Our Story Too: Lesbians and gay men in the Bible by Nancy L. Wilson (Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, 1992, 10 pp.)
by Dr. Ralph Blair
It’s sad but true, as Wilson says, “Most modern gay men and lesbians are either afraid of the Bible or unfamiliar with its content, thinking that the Bible has only bad news for them.” Unfortunately, her overreaching effort to make the case for biblical good news for lesbians and gay men is delusional and needlessly vulnerable.
As a minister in the predominantly gay/lesbian Metropolitan Community Churches, Wilson says it’s “not enough” to see that “the Bible does not condemn homosexuality”. She says: “It is time to move beyond” that and, by “a bold, proactive reading of the Bible”, to find “lesbians and gay men in the Bible” and “boldly liberate” them. But the boldness with which she rummages through an empty closet is not matched by boldness to admit that, after the search, the closet is as empty as it ever was. Since her approach is to “just assume that lesbians and gay people were always in the Bible … everywhere … even when silent”, it’s not at all surprising that she finds the “le4sbians and gay men” she’s looking for.
Her claim is that the Bible contains both “incontrovertible” stories that are “compellingly gay and lesbian” as well as material that is “curiously suggestive of same-sex relationships”. But what evidence does she offer? She fabricates a case with statements of dubious to implausible insinuation, tabloid overstatement as substitute for sound exegesis, and facile misapplication of terms and concepts.
Notions that would simply sound too far-fetched as claims are seductively stated as questions. For example: “Did Ruth and Naomi have a lesbian relationship?” “What if Mary and Martha were not sisters but called each other ‘sister’ as did [Wilson merely assumes] most lesbian couples?” “What drew Jesus to [Lazarus] a bachelor brother living with two spinster sisters?” (But, weren’t they a lesbian couple?) “Was Lydia a lesbian?” Noting that Lydia was a seller of purple – a color now linked to the modern gay/lesbian liberation movement (really more a lavender) – Wilson fantasizes: “Does the color purple also have gay and lesbian connotations in the Bible?” Was Pauol’s “tireless missionary zeal partly a way to suppress his [merely assumed] homosexuality?” At times she leaves this querist format in favor of direct assertions. For example, she sees lesbianism in “a lifelong passionate [?!] and committed relationship” between Ruth and Naomi even though the only clearly sexual relationship in the text is between Ruth and Boaz. She styles Ruth and Naomi and David and Jonathan as “two prominent same-sex couples [?!] in the Bible” and insists that “Jonathan was the love of David’s life”. But David’s tribute to his friendship with Jonathan as “more wonderful than the love of women” is textual evidence that their fraternal friendship stood in contrast to sexual experience. Wilson embellishes Paul’s “stormy relational life [?!] … centered around men”. She projects homosexuality into the fact that “John’s gospel refers no less than eight times to the ‘one whom Jesus loved’, also called the ‘beloved disciple’”.
Overlooking the diversity among gay men and lesbians, Wilson homogenizes them into “the gay and lesbian community”, a “nation” or “people” that she reads into Acts 10. She reads homosexuality into biblical references to “eunuchs”, not all of who – as she does grant – were sexually anomalous. She claims that the “comment by Jesus” about those who were born eunuchs “applies to gays and lesbians”, even though the discourse revolved around the disciples’ difficulty with Jesus’ prohibition against remarriage and the text itself indicates that the teaching is enigmatic. Her interpretation is anachronistic.
Wilson alleges that what she presents is “consistent with what historians and anthropologists know about sexuality during Biblical times”. But it is not. The peer relationships Wilson calls “couples” and reads into the Bible from her own modern cultural assumptions have nothing in common with the known parameters of same-sex behavior in the ancient world’s sexually aggressive abuse of slaves and enemies, cultic or commercial prostitution, or the pederasty that ended when the beloved boy reached the age of 17 with the appearance of his facial hair and/or the bond of matrimony. Wilson shows no awareness of the distinctively modern construction of the idea of psychological “sexuality” (both heterosexuality and homosexuality) as discussed by scholars such as Foucault, Halperin, Winkler, Zeitlia, Sergent, Furnish, Woudstra and others.
Wilson wants the Bible to be “our story too”! – something that “can empower lesbians and gay men to joyfully embrace” it. The bible is already “our story too”. But not on the basis of our present culturally defined and experienced sexuality foisted into ancient times and texts. Rather, the Bible is “our story too” because it is God’s good news to “whosoever” aliens of whatever experience and to the estranged sinners we all are, saved only by God’s grace. Instead of searching for modern-day gay men and lesbians in the Bible, why not find the Bible autobiographical in terms of human sin and God’s grace in all times and places? The Ethiopian eunuch was not empowered by his own vainglorious eunuchness – whatever that was – but by the good news of Jesus.