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The Christian Bible and the Homosexual

The Bible does not speak of gays. Nor does it speak of the earth orbiting the sun. Sexual identity was not a concept of biblical times.

It speaks of homosexual acts only when they are part of sacred prostitution, idolatry, promiscuity, seducing children, rape, or violating hospitality. It condemns all such acts, whether heterosexual, homosexual, or having nothing to do with sex.

Of the thousands and hundreds of words, pages, stories, laws, and commandments in the Bible, very few deal with homosexual acts. A little study of history reveals these references are fewer than we have come to believe.

- The Sodom Story -

Probably no story in the Bible has been used more to persecute homosexuals than the story of Sodom. By the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas had come to see all disasters of any kind as God's wrath at homosexual sin. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, collapsing buildings, runaway horses, women falling into ditches - all these and more were understood to be expressions of God's displeasure at "the wickedness of Sodom."

Yet in Old Testament times we never find references to the destruction of Sodom being equated with homosexual acts. For these references we must look to the last centuries before Christ.

In the two centuries before Christ, the Hebrews became better acquainted with the Hellenistic world as they traveled, traded, and settled in Asia Minor, Greece and Rome. Heterosexual and homosexual acts were traditional expressions of fertility worship in the Hellenistic world. Having been raised under the Holiness Laws, the Hebrews found these practices offensive. Among the Hebrew's reaction to these worship practices we find the first texts equating homosexual acts with Sodom. There are also references to the iniquity of sexual acts between Hebrews and Gentiles ("your union shall be like unto Sodom and Gomorrah" [footnote 1]) and between angels and humans. The references to homosexual acts usually were concerned with the practice of sex with youths, which was popular in Greece as an expression of appreciating beauty.

By 50 AD we find the first time the sin of Sodom is associated with homosexual acts in general. In the Quaest. et Salut. in Genesis IV.31-37, Philo interpreted the Genesis word yãdhà as "servile, lawless and unseemly pederasty." Around 96 AD, Josephus first used the term sodomy to mean homosexual acts. From Antiquities: "They hated strangers, and abused themselves with Sodomitical practices."

Since Old Testament times did not equate the Sodom story with homosexual acts, what was the crime of Sodom - a crime worth the destruction of five thriving, wealthy cities on the fertile plains?

The crime was pride. And it was inhospitality.

We have to remember the Hebrews were a nomad people in a dry, hostile environment. Weather and suspicious neighbors made hospitality a matter of survival. Being welcomed in a stranger's home or tent could mean the difference between life and death.

Throughout the Old Testament, Sodom is held up as a lesson in wickedness that deserves utter destruction for reasons other than homosexual acts. Examples: Ezekiel 16:49 - 50, "Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. And they were haughty, and committed abomination before me: therefore I took them away as I saw good." Isaiah tells of lack of justice. Jeremiah emphasizes moral and ethical laxity. The Deuterocanonical books identify the sin as pride and inhospitality; in Wisdom 19:13-14, we read "...whereas the men of Sodom received not the strangers when they came among them." In Ecclesiasticus 16:8 the sin is recognized as pride: "He did not spare the people among whom Lot was living, whom he detested for their pride."

In the New Testament, too, there is reference to Sodom and inhospitality: In Luke 10:10-13, Christ talks about cities that are inhospitable to his disciples. He warns: "...it shall be more tolerable in that day for Sodom, than for that city." It's not until the very late books of 2 Peter (2:4) and Jude (6), that sex is considered a sin of Sodom. These books were written several generations after the deaths of the apostles and were talking about the transgression of the natural order of life when angelic and human beings have heterosexual relations - a major concern to the popular Stoic philosophy of the time.

Not only are there no references to homosexual acts when Scripture refers to Sodom, there are no references to Sodom when the Scriptures refer to homosexuality. There are several biblical passages we've come to understand as condemning homosexual acts. Not one of these gives Sodom as an example of the result of homosexual behavior. Considering how often Sodom was used as an example of the result of wicked behavior, it's apparent that biblical times did not see homosexual acts as the important lesson of the destruction of Sodom.

How did the lesson of Sodom become so identified with homosexual acts that the very word for one of those acts became Sodomy? The answer is in the Hebrew word: yãdhà.

Yãdhà has two meanings: "to know" and "engage in coitus." Of 943 times yãdhà is used in the Old Testament, only ten times is it used to mean sexual intercourse, and all of these are heterosexual coitus. The Old Testament uses the word shãkhabh to mean homosexual acts and bestiality.

Lot was a resident alien in Sodom. When Lot invited strangers into his home, the townspeople approached Lot and demanded "Bring them out unto us, that we may know them (yãdhà)." Judging from the biblical references we've just discussed, it seems the townspeople were asking to get to know the credentials and intentions of strangers in their city.

The absolute sacredness of a guest was a principle well known to Lot. Lot also understood the way crowds give in to hostile acts against outsiders (see Judges 19:1- 21:25 for a similar tale of hostility to strangers.) So he protected his guests and refused to hand them over to the crowd. When the crowd insisted, he offered his two daughters as the most expedient diversion for a hostile situation [footnote 2].

For 2,000 years, until the last century before Christ, Israel understood the lesson of Sodom to be one of pride and hospitality.

- The Holiness Code and the Legal Code -

The Yahwist and Priestly authors tell of Moses giving the Holiness Code in Leviticus. They further credit the Legal Code in Deuteronomy to Moses, although these texts were found centuries later. Scholars generally agree that crediting Moses with delivering the laws of Deuteronomy was an attempt to make the Legal Code legitimate.

As the Hebrews settled Canaan, their leaders worked to keep the identity of Israel separate from that of the Canaanites. A principle way to do that was to emphasize the Canaanites' practice of idolatry. The Yahwist and Priestly authors of Genesis, Leviticus and Deuteronomy equated sacred prostitution (an important part of Canaan's worship of fertility [footnote 3]) with idolatry. Prostitution - and any sex act not contributing to procreation - came to be equated with idolatry. When the Old Testament mentions homosexual acts it is usually in the context of male worshipers using male prostitutes in temples.

In Deuteronomy 23:17 we find the main concern of the Hebrews toward homosexual acts: "None of the Israelite women shall become a temple-prostitute, nor shall any of the Israelite men become a temple-prostitute. You shall never bring the gains of a harlot or the earnings of a male prostitute as a votive offering to the temple of the Lord your God; for both are abominable to the Lord your God." In Leviticus 18:22, 20:13 the Holiness Code establishes the association of homosexual acts and idolatry. It specifically bans practicing the Canaanites' worship customs.

The concern with idolatry was not the only cultural or historical consideration of the Hebrews when dealing with homosexuality:

1. According to Genesis, God chose the Hebrews as his children. Eternal life with God was something God's people did, not something each person did themselves. To be a part of God's eternal covenant required marriage and bearing children. To be sterile, or to not bear children for any reason, was one of the greatest curses a Hebrew male could suffer. It cut him off from the covenant of God.
   
   
2. The Hebrews were a small tribe surrounded by big and powerful neighbors. There was a desperate need to be sure every seed became a member of the tribe. To "cast your seed on fallow ground" was a serious crime, whether that casting be outside of the tribe or in nonreproductive sexual acts.
   
   
3. The concept of the absolute dignity of the male was central to Hebrew values. In nomad societies, where life is hard and the tribe must always move with the needs of the herds, the male is always revered for his aggressiveness and dominance. These qualities are needed for protection and survival. The gods of these societies are always male, while agricultural, settled societies often have female as well as male gods. Also, the Hebrews understood procreation as being purely the doing of the male. The visible semen was the entire baby - the fertile seed. Females were understood only as incubators for this seed [footnote 4].
   
   The absolute dignity of the male was revered by the Hebrews, even to the extent that virgin daughters were offered when that dignity might be threatened. The homosexual act of anal intercourse was an affront to this dignity, undermining the Hebrews' patriarchal society.
   
   
4. In biblical times, anal intercourse was used as an act of contempt, domination, and scorn. The Egyptians used sodomy on their beaten enemy to demonstrate domination. There were stories of Egyptian gods using sodomy to demonstrate that they had the right to the inheritance of other male gods [footnote 5]. Homosexual acts outside the temple were seen only as violations of the sacredness of the guest: acts of violence and inhospitality to others.

- The Letters of Paul -

The New Testament has three main references to homosexual acts. These references are not found in the disciples' accounts of Christ's teachings. Rather they are found in the letters of an early convert. Paul sent these letters to early Christian communities: the Romans, the Corinthians, and to Timothy. Paul's philosophy, his reaction to foreign culture, and his understanding of Jewish history all influenced these letters.

The disciples were mostly simple fishermen. But Paul was highly educated, especially in philosophy. Stoicism was a popular philosophy in the first century AD and Paul was one of its avid teachers.

"Reason" was the soul of the Stoic world. God was seen as logos (reason) spread through the heavens. Nature was not instinct, but reason expressed in biology. To "live according to nature" (meaning reason) was to become united with the divine. Whatever distracted from living the reasonable life was evil: the passions of pleasure, pity, sorrow, desire, and love were irrational and, therefore, unnatural. Affectionate and sexual relationships were "unnatural" because they bred passions.

Some results of Christian Stoicism were: Monks separated themselves from society to achieve the ideal state of emotional indifference. The male became the soul (natural reason) of heterosexual relationships while the female became the body (unnatural passion). The Eve story became symbolic of temptation and lust. Females were seen as mutilated males, this "accident" often caused by warm winds blowing at the time of planting the seed. Christian philosophers declared that Christians entered marriage only for the reason of having children. St. Augustine came to identify any sexual pleasure or attraction as sinful passion, saying the "normal exercise of the will" would have the husband lie calmly on his wife and procreation would occur without disturbing the hymen; the semen would enter through it the same way menstrual blood flows from a virgin [footnote 6].

This is the same Stoicism Paul was teaching when he wrote letters to early Christian communities.

Culturally, Paul was raised a conservative Jew in Palestine. The society he had been raised in was shaped by the Holiness Laws and he did not understand much of the worship of the Hellenists. When he traveled to Asia Minor, Greece and Rome as a Christian, he reacted to the foreign cultures with shock and contempt.

Paul's understanding of Jewish history was shaped by the teachings of Hebrews who themselves were reacting to Hellenistic society. As we've seen when considering the Sodom story, about 300 years before Paul's letters the Hebrews were giving new meaning to traditional stories. Paul took these new meanings as tradition.

Paul's letters consider homosexual acts to be the result of idolatry, reasoning that only when abandoning the true god for idol worship could a person abandon what Paul considered sexual "nature." His main concern was idolatry, not the sexual acts.

Considering Paul's Stoic philosophy, his shock at Gentile worship practices, and his understanding of idolatry, it's surprising he condemned homosexual acts in so few of his many letters to Christian communities - and only in brief passages.

Even then, Paul's use of Greek makes his messages very confusing. In fact, one test of whether a passage was truly written by Paul is whether the Greek is used in confusing ways.

In 1 Corinthians 6:9, he used malakoi, which literally means "soft" and was used in moral contexts for "loose" and "lacking self control." In 1 Corinthians 6:9 and in 1 Timothy 1:10, he used arsenokoitai, which was the first time the plural noun had been used.

In Romans 1:26, Paul called homosexual activity para phusin. The English translation is usually: "against nature." But Paul's understanding of "nature" was based on Stoic philosophy, and is not the understanding we have today. To Stoics, "nature" was reason. Paul always associated the word "nature" with cultural heritage and religious teachings. In Galatians, Romans, and Ephesians he refers to Jews being Jews by nature, Gentiles being uncircumcised by nature, and all of us being children of wrath by nature. Paul saw nature as a condition of social training in 1 Corinthians, 11:14: "Does not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him?" When he uses para phusin, Paul seems to use a Stoic term based on "nature" in the place of the Old Testament word toevah. Toevah was the concept of what is not proper according to Jewish law and custom.

At the time of Paul's letters there were names for people who did homosexual acts (arrenomanes, kinaidos, paiderastes, paidophthoro, pallakos and others). Paul never used these words in his letters.

- Scripture and Homosexuality -

Considering these cultural and historical facts, it's surprising Scripture has so few references to homosexual acts. What's not surprising is that these references always condemn homosexual behavior.

But Scripture never condemns homosexual behavior by itself. It is condemned when practicing idolatry or sacred prostitution. It is condemned when promoting promiscuity. It is condemned when forcing violent rape or seducing children. And it is condemned when violating a guests' right to dignity as a male.

Also, Scriptural references only speak of homosexual acts - not homosexual people. Not until the Revised Standard Version of the Bible (revised from the King James version in 1885) do we find references to homosexuals themselves. These occur in translating the Greek words "malakoi" and "arsenokoitai" in Paul's letters.

Never is the issue of homosexual behavior between loving, homosexual partners addressed in Scripture. The reason is simple: biblical cultures did not have knowledge of homosexuality as a psychological identity. In biblical times homosexuality was known only by the acts people committed, not as a sexual personality. A person born heterosexual assumed homosexual acts to be something people did for dominance or in perversion of their inner identity.

Scripture and Homosexuality

- Scripture and Sexuality -

In the creation stories of Genesis we find two different reasons for sex.

The first reason is given in the writings of the Priestly tradition. In Genesis 1:27-28 we read: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it..." In this account, written about 550-500 BC, the purpose of sex is procreation, pure and simple. Mankind came forth male and female specifically for being fruitful and multiplying. The Old Testament's need for children (population and union with God) and Paul's letters teaching Stoic philosophy both rely on this reason for the creation of sex. And they rely on reserving sexual acts for this reason only.

The second reason was written by the Yahwist author. Here a male is formed of clay and placed in the garden of Eden. "And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an helper meet for him." (Genesis 2:18) In this account, sex is created for companionship and to cure loneliness. This account was written about 950 BC, so is much older than the Priestly tradition found in Genesis 1.

In biblical terms, then, we can accept our sexuality as either for the purpose of procreation or for the purpose of mutual love and fulfillment. Most of us, of course, have always been glad it provides us with both.

- Jesus and the Homosexual -

There is a different treatment of sexuality between the Old and New Testaments.

In the Old Testament, contact with God was passed through the blood of his chosen people. Marriage and children were the way the covenant with God was gained and passed on. The new covenant of Christ, however, was passed by a love even stronger than conjugal love - and much more fertile!

The New Testament also emphasized resurrection, which led to belief in personal immortality. Survival beyond the grave no longer was associated with bearing children.

Different sexual lifestyles entered the new covenant with God. Sexual abstinence and celibate communities became common expressions of Christian living.

In the Act of the Apostles, 8:26-39, we see the first time the Holy Spirit recruits members to the new covenant from the sexual outcasts of Israel. The Spirit leads Philip to encounter the Ethiopian eunuch, who is baptized into the Christian community. The Lucan author of this account is showing how the Holy Spirit formed the first Christian community. He emphasizes the fact that outcasts were included in the new covenant with God. First he tells of including the Samaritans. Then the Ethiopian eunuch was welcomed to the covenant.

The New Testament was written in Greek. At the time, Hebrew, Greek, and the translation between them used the term eunuch two ways: literally, meaning the castrated; and symbolically, meaning those who do not marry and/or bear children.

Jesus was the first to recognize sexual outcasts as worthy of God's kingdom. He and his disciples were discussing marriage and divorce in Matthew 19:12 when he said: "All men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given. For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother's womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it." [footnote 7]

This quote from Matthew is the closest biblical reference we have to our current understanding that homosexuality is a psychological identity, rather than just physical acts. For Christ to have known this in biblical times is a testament to his inspired understanding.

Jesus brought a new covenant with God, not only to the children of Israel but to all mankind. It is a covenant of loving your neighbor as yourself, and raising a joyful noise unto the Lord. The communities established by his disciples, who knew and quoted him, accepted all the outcasts of Israel and understood the Genesis account of sex as the gift of companionship as well as procreation.

This fulfills the prophecy of the Messiah. In Isaiah 56: 2-8, the eunuch is predicted to inherit a special place in the house of the Lord and the sons of strangers are predicted to take hold of the Lord's covenant. Verse 7 predicts: "Even them will I bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer: their burnt offerings and their sacrifices shall be accepted upon mine altar; for mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all people."

NOTES

[footnote 1] polemical addition to the Testament of Naphtali, 70-40 BC.
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[footnote 2] In telling of offering Lot's daughters, the Yahwist author of the Sodom story again uses the word yãdhà, this time specifically to mean heterosexual sex: "I have two daughters which have not known man (yãdhà); let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof."
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[footnote 3] In fact, sacred temple prostitutes were an important part of worship throughout the classical world, possibly including Mary Magdalene.
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[footnote 4] Only male homosexual acts are condemned in the Holiness Code: there is no mention of female homosexual acts.
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[footnote 5]] There is an argument that after the flood Noah's son Ham laid claim to Noah's ancestry of all men by dominating Noah through anal intercourse. This would explain the Israelis' conviction against homosexual acts. The story after the flood (Genesis 9:18-27) was rewritten and we may never know the Yahwist author's original account. Interestingly, the revised version gave Noah's curse for this act not to Ham, but his son Canaan - at a time when Israel's survival was mostly threatened by Canaanites.
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[footnote 6] By the time of Aquinas, Christian Stoicism had so completely identified sex with sin that nakedness - even when bathing - was known to damn the soul forever. Until the Reformation in the 1400's, Europe was known as "the Continent that didn't bathe for a thousand years ."
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[footnote 7] Jesus never spoke specifically of homosexual acts or relations. Scholars consider this quote one example of the New Testament use of eunuch to mean all sexual outcasts.
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Other notes:

NOTE: Biblical quotes are from the King James Version (translated in 1611) or The Complete Bible: An American Translation (1939).

For a much deeper understanding of the relationship between the Christian church and the homosexual, please read John J. McNeill's The Church and the Homosexual. (Beacon Press, 25 Beacon Street, Boston, MA 02108.) This Jesuit priest suffered at the hands of the Nazis when his infantry division was captured in 1944. With the same courage he has dedicated himself to awakening the church to the homosexual's contribution to Christian communities.

The vast majority of my understanding on this subject has come from The Church and the Homosexual, and I refer you to this book if you have any questions.

* © 1992 by Dean Worbois, Reproduction by any means, including photcopy, requires the expressed, written permssion of the author.

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