Friday, November 20, 2015

Jesus and same-sex relations

THELOGY IN THE RAW: Jesus Was a Jew: Understanding Jesus and Same-Sex Marriages in His 1st Century Jewish (Not Our 21st Century Western) Context.

This is an ETS paper that was presented on Wednesday. It indicates that same-sex relations were condemned without exception in Second Temple Judaism whenever it was (rarely) mentioned, and as far as I can recall (never having thoroughly checked), this sounds right. (As often happens with these things, I am not certain that all the texts cited in this paper are actually Jewish.) There is nothing in the texts about Jesus to indicate he might have thought otherwise. Beyond this, I have very serious reservations about trying to figure out what Jesus might have thought about any modern hot-button issue. The texts give us very little information about the historical Jesus and there remains considerable debate even about what his major teachings and actions were, so we're not likely to get very far on what he thought about things that the texts don't even mention.