Were there gay people in jesus time
What Does the Bible Say About Homosexuality?
What Does The Bible Tell About Homosexuality?
Introduction
For the last two decades, Pew Analyze Center has reported that one of the most enduring ethical issues across Christian traditions is sexual diversity. For many Christians, one of the most frequently first-asked questions on this topic is, “What does the Bible declare about attraction to someone of the same sex?”
Although its unlikely that the biblical authors had any notion of sexual orientation (for example, the legal title homosexual wasn't even coined until the late 19th century) for many people of faith, the Bible is looked to for timeless guidance on what it means to honor God with our lives; and this most certainly includes our sexuality.
Before we can jump into how it is that Christians can maintain the authority of the Bible and also affirm sexual diversity, it might be helpful if we started with a brief but clear overview of some of the assumptions informing many Christian approaches to understanding the Bible.
What is the Bible?
For Christians to whom the Bible is God’s very written word, it is widely understood that God produced its contents through inspired
What the New Testament Says about Homosexuality
The Fourth R Volume 21-3 May-June 2008
Mainline Christian denominations in this territory are bitterly divided over the doubt of homosexuality. For this reason it is important to ask what clear, if any, the New Testament sheds on this controversial issue. Most people apparently assume that the New Testament expresses strong rivalry to homosexuality, but this simply is not the case. The six propositions that follow, considered cumulatively, lead to the conclusion that the New Testament does not provide any direct guidance for understanding and making judgments about homosexuality in the modern world.
Proposition 1: Strictly speaking, the New Testament says nothing at all about homosexuality.
There is not a single Greek synonyms or phrase in the entire Fresh Testament that should be translated into English as “homosexual” or “homosexuality.” In fact, the very notion of “homosexuality”—like that of “heterosexuality,” “bisexuality,” and even “sexual orientation”—is essentially a modern idea that would simply have been unintelligible to the Novel Testament writers. The word “homosexuality” came into use only in the latter part
Has 'Homosexual' Always Been in the Bible?
Reprinted with permission from The Forge Online
The word “arsenokoitai” shows up in two different verses in the bible, but it was not translated to intend “homosexual” until 1946.
We got to sit down with Ed Oxford at his dwelling in Long Beach, California and talk about this question.
You have been part of a research team that is seeking to perceive how the decision was made to put the word homosexual in the bible. Is that true?
Ed: Yes. It first showed up in the RSV translation. So before figuring out why they decided to utilize that word in the RSV translation (which is outlined in my upcoming book with Kathy Baldock, Forging a Sacred Weapon: How the Bible Became Anti-Gay) I wanted to see how other cultures and translations treated the same verses when they were translated during the Reformation 500 years ago. So I started collecting old Bibles in French, German, Irish, Gaelic, Czechoslovakian, Polish… you name it. Now I’ve got most European major languages that I’ve collected over time. Anyway, I had a German friend come back to town and I asked if he could support me with some pa
Wait, Was Jesus a Homophobe?
A gay Ohio teen is suing his high college after school officials prohibited him from wearing a t-shirt that said, “Jesus Is Not A Homophobe.” First Amendment aside, is the shirt accurate?
Yes and no. While it’s sensible to assume that Jesus and his fellow Jews in first-century Palestine would have disapproved of same-sex attracted sex, there is no record of his ever having mentioned homosexuality, allow alone expressed particular revulsion about it. In Leviticus, the Old Testament declares it “an abomination” for a man to lounge with a man; the punishment was death. It’s possible that attitudes would have been less draconian in Galilee, the region in northern Israel where Jesus spent most of his life, since it did have a reputation for political autonomy. Still, Jews of the age tended to be less sexually permissive than either the Romans or the Egyptians, so same-sex relationships probably would have been kept quiet.
For all that, Jesus’ best-known pronouncement on sexuality comes from the Gospel of Matthew, in which he merely condemns divorce except in cases of adultery. He also exempts eunuchs from the requirements of traditional marriage—a passage traditiona
This article is part of the What Did Jesus Teach? series.
Silence Equals Support?
In a 2012 article for Slate online, Will Oremus asked a provocative question: Was Jesus a homophobe?1
The article was occasioned by a story about a gay teenager in Ohio who was suing his high school after university officials prohibited him from wearing a T-shirt that said, “Jesus Is Not a Homophobe.”
Oremus was less concerned about the legal issues of the story than he was about the accuracy of the statement on the shirt. Oremus suggests that Jesus’s views on homosexuality were more inclusive than Paul’s. He writes,
While it’s sensible to assume that Jesus and his fellow Jews in first-century Palestine would have disapproved of queer sex, there is no record of his ever having mentioned homosexuality, allow alone expressed particular revulsion about it. . . . Never in the Bible does Jesus himself offer an explicit prohibition of homosexuality.
Oremus seems to suggest that since Jesus never explicitly mentioned homosexuality, he must not hold been very concerned about it.
There are at least two reasons that we should be skeptical of this view.