, 13:25,
and 21:20. Playing the role of “new bride” (in other words, the passive
role), Gracchus is said “to recline” as the inside partner “in the lap of the
husband” (gremio iacere mariti) during a dinner.

Juvenal here picks up a common motif of the literature of the
day: that philosophers’ ostensive sexual austerity and moralism mask their
true objective, which is to penetrate or to be penetrated by (as in Juvenal’s
Satire 2) the boys in their care to educate.42 Elsewhere, Theomnestus, who
appears in Pseudo-Lucian’s Er¯otes as a connoisseur of love with considerable
erotic experience with both boys and women, remarks that Alcibiades did
not rise unscathed from Socrates’s couch, despite Alcibiades’s claims to the
contrary in Plato’s Symposium.
43 In the hands of satirical writers like these,
high-minded philosophical pedagogy was paramount to seduction.

The phrase “of his lap” appears
also in Plutarch’s biography of the younger Cato, where Aulus Gabinius is
described as a man “from Pompey’s lap [ἐκ τῶν κόλπων], as those who knew
of his character and manner of life said.”45 The context of usage here is not
the banquet, but Plutarch takes the fact that Gabinius is “from the lap” to
signal something malignant about his way of life. Elsewhere in Plutarch’s
Lives Gabinius is portrayed as Pompey’s flatterer and lackey, and this critique
undoubtedly applies here too.46 But the dining context from Cicero ups
the ante of the critique. Cicero implies that Catiline plays both the sexually
active and passive roles with his clique of lackeys, since these “effeminates”
in their long-sleeved tunics have also learned “to love and to be loved.”

The
younger Pliny, for instance, writing a letter to an associate, emphasizes that
a man named Veiento reclined “in the lap” of the emperor Nerva during
dinner, using the words “and even” to insinuate something baleful about the
character of Veiento, who is the target of Pliny’s criticism throughout the
letter. This snide remark loses its critical force if it is simply read as describing Veiento as a close friend or right-hand man of the emperor.

As
Van Tilborg has argued, this explains why Petronius names the pederastic
antihero of his vulgarly sexed mock epic the Satyricon Encolpius (literally,
“in-the-lap man”).72 I would add to this another “in-the-lap man” named
Encolpus, whom we meet in two epigrams by the first-century Roman poet
Martial, in both of which he is the slave of his master, the pederast Aulus
Pudens.7

As the foregoing analysis of lap holding in the literature depicting reclining
at banquets has shown, in almost every instance that I have found, writers deploy lap holding during dinner as part of a description of couples whose
relationship moves beyond mere homosocial friendship and is inflected
with erotic desire, romance, and sexual implication. It is certainly not coincidental that the highest concentration of examples appears in the Greek
erotic epigrams. To be sure, friends or family members also share couches
sociably and intimately in Greco-Roman literature without there being
anything erotic about it. Indeed, males may have reclined in the laps of their
friends, snuggled up to them, or rested their heads on their chests without
necessarily desiring to be their lovers. But in these cases, couch sharing is
depicted without reference to laps or chests.

In Suetonius, Dolabella only needed six Latin
words, with one reference to the interior reclining position, in order to
malign Caesar for playing passive to Nicomedes; he is maligned simply as
“the queen’s rival, the inner partner of the royal litter.”

Most relevant here is the author’s familiarity with the literary
symposium. George L. Parsenios identifies several figures and circumstances
in the Johannine Farewell Discourses (13–17) that typify this genre.

But, as I have underlined, all this is consistent
with the modes of description of Greek writers, who everywhere describe
couch sharing and communal reclining and dining among friends but seem
most often to reserve lap holding specifically for love relationships that are
distinct from other loves.

Tracing this story after the beloved’s introduction in 13:23 confirms the
privileged status of their relationship. Lap holding is only one among many
clues that this love is special. That the beloved is reclining in the lap (13:23)
and on the chest (13:25) positions him to ask Jesus at Peter’s prompting
(13:24) to identify the betrayer whom Jesus has foretold (13:21). The beloved’s repose with Jesus allows for a hushed verbal exchange in 13:25–26
to which the beloved alone remains privy. His special access to the teacher
elevates his standing as a trustworthy source of knowledge and positions
him, even if he does not understand this statement about Judas’s betrayal
in the moment (13:28), to carry the story forward accurately in the future.

The narrator thus portrays this story as having its origin in
their relationship, which constitutes a love apart from other loves. This in
turn enhances the prestige of the text: it comes from the one who had a
special love relationship with Jesus.

In his lives of the ancient philosophers, Diogenes Laertius, writing in the
third century CE, portrays some transfers of leadership in Plato’s Academy
as occurring between pairs of teacher/student lovers, as Van Tilborg has
detailed. The beloved follows the lover as the head of the Platonist school
when Polemo follows Xenocrates and Crates Polemo. Diogenes emphasizes
the love and closeness of these pairs, whose love is set apart from other
loves. He evokes the topos that friends share all things in common, including pursuits, breath, a tomb, meals, and houses. This qualifies the beloved
pupils Polemo and Crates to play successor to their teacher lovers Xenocrates
and Polemo, since they are able to replicate their lovers’ ways of life with
insiders’ access to their minds. This relationship unfolds in accordance with
the Platonist theory of love, which prioritizes love’s power for solidifying
friendship “from habitual intimacy.”104 The fact that these students and
teachers are couples functions to extend the school’s homogeneity to successive generations and invests the beloved students with the character and
knowledge needed to carry their lovers’ teachings into the future.
This is not an isolated phenomenon. In Persius’s Satire 5, the poet
similarly writes lovingly of his teacher Cornutus, to whom the poet recalls
entrusting himself as into the “Socratic lap” (Socraticus sinus) at a ripe age.
He goes on to emphasize their intimacy, their long days together, and the
evenings they spent dining in leisure. With Cornutus assuming the role
of teacher, adoptive father, and “sweet friend,” the poet recalls all that
he learned from their shared life together as a pair bonded in harmony.
It is from their shared intimacy that Cornutus was able to shape the poet
who internalized his lessons and allowed his way of life to be formed by
Cornutus’s example.

To employ the words of
Amy Richlin as she grapples with the same problem in trying to characterize
the love between another pedagogical pair, Marcus Aurelius and Fronto, it
might also be called “sentimental friendship.” As Richlin recognizes, the
experience of friendship and expectations about it have taken numerous
forms throughout history: there have been debates about whether it should
be public or private; about its connection with notions of family, kinship,
and marriage; and about the intensity of its expressions of devotion, both
verbal and physical.108 Richlin seeks to carve out a relational category for
Marcus and Fronto that she describes as comprising “romantic mutual devotion but not necessarily physical expression.” For Richlin, this warrants
the claim that Marcus and Fronto were “lovers.”

The goddess Hera complains to her husband, Zeus, a god
repeatedly smitten with mortal women, that he has again found another
Danae, one of Zeus’s mortal lovers whom he seduced by turning into a
shower of gold and falling through the roof of her chamber. Tormented
“by love” (ὑπὸ τοῦ ἔρωτος), Hera remarks, Zeus will assuredly turn into a
shower of gold and fall “into the lap of the beloved” (εἰς τὸν κόλπον τῆς
ἀγαπωμένης). When the author of John describes Jesus’s disciple reclining
in the lap during dinner as “the one whom Jesus loved” (ὃν ἠγάπα ὁ Ἰησοῦς),
this would be a legitimate way to say “loved erotically” and can be taken
to express romantic devotion in light of both the other textual clues in
the Johannine text and the newly collected evidence of lap holding in the
literature of the reclining banquet.
Jesus and the beloved would thus join many other pairs of teacher/
disciple lovers, including, as Richlin suggests, Fronto and his pupil Marcus.
Diogenes Laertius also records many such couples using the terminology
of eros; though drawing on earlier sources, his Lives of the Eminent Philosophers from the third century CE exemplifies the numerous stories about
philosophers and their beloved pupils circulating in later antiquity (which is
not to claim that they are historically reliable). Socrates is reported not only
“to have loved” Alcibiades but himself to have been his teacher Archelaus’s
“favorite” or “darling,” just as Eudoxus was Theomedon’s and the eunuch and tyrant Hermias Aristotle’s.113 Similarly, Xenophon is said “to
have loved” Clinias; Plato loved his disciples Aster, Dion, Phaedrus, and
Alexis; Xenocrates loved Polemo, his most industrious student; Polemo
loved Crates; and Arcesilaus loved Demetrius and Cleochares.114 Still more,
Crantor is said “to have been erotically disposed” toward his student
Arcesilaus; Theophrastus, toward Aristotle’s son Nicomachus, his student;
and Zeno, toward Chremonides. When once sitting by him, Zeno suddenly
stood, quipping that he needed to cure an inflammation.115 It is not a big
step from such stories to the Romans’ worry, which I have described above,
about protecting their citizen sons from predatory teachers. Such pairs also
are the target of Juvenal’s parody of effeminate philosophers whom Juvenal
accuses of desiring to play the passive role in sex with their students.

To claim “mutual romantic devotion” for Jesus and the beloved, therefore, is to invest their relationship with eros—with a longing and desire for
one another, for time together, and even for physical contact such as lap
holding. In the culture of the day, this distinguished their love from other
loves, and for these teacher/student pairs, it was eros that rendered the
pedagogical relationship most effective.

Finally, we must consider the dimension of Richlin’s “sentimental friendship” that proves the most controversial and elusive: the question of physical
expression. To be specific, Richlin writes of romantic devotion “but not
necessarily physical expression,” which wisely and carefully leaves the door
open for a physical relationship without necessitating it. So much is clear
from John’s text, where such expression takes the form of lap holding, an
erotically inflected posture, as I have shown. We are thus on stronger ground
in this regard with Jesus and the beloved than Richlin is with Marcus and
Fronto, who were writing letters and were thus physically separated.

What is really at issue in our analysis of physical expression is the question of sex. In his discussion of pederasty as an ancient sexual practice,
Halperin argues that couples whose characterization unfolds according to
this particular discursive model typically have sexual relations, as the case of
the trainer Demetrius exemplifies. But Halperin adds the caveat that this is
“mostly” the case. This is judicious in light of a figure like Plato’s Socrates,
who snuggles the entire night in the lap of Alcibiades but refrains from sex
despite Alcibiades’s invitation.116 Socrates’s abstinence and mastery over
sexual urges come under suspicion in later writers, who harbor doubts that
Socrates could have resisted. In this vein, Juvenal ridicules philosophers
and teachers, arguing that their supposed sexual abstention merely masks
their desire to be penetrated. On the other hand, Halperin distinguishes
pederasty, which is a hierarchical relationship between old and young or
teacher and student, from intense male friendship and love, which emphasize the equality, similarity, and mutuality of the intimate pair. Though
sentimental friendship allows for expressive passion and devotion, it by
no means necessarily entails sexual contact. Nonetheless, as the evidence I
have analyzed demonstrates and as Halperin recognizes, at the very least
intimate friendships open the friends up to having contemporaries interpret
their relationship in sexual terms. At the same time, Halperin argues, any
particular pair of intimate male friends may in some cases very well have
appealed to the prestige of intense friendship to cover up their sexual activities.