REFERENCES TO HOMOSEXUALITY IN THE BIBLE (I swiped nearly all of this information--and even a couple of sentences verbatim--from chapter four of John Boswell's _Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality_. You can confirm most of the information herein easily enough, though, just as I did, in _Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible_, which no household should be without. If you don't have a Strong's, I saw a few last week in Half Price Books on Telegraph for I think $12 each.) The argument that God punished Sodom for homosexuality turns on the word "know" in Genesis 19:5, "And they called unto Lot, and said unto him, Where are the men which came in to thee this night? bring them out unto us, that we may know them." The chapter contains no other possible reference to homosexuality. There is no reason to assume that "know" in this passage meant carnal knowledge: the Hebrew verb "to know" occurs 943 times in the Old Testament, but refers to carnal knowledge only ten times. In the Septuagint, the Greek word chosen to translate it in this verse clearly means "to make the acquaintance of" with no sexual connotation. There is a strikingly similar passage in Judges 19:22ff., "...the men of the city...beat at the door, and spake to the master of the house, the old man, saying, Bring forth the man that came into thine house, that we may know him." (The old man even offers his daughter as a bribe to get them to go away, just as Lot does.) This passage is universally interpreted as a warning against inhospitality, and the old man himself doesn't mention homosexuality at all when he recounts the incident in 20:5. Jesus himself apparently believed that Sodom was destroyed for the sin of inhospitality: check Matthew 10:14-15 and Luke 10:10-12. In Ezekial 16:49-50 the sins of Sodom are enumerated; homosexuality is not mentioned. The word "sodomite" occurs five times in the King James Version: Deuteronomy 23:17; I Kings 14:24, 15:12, and 22:46; and II Kings 23:7. In all five cases it translates the Hebrew word "qadesh" which means a male prostitute in a pagan temple; there is very little evidence about the practices of the qadeshim, and no particular reason to assume they serviced men. The only direct references to homosexuality in the King James Old Testament are Leviticus 18:22, "Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination," and the similar verse 20:13. "Abomination" here is a rather loaded translation of the Hebrew word "toebah" which suggests ritual uncleanliness rather than moral evil. Both Jesus and Paul taught that under the new dispensation it was not the physical violation of Levitical precepts which constituted "abomination" but the interior infidelity of the soul. The Council of Jerusalem in A.D. 49 decided that converts to the Christian faith would not be bound by any requirements of the Mosaic law except to refrain from eating food that had been strangled, contained blood, or had been offered to idols, and to refrain from fornication--the Greek term for which does not refer to homosexuality. (There is also room for doubt as to what exactly is being prohibited: a literal translation would be "You shall not sleep the sleep of a woman with a man"; just what constitutes "the sleep of a woman" has been the subject of considerable debate, to put it mildly, among Jewish scholars. Some have speculated that this passage, too, was aimed specifically at curbing temple prostitution; notice, for example, that the qadeshim are specifically labeled as "toebah" in I Kings 14:24.) Romans 1:26-27 reads, "For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet." The "nature" in this passage is the Greek word "phusis" which means personal nature or disposition. It's the same Greek word that occurs, for example, in I Corinthians 11:14, "Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him?", where Paul is probably using "phusis" to mean custom or tradition. There's a lot of debate about just what "phusis" connoted at that time; but the one thing that's clear is that Paul isn't talking about "natural law" here. (The concept of a "natural law," one that was sinful to violate even for those ignorant of divine law, probably never even occurred to Paul, and certainly didn't occur to any of the many early Christian theologists who commented on this passage; the idea didn't show up in theology for another thousand years. Also, we know from other sources that homosexuality was generally regarded at the time as a natural physical trait; if Paul disagreed with the prevailing belief, there are plenty of other places in his writings where you'd expect him to say so, and he doesn't.) The word "against" in "that which is against nature" is a clear mistranslation. The Greek word here is "para," which means not "against" but "in excess of." (It's translated as "more than" in the preceeding verse, in fact, and in many other places in the New Testament. The Greek word meaning "in opposition to" is "kata.") The very same phrase, "para phusis," is even used to describe the activity of God Himself in Romans 11:23-24, "And they also, if they abide not still in unbelief, shall be graffed in: for God is able to graff them in again. For if thou wert cut out of the olive tree which is wild by nature, and wert graffed contrary to nature into a good olive tree: how much more shall these, which be the natural branches, be graffed into their own olive tree." What Paul seems to be condemning here is not homosexuality per se (in fact, the absence of any reference to homosexuality in the list of sins that immediately follows, in verses 29-31, is striking) but the satisfying of one's desires in excess of what is fitting to one's nature. (This is also how the passage was interpreted by early Christian theologians; Saint John Chrysostom, for example, felt that it was an important point that the men and women had previously enjoyed satisfactory heterosexual relations. "No one can claim, [Paul] points out, that she came to this because she was precluded from lawful intercourse or that...she was unable to satisfy her desire...") In general, Paul seemed to feel that sin lay not in specific acts but in their immoderation. "Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote unto me: It is good for a man not to touch a woman. Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband," I Corinthians 7:1-2. "All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any," I Corinthians 6:12. I Corinthians 6:9-10 reads, "Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolators, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God." "Effeminate" is a poor translation of the Greek word "malakos" which means "soft". The word is not translated as "effeminate" anywhere else in the Bible. It is the same word that is translated as "soft" in Matthew 11:8 ("But what went ye out for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment? behold, they that wear soft clothing are in kings' houses"; similarly Luke 7:25). In a moral sense, "malakos" just means "licentious"; Aristotle in the _Nicomachean Ethics_ (7.4.4) says specifically that "malakos" refers to unrestraint in respect to bodily pleasures. The translation as "effeminate" seems awfully gratuitous. "Abuser of himself with mankind" is a translation of the Greek word "arsenokoites"; this word has changed meaning several times over the centuries, so it's perhaps understandable how it got translated as it did; but in Paul's time, and in fact until well into the fourth century, it seems to have simply meant a temple prostitute. (Corroborating this indirectly is the fact that a great deal of contemporary homoerotic Greek writing has survived and not once in any of it does the word "arsenokoites" appear.) I Timothy 1:10 refers to "them that defile themselves with mankind"; this is a translation of the same Greek word "arsenokoites" as appears in I Corinthians. And that is the sum and total of what the Bible has to say about homosexuality.