For all four of these posts on biblical texts, which are attempts at exegetical dialogue, I will be pairing Peter Gomes and Richard Hays as conversation partners. Gomes, now deceased, was an American preacher and theologian, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard Divinity School as well as the University’s chaplain. Richard Hays was the Dean and George Washington Ivey Professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolino. I will be drawing from Hays’s book The Moral Vision of the New Testament and Gomes’s book The Good Book. *When I initially crafted these documents nearly a decade ago Hays formally had a non-affirming position. As recently as of the September of 2024, Richard Hays ostensibly amended his position in the book The Widening of God’s Mercy, which he coauthored with his son Christopher. I have only heard about Hays’s amended position and have not read the book.
The question I raised at the end of my last post was this, did Paul have an epistemic category for a committed consensual same sex relationship and or a same sex orientation as it is conceived of in the 21st century? If we answer that he did, then there may be validity to the argument that Christians should not condemn the practice of a consenting monogamous committed same-sex relationships. Similarly, it has been suggested that if Paul knew about the gay gene or a homosexual predisposition he would have spoken differently or at least more carefully about this issue.
“In any case, neither Paul nor anyone else in antiquity had a concept of ‘sexual orientation.’” (Hays 388)
“All Paul knew of homosexuality was the debauched pagan expression of it.” (Gomes 158)
Arsenokoitai and malakoi
Readers may have noticed that I ignored the rest of the verses in the New Testament that allegedly speak to the issue of homosexuality. Those include 1 Corinthians 6:9-11, 1 Timothy 1:10, Acts 15:28-29. None of these verses offer an argument as sophisticated as does Romans 1, thus I have left them alone. Having acknowledged that I will make one comment on the 1 Corinthians text. Paul is making the point that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God. By way of illustration, he offers a list of those wrongdoers: fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, malakoi, arsenokoitai, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers (relevant terms left untranslated). Hays points out that the first term, malakoi, is not a technical term meaning homosexual (no such word exists in Greek or Hebrew he admits), but it appears often in Hellenistic Greek as pejorative slang to describe the “passive” partners—often young boys—in homosexual activity (Hays 382).
Something to consider is that the most clear and explicit reference to what we might call homosexual practice is found in the Leviticus text (18-22) I wrote about that here. Not insignificant when considering this. The Septuagint’s (Greek translation Old Testament presumably used by our New Testament authors) translation of Leviticus 20:13 reads, “whoever lies with a man as with a woman [meta arseno koiten gynaikos], they have both done and abomination.” You don’t have to know Greek to see that arsenokoitai, used by Paul in 1 Corinthians, is a linguistic construction of this phrase. What I think this does say is that Paul did know about more than pederasty. What this still does not say is that Paul rejected homogenous committed same sex relationships between two consenting adults.
On the nature of “nature”
As we saw in the previous post on Romans, one of the words contested by Gomes is the translation of “natural” found in Romans 1:26-27. Gomes argues that natural and unnatural is a delineation between those heterosexuals who engage in heterosexual relationships, what is natural for them, and heterosexuals who engage in homosexual relationships, what is unnatural for them. What’s obvious is that Gomes presupposes a same sex predisposition in some individuals for whom engaging in same sex relationships would also be natural.
Hays’s response.
First a look at the relevant Greek phrases: “the natural (kata physin) use for that which is contrary to nature (para physin).”
Hays shows that these categories play a major role in Stoicism, where right moral action is closely identified with living kata physin. In particular, the opposition between “natural” and “unnatural” is very frequently used (in the absence of convenient Greek words for “heterosexual” and “homosexual”) as a way of distinguishing between heterosexual and homosexual behavior (Hays 387).
An example from antiquity. Hellenistic Jews tended to see a correspondence between the philosophical appeal to “nature” and the teachings o the Law of Moses. For example Josephus writes, “The Law recognizes no sexual connection … except for the natural [kata physin] union of man and wife, and that only for the pro-creation of children. But it abhors the intercourse of males with males, and punishes any who undertake such a thing with death. (Josephus)”
A final lengthy quote from Hays, “In Paul’s time, the categorization of homosexual practices as para physin was a commonplace feature of polemical attacks against such behavior, particularly in the world of Hellenistic Judaism. When this idea turns up in Romans 1 (in a form relatively restrained by comparison to the statement of some of Paul’s contemporaries, both pagan and Jewish), we must recognize that Paul is hardly making an original contribution to theological thought on the subject; he speaks out of a Hellenistic-Jewish cultural context in which homosexuality is regarded as an abomination, and he assumes that his readers will share his negative judgment of it. (Hays 387)”
Concluding thoughts on the Exegetical Task
To answer the question would Paul have opposed a committed, consenting, same sex relationship might be impossible. To answer definitively assumes an argument from silence on either side. We simply don’t know if what Paul witnessed was pederasty, abusive sexual relationships, cultic temple practices, or a gay and/or lesbian couple who demonstrated a healthy, committed, loving relationship by cultural standards.
Still I think we need to be conscious of the scope of Paul’s contextual argument in Romans 1. Because he has contrasted homosexual practices with the Genesis story and consequently a moral presupposition of a particular sexual disposition, the argument about the nature of the relationship seems a moot point. Said differently, because homosexual practice stands as sacrament of the antirelgion (to quote Hays) the nature of the relationship in which those practices occur strikes me as irrelevant for Paul. I should note that I’m involved in a reading group of friends (all, it is safe to say, who are good deal smarter than I) who read this material with me, and almost all of them disagreed with my read on this text. I stand by what Hays says. Thus, when I’m asked my opinion about the permissibility of homosexuality practices from a Christian perspective, and I often was, I would begin by saying that I think one would be hard pressed to argue that an exegetical read of key texts will lead one to a position of affirmation.
It might also be worth pointing out here that I’ve read several versions of a popular argument including which now includes a documentary that make the point that the word homosexual was not included in any translation of the bible until 1946. The verse in question in the documentary is the verse from 1 Corinthians discussed above. While I think this is true that explicit use of the English word homosexual wasn’t added until 1946, I think this has little bearing on the exegetical task.
What remains then is the hermeneutical question. Is there interpretive reading strategy that takes into account the cultural context in which Paul and others are writing that allows us to supersede the seeming univocal voice of Biblical writers? To that we turn our attention next.