“Jesus was intimate with men and women,” a biblical scholar told his audience at Harvard-Epworth United Methodist Church, a stone’s throw from the final resting places of Harvard’s early Puritan presidents.

Peter Larose was hosting the first in a series of five discussions on the Bible and the ethics of sexuality at the church adjacent to Harvard Law School.

“The ancients had no way of understanding human sexuality the way we understand it,” he told the audience of 10.

“This is where science was 200 years ago,” he said, pointing at a picture of a tiny man inside a sperm cell.

He argued that the Bible should not be interpreted verbatim, giving the example of levirate marriage, under which a man is compelled to marry his dead brother’s widow.

Larose said homosexuals have been singled out and discriminated against on the basis of biblical texts deliberately used out of context.

“There’s nothing that gay people do that heterosexuals cannot mimic,” he concluded.

The workshop was organized by the Boston-Cambridge Ministry in Higher Education, a Protestant group that sponsors the chaplaincy of Harvard’s Rev. Carolyn Dittes.

“I’m excited that we are affirming that it can be good to be both gay and Christian,” said Dittes, who attended yesterday’s event.

The series will continue over the next four Tuesdays, covering issues such as Sodom and Jesus’s sexuality.