Bible's Condemnation of Homosexuality, More Shaky Evidence
I wrote recently about the two Old Testament passages which are most often used to condemn homosexual people and homosexuality. They are Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13. It is from these passages the word "abomination" has come to be used against homosexuality.
To put homosexuality in it proper context, it was not really a big deal to those who wrote the Bible. When something was considered important the writers would have Jesus say something about it. They did not have Jesus mentioning homosexuality even once.
The Leviticus passages were written in Hebrew. This was a Hebrew used mostly BCE. As a spoken language it stopped around 200 CE. A thousand or two thousand years after a language stopped being spoken we could expect there would be disagreements about what was meant in passages written centuries before.
Any rational view would include the good possibility that translations would be colored by views at the time. Cultures change and so would at least some translations.
It is not surprising, then, that Bibles written in the 1400's might be based on translations that differed from current ones. The Bibles of all European languages referred not to homosexuality in the Leviticus passages but to man/boy sexual abuse. Five hundred years later the same passages in our Bibles refer to homosexuality.
Today, we are taught to visit a "Lexicon" when we are in doubt about what something in the Bible means. The same was true 500 years ago. A Lexicon from 1483 says the Leviticus passages referred to man/boy abuse.
It is not clear at all the Bible condemned homosexuality.
Does this work now??? We are all born equally no matter our color, age, race or ethnic group and especially our sexual orientation. This tendency to divide us up into "us and them" is tearing the social fabric into warring factions......and divided, we will destroy each other and the planet and not some commanding god.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Jinx. "Into warring factions.." is exactly was Christians, and most other religions, do with their Bible. With the gay issue, it would be most refreshing if believers would just say, "We don't like gays" and leave it at that. Instead, they read into the Bible something that is not there.
Deleteseems to me that you so-called secularists with your "bible" are doing quite a good job of dividing us into "us v. them". ever heard the old adage about glass houses and stones? BTW. welcome back Jinx. I have missed your wisdom.
DeleteIf I recall the Greeks shortly before this time, history wise, had all sorts of 'man with man' 'debauchery' (to use a judgmental term today's morals would infer) going on. It would seem entirely plausible that history has expunged in the name of decency and other noble causes many of those references in order to spare mankind the indignity of his past. That's what righteous people do.
ReplyDeleteThanks for commenting, Max. That's a good topic, what was written down in ancient times and of that written down what survived and why? Those of made up what Jesus was supposed to have said, none of those writers knew him if he existed at all, did not have him saying anything about homosexuality. Was that because they were trying to erase it from history or because it wasn't important enough to even mention?
Deleteseems that Max is looking for conspiracies where none exist. if you want history look, for example, in Aristotle's Politics. he even names names. that aside, we know that the Greeks were often into pederasty. I'll wager that even Jon would frown on that, moralizer that he is.
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