“The Word ‘Homosexuality’ Isn’t In The Bible!” And Related Nonsense (December 11, 2005)

More from my son’s letter from college:

"The professor challenged the belief that the Bible condemns homosexuality, saying that that term as we understand it did not even exist in ancient times, and that, though the Greek in the New Testament is unclear and may be referring to male prostitution, it cannot be understood to be referring to the sort of committed,
long-term relationships homosexuals have today. How would you address this?"

I wrote:

1) To say that the term "homosexuality" did not exist in ancient times is a stunningly irrelevant point, even if, for argument's sake, we grant that the word did not exist. So what if Hebrew had no word that precisely parallels our word "homosexuality"? When other words combine to describe (and condemn) homosexual acts, the presence or absence of any particular word is moot. The professor's argument here is a deceptive piece of psycholinguistic sleight-of-hand.

An example may help. Consider the gory details of what Ehud did to Eglon in Judges 3:20-22: "Ehud...drew the sword...and plunged it into the king's belly. Even the handle sank in after the blade, and the fat closed over it." Question: did Ehud stab Eglon? Yes. Did Ehud assassinate Eglon? Yes. Did Ehud disembowel Eglon? You could say he did. But the text never mentions the words "stab", "assassinate", or "disembowel". Maybe Hebrew didn't even have these words. But who cares? Does that mean that the English words stab, assassinate and disembowel do not accurately describe what happened? Of course they do. We've always taken for granted that languages carve the same reality into the distinct semantic shapes of their own particular words. This is so self-evident it hardly qualifies as an insight. But it is a principle that needs to be made explicit whenever a professor (or anyone else) trots out that old stinker of an argument: "They had no word for!" whatever might be the issue at hand.

The texts in Leviticus say that a man should not lie with a man as he would with a woman. I'll be the first to concede that there is no word in that last sentence that even remotely matches the English word "homosexuality." But so what? Only a mentally blind partisan with an ax to grind could fail to find homosexual behavior in words as plain as those.

2) The professor almost has a point when he says "the Greek in the New Testament is unclear and may be referring to male prostitution." He is referring to the difficult Greek of 1 Corinthians 6:9, which says that among those who will not inherit the kingdom of God are (NIV) "male prostitutes" (Greek malakoi) and "homosexual offenders" (Greek arsenokoitai). The first word can literally mean "soft" (and thus metaphorically referred to effeminacy) and almost certainly indicated a male prostitute - a man paid to play the role of a woman. The second word, literally men-bedders, appears in known Greek literature for the first time right here in 1st Corinthians. It has no prior history and for all we know Paul coined the term. What is certain is that both terms refer to homosexual behavior. What is uncertain is whether that behavior here is to be understood mainly in the context of prostitution.

But again, the point is moot for the purposes of the professor's argument. In Romans 1:26-27, the same Paul writes, "Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men..." There is no hint of prostitution here. What is being condemned are simply male-to-male and female-to-female sexual relations. The possibility that only male prostitution is explicitly condemned in 1st Corinthians 6 does not mean that mere homosexual contact is not condemned elsewhere.

3) When the professor says that biblical prohibitions of homosexual behavior "cannot be understood to be referring to the sort of committed, long-term relationships homosexuals have today," his brain is just out to lunch. The matter is really pretty simple. The Bible, Old Testament and New, forbids same-sex sexual contact. To respond that it says nothing about homosexual conduct performed in the context of long-term committed relationships is just desperate pleading. It is like John Dillinger saying, "OK, maybe the Bible condemns stealing, but it never says that there is anything wrong with my long-term, vocational commitment to robbing banks. Where exactly does the Bible say that it is wrong to rob banks for a living? The Bible never envisioned my kind of situation - in fact, the word 'bank' did not even exist in Hebrew!"

Ben, be on your guard against sleight-of-hand arguments. It's amazing what kind of nonsense people can pull out of their sleeves when they are desperate to drum up support for untenable positions. It would be so much more honest of the professor - and those who believe as he does - to say simply, "Yes, the Bible unambiguously condemns homosexual behavior, but I think the Bible is wrong." Fair enough. That's were we disagree. But all this pretending that the Bible doesn't say what it clearly does just makes it difficult to have a frank discussion where honest differences can be aired.