Quote:
Originally Posted by elphenor
I think it's interesting
one interpretation I found for same-sex in The Bible
"While the six passages that address same-sex eroticism in the ancient world are negative about the practices they mention, there is no evidence that these in any way speak to same-sex relationships of love and mutuality. To the contrary, the amount of cultural, historical and linguistic data surrounding how sexuality in the cultures of the biblical authors operated demonstrates that what was being condemned in the Bible is very different than the committed same-sex partnerships we know and see today. The stories of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19) and the Levite’s concubine (Judges 19) are about sexual violence and the Ancient Near East’s stigma toward violating male honor. The injunction that “man must not lie with man” (Leviticus 18:22, 20:13) coheres with the context of a society anxious about their health, continuing family lineages, and retaining the distinctiveness of Israel as a nation. Each time the New Testament addresses the topic in a list of vices (1 Corinthians 6:9, 1 Timothy 1:10), the argument being made is more than likely about the sexual exploitation of young men by older men, a practice called pederasty, and what we read in the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans is a part of a broader indictment against idolatry and excessive, self-centered lust that is driven by desire to “consume” rather than to love and to serve as outlined for Christian partnership elsewhere in the Bible. While it is likely that Jews and Christians in the 1st century had little to no awareness of a category like sexual orientation, this doesn’t mean that the biblical authors were wrong. What it does mean, at a minimum, is that continued opposition toward same-sex relationships and LGBTQ identities must be based on something other than these biblical texts, which brings us back to a theology of Christian marriage or partnership."
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I'm familiar with this line of argument but it's just a case of extreme wishful thinking imo. They prescribe the death penalty for gay sex because they're concerned about "health and lineage"?? That's delightfully vague. Seems much more likely that it was just a subset of what is generically deemed "sexual immorality" by the Bible for a variety of backwards, repressed and superstitious reasons.
For example I saw a woman who was taking this line of argument who tried to explain away the fact that it's supposedly sinful to have sex with your wife when she's menstruating as God trying to incentivize procreation, since you can't get pregnant on your period. Which makes no sense since you would presumably also still have sex when she's not on her period and it's even forbidden for a priest to touch a woman who's on her period. It's just a bunch of ancient superstitious puritanical bull****.
He's right they didn't speak about stable homosexual relationships because they didn't even see homosexuality in that light back then. It was just another form of sexual depravity. And you can take any of the isolated mentions of homosexuality like Sodom and Gomorrah or the New Testament verses and explain it away as it's about rape or pedophilia but when every single mention of not only homosexuality but any deviation from sex within a (then understood to be heterosexual) marriage is presented as negative and even listed as a crime deserving of punishment, it's fairly dense for someone not to see the pattern there.