Audio only:
In this episode Trent refutes the claims in the new documentary “1946” that scripture doesn’t condemn homosexual relationships.
Was Sodom and Gomorrah Really about Homosexuality? | Mary Healy
Transcript:
What if the word homosexual was never meant to be in the Bible? That’s the question a new documentary called 1946 is asking, and it’s part of a long-running effort to misinterpret the Bible to say that it never condemns sexual relationships between people of the same sex. There have been a lot of liberal and self-described gay Christians in the past 40 years who have practiced this kind of Biblical revisionism, and the arguments made in this film follow the same tired pattern. Let’s see what they get wrong.
The documentary follows its director, Sharon “Rocky” Roggio, a self-described gay Christian who interviews people like Ed Oxford and Kathy Baldock who defend the idea the Bible was misunderstood and thus mistranslated on homosexuality. The primary story in the film deals with the 1946 Translation Committee of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, or RSV, and their decision to include the word homosexual in First Corinthians 6:9-10, which says the following, “Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God.”
The documentary makes a big deal about how these two had to investigate old archives and libraries and found a letter from a 21-year-old self-described gay seminary student, David Feardon, who wrote to the Translation Committee for the RSV back in the 1950s objecting to their use of the word homosexual in their translation. They also make a big deal about how the word homosexual does not appear in the Bible until 1946.
1946 is the first time, in any language, in any translation, that the word homosexual ends up in the Bible, right?
Can you tell us exactly how you guys first discovered that the word homosexual was first written in 1946?
And my response to these parts of the film is this, who cares? The word homosexual was coined in Germany in 1868, and it didn’t become popular until its use in clinical psychology manuals in the late 1800s. It’s no surprise that the word homosexual would not show up in the Bible until the 20th century. Prior to that time, translations of First Corinthians 6:9 would refer to, “abusers of themselves with mankind,” or, “lyers with men,” and the same point comes across. Illicit sexual activity is incompatible with God’s plan for our lives. And I simply don’t care what some 21-year-old seminary student thought in the 1950s about how the Bible should be translated. The whole thing isn’t interesting or even relevant to their argument. What I do care about is figuring out what the Bible means and looking at all of the facts in order to do that. And the film completely face plants on this point because it barely gives any time to those issues.
Let’s look at First Corinthians 6:9-10. Paul is giving a vice list to warn the Corinthian Christians about sins that will cost them their salvation. The word rendered homosexuals in the RSV is actually two Greek words, [Greek 00:03:13] and [Greek 00:03:16]. I actually agree with the film that rendering both of these words as homosexuals is not an ideal translation. The RSV even has to include a footnote explaining the translation, which says this, “homosexuals, Greek has effeminate nor sodomites. The apostle condemns not the inherent tendencies of such, but the indulgence of them.” A person won’t be barred from eternal life just because he has illicit or disordered sexual desires beyond his control.
In modern language, the word homosexual can refer to one’s orientation, like Christians who experience same-sex attractions but practice chastity, or one’s sexual behavior. It’s an unclear translation. A better translation would be this, “nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor the passive and active partners in homosexual acts will inherit the kingdom of God.” However, 1946 goes way beyond this point in claiming that the Bible does not condemn what is seen in modern same-sex relationships. They say the Bible only condemns rape between same-sex partners and the filmmakers say that this was the only kind of same-sex relationship in the ancient world.
You show one example in the Bible that speaks of same-sex relations in a positive way. One example.
No.
No, because there are none.
Why? Because it was written in the context of the social sexual-
Well, there are plenty of examples of marriage relationships in the Bible, man and a woman.
Mm-hmm.
Paul gives very clear instructions about sexual relationships in the book of First Corinthians chapter seven. He talks about how a man and a woman should come together and not deny one another. He gives zero instructions of any other kind of sexual relationship. I would think if I’m writing a book on sexual relationships and when you should have them and when you shouldn’t have them and something is common in the church, I would include that which was common.
It was not. There was always an age or power differential when there was a same-sex relationship.
The Roman emperors were well known for homosexuality.
Always an age and power differential-
But, that’s not true. Ancient Mesopotamian texts like the Almanac of Incantations do describe consensual same-sex relationships in the ancient Bronze Age when Leviticus was written. And Plato’s Symposium, which was written in the fourth century BC, talks about women who quote, “Do not care for men but have female attachments,” and of men who exclusively hang about men and embrace them. The Roman satirist Juvenal, writing after the completion of the New Testament, records his contempt for men who married other men in Roman wedding ceremonies. They say the word [Greek 00:05:58] simply means soft, lazy, indulgent people. And [Greek 00:06:03] means pedophiles or boy rapists.
In the ancient world, not every [Greek 00:06:08] was a passive recipient of a same-sex act. Some [Greek 00:06:12] were men who overindulged in food or even sex with women, but every passive recipient of same-sex acts was a [Greek 00:06:21], or a softie, because he made himself soft and penetrable like a woman. [Greek 00:06:26] is clearly being used in a sexual context in First Corinthians nine because it’s paired with [Greek 00:06:32]. They also say the [Greek 00:06:33] were boy prostitutes who the [Greek 00:06:36] had sex with.
In the context of Roman Corinth, there was a system called pederasty, the idea that an older man would initiate a younger boy into Roman society, all right? The older man, the arson of the [Greek 00:07:02] was also penetrating the younger man, or the [Greek 00:07:10], all right? When we talk about the Greco-Roman age, where it’s men who have power are allowed to penetrate any other person, be it woman, child, enslaved person, which is very different. It does sound like rape and pedophilia. Yeah.
There’s a huge problem for the revisionists here because they don’t want same-sex sexual acts to be a sin worthy of damnation. They say [Greek 00:07:42] and [Greek 00:07:43] do not refer to those kinds of same-sex acts, but the words [Greek 00:07:48] and [Greek 00:07:49] have to refer to some damnable acts to fit the context. For example, if you say [Greek 00:07:56] does not refer to simply being the passive recipient of sex between men, then what does [Greek 00:08:02] refer to? Should we believe that Paul thought merely being soft or weak or cowardly was on par with fornication, adultery, or idolatry? Even worse, if the [Greek 00:08:15] were boy prostitutes and the [Greek 00:08:19] were rapists or sex traffickers, then St. Paul would be saying that rape victims deserve to go to hell. To be honest, this isn’t just a problem with the 1946 film. The Catholic New American Bible has a footnote on this verse which says the following, “The Greek word translated as boy prostitutes may refer to [Greek 00:08:38], I.E. boys or young men who are kept for purposes of prostitution, a practice not uncommon in the Greco-Roman world.”
In Greek mythology, this was the function of Ganymede, the cupbearer of Gods, whose Latin name was Katamitis. The term translated as sodomites refers to adult males who indulged in homosexual practices with such boys. Remember, while the Bible is an errant, the footnotes are not. Boy or child prostitute is a euphemism. We should be saying boy or child rape victim. Ergo, the LGBT revisionists are saying that rapists or the [Greek 00:09:13] and their rape victims, the [Greek 00:09:17] are both going to hell, which is a monstrous view. If Paul wanted to condemn boy rape, he had perfectly good Greek words covering this act already, it was called [Greek 00:09:27]. But instead, Paul used these two terms to equally indict grown adult men who are freely engaging in same-sex acts that disordered the gift of sexuality God gave us. Paul possibly coined the term [Greek 00:09:42] because it literally means man better.
The same Greek words are found in the Greek translation of Leviticus 20:13, which says, “If a man lies with a male, as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination.” Under this view, Paul would be condemning immoral behavior among adults just like all the other sins on his vice list in First Corinthians six, not acts of evil committed against children, as the revisionists seem to be saying. In his commentary in First Corinthians, St. John Chrysostom says this about Paul’s vice list. “Many have attacked this place as extremely severe, since he places the drunkard and the reviler with the adulterer and the abominable and the abuser of himself with mankind.” People in St. John Chrysostom time understood that sexual disorder was gravely sinful. They were more concerned about the prohibition on partying, which Chrysostom says is just as sinful because of the way the body and mind are abused. On a side note, the filmmakers interview a rabbi who says that Leviticus is just condemning cultic prostitution and rape between men, not sex between men of equal standing in society. And the absence of references to lesbianism, they say, show that this is about prostitution, not homosexuality.
One way to read this could be that the active partner is liable for the violence and humiliation of women, but the passive partner could very well be under a category, that appears later in the Hebrew Bible, of [foreign language 00:11:21]. A [foreign language 00:11:23] is a male prostitute, a ritual pagan male prostitute. What’s missing from the text is that there’s no reference to lesbian sex. Homosexuality is not the worry of the Hebrew Bible because if it was, then sex between two women would be problematic.
This is wrong because there were many ancient law codes that punished the act of partners in homosexual acts because they humiliated the passive partners and showed dominance through rape. But Leviticus doesn’t do that. It punishes both partners as being equally responsible, and Leviticus does not use the Hebrew word for male prostitutes or [foreign language 00:11:59]. In chapter 18 is a long section about what sexual relations are permissible. The fact that lesbianism is missing from the prohibitions doesn’t mean that the ancient authors thought that lesbianism was okay. The same chapter is missing a prohibition on fathers having sex with their daughters, but that was never considered okay in ancient Israel. The wrongness of unnamed crimes in scripture follows from the wrongness of named crimes from which we can rationally infer. And since the Levitical code was written for a male audience in mind, the prohibition against male homosexual acts would also apply to any female acts.
In Romans chapter one, St. Paul condemns male homosexual acts and lesbian acts, the latter of which in the ancient world were always recognized to be a relation between social equals involving women, not the rape of prostitutes because women did not purchase female prostitutes, only men did that. Paul says “Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another. Men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error.” The filmmakers say that St. Paul was just critiquing Roman excess and that Paul said nothing about homosexual acts in general.
Where Paul got those ideas seemed to be rooted in his own culture, his own understanding, his own reading of his sacred text.
Paul wants to show the excess of passions, greeds, licentiousness and the background of Roman imperial society that allows those things to be in excess where those who are powerful men just get to do whatever they want to do. And I think that’s where Paul’s beginning to argue against that idea, and not necessarily how we just read it as a blanket condemnation.
By unnatural, Paul did not mean these relationships contained excess sexual desire or that they were simply a contradiction of social standards of his time. Paul meant that the general idea of same-sex relations violates the image of God made known in the human body, that we were created male and female. Prior to Romans 1:26, Paul says that creation proves there’s one true God and idolaters have no excuse not to worship him. The reason they have no excuse is because God’s existence is made known in nature. You can look in nature and see that God exists. However, Paul says their minds were darkened and they exchanged the proper end of their worship, God, for an improper end, idols. Paul repeats the cycle of destruction in exchange when he talks about unbelievers passions being degraded and women exchanging the natural object of their sexual desires, men for women, and men doing the same with other men.
What all of these exchanges have in common is not a failure to adhere to a social norm. It’s a failure to adhere to the natural order that is obvious from looking at creation itself, whether it’s the worship of the one true God or sexual relations with your biologically compatible partner. Paul even uses the Greek words for male and female instead of the Greek words for men and women. No doubt a reference to the creation account in Genesis one, which describes how God made humans male and female. In fact, St. John Chrysostom commented on Romans one and said he considered same-sex relations worse than fornication. He writes, “In the case of the one, the intercourse, even if lawless is yet according to nature, but this is contrary both to law and nature, for even if there were no hell and no punishment had been threatened, this were worse than any punishment.”
1946 also repeats the same trope that the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was not about homosexual acts, but only in hospitality. There’s a great episode of the Catholic Answers Focus podcast that breaks this down in detail with Bible scholar Mary Healy. I’ll link to that in the description below if you want more on that subject. It’s also unfortunate that the film creates two extremes through its director and her father, who is a Protestant preacher that affirms the Bible’s traditional teaching on this subject. Roggio’s father has a very literal view of the Bible. And he thinks sexual orientation can be changed, but that isn’t the only position on the traditional side of this issue. I would say we don’t know how or why sexual orientation arises or changes. And even those on the other side of this issue use terms like gender-fluid and sexual fluidity. The Catechism says of homosexual orientations, its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained. Science can definitely help us understand why people have certain desires or how they change, but science can never tell us which desires are right or wrong because science is not in the business of adjudicating moral questions.
That’s what reason and revelation are for. Finally, the problem ultimately is not homosexuality. The problem is that this revisionist view of scripture will not stop there. Brandon Robertson, who I’ve dialogued with before, has defended polyamory from a Christian perspective.
I know that many people, not only in our church, but Christian leaders that are in open and polyamorous relationships. And I’ve got to tell you that as I’ve interacted with them and as I’ve got past my own bias and listened to their experience and stories, I’ve walked away believing that what they have and what they’re doing is healthy, holy, and good.
Mark Regnerus has conducted a survey showing that self-identified gay Christians are far more likely to support pornography, fornication and occasional adultery. My point is that when your exegesis of scripture merely amplifies human feelings, you will tear the Bible apart to protect those feelings. If moral sex only came down to consenting adults, then why did John the Baptist care who Herod was married to? Why did Jesus say remarriage after divorce constituted adultery? And why did St. Paul say that a man in Corinth who committed incest with his stepmother was so dangerous to the community he had to be handed over to the devil, essentially excommunicated until he repented of his sins? If the Bible’s teaching on sexuality bothers us, what about its non-sexual teachings that bother us, like the claim that only Christ saves us from sin, or that not everyone will be saved?
If your standard for biblical interpretation is it can’t be right if it makes me uncomfortable, then you’re not interpreting the word of God. You’re attempting to rewrite it. And that’s not a position I want to be in when I stand in judgment before the Almighty God who wrote the moral law, both in scripture and our hearts, so that we would find perfect joy in him. Hey guys, thank you so much for watching. Definitely check out my related content on these issues, and please like and subscribe to this video to help our channel grow. And finally, if you want to help us to expand and reach more people, definitely support us at trenthornpodcast.com.