Martinus: Livets Bog, vol. 5, sect. 1721

1721. One has thus been able to establish that the Lord Jesus Christ differed from other men in that he neither desired women nor aspired to marry, and therefore did not become jealous either. His love was not based on a particular sex. Is not the apostle John described in the Bible as "he, whom Jesus loved"? For Jesus, loving a being of one's own sex was thus not a sin. Was it not precisely Peter's love for Jesus that made the master call him "Peter", which means "rock"? Was it not after Peter had answered the master's urgent, thrice-repeated question, "Simon, son of Jonah, lovest thou me more than these?" that Peter assured him of his love just as many times by answering, "Lord, thou knowest all things. Thou knowest that I am fond of thee"? But being fond of someone is of course the same as feeling affection for them. Feeling affection for them is in turn the same as loving them. Thus Peter loved Jesus. This love was neither ordinary politeness nor a kind of "good breeding" nor acquired "etiquette" with which one can camouflage one's otherwise uncultivated nature. It was truly an organic love on the scale of "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself". Here it was not a matter of a specifically male or female sympathy based on the organs of one pole. Jesus did not say that you should love the opposite sex as yourself, but, on the contrary, he said expressly that you should love your neighbour in this elevated way. For him this neighbour, that is so say male beings as well as female beings, was in reality a kind of "opposite sex". This "opposite sex" was simply the living being in the form of anyone who happened to enter his sensory sphere or sphere of perception. It had to be any living being whatsoever that in a given situation in the most literal sense was closest to him in both time and space, regardless of kinship, race, position, level or spirit. It was truly a divine love, a mentality in "God's image", an attitude that was worthy of a godhead. No wonder that the masculine, one-poled ecclesiastical authorities could later perceive this being and his strange and incomprehensible loving attitude as something that lay beyond all terrestrial human competence and behaviour, something that could be accomplished only by a godhead or a being that was a direct son of the Godhead.