Biblical references to same-sex relations are comparatively few.  There are only seven major passages, and they are all against it, often in the strongest terms.  For Evangelicals this is likely to be an uncontroversial remark; this chapter will largely explain why that is so.  As we assess these, remember our main question is whether the condemnations that apply to same-sex relations in scripture also apply to orientation and marriage as we presently understand those things.  Do they make the same sense when we must address orientation and marriage together?

The best-known reference to same-sex intercourse in the Bible is in the story of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah from the time of the patriarchs (Gen 19).  A little less well known is the similar story of the city of Gibeah in the time just before the monarchy (Jdg 19).  In both stories, large groups of men threaten visitors to their city with same-sex rape.  In each story the breakdown of moral society is in view, and the social obligation to show hospitality to travellers is not just neglected but violently denied.  A third possible reference of this kind, much less well known, is the story of Noah’s son Ham (Gen 9:20–29), which might or might not imply that he raped his drunk father.  This idea turns on a possible euphemism in “seeing” his father naked, and the severity of Noah’s response.  But the story only underscores the horror of male rape.

The passage in Gen 19 is sufficiently similar to the one in Judges 19 that they can be considered together.  It is sometimes argued that same-sex rape was not in view here, and that the demands to hand over Lot’s companions “so that we may know them” were just about verifying their identity.  In favour of this view, most references to the incident in the Old Testament and intertestamental literature emphasise Sodom’s famed inhospitality – as Jesus does in Luke 10:10–13 – without mentioning the threatened assaults.  Against this, though, it’s hard to explain why verifying someone’s identity would have required a large and violent mob.  Moreover, when Lot offered to hand over his daughters instead (!), he says they have not “known” a man, showing a definitely sexual meaning of that same word.  The whole story is not about this one incident prompting the cities’ destruction, but rather their whole way of living, of which this was just one expression.  Still, there followed a long tradition of western rulers thinking that they needed to crack down on same-sex relations if they wanted to avoid natural disasters.

Few feel the need to argue in that way anymore.  The evident purpose of the stories of these cities is to show how bad things were at the time: why Sodom deserved judgement, and the pure anarchy of the latter chapters of Judges when “there was no king in Israel and everyone did what was right in their own eyes” (Jdg 17:6; 21:25).  They don’t feature much in modern discussion of same-sex issues, since same-sex rape has nothing to do with our present concerns of same-sex orientation or same-sex marriage.  The violence and degradation is about as far as you can get from two people in love wanting to commit their lives to each other in marriage, and if “all the men from every part of the city” (Gen 19:4) were involved, that’s far too many people to explain by same-sex orientation anyway.  So they don’t add much to the later legal prohibitions, except to underscore the peculiar horror of same-sex rape, and depict such actions as a sign of societal breakdown.  It might nowadays be suggested that churches who cannot show hospitality to any sub-group of humanity are the true heirs of Sodom.  But that involves first assessing whether their concerns over same-sex relations are in other respects justified.

In Leviticus 18:22 and 20:18 the Jewish law prohibits male same-sex relations and prescribes a death penalty for them, as it does for adultery and incest, among twenty-or-so capital crimes mentioned in the Old Testament.  The stated concern is that Israelites must not live like the nations before and around them.(In Appendix §7.a, we’ll ask whether these laws should have taken account of orientation.)

They are in each case described as an ‘abomination’.  What is not explained is why it is abominable.  The word can refer to all the sexual sins in Lev 18 (see vv.27–30), but also to some food laws, pagan idolatry, and express general strong disapproval.  It means something loathsome, hateful, and detestable, but does not in itself say why.

Several explanations have been proposed.  The reference to ‘male’ rather than ‘man’ might be a reference to the creation of ‘male’ and female in Genesis.  But then, ‘male’ also avoids having to say that the prohibition covers boys as well as men, so it seems at least as likely to be simple brevity.

Other explanations turn on the phrase “you shall not lie with a male as one lies with a woman”.  On this view the passive partner would be being treated as a woman, which would affect their patriarchal honour as a man.  In the Ancient Near East, male rape was commonly used to humiliate and subjugate defeated enemies.  But there’s no suggestion of violence or exploitation in these passages; on the contrary, the culpability of both parties suggests that consent is envisaged.

Alternatively, “as one lies with a woman” might refer to the penetrative nature of anal intercourse.  The Old Testament’s purity and hygiene laws, which worried about a range of bodily fluids, might reasonably have framed any possible mixing of semen, faeces, and blood as extraordinarily impure and unhygienic.  The immediately following prohibition of sex during menstruation was likely of this kind.  Against this is the problem that anal intercourse could equally well be performed with women, and that is not prohibited here.  Moreover, there is no prohibition of sex between women to accompany the prohibition of sex between men.

The passage emphasises that the Israelites are not to be like the nations around them.  If the Hebrew word qedeshim refers to male temple prostitutes in other passages (Deut 23:17;1 Ki 14:24, 15:12, 22:46; 2 Ki 23:7), then same-sex prostitution may also be in view; the prohibitions do not . The nature and extent of such prostitution is presently disputed, but since there’s no sign here that the concern is being narrowed to prostitution or temples, such practices don’t add much to the prohibitions.

Moving to the New Testament, we should begin by pointing out something not visible in English-language translations.  The New Testament condemnations of same-sex relations avoid all of the normal Greek words for them.  This is also true of Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible.  There was no shortage of available vocabulary, whether for sex between men and boys (paiderastēs, arrenomanes ‘boy-mad’, paidophthoros ‘corrupter of boys’), between men (erastes for the ‘active’ partner, eromenos and kinaidos for the ‘passive’), or between women (tribades, hetairistriai); and various others.  While same sex relations are undeniably mentioned in the New Testament, they are curiously not named.

This is reminiscent of the circumspect language that runs through the whole western legal tradition from Justinian to the British Empire.  By the end these matters would be expressed in Latin to avoid language ordinary people might recognise.  Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–69), which widely influenced law throughout the Commonwealth, speaks of peccatum illud horribile, inter christianos non nominandum – “that horrible crime not to be named among Christians” – quod non proficit scire – “which it is unfit even to know”.

Paul’s use of ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ may, then, be a euphemism for a topic at best inappropriate in polite society and at worst unspeakable by anyone of moral sensibility.  Paul might here be following his own advice in Eph 5:3–13, where he urges former pagans to renounce fornication (porneia), impurity, obscenity and so on, “For it is shameful even to mention what such people do secretly” (v.12).  He urges them to “expose” such conduct (v.11).  How do you expose something that it is shameful even to mention?  By oblique references and euphemisms.

The fundamental Evangelical conviction about same-sex relations is that they must be sexual immorality – something like adultery or prostitution, say – and so, that they can never be negotiable for Christians.  We’ll need to understand this idea before we go further.

One of the New Testament’s most pivotal passages appears in Acts 15.  It describes a meeting convened by early Christian leaders to answer the pressing question of how much of the Jewish law is binding on Christians who are not also Jews.  They conclude that gentiles need only avoid idolatry and sexual immorality.  There’s also mention of avoiding blood and strangled meat, but a) later references omit these two concerns, b) they may be aspects of the same concerns, c) and they are in any case of limited modern relevance.  So the idea seems to be that idolatry and sexual immorality are the matters of universal importance before God.  At least, for the matters that were in question – we shouldn’t think they were suddenly endorsing murder or theft by omitting any mention of them here.

The Greek word translated “sexual immorality” in this passage is porneia.  It later turns up in English words like pornography and (via Latin) fornication.  It was used by a handful of Greek writers in the fourth and fifth centuries BCE, such as Demosthenes and Aeschines, to mean prostitution.  But Greek-speaking Jews and then Christians adopted it and began to use it much more than Greek authors ever did, and give it their own meaning.

Greek Society

In classical Greek society there was a fundamental distinction between marriable and unmarriable women.  A free woman, an eleuthera, was marriable and, so, had sexual honour.  She was expected to be a virgin when married and chaste afterward.  Slaves, prostitutes, and courtesans were unmarriable, though.  They could not be dishonoured, having had no sexual honour to begin with.  Of these women, prostitutes were called pornē and prostitution was porneia.

There was no general moral disapproval, in Greek or Roman society, of a man or husband using unmarriable women for sexual pleasure; if anything, it was seen as a safeguard against them committing the actual crime of adultery.  Adultery meant sexually dishonouring a free woman, whether a wife, a widow, or a daughter.  It was an offence against the man to whom that woman’s sexual honour was a legitimate concern – her husband or father – and the offender was the man who dishonoured her.

Old Testament

The Hebrew word zānāh follows a similarly patriarchal pattern.  Where a Greek woman could lose sexual honour, a Hebrew woman could fall into sexual shame, which this term describes.  A prostitute is a woman characterised by such shame or shamelessness.  Where the Greek language did not naturally speak of women committing adultery, the Hebrew language did not naturally speak of men being prostitutes; both required special phrasing.

In the early Old Testament, there is a matter-of-fact story of one patriarch visiting a prostitute, and his daughter-in-law seemingly expecting him to (Gen 38).  It is a recurring theme of the wisdom literature that foolish young men are ensnared by such women (e.g. Prov 5).  But there’s no clear prohibition, whatever was generally done or expected.  It is only deprecated in a range of ways: they cannot marry priests or give their earnings to the temple.

This starts changing in the eighth-century prophets, most notably in Hosea (1:2, 4:4–5).  He makes zānāh a metaphor for unfaithfulness to God, likening Israel’s covenant with God to a marriage covenant.  This creates a two-way metaphor between spiritual ‘adultery’ and sexual ‘idolatry’.  Suddenly men are being described as committing fornication – albeit spiritually at first – by worshipping idols.

Intertestamental Writings

This pattern increases in the Greek-language Jewish writings that come in between the Old and New Testaments.  These were naturally appended to the Greek language Old Testament, and then the Latin Vulgate, and so appear in modern Catholic Bibles.  In these the Greek word porneia has taken on the extended meaning of zānāh – and then pushed it farther in the same direction.

By the Book of Sirach, men visiting prostitutes is itself porneia and a pornos is now a these male who sins in this way (XXXX).  In 23:22–23, a woman commits en porneia moicheia, that is, “adultery in fornication,” meaning it’s now possible for a woman to be the culpable agent in adultery.  This is changing the patriarchal presumption that adultery is one man sinning against another.

The Testimony of the Twelve Patriarchs is a fanfic and occasional retcon about the sons of the patriarch Jacob.  As they lie on their various deathbeds, they offer reflections on their lives and mistakes, give moral exhortations to their sons, and appear to have all been reading the book of their contemporary Enoch, to see what their offspring would be doing in the distant future.  It is a Hellenistic Jewish work later adopted and overdubbed by Christian writers.  Most interestingly, for our purposes, it uses porneia as a broad category for sexual sin.  Because this especially characterises the patriarchs who committed sexual sins in Genesis, this is part of the original structure of the books, not just a later gloss.

In these Testaments porneia can describe sex before marriage (T.  Levi.  9:9), temptation to adultery (T.  Joseph.  3:18), and looking upon a woman (T.  Issachar 7:1–2).  Hellenistic society encourages the sexual use of dishonoured women, and this is called “the mother of all evils” (T.  Simeon 5:3).  Another predicts the sons of Benjamin will “fornicate the fornication of Sodom” (T.  Benj.  9:1).  There is no sexual sin, including adultery, that can’t be grouped under the term porneia.  It covers exogamy, incest, and everything in between.

A letter from around 200 BCE purports to describe the translation of the Septuagint for the Library of Alexandria.  Mainly it consists of the translators impressing the pagan king with their great wisdom.  The sages insist:

For most other men defile themselves by promiscuous intercourse, thereby working great iniquity, and whole countries and cities pride themselves upon such vices.  For they not only have intercourse with men but they defile their own 153 mothers and even their daughters.  But we have been kept separate from such sins.

Letter of Aristeas 152–153.

For Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish contemporary of Paul, pleasure and virtue are likened to the opposing forces of a porne and an eletheros within a person.  Prostitution is seen as a fundamental difference between Jews and other people.  When he retells the story of Joseph from Genesis 38–50, he has him react to the sexual advances of his master’s wife by saying:

We, the descendants of the Hebrews, are guided by special customs and laws of our own; 43 in other nations the youths are permitted, after they are fourteen years of age, to use concubines and prostitutes, and women who make gain by their persons, without restraint.  But among us a harlot is not allowed even to live, but death is appointed as a punishment for any one who adopts such a way of life.  Therefore, before our lawful marriage we know nothing of any connection with any other woman, but, without ever having experienced any similar cohabitation, we approach our virgin brides as pure as themselves, proposing as the end of our marriage not pleasure but the offspring of legitimate children.

Philo.  On Joseph.  IX.43–44.

That’s not to deny that there is also evidence of syncretism or compromise in this period.  Jewish names appear on the lists of officials in some pagan temples, and there was evident sexual immorality addressed in Paul’s letters to the church in Corinth, among much else.  But among the seriously observant, whether Jews or Christians, and all their main writers, there was no dispute at all about the core principles.  This was their identity, which separated them from other people.  These same ideas continue into the rabbinical texts that codify Judaism in the centuries after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem.

New Testament

When we come to the New Testament, this is the broad meaning that porneia has in Jewish and Christian usage.  It’s difficult to pin it down precisely because it’s an umbrella term.  Minimally through, it means everything condemned in the Old Testament law.  For sexual ethics, that is largely Leviticus 18, as we saw above.  One or two concerns disappear.  Child sacrifice is no longer a problem in surrounding nations, and the prohibition on sex in menstruation isn’t mentioned again.  But incest, adultery, and, as we will see, male same-sex relations are topics specially reiterated in the New Testament.

We saw that Acts 15 considered porneia to be a universal and non-negotiable concern, just as applicable to gentiles as to Jews.  Jesus in the gospels very actively reinforces this idea.  He does this by intensifying the Old Testament moral condemnations (Matt 5:27–28).  The Sermon on the Mount in Matt 5 contains a passage that begins with “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill” and then lays out six ‘antitheses’, which follow the pattern, “You have heard that it was said… but I say to you…”.  Here’s the one on adultery:

Matt 5:27–28.  “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’  28 But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”

The antitheses typically take one of the Ten Commandments, perhaps as it was then preached, and makes it stronger.  The only exception is the last one, which addresses love for neighbour, a command from Lev 19:19 that he elsewhere uses to encapsulate the whole Old Testament law.  Jesus is taking formulations of the commandments against murder, adultery, and false testimony, and multiplying them by the tenth commandment, the one against harbouring wrong desires.  God looks on the heart and is not fooled by hypocrisy.  This not only reinforces the Old Testament prohibitions of sexual immorality but actively strengthens them.

Matt 15:16–20.  “Are you still so dull?”  Jesus asked them.  17 “Don’t you see that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and then out of the body?  18 But the things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart, and these defile them.  19 For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality (porneia), theft, false testimony, slander.  20 These are what defile a person; but eating with unwashed hands does not defile them.”

Notice again the order.  Murder, adultery, theft, and false testimony are the subjects of the sixth to the ninth of the Ten Commandments (Ex 20:1–17), and Jesus wraps them up in the warning against evil thoughts that appears in the tenth.  (The parallel passages in Mark 7:18–23 adds some other sins to the list, but still begins with evil thoughts, and has two murder/adultery/theft sequences.)

Notice too that he injects ‘sexual immorality’ alongside adultery in this list.  This is reflected in the New Testament, from its earliest text:

1 Thess 4:3–7.  For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality [porneia]; 4 that each one of you know how to control your own body [skeuos, ‘vessel’] in holiness and honor, 5 not with lustful passion [pathe epithumias], like the gentiles who do not know God; … 7 For God did not call us to impurity [akatharsia] but in holiness.

Porneia is paralleled with non-Jewish lustful passions, and ‘impurity,’ which recalls Jesus saying (above) that a person’s inward thoughts are what ‘defile’ them.  In Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth, we see porneia being used as a general category of action that includes things like incest:

1 Cor 5:5.  It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality [porneia] among you and the sort of sexual immorality [porneia] that is not found even among gentiles, for a man is living with his father’s wife.

A chapter further, and he’s saying that, while there are good reasons not to marry:

1 Cor 7:1–2.  Now concerning the matters about which you wrote: “It is good for a man not to touch a woman.”  2 But because of cases of sexual immorality [porneia], each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband.

The phrase “cases of” is an interpretive gloss; Paul’s concern might just as well be with the extent of porneia in society at large as with individual cases.  In the same way that sexual immorality was not to be tolerated in Israel, Paul stresses that it cannot be tolerated in Christian communities.

1 Cor 5:9–13.  I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral persons (pornois), 10 not at all meaning the sexually immoral (porneia) of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters, since you would then need to go out of the world.  11 But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother or sister who is sexually immoral (pornos) or greedy or an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler.  Do not even eat with such a one.

1 Cor 10:3–4.  Do not become idolaters as some of them did … We must not engage in sexual immorality (porneuōmen), as some of them did …

So, it will be clear that both Jesus and the early Christian church continued with the inward Jewish identity markers of opposition to both idolatry and sexual immorality.  The presumption we would draw from both Jesus and Paul is that sexual immorality, as portrayed in Lev 18 and 20, carries through verbatim, including its prohibition on same-sex intercourse.  This is consistent with specific comments about incest and same-sex relations elsewhere in the Pauline letters.  This is why Evangelicals usually believe that same-sex relations must be sexual immorality in any and every circumstance.

Eph 5:3–5.  But sexual immorality (porneian) and impurity of any kind or greed must not even be mentioned among you, as is proper among saints.  … 5 Be sure of this, that no sexually immoral (pornos) or impure person or one who is greedy (that is, an idolater) has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.  (cf.  Col 3:5–6)

1 Cor 13:4.  Let marriage be held in honor by all, and let the marriage bed be kept undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral (pornous) and adulterers.

Synopsis

There is no coherently Christian position in which same-sex relations are recognised as being sexual immorality in God’s sight and still considered acceptable for any faithful Christian.  The prohibitions against sexual immorality are too strong and too consistent.

1. porneia is used in the New Testament as a catch-all term for sexual immorality, following the Jewish use of that Greek term as an umbrella category
2. as such, porneia necessarily includes any sexual behaviour prohibited in the Old Testament
3. separation from porniea is, like idolatry, a fundamental matter of Christian identity, just as it was for Jewish identity

This is accompanied by the most strident warnings.  People who commit sexual immorality will not inherit God’s kingdom.  In the absence of clear repentance churches should exclude people who commit sexual immorality from community, though not punitively and with the hope of repentance and reconciliation.  Leaders who endorse or defend sexual immorality should be removed from their positions.  These standards are identical for all persons, as there is no partiality with God.

However,  if same-sex marriage is sexual immorality, in the sort of clear and obvious way that scripture presupposes, then why do Evangelicals have so much trouble publicly explaining that?  Why can’t the charge of discrimination over same-sex marriage be speedily dismissed with a short and friendly explanation of its moral problems?  Wouldn’t that at least seem respectably conscientious even to someone who disagreed?  And on the other hand, why do those who wish to say that same-sex marriages are fine have such trouble – and we’ll get into this as we go through – explaining away the biblical prohibitions?  Can we show that the biblical condemnations of same-sex relations apply to orientation and marriage, or on the other hand that they do not?

We’ll discuss in a concluding chapter (§6.c, Reconciliation) what both Jesus and Paul might have made of our modern understanding of orientation and the modern social viability of same-sex marriages.  For now, what do we make of the fact that Jesus neither mentioned same-sex relations by name nor alluded to the concept?  An argument from silence can be compelling if the silence is exceptional or unexpected and so needs explaining.  It must be an anomaly, an incongruity.

We might suppose that Jesus, with his deep insight into people, must have known about same-sex orientation and made some allowance for it.  If so, his apparent silence on the matter might suggest that he differed from the condemning stance of his contemporaries (see above).  When he healed the ‘highly valued’ servant of a centurion (Matt 8:6; Luke 7:2) did he know or care whether they were sexually involved?  We’ll see in the next chapter that this would have been by no means an uncommon situation (§3.b, Romans).  Or, as is sometimes suggested, was he on unusually intimate terms with “the beloved disciple” John, who “laid back on his breast” at the Last Supper?

It’s simply false, however, that Jesus was silent about same-sex relations.  As we saw above, when explaining what desires proceed from the heart and make a person ‘unclean’, he recited the second half of the Ten Commandments, injecting ‘sexual immorality’ in general alongside adultery using the word porneia.  As already noted (§2.d), Hellenistic Jews in this period used porneia as a catch-all term for sexual sins as they are outlined in the law.  Possibly the Old Testament metaphor of spiritual unfaithfulness as adultery or prostitution (pornos) lies behind this development.  Jesus appears to use the term in the same way, here and when discussing grounds for divorce in Mark 10 and Matt 19.  So, he mentions same-sex relations when he mentions sexual immorality as a category.  Generally, the only specific kind of sexual immorality in view is adultery, which is mentioned by name.  It comes up when listing the Ten Commandments, discussing grounds for divorce, as a figure of speech for the general unfaithfulness of “this generation,” and in reference to two individuals.  In John 4 there’s a woman who “had five husbands” and in John 8 there’s an actual adulteress (but, mysteriously, no adulterer).

So, saying that Jesus never mentioned homosexuality is like saying that he never mentioned idolatry.  It’s perfectly correct, in that the words for idols and idolatry never appear in the gospels.  There’s only the one probable idol mentioned in an apocalyptic passage about the future (Matt 24:15; Mark 13:14; “let the reader understand”).  Avoiding idolatry is implicit in loving God with all your heart, the greatest commandment.  But Jesus never says, “Don’t worship idols.”

But why is idolatry not mentioned?  Not because the prohibitions in the Old Testament were no longer thought relevant, but because there was, in Israel itself, no conflict or disagreement about them that ever called for a comment.  As we’ve seen, idolatry and sexual immorality were matters over which first century Jews took pride in being separate and superior to gentiles.  As soon as the wider Greco-Roman world comes into view, the strictures on idolatry and sexual immorality snap back into central focus.  So, it’s a fudge at best to say that Jesus never mentioned idolatry or same-sex relations.  In what they say about sexual immorality, Jesus and the New Testament writers closely align with the social context of Second Temple Judaism.  This is the period from the return from Exile after 516 BCE, through the rise of Pharisaism after 180 BCE, in which Jesus and Paul later appear, to the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 CE, preceding the rise of Rabbinic Judaism.  Faithful Jews saw both idolatry and sexual immorality as crucial points of difference from surrounding pagan cultures.

A popular ‘rabbi’ redefining their sexual ethics would have been a bombshell in Second Temple Judaism.  It would have caused exactly the kind of dramatic religious conflict that the gospels constantly highlight.  Most likely, then, the absence of such conflict indicates continuity with the Old Testament moral law, rather than any substantial revisions of it.

The New Testament passage which frames all the others is Romans 1:18–32.  It is the only one that has substantial context, being part of a lengthy argument.  We’ll discuss this in more detail in its own chapter (§3.b, Romans).  For now, we can simply note that, in a passage discussing the distinctive immorality of the Greek and Roman world – both sexual and social – same-sex relations feature prominently.  Whether between men or between women they are pointedly called unnatural and shameful passions.  Parallelling Sodom and Gibeah, they are used to exemplify moral failure in a society, and parallelling Leviticus, Christians are implicitly expected to be separate from the practices of their surrounding nations.

Making pithy collections of behaviour to avoid was clearly a common practice in early Christianity, as the New Testament contains twenty ‘vice lists’ of this sort (Matt 15:19; Mark 7:20–23; Rom 1:28–32; 13:13–14; 1 Cor 6:9–11; 2 Cor 12:20–21; Gal 5:17–20; Eph 4:31; 5:3–8; Col 3:5–10; 1 Tim 1:9–10; 2 Tim 3:1–9; 6:4; Tit 1:5– 8; 3:3; 1 Pet 2:1; 4:3–5; James 3:14; Rev 21:8; 22:15).  Sexual immorality is the most frequent issue, appearing in half of them, followed in descending order by idolatry, slander, anger, drunkenness, envy, malice, murder, deceit, impurity, jealousy, and a few dozen more.

In 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10 two such lists use the Greek term arsenokoitai.  The first reference precedes it with malakoi.  They are each plurals, and refer to the people who commit certain sins.  ‘Adulterers’, for example, appears in both lists.  The message in each case is “do not be these people.”  We will examine these terms shortly.

Paul curiously adds that ‘some of you’ used to live like this but were ‘changed’ (1 Cor 6:9–11).  That term has been suggestive to those Evangelical readers who see same-sex desires as a temptation or pathology, and so, support conversion therapies.  This passage, though (vv.1–11), merely offers a list of sins that should be common knowledge for Hellenistic Christians.  When gentiles became Christians, they stopped behaving in these characteristically gentile way.  This has nothing to do with orientation, which is why it was as straightforward as abandoning the other practices in the list: adultery, theft, reviling, or swindling.

The meaning two key Greek terms is contested, so we’re going to take a moment to dig into them.  I’ll refer to them by their standard, singular forms.  These are arsenokoitēs, a noun, and malakos, an adjective.  A single Greek word can appear in many forms, as its function in a sentence will be indicated with a range of different endings, or ‘declensions’.  Think of strong, stronger, and strongest or run, runner, and running, but with different endings used to indicate male or female, singular or plural, and half a dozen other qualities.

It takes relatively little knowledge of Greek to observe that arsenokoitēs is a compound word, made of the words for ‘male’ (arsenos) and ‘bed’ (koitēn).  So, it has often been assumed to mean ‘man-bedder’ or something like that, which is how it was later used by Christian writers.  But that’s not a consistently reliable way to determine a word’s meaning.

The best way to understand the meaning of a word is to look at how other writers have used it then or before.  This can be done easily for malakos, which just means ‘soft’, although that carried a range of additional meanings like effeminate, luxurious, or lenient.  But it can’t be done for arsenokoitēs, because these are its first two occurrences in all recorded literature.  On top of that, these occurrences and those that follow are often found in vice lists of their own, including when they are just quote Paul.  It’s harder to say what an unfamiliar word means when it appears in a list rather than in a sentence or argument.

Still, there are four obvious ways to understand the word’s meanings in these passages.

1. Their immediate context in these letters.
2. The meaning of other words with the same -koitēs ending.
3. The combination of the words arsenos and koitēn in the Old Testament prohibitions of male same-sex intercourse.
4. Usage by native Greek speakers over the next two hundred years.

Paul’s use of these terms in context

Firstly,  these vice lists tell us a few things just as they are.  Most obviously, whatever is meant is considered a bad thing, and is meant to make sense to people living in another city.  It can’t then be anything too obscure.  The first historical use of arsenokoitēs appears in 1 Corinthians.

1 Cor 6:9–10.  Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God?  Do not be deceived!  Fornicators (pornai), idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes (malakoi), sodomites (arsenokoitai), 10 thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers—none of these will inherit the kingdom of God.

This is the Anglicised edition of the NRSV.  Its Updated Edition replaces ‘sodomites’ with “men who engage in illicit sex” and adds a footnote on both malakoi and arsenokoitai to say that the meaning of the Greek is uncertain.  Most translations fall somewhere between these two, typically trying to say something like “men who sleep with men” for aresnokoitai.  Old translations employ a little delicacy by saying “vile lusts” or some such euphemism.

• “nor the effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind” (KJV, 1611)
• “nor wantons, nor buggerers” (Geneva Bible, 1599)
• “nor effeminate, nor homosexuals” (NASB, 1995)

You will note /malakos is being translated effeminate here.  This suggests a connection with arsenokoitēs that has generally been persuasive to Evangelcials.  We’ll discuss Greek and Roman ‘homosexuality’ in §3.b (Romans), and will note then that the penetrated partner in male same-sex relations was ordinarily a social inferior, whether a youth, a prostitute, or a slave.  The ‘womanly’ and ‘passive’ role was considered unmanly for a free citizen male, who was supposed to take the ‘active’ role.  Because being luxurious or lenient doesn’t seem to fit with the other sins here, translators go for effeminacy in the Roman sense.  This is why translations of malakoi can include “effeminate” and “male prostitute”, meaning the passive partner in male same-sex intercourse, and the translations of arsenokoites give some version of “men who sleep with other men,” meaning the active partner.  Some recent translations have represented the two terms with a single idea:

• “nor men who practice homosexuality” (ESV, 2001)
• “nor men who have sex with men” (NIV, 2011)
• “nor homosexuals” (NASB, 2020)

The idea behind these translations is explained in a footnote in the NIV: “the words men who have sex with men translate two Greek words that refer to the passive and active participants in homosexual acts”.  This is the most widespread understanding among Evangelicals.

Obviously, some of these terms are widely deprecated now, and not just ‘sodomites’ and ‘buggerers’.  The terms ‘homosexual’ and ‘homosexuality’ were coined in the late 1800s, and have been widely used to represent same-sex behaviour (‘homosexual practices’) or the people who behave in that way.  But those terms today will be read as same-sex orientation instead, and translations should account for this.  We’ll see in §3.b (Romans) that there were some concepts comparable to same-sex orientation in antiquity – observed lifelong tendencies, romantic attraction, and so on – but Paul was not thinking of them in Romans 1, and so, was unlikely to be thinking of them here.

The second historical use of arsenokoitai also appears in a New Testament vice list.  I’ll refer to 1 Timothy as one of Paul’s letters here.  While the authorship of 1 Timothy has been widely contested, it is less contested by Evangelicals, and whether it comes from Paul or one of his early churches is unlikely to affect the usage of the words.

1 Tim 1:8–11.  8 Now we know that the law is good, if one uses it legitimately.  9 This means understanding that the law is laid down not for the innocent but for the lawless and disobedient, for the godless and sinful, for the unholy and profane, for those who kill their father or mother, for murderers, 10 fornicators (pornai), sodomites (arsenokoitai), slave-traders, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to the sound teaching…

People in this second list are not just the ‘wrongdoers’ of 1 Corinthians, but ‘the lawless and disobedient … godless and sinful … unholy and profane’.  In both cases the terms, whatever they mean, are seen as completely incompatible with Christian faith.  Because 1 Timothy 1 presents a short set of examples of what the Old Testament’s moral law prohibits, it must be using arsenokoitai to represent an Old Testament prohibition.

The passage follows the order of the second table of the Ten Commandments, requiring honour for parents, then prohibiting murder, adultery, theft, and false testimony, in that order (see 20:2–17; Deut 5:6–21).  Jesus did much the same when answering the rich young ruler who wanted to know how to enter eternal life (Matt 19:18; Mark 10:19).  The only commandment not mentioned explicitly in 1 Tim 1:8–11 is theft, though ‘slave traders’ might carry that general sense, given that stealing and selling a person was a capital crime in Old Testament law (Ex 21:16).

Having noted this order, it becomes important where arsenokoitai appears in 1 Tim 1:8–11.  The list begins with murderers of parents, then murderers generally, then fills the ‘adultery’ and ‘theft’ slots with pornai, arsenokoitai and slave-traders, before concluding with liars and perjurers.  Arsenokoitai falls between the prohibitions of adultery and theft, so it is being grouped with one or the other.

So far, then, we know that arsenokoitēs refers to something prohibited in the Old Testament, and that is most likely either a form of sexual immorality or some social injustice comparable to theft or fraud.

Words that end in -koitēs

Secondly,  there are two dozen other Greek words that end in -koitēs and they follow a similar pattern, meaning where or with whom somebody sleeps.  The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae indexes many thousands of ancient Greek texts, and allows wildcard searches, so you can easily find all occurences of these words.  Half of these precede Paul’s usage here, and half come later.

Thus, a certain frog dwells in the mud (borborokoitēs).  Someone sleeps in the woods, or the hills, on the ground, or on their right hand side (hylokoitēs, orikoitēs, kamaikoitēs, dexiokoitēs).  In a few delightful phrases, fire sleeps in Prometheus’s staff, all will sleep in the grave, and some people have ears large enough to sleep in (purikoitēs, pankoitēs, enōtokoitēs).  Two very common words mean a husband or bedfellow (akoitēs, parakoitēs).  There’s a word for those who ‘sleep’ with their mother (metrokoitēs, in a sixth century BCE poem by Hippolax, and in the first century Revelation of Ezra).  There’s one for a man who lived with a gentile wife (hellenokoitēs).

Later uses of this term cannot inform early Christian usage, but they can illustrate how such words continued to be coined.  People might be said to sleep with slaves and siblings, or among the dogs (doulokoitēs, athesmokoitēs, kuvokoitēs), or to have ‘illicit’ intercourse (klepsikoitēs).  The male prefixes andro- and arreno- were also substituted for arseno-, perhaps in the latter case due to a mixup with arrenomanes, the old Greek word for ‘boy-mad’.

Arsenokoitēs can’t mean merely “one who sleeps among males,” or “in the male quarters,” because that wouldn’t be considered conspicuously sinful, as it is in all these references.  It must mean with whom a person sleeps, where ‘sleeping’ is a euphemism for sexual intercourse.  Since females sleeping with males would be unremarkable, it would then mean “males who ‘sleep’ with other males.”  This would include pederasty, or masters exploiting slaves, but by merely saying ‘male’, it has a much wider range.

The fact that this is the first appearance of this word raises the question of how Paul expected it to be understood.  Was it simply a rare word?  We saw a moment ago that there were six centuries between the first two known mentions of metrokoitēs, meaning it was either rare, or two writers invented it in the same way from the same general pattern.  Consider when you first heard the word ‘homophobia’, for example.  You would have recognised that it belonged to the general class of –phobia words, and then tried to guess what the ‘homo-’ prefix signified, probably arriving fairly quickly at the idea of an aversion to homosexuality.  In Greek the class of ‘-koites’ words seems to have invited similar creativity.

Arsenos and koitēn in Leviticus

Thirdly,  for Jewish and Hellenistic Christians in Paul’s circles, there was an obvious prompt for this word construction in their Greek translations of the Old Testament.  The best known of these is the Septuagint (LXX).  The New Testament, written in Greek, typically quotes such translations, so we know they used them.  In the Septuagint translations of Leviticus, the terms arsenos and koitēn both appear in both the condemnations of male same-sex relations:

Lev 18:22.  You shall not lie (koitēn) with a male (arsenos) as with a woman; it is an abomination.

Lev 20:13.  If a man lies with a male (arsenos koitēn) as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death; their bloodguilt is upon them.

This reflects the Old Testament Hebrew texts from which they were translated.  The term there is mishav zakur (“lying with a male”) which appears in these texts as well as rabbinic discussions about them.  Since early Christians saw sexual morality as something that distinguished them from the Greek and Roman culture around them, we should assume that they were thoroughly conversant with these passages.  Paul, who quotes the Old Testament some sixty times in Romans alone, in writing to a church he’d never visited, clearly assumed a high degree of biblical literacy among early Christians.  Also, Paul quotes from chapters 18 and 19 in his other letters in the New Testament (Lev 18:5 LXX in Rom 10:5 and Gal 3:12, and Lev 19:18 LXX in Rom 13:9 and Gal 5:14).  This part of Leviticus attracted such attention because it contains the command to “love your neighbour as yourself,” which Jesus used to sum up the law (Lev 19:18).  So these passages were familiar.

This connects with two other points we have already noted.  When 1 Timothy uses arsenokoitai while naming the people “for whom the law was made” – thus referencing one of the law’s prohibitions – these passages are his likely referent.

We have also mentioned that Romans does not use the normal Greek words for same-sex relations, suggesting that these terms may have intentionally been avoided.  If so, this would explain why early Christians made a new word from the biblical prohibitions themselves, following a common construction for saying where or with whom people slept.

Native speakers in the next 200 years

Fourthly,  the usage of this term arsenokoitēs in the two centuries after Paul – up to the social rise of Christianity after 250 CE – confirms this general understanding.  All these writers were native speakers of Greek; the shift to Latin was only beginning at the end of this period.  According to Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, there were 15 occurrences of arsenokoitēs by eight different authors over this time.  These are listed below, with those that tell us nothing new crossed out.

• Polycarp (1),
• Pseudo-Clement (1), Recognitions
• Pseudo-Ignatius (1),
• Acts of John.  (1)
• Theophilus, Ad Autolycum.  (1)
• Clement of Alexandria (2).  Paedogogus, Stromata.
• Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies.  (1)
• Origen (7). Homiles in Jeremiah, Dialogue with Heraclides (2), fragments of his Commentary on 1 Corinthians, Commentary on Matthew, Homilies in Psalms (2)

Pseudo-Ignatius, Clement of Alexandria, and some of Origen’s mentions are just quoting Paul in 1 Cor 6:9–11.  Theophilus of Antioch puts the word in a lengthy vice list of his own, and this also tells us nothing new.  But other passages are more instructive.

Polycarp (70–155 CE) was a bishop who lived near Ephesus.  He is one of the earliest surviving Christian authors outside the New Testament.  He urges young men to keep free of the “lusts that are in the world,” saying “neither pornoi, nor malakoi, nor arsenokoitēs, shall inherit the kingdom of God” (v.5, ANF).  He is partly quoting Paul in 1 Corinthians 6, of course, but skips idolators and adulterers, and then stops the quote before he gets to thieves.  So, he thinks these three terms represent sexual desires and that they were characteristic of “the world” of the surrounding Hellenistic culture.  The Refutation of all Heresies by Hippolytus of Rome (maybe!, d.234 if so) describes the teachings of a gnostic called Justinus.  Gnostics generally had a mix of Christian language and ideas, elaborate cosmology, and a very low view of the material world, the body, and the Old Testament.  Justinus’s system had 24 high-ranking angels, some of whom were responsible for the presence of certain sins in the world:

[The Angel] Naas, however, has committed sin, for he went in unto Eve, deceiving her, and debauched her; and (such an act as) this is a violation of law.  He, however, likewise went in unto Adam, and had unnatural intercourse with him; and this is itself also a piece of turpitude, whence have arisen adultery and arsenokoitia.

So Justinus thinks arsenokoitia is a general problem in the world, was not present in God’s original creation, and clearly means male same-sex relations, which he calls ‘unnatural’.

The largest number of occurrences are in Origen (185–253 CE), one of the first Christian writers to use their classical education to make a defense of their faith.  Some of these are just quotations of 1 Cor 6:9.  Those include his Homilies in Jeremiah, Commentary on Matthew, the second reference in Homilies in the Psalms.

Origen’s Dialogue with Heraclide, quotes 1 Cor 6:9, and then comments specifically on “such enormous evils” as “arsenokoitai, malakoi, adultery, fornication” (Book XIV.11).  This groups them with terms for sexual immorality.  In his first reference in Homilies in the Psalms, he writes that many orators and philosophers were “not only idolaters, but also arsenokoitas and pornous and adulterers,” again grouping this term with sexual immorality.  This, as we saw, was how Polycarp also grouped them together.  In a fragment of his commentary or 1 Corinthians, he quotes Paul that “No arsenokoitai will inherit the kingdom of God” and says to leave a church where even one of them is found (my translation).

As an aside, the first use of the term by someone who was not a Christian or a Gnostic is by the Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry (234–305 CE).  In Fragment 88 of Against the Christians, he cites “but you were washed” from 1 Cor 6:11, before listing a set of vices, and marvelling that merely being baptised is enough to deal with them all.  He writes arrenokoitēs, perhaps mixing the word up with arrenomanes for ‘boy-mad’, and groups it with “base and disgusting things”.

The main alternative to reading arsenokoitēs as male same-sex intercourse is some kind of theft or associated violence.  This is suggested by the appearance of ‘slave traders’ after arsenokoitēs in 1 Tim 1:10.  We saw that this vice list follows the second table of the Ten Commandments.  If arsenokoitēs goes with slave traders rather than with pornai, then it fits under the commandment regarding theft rather than the one about adultery.  A second century text called the Acts of John uses the term in a list of different kinds of thieves.

Acts of John 36.  Thou that rejoicest in gold and delightest thyself with ivory and jewels, when night falleth, canst thou behold what thou lovest?  thou that art vanquished by soft raiment (malakos), and then leavest life, will those things profit thee in the place whither thou goest?  And let the murderer know that the condign punishment is laid up for him twofold after his departure hence.  Likewise also thou poisoner, sorcerer, robber, defrauder, arsenokoitēs, thief, and as many as are of that band, ye shall come at last, as your works do lead you, unto unquenchable fire, and utter darkness, and the pit of punishment, and eternal threatenings.

The sentence that includes the words for thieves seems to mean crimes that are in a second tier below murder.  It isn’t following any definite sequence that we can reason about, like 1 Tim 1:10 does.  The exploitative nature of Roman same-sex relations, especially from the view of Christian slaves of pagan masters, would not leave it out of place among crimes of violence, though, so this does not seem at all conclusive as an argument for a different meaning to the other passages already discussed.  It is tempting to note the reference to being “vanquished by malakos,” since we have seen that Origen uses malakos for sexual immorality.  However, that reads more naturally as just the decadent living of the preceding sentence.

Also, against this, there’s an example of arsenokoitēs being explicitly contrasted with theft.  In his Preparation for the Gospel, the sort-of-historian Eusebius (d.339) quotes someone he mistakenly takes to be the early Christian leader Clement of Rome, who had published a list of foreign laws and customs, possibly from an earlier document.  One of them says:

From the river Euphrates, and as far as the Ocean towards the East, he who is reviled as a murderer, or a thief, is not at all indignant: but he who is reviled for arsenokoitēs avenges himself even to the death: among the Greeks, however, even their wise men are not blamed for having favourites.  (VI.x.  Link)

In this case, arsenokoitēs is being explicitly contrasted with theft, which would be incongruous if that were one of its common meanings.  On the other hand, presumptions of effeminacy explain male shame in many cultures, and Greeks having ‘favourites’ sounds exactly like their practice of pederasty.

✻ ✻ ✻

We have then four major reasons for thinking arsenokoitai refers to the Old Testament prohibitions against male-to-male same sex relations.

1. The vice-list context means that is must be a serious sin.  1 Tim 1:10 includes it in a list of various miscreants for whom the Old Testament law “was made”, so the term must refer to one of the law’s prohibitions.  This list follows the order of the second table of the Ten Commandments, and places arsenokoitēs under either adultery or theft.
2. A dozen Greek words ending in -koiten precede Paul’s first use of this word.  They mean where or with whom one sleeps.  Sleeping among men (say, in a dormitory) would not be considered a serious sin; but “’sleeping’ with” a male could be.
3. Arsenos and koiten appear adjacently in the Old Testament prohibitions of male same-sex relations.  Arsenokoitēs first appears among people conversant with the Greek text of these laws, but who otherwise avoided the normal Greek terms for same-sex relations.
4. The term’s usage by native Greek speakers in the next 200 years generally confirms reading it as sexual immorality rather than theft.  It is in one case listed among terms for theft, but there is no reason that list could not be eclectic, and in another case, people said to be ashamed of arsenokoitēs are also said not to feel ashamed of theft, which would be odd if the terms were ambiguous.

It’s common to criticise Evangelicals, especially in the US, for focusing on the same-sex prohibitions while paying less attention to other biblical concerns.  A typical complaint of this kind says that there are, say, “six verses on same-sex relations” (depending on how you count them), but hundreds of verses on helping people in poverty, and yet these six get more attention.  This comparison in verse count is broadly correct.  One is mentioned much more than the other, even if we count porneia as a general reference to Old Testament sexual morality, or nature language as a reference to a created order.

But on the other hand, the prohibitions of idolatry and porneia are necessary for gentile Christians in Acts 15, and sexual immorality is consistently one of the most serious personal sins in scripture, something which fundamentally defines Christian identity.  When Jesus judged some of his contemporaries for paying close attention to obscure applications of how charity laws, while simultaneously ignoring justice and mercy.  He said, “You should have done the one and not neglected the other,” rather than that the lesser could be ignored on that basis.  The objection that same-sex relations are not mentioned frequently is a deflection, at best, and a false dichotomy at worst.

Hermann van de Spijker, quoted in John McNeill’s The Church and the Homosexual (1976), writes that:

… every text dealing with homosexual activity also refers to aggravating circumstances such as idolatry, sacred prostitution, promiscuity, violent rape, seduction of children, and violation of guests’ rights.  (ch.2)

As we have seen, at least some of these concerns made same-sex relations an easy target in Canaanite and Hellenistic life, and Paul and other Jewish writers before him were happy to refer to these in arguments against pagan culture.

Robin Scroggs argued similarly in The New Testament and Homosexuality (1983) that Paul primarily referred to pederasty in his condemnations, with an eye-opening catalogue of the ways in which pederasty was accepted and even advocated as a moral good, a kind of mentoring, in large parts of society.  He covered also some of the contemporary arguments against it, and how Hellenistic Jews joined that existing counter-argument.

But it reaches too far to say that every text refers to such aggravating circumstances.  The Old Testament stories (Gen 19, Jdg 19, cf. Jude 7) certainly involve violent rape and violation of guests.  But that’s not to say this was the whole problem.  For example, had the men of the city slept with Lot’s daughters, that would not have been wrong only because of the threat of violence.

The condemnations in the law (Lev 17:22; 20:13) and in Romans 1 are implicitly tied to the highly idolatrous cultures of Canaan and Rome, but they are not said to be wrong because of any connection to idolatry, prostitution, promiscuity, or the ‘seduction of children’.

In the case of the Old Testament law, the fact that both partners were considered guilty indicates a supposition of mutuality that is clearly not present when the law discusses rape.  But even if they had, it would not have followed that this was the whole problem.

However, Paul writes “males with males” (arsenes en arsesin, Rom 1:27).  This is much broader language than saying “men with boys,” or any of the quite specific Greek words for same-sex relations.  Paul also emphasises women’s conduct (‘even their women’, v.26).  On top of which, Paul’s condemns a long list of sins and crimes that would be wrong whether they were prompted from idolatry or not, so that doesn’t seem to be his basic concern here.

And in the other Pauline letters, the connection to porneia is stronger.  There’s no context in 1 Cor 6:9–11, though it groups the key terms with sexual immorality, and the order in 1 Tim 1:10, by following the Ten Commandments, ties the behaviour to either sexual immorality or theft, with sexual immorality much better fitting the usage of the terms.

All this together establishes that Paul is not limiting his remarks to ‘aggravating circumstances’ in the culture.

There are cases in scripture of people having strong emotional ties to others of the same sex, suggestive of romantic and sexual attraction.  These are sometimes used to argue for some flexibility in the biblical condemnations, whether making allowance for orientation or just expressing greater freedoms.

Close bonds between Naomi and her daughter-in-law Ruth, and between Jesus and “the beloved disciple” are sometimes considered suggestive.  But there is only ever deep affection and commitment there, and not any sign of a sexual relationship.

Same-sex relations may be implicit in the story of the emotional Roman centurion who wants his servant (pais, ‘boy’) healed by Jesus (Matt 8:5–13; Luke 7:1–10).  It wouldn’t be unusual for any Roman with servants to be sleeping with at least some of them.  Was pais, then meant to connote this?  This doesn’t seem to fit the story.  The centurion seems to be a God-fearing gentile, committed enough to have helped build a local synagogue.  He doesn’t know Jesus personally.  He is asking a locally famous rabbi for an important favour through his best Jewish connections.  He would know first-century Judaism well enough to know a rabbi would certainly not approve of a sexual relationship with a slave, so it’s difficult to believe that he would risk describing the slave in sexually significant terms while seeking a religious favour.  So we probably shouldn’t read that connotation in to the term here.

The most significant example is David and Jonathan.  The book of 1 Samuel ends with the death of King Saul in battle, together with Jonathan his son.  2 Samuel opens with David hearing of it and mourning.  He says of Jonathan: “greatly beloved were you to me; your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women” (v.26).  It’s an elegy, though, so effusive praise of the dead is to be expected, and need not be strictly accurate.  He says, for example, that Saul and Jonathan were “beloved and lovely!”  – “they were swifter than eagles; they were stronger than lions” (v.23).  However, this can be set beside a similar, earlier passage that seems clearer:

1 Sam 18:1–4.  Jonathan became one in spirit with David, and he loved him as himself.  … 3 And Jonathan made a covenant with David because he loved him as himself.  4 Jonathan took off the robe he was wearing and gave it to David, along with his tunic, and even his sword, his bow and his belt.

This is not mentioned for its own sake, but to explain King Saul’s jealously of David, that his own son takes David’s side, and later his daughter Michal also, who David marries in the same chapter (v.27).  Nonetheless some of the phrasing is certainly suggestive.  Did Jonathan give David his expensive royal armour for protection, or was he undressing?  If Jonathan’s love was better than that of women, was this sexual love, romantic love, or being soulmates who faced death together?  David himself doesn’t make any declarations of affection, except calling Jonathan “beloved” after he is dead.

So what can we make of this?  Can we say that bisexual or same-sex oriented people existed throughout history?  We don’t need this passage to say that.  It is uncontroversial from the the modern understanding of these terms; we should expect them to be there.  We don’t know about Jonathan, but it is clear David was not same-sex oriented, at least in the exclusive sense that distinguishes it from bisexuality.  He committed a range of sins because he couldn’t or wouldn’t control his heterosexual attractions.

Can we say that God or scripture approves of same-sex affection?  Biblical narratives relate many things of which the writers disapprove, and don’t always stop to identify them.  Whereas law and explicit moral teaching has no such ambiguity.  So pitting narratives against moral texts is not easy.  Also, this means pitting some parts of scripture against others; in this book, I am seeing what can be worked out about same-sex orientation on Evangelical premises, and so, I will be trying to keep the whole together.

Can we say that scripture approves of same-sex marriage in the case of same-sex orientation?  It is unclear from this survey so far, whether same-sex orientation or same-sex marriage were ever imagined in scripture.  The blanket nature of the condemnations would suggest either that they were not or that they were and it made no difference.  A more detailed study of Romans 1 (§3.b, next) will help resolve this.

The passages that condemn same-sex relations in scripture do not generally have enough context to identify their underlying rationales.  The major exception, of course, is Romans 1, which we will be looking at next (§3.b, Romans).  Applying them to the specific combination of orientation and marriage means understanding whether there is any difference in the cases, which means understanding these reasons.  So, we will continue with our biblical overview by reviewing the start of Paul’s letter to the Romans, before then considering what moral reasons may lie behind these prohibitions.