Adam and Steve (what the Bible says about homosexuality)

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Daniel McClellan (0:31)

In 1 Corinthians and in Thessalonians, we have this idea, it's better to be celibate, but if you can't hack celibacy, go ahead and get married. However, sex within marriage should be without passion, because that's for the dirty, dirty Gentiles.

And it should be basically prophylactic. You only have enough sex to keep a lid on sexual desire. Not to say you must keep it at a level zero at all times, but to say whenever it starts bubbling up, you don't want it to boil over. And so sex is really prophylactic within Paul's sexual ethic, but he would prefer people just didn't have it.

Daniel Beecher (1:11)

Yeah, consider me team dirty, dirty Gentile on that one, but that's just me.

Daniel McClellan (1:20)

Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Daniel Beecher (1:22)

And I'm Dan Beecher.

Daniel McClellan (1:24)

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we try to increase public access to the scholarly study of the Bible and religion and combat misinformation about the Bible and religion. How are you today, Dan?

Daniel Beecher (1:38)

I'm doing great. I'm just ready to combat some misinformation or expose people to scholarship. You never know what's going to happen here.

Daniel McClellan (1:49)

Little from column A, little from column B. We're going to get there.

Daniel Beecher (1:52)

Yeah, exactly. And this week, we're having some fun. We're only doing one segment because it's an important issue.

Daniel McClellan (2:01)

It's a complex issue.

Daniel Beecher (2:03)

It's a difficult one, and we're going to dive into it head first, are we not?

Daniel McClellan (2:10)

We are.

Daniel Beecher (2:11)

All right, so, Dan.

Daniel McClellan (2:13)

Dan.

Daniel Beecher (2:13)

What are we talking about?

Daniel McClellan (2:15)

I think today we're going to be talking about homosexuality in the Bible.

Daniel Beecher (2:20)

Uh-oh. Dun, dun, dun.

Daniel McClellan (2:22)

Yeah, something that comes up.

Daniel Beecher (2:23)

Brace yourselves.

Daniel McClellan (2:24)

Comes up all the time.

Yeah. My family and I watched Airplane last night.

I was just stumbling around HBO Max, and they happened to have Airplane on there, and I was like, awesome. So I got to introduce my kids to a show that I grew up. Just loving. So I don't know, but you reminded me of that. Buckling up. Well, buckling up, but dun, dun, dun's also.

Daniel Beecher (2:49)

Oh yes, exactly. All the things.

Daniel McClellan (2:51)

Yeah, all the things.

Daniel Beecher (2:53)

And don't call me Shirley.

Daniel McClellan (2:54)

Yeah, that's the, my daughter loved that.

All right. So go ahead.

Daniel Beecher (3:02)

Good Lord, we are just on top of each other today.

Daniel McClellan (3:05)

Yeah, it's a mess.

Daniel Beecher (3:08)

So let's start with, I think we need to start with sort of a basis, ground us in what we're talking about in terms of sexuality, in terms of biblical times. Help us out with that.

Daniel McClellan (3:23)

Well, I wanna start with trying to explain that anciently they thought and talked about sexuality and organized their society around sexuality very, very differently from the way that we do today. And so when in our public discourse and discussions with other people and the ways that we think about sexuality, science and our culture and media and a bunch of other things have kind of created the structures that we use to kind of give flesh to the skeleton of what sexuality is, what human sexuality is, including homosexuality. And anciently, they did it in a very different way. And when we look at the biblical text and we superimpose those frameworks, those interpretive lenses, if you will, that we use today, if we superimpose them on the biblical text, we are going to distort what those authors were trying to do with their texts. We are going to misunderstand how they thought and talked about sexuality. And so I want to provide a couple of insights from the broader study of sexuality in the ancient world to help us kind of reorient our thinking. And one of the main things that I think we need to understand is that we try to think of sexuality today, sexual relationships, as reciprocal, as equal partnerships, as two people doing something together. I mean, ideally, that's how we would like to think of it. Aspirationally, that's what we would like everyone to how we would like people to talk and think about sexuality. And it was much less so anciently. In the ancient world, there was a social hierarchy of domination and one of, and I'm still trying to find the right terminology for this, but I refer to a social hierarchy of domination and penetration. Although I'm gonna use when I refer to this later on to be a little more discreet, I'm gonna talk about active slash insertive roles versus passive slash receptive roles. But anyway, sexuality was not something that two people did together. It was something that one person did to another person, someone lower down on that social hierarchy of domination and penetration. The roles, the social roles, sat a lot closer to the surface and were a lot more normative. They were a lot more important to how people function socially. And so men, particularly free-born citizen men in most societies in the first millennium BCE were at the very top of the social hierarchy of domination and penetration.