The New Testament and Homosexuality by Robin Scroggs (Fortress, 1983, 160 pp.)
by Dr. Ralph Blair
In his Preface, this New Testament scholar tells us he “consulted numerous commentaries on the relevant passages in the New Testament (there are only three of them) to see what the minister or lay person might learn” about the New Testament and homosexuality. As a seminary educator, he is concerned, as well, about the preparation of future pastors. “I was shocked”, he says, “to find that virtually none of [the commentaries] offered any adequate information. … They have done a great disservice to us, since they have let us remain in ignorance about what the New Testament is against, and thus have made it impossible for us to know how the Bible may or may not be properly used in today’s discussions” of homosexuality. Scroggs reminds us that, “it is the most serious violation of any scholarly canon to assume without inspection that what an ancient author is opposed to is the same phenomenon as exists in our own time”. Nonetheless, assuming without inspection is the unfortunate practice of most ministers in this matter. But in dealing with the Bible and homosexuality, ministers are here not simply in danger of making a scholar’s error. They can easily make a pastor’s error. And such a misapplication of the biblical text can have tragic repercussions in the everyday lives of millions of gay people and their families who are already suffering from the ecclesiastical mistakes of the past.
Reviewing the approaches to homosexuality taken by the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church and the Untied Presbyt4erian Church, Scroggs gives an overview of several different ways of treating the Bible vis a vis issues of homosexuality. He moves into considerable detail in examining the cultural background for the relevant biblical passages, taking a close look at the ideal of male beauty in the Greco-Roman world, ancient arguments for and against pederasty, Palestinian and Hellenistic Judaism, and concerns in the early New Testament church. In so doing, he uncovers important contexts which are indispensable to understanding the biblical statements. He notes the significance of a male-oriented civilization in which “the apposite intellectual and, indeed, affective partner to a male was another male” but adds that the ancient ideal of male beauty was the youth whose “bodily form [was] most like that of a female”. It should be observed here that this is in stark contrast to modern homosexuality in which a gay man prizes masculinity in his partner (however idiosyncratically he may see it), and not femininity or effeminacy. Today’s gay phenomenon does not at all reflect the ancient phenomenon.
Scroggs extensively investigates the inequalities of slave prostitution and the entrepreneurial “effeminate call-boy” system. He infers that what Paul “knew” about such Gentile pederasty probably originated from Jewish rumor and he surmises that “Paul’s basic attitude toward pederasty could have been seriously influenced by passing a few coiffured and perfumed call-boys in the marketplace”. That “the male homosexuality Paul knew about and opposed had to have been one or more forms of pederasty [because] pederasty was the only model in existence in the world of this time” is at the nub of Scroggs argument. “It can hardly be accidental that the three passages [on alleged homosexuality] are addressed to churches located in the Greco-Roman world [Corinth and Rome] where pederasty was the norm for homosexual relationships”. Speaking of the vice lists in I Corinthians 5:10; 5:11 and 6:9f, he says that Paul built “toward a rhetorical climax …using traditional items, with no particular item of special significance to him”. In fact, Scroggs observes: “No single New Testament author considers [homosexual behavior] important enough to write his own sentence about it! The language”, Scroggs notes, “comes entirely from already established conventions in both Greek and Jewish cultures”. In listing, for example, the malakoi and arsenokoitai (this latter term “has no recoverable history prior to Paul’s use of it”), he suggests the Apostle means both the “effeminate call-boys” and their adult customers. In Romans 1, Paul employs but an illustration and it’s based on pederastic prostitution for, as he says yet again, “there was no other form of male homosexuality in the Greco-Roman world which could come to mind”.
Arguing that, “what the New Testament was against was the image of homosexuality as pederasty and primarily here its most sordid and dehumanizing dimensions”, Scroggs eloquently concludes his research by stating: “Biblical judgments against homosexuality are not relevant to today’s debate … not because the Bible is not authoritative, but simply because it does not address the issues involved”. This is the crux of the whole discussion, though antigay evangelicals have not yet learned it.
Scroggs’ solid study constitutes one of the few fine resource books on the question of just what the New Testament does and does not say about homosexuality. He confirms the paucity of material on ancient lesbianism in a brief appendix. He adds a less than helpful appendix on psychoanalytic reflections. The book contains handy indexes to the biblical, post-biblical Judaic, classical and patristic references as well as a short general index that all make this excellent volume an even more efficient tool in the current controversy.