Mike’s Response to the “Standard Seven” Biblical Texts Cited to “Prove” the Immorality of Homosexuality or Homosexual Acts
A word about translations. It is unfortunate that, despite the great beauty of its language and the weight of traditional usage behind it, the King James Version (KJV) continues to be among the most familiar and most frequently cited translations of the Bible into English. The beauty of its language cannot compensate for the generally poor quality of the texts from which it was translated, the scholarship with which that translation was undertaken, or the fact that the majority of people reading it today really do not understand the idiom in which it was written.
The shoddy scholarship behind the KJV is especially troubling when it comes to the question of homosexuality in Scripture, as the translators of the KJV were quite fond of rendering the Hebrew term qadesh, which basically means something dedicated, bound, or set aside (frequently with the connotation of binding or dedication to a deity, and frequently to a deity that is not Yahweh), as “sodomite” (e.g., Deuteronomy 23:18; II Kings 14:24; 23:7 — IV Kings in the Septuagint). As reference to either the Septuagint (the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek which was begun around 200 years before the birth of Christ) or any of the modern translations will show, these references are almost always better translated as “prostitute,” “temple prostitute,” “initiate into the mysteries,” etc.
That said, there remain seven passages in Scripture which are typically cited to “prove” the immorality of homosexuality or homosexual acts. In order of their occurrence, these texts are:
Probably the most frequently referred to of these seven passages, it is also probably the most seriously misinterpreted.
To begin with, it is self-evident from Gen. 18:20-21, “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great, and their sin is so grave, that I shall go down and see whether or not their actions are at all as the outcry reaching me would suggest,” that God had already planned to do something about the cities even before the arrival of the angels on the scene. That this “something” was the cities’ destruction is suggested by the bargaining session with Abraham which follows the cited passage. So, reprehensible though the citizens’ actions toward the angels might be, it seems fairly obvious that those actions were not the primary cause of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Secondly, as the parallel story of the outrage at Gibeah (Judges 19) demonstrates, those reprehensible actions on the part of the citizens of Sodom were quite clearly attempted rape and humiliation. These are crimes of violence and inhospitality, and are only tangentially at best related to sexual acts — and they are in any case not at all on a par with consensual sexual relations between willing adults.
Both the classical prophets and the majority of later Jewish tradition (e.g., Ezekiel 16:49-50, Sirach [Ecclesiasticus] 16:8), and Jesus himself (e.g., Matt. 10:15, Luke 10:12) equate the sin of Sodom with pride, inhospitality, gluttony, failure to help the widow and the orphan, or an inability (or unwillingness) to heed God’s word. Nothing even remotely sexual is either stated or implied. The sexual connotation of the Sodom story was not developed until almost the time of Jesus — long after the events in the story allegedly took place, and despite centuries of consistent scholarship and tradition which maintained otherwise — and Jesus himself seems to agree with the earlier tradition on the matter in his recorded discourse on the subject of Sodom and her sins.
Some, including Boswell, have argued against translating the Hebrew verb yadha in this passage as “to have intercourse with,” citing the rarity of its use in that fashion elsewhere in the Hebrew Scriptures, where more than 90% of the occurrences of this verb cannot be translated with the connotations of sexual intercourse. I find this argument unpersuasive, because the second time this verb is used in the Sodom story, when Lot offers his virgin daughters to the mob as a bribe to prevent them from misusing his guests, the Hebrew original reads “who have not known man” and uses the verb yadha in an explicitly sexual context. If it is used once in that fashion, it seems a little bit far-fetched to me to suppose that it should not have the same connotation only a few verses earlier in the same story.
Thus it would seem that the “sodomites” who need to worry about divine retribution are not necessarily those persons who are sexually attracted to others of their own gender, but rather those who despoil the poor and downtrodden, and then gorge themselves on their ill-gotten gains. That description covers a lot of ground, and most of it in the heterosexual camp, it seems to me.
These two passages have the distinction of being the only places in the entire Bible where homosexual acts are explicitly mentioned. Yet before the onset of general rejoicing and the rush to conclude that the passages represent a “sure thing” for proving the immorality of homosexuality or homosexual conduct, there are some obstacles to be overcome.
To begin with, there is the meaning of the Hebrew word toevah, usually translated along the lines of “abomination.” The Greek of the Septuagint is bdelygma, also typically translated as “abomination” or “loathsome” or “horrifying.” But neither the Hebrew nor the Greek term appears to carry any connotations of intrinsic evil — merely intense dislike. Indeed, since bdelygma appears to be related to the Greek word for “leech” (bdella), it is not hard to imagine how the term came to have that meaning. Jonathan J. Oriole comes to a similar conclusion is his detailed and nuanced discussion of the meaning of these two verses of the Holiness Code for observant Jews, “Homosexuality and Its Role in Judaism.”
Furthermore, as Boswell points out, toevah in the Hebrew Scriptures usually denotes something that is ritually unclean for the Jews, but not necessarily intrinsically evil (a connotation that is also found in the Greek terms used in the Septuagint). It is often used as a specific for “idol,” and frequently as part of the stock phrase toevah ha-goyim, “the uncleanness of the Gentiles.” It is thus difficult to escape the supposition that male-male sexual intercourse was condemned more for its frequency among the Gentiles and its long-standing associations with cultic prostitution than because it was considered intrinsically evil.
This supposition is further strengthened by the growing scholarly consensus that the “Holiness Code” was not originally part of Leviticus, but was added to the book after the Jews were returned to Israel following the Babylonian Exile. This period in Jewish history was characterised equally by an intense nationalism and a vehement dislike of anything and everything foreign, possibly nurtured by a deep-seated suspicion that those same foreigners and foreign ways which had been making inroads into Jewish culture (and in particular non-Jewish religious practices, which are attested throughout both the historical books and the classical prophets) were in some way responsible for the loss of divine favour that was believed to have made the Exile possible.
There is also the fact that, for Christians at least, virtually none of the other Levitical strictures is still observed today. We regularly violate the prohibitions against eating blood that comprise the whole of Leviticus 17 (when was the last time you purchased kosher meat? how about that rare steak you had for supper the other night?), the complex regulations about contracting impurity from a menstruating woman (Lev. 15:16-30), the prohibition against wearing clothes woven from two different fabrics (Lev. 19:19 — think about it: how many of your clothes are 100% anything these days?), about men trimming their beards (Lev. 19:27) — the list goes on and on. Why, then, should Christians be concerned about this particular requirement for ritual purity when we feel perfectly free to ignore others that are even more strongly stated and more frequently repeated?
Finally, where Christians are concerned, we have it on the authority of St. Paul that “no flesh-and-blood [creature] will be justified in God’s presence through the works of the Law, because all the Law does is to disclose what is sinful” (Rom. 3:20, my
translation). Moreover, as Christ (Matt. 22:40, 25:35-40; Mark 12:31b; Luke 10:28), Paul (Rom. 13:9-10, Gal. 5:14), and the Letter of James (2:8) state, the whole of the Law is summed up in
love of God and love of neighbour. If those issues are attended to, we need have no concern for the ritual precepts of the Mosaic code.
This passage is unique, as it is the only mention of lesbian sex anywhere in Scripture, the Leviticus passages I dealt with above only having concerned themselves with male sexual activities. That statistical consideration aside, Romans 1:26 and following is still problematic where the condemnation of homosexuality or homosexual activity is concerned.
It is problematic first of all because, as verses 23-24 clearly state, the behaviours in question represent a divine punishment for (or, at the very least, the “natural” consequences of) idolatry — which is not really a concern for a believing Christian, now is it? This passage once again demonstrates the perceived connection in the early church between idolatry and homosexual practices. It also displays a somewhat different aspect of those practices, something not found in any of the earlier texts we have examined: Paul states that the men, at least, “burned with desire for one another” (Rom. 1:27, my translation).
Yet it is this very verse, together with the prepositional phrase para physin — usually translated as “contrary to” or “against nature” — which precludes using this passage to condemn homosexual behaviour. Paying careful attention to root meanings of words, verb prefixes, and prepositions, I translate the Greek of verses 26-27 as follows:
For this reason, God gave them over to a state of dishonour: for their women exchanged the characteristic [or “usual”] practice for one that went beyond what was characteristic, and in the same way their men left behind their usual use of women and burned in their desire for one another, men really working to do what was uncharacteristic with [or “for”] men, and in return receiving in themselves the reward which their straying deserved.
First of all, while the language in this passage is definitely negative, it is neither overly condemnatory nor the typical vocabulary of sin and morals. It speaks of what is customary (or even “appropriate”), what is honourable, and what is characteristic — not of what is just, right, moral, or good (or unjust, wrong, immoral, or evil).
Secondly, it speaks both of “leaving behind” what is usual, normal, or possibly even “expected” (given that Paul again uses the expression para physin of God’s actions in saving the Gentiles at Rom. 11:24 — where “unnatural” would clearly be an inappropriate translation in context of an omnibenevolent God) for the individuals in question, and really having to work at doing that which is uncharacteristic. The verb Paul uses is katergazomai, “to achieve by labour”; if he had wanted to say “work” — which is how the word is often translated — he could simply have said ergazomai, but he chose instead to include the intensifying prefix kata. At least to me, that word choice suggests that Paul wanted to underline how difficult it was for these people to act in this way.
The prefix para is also important to a proper understanding of this passage. Usually translated “against” in context of these verses, its more usual meaning is “beside” or “beyond” — as we use it today in such expressions as “paranormal.” Paul is therefore not speaking of something completely foreign to the people he is describing, but merely something which goes beyond their everyday or usual experience.
It is important to understand, in looking at this passage, that the modern concept of homosexuality as a perduring (natural) state was millennia in the future at the time Paul wrote this letter. That concept of homosexuality, in fact, is only about a hundred years old. Prior to that time (and, in some cases, still today), it was taken for granted that the only “setting” on the “dial” of human sexual orientation was “heterosexual” — so even if this passage is interpreted as condemnatory of homosexual behaviour, that condemnation is rooted in an understanding of the human condition that is both outdated and
seriously flawed. If we no longer base our understanding of the universe on the cosmology of Ptolemy that was current at the time of Paul’s writing, why should we base our understanding of human sexuality on the model then in use, especially when that model is
explicitly contradicted by virtually all of the research available to us today?
These passages are probably the second most often cited in the debate over the morality of homosexuality. Unfortunately, one cannot lay the blame for that fact entirely with the translators of the King James Version, as most of the modern editions of Scripture still insist on using — improperly — the words “homosexuals,” “sodomites,” or “perversion” in their translations.
I treat these two passages together, even though they occur in two different books of the Bible, because they are very similar in both structure and vocabulary. Indeed, the I Timothy passage (which most modern scholars agree was not written by Paul) is probably a quotation of the I Corinthians passage.
There are two terms in I Corinthians that are usually translated as “homosexuals” (or, as in the New English Bible, lumped together into the bastardised phrase “homosexual perversion”) — malakoi and arsenokoitai. Only the latter term is found in the I Timothy passage.
Malakoi is a perfectly normal Greek word (I have evidence for some 8,000 occurrences in surviving Greek literature), and its root meaning is “soft.” The immediate assumption in most translators’ minds seems to be that “soft” equals “effeminate” and “effeminate,” as we all know, can only mean “gay.” Wrong answer, thankyouforplaying!
As Boswell notes, there are an awful lot of people called malakoi in classical literature, for an awful lot of different reasons, and very few of those reasons seem to have anything to do with sexual behaviour. So the burden of proof must fall on anyone who wants to link malakos with gay people — and I’m still waiting for any kind of convincing evidence, much less conclusive proof.
Malakos was used, on the other hand, as early as Aristotle (some 400 years before I Corinthians was written), to denote a generalised sort of moral weakness (one might even say “weakness of character,” to borrow a phrase from the current political campaigns here in America). It also has the connotation of physical weakness, sickness, or disease throughout the Septuagint. However, given that in the context of the I Corinthians passage the word is sandwiched in between two others of undeniable sexual connotation, I think some of that contextual shading should be felt in its translation, and so I suggest “the [sexually] promiscuous,” which encompasses both the established meaning of moral or character weakness and the sexual context in which the word is used.
Arsenokoitai is another kettle of fish entirely, as I Corinthians represents the first genuine and reliably datable usage of the word in surviving Greek literature. There is therefore no historical background on which to draw for help in determining its meaning, and not much other context either, as the word occurs a grand total of 50 times in more than a thousand years’ worth of recorded writings.
Further complicating the problem is that, apart from the two occurrences in the Christian Scriptures and one in the so-called “Sibylline Books,” a late Jewish or Christian fraud purporting to be a pagan work, slightly more than half of the remaining occurrences of arsenokoitai are found either in direct quotations or paraphrases of one or the other passages from the Christian Scriptures, and so offer no more illumination as to its meaning than the originals themselves. Fourteen of the remaining 20 occurrences of the term are in lists of behaviours that are considered immoral but which again provide no additional context for determining exactly what kind of behaviour is meant.
All of the remaining six occurrences of the term involve sex in some way (which I would expect, both from the company it keeps in the I Corinthians passage and the fact that the word itself is a hybrid of the terms arsen, “male” or “masculine”, and koitazo “to bed” or “to fuck”: it’s the precise relationship between the men and the fucking that causes honest translators to rip their hair out), and do not, of course, always agree with each other.
Without going into exhaustive detail (I hope someday to publish a paper which will lay out my reasoning in full), I propose translating arsenokoitai in I Corinthians and I Timothy as “cultic prostitutes” for the following (briefly denoted) reasons:
Ergo, given that what unanimity there is in these uses of arsenokoitai all seems to point toward prostitution or rape, and some additional structural evidence that I develop further in my planned paper, the translation “cultic prostitutes” seems most appropriate.
I suspect that the only reason this passage gets cited in the debate over homosexuality at all is because it mentions Sodom and Gomorrah in the same verse as the verb ekporneuo, “to go screwing around,” “to go a-whoring” — or, as is often the case with compounds of porne in Scripture, “to commit spiritual prostitution” (that is to say, idolatry). Put Sodom and screwing in the same verse, and you’ve got to be talking about gay people, right?
Wrong. The verse, in pretty bad Greek, reads:
Just as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities around them, went whoring in the same manner and went after a different [or “strange”] flesh, they lie before [us as an] example, suffering the penalty of eternal fire.
It is the phrase sarkos heteras that causes all the problems. The Greek adjective heteros (as in “heterosexual”) means “different” or “other.” I should think it just a bit queer (pun intended) for anyone to think it could possibly be used to refer to sexual relations between two people of the same gender, but people do continue trying to use it in just that way.
As all reputable modern commentators note, however, the import of the phrase is not to imply that the men of Sodom went looking for a “different” kind of thrill, but that human beings were attempting to have sexual congress (well, actually, to rape, but that problem for another discussion) with angels — a different sarx, or order, of creation. Even more interesting (and more damaging to the arguments of those attempting to put a homosexual spin on this passage), the Testament of the 12 Patriarchs, which seems to be the source of the legend to which Jude refers, states that it was the women of Sodom, not the men, who lusted after the angels and so transgressed the “natural order” of things.
For another good look at most of these passages, check out this page. (And thanks to NTodd over at Dohiyi Mir for pointing me toward it.)
A visitor to this page sent me an e-mail that said, in essence, “Well you’ve made some good points, but the Pope still has the power to determine who gets into heaven, right?” I hadn’t actually thought about that angle before. There are two passages in Matthew’s Gospel (16:19 and 18:18) that Catholics believe give the Pope or the Church the authority to condemn and to forgive sins. (The 16:19 reference uses a singular verb form, obviously referring to Peter; the passage at 18:18, however, uses plural verb forms, and must therefore refer to the disciples as a whole or, by extension, the Church.)
This grant of authority is not, however, absolute — even though the verse says “whatever you bind on earth will be held bound in heaven.” It would be ludicrous to think that this verse could be claimed as authority, for example, to declare — in contravention of Scripture — that hating one’s brother or sister was acceptable behaviour for a Christian. Nor could it be used to insist that Catholics worship the Adversary.
Clearly, then, both the Pope and the Church must be guided by the mind and will of Christ, as that mind and will are made clear in Scripture and in the Tradition. However, as Richard McBrien observed in March 1996 at the Great Lakes Pastoral Ministry Gathering, “Tradition is not a fact factory.” If there is nothing in Scripture to condemn homosexuality or homosexual relations, then we cannot use Tradition to manufacture evidence for such a condemnation. I believe I have demonstrated above that there is no evidence in Scripture for such a condemnation. That being the case, there can then be no grounds for any other condemnation of either homosexuality or homosexual behaviour which is not otherwise immoral.
That is not to say that gay people are therefore free to conduct their lives and their sexual relationships in any way they may choose — that would also clearly be in contradiction of the Scriptures — but it does at least appear to mean that there is no foundation for automatically assuming that gay people and what they do are ipso facto immoral, “intrinsically disordered” or otherwise in a bad odour with God.
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