Does This 1994 Reference By Jacob Neusner Count as the First Reference to the Claim that Morton Smith Was Homosexual?

Announce that Jesus was precisely what the Gospels say he was—and still is—and even in churches some will yawn. But tell the world he was a homosexual magician, as the late Morton Smith did, and your day is made: you get to offend and insult those you wish to provoke, and to call yourself a great scholar at the same time. In no other field of study, whether claiming historical objectivity or glorying in utter subjectivity (as in current literary criticism) can solecism pass for scholarship, and out-and-out psychosis win a hearing as a new fact.

Certainly, in what must now be declared the forgery of the century, the very integrity of the quest for the historical Jesus was breached. The very quest met its defining disgrace by Morton Smith, whose "historical" results—Jesus was "really" a homosexual magician—depended upon a selective believing in whatever Smith thought was historical. Even at the time, some of us told Smith to his face that he was an upside down fundamentalist, believing anything bad anybody said about Jesus, but nothing good. And no one who so rebuked him objected to the campaigns of character assassination that Smith spent his remaining years conducting; there is a moment at which, after all, truth does matter, even if, in respect to Jesus, some imagine that it does not. Still, in defense of the question as Smith conducted it, the charge that each "biographer" of Jesus produces a Jesus in his own image is wide of the mark, since no one ever accused Smith of being a magician. [Jacob Neusner, "Who Needs the Historical Jesus?" an Essay-Review, Bulletin For Biblical Research 4 1994 p. 115, 116]