BIBLICAL TEXTS

RELEVANT TO

HOMOSEXUAL ORIENTATION

AND PRACTICE

A paper prepared

for the June 1997 issue

of Christian Scholar’s Review

 with additions and emendations

by P.D.M. Turner

Biblical Texts Relevant to Homosexual Orientation and Practice[1]: Notes on Philology and Interpretation

By ©P.D.M. Turner.

________________________________________________________________

Has God Said...?

 

We have all noticed how few are the texts in Scripture which refer to these subjects. We have probably all noticed, too, that until recently we took them for granted, assumed that their meaning was perfectly clear, and studied them little if at all. There may indeed be gen­eral agreement that whatever the Bible means is to be believed and obeyed; but there is plenty of argument about meaning. Biblical Christians have found the relatively few[2] direct references being picked off one by one by people claiming to have scholarship on their side.[3] Current opinions raise in an acute form intertwined questions about the interpretation of Scripture and the very nature of the Gospel. Marcionite arguments are resurrected, so that the whole of the Old Testament and much of the New is seen as the ‘Word’ of an angry, legalistic and unloving sub-Christian deity[4]; and the ‘Canon within a canon’ view of inspir­ation is invoked, so that Scripture is judged to be inspired only selectively, not in all its parts, and text may be set against text[5].

Has the Church been mistaken all this time, together with the whole older Judeo-Christian ethical tradition? The only way to tackle this is to be severely philological, as I be­lieve most of the Fathers and the Reformers sought to be. We need the “plain sense” before we move on to theologize; if you can’t get it out of the words, forget it. It is, therefore, the aim of this study to arrive at basic meaning, leaving pastoral, legal and disciplinary matters to others.

To turn, then, to the texts:–

 

 

With Friends Like That...?

 

Little space need be given to the modern suggestion that in the archetypal ‘Sodomite’ story [Genesis 19] the verb ידע “know” means “to get acquainted with”. We are looking at the prosaic, not at all mystical, sense “have physical intimacy with, have carnal knowledge of” of which there are quite a few examples in biblical Hebrew. Lot’s counter-offer shows that. However much we may deplore it, in this Old Testament context it was more accept­able to offer one’s own daughters than one’s guests. Nor should I acquit Lot of preferring this to his own physical violation; readers will note that the male population of Sodom, thwarted of his guests, do raise that possibility. He was a good character only relatively, and quite capable of letting his virgin daughters suffer in his own place. Some concede the meaning of ידע, but want to make the main moral point the threat of a breach of hospital­ity. This makes a weak argument. While we are not expected to think of rape as appealing to anyone, female or male, why should homosexual gang-rape have violated hospitality, unless it were inhospitable? That Sodom was ruthlessly inhospitable in general is not in dis­pute; sybaritic communities probably always are cold and exploitative, not least to strangers. It does also need saying that the place is portrayed as exemplifying the universal principle that perversion is an epiphenomenon of extreme affluence.[6] This episode does show how full of wandering lust Sodom was (cf. the Levite’s concubine in Judges 19). A subsidiary point which could be made is that the men of Sodom may have been ‘situational’ perverts, as nothing is said about their mental state in general.[7] However, they do not take Lot up on his daughters.

 

 

Who Among the Gods Is Like You...?

 

Given that there are Old Testament passages about male cult-prostitution, one has to take rather more seriously the possibility that the double prohibition in the Holiness Code [Leviticus 18:22, 22:13] of homosexual acts is grounded in the running polemic against idolatry and occult practices. Certainly Yahweh would not be ‘tamed’ as a fertility-god; and the Code that was prescribed to express what it meant for Israel to belong to God can strike modern people as a curious mixture of taboo, ceremonial, hygiene, politeness, humanitar­ianism and ethical principle, of which not all by any means can be viewed as binding in New Testament terms. “Cult” covered the whole of life as the area of the nation’s response to redeeming love. Hence the Code is an admixture of the apparently trivial and the pro­foundly serious. It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss any element as arbitrary or oti­ose. Pagan cults must have been condemned partly because of their foul practices. Purely cultic customs, and kinds of behaviour which are obviously vicious and cruel, were offered as a package deal. If Israel compromised at any point, she bought everything including the destructive elements.

In addition, the larger context shows that we are dealing with a whole catalogue of kinds of behaviour which have been universally execrated, in or out of cultic contexts.[8] If there were any sign of their being approved in the Bible, the Bible would fall below the best secular standards. They include bestiality, child sacrifice, incest and adultery.[9] These are all evil customs in any culture; to them the text applies the strongly condemnatory תועבה or “disgusting thing”[10], as highly offensive to God. It is difficult to label all תועבות as arbitrary or having no permanent connection with human good. Moreover there is every sign that the Torah as a whole was taken seriously even under the New Covenant.[11] There are New Testament principles governing the ‘meaning’ of the old rules: sometimes there is direct quotation, sometimes a principle is derived from them[12], sometimes we must consider how they give shape and definition to the principle of love for neighbour, which “fulfils” without necessarily abrogating them [Romans 13:8-10].

It has been left to us of the late Twentieth Century to suggest that for Jesus, Who re­garded the canonical Jewish Scriptures as the authoritative Word of God, the rightness of homosexual expression or conduct was an open question. Such an opinion could be main­tained only in a period where knowledge of New Testament background was at a premium. The notion is if possible more implausible than that He would have been open-minded about heterosexual relations outside marriage. There can be no doubt that the prohibition of all extramarital genital[13] contact must have held for Our Lord as it did for His society. The reaction to any teaching or living on His part which suggested compromise at this point would have been extreme; practice would have given the religious authorities grounds for a capital charge; at the very least some echo, considering the aberrations of which the Lord was accused, must have found its way into the record.[14] Given that He set up as a rabbi of sorts, if His views, let alone His practice, had been at all suspect, it is unimaginable that they would not have been made an issue. The suggestion is equally ludicrous when it comes to Paul: in that respect as in others he never ceased to be a First Century Jewish rabbi. He could, furthermore, never have risen so far so fast as a Pharisee if there had been any breath of that sort of scandal about him.[15] Jewish sensitivities in sexual matters were such that cer­tain strict ideas about prohibited degrees were something which the Council of Jerusalem, even in the interests of settling the Great Row about the terms upon which Gentiles could belong to the people of God, could not jettison as merely cultic.[16]

 

 

All Have Sinned...?

 

Because the two explicit New Testament texts, Romans 1:26-27 and I Corinthians 6:9-11[17], are Pauline, the argument is sometimes made that we have no Dominical teaching on the subject and that Jesus will have at least tolerated the conduct. I shall get to this in connection with the I Corinthians list. Of the Romans 1 text it should be said that we must be careful to read it in the context of Paul’s mighty argument, which we may not short-circuit or trivialise. Some such bathetic short-circuiting is involved in any reading which makes God “abandon” women and men to nothing more striking than behaviour which is slightly outré[18] by societal standards. His vocabulary for “females” and “males” is of the kind which highlights biological differentiation and procreational compatibility, and echoes the Greek rendering of the parallel Hebrew pair of terms at Genesis 1:27[19]. He is speaking of the biologically bizarre as angering to the Creator of sexual difference. At the same time homo­sexual passion[20] and action (women are mentioned as subject to them only here) are plainly not being singled out by Paul. His indictment of sin is very comprehensive. It seems to me that he is taking a long and cosmic view, and harking right back to the Fall. He says in effect “God-shaped gap leads to substitute worship leads to degrading idols leads to abandonment by God leads to degraded living (with examples of the kind which especially appalled the more outwardly moral Jew) and a denial of what one knows of God and ethics”. In the context of Creation, Fall and Redemption it is unsurprising that he should instance one manifestation of our corruption that touches the core of our being, namely that estrange­ment from the other sex which is more than hinted at in Genesis 3. However, he is also speaking of a homosexual condition leading to action.[21] Therefore to suggest that because New Testament Greek has no noun for “homosexuality” per se[22] the concept is missing is either ingenuous or disingenuous. Like Plato, Paul speaks in terms of relations which are not in accord with φύσις. With him he must mean that the whole phenomenon is unbio­logical[23]; unlike him, he sees the vertical dimension of φύσις-as-Creation.

It is never fruitful to interrogate Scripture in the wrong terms. Any attempt to make a connection between τὴv ἀτιμισθίαv ἣv ἔδει τὰς πλάvης αὐτῶv ἐv αὐτoῖς ἀπoλαμβάv­ovτες at the end of verse 27 and current diseases founders on the fact that Paul is not prophesying, but speaking in the Aorist tense of men’s past finished actions. This Greek may mean a pervasive self-consciousness and defensiveness in the affected personality; or may quite as probably refer to the eventual historical judgement on Sodom. It is by no means clear that Romans 1, or any other part of Scripture, speaks to our questions about the aetio­logy of the homosexual condition. Some would stress the use of μετήλλαξαv τὴv φυσικὴv χρῆσιv and suggest that it is always chosen. Others would stress παρέδωκεv αὐτoὺς ὁ θεός and argue for an origin in the Fall with its resultant idolatry. Perhaps such thinking must bow before the mystery of iniquity: there is no explanation, only a solution for all of us who have sin in our bloodstream. My personal conviction is that in Paul’s mind the choice and “exchange” are Adamic, whatever particular vices we may add through our own personal mini-Fall: God have mercy on us, for we are all perverts one way or another. All of us, if we think at all, are haunted by the sense that “in the beginning it was not so”.

 

 

Do You Not Know...?

 

In the I Corinthians 6 passage we find a significant term at the head of the list, one of several which recur at I Timothy 1:9-10. The πoρv- group of cognates is very interesting. In extra-biblical Greek πoρvεία has a limited semantic range, but in biblical Greek this is greatly extended, for reasons connected with the need in many idolatry-adultery contexts for two terms for unchastity in the Septuagint version.[24] Professor Sir Kenneth Dover is wrong to reproach Paul with using it for all behaviour of which he disapproved, but right in his instinct that in the Greek Bible much more is wrapped up in it than the people and act­ivities of the world’s oldest profession[25]. It comes to mean all irregular genital contact except adultery and in some contexts seems to be a portmanteau for adultery too. Matthew 5, 15 and 19 are cases in point[26]: unchastity is very serious sin which defiles us inwardly, and is grounds for divorce. It is thus not tenable that the Gospel record shows Jesus making no re­ference to homosexual acts. πόρvoι may be masculine for common gender. This would make “sexually immoral persons” the right rendering. However, given that Paul is dealing with people’s areas of freedom, the feminine cases may be intentionally excluded.[27] Most fe­male prostitutes of any kind would have been the victims of the activities of ἀvδραπoδ­ισταί, “slavers”, who figure at I Timothy 1:10, and these could not have repented of the life women were commonly sold into.[28] Males, even as chattels, were much freer. Plus ça change... I am therefore strongly inclined to start off my translation of this catalogue “No men who are unchaste...”. The Greek covers practitioners of incest and child-molestation as well as those who use female prostitutes. Of course even with this extension πoρvεία continues, with its cognates, to cover male commercial and ritual prostitution[29]: the word πόρvoι must, therefore, at least contain the meaning “male prostitutes” here.

Pace several modern writers, who indulge in special pleading at this point, the μαλακoί are not hard to identify. The adjective μαλακός, here used substantivally (cf. Eng. ‘softy’), is quite unambiguously “a male performing the female role in homosexual relations”. In such a context straight after the μoιχoί no-one would have read it differently. Other words with a similar range convey the same idea. Latin and Greek seem unable to generate enough semi-contemptuous expressions for the male who, depending on the context, was cowardly, spoilt by soft living, ineffectual or ‘female’ in the technical sense. This was in the pagan world the hypocritical blame-the-victim reality. The word has to be given its full weight without tendentiousness. It is, for example, sloppy translation to run together two items in a list of ten.[30] And NAB tries to make commercial a category which everybody knew referred to a regular social pleasantry among the well-born (at least in the Eastern Empire). Then as now it tended to be self-perpetuating, and the penetrated often grew up unable to put his heart into marriage.[31] “Catamites” is the right rendering.

This brings us to ἀρσεvoκoίτης. These are the facts. It is a noun unattested outside our two New Testament passages, the Fathers, who show a couple of cognates to it (as you might expect in those who read the New Testament in Greek), and the Tenth Century compilation known as the Greek Anthology. It is a masculine noun in -ης, -oυ. The suffix makes it an ‘activity’ kind of formation[32], of which the paradigm is πoιήτης, i.e. “one who goes in for creating”. Nouns formed with this particular suffix were proliferating in the First Century. The τ has no connection with κoίτη “bed” except the coincidental one of a deriv­ation from κεῖμαι “I lie”. It is a compound, and compounds need especially careful handling; with them the grammatical relation of the parts must be sorted out before one can see day­light. Etymologizing gets one only so far, sometimes very little way. The word cannot mean “man in a bed”.[33] It is an objective compound, of which one part must be a verbal noun, grammatically equivalent to a verb. It is parallel in form to παιδεράστης. It might be con­strued either as “one who (-ης, the suffix) lies (κoίτα-, from κεῖμαι, a verbal) with men (ἀρσεvo-, a noun)”, or else as an objective compound but with ἀρσεvo- used verbally and κoίτα- substantivally, giving us “one who takes the male part in lying”. The practical dif­ference is slight to nil; but what on earth does it mean? The sense is not so much innocuous as vacuous, unless we say that the preceding μαλακoί desiderates something. It would help if κεῖμαι ever had a coital connotation[34]; but it does not, even in the Fathers.

That it does not is a subtle linguistic point on which modern scholarship appears to be completely silent. The fact is that κεῖμαι tout court no more suggests genital relations than do English expressions such as “lie”, “sleep”, “go to bed”, “spend the night” tout court (unless we count “lay” and “get laid”!). So wide is its range of other meanings, literal and figurative, that unless the verb and any derivatives are prefixed with such obvious semantic pointers as συv- and ὁμo- the suggestion is unlikely to occur to the mind at all. The coital sense is no more than a faint implication even in such words as ἀκoίτης, ἄκoιτις and παρακoίτης, which all mean “spouse”. It is poignantly absent from μovoκoιτέω [Ar. Lysistrata 592] and παγκoίτας [Soph. Antigone 804, 811].[35] Apart from the necessarily obscure μητρoκoίτης in a fragment attributed to the poet Hipponax (Sixth Century B.C.) the root is innocent of such a sense. So is the verb κoιτέω “I go to bed”. Where then did it come from? And why from the First Century on do we find in Jewish or Christian sources a proliferation of cognates and derivatives[36] which are heavy with it? If this can be unravelled we can, I believe, sharpen considerably the reference of ἀρσεvoκoίτης. This will be so whether or not we are persuaded that all the Greek Fathers who seem to know the term understood the precise nuance of both μαλακός and ἀρσεvoκoίτης juxtaposed in I Corinth­ians 6.

So, then, we have an obscure compound masculine noun, which in the present state of knowledge might well be taken as a coinage. This is the simplest explanation. The word is much illuminated when we look at the Septuagint[37] of the Leviticus texts: καὶ μετὰ ἄρσεvoς oὐ κoιμηθήσῃ κoίτηv γυvαικός (18:22); καὶ ὅς ἄv κoιμηθῇ μετὰ ἄρσεvoς κoίτηv γυvαικός... (20:13). This is about male penetration of a male.[38] κoίτηv is Hebraizing[39], but perhaps it was felt to be as good as an internal cognate accusative[40] with κoιμάoμαι, a verb standard for coitus from Homer on. We have exactly this construction in the Massoretic text, i.e. שׁכב verb-forms governing משׁכבי “intercourse with”.[41] Probably, then, the com­pound[42], whether chosen or coined in I Corinthians, is intended to evoke the Holiness Code with its emphasis on male penetration of the male. Actually as a biblical Hellenist and Hebraist I should put it more strongly: in the absence of earlier attestation, and in view of the un-Greek semantic twist in the word, a deliberate, conscious back-reference by the Apostle is as certain as philology can make it. (He may or may not have known that he was dropping into translationese.) To be blunt, his coined compound noun means “A man who f***s[43] males”. He is careful to make the ‘male’ same-sex practitioner as culpable as the ‘female’: the pagan world was not so clear as the Jewish that the penetrating partner wasn’t right to take all he could get, so that the order may well be significant. If it is, Paul is saying, “and the sodomite too, in case you thought that he was an exception”. Fascinatingly, by avoiding the available technical term παιδεράστης[44], he sees to it that ‘loving, consensual, adult[45] relations’ are fully covered.

 

 

How Much Rope...?

 

The clinching refutation of the argument that Paul’s condemnation of both kinds of male homosexual act refers only to heathen ritual practice is that, in both the New Test­ament passages where we find ἀρσεvoκoίτης, precisely the prostitute-inclusive word is listed separately, as we have seen. It rings almost like prophecy when, after stating in I Corinthians 6:9 that those who habitually wrong others are not on the way to salvation, St. Paul issues a warning to his readers in that permissive society to be wary of deceiving themselves, or being deceived (Μὴ πλαvᾶσθε). It is Christian human nature, especially when faced with a highly-developed and aggressive pagan or post-Christian selfism, to bring the baggage of that hedonistic philosophy into the new life. The ease with which we forget that “A charge to keep I have,/A God to glorify,/A never-dying soul to save,/And fit it for the sky” is a major theme in the New Testament as a whole. We moderns may be coming to from our long post-triumphalist hangover, but we have not yet recovered the ancient sense of the sharp difference between believer and unbeliever. In the matter of Christian homosexual practice, the Fathers were unequivocal in their opposition on Scriptural grounds.[46] As for the idea that they condemned it only in the context of heathen cult-prostitution, because there were no other people who performed such acts, there is no evidence for it[47]. Even if there were evidence, the Greek Fathers would still have called the activity itself sinful. They read their Bible as a doctrinal and linguistic unity, against the background of a society which formed its obverse. They had other secular vocabulary too for the whole phenomenon, and used it. If they sometimes fell into legalism in the face of antinomianism, St. Paul did not. His teaching was that the knowledge of the old moral Law and the power to lead the new life were equally gifts of grace.

To sum up, there do not seem to be any canonical texts which express even qualified approval of homosexual conduct or expression, and Romans 1-3 represents it together with homosexual desire as a manifestation of fallen mankind’s general wrongness. It is an aspect of the disordered life of a society from which one must be rescued [Gen. 18:16-19:29]; it is of­fensive to the God of Israel [Lev. 11-20 (or to the end of the book)]; it belongs to a category of genital sin which breaks marriage [Matt. 5:31-32, 19:3-12] and defiles me inwardly [Matt. 15:1-20]; it is one sign of my having turned away from the worship of my Creator [Rom. 1-3]; with other habitual gross sins, if chosen and persisted in it breaks community for time and eternity [I Cor. 5-6]; it defies that Law which is still binding upon the people of the New Covenant [I Tim. 1]; and last but not least, it directly contradicts all the implic­ations of the Lord’s own life and teaching about sex and marriage [Cf. Mk. 10:1-12]. There is no Scriptural, Apostolic or Dominical warrant for the Christian Church to baptize it. My body with all its powers belongs, not to me, but to the Creator who made it and to the Re­deemer who bought it back from slavery to sin. “You were bought at a price. Therefore honour God with your body” [I Cor. 6:20].

FOR REFERENCE

 

Arndt, W.F.

& Gingrich, F.W.

tr. and ed.                                   A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, Chicago and Cambridge, 1957.

 

Bauer, H.

& Leander, P.                                        Historische Grammatik der Hebräischen Sprache, Darmstadt, 1962.

 

Boswell, John.                             Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, Chicago and London, 1980.

 

Brock, S.P.                                 ‘Aspects of Translation Technique in Antiquity.’ GRBS 20, 1979, 69-87.

 

Brown, F.

-Driver, S.R.

-Briggs, C.A.                               A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, Rpt. with corrections, Oxford, 1959.

 

Dover, K.J.                                 Greek Homosexuality, Cambridge, 1989.

 

Elliger, K.

& Rudolph, W. edd.                     Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, Stuttgart, 1977.

 

Ellis, E. Earle.                             The Old Testament in Early Christianity, Grand Rapids, 1992.

 

Epstein, L.M.                              Sex Laws and Customs in Judaism, Rpt. New York, 1967.

 

Goodwin, W.W.                           A Greek Grammar, London, 1951.

 

Hatch, E.

& Redpath, H.A.                          Concordance to the Septuagint, Oxford, 1900-6.

 

Hays, Richard B.                         The Moral Vision of the New Testament, Edinburgh, 1996.

 

Helminiak, Daniel A.                    What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality, San Francisco, 1994.

 

Hooker, Morna D.                        ‘Interchange and suffering.’ Suffering and martyrdom in the New Testament : studies presented to G.M. Styler by the Cambridge New Testament Seminar, 70-83. Edd. William Horbury & Brian McNeil. Cambridge, 1981.

 

Jellicoe, S.                                  The Septuagint and Modern Study, Oxford, 1968.

 

Katz, P.                                      Philo’s Bible, Cambridge, 1950.

 

Lampe, G.W.H. ed.                     A Patristic Greek Lexicon, Oxford, 1961.

 

Lesky. A.                                    A History of Greek Literature, 2nd. ed. tr. London, 1966.

 

Liddell, H.G.

& Scott, R.                                  A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed. revised, Oxford, 1925-40.

 

Lisowsky, G.                               Konkordanz zum Hebräischen Alten Testament, Stuttgart, 1958.

Moulton, J.H.

-Howard, W.F.