← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Does the Bible Condemn Homosexuality? Guest Interview with Jeffrey Siker
00:48:55
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Banking services provided by lead bank member fd. Welcome to Ms. Quoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. The only show where a six time New York Times best selling author and world renowned Bible scholar uncovers the many fascinating little known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity. I'm your host, Megan Lewis. Let's begin. I'd like to welcome you to this special edition of the Misquoting Jesus Christ podcast. This week I'm not being interviewed by Megan. I'm interviewing a fellow scholar and friend of mine, Jeffrey Seiker, who is an expert on a large number of things including questions dealing with homosexuality in the Bible. I've known Jeff Seicher for God, I don't know, 40 years.
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A
40 years. 40 years.
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B
Jeff was two years behind me at Princeton Theological Seminary in our PhD programs. Jeff had come to Princeton in, I guess in 1983. He did a master's degree at Yale before coming to Princeton Seminary. And when he graduated from Princeton Seminary, he went on for a long term teaching career at Loyola Marymount University in California in Los Angeles. This was an interesting teaching career for him because Jeff is actually a Presbyterian and Loella Marymount is Jesuit.
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Yes, it is.
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B
And so he's a wide ranging guy. Jeff was a professor of theological studies there in the department of Theological Studies. He was the chair of that department for a long time. He also is the chair of Classics and archaeology.
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Not at the same time.
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B
Not at the same time, luckily. And Jeff has done a lot of things in a lot of different areas. One of his main interests is actually in Jewish and Christian relationships in the ancient world for a spell. He was a fellow at the Hartman Institute for Jewish Christian Relations in Jerusalem for a couple summers. Jeff is an accomplished author and scholar, principally of the New Testament. He's an expert in the Bible generally and in early Christianity. He has written or edited eight books over the years. The most recent one is on Sin. Sin.
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Don't leave home without it.
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Yeah, don't leave home without it. And he and I could Both tell stories about sin, but I don't think we want to go there.
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No.
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His book is called Sin New Testament Perspectives with Oxford University Press. Among his eight books, two of the ones that he has edited in fact involve this issue of Homosexuality in the Bible. One is called Homosexuality in the Church, Both Sides of the Debate, a collection of essays by scholars who. Who are saying what different views about homosexuality within the Christian church. And then. Then the other is. He's an editor of an encyclopedia called Homosexuality and Religion. And so he is. He is quite an expert on that and many other things. When. When we were in graduate school together, Jeff published one of his early articles that was called the Canonical Status of the Catholic Epistles in the Syriac New Testament. So, Jeff, sometime we need to get together and talk about the Syriac Syriac New Testament.
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Yes.
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The hot topic for podcasts these days.
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So.
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B
Well, anyway, so, Jeff, welcome. Welcome to the Recording Jesus podcast. Thanks for coming on. So what I didn't mention is that you. You've moved from Los Angeles to North Carolina. So.
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A
Well, it comes with a little early retirement because apparently you can sell your home in Los Angeles and buy half the state of North Carolina. So where my wife is, my wife Judy is from. And by the way, folks, Bart introduced me to my wife. Although he had no intentions of us getting married and living happily ever after. I don't think he's disappointed by that. But it's been actually a great joy to be back in North Carolina, close to you and Sarah. And here we are. Here we are.
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B
Yeah. So Jeff married, actually one of my former PhD students. I introduced them at a professional meeting, and, yeah, they fell madly in love. And when they got married, Jeff asked me if I'd be willing to be the best man. And I told him that I was just happy being the better man.
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A
Yeah, that's right. Why isn't she marrying the best man?
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B
Exactly. She had to settle. Right. Okay, so, Jeff, we're going to talk about homosexuality and the Bible. And as I know, and as people are going to know. Tell me if I'm misstating this, because I don't mean to be misstating it, but your. Your basic view is that the Bible does not condemn what we think of as homosexuality. Is that fair to say?
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Basically, yeah, basically.
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Okay, well, give me the. Give me the one or two sentence.
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Correct. View Beyond. Beyond basic. Well, I. I think there are a couple of things. One is that the language of homosexuality, the term itself, when applied to the Bible, is somewhat anachronistic. And even in the. You know, the 20th century, there have been different understandings of what homosexuality means. At the beginning of the 20th century, homosexuality was largely seen as a perverse choice against nature, which, you know, has been the long tradition over the centuries. But then by the mid-50s, you start having language of homosexuality as a preference. It's still a choice, but it's a preference, but much more neutral language. And then finally, towards the end of the 20th century, and now especially the language is all about orientation. So that it's not a choice you make. You know, it's like eye color or handedness. It's something you discover about yourself. And so it's natural. Whereas at the beginning of the 20th century, homosexuality was seen as unnatural. And we'll get to the Romans, one passage that it's against nature. You know, by the end of the 20th century, people are using actually the argument from nature that, well, no, this is part of the variety of sexual orientations.
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B
So you're saying that they used to use the argument for nature to show that homosexuality was sinful or wrong, and now they use the argument from nature to say that in fact it's a natural phenomenon.
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A
It's rather ironic. It is ironic that gets turned on its head. The other thing I would say is that the fight within the churches about homosexuality is rather different depending upon whether you're in the Roman Catholic tradition or in the Protestant tradition. In the Roman Catholic tradition, it's all about procreation. That's the issue. It's not about whether somebody can be ordained who is openly gay. In the Catholic Church, of course, all priests are supposedly celibate. And so it doesn't matter technically if you're gay or not because you're celibate. The issue is procreation. And the Protestant tradition has nothing to do with procreation. It's all about ordination and modeling what a Christian life should be like. And so can an openly gay person model the Christian faith? And all of these arguments go back to the, you know, six texts that we're going to discuss in the Bible, three in the Old Testament, our Hebrew Bible, three in the New Testament. Yeah. So my position is that you have to take into account the cultural contexts in which same sex relations were broached in the Hebrew Bible and in the New Testament. And those contexts are rather different than our contexts today. The other fight that goes on is whether nature is the same at all times and in all places, or whether our understanding of nature and what's natural develops and changes over time. And so you end up with rather different understandings of the applicability of these passages.
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B
Okay, all right. So there are a lot of people are going to be very interested in Christian attitudes and what happens in denominations these days. And a lot of people are just interested in what the Bible says. And I think a lot of people are going to say that. Look, it's pretty clear. And so you know the passages better than I do. But. But to especially the people point to these two verses in the book of Leviticus.
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Leviticus, right.
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So Leviticus 18:22. Let me just read it to you. So you can't go for it. Wiggle out of this.
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Yeah, I'll wiggle.
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It says, you shall not lie with a male as with a woman. It is an abomination. Okay, so it's an abomination for a man to lie with a man. And then two chapters later, in chapter 20, verse 13, if a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall be put to death. Their blood is upon them.
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Pretty serious.
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That sure sounds like the Bible's condemning homosexuality.
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Well, again, you have to ask, what are they talking about? And the context is crucial. So the context of both of these passages in Leviticus is what's called the Holiness code. And this is instructions given to the people as they're getting ready to go into the land, the promised land that God has given them. And basically, God is saying, don't do the things that the people who I'm kicking out of the land, don't do the things that they did because it was idolatrous and against my law. And the difficulty is that there's no rationale given for the prohibition. They're just prohibitions, one with a rather severe punishment. But there are all kinds of other prohibitions, you know, against wearing garments made of two different materials, sowing two different kinds of seed in the same field, getting a tattoo, shaving your beard into a point. And so it looks like the condemnation is of various practices of the people who preceded them in the land. And so there's a generic just kind of condemnation of don't do those kinds of things, especially mixing different things.
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Mixing different things.
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Yeah, two different things together.
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So let me just ask. It is which is forbidden, shaving your beard into a point or not shaving it into a point?
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Yeah, that would. That wouldn't matter to you, wouldn't it?
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You know, you got any facial hair, you got to know these things. So what you're saying then, I mean, you're admitting that this says that men should not sleep with men. But you're saying you're also not supposed to wear a sweater that's also made of cotton and polyester or something because,
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A
well, and that's, and that's the difficulty. How do you pick and choose? And you know, Jesus says in Matthew, not an iota, not a dot will pass from the law. Whoever relaxes the least of these commandments will be least in the kingdom. Well, you know, the rabbis had rather serious disagreements. In fact, one of the most interesting disagreements the rabbis had, and this is in the Talmudic times, a little later. So the question was, could a woman who has had sexual relations with a woman marry a rabbi? And one school of thought said, absolutely not because she's defiled her body. Another school of thought said, well, what can she do? She doesn't have semen.
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So sure, okay.
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And so understandings of same sex relations, you know, it changes. And you know, as you know, in the Greco Roman era, in both Greek culture and Roman culture, there are developing ideas about same sex relations.
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Okay.
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And that also interplays with what the early Christians thought. And the Jews mostly, you know, they were familiar with some practices in the Greco Roman world. And these are practices of idolaters, These are the practices of, you know, these people whom God would condemn.
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B
Jeff, before we get to the Greco Roman world, I want to, I want to ask you a little bit more about the Old Testament because I'm still want to make sure I understand the point. So Jeff, but about the Old, these Old Testament passage. So it sounds like you're agreeing that, you know, look, the law, Moses says a man's not supposed to sleep with a man, but it also says, you know, this thing about not sowing your field, you know, you're not supposed to put both barley and wheat in the same field. Or, and there are, there are these other things about pointed beards and things that nobody really thinks apply today.
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Exactly.
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So, and so the problem is that people ignore 4/5 of the law or more as not being relevant, but they pick the one thing that they personally have an opinion about. You know, so they use the Bible to support their view, even though they're actually not saying the Bible's authoritative, they're just picking the one they want.
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A
It's a non contextual reading of the Bible, both historically, culturally and also just if you look at the passages, all you have to do is look at the passage just before and the passage just after and you end up as you say, cherry picking. Yeah, this doesn't apply. This does apply. And the question is, what kind of rationale is there?
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B
Yeah, I have a lot of students. You probably, you probably did too. Who, Christian students who tell you that, you know, what do you know, what do you think of the law of Moses? And they say, well, I keep the Ten Commandments. But that's, you know, just, I just think the Ten Commandments apply. But then you ask them, okay, have you ever had a, like a job on a Saturday? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I used. But no, that's against the Ten Commandments. You can't work on the Sabbath.
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Yeah.
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So, you know, they keep the nine commandments. So even, even with the Ten Commandments, like they're, they're picking. And, and the thing is, people want to quote these verses from Leviticus to condemn same sex relations. Why aren't they condemning people who are wearing sweaters and people who are. Exactly. Because they want an authority and they find one rather than actually trusting the authority for what it says altogether. So. Okay, fair enough.
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A
The other thing that I think is important to say is that when you have passages and you're not exactly sure how to interpret them, it's typical to appeal to other sources of authority. So tradition is one source of authority. What have the elders taught? What has the church taught? Or not only tradition, but experience becomes an authority. I love this passage actually in Galatians where Paul appeals to the experience of the Galatians. What was your experience in terms of the Spirit? How did you get the spirit? And then finally reason, rational discourse becomes an authority. And when you put all these things together and you sift through what the Bible has to say about same sex relations, if you privilege tradition and scripture read out of context, then it's going to be a very conservative interpretation. If you privilege experience and reason, then you're going to come out in a much more liberal side.
- [15:54]
B
But I would say that, you know, most, you know, in our context here, where you and I live in the south, the idea that you're supposed to use experience and reason to interpret the Bible just means you're not listening to God. You think you know it all. And so, you know, so for people who believe in the Bible, I mean, it sounds like, like you and I prefer, like thinking about things, but some people just want to quote Bible verses. But you're saying that even those who do that aren't really doing that. They're just, they are using the reason, they're choosing which things. And so, but what about, you know, there's also arguments that people have made that I assume you have too, that when the Bible. I don't know. When the Bible says, you know, know a male shall not lie with a male, that's not talking about what we consider to be homosexuality.
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Yes, yes, I would say that as well.
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B
Could you explain what that means?
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Yeah, partly. It depends on ancient constructs of sexual relations. So, for example, you know, people used to quote the Genesis 19 passage, Sodom and Gomorrah, because these two strangers visiting the city, happening to be angels, as it turns out, the townspeople want to know them. And there's a sexual overtone to that because Lot offers his daughters in place of the men. And the translation.
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These guys are staying in Lot's house and, and the. The town gathers around, bangs on the door, and they want to know. Know the men in the biblical sense.
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In the biblical sense, that's exactly right. And the translations are all over the place.
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B
But not his daughters. What?
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Well, no, almost all of them agree that this is the townspeople wanting to show dominance over these visitors, wanting to show power over these visitors. And so what mattered in antiquity was whether you were in the dominant or the submissive position. You want to be the male who penetrates rather than acting as a female who is penetrated. This also carried over into Greco Roman culture where we do have evidence of same sex relations. But what seems to most matter is whether you're in the dominant position or a passive position.
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B
So why, I mean, why does God bring down fire and brimstone on the people of Sodom and Gomorrah? Gomorrah. If they, if it's not sexual, they want to rape these two men, right?
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A
Well, yeah, rape. I mean, it's simply a further indication of how depraved Sodom and Gomorrah are. So, I mean, God has already pronounced judgment, but Abraham has bargained God down, as you know, to 10 if they're 10. Righteous people don't destroy the town. But, you know, they can't find. They can't even find that. And they're wanting to rape these visitors. Is.
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B
You're saying the problem isn't that they want to have sex with men. The problem is they want to. These are guests in Lot's house, Right.
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A
So it's in hospitality and it's the fact that they, it's a condemnation of sexual violence.
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B
Yeah, yeah, they're condemning. So it's condemning violence against these guests. And, and his, his kind of sacred obligation is to protect his guests.
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A
Yes.
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B
That he takes so seriously that he says, yeah, I'll give you my two Daughters.
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A
That's the lesser sin. Yeah. Wow.
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B
Okay. Well, so, yeah, apart from the kind of morality of all that giving away your daughters, but it turns out not happening, of course, because they escape and God destroys Sodom. Go more. But the, but it's actually in the Bible, the idea that they are condemned for wanting to rape men, that it's male with male. That's never talked about in the Bible as being the problem with Sodom and Gomorrah.
- [19:34]
A
No, that's true. It's injustice and hospitality. Yeah.
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B
Yeah. Okay, so it sounds like you're saying that even, even if the Old Testament is saying, you know, a male aligned with a male, it's not actually what we think of as homosexuality. Can you just say something about sexuality, like, as a concept, like how our understanding of sexuality might differ from somebody living 3,000 years ago?
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A
Yeah, they're different.
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Okay.
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A
Different cultures at different times develop different understandings of male, Female sexual relations. Male, Male sexual relations. And so it's, it's a moving target. I mean, there are certainly constants that you can find, but it's a moving target. And even in our own day today, I mean, if you look at Latino culture with notions of machismo, or if you look at African American culture, which is much less open typically to same sex relations, you're not always talking about the same thing. And in antiquity, also, you're not talking about an understanding of sexuality in the same sense that we talk about sexuality and sexual identity.
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B
I mean, it's. Earlier you said that, you know, Even in the 20th century, they moved from homosexuality is against nature to homosexuality is natural. I mean, it does seem that in the modern world we've been so influenced by post Freudian psychology and we think in terms of sexual orientation. Now that's kind of the common way of thinking about, is that we think that humans, you know, some people, some people still deny you're kind of born this way, but you have a sexual orientation, which means that you are inclined to have sex with person of the same sex or of the opposite sex or other, you know, and now they're, you know, we now know, I mean, we no longer talk strictly about binaries anymore. But, but the idea that you've got an orientation, I mean, I assume that people in Leviticus did not think about sexual orientation that you like.
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A
No, they certainly did not. They certainly did not.
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B
So they're condemning an act. Yes, but they're not condemning an orientation because, you know, a lot of people, I mean, historically, we, you and I have both known people and everybody's probably known people who feel very guilty because they're attracted to people of the same sex. And that's. They consider that to be a sin. But it can hardly be a sin from the Bible, because the people in the Bible didn't even know about orientation.
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A
No, what the people in the Bible cared about was physical acts, not about your feelings. I mean, one of the things that's interesting for people who want to make a case for same sex relations, you know, they point to, you know, David and Jonathan. You know, David loved Jonathan. Well, yeah, that's not what we would call homosexuality. That's what we would call brotherly love, I think.
- [22:32]
B
Well, even if it was, I mean, it's. Even if he was attracted to him, it's not that he would define that as orientation.
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A
No, no.
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B
I mean, of course, people in the ancient world wanted. I mean, the percentage of people who were homosexual in the ancient world is the same percentages today. The brain is not. You know, we. It's not that our brains have changed. And so probably it's just the same number sleeping with other people. It's just that they didn't have this idea.
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A
Yeah, it may well be. The difficulty is that today people are not in the closet in the same way that they were. And so many more people feel free. Free to discuss their sexual identity. But there are still cultures where it's kind of taboo. One of the things I learned when I was editing the book, the encyclopedia, in Native American traditions, there were individuals who were identified as two natured or two spirited, who were seen as holy figures who could communicate with the divine. And they were considered to have both male and female spirits and so kind of a transgender relationship all in themselves. So it's just to say that, you know, if you're in Japan, there's one understanding. If you're in China, there's another understanding. If you're. If you're in the United States, you know, there's still another understanding now.
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B
In fact, there are lots of understandings.
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A
Yes, there. There certainly are. It gets back to the question of, all right, so what's normative, what's not, and why?
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B
Yeah, so but I guess you would say then that one problem today is that people will agree, yes, you have that orientation, and that that can't be sinful because you can't help it. But if you have that orientation, you better not act on it. And that way they think they're following the Bible, but that. That creates as much damage as anything.
- [24:25]
A
Yeah. What I. In the Presbyterian Church the language used to be, are you a practicing homosexual, mom? Practicing, Practicing.
- [24:36]
B
Yeah, yeah, practice every Thursday night. So. Okay, so that's the Old Testament. It sounds like your basic line is, look, when you're, when you're reading the Old Testament, you've got to put it into its own historical context and understand what these people mean at that time. And you can't just transplant it to some other situation. You don't do that with most of the Old Testament. Why do you do it with this one issue?
- [24:56]
A
And so, no, and not only that, I mean, you have to hunt for these passages. Yeah, you really have to hunt for them.
- [25:05]
B
There are two. I mean, Leviticus, that's kind of it. In, in terms of commands. That's it.
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A
That is.
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B
The Old Testament's a big book.
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A
It's, it's a very big book.
- [25:14]
B
And people condemn homosexuality. They, they don't mind doing all the other things that the prophets condemn.
- [25:18]
A
Oh my word.
- [25:20]
B
Yeah.
- [25:20]
A
No, if you want to look at condemnation of, you know, the rich against the poor and. Oh yeah.
- [25:26]
B
So I think for a lot of, a lot of people, most people probably are kind of interested in the Leviticus stuff, but, or the Sodom and Gomorrah. But you know, once you get to Jesus, you know, that starts really kind of where the rubber meets the road for a lot of people. I mean, Jesus, Jesus does not come out and say, you know, thou shalt not commit homosexual acts. He doesn't say that. But there's that famous passage where Jesus is asked about whether divorce is legitimate.
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A
Yes.
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B
And Jesus points out that in the beginning God created male and female. And so, you know, man shall leave his mother and woman, leave her home, and the two shall cling together together and be one flesh. And that seems to presuppose that the standard that Jesus has in mind is one man, one woman for life.
- [26:10]
A
I think that's right.
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B
Okay, so Jesus is against homosexuality.
- [26:14]
A
No, Jesus is a first century Jewish. I mean, the question to ask Jesus is what about Abraham and his and his many wives? Or what about concubines? What about those who were celibate? You know, those who are celibate were not exactly looked up to as examples of what you should do. You should get married and have kids.
- [26:36]
B
Yeah. And even Jesus was probably celibate. I mean Jesus, Jesus is probably celibate. Whatever Dan Brown tells us he was not married with kids.
- [26:45]
A
So yeah, I think Jesus had a view of if he ever thought about same sex relations, who the hell knows? But if he did, he probably had a Typically Jewish understanding that, oh, that's something that pagans do. That's something, you know, that he's heard about but has no first hand knowledge of. I would, I would say, yeah, I don't know.
- [27:08]
B
So, I mean it is, people may not know that. There are, there are scholars who have ad. Who have argued that in fact Jesus and Paul were both gay in our terms. We, you and I have a friend, Dale Martin, who wrote a book called Sex and the Single Savior.
- [27:23]
A
Yes, and a good book it is.
- [27:26]
B
You know, he was a senior professor of New Testament at Yale. So he's not, he's not some guy, somebody just guy is spouting off stuff on the Internet. He's actually.
- [27:33]
A
No, he's not.
- [27:34]
B
So there are discussions about that kind of thing. But the, I think again the point surely must be that whatever Jesus said, he doesn't have our concept of sex and sexuality or homosexuality. And so to say that he condemns something, he's never, he doesn't even have any language for this kind of stuff.
- [27:52]
A
Yeah, that's true.
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B
Bible readers do point out that homosexuality is condemned. I mean, Paul, the Apostle Paul, as you know in First Corinthians 6 makes a list of activities or people who will not, who will not get into the kingdom of heaven. And it includes, I don't know what it includes murderers and adulterers and whatever and homosexuals.
- [28:13]
A
Well, now we're getting into translation issues, as you well know. It's a vice list and it's kind of a generic vice list. And vice lists were rather common in antiquity. Paul is saying don't do these kinds of things. And so there are sexual sins. And one of the sexual sins is Greek words are the malakoi, which literally means soft ones.
- [28:41]
B
And the, it's a masculine molokoi. It's masculine soft people, apparently.
- [28:46]
A
Yeah, soft people, yeah. And then the arsenal koitai, the arson, the, the male who koaitai goes to bed.
- [28:54]
B
Let's think about this word for a second. So malakoi is non problematic for those of you who are not Greek scholars. Malakoi just means soft. Like you can talk of a soft pillow, Malakoff's pillow or something. But arsenokoites, the plural is arsenicoitae, as you say. Does this word appear before Paul? Does he make this.
- [29:11]
A
It does in the Septuagint, sort of. Sort of, sort of in the Leviticus passages, a man who goes to bed with another man. And so that language is used but
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B
the word itself isn't there. Right.
- [29:24]
A
In other words, no.
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B
So it's made up of two words.
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A
Right.
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B
So Arsenal, coitase.
- [29:29]
A
So I guess people get coitus from coitus. Yeah.
- [29:32]
B
And arsen is the. It's a form of the verb for a male. An adult male.
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A
Yes.
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B
And so the word means something like adult male bed.
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A
Yes. Now, what's. What's interesting is when you put it together with malakoi. Because malakoi is clearly a euphemistic term.
- [29:52]
B
Yes.
- [29:52]
A
Because if you just translate it as soft people, it makes absolutely no sense.
- [29:56]
B
Means people don't work out well. They'll never get into the kingdom, go to the flabby people.
- [30:03]
A
You're right on. But it goes with arsenal coites. And I think the best translation would be male prostitutes and those who hire their services. Whoa.
- [30:16]
B
Wow, that's interesting.
- [30:18]
A
Isn't that interesting?
- [30:19]
B
So I did an episode for the podcast with Jenny Knutz, you know.
- [30:22]
A
Yes.
- [30:23]
B
And we were talking about. She was on the NRSV updated edition thing, and we ended up talking about Arsenal koi die, because. Oh, okay. She was. Yeah. It's really complicated because it literally means something like man beds.
- [30:33]
A
Yes.
- [30:34]
B
And so, like. So normally it's translated so these two words just so people will know what we're talking about in 1 Corinthians 6. Jeff, do you know what verse 6, 9. Thank you. So the verse says, you know, all these people, including malako and arson coitae will not enter into the kingdom. And so since you've got the soft and you've got the man bed, I think when we were in graduate school, what a lot of people were saying is that that. That refers to the man who is on the receiving end of the sex act, the soft, soft man who's behaving like a woman, and the arse koitai as the man who's having sex with him. So the man who's penetrating is also condemned. So it's the passive partner and the active partner, male partners in the sex act. And that was always thought of as interesting when we were in graduate school, because it is the case you've brought up several times about the Greek and Roman worlds, but it was the case, especially in Greek society, that the man who's doing the penetrating is normally not condemned because he's being the man men are supposed to dominate. You brought up domination earlier. Men are supposed to dominate. So if you're dominating another man, you're doing what you're supposed to do.
- [31:37]
A
Well, and to put it crassly, as one of my classics colleagues once put it, what matters is that you're the sticker and not the sticky.
- [31:46]
B
Okay. Right. Okay. You got to be on top is basically the thing.
- [31:50]
A
Basically. Although, I mean, it didn't always involve penetration. Just as often, if not more so. It's what would be called intracrural. It's a hard to pronounce word.
- [32:01]
B
Yeah.
- [32:01]
A
Where the penis goes between the legs. Yeah, yeah. It's not anal intercourse, so.
- [32:08]
B
But it's the man who is being on the receptive end of it that is being. In this interpretation, that person is being soft. Because it's built into this whole ideology. Right. That men and women, it's not that they're just like two different kinds of things. There's really more, like two different degrees of things.
- [32:24]
A
One's more powerful than the other. And if you're a man, you don't want to play the woman, as it were. And so pederasty, which is one of the contexts that we know about in antiquity, typically would involve an older male who would provide tutelage for an older boy. And once they hit puberty, once they start growing hair, it then becomes inappropriate to continue that relationship. And it's not just a sexual relationship, if it even is a sexual relationship. So there are all these, you know, vase paintings and.
- [32:59]
B
Yes, there are, but the idea is that the older man is, since he's an adult, he can dominate the exact. And. And so that's okay.
- [33:07]
A
He can show him the way.
- [33:08]
B
In Greek cultures, like in classical Athens, this is just kind of an accepted practice. And so they. They absolutely did not consider that to be unnatural. They considered that to be natural.
- [33:17]
A
No. Yeah, yeah. Whether you're with a woman or the boy. A man, you know, Or a slave. Or a slave, yeah.
- [33:27]
B
I mean, part of the idea is that men are superior. Like, strong men are superior to.
- [33:32]
A
Yes.
- [33:33]
B
Weak men, soft men, to women, to children. And it's kind of a continuum where you really want to be this kind
- [33:38]
A
of strong macho man.
- [33:40]
B
Macho man, yeah. So if that's the case, then if it is, that molokoi are soft ones and Arsenal Koitai are the strong ones, but they're both being condemned. Okay. That would be a condemnation. But you're saying you don't think that's it at all. You think, in fact, it's somebody who is buying a male prostitute and somebody who's a male prostitute is that.
- [34:02]
A
Well, I think that's certainly one way to interpret it, because unfortunately, some of the translations say not homosexual. Some of them say sodomites, which then incorporates the whole Genesis 19 passage wrongly. And the question is whether you translate these two words as one term, homosexuals, which some do, or whether you try and translate them as. No, they're, they're two words. They may have a relationship to each other. They probably do. And then how do you do that? And you know, typically you want to go with what's going to be the most generic and least specific translation. I think I forget how they do it in the updated revised.
- [34:46]
B
I forget too. But they paraphrase it. Something about engage in sexual immorality or something.
- [34:51]
A
I don't know.
- [34:52]
B
But yeah, but the trick is, I guess we didn't quite say this, but this term arsenicoite taste that we, we asked whether it was invented by Paul. The reason we aren't sure what it means is because it doesn't get used.
- [35:03]
A
No, we've never. That's the only place it occurs.
- [35:06]
B
Yeah, so. And people who later used, you know, the Paul's passage because yes, most Greek words occur like you know, 29 trillion times in Greek literature. And so you can pretty much figure out what they mean because they show up.
- [35:17]
A
There is a literature, I hear there
- [35:18]
B
is a literature there and this word doesn't show up. And so like it's a made up word and you're not quite sure. It involves a man, involves a bed, but it's not quite sure.
- [35:27]
A
And just to use another good term, it's a hoppox legomina, hoppax lagomon.
- [35:33]
B
I'm telling you, it's a good word, good term. But so a hapax legomina, by the way, is a term that occurs once. It said once. So. Okay, but I think some people have pointed out that when the term does get used later, it tends to be in a context of economic sins. That's one of Dale Martin's arguments, I think that supports the idea that it's prostitution, that it's sex for sale that is being condemned, buying male sex. Some people have argued, like temple prostitutes. I don't know. I don't know. I don't. But the reality is it's really hard to use a word that we don't know the meaning of in order to condemn a modern practice.
- [36:10]
A
Especially when it's. It just appears kind of, you know, in passing in a vice list. And the first Timothy passage, the same thing. It's in passing in a vice list. And you know, vice lists are just clubs that you use. And the longer the list, the bigger the club you're swinging. Yeah, but I mean the fact that there are sexual Sins, as it were. Being identified tells you that. Okay, there's some issues in Corinth with people acting in sexually immoral ways.
- [36:39]
B
Yeah. And, you know, if everybody was condemned for everything, that's that the Corinthians are condemned for. Nobody would get into the kingdom of heaven.
- [36:47]
A
That was a happening church, man.
- [36:49]
B
It was. Boy, honey. Paul begins his letter, the First Corinthians, by addressing it to the saints who are in Corinth.
- [36:56]
A
He's being ironic.
- [36:57]
B
You wonder what those sinners look like. Okay, so one last passage we need to talk about quickly. Is that one you mentioned earlier, Romans
- [37:06]
A
Chapter one, the most significant to the passages.
- [37:09]
B
Yeah. So why don't you tell us what's in Romans 1 and just tell us
- [37:13]
A
about this passage, Romans 1, we'll break out the text. How about that? So this is Romans 1:24. Following therefore, God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator who is blessed forever. Amen. For this reason, God gave them 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 person the due penalty for their error.
- [38:08]
B
Yeah, well, that was used for some horrible, horrific purposes in the 1980s.
- [38:12]
A
Yes, it was. You know, people deserve to get AIDS.
- [38:18]
B
Yeah. So this passage. Who's Paul generally talking about here? Is he. What's the issue that these people are being turned over to degrading sexual activities?
- [38:27]
A
Well, I mean, what Paul is saying, and there's a debate about this, of course, you know, is Paul talking about creation and that God created male and female, and now it's being violated. And the answer is no. Paul's talking about idolatry.
- [38:42]
B
Idolatry.
- [38:43]
A
And that idolatry leads to worshiping creation rather than worshiping the Creator, worshiping God. And the consequence of this is people get screwed up.
- [38:57]
B
In other words, he's talking about all the pagans, right? Yeah, like 95 of the world. So the reason they engage in this kind of crazy sexual activity, in his view, is because God's given them up.
- [39:08]
A
Yeah. I mean, what Paul's trying to do is to say, all right, it all comes back to sin. Of course, there's gentile sin, which is fundamentally idolatry, and there's Jewish sin, which he'll get to which is disobedience. And everybody has sinned, everybody's guilty, so that God may eventually have mercy upon all. But here he's just trying to say that one of the consequences of idolatry is people acting in what Paul considers unnatural ways, excessively lustful. Now, again, begs the question of what's natural and what's unnatural and what's excessively lustful and. And what's not. I mean, one of the things that I know LGBT people got tired of many moons ago was people thinking all they do is think about sex. That's all they do. It's just. It's all about sex. And of course, no, you know, we go to the grocery store and we have jobs and were regular people. Yeah, but. So this passage has been used as a bat to swat at people who are. Who claim to be Christians and yet also claim to be gay.
- [40:20]
B
Because Paul says that it's unnatural to engage in these activities and that it's because God's abandoned you that you do these things.
- [40:29]
A
Yes, exactly.
- [40:31]
B
Well, okay, so it does say that. So how does the Bible not condemn homosexuality?
- [40:36]
A
Well, again, you have to ask, what is Paul talking about? So what does Paul know about same sex relations? Well, he likely knows about pederasty. He likely knows about prostitution. Does he know of same sex relations between equal adult males? I would say unlikely. And even if he did, he would probably condemn them. But Paul knew what he knew in his context.
- [41:03]
B
Yeah.
- [41:03]
A
And so our context is rather different. Now. Does this mean we don't take Paul seriously? No, I think the way you take Paul seriously is taking him with his understanding as a first century Jew, a first century Christian, of relationships, sexual relationships, and what's appropriate, what's not appropriate.
- [41:25]
B
If Paul started talking about, you know, cosmology and started talking about what the solar system is, you know, you wouldn't take that as authoritative, right? He doesn't know.
- [41:35]
A
I wouldn't, but.
- [41:36]
B
Well, I wouldn't. I mean, if he thinks that. That the sun revolves around the earth today, we know better. And science isn't just about the stars. It's about biology and psychology and the.
- [41:52]
A
And this is where. How do you interpret scripture? Well, you interpret scripture with other scriptures. The passage I really like for this is Matthew 13, where it's the parable of the weeds and the wheat, where the farmer and his servants say, look, there are weeds growing up with the wheat. You want us to go out and pull them? And the farmer says, I don't think so, because you're not going to be able to tell which is which, and you're going to pull up some wheat. And so my argument is, look, presume wheat, not weeds. And, you know, things will get sorted out, so don't presume that you have the ability to say, oh, yes, this center here is going straight to hell. I remember I had a debate once with Marty Swords. You know, Marty, I do a professor at Louisville Presbyterian Seminary, and we were having this debate. We did this kind of dog and pony show. And he concluded by saying, at present, he didn't see any evidence that would mandate the church to change its historic position on not ordaining gay and lesbian people. And I said, well, Marty, what would count as evidence? And how would you recognize it if you saw it? And Marty paused and he said, I'm not sure what would count as evidence, but I know I would recognize it if I saw it.
- [43:14]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [43:15]
A
And I said, well, Marty, you know, there are all kinds of gay and lesbian Christians who are the evidence, and they're asking for you to recognize them. And, you know, that was the end of the conversation. And so, of course, since then, the churches have split over this. Presbyterians, Methodists, Episcopalians. It's on, we go on, we go.
- [43:36]
B
And you know, the thing is, it's just for me, you know, you pick this thing that somebody has an alternative lifestyle that you don't approve of, but you don't. You don't pick other things. No, you don't pick somebody who's a glutton, you know, or somebody who is an adulterer. You know, you say, well, okay, you know, I mean, there. There are things that don't apply, I mean, to. Okay, so, I mean, it sounds to me like. It sounds like you and I agree that Paul and Jesus, they probably didn't like the idea of men sleeping with men, but their concept of what that was all about, they didn't have our institution. They didn't have institutions of marriage. I mean, you know that you, like, you fall in love, you date somebody and you go, you know, you fall in love and you get marri. They didn't have anything like that with.
- [44:20]
A
No.
- [44:20]
B
The idea of two adults having a relationship where they decide they wanted to. To have intimacy together. It was like there was nothing like that in the ancient. So it's kind of hard to condemn something you've never heard of.
- [44:32]
A
Unless you're anachronistic.
- [44:33]
B
Unless you're anachronistic, you pretending that you're living in the same time period as someone else when you're not. And so, okay, so, Jeff, we need to end now. Can you just kind of summarize your views, I mean, about the Bible condemning homosexuality?
- [44:46]
A
Well, to summarize, there are six passages in the Bible that deal in some way, shape or form with same sex relations. Three in the Hebrew Bible, Old Testament, three in the New Testament, the Genesis 19, Leviticus 18, Leviticus 20, Romans 1, 1 Corinthians 6, 1 Timothy 1. The Genesis 19 passage is talking about sexual violence and rape. The Levitical passages are quite explicit in condemning same sex sex between men. But the larger context of the holiness code makes it difficult to say, yes, these should be interpreted literally because of all the other things that are condemned that we have no problem with. And then in the New Testament, the first Corinthians 6 passage has to do with probably male prostitution. And the same in first Timothy and the Romans, one passage has to do with idolatry. And the pagans who are guilty of idolatry, they tend towards things that Paul considers unnatural. The problem is that Paul's understanding of nature as unchanging and our understanding of nature is unchanging is difficult. The understanding of sexual orientation is not one that the ancients had that we do. And even in our own time, just in the last century, as everybody knows, we've seen some rather sweeping change in societal attitudes towards people who self identify as gay, lesbian or transgender. Bite still goes on, but here we are.
- [46:29]
B
Okay, I think I might point out, just to put you in the public public view here, that that Jeff, you, unlike me, you're a Christian.
- [46:38]
A
I am, yeah.
- [46:39]
B
And, and you, you're actually an ordained minister. So this is not like a crazy atheist teaching at Chapel Hill talking. You, you really don't think that the Bible's condemning what we think of as homosexuality or that it's applicable.
- [46:52]
A
And I would also situation, I would also point out, I mean, I, I got into this whole discussion really quite by accident because I was on a committee in LA for the Presbyterian Church that oversaw the ordination process. And since Presbyterians have to learn Hebrew and Greek, I was the language geek on the committee examining people. And there was a gay man, Chris Glasser, he wrote a book called Uncommon Calling, A Gay Man's Struggle to Serve the Church. And he came up for whether we would approve him to be ordained. And I didn't know what to do. And I abstained from the vote. He was not passed. And I decided I better find out what I think and why. And so that's what led to the first thing I published, which was way back in Gosh 87, I think. And then the book. So change comes slowly.
- [47:47]
B
It's hard for people. It's hard for people to kind of think differently from how they've been raised. But it is thankfully a really. It's a very serious movement within. Within Christianity now to take seriously the fact that we're living in a different age. It is happening, but there's a lot of resistance as well, as you've said so.
- [48:05]
A
Yeah. One other thing. I've often said that I have one foot in the church, one foot in the academy, and then each helps to keep the other honest. And it's my foot in the academy that helps me to engage in critical reading of the biblical texts that can then be of service to the church. And I think the service is providing contextual understandings of these things, which is. I know what you're all about as well. Yeah.
- [48:31]
B
I've got an analogous thing. I've got one church in the one foot in the academy and one foot in my mouth.
- [48:38]
A
How's that working out for you?
- [48:39]
B
Yeah.
- [48:42]
A
Okay.
- [48:42]
B
Look, Jeff, it's been great having you on, and I really appreciate it. So hopefully we can. Next time we'll talk about the Syriac new test. All right, thank you all for tuning into the podcast, and we will have another really interesting one next week. Thanks so much.
- [48:57]
A
Thanks.
- [49:01]
B
This has been an episode of Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. We'll be back with a new episode next Tuesday, so please be sure to subscribe to our show for free on your favorite podcast listening app or on Bart Ehrman's YouTube channel so you don't miss out. From Bart Ehrman and myself, Megan Lewis. Thank you for joining us.