LGBT History Month in the UK: The Bible comes out

LGBT History Month in the UK: The Bible comes out

In 1992, while serving as a Campus Minister at the University of Minnesota with the single remit of “working with under-represented and traditionally-excluded students, faculty, and staff addressing issues of oppression,” I decided to research what Scripture really has to say on the topic of “homosexuality.” I confess to you, if the Bible treated “homosexuality” like it does the topics of “women” and “slavery,” I was prepared to deal with it similarly, that is, take a “that was then – this is now” approach.

To my surprise, I found Scripture does not address “homosexuality” much less condemn it. (This is where I differ from some other liberal folks who use “women” and “slavery” as analogies to “homosexuality.”)

In 2007 I refreshed my research, reading up on the latest exegeses and commentaries. Again, I was unsure about what I might find; perhaps the exponential growth over the past fifteen years in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies; Gay Liberation Theology; and Biblical Studies from Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender perspectives would reveal a different conclusion. And again, I was willing to go where the research led me and have my mind changed by new knowledge about ancient texts. Lo and behold, I found more bases offering greater precision that Scripture does not, in fact, deal with “homosexuality.”

The story of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19:1-11 (from which we get the English word “sodomy” which can refer to heterosexual activity, including that between a husband and a wife) is about the threat of gang rape and mob violence and the extreme limits to which the Biblical code of hospitality—welcoming and sheltering a stranger or foreigner—is to be practiced.

Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 are part of the Holiness Code which condemns Hebrew men for “wasting their seed.” In order to be fruitful and multiply as the covenant people of God, and to survive as a distinct religious group in a harsh desert land, Israelite men—who were thought to contain a finite number of miniature human seeds inside their testicles, a misconception common among ancient peoples—were not to “sow their seed” in any ways other than by planting them in certain prescribed females (for example, a Hebrew wife, or multiple wives especially as one wife might be barren as in the story of Jacob and Leah and Rachel, or a slave as in the story of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar) only when the woman was impregnable, that is, no sex during menstruation, no masturbation or coitus interruptus (“onanism,” from the story of Onan in Genesis 38), and no sex with animals or with various proscribed types of people –male and female. Rather than conserve this ancient Israelite context (ignorant of human reproduction though it is), the New Living Translation (1996, 2004) chooses to state: “If a man practices homosexuality, having sex with another man as with a woman, both men have committed a detestable act. They must both be put to death, for they are guilty of a capital offense.” (Leviticus 20:13)

The English word “sodomite” was inserted into the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible in 1611, in Deuteronomy 23:17, I Kings 14:24, 15:12, 22:46, and 2 Kings 23:7. “Sodomite” was used to translate a Hebrew word qadesh which means, literally, “holy” and implies in these verses “holy temple prostitute” (or “cult prostitute” or “sacred prostitute”). As with all forms of sexual exploitation, gender is not the issue; prostituting children or adults—regardless of the gender of the prostitutor or the gender of the victim—is wrong. It is important to note that The Living Bible Paraphrased (1971) decided to stick “homosexual” and “homosexuality” in the first two of these passages, but now its successor, the New Living Translation (1996, 2004), uses “temple prostitute” and “shrine prostitutes”—male and female.

In the New Testament, Paul discusses the major issue of monotheism and polytheism in his letter to the church in Rome. In Romans 1:26-27, he uses, in an analogy, the Greek phrase para phusin which gets incorrectly translated as “unnatural” or “against nature.” The word para (same as the English prefix “para”) means “exceptional,” “different,” or “beyond the usual.” Modern English examples are “paramedic” and “paralegal”: a paralegal secretary working in a lawyer's office is not “against the law” or “illicit,” and a paramedic working for an ambulance service is not “against medicine,” or “unhealthy.”

Paul uses in this passage the Greek phrases pathe atimias (“passions of dishonor” or “degrading passions” or (KJV) “vile affections”) and orexis (“passion,” “yearning,” or (KJV) “lust”). In 1 Corinthians 7:9, Paul again refers to “passion”: “But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn” (KJV). For Paul, sex is not the problem—passion is—so much so that marital sex acts are judged by him to be the cure of last resort! Paul felt all passions were “dishonorable” and urged Roman Christians to believe “naturally” in one God, rather than “exceptionally” in more than one God, that is, polytheism—which is not “against belief” or “atheism.”

In 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 and 1 Timothy 1:9-10, Paul lists a variety of sins, two of which get mistranslated as “homosexuals.” (The Good News Bible (1976, 1994, 2004) prefers “homosexual perverts.”) In the Corinthians list, the Greek word malakos means “soft” or “gentle.” The KJV translated it as “effeminate.” If we suppose Paul's intended audience was male, he is saying men should not appear “feminine” or act “lady-like.” Regardless of whether we talk about the 1st century Roman world or the 21st century world, there are “straight” men who are feminine in style and personality, and there are “gay” men who are masculine and quite manly. One's primary personal demeanor does not have anything to do with the primary gender one finds most attractive.

As for the Greek word arsenokoitai, no one knows nowadays what it really meant during Paul's time. It only exists in Scripture in these two vice lists, and there are few contemporary examples to go by. Thus to assume it means “homosexuals” (the Today’s New International Version (2004) opts for “practicing homosexuals” in the Corinthians list and “those practicing homosexuality” in the Timothy list) is faulty scholarship and extremely discriminatory. Where this word is included in extra-Biblical ancient lists, the other words in the lists are not related to sexual activity but rather to economic injustice and exploitation. So it is fair to assume Paul is referring to some kind of economic exploitation, like slavery or prostitution. But we simply don't know for sure. As with all forms of exploitation—sexual, financial, physical, etc.—gender is not the issue.

To insert into the Bible the word “homosexual”—a term coined in the late 1800's by schools of psychology and sociology to designate a person who is attracted to another person of the same gender—is both anachronistic and unfounded.

Any group of translators, editors, and publishers—including Bible Societies!—who permit the word “homosexual” to replace Biblical Hebrew and Greek words or phrases that mean other things, or whose original meanings are long lost, cause a scandal to the Gospel. This is not about linguistic nuance or academic parlance: this is about manipulating The Good Book to underwrite hate crimes and witch hunts against all of us who are identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender—including my Roman Catholic colleagues who dare to lend a sympathetic ear and offer compassionate advice to anyone struggling with anything remotely queer.

Providentially, two English language Bibles have done a fair job of revision. The New Revised Standard Version (published under the auspices of the National Council of Churches in 1989) does not retain the word “homosexuals” printed in the Revised Standard Version (published by the NCC in 1946). The Revised English Bible (published by the university presses of Oxford and Cambridge in 1989) does not retain the phrase “homosexual perversion” printed in the New English Bible (published by same in 1961).

To my knowledge, the word “homosexual” does not appear in The Message, a paraphrase by Eugene H. Peterson (1993, 1994, 1995).

LGBT History Month in the UK: My coming out story

LGBT History Month in the UK: My coming out story

I grew up in the Southern United States quite aware, because I had two cousins who lived in California, that we Southerners were about ten years behind the times when it came to popular culture. Whatever my relatives were listening to or wearing in the early 70’s didn’t drop across the Mason-Dixon Line until I was in college in the early 80’s.

When it came to politics and morality, the South was a world unto itself: Southern Democrats, known as Dixiecrats, had a stronghold in local governments in states where Black people were still kept from voting even after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. I know this because my parents were frowned upon by other white people in Starkville, Mississippi, where we lived from 1969 to 1972, when my mother drove our maid, Thea Bishop, who was African-American, to the polling station each Election Day before taking her home after work.

I remember my family going on vacation to the Bay Area during the summers of 1967 and 1972, when Flower Children dotted the streets of San Francisco. Their long hair and hippy clothes and androgynous style so captivated my father that he toured the city with his camera ready and aimed at this wild life in their natural habitat. The only way you could distinguish between the males and the females was by their beards—men’s beards tended to be a bit fuller. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, in December 1960, I was a child in the 60’s—not a child of the 60’s—and, sure enough, long hair and unisex clothing featured prominently in my Southern high school and college yearbooks from 1977 to 1983, a full decade after the “summers of love” on the West Coast.

The AIDS crisis forced me to grow up.

In 1985, I started seminary, in Washington, D.C., dimly aware of “the homosexual disease.” Herpes was all the rage among the sexually-active, of which I was not one, but I knew and laughed at the jokes, which were often at the expense of gay people. Only we didn’t call them “gay people” but rather “queers” or “fags” or “homos.” If you really wanted to put somebody down, you merely had to call them a “homo” or “faggot.”

Then I heard through the grape-vine that one of our seminary professors, the Rev. Dr. Joe Weber, who taught New Testament, Greek, and Orthodox Theology, had died of AIDS and that he had been secretly gay and homosexually-active. Publicly he had been married to his wife for many years, and they had a couple of grown children, whom I caught a glimpse of at his memorial service attended by many of us from the seminary, following his death from what was reported to be some rare form of pneumonia. Dr. Weber had gotten sick half-way through the semester and had to quit teaching us first-year students about the Jewish roots and different developments of the various gospels (of which there are more than four, we learned to our surprise).

The only good news about our professor’s illness was that we New Testament students did not have to endure being divided into small groups to work together on biblical research projects, for which the members of each group would earn the same grade—regardless of how much time or energy or intelligence each student contributed to their group’s final outcome. Our fierce sense of unfairness at this common-fate grading scheme helped to unite us newcomers—only to discover that previous generations of New Testament students had suffered the same common fate—and so our protests, official and unofficial, proved futile. Thus imagine our initial feeling of liberation when the academic dean came to our class one day to announce our professor’s medical absence and then distributed a revised syllabus, with the remaining lectures to be given by other members of the faculty and our final grades to be based on the usual method of written examinations—with each student earning their own grade.

Six months after Dr. Weber’s funeral, rumors about his real death and real life started to spread. Like any secret functions in a familial organization, the chain of action and reaction quickly became toxic: we students blamed “the administration” for, supposedly, lying about our professor; the gay students blamed the non-gay students for protecting the supposed lies; and the whole situation exposed the religious and moral hypocrisy that shamed individuals to go into the closet. None of us wanted to admit that we—individually and communally—were responsible for perpetuating homophobia, heterosexism, anti-gay discrimination, fear and hatred against anyone perceived as “different.”

This is what forced me to come out. To choose, for the first time, to relate differently—with acceptance and affirmation—to people—those I knew, and all the ones I didn’t know I knew—who identified—or who needed the freedom to explore their identities—as being other than strictly heterosexual.

I am grateful to every gay person and gay-friendly person on my seminary campus and in the More Light Presbyterian Church where I interned for three years who sat me down, told me the truth of their lives, opened me to the truth of my life, and turned me to identify Jesus as “different”—as queer as any of us.

The decade after Joe Weber’s death, I went to see the AIDS quilt when it came to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where I was living. I remember finding his panel, one of the many thousands of panels by that time, and reading his name and touching the symbols from his life that had been sewn onto it. I trust that he knows how many lives his death changed and how much those lives have worked together to help change the church and the nation—congregation by congregation, state by state.

Thank God, once you come out there’s no going back.