Written by Robert A.J. Gagnon |
Wednesday, August 31, 2022
That Israel’s firm view of a male-female foundation for sexual ethics and sexual purity was intended to be distinctive within the broader cultural environment of the ancient Near East is precisely what the Holiness Code affirms. Israel must not follow the practices of the Canaanites and the Egyptians (Lev 18:2-5, 24-30; 20:22-26). This theme is consistent with Israel’s longstanding proscription of worship of other gods and of images of God (Exod 20:2-7, Deut 5:7-11), which marks Israel off from the surrounding culture as “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exod 19:6).

From the op-ed pages of the New York Times comes “The Secret History of Leviticus,” an improbable essay by Idan Dershowitz. A scholar of the Hebrew Bible and a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, Dershowitz has written for the Times a popular version of the academic argument he published recently in the journal Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel.
The Book of Leviticus contains two prohibitions against homosexual acts, the first of which (18:22) states: “You shall not lie with a male as though lying with a woman; it is an abomination.” According to Dershowitz, “before Leviticus was composed, outright prohibitions against homosexual sex … were practically unheard-of in the ancient world.” But he proposes that “an earlier version of the laws in Leviticus 18 permitted sex between men,” albeit tacitly. Supposedly, the laws were revised by a later editor so as to include the prohibition, and to “obscure any implication that same-sex relations had once been permissible.”
Dershowitz begins with “the core of Leviticus 18,” its incest laws. He points out two incest laws that are not presented in “a straightforward manner.” These are the two laws against homosexual incest: one against father-son incest (18:7), the other against uncle-nephew incest (18:14).
The nakedness of your father and the nakedness of your mother you shall not uncover: She is your mother. You shall not uncover her nakedness.
The nakedness of your father’s brother you shall not uncover. You shall not approach his wife. She is your aunt.
Dershowitz says that each of these laws comprises two parts: the law proper (which I have put in italics) and the explanatory note, or “gloss.” In the case of the other incest laws (all of which address heterosexual incest), the relation between law and gloss is straightforward and emphatic. For instance, the law against sex with one’s daughter-in-law is glossed, “she is your son’s wife.” But in the two cases above, the gloss transforms the law from a law against homosexual incest (with one’s father or uncle) to a law against heterosexual incest (with one’s mother or aunt). Dershowitz calls these glosses “strong evidence of editorial intervention.”
He speculates that these glosses were added by an editor, perhaps “more than a century” after the composition of the oldest parts of Leviticus, to bring all the incest laws into conformity with the prohibition against homosexual acts (which Dershowitz presumes was a comparatively recent addition). With these glosses, all of the incest laws became laws against heterosexual incest. How do such revisions accord with a turn against homosexual acts? According to Dershowitz, the editor feared the principle, “The exception proves the rule.” Dershowitz reasons: “A law declaring that homosexual incest is prohibited could reasonably be taken to indicate that non-incestuous homosexual intercourse is permitted.” Once the prohibition against male same-sex intercourse was added, “it became expedient to bring the earlier material up-to-date by doing away with two now-superfluous injunctions against homosexual incest—injunctions that made sense when sex between men was otherwise allowed.” Thus, Dershowitz infers an earlier version of Leviticus 18, according to which homosexual acts were permissible.
For Jews and Christians who treat the Bible as Scripture, the speculations of Dershowitz should have little relevance. What counts as authoritative is what made it into the canon, not what didn’t. In any case, I am unconvinced by Dershowitz’s arguments. Here’s why:
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Written by Robert A. J. Gagnon |
Tuesday, August 30, 2022
Jesus reached out to sexual sinners because they, like the exploitative tax collectors, were most in need of being called to repentance, so that they might yet inherit the very Kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed. Jesus both intensified God’s ethical demand and reached out in love to the biggest violators of that demand.

Rachel Held Evans is once again arguing against “The False Gospel of Gender Binaries.” Regrettably, she does little more than provide us with a reminder of a textbook example of eisegesis (reading “into” the biblical text one’s own ideology) rather than exegesis (reading “out of” Scripture with attentiveness to historical and literary context, even if it conflicts with one’s own personal views). To suggest that Jesus cared little for gender binaries is to distort badly the portrait of Jesus that we find in the Gospels, or for that matter any credible reconstruction of the “historical Jesus” in his first-century Palestinian Jewish context.
Some background: Rachel Held Evans has made a career out of undermining fidelity to the teachings of Scripture by ridiculing simplistic or non-existent notions of biblical interpretation (hermeneutics), while practicing a flawed hermeneutic of her own that often seems to be little more than an extension of her own ideology. After starting in the evangelical tradition, she abandoned that tradition to embrace a non-orthodox sexual ethic and is now a member of the Episcopal Church.
She believes that all who do not agree with her promotion of homosexuality and transgenderism—an overwhelming “cloud of witnesses” from the beginnings of God’s people to the present day—have been proclaiming a “false gospel.” That depends on whether the Gospel is determined by her or by Christ.
In Mark 10 (par. Matt 19) Jesus predicated a duality of number for sexual unions (what we call monogamy; a strict monogamy I might add) on the deliberate divine design of the duality of complementary sexes. Binary sexuality for Jesus, the singular fact that God created us (as part of an intentional Divine Design) as “male and female,” was the foundation for rejecting both polygamy and a revolving door of divorce-and-remarriage for any cause.
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Written by Robert A. J. Gagnon |
Friday, August 26, 2022
Although Yarhouse refers obliquely to wise counsel from church leaders, he allows the offender to call the shots. Paul rather recommends temporary remedial discipline for the persistently impenitent in order to minimize the harm done both to the offender and to the church (vv. 4-5, 9-13). The church’s complicity in sexual delusion benefits no one, least of all the offender. How far should Christians following Yarhouse’s suggestions go?

In June, Christianity Today published an article by Mark Yarhouse, a professor of psychology at Regent University in Virginia, on “gender dysphoria.” Gender dysphoria is the APA’s current description of the condition whereby someone perceives one’s “gender” to be other than one’s birth or biological sex. The previous designation in the APA’s diagnostic manual (and in my view still preferable) is “gender identity disorder” (GID).
Yarhouse contends:
1. Church members should address a man who thinks he is a woman by her chosen female name and use feminine pronouns, and a woman who thinks she is a man by her chosen male name and use masculine pronouns.
2. The church should not “treat as synonymous management of gender dysphoria and faithfulness” to Christ. The church should allow those with transgender desires “to identify with aspects of the opposite sex, as a way to manage extreme discomfort.”
3. For the most part, the church should give up on the “culture war” battle on this and other issues. “The church is called to rise above [culture] wars and present a witness to redemption.”
Yarhouse refers to three different lenses for interpreting the issue: Integrity (Yarhouse cites me as a proponent; go here for an online discussion), Disability, and Diversity (full affirmation of transgenderism). Although Yarhouse states that he believes “there are strengths in all three lenses,” he clearly operates with a descending scale with Disability at the top and Diversity at the bottom: “Because I am a psychologist…, I see value in a disability lens.”
Yarhouse doesn’t dump the Integrity lens entirely. “Even as Christians affirm the disability lens, we should also let the integrity lens inform our pastoral care.” He rather sees the disability lens as embracing the Integrity lens but going beyond it and even correcting it, at least at two points. First, “the disability lens also makes room for supportive care and interventions that allow for cross-gender identification in a way the integrity lens does not” (it is this allowance that is the main problem in my view). Second, it “rejects the teaching that gender identity conflicts are the result of willful disobedience or sinful choice.”
This last claim is curious. I for one do not view the mere experience of gender dysphoria as necessarily resulting from active efforts to rebel against God. My approach is not far from Yarhouse on this score: “A person may have choices to make in response to the condition, and those choices have moral and ethical dimensions. But the person is not culpable for having the condition as such.” Where I would qualify Yarhouse is in noting a more complex interplay of nature, nurture, environment, and choices. Incremental choices made in response to impulses may strengthen the same impulses.
Another problem with his “Disability” view is that for the most part people don’t associate a disability with sinful conduct. When people think of disabilities they typically think of such things as physical impairments of mobility, hearing, or sight; intellectual disability or other learning impairments; or health impairments like asthma, epilepsy, or attention deficit disorder. Such non-moral disabilities can be accommodated in all sorts of ways without violating any divine standards.
Even depression and anxiety (cited as parallels to gender dysphoria by Yarhouse) are not as directly or severely related to the desire to sin as a desire to pursue a gender identity at odds with one’s biological sex.
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Written by Robert A. J. Gagnon |
Thursday, January 6, 2022
There is absolutely no doubt, based on extant evidence, that the term arsenokoitai in 1 Cor 6:9 is correctly translated as “men lying with a male.” If any updating of the NRSV were to be done on 1 Cor 6:9, it should have been done in the direction of translating arsenokoitai as “men lying with a male.” The previous NRSV translation of “sodomites” was not the best translation because “Sodom” is not part of the stem of this Greek noun…. What the NRSVue translators have done is to conform the biblical witness to their own ideological biases, biases that mitigate against the overwhelming evidence from morphology and historical context.

The NRSV has been updated (NRSVue) to make a number of changes. The most noteworthy has been to “gaywash” and eliminate clear reference to homosexual practice in the offender list in 1 Corinthians 6:9. Previously the NRSV translated as among the serial and unrepentant behaviors that could get even self-professed believers excluded from the Kingdom of God “male prostitutes” (the Greek word is malakoi) and “sodomites” (the Greek word is arsenokoitai). They have now changed “sodomites” to the nebulous “men who engage in illicit sex,” which does not indicate to English readers the connection to homosexual practice provided by the Greek word, contrary to both morphology and context. A textual note added by the NRSVue committee claims that the term is unclear. It isn’t.
The word literally means “men lying with (i.e., having sexual intercourse with) a male.” It is a specifically Jewish and Christian term formed from the Greek (Septuagint) translation of Hebrew Levitical prohibitions of man-male intercourse in Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13.
These Levitical texts prohibit absolutely (no exceptions) a man from lying (verb koimaomai) with a male (arsen) as though lying sexually (abstract noun koite) with a woman.* All future uses of the term arsenokoitai in Christian literature that have sufficient context to make a determination involve men lying with a male.
The parallel Semitic expression mishkav zakur (“lying with a male”) was used in the Jewish Talmud to forbid a man from having sexual intercourse with a male of any age (whether adult or minor). Both Josephus and Philo, two first century C.E. Jews, make clear from their discussion of homosexual practice that they understand the Levitical prohibitions as precluding any male same-sex relationships whatsoever.
The term or its cognates does not appear in any non-Jewish, non-Christian text prior to the sixth century A.D. This way of talking about male homosexuality is a distinctly Jewish and Christian formulation. It was undoubtedly used as a way of distinguishing their absolute opposition to homosexual practice, rooted in the Torah of Moses, from more accepting views in the Greco-Roman milieu. (c) The appearance of arsenokoitai in 1 Tim 1:10 makes the link to the Mosaic law explicit, since the list of vices of which arsenokoitai is a part are said to be derived from “the law” (1:9). While it is true that the meaning of a compound word does not necessarily add up to the sum of its parts, in this instance it clearly does.
Paul’s own remarks in Romans 1:24-27 also make clear that any “male with male” sexual contact is expressly forbidden as “contrary to nature” and “shamelessness.” Both Church Fathers and developing rabbinic literature reject even semi-official marriages between males and between females as acts that are contrary to nature even when conducted in the context of love and commitment.
There is absolutely no doubt, based on extant evidence, that the term arsenokoitai in 1 Cor 6:9 is correctly translated as “men lying with a male.” If any updating of the NRSV were to be done on 1 Cor 6:9, it should have been done in the direction of translating arsenokoitai as “men lying with a male.” The previous NRSV translation of “sodomites” was not the best translation because “Sodom” is not part of the stem of this Greek noun.
As for the Greek term malakoi, which literally means “soft men” and which NRSV continues to translate as “male prostitutes,” this translation should have been changed to eliminate any restriction to prostitution and any inference that heterosexual relations might be in view. It is more accurately rendered as “males who feminize themselves to attract male sex partners” or even as “male-to-female transgenders.”
What the NRSVue translators have done is to conform the biblical witness to their own ideological biases, biases that mitigate against the overwhelming evidence from morphology and historical context.
*For a more technical discussion of the morphology of arsenokoitai: The compound Greek word arsenokoitai (arsen-o-koi-tai; plural of singular arsenokoitēs) is formed from the Greek words for “lying” (verb keimai; stem kei- adjusted to koi- before the “t” or letter tau) and “male” (arsēn). The word is a neologism created from terms used in the Greek Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Levitical prohibitions of men “lying with a male” (18:22; 20:13). Note that the word for “lying” in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Levitical prohibitions is the noun koitē, also meaning “bed,” which is formed from the verb keimai. The masculine –tēs suffix of the sg. noun arsenokoitēs denotes continuing agency or occupation, roughly equivalent to English -er attached to a noun; hence, “(male) liers with a male.
Robert A. J. Gagnon is Professor of Theology at Houston Baptist University. Used with permission.