INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
AUTHORTALK® HOST: RONALD WAY
AUTHOR: L. MICHAEL WHITE
SUBJECT: HOMOSEXUALITY IN THE BIBLE — PART TWO OF TWO
AUTHORTALK® HOST: RONALD WAY
AUTHOR: L. MICHAEL WHITE
SUBJECT: HOMOSEXUALITY IN THE BIBLE — PART TWO OF TWO
Ron:
Hello, everyone. My name is Ron Way. I'm your host here on Author Talk and the Rising Light Media outlets. I am excited to continue with Part Two of our interview on homosexuality in the Bible, both Old and New Testament, with Dr. Michael White. We began with Part One, and we went through the Old Testament last week, so if you haven't heard that, start there because it's going to set you up and tell you how this all fits together and how it makes some sense.
Ladies and gentlemen, I want to welcome back our guest today on our show. Michael White, welcome back.
Michael:
Thank you, Ron. Glad to be here.
Ron:
Let's move fast forward now. We examined the Old Testament first for references to homosexuality, and found none. Incidentally, you blew my mind. I should note, that there's also transcripts here on the website for both interviews, so you can read them if you're in a hurry and can read faster than you can listen.
Here we go. Our number-one writer of the New Testament, the earliest writings that we have before the Gospels, were written by the Apostle Paul. Michael, I think that Corinthians is pretty clear about homosexuality, isn't it? Where did I go wrong?
Michael:
Yes, it is the writings of Paul that seem to be the place where most people go, and it is because the language there seems to be crystal clear about same-sex relations. But as we mentioned last time, the first thing to observe is that the term homosexuality or homosexual did not exist in the world of the New Testament, the world of the Old Testament, nor the Hebrew Bible, and did not exist down until very modern times, in fact, the 19th century.
In practical terms, let me summarize some of our findings this way. First, there is no general word for same-sex relationships in the Hebrew Bible at all. There are specific passages in two cases about men, but nothing about women. Nor is there a general word for same-sex relations in the New Testament or in the contemporary literature of the New Testament world, whether Jewish, Christian, or pagan. In other words, there is just no terminology like homosexuality that’s a big catch-all category for these ideas.
Second, the New Testament inherits from Judaism an antipathy toward Hellenistic culture, which often manifests itself as a polemic against idolatry and its attendant vices. We can go to the passage in Wisdom of Solomon that I cited last time, which says that the beginning of idolatry is the source of all things like fornication and sexual evil. That connection is one that really dominates the thinking patterns of the earliest Christians when they come at it. If there is a discussion of sexuality in conjunction with this, that’s where we have to recognize that that is where it is coming from.
Now the two key passages then, and there are only two really ... Excuse me, there are only three key passages in the New Testament that deal with, directly with same sex relations, and so when we look at them, we have to recognize where they're coming from and think about what ... They're really aggressive. Now to kind of look ahead, let me summarize it this way. All of the passages in the New Testament are primarily directed against the Greek practice of pederasty, which means older adult men with younger boys, or what we now call pedophilia. That’s really the sexual practice that most comes under the voice of warning that we get in Paul and in the rest of the New Testament when he gave it. If there's something that they're talking about, it's almost always that. In order to see that, we have to look at some of these passages and think about what's happening.
Ron:
Let's read those in context, and maybe you can help us, walk through it.
Michael:
Okay. This is 1 Corinthians 6, Verses 9 and 10. It's the first and one of the most important ones, "Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived, neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor sodomites, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortionists will inherit the kingdom of God." That is the New King James Version that I'm reading.
Now there's the passage, and that’s the one. You can see it's a series of sexual practices, sexual aberrations, it might be called. But notice, fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, and then homosexuals or sodomites. That’s the kind of passage that people have latched onto for years and years and years. The problem is the translation, homosexuals and sodomites. Neither of those terms is in the Greek of the New Testament.
Ron:
Really? How did we get those?
Michael:
Yeah. How did we get those terms? That’s where the later terminology that comes up in the 19th century begins to creep into modern translation. Sodomites is an old term, but it's medieval. It doesn’t exist in the biblical world at all, nor does ... and certainly not homosexuality. There are several ways that we can think about this, but I did look through all the modern Bible translations, just to compare different wordings for these two terms. Just taking this verse and the two terms translated here in New King James, I just ran just all different translations just to see, and here's a variety of the things that are used.
The English Revised Version, "Effeminate and abusers of themselves with men." The Douay Rheims, the early English Catholic Bible, "Effeminate and liers with mankind." It's not until the Revised Standard Version of 1952 that we actually have the word homosexual introduced into modern translations.
Ron:
Even though the word homosexual isn't used, isn't that the same, even with the other interpretations you just read, Michael?
Michael:
You might think so at first until you look at some of the other translations. Now let me read another one. Here's one. This is the New American Bible, and it says for those two words ... Instead of homosexual and sodomites, it says, "Boy prostitutes and practicing homosexuals." That’s a very different translation, the same passage in the New Testament and the same Greek words, but something very different, "Boy prostitutes and practicing homosexuals." What's going on there? Well, in fact, you can recognize that the New American Bible is a Catholic translation, and so the term "practicing homosexuals" is a way that Catholic tradition has tried to work with these concepts, where, at least in some forms of Catholic thought, you can say, "Yes, you can't help it if you're gay, but don’t practice." This puts a modern Catholic theological decision into the translation.
Ron:
That’s truly powerful, because it changes the entire meaning of the passage, even though I'm not happy with the first meaning. Keep going.
Michael:
This is what's happening in all of these translations. So, let’s continue; we have the New International Version, male prostitutes and homosexual offenders, meaning not just any old homosexuals, the offending ones, I suppose. Obviously, these translations get a little stretched in terms of their meaning, and that's the problem, because when we go back and actually look at the Greek, what we find is the two words that are being used here are…
Ron:
From Paul?
Michael:
Yes. These are from Paul. From this passage in 1 Corinthians 6, Verses 9 and 10, the first word, it means soft. That’s all it really means, but it can be either soft in sexual terms like the passive partner in a pederastic relationship, in other words, the boy in a pederastic relationship. Not necessarily a prostitute, but the boy in a pederastic relationship in Greek culture. The other term is “arsenokoïtai,”, which probably refers to the adult male lover of the boy. Yes, it may well refer to Greek pederasty, but if it refers to Greek pederasty, it's not referring to all same-sex relationships either.
Ron:
I understand.
Michael:
This is where the terms or the translations obscure what the passages are really about.
Ron:
If we go back to Paul's world then, Paul was a Jew, practicing Jew, believing Jew. He would have been pulling his definitions from Judaism, right?
Michael:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ron:
But he coexisted and was ministering in a Greco-Roman world, and what this may, in the cult religions, may have very well been very prevalent with temple prostitutes, male and female, young boys. Is that what he's referring to?
Michael:
There's really not even as much of that in the New Testament world as we might have imagined. We hear stories about that sort of thing, but, in fact, probably not. In fact, the other part of what's going on here by the Roman period ... In other words, Paul is writing in the early Roman Empire, but by the Roman period, there's actually some criticism of older Greek culture precisely for this practice of pederasty. Now what we mean by pederasty ... The modern term would be pedophilia, but what we mean by pederasty in Greek culture is a kind of institutionalized apprenticeship of boys to older men where sexual activity was part of the training, and so it's part of their ... It's an institutionalized aspect of their culture.
By the time we get to the Roman Empire, that is even being criticized by Romans, not just Paul and not just Jews more generally. It's a much broader range of discussions of sexuality where I think many more people in Paul's day would have said, "Nah, we don’t really like that idea." Paul is not doing something so different after all, although Jews more generally—Paul in particular—would have found the Greek pederasty to be somewhat abhorrent. There's no question that’s what he's talking about. I also think that it's not the same as talking about all kinds of same-sex relations between men. It's just not the same thing.
I think the other thing that's worth noting is, notice this passage. This is 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 10 that we were just reading. Notice it's a list of things, bad things that make a person not fit to inherit the kingdom of God. That’s the way the passage works. We call them vice lists, so in this case, it's fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, homosexuals, sodomites, thieves, covetous, drunkards. Now those are the same category in Paul. Do you hear many people saying that’s the same category as homosexuality, a thief? Someone is covetous, is drunkard, a reviler. What's a reviler? We would call it libel and slander, I suppose. While that might take you to court, it's not usually thought of as keeping your eye with the kingdom of heaven.
Ron:
Right.
Michael:
In fact, we can track this. Paul actually uses these vice lists rather frequently, and they're often in this form. They're kind of a staccato repetition of things that everybody agrees are bad, and that’s what he's really doing. If we just look at how he called this, immorality almost always shows up in all of them; 1 Corinthians 5:10, "Immoral, greed, robbers, idolaters," 1 Corinthians 5:11, "Immoral, greedy, idolaters, revilers, drunkards, robbers." The one is 1 Corinthians 6, "Idolaters, adulterers," then the pederasts, "thieves, greedy, drunkards, revilers," and so it goes on and on. You can extend that list. All of these are things that you could think are bad, but notice thieves, greedy, drunkards, revilers. We do not think of those in the same breath with homosexuality today, and I think that’s part of the misreading of Paul here.
Ron:
We also have to consider Paul himself, who recommended that none of us have any sex.
Michael:
Right.
Ron:
If you're really going to get to heaven, you can. Okay, I accept that, but you shouldn’t.
Michael:
Yeah, 1 Corinthians 7 is absolutely explicit, that Paul thinks the preferable way is asceticism, that is, no sexuality whatsoever, and he thinks passion is a bad thing. Paul's ideal for humanity, and humanity in religions life, is one without sex. Now he makes concessions. Marriage is there to forestall immorality, but it's more of a concession than it is his ideal. If you really want to follow Paul, you’ve got some real big shoes to fill in terms of sexual ideals as far as…
Ron:
And behavior.
Michael:
And behavior. Also, you think about all of this other stuff in a very different light as a result of that.
Ron:
We've been talking about men. I'm watching the clock here too, Michael. Can you get to women as well, because we haven't talked about them. It's not in the Old Testament, but did it creep into the New Testament?
Michael:
The only other passages in the New Testament that deal with the issue of homosexuality, or usually as read, there's one passage in 1 Timothy, Chapter 1, Verses 9 and 10, and it talks about fornicators and sodomites, but the term used there is the same term that’s in 1 Corinthians that is sometimes translated sodomites, and it refers only to the adult male member in a pederastic relationship in that case.
[Note: most scholars do not consider 1st or 2nd Timothy to be an authentic letter written by Paul, but rather was composed and credited to Paul at a later date. Ron]
The other passage that is very frequently cited is that in Romans 1, Verses 26 and 27 are the two principal verses, but it comes in a passage primarily about idolatry and immorality.
Ron:
But are we talking about immorality? Isn't that the subject?
Michael:
Right, but this is actually a criticism of basically Greek culture from that perspective. It's worth reading the passage. "They exchange the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles. Therefore, God gave them up to the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to degrading of their bodies among themselves because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever. Amen. For this reason, God gave them up to degrading passions."
You see, now one way that people have begun to think about this is, "Hmm, you mean God gave them up to passions. That’s kind of a punishment for idolatry," so God's at fault in some way. Well, that’s pretty hard to say. No one would really say it's God's fault, but notice that the logic here is really starting from idolatry, not from the sexuality. The sexuality is viewed as an outgrowth. Here it comes in the two passages. This is Romans 1:27, "Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural."
I'm reading from the New Revised Standard Version, "Natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men giving up natural intercourse with women were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the penalty for their error, and since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to the base mind, to things that should not be done. They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice, full of envy and murder and strife, deceit, craftiness and so on.
Ron:
Isn't that pretty clear, though, Michael?
Michael:
Well, no. Let's talk about what's going on. In this passage, we start with the idea ... This is what comes out of the older Jewish tradition that Paul is working from. It's idolatry that’s the source for immoral sexuality, and immoral could be a variety of things, not just same-sex relations. Specifically, Greek culture is what's being criticized here because of the Greek practice of pederasty. That’s really primarily what this is. The most explicit passage is Romans 1:27 where he talks about man giving up natural intercourse with women, consumed with passion for other men. That I don’t think is really being questioned here.
The first verse, though, 26 is more difficult. It says, "The women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural." What's unnatural? Is it referring to same-sex relations between women? Not necessarily.
Ron:
Really?
Michael:
No.
Ron:
It's not oral sex?
Michael:
It could be referring to women who adopt a practice of sexual intercourse so that they don’t become pregnant.
Ron:
Oh, my goodness.
Michael:
That would be called unnatural in that way of talking. In fact, that’s exactly how the Greeks used the terminology, so unnatural doesn’t mean not with men. This is the one passage, Romans 1:27, that seems to refer to women, and he calls it exchanging natural intercourse for unnatural.
Ron:
Now if you're exchanging unnatural intercourse, is this women to women? Is that what we're talking about here? Is that gay?
Michael:
No, actually, I don’t think so. I actually think this passage is referring to marital sex between a man and a woman, man and his wife, where they're performing sex in such a way that she will not get pregnant. So, it's some form of sexual activity that avoids pregnancy, and that’s what that’s really talking about. It's not actually same-sex relations between women that is even being discussed here, so there's no general concept of homosexuality.
Ron:
Thank you, Michael. That is powerful. I would have never understood that, and really do appreciate that. Holy cow.
Michael:
If this verse is about something else, let's say it's about contraception. Wow, that really is a very interesting question, and there is a long debate over whether contraception is Godly or not; certainly, within the Catholic tradition, partly coming out of this book, it is not.
Ron:
Wow.
Michael:
But, you see, that’s not what most people think is going on here. It's very different than if you think it's talking about same-sex relations among women, but if that’s not what this is about, yes, we have something about men and clearly in the same-sex relationship issue, but not about women. Once again, the idea of homosexuality as the overarching category goes out the window here. Then when we look at what is going on in the passage, notice it's really in the context of a polemic against idolatry and how sexual practices, deviant sexual practices, if you want to call it that, are a result of idolatry in this case.
That, I think, is really what Paul is really talking about. Paul is talking about Gentiles first and foremost, and why they need to turn to God, but what he's really trying to do here is set up a kind of sexual ethic that establishes the right relation to God, but to claim that that is predicated on a modern notion of homosexuality is simply not there. It's not in the text. There's no reference to women having same-sex relationship, and so on.
I think that the game is different now when we start looking at these passages this way, and remember, as you noted before, that Paul himself is an ascetic. He thinks all sexuality is bad, and so what we're looking for is ... Paul himself makes a concession about marriage, but these, the middle ground, shall we say, in sexual activity is what everybody is trying to talk about.
I go back to one final point, this criticism of Greek sexuality that we find in Paul is invariably about pederasty. It's not about loving, same-sex relations between adult males of the same general status. It's about something different. It's about something that I think many people would consider abusive, and that’s what we need to be focused on rather than just the idea of same-sex relations.
Ron:
Michael, that is fascinating, however, we have just a few minutes left. Our time together has gone that fast. Michael, I can't tell you how appreciative I am for you having come up here where we can tape this interview, because it is so needed. I asked you privately, but I'll ask you publicly for any of the publishers that are listening. When are you going to write a book about this? Because it's needed/
Michael:
I've toyed with the idea and even proposed a couple of different versions of it for doing a book on the Bible and “the H-word”, as I like to call it, just to get out some of the issues that are in this. It's a complicated subject. It's not obvious on every level, and it requires a lot of in-depth study, and I think that’s what one has to do. I hope I'll get to it in the next year or so.
Ron:
That’s great, Michael. You really put Paul in perspective for me today, and I appreciate that very much. I can see it. One of the things we tend not to do when we're reading the Bible is we don’t see real people. We don’t see real humans. We're reading a letter that he wrote for whatever reason to the Corinthians, Philippians, Thessalonians, and to the Romans, but we don’t see a real man who is struggling himself with sexuality. It's really evident.
He says in essence, “Okay, I'll agree you can have this kind of sex, in marriage only, and still get to God, but if you have to, you shouldn’t really have any sex.” He's fighting against a Greco-Roman worldview, primarily Greco, that has these other, what he considers, aberrant behaviors. At least that is what he thinks they are.
Michael:
And we're, in Paul’s time, moving away from the Greco culture.
Ron:
Yes, as a society the Romans and he were moving away from that concept of sexual behavior, of men with boy lovers, being acceptable, and that’s all it is. It's an advancement of his ideas of sexuality and the norms for this society that he's trying to build. Am I right?
Michael:
Yes, and I do think it's fair to say that in the Roman world, same-sex relations between men and adult males of a more honorable sort, let's call it, were much more commonplace and were widespread. The discussions of homosexuality or same-sex relations in the Roman world are another very complicated topic, because there are some problematic aspects to that and there are some that are more, shall we say, mainstream of the period. Finding where to locate any of the biblical materials in this spectrum is what we are trying to do when we embark in this kind of study and research.
Ron:
In any case, Paul was one man. He had his own ideas. Some of them we agree with and some of them we don’t. It is always fascinating to me which we pick and choose. We cherry-pick what we want to read in any of these passages anyway.
Thank you once again, Michael, for being my guest on Author Talk. I'm very, very appreciative.
Michael:
Thanks again, Ron. I enjoyed being here.
Ron:
I look forward to meeting you again a year from now when we have the book to review.
Ladies and gentlemen, that’s it for today. Thank you so much for being with us on Author Talk and the Rising Light Media Network. Until next week, I remain faithfully yours.