This is just a summary of my main points about the New Testament “clobber texts” for those wanting a quick overview. Press here for my my full case.

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As a first century Jewish Roman citizen, Paul would have known of plenty of all-male sexual activity but all known forms of it were selfish, promiscuous and exploitative – mainly slave masters sleeping with their slave boys (or men) and (in Greek cities) pederastic older men sleeping with youths by arrangement with their fathers. Faithful, committed sexual relationships between free men of similar standing were virtually never, if ever, heard of (and would have been universally condemned). Same-sex marriages didn’t happen until Nero’s infamous marriage to his castrated slave boy about two years after Paul died. Moralists saw men having sex with other men as just resulting from an excess of lust. There was no awareness that some men could only ever be satisfied with sex with other men. All-female sexual relationships were rarely spoken about and no one worried about them. If it didn’t involve a willy it wasn’t really seen as sex at all!

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Romans 1:18-2:1 does not condemn all gay sex as sinful rebellion against God’s natural order. The Greek term Paul used for “nature” – physiken concerned not just biology but also social custom/standards and inner nature.

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Paul was very probably paralleling the Old Testament Canaanite chain of depravity with the modern Roman version: turning away from the living God to worship idols, so that they lost their moral compass and pursued lives of sinful selfish excess and committed various wicked acts. These included lustful male homoerotic acts but also other, even more serious sins.

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The type of male sexual conduct Paul was condemning was certainly not a man having sex with another man within a faithful, monogamous partnership for two reasons. First, such relationships were then unknown. Second, the sex Paul describes involved men “inflamed with lust” driven by selfish excessive desire – the very sort we know was then rife between masters and their male slaves; very different to sex proceeding from a loving, committed relationship.

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He said nothing at all about all-female sexual acts. Until the 4th century AD all Christian writers agreed the reference to their women exchanging “natural sexual relations for unnatural ones” involved non-procreative heterosexual sex against society’s “better” social standards (and so contrary to nature in its social meaning). This could have included women sleeping with their slave boys, copying what their own husbands did, or incest as seen in the court of the recent ex-Emperor Caligula who slept with his sisters. He may well also have been referring to women taking the lead role in sex with men - contrary the then normal gender roles. 

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The lack of any condemnation of female homoerotic sex in the whole of Scripture should give us a strong clue that the condemnation of male homoerotic sex can’t have been simply because it involved people of the same sex. Otherwise, lesbian sex would also have been condemned somewhere and it isn't.

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The 1 Corinthians  6 and 1 Timothy 1 passages do not condemn all gay sexual acts as sending you to hell.

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Paul was warning his audience against copying some of the sinful  practices they saw going on around them, many of which they would have indulged in before they came to Christ and might be tempted to return to. He warned them that lives characterised by such behaviours make them unfit for and exclude them from God’s kingdom.

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In these two long list of vices Paul includes just two which have become associated with “homosexual” sexual activities: malakoi (only in Corinthians) and arsenokoitai (both passages). And homosexual acts are not included in any of the other 21 vice lists in the New Testament.

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Some modern versions of the Bible have translated malakoi as referring to the passive partner in the act of all-male intercourse. However, the much more common meaning of malakoi was someone who was morally soft/weak and unable to control their passions. It’s almost certain that’s what Paul meant. In that patriarchal culture such moral weakness was seen as a female trait, just as it was in 17th century England. This was why the King James Version translated the word as “the effeminate”. An accurate modern translation might be “hedonists”.

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Paul’s newly coined word arsenokoitai literally meant male-bedders, almost certainly coming from words in the Greek version of Levitcus 18: 22, condemning men who carried out anal intercourse on other males.

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But in using this word Paul could only have had in mind the type of all-male sexual relationships then known to be happening in Corinth and Ephesus - to warn his congregation to avoid them. These were all abusive relationships: slave-owners having anal intercourse with their male slaves and older men doing the same with pederastic youths. Faithful monogamous sexual partnerships between men were then unknown and so not what he was contemplating.

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It’s like Paul had called out “gin-drinkers” if the only gin drank at the time were 90% proof, consumed neat just to get drunk. This would not be condemning gin-drinkers today drinking a single gin and tonic to unwind after work!

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Very soon after Paul wrote, arsenokoitai had evolved to describe more powerful men exploiting others economically, often without any sex involved. This surely just confirms that the type of acts Paul was describing by this word must have been abusive ones. This fits with most of the older English translations of arsenokoitai: “abusers of themselves with mankind” (KJV)

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An accurate modern translation of Paul’s word arsenokoitai might be something like: men who sexually abuse boys and other men in having anal intercourse with them.

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The type of male homoerotic sex Paul was condemning in these three passages clearly seems to be expressions of Paul’s key principles of sexual ethics in 1 Thessalonians 4:1-7: to not take sexual advantage of another person and to control your body sexually in a way that is holy and honourable, not in passionate lust like the pagans. This has nothing to do with sex in loving monogamous gay partnerships today, which takes no advantage of anyone and, when kept between those two partners, is actually a means of controlling sexual desire.

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Next stop ... press here to continue the journey onto the Old Testament clobber texts.

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