True, leviticus is written for the priests running the temple. But how about Romans, 1 Corinthians, 1 and 2 Timothy, etc? They are just letters, written by Paul (a regular guy used by God) written to be read aloud in churches (because that is how the information was spread in those days) and who were the people in the churches listening? Just average people. So while your refute of my case weakly holds up for the verse from Leviticus, it does not for the verses I gave you from Paul's letters.
Another point......Leviticus, and all the OT law, was written to show people their need for a Savior. It was written to be impossible to follow perfectly, and then to give guidelines on how to perform the sacrifices that were done in the time before Jesus came. The whole OT pointed ahead, to a coming Savior. The NT is full of practical information for the average joe. That is why Christ said that he came to fulfill the law, to be the perfect sacrifice once and for all. While the law contains good moral information, like the ten commandments (I'm sure there is no dispute that the ten commandments are good), it's not meant to be followed to the letter anymore because Christ came. Does that mean we can willfully sin? No. That's dealt with in Romans 6-9. The purpose of the OT Law was to show people that they could not please God on their own. So first God gave them a sacrificial system to cleans themselves of sin. Then He sent Jesus to be our sacrifice.
I wonder; if you doubt the Bible so much, why do you still follow Christ? I'm not doubting your faith, I just wonder why you follow something you think is so untrustworthy.
Although we can never, this side of the veil, be certain, I can accept that Paul probably coined the term "
arsenokoitai" (1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy) from the LXX translation of Leviticus 20:13. But then we have to ask why --Why didn't he just use an existing Greek word?
I suspect that it was because no Greek word meant exactly what he wanted he wanted to convey. There was something in the original commands in Leviticus that would be lost in translation. Whether it was the implication of rape, the hint of idolatry, or the fact that it was part of a Law that was intended for the Jewish people, to set them apart from the nations, Paul needed to be clear that it was Levitical "man-lyers" to which he was referring.
As far as Romans goes, we have, most of us, lost the key to understanding Paul's point because of baggage. The example that Paul borrows in Romans 1:26-27 came with baggage that the Romans would have understood. Paul altered the language of the original example, even to the point of breaking up a parallel construction that clearly contrasted "bad" homo-sex to "good" hetero-sex, in order to make it clear what was baggage and what was essential to the example. But let me back up and start from the beginning.
Romans 1 cannot be separated from Romans 2. The entire section 1:18-32 is a set-up for the claim made in 2:1-3 (
"Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself; for thou that judgest doest the same things. Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself; for thou that judgest doest the same things. And thinkest thou this, O man, that judgest them which do such things, and doest the same, that thou shalt escape the judgment of God?") and expanded upon in the rest of the chapter, indeed, even in the rest of the letter. [1 Corinthians 6:9-11ff is a mini version of this same set-up/let-down/godspell
* technique.](
*I used the archaic spelling of gospel to indicate that I am not talking about the biography recorded in the four Gospels, but the "good news" of salvation by grace through Christ that is their message.)
Most of the set-up is an account of the sins of the world as practiced by the
goyim that his Jewish-born readers/listeners would have found very familiar. Many contemporary works read very similarly (but they simply condemn the "nations" without turning the lesson back on the righteous, as Paul does. One easily obtainable example of such literature of the Hellenized Jews is found in the
Book of the Wisdom of Solomon in the Apocrypha (which can be searched online on
the Unbound Bible site. Compare chapter 14 to Romans 1:18-32.
For the Gentile-born, Paul added a famous example of the sin of excess, a sin whose root cause was seen as allowing Passion to overcome Reason. The first clue that this is a Greek example is the use of the phrase "
para physis," "against (or "contrary to") nature." This is Greek concept, not a Jewish one, and does not appear anywhere in the Hebrew scriptures. By the first century, the phrase had been much watered down and simply meant "unexpectedly" or occassionally "uncharacteristically." That ("unexpectedly") is the way Paul uses it later in the letter when he speaks of God grafting both wild and original branches into the tree (Romans 11:24 "
For if thou wert cut out of the olive tree which is wild by nature, and wert graffed [grafted]
contrary to nature into a good olive tree: how much more shall these, which be the natural branches, be graffed [grafted]
into their own olive tree?")
But, originally, the phrase "
para physis" was a philosophical term, basically equivalent of naming something a sin. The Greeks thought that the better nature of man was to strive to do the Reasonable thing at all times, and that to allow Passion to over-ride Reason was to go against that better nature.
The example Paul borrows originally comes from
Laws, one of Plato's
Dialogues. Plato's protagonist (for once not identified as Socrates) is explaining that a lawmaker must not only be concerned with defining wrongful actions and their punishments, but also with educating his people on good behavior, especially on avoiding excess. Most of his examples in this section concern drinking, drunkenness, and what we now call alcoholism and addiction, but for his first example, he chose sex, and could not help but tweak the example to get in a little "dig" at his host by making the excessive behavior same-sex.
NOTE: I'm spending more time on this response than I had anticipated. I have to sign off now for real-life reasons. I will continue this tonight.
