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Why It's Heresy to Read the Bible Literally: An Interview with John Shelby Spong
(religiondispatches.org)
this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2024
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The word αρσενοκοιται
αρσεν Male
κοιται Bed
It literally means "males who bed with other males (in a sexual manner)"
As for Romans 1:27
The Greek and the English both make it clear that they "burned in their lust one toward another". Which describes a passionate, consensual relationship.
When talking about marriage, marriage is insituted by God. In fact, it's the first sacrament (if you see it as one) instituted.
Genesis 2:24 ESV [24] Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
The marriage is between a man and a woman. It remains that way throughout the whole Bible, that it's between a man and a woman. The only time a sexual union is mentioned between two men or two women, it's condemned. A man and a man cannot get married, neither can two women.
And “butterfly” literally means “winged insect made of butter”.
An ἀρσενοκοίτης is a male who has homosexual relationships, but there's no certainty about which kind. Nothing permits to be sure that Paul thought there about all kinds of homosexual relationships, that's why I said and still say that these texts aren't clear.
We have two clues, however, that suggest this is not the case. The first is Romans 1:27, which does not speak of love but of lust. Nothing to do with today's romantic and sexual homosexuality. The second is Paul's context: in his time, homosexual sexuality existed mainly in the form of pederasty, that is, the rape of young boys by mature men. So when Paul writes about “males who bed with other males (in a sexual manner)” he has this image first in mind. It would therefore be entirely justified to translate ἀρσενοκοῖται as “pederasts” and not as “homosexuals”.
If these texts seem clear to you, it is because you are injecting your cultural homophobia into them. This is the opposite of “taking the Bible seriously.”
Ah yes, I'm sure "males who bed with other males" is referring to a butterfly.
Romans 1:27 speaks of "lust for one another". Mutual lust is an aspect of a sexual relationship. Are you trying to tell me that homosexual men don't lust after each other?
The word ἀρσενοκοίτης can be related to what's written in the Septuagint in Leviticus 18:22
"καὶ μετὰ ἄρσενος οὐ κοιμηθήσῃ κοίτην γυναικός· βδέλυγμα γάρ ἐστιν."
There is absolutely zero mention of children when there could be. That's just a vague theory which isn't as probable as showing what the text actually says and has been interpreted to do so
Where did my "cultural homophobia" originate?
And these "scholarly revelations" about the meaning of these verses in the Bible did not predate the LGB movement. They mysteriously popped up after. Isn't this not injecting cultural values into the text? Why can't we inject cultural Chinese values into the text and claim that the "eye of a needle" is actually a gate or some unfounded rubbish.
In my mother tongue, lust and desire are very different things. It's normal to desire your significant other, not to lust after them. It may not be the case in English, but it was in Greek.
Yes, but that's why I spoke about culture. There were no need to explicitly speak about children, as the involvement of children was the norm. On the contrary if Paul spoke about adult relationship too, it would have been logical for him to say that explicitly, and he didn't.
That's normal, science and culture evolve, and out understanding of the Scriptures have to evolve too. Just like everyone thought that the Bible taught that the Earth was the center of the universe. It was logical for everyone that, say Isaiah 40:22 was geocentric. And we discovered that Earth was not the center of the universe, and we stopped to take these texts literally. It will be the same with the texts about homosexuality, as our understanding of sexuality changed.