by jimwalton » Sun May 27, 2018 5:00 pm
> I'm going to need sources with statistics on that claim if you want me to take it seriously.
From
http://epistle.us/hbarticles/neareast.html, we can see that homosexuality in the world of the ancient Near East was not totally pederastic, though that may have been a majority of it. It, along with heterosexual prostitution, was part of their pagan religious system, as it was in the days of the NT as well (notably, but not exclusively, Corinth). A third expression of homosexuality seems to have been homosexual relationships between consenting adults by choice. According to the research, the end of that was not a marriage relationship, or even an enduring one, but merely another way to express one’s affections.
It is in this cultural context that Leviticus was written, where God is defining his own holiness and making an appeal to the holiness of those who claim his name (Lev. 11.44-45). Chapters 18-22 are written to show that because of God's holy nature, there are many behaviors that break fellowship with Him. Homosexual behavior is one of them. It is "detestable". Why? There is no immediate explanation, but the tenor and teachings of the Pentateuch gives us clues. The lives of God's people are supposed to imitate and reflect the character and nature of God: that we must always be attentive to holiness, whether physical, ritual, or moral.
In Romans 1.24-28, Paul speaks of homosexual "indecency." Sarah Ruden, an expert is Greek and Roman literature (B.A. from Univ. of Michigan, M.A. at Johns Hopkins, PhD from Harvard, now a research fellow at Yale Divinity School) says, "For more than 300 years before [Paul] was born, first the Greeks and then the Romans had ruled his home city of Tarsus and made it as similar to the cities of southern Europe as they could. But however much of the Greco-Roman worldview Paul might have adopted, what he heard at home and in the synagogue would not have led him to tolerate homosexuality. Jewish teaching was clear: homosexual acts were an abomination.
"But another teaching mandated circumcision for all males in God’s covenant. Paul put this aside; Judaism would not always hand down what Christianity would practice. Perhaps, in the matter of homosexuality, what he saw as a boy influenced him more than his tradition did. Among the female prostitutes on the streets, or in the windows or doorways of brothels, were males, on average a lot younger. At any slave auction he found himself watching, there might be attractive boys his own age knocked down to local pimps at high prices, to the sound of jokes about how much they would have to endure during their brief careers in order to be worth it. A pious Jewish family, as Paul's probably was, would not have condoned sexual abuse of any of its slaves, but he would know from his non-Jewish friends that household slaves normally were less respected as outlets for bodily functions than were the household toilets, and that a sanctioned role of slave boys was anal sex with free adults.
"Flagrant pedophiles might have pestered him and his friends on the way to and from school, offered friendship, offered tutoring, offered athletic training, offered money or gifts. But adults he trusted would have told him that even any flirting could ruin his reputation, and at worst get him officially classed as a male prostitute, with the loss of all of his civic rights. After his conversion, as he preached what Jesus meant for human society, he wasn’t going to let anyone believe that it included any of this.
"The Roman poet Martial uses 'to be cut to pieces' as the ordinary term for 'to be the passive partner.' The Greeks and Romans thought that the active partner in homosexual intercourse used, humiliated, and physically and morally damaged the passive one. Heterosexual penetration could be harmless in the Christian community, in marriage; homosexual penetration could be harmless nowhere. There were no gay households; there were in fact no gay institutions or gay culture at all, in the sense of times or places in which it was mutually safe for men to have anal sex with one another.
"In 5th-century Athens (the gay paradise we hear of), one of the most common insults in comedy was 'having a loose anus,' meaning depraved—not just sexually, but generally.
"It was a system of ethics that locked people into this cruel regime, a regime which also included the erotic oppression of women. While Paul may seem to mention lesbianism, this was such a rare or little-noticed phenomenon in the ancient world that it is likely he instead means anal penetration of women by men. That did happen often, but men valued it less than penetration of boys: women were made to be penetrated anyway; a real man needed to transform an at least potentially active and powerful creature into a weak and inferior one.
"The Greeks and Romans even held homosexual rape to be divinely sanctioned.
"No wonder parents guarded their young sons doggedly. It was, for example, normal for a family of any standing to dedicate one slave to a son’s protection, especially on the otherwise unsupervised walk to and from school: this was the pedagogue, or 'child leader.' Since success with freeborn, citizen-class boys was rare, predators naturally turned to those with no protectors, young male slaves and prostitutes. Besides that of the pedagogue, another telling slave profession—perhaps only among Romans—was that of the deliciae ('pet') or concubines ('bedmate'), a slave boy whose main duty was passive anal sex with the master. The public acknowledged such a child's status, as well as his vulnerability to being retired at a young age. His retirement was not likely to be a happy one; he kept the stigma of passive sodomy, but he lost the protection of his close relationship to his master, while usually remaining bound to the same household and the other slaves with the accumulated grudges. They may have refused him, as he would have passed his 'boom,' even the status of a sexual plaything. (She continues her chapter with pages and pages of information.)
"Paul could have, like generations of Greek and Roman moralistic and cynical commentators, lit into passive homosexuality, into the victims. But in Romans 1 he makes no distinction between active and passive: the whole transaction is wrong. This is crucially indicated by his use of the Greek word for 'males,' arsenes, for everybody; he does not use the word for 'men.' The Classical and New Testament word for a socially acceptable, sexually functional man is aner. In traditional parlance, this could mean an active but never a passive homosexual. But Paul places on a par all the male participants in homosexual acts, emphasizing this in Romans 2.1 (which see), and clearly implying that they are all morally degraded and that they all become physically debilitated from the sex act with each other. Such effects were unheard of among the Greeks and Romans when it came to active homosexuals: these were thought only to draw their passive partners' moral and physical integrity into themselves.
"According to all of the evidence, Paul’s revolutionary message stuck. This may be in part because he told his audience a more resonant truth than that of sexual misconduct in itself. First look at what he immediately passes on to in Romans 1.28-2.1. I picture Paul flushed and sweating in his rage as he writes that everyone is responsible for what pederasty has made of society: especially those who, egging one another on in an insolent, boastful clique, damage others with active sodomy and then blame them. These acts are 'the very same things,' no matter who is doing what to whom. Compare the list of horrors in vv. 29ff to Gal. 5.16-21."
> I'm referring to the Flood, but I recognize some Christians don't believe the Flood literally happened.
I believe the Flood literally happened, but it wasn't global.
> There is also the wholesale slaughter of children when the Israelites conquered a town.
Actually there wasn't, but there isn't enough room on this post to go into it. It was warfare rhetoric, not what was actually done.
> This only applies to taking fellow Israelite men as slaves. I'd suggest reading Exodus 21 and Leviticus 25.
I've read them. Again, no room on this post. It would take the character limit all by itself.
> Dt. 22.21: If she can't prove her virginity (her innocence), she is stoned. That's actually guilty until proven innocent.
You've misread the text. Vv. 13-14 start off with a false and slanderous accusation. In v. 15 evidence is provided, and the truth starts to come out (16). A counter accusation of slander is offered (17). When the evidence is presented (17), the slanderous man with the false accusation is punished, and the girl's reputation is both protected and vindicated. If, however, there is no evidence or testimony to counter the accusation, then the girl is punished for her promiscuity.
> All of your arguments against the passage being read as-is can be seen as: "The inspired word of God is confusing if taken at face value and following it as it is written, without inserting our own caveats and qualifiers, would be a mistake."
What I'm saying is that we shouldn't be satisfied to read the Bible superficially.
> I'm going to need sources with statistics on that claim if you want me to take it seriously.
From [url]http://epistle.us/hbarticles/neareast.html[/url], we can see that homosexuality in the world of the ancient Near East was not totally pederastic, though that may have been a majority of it. It, along with heterosexual prostitution, was part of their pagan religious system, as it was in the days of the NT as well (notably, but not exclusively, Corinth). A third expression of homosexuality seems to have been homosexual relationships between consenting adults by choice. According to the research, the end of that was not a marriage relationship, or even an enduring one, but merely another way to express one’s affections.
It is in this cultural context that Leviticus was written, where God is defining his own holiness and making an appeal to the holiness of those who claim his name (Lev. 11.44-45). Chapters 18-22 are written to show that because of God's holy nature, there are many behaviors that break fellowship with Him. Homosexual behavior is one of them. It is "detestable". Why? There is no immediate explanation, but the tenor and teachings of the Pentateuch gives us clues. The lives of God's people are supposed to imitate and reflect the character and nature of God: that we must always be attentive to holiness, whether physical, ritual, or moral.
In Romans 1.24-28, Paul speaks of homosexual "indecency." Sarah Ruden, an expert is Greek and Roman literature (B.A. from Univ. of Michigan, M.A. at Johns Hopkins, PhD from Harvard, now a research fellow at Yale Divinity School) says, "For more than 300 years before [Paul] was born, first the Greeks and then the Romans had ruled his home city of Tarsus and made it as similar to the cities of southern Europe as they could. But however much of the Greco-Roman worldview Paul might have adopted, what he heard at home and in the synagogue would not have led him to tolerate homosexuality. Jewish teaching was clear: homosexual acts were an abomination.
"But another teaching mandated circumcision for all males in God’s covenant. Paul put this aside; Judaism would not always hand down what Christianity would practice. Perhaps, in the matter of homosexuality, what he saw as a boy influenced him more than his tradition did. Among the female prostitutes on the streets, or in the windows or doorways of brothels, were males, on average a lot younger. At any slave auction he found himself watching, there might be attractive boys his own age knocked down to local pimps at high prices, to the sound of jokes about how much they would have to endure during their brief careers in order to be worth it. A pious Jewish family, as Paul's probably was, would not have condoned sexual abuse of any of its slaves, but he would know from his non-Jewish friends that household slaves normally were less respected as outlets for bodily functions than were the household toilets, and that a sanctioned role of slave boys was anal sex with free adults.
"Flagrant pedophiles might have pestered him and his friends on the way to and from school, offered friendship, offered tutoring, offered athletic training, offered money or gifts. But adults he trusted would have told him that even any flirting could ruin his reputation, and at worst get him officially classed as a male prostitute, with the loss of all of his civic rights. After his conversion, as he preached what Jesus meant for human society, he wasn’t going to let anyone believe that it included any of this.
"The Roman poet Martial uses 'to be cut to pieces' as the ordinary term for 'to be the passive partner.' The Greeks and Romans thought that the active partner in homosexual intercourse used, humiliated, and physically and morally damaged the passive one. Heterosexual penetration could be harmless in the Christian community, in marriage; homosexual penetration could be harmless nowhere. There were no gay households; there were in fact no gay institutions or gay culture at all, in the sense of times or places in which it was mutually safe for men to have anal sex with one another.
"In 5th-century Athens (the gay paradise we hear of), one of the most common insults in comedy was 'having a loose anus,' meaning depraved—not just sexually, but generally.
"It was a system of ethics that locked people into this cruel regime, a regime which also included the erotic oppression of women. While Paul may seem to mention lesbianism, this was such a rare or little-noticed phenomenon in the ancient world that it is likely he instead means anal penetration of women by men. That did happen often, but men valued it less than penetration of boys: women were made to be penetrated anyway; a real man needed to transform an at least potentially active and powerful creature into a weak and inferior one.
"The Greeks and Romans even held homosexual rape to be divinely sanctioned.
"No wonder parents guarded their young sons doggedly. It was, for example, normal for a family of any standing to dedicate one slave to a son’s protection, especially on the otherwise unsupervised walk to and from school: this was the pedagogue, or 'child leader.' Since success with freeborn, citizen-class boys was rare, predators naturally turned to those with no protectors, young male slaves and prostitutes. Besides that of the pedagogue, another telling slave profession—perhaps only among Romans—was that of the deliciae ('pet') or concubines ('bedmate'), a slave boy whose main duty was passive anal sex with the master. The public acknowledged such a child's status, as well as his vulnerability to being retired at a young age. His retirement was not likely to be a happy one; he kept the stigma of passive sodomy, but he lost the protection of his close relationship to his master, while usually remaining bound to the same household and the other slaves with the accumulated grudges. They may have refused him, as he would have passed his 'boom,' even the status of a sexual plaything. (She continues her chapter with pages and pages of information.)
"Paul could have, like generations of Greek and Roman moralistic and cynical commentators, lit into passive homosexuality, into the victims. But in Romans 1 he makes no distinction between active and passive: the whole transaction is wrong. This is crucially indicated by his use of the Greek word for 'males,' arsenes, for everybody; he does not use the word for 'men.' The Classical and New Testament word for a socially acceptable, sexually functional man is aner. In traditional parlance, this could mean an active but never a passive homosexual. But Paul places on a par all the male participants in homosexual acts, emphasizing this in Romans 2.1 (which see), and clearly implying that they are all morally degraded and that they all become physically debilitated from the sex act with each other. Such effects were unheard of among the Greeks and Romans when it came to active homosexuals: these were thought only to draw their passive partners' moral and physical integrity into themselves.
"According to all of the evidence, Paul’s revolutionary message stuck. This may be in part because he told his audience a more resonant truth than that of sexual misconduct in itself. First look at what he immediately passes on to in Romans 1.28-2.1. I picture Paul flushed and sweating in his rage as he writes that everyone is responsible for what pederasty has made of society: especially those who, egging one another on in an insolent, boastful clique, damage others with active sodomy and then blame them. These acts are 'the very same things,' no matter who is doing what to whom. Compare the list of horrors in vv. 29ff to Gal. 5.16-21."
> I'm referring to the Flood, but I recognize some Christians don't believe the Flood literally happened.
I believe the Flood literally happened, but it wasn't global.
> There is also the wholesale slaughter of children when the Israelites conquered a town.
Actually there wasn't, but there isn't enough room on this post to go into it. It was warfare rhetoric, not what was actually done.
> This only applies to taking fellow Israelite men as slaves. I'd suggest reading Exodus 21 and Leviticus 25.
I've read them. Again, no room on this post. It would take the character limit all by itself.
> Dt. 22.21: If she can't prove her virginity (her innocence), she is stoned. That's actually guilty until proven innocent.
You've misread the text. Vv. 13-14 start off with a false and slanderous accusation. In v. 15 evidence is provided, and the truth starts to come out (16). A counter accusation of slander is offered (17). When the evidence is presented (17), the slanderous man with the false accusation is punished, and the girl's reputation is both protected and vindicated. If, however, there is no evidence or testimony to counter the accusation, then the girl is punished for her promiscuity.
> All of your arguments against the passage being read as-is can be seen as: "The inspired word of God is confusing if taken at face value and following it as it is written, without inserting our own caveats and qualifiers, would be a mistake."
What I'm saying is that we shouldn't be satisfied to read the Bible superficially.