In the December 1993 issue of BR, fellow columnist Jacob Milgrom wrote about homosexuality in the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament (“Does the Bible Prohibit Homosexuality?”BR 09:06).a That column drew a heated response.b Because equally heated discussions of homosexuality and lesbianism are occurring in Christian circles (including my own denomination), I decided to devote this column to the New Testament and homosexuality.
I begin with the Old Testament background for two reasons. The authors of the New Testament had their roots in the Jewish tradition, and Christians regard the Old Testament as sacred, as part of their Bible. In the legal portion of the Hebrew Bible, homosexuality is prohibited by one verse (Leviticus 18:27), with the penalty (death) specified in a second verse (Leviticus 20:13). This prohibition (and penalty) is the only text about homosexuality in the Hebrew Bible to have the status of law.1
As Christians think about the significance of that law for today, we should realize that it is part of “the holiness code” (Leviticus 17–26), a collection of the laws of ancient Israel probably put into their present form in the sixth century B.C.E. This code contains many prohibitions that Christians generally set aside: to avoid eating certain foods (Leviticus 19:26); not to cut beards (Leviticus 19:27); not to cross-breed animals, or plant two kinds of seed in the same field, or wear garments made of two kinds of material (Leviticus 19:19).2
The point seems obvious: The prohibition of homosexual behavior (and the death penalty for violation) is embedded in an ancient legal code that Christians typically see as no longer in force. To put that differently, the burden of proof has shifted: Since we no longer feel constrained to heed this collection of laws, a case must be made for anyone of them, including the law on homosexuality.
To turn to the New Testament, three texts (all in letters written by or attributed to Paul) refer to homosexuality. Neither Jesus, the gospel-writers nor any other New Testament author mention it.
Two of the references are in “lists of vices,” or behaviors to be avoided (1 Corinthians 6:9–10 and 1 Timothy 1:9–10).3 Examples of behavior in the lists include fornication, idolatry, adultery greed, lying and perjury. The two lists also include arsenokoitai, the crucial Greek word for our purposes.
The word arsenokoitai means “men lying with men,” and is often translated as a comprehensive term for homosexual behavior.4 However, its meaning in the New Testament is probably more specific, referring in particular to pederasty, a sexual relationship between an adult male and a pubescent or pre-pubescent boy. Pederasty took many forms in the first-century Mediterranean, world, ranging from mentor-pupil relationships to prostitution of young boys, sometimes involving slavery and even castration for prolonging pre-pubescent characteristics.5 Most likely it is pederasty, not homosexuality in general, that is condemned in these lists of vices.6
The third and final New Testament text, Romans 1:26–27, is the best-known and most-often cited passage in Christian debates about homosexuality, and therefore will be treated at greater length:
“For this is reason God gave them [the Gentiles] up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.”
This text uses comprehensive language, and is apparently the only one to mention lesbian behavior. It is important, however, to see it in the context of the whole passage, Romans 1:18–32, where Paul speaks of the, disordering of creation brought about through the “primal sin” of idolatry (worshiping the creation rather than the creator).
In this context, there are two very different ways of reading this text. The first is the most obvious and familiar: Paul was against homosexuality, and saw it as part of the disordering of creation brought about by sin.
The second way of reading it is less familiar and takes longer to explain. The verses may be part of Paul’s “rhetorical strategy” in the context of his extended argument which runs from Romans 1:16 to 3:31. With all of Romans 1:18–32 (including verses 26–27), Paul repeats Jewish stereotypes of Gentiles in order to gain the good will of his Jewish-Christian readers (the rhetorical strategy is captatio benevolentiae capturing the good will of one’s audience).
From a Jewish point of view, Gentiles were notorious for their idolatry and impurity (with homosexuality seen as a purity issue). Having captured his audience’s good will by saying, in effect, “Those Gentiles sure are awful,” Paul can then proceed in Romans 2 to challenge a conviction that many in his audience held: the sense that 054Jews stood in a privileged relationship with God. On this interpretation.7 Romans 1:26–27, relating to the shameful acts of the Gentiles, should not be taken as “law,” but as part of a larger rhetorical strategy by which Paul addresses an early Christian community.8
Choosing between these two interpretations is difficult. The second has much to commend it, but the first could be correct: Paul may have seen homosexual and lesbian behavior as sinful and unacceptable.
This leads to the final point: Ultimately, there is a further question to be asked beyond “What does the Bible or the New Testament say about homosexuality?” This is a question about what the Bible is. Are we to understand it as the direct and permanent expression of God’s laws and rules of moral behavior? Or does the Hebrew Bible contain ancient Israel’s understanding of moral behavior, and the New Testament the early Christian movement’s understanding of moral behavior?
If one thinks of the Bible as the former—as the direct and permanent expression of God’s laws—then one will treat its rules (all of them?) as eternally binding on us. If the latter, then one can say, “This is what they thought then—what do we make of it now?” Thus, ultimately, the debate about Christian attitudes toward homosexuality is a struggle over the nature of Scripture itself.c
In the December 1993 issue of BR, fellow columnist Jacob Milgrom wrote about homosexuality in the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament (“Does the Bible Prohibit Homosexuality?” BR 09:06).a That column drew a heated response.b Because equally heated discussions of homosexuality and lesbianism are occurring in Christian circles (including my own denomination), I decided to devote this column to the New Testament and homosexuality. I begin with the Old Testament background for two reasons. The authors of the New Testament had their roots in the Jewish tradition, and Christians regard the Old Testament as sacred, as part of their Bible. […]
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Other passages in the Hebrew Bible are sometimes thought to refer to homosexuality. Older English translations (including the King James Version) used the word “sodomite” to translate the Hebrew noun qedeshim, which we now know meant something different, namely, “consecrated ones” (see Deuteronomy 23:17; 1 Kings 14:24, 15:12, 22:46; 2 Kings 23:7; and Milgrom’s comments in Readers Reply,BR 10:02). Sometimes the “sin of Sodom” is claimed to be homosexual behavior, but the Jewish tradition consistently understood the sin of Sodom as inhospitality.
2.
Milgrom argues (BR, December 1993) that the prohibition of homosexuality in Leviticus 18:22 applied only to Jewish males, and not to Gentile males (unless living in Israel). Whatever one makes of this specific claim (and I am not competent to make a judgment about it), the more general point of the law code of ancient Israel that contained many particularities that Christian tradition has generally set aside.
3.
Though 1 Timothy is attributed to Paul, most mainstream scholars do not think it was written by Paul, but by a follower (or “corrector”?) of Paul writing two or three generations later in Paul’s name.
4.
The King James Version translates it as “abusers of themselves with mankind,” the New English Bible as “homosexual perversion” and the Revised Standard Version and New Revised Standard Version as “sodomites” and/or “male prostitutes.”
5.
Space limitations prevent citing the reasons it probably refers to pederasty. For details of the argument, see Robin Scroggs, The New Testament and Homosexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), esp. pp. 17–65 and 101–109. Scroggs’s book is the most helpful book-length study of homosexuality in the New Testament by a mainstream scholar. L. William Countryman’s study of sexual ethics in the Bible, Dirt, Greed and Sex (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988), is equally important, though it treats matters in addition to homosexuality.
6.
In 1 Timothy 1:9–10, arsenokoitai is grouped with two other Greek words, pornoi (often translated variously as “immoral persons” or “fornicators”) and andropodistai (translated variously as “menstealers,” “kidnappers” or “slave traders”). Scroggs, pp. 118–121, makes the interesting argument that the three terms should be taken together and translated as “male prostitutes, males who lie with them, and slavedealers who procure them.” If so, the reference is not to homosexuality in general, but to a particular form of it.
7.
For this argument, see Countryman’s Dirt, Greed and Sex, esp. pp. 120–123.
8.
Moreover, given that Paul treats homosexuality as a purity issue in Romans 1, Paul’s own attitude toward purity becomes crucial. It is most clearly expressed later in Romans: “I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean/impure in itself” (Romans 14:14). For my own treatment of homosexuality as a purity issue and the subversion of the purity system by Jesus and the early Christian movement, see chapter three of Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (Harper San Francisco, 1994), esp. pp. 50–59.
