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From: david@gladys.UUCP (David Dalton)
Newsgroups: soc.motss
Subject: Re: New question for biblical scholars
Message-ID: <645@gladys.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 11-Oct-86 03:46:56 EDT
Article-I.D.: gladys.645
Posted: Sat Oct 11 03:46:56 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 12-Oct-86 05:33:40 EDT
References: <1575@felix.UUCP> <1576@felix.UUCP> <414@ubc-cs.UUCP> <426@ubc-cs.UUCP>
Organization: SFWN at Bethania, N.C.
Lines: 194
Summary: There are excellent sources on Christianity and gay people...

In article <426@ubc-cs.UUCP>, manis@ubc-cs.UUCP writes:
> 
> As a postscript, the notion of a group of gays getting together to prepare
> an expurgated/amended version of the Bible ...

An expurgated version of the Bible probably isn't necessary. A better
course would be to apply good scholarship to statements in the Bible
that are generally held to apply to gay people. It is possible to make
an excellent case for the argument that the Bible isn't nearly as harsh
on gay people as is generally believed.

John Boswell, a professor of history at Yale University, published an
excellent book in 1980 which I am ashamed to say I read only recently.
The book is _Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality,_
University of Chicago Press.

I should be very cautious in attempting to condense Boswell's major
points; Boswell is cautious even with 400 pages in which to make his
case. However:

                            ---------

-- A harsh Christian attitude toward gay people is a fairly new
   invention. It arose about the time the Inquisition got started --
   the 13th Century. Before the 13th Century, gay people generally
   were quite well accepted. In many periods and places there were
   no laws against homosexuality at all. When there were laws,
   homosexuality was generally held to be no worse than gluttony,
   or heterosexual dallying -- sins of excess and indiscretion, in
   other words. Punishment, when there was any, was light, and in
   many cases the punishment for homosexual acts was less than that
   for heterosexual fornication.

   The problems began in the 13th Century, when theologians
   advanced the idea, for the first time, that homosexuality was a
   much greater crime, as bad as, or worse than, murder. Gay people
   were not the only minority to suffer. Boswell writes, "The Jews
   were in fact one of the first casualities of the intolerance of
   the later Middle Ages. For centuries they had lived among 
   European Christians quietly and with little difficulty....
   During the later half of the twelfth century, however, an
   increasingly conformist European society found the persistent
   distinctiveness of the Jews more and more irritating."

   Things got worse. "During the decades surrounding the opening
   of the fourteenth century, the Jews were expelled from England
   and France; the order of the Templars dissolved on charges of
   sorcery and deviant sexuality; Edward II of England, the last
   openly gay medieval monarch, deposed and murdered; lending at
   interest equated with heresy and those who supported it 
   subjected to the Inquisition; and lepers all over France 
   imprisoned and prosecuted on charges of poisoning wells and being in 
   league with Jews and witches."

   It has persisted for centuries: "Moreover, whatever its effect
   on public lives, the change in public attitudes had a profound
   and lasting impact on European institutions and culture as a
   result of the permanent and official expression it achieved in
   thirteenth-century laws, literature, and theology, all of which
   continued to influence Western thought and social patterns long
   after the disappearance of the particular circumstances which
   produced them."

-- Translations of, and popular contemporary understandings of,
   biblical references to homosexuality are by no means firmly
   supported by good scholarship. Boswell is a historian and a
   linguist. He is quite familiar with, and frequently quotes at
   great length from, primary sources. Boswell writes, "In spite
   of misleading English translations which may imply the
   contrary, the word 'homosexual' does not occur in the Bible:
   no extant text or manuscript, Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, or Aramaic,
   contains such a word. In fact none of those languages ever
   contained a word corresponding to the English 'homosexual'...

   "None of the many Old Testament passages which refer to Sodom's
   wickedness suggests any homosexual offenses, and the rise of
   homosexual associations can be traced to social trends and 
   literature of a much later period."

   The story of the destruction of Sodom is an excellent example
   of contemporary and historical misinterpretation of Biblical
   stories. Boswell writes, "Since 1955 modern scholarship has
   increasingly favored interpretation (4) [that the city was
   destroyed for inhospitable treatment of visitors sent from the
   Lord], emphasizing that the sexual overtones to the story are
   minor, if present, and that the original moral impact of the
   passage had to do with hospitality. Briefly put, the thesis of
   this trend in scholarship is that Lot was violating the custom
   of Sodom (where he was himself not a citizen but only a
   'sojourner') by entertaining unknown guests within the city walls
   at night without obtaining the permission of the elders of the 
   city. When the men of Sodom gathered around to demand that the
   strangers be brought out to them, 'that they might know them,'
   they meant no more than to 'know' who they were, and the city
   was consequently destroyed not for sexual immorality but for the
   sin of inhospitality to strangers.

   "Numerous considerations lend this argument credibility. As
   Bailey pointed out, the Hebrew word 'to know' ([Hebrew characters
   omitted!]) is very rarely used in a sexual sense in the Bible
   (despite popular opinion to the contrary): in only 10 of 943
   occurences in the Old Testament does it have the sense of carnal
   knowledge. The passage on Sodom is the only place in the Old
   Testament where it is generally [that is, popularly] held to
   refer to homosexual relations.

   "Jesus himself apparently believed that Sodom was destroyed for
   the sin of inhospitality: 'Whosoever shall not receive you, nor
   hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake 
   off the dust of your feet. Verily I say unto you, it shall be no
   more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of
   judgment, than for that city.'

   "There are, moreover, numerous other references in the Old
   Testament to Sodom and its fate, and scholars have failed to
   accord this facet of the controversy the importance it deserves.
   Sodom is used as a symbol of evil in dozens of places, but not
   in a single instance is the sin of the Sodomites specified as
   homosexuality."

-- The words of Saint Paul, too, have similarly been misunderstood
   and mistranslated by translators all too willing to let the
   popular prejudices of their time affect their work. Boswell
   goes into these questions in detail, and there is even an
   appendix, "Lexicography and Saint Paul," which discusses this
   problem.

-- Boswell argues that religious belief -- Christian or other -- 
   is not the CAUSE of intolerance of gay people. He writes: "If
   religious strictures are used to justify oppression by people
   who regularly disregard precepts of equal gravity from the same
   moral code, or if prohibitions which restrain a disliked minority
   are upheld in their most literal sense as absolutely inviolable
   while comparable precepts affecting the majority are relaxed or
   reinterpreted, one must suspect something other than religious
   belief as the motivating cause of the oppression.

   "In the particular case at issue, the belief that the hostility
   of the Christian Scriptures to homosexuality caused Western society
   to turn against it should not require any elaborate refutation. The
   very same books which are thought to condemn homosexual acts condemn
   hypocrisy in the most strident terms, and on greater authority: and
   yet Western society did not create any social taboos against 
   hypocrisy, did not claim that hypocrites were 'unnatural,' did not
   segregate them into an oppressed minority, did not enact laws
   punishing their sins with castration or death. No Christian state,
   in fact, has passed laws against hypocrisy per se, despite its
   continual and explicit condemnation by Jesus and the church. In the
   very same list which has been claimed to exclude from the kingdom of
   heaven those guilty of homosexual practices, the greedy are also
   excluded. And yet no medieval states burned the greedy at the stake.
   Obviously some factors beyond biblical precedent were at work in
   late medieval states which licensed prostitutes but burned gay
   people."

-- Oppression of gay people is closely linked to oppression of other
   minorities. Boswell writes, "Most societies, for example, which
   freely tolerate religious diversity also accept sexual variation,
   and the fate of Jews and gay people has been almost identical
   throughout European history, from early Christian hostility to
   extermination in concentration camps."

   In many ways, life for gay people can be worse than for Jews in
   times when both are being oppressed. "... Jewish family life
   flourished as the main social outlet for a group cut off from the
   majority at many points in its history, imparting to individual
   Jews a sense not only of community in the present but of belonging
   to the long and hallowed traditions of those who went before.

   "Gay people for the most part are not born into gay families. They
   suffer oppression individually and alone, without benefit of advice
   or frequently even emotional support from relatives and friends....

   "...[G]ay people have been all but totally dependent on popular
   attitudes toward them for freedom, a sense of identity, and in many
   cases survival. The history of public reactions to homosexuality is
   thus in some measure a history of social tolerance generally."

                           -----------

It is quite chilling that Boswell declares that intolerance of gay
people has never been worse than it is this century. Anti-gay
propagandists seem to be succeeding in making gay people a major symbol
of immorality in this country today. These propagandists generally cite
religion as their authority. 

John Boswell's book, if widely read, could go a long way toward showing
that religious bigots are connecting not with the gentle roots of
Christianity but with the worst horrors of the late Middle Ages and the
Inquisition.

-- 
David Dalton 	ihnp4!gladys!david  -or-  ethos!gladys!david
____________	P.O. Box 256, Bethania, NC 27010