the beloved disciple......

ok, so today's sunday school lesson dealt with john chapter 21 verses 1-19....a passage that includes the following 'that disciple whom jesus loved said to peter, it is the lord...' we had quite a discussion about the disciple that jesus loved.......john is the only gospel writer that mentions this unnamed person.......most notably in chapter 21 when peter asks jesus about his relationship with the beloved disciple and jesus tells him to mind his own business........on-line references were varied........there is a gay christian website named the beloved disciple.....this option had already occured to me........how do we know that jesus was heterosexual.........we don't..............there was a web mention of the beloved being john the guy who wrote the gospel......kind of like......jesus loved me best.........and then there was the mary magdeline theory.....some guy from egypt identified mary as the beloved in the second century.......of course, i like the mary magdeline theory.....why couldn't jesus' beloved be a woman?...........this really makes sense in davinci code terms.......peter took over the church, and peter black-washed mary as a prostitute or worse.......some jealousies run deeper than faith...........anyway, there was a person in my sunday school class, raised catholic but now southern baptist, who took great umbrage at this notion...............she even admitted that she was having a hard time finishing the davinci code because she could not get by the 'fiction' ............at the very least, the gospels are themselves fictions..........personally edited accounts that leave in and leave out details based on an agenda of some sort..........for us to say that the gospels are the truth, without taking this reality into account is simple-minded............does that mean that i lack faith.....not at all, in the same way that martin luther did not lack faith when he had the courage to go up against the catholic church over ethical issues.............oh my......at this late date i am so amazed to find that there are people who take everybit of information that comes along as 'gospel' and do not feel empowered to question any of it...........