Maybe We're Talking About A New Thing In The World That Paul Didn't Know

More Answers to Trad-Catho Objections To My Call For Faithful, Equal, Loving Marriages

I ADMIT THAT, given his language about Women, about slavery and about LGBTQ People, I had the typical, shallow disdain for Paul that is had only with the selective, distorted, superficial view of what he presumably did write and that which is traditionally ascribed to him  but much of which is probably not by him, some of which certainly contradicts much of what he did write. When you try to read entire letters, to really think about what is said in full instead of by picking out bits from it, those are seldom really understandable out of context.

As I have confessed, from now on I read all Scripture, judge all religious doctrine, dogma, tradition, theological claims according to what both Jesus and Hillel said was the encapsulation of The Law and the Prophets, does it lead you to do to others what you would have done to you.  If that were the way Christians behaved, slavery, Women's subjugation, inequality to LGBTQ+ People, oppression and cheating of workers, the poor,  and virtually every human created evil that has been the norm and which still persists would not happen.  There would be no scandal of Christians who did any of those things.  Christianity would be something wanted by all oppressed people, everywhere.  Equality, economic justice, social justice, charity for all, including the downtrodden and despised, especially for the downtrodden and despised. Those conditions of life might even disappear.

It is as perfect a commandment as any religion anywhere has ever come up with, I trust it entirely as the greatest rule of human conduct, the safest basis of human law.  I judge the obscure cases in which its application is not obvious with that other rule for judging the validity of claims of morality and religion given by Jesus, by their fruits YOU WILL KNOW THEM.  What comes of their application in life?  Do those results comport with the Golden Rule? Based on that, large parts of the Scripture have to be judged to be an invalid basis for human conduct, human law, while much of it gives good advice on how to act that way and even much of what is mistaken as a model for behavior is really a cautionary tale. I will note that it is the best way to view some of the worst passages in Scripture, such as those that command death for this or that transgression of law, things that an 8 year old knows violate the commandment against killing, among the earliest self-contradictions in the Bible that I recall noticing.

I am no student of the literature but certainly the Rabbis who studied the Hebrew Scriptures so minutely for so many centuries noticed that in one place God is said to have said that if a human kills another human they are to be killed by another human, Genesis 9:5.  How this doesn't eventuate in our committing suicide as a species as those who kill the killers must, as well, be killed, I'd like to know.  Of course the first thing to notice about that is it contradicts what God said to Cain when he killed Abel.  And there were certainly many in in Scripture of this or that hero killing many people, soldiers among the Children of Israel, Samson, Joshua, the later kings, etc. who were not held to that rule, many of them lived out their lives and died a natural death. David, Solomon . . . murderers, many are considered great figures in the same religions that maintain that passage in Scripture.

The last time I dealt with Paul on same-sex-sex I noted that you could only maintain the common view of his use of same-sex-sex, that he held it out as uniquely sinful only if you failed to read Paul's flawed and limited concept of it in the context of general, I would say universal human sinfulness that he mentions it in.  Of course nearly everyone who cites Paul to identify this or that act of sinfulness and, in the worst use of his writing, to condemn, to damn LGBTQ People, to support slavery, to tell Women to take a subservient role and to shut up in church is guilty of that dishonest use of him.  

And as he was merely human, his human limitations and flaws are certain, he certainly knew he was imperfect and we know his understanding was.  Things he said which were likely rejected by Christians of his own time.  I mentioned that while we can be certain from what he said that Women were speaking in church in Corinth but, as Elizabeth A. Johnson noted, what the Women of Corinth who were speaking out thought of Paul's instruction is not known. We do know that just as American slavers lied about his instruction to Philemon on slavery to defend them not following the entire context of his advice, that the slaver was to treat the slave as a brother, not as a slave, which would have freed the slave in fact if not under law.  St. Macrina talking her mother into coming to such an arrangement with the slaves in their household was one of few such instances where that was taken seriously. None of the rest of that use of Paul's less than perfect wisdom is even up to his written words.

I'd speculate that there may have been Pauline letters which don't survive including because they were rejected.  But that speculation isn't needed because hardly anyone takes full note of his whole text which, when you do take that in considerations, it changes your understanding of the attention-getting phrase or one or two sentence tid-bits concentrated on.  

Paul is an extremely subtle, at times, sometimes almost ecstatically  poetic writer.  The source of his inspiration was a profound mystical experience that left him traumatized, having serious physical consequences. A lot of it, not just the  word here or there is obscure.  And one of those "arsenokoitai" is not a word whose accurate denotation is not agreed on today.  It very likely did not mean "homosexual" or, as the goddamned KJV has it "sodomite" it is not useful for making hard and fast laws. It certainly did not refer to what we, today, would consider adult, mutually consented to, mutually respectful, responsible, faithful same-sex-sex.

I did state that my conclusion from Paul's words and what we know of Paul's life that he very likely could have been a man who felt exclusively sexually attracted to other men and, in a phenomenon not unknown today, he was scared and disgusted by some of his deepest desires.  But I think to limit him to that on the issue is to a. to presume we understand him on the basis of insufficient evidence and b. that his language (in the Greek) seems only to point to uses of same-sex-sex by others that were evil, the sexual abuse of adults and children in prostitution, whether or not that was in association with pagan temples, masters abusing those they held in slavery, adults preying on children, non-consensual sex among adults in a context of inequality.   I am not a very good Greek scholar and am reliant on scholars of the language but I do think it is a virtual certainty that when we talk about being a fair, responsible gay man or Lesbian woman, or bisexual or transexual, etc. today we are talking about behaviors that surpass what Paul and the majority of his contemporaries who wrote documents that survive, the basis of our understanding of Paul's and others vocabularies, could have talked about. It's clear that many people, both straight and even within LGBTQ+ people have a hard time wrapping their minds around that idea now.

I will take as my text Isaiah 43:19.  I think when we, today speak of real marriage equality we may well be talking about a new thing in the world.

I see no evidence that anywhere in the written record there is evidence that any writers, Christian, Jewish or pagan had a conception of loving, equal, exclusively faithful, adult, consensual same-sex sex.  I DON'T SEE MUCH OF ANY EVIDENCE THAT THEY MUCH CONCEIVED OF EVEN MONOGAMOUS STRAIGHT MARRIAGE IN THOSE TERMS. If there is any classical Greek or Hebrew text that talks about what I am talking about when I talk about marriage equality, I'd love someone to point it out to me. I would not be surprised if there were such relationships among, for example, male couples of that time, I think there is no evidence that any texts they may have written about that survived so what language they would use for that cannot be compared to the words of Scripture.  

I can point out we have little to no language of slaves who rejected their enslavement, we have no language of Women who rejected their subjugation, we have little to no language of so many "others" who are named in Scripture or classical literature but who are not known in their own words or who have had their thinking about their own experience preserved.  Given how rare authorship was, presumably even much rarer than the uncommon achievement of literacy, given the ravages of time on paper, it isn't surprising that we wouldn't have positive examples of same-sex-sex set down in the texts that survive.  If there were any such Jewish or Christian writings, I think it's a safe bet that the Church as they were accepting and rejecting what the bishops decided were to be included in the canon of Scripture would have rejected those.  If there were such texts, by that time, I think it's a pretty good guess that they would have been rejected out of bigotry, not inspiration.  For whatever good and even great things that would come out of the clearly post-Scriptural and novel development of monasticism, on which so much of the transmission of texts and writing and learning depends, it promoted an extremely morbid view of sex that would have guaranteed that.

I have gone back, several times, to the story in John's Gospel, the Woman Taken in Adultery, which so many moderns like to claim was inauthentic, that it was a later insertion because it's not contained in the oldest complete manuscript of John's Gospel.  We don't have any idea why that would be, it could have been not there because it was a later insertion -which, given the already present and extreme sexism of the Bishops and the Emperor who wanted them to select what was to be included, I doubt they'd have included it if they figured it was optional.  

I've got to wonder if whoever created that manuscript or the manuscript they copied may have left it out because they didn't like the story.  We don't have any way of knowing but we do know that its survival in the canon proves that many of the early Christians conceived of Jesus as the kind of messiah who would save the life of the poor woman, doing so overturning the ancient law that adulterers were to be stonned to death.  Which brings us to the sexual sin that rulers, certainly, not infrequently even the most sexually suppressive clerics wink and nod at, today totally accepted among the white-evangelicals among whom it is extremely popular, among the hardest right of Catholic cardinals, bishops, those kinds of young JPII era priests who I cannot find credible as ministers of religion, the Republican-fascists, the Trump voters, even as they are the most vicious voices against LGBTQ+ equality.  

There is no sexual sin that is more continually condemned in Scripture than straight adultery, its condemnation is ubiquitous as mentions of what is taken as the few instances where same-sex-sex is condemned.  Yet in practice, since the dawn of Christianity as an established state church, adultery by the rich and powerful was never much called out. You know, like the serial adulterer, Trump, like Ronald Reagan was, like I'll bet most of the House "Freedom" Caucus are.   Skipping over the long history of adultery being treated with a wink and a nod by clerics and and the legal system, today it is only under a few instances in Catholicism and a few other smaller sects that issues of straight adultery which, by the Words of Jesus has to include remarriage after a divorce, is perfectly legal and not problematical. I hear it's especially popular in "red states" and "red counties."  I would like to know when the last example of a public school teacher, a Catholic school teacher who was fired for adultery was, how many divorced, remarried men and women teach in our schools, I've known of a number who were openly known to be carrying on affairs within the faculty of the school while both were married, we all have. That certainly falls under the most frequently mentioned sin of sexual behavior in scripture AND NO ONE BATS AN EYELASH ABOUT IT.  And I'm certainly not advocating they all be fired (the unemployment rate among straight people would soar) though I do wonder what that example before them holds for students who do know it's going on.  One of my conclusions was that if I were ever married to another man I wouldn't want us to act so irresponsibly and selfishly or so openly.

I think even among the damned Ratzinger-cult bishops and priests who flipped out when Good Pope Francis contemplated allowing divorced remarried Catholics to receive Communion have no real problem with Catholics who commit adultery without remarriage after divorce because I don't hear much from them about it. They certainly have no problem with Newt Gingrich and his third wife, adulterers, both of them, no doubt having bought themselves an annulment, perhaps the most officially hypocritical practice in the hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church today. The Catholic annulment industry with its high-price canon lawyers, etc. is a scandal in itself.  

The Catholic Church, the "white evangelicals" as mentioned in the media, the Republican-fascists, perhaps most of all the right-wing media whores, have no credibility on matters of sex, they are uniformly hypocrites in the matter, those who aren't personally hypocritical are typically clueless and have no problem being in league with the hypocrites they don't break with.  

No future Christianity will ever be able to go back to where it was, as my generation passes, as the generation of my nieces and nephews replace us, as the libertarian over-compensation for the oppressive suppression of LGBTQ+ people will have to give way to the consequences of that overcompensation, I have no doubt that LGBTQ+ life will become unremarkable and same-sex marriage equality will become as common as the reality that straight people often marry the wrong person and that a modern divorce with economic security for ex-wives is not the same thing as divorce was in the time of Jesus has become an accommodation for straight people living their lives the best way they can figure out how to.  My hope is that Gay men, Lesbians, etc. pursue marriage-equality so fervently that we will demand to have the best kind of marriages, loving, equal, mutually supportive, faithful and life-long instead of cranky, exploitative, unequal, unfaithful, hateful and ephemeral ones such as so many straight people seem to go for.  If I thought marriage-equality was to enable the worst kinds of marriages, the effort for it would be a waste of time.