“What Jesus Said About Homosexuality” by Timm Peterson, WAVES, March 1991 reprinted in The Voice of Integrity, Summer 1991
by Dr. Ralph Blair
Several years ago I drew up a whimsical little tract entitled What Jesus Christ Said About Homosexuality. The inside of the tract was blank. On the back page it read: “That’s right. He said absolutely nothing about it.” I got the idea from a tract I remember seeing as a child. It was What You Must Do to Go to Hell. True to the graceless theology of its publishers, the inside of the tract was blank.
Peterson, who calls himself “a Feminist-Liberation Theologian” and is a minister in the United Church of Christ, has now written a rebuttal to my little tract. It’s in the newsletter of the United Church Coalition for Lesbian/Gay Concerns and it’s been reprinted in an organ of the caucus of gay/lesbians Episcopalians.
He begins by saying: “One of my pet peeves has been the notion that in the Bible Jesus said nothing whatsoever about homosexuality”. He then refers to “the brochure of the Evangelicals Concerned and [erroneously, though it has been reprinted often and by many groups] the Universal Fellowship of the Metropolitan Community Church”. Peterson says he “never did understand the ‘good news’ about this pamphlet”. The “good news”, such as it is, is simply this: Jesus never mentioned what many fundamentalists think is the “worst sin”. In fact, as I have pointed out in my later tract, The Bible is an Empty Closet: “There are no homosexuals in the Bible. Ruth and Naomi were no lesbians. David and Jonathan weren’t gay. Neither were Jesus and John, the men of Sodom, cult prostitutes, slave boys and their masters, nor call boys and their customers”. After presenting the comments of the best biblical scholars on so-called “homosexuality” in the Bible, I quote Helmut Thielicke’s statement that questions about homosexuality as we see it today are, “for purely historical reasons … alien” to the Bible.
But now Peterson claims he has “discovered” a statement by Jesus indicating “that he supported [what Peterson claims was] the controversial pro-lesbian/gay Roman law [for] homosexual marriages”. Peterson, however, offers no explicit documentation for his “discovery”. He claims Jesus’ statement recorded at Matthew 5:22b as his prooftext. The New International version translates it: “Again, anyone who says to his brother, ‘Raca’, is answerable to the Sanhedrin”. According to Peterson’s anachronistic reasoning, “raca may very well mean ‘faggot’ in Aramaic, a street-language term that was pointedly anti-lesbian/gay in that culture”. But his exposition is careless. For example, on raca, he says that “the translation ‘fool’ made no sense to me”. But “fool” is the usual English rendering for the next term (moros) in Jesus’ threefold antithesis, not raca – which usually isn’t translated. And he claims that a Roman law protecting “holy unions [sic]” for “military soldiers [sic]” somehow protected “lesbian/gay couples of roman citizenship [sic]”. Lesbian legionaries? His conclusion that “universal salvation extended to lesbians and gays” is redundant. He writes: “Jesus said [sic] lesbians, gays, heterosexuals and celibates are included … as we [sic] are”. Who, by contrast to this list, are “we”?
Although raca is a New Testament hapax legomenon (appearing only here and not again imported into extant Greek literature), there are rabbinic instances of a deprecatory expression in Aramaic, of which this Greek term is a transliteration. On that basis, biblical scholars say that the term probably means “empty headed” (Argyle, deDietrich, Filson, Gundry), “hollow head” (Luz), “blockhead” (Jeremias), “imbecile” (Hill) “brainless idiot” (Barclay), “idiot” (Guelich). According to the fourth century Syrian church father John Chrysostom, the term was used as a disrespectful expression towards one’s slaves: “you there” or “Hey, you!”. It is, as Buare says, “obviously an insult”, if a relatively harmless one at that. But Beare notes that, in the final analysis, “the meaning of ‘Raca’ is not certain”. Argyle agrees and the editors of the New Revised Standard Version call it “an obscure term of abuse” and elect to render the text: “if you insult a brother or sister”. Barclay puts it well when he says that it’s “an almost untranslatable word, because it describes a tone of voice more than anything else. Its whole accent is the accent of contempt”.
As such, what Jesus says here does apply to issues of homosexuality today, not because raca is forced to mean “faggot” but because raca was an invective used to depersonalize and rub out faces. Instead of name-calling, the Good Shepherd calls by name. When those who claim to follow Jesus refuse to follow him in equating disrespect with murder and refuse to see the links between homophobic hatred, heterosexist self-righteousness, fag jokes, antigay rights crusades, gay/lesbian bashing, and complicity in gay teen suicide, they fail to hear Jesus’ clear word on homosexuality.
Nothing good is gained when Christians on the Right project “homosexuals” into an unfamiliar inkblot of a word in I Corinthians 6:9 or when Christians on the Left project “faggots” into an unfamiliar inkblot in Matthew 5:22. Instead, aren’t we to take seriously Jesus’ sobering irony in these Sermon on the Mount Antitheses? As Guelich explains: “Jesus was seeking to penetrate the casuistry of his day by the deliberate use of irony in 5:22 … to get at the underlying relationship between individuals. … Jesus ultimately demands a relationship … in which there is no alienation”. Doesn’t that apply today between homosexual and heterosexual Christians?