Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality

Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century

John Boswell

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226345369
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

John Boswell's National Book Award–winning study of the history of attitudes toward homosexuality in the early Christian West was a groundbreaking work that challenged preconceptions about the Church's past relationship to its gay members—among them priests, bishops, and even saints—when it was first published thirty-five years ago. The historical breadth of Boswell's research (from the Greeks to Aquinas) and the variety of sources consulted make this one of the most extensive treatments of any single aspect of Western social history.Now in this thirty-fifth anniversary edition with a new foreword by leading queer and religious studies scholar Mark D. Jordan, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality is still fiercely relevant. This landmark book helped form the disciplines of gay and gender studies, and it continues to illuminate the origins and operations of intolerance as a social force.

Appendix

1 Lexicography and Saint Paul

It is not readily apparent to modern English speakers with little knowledge of classical languages that the passage of thousands of years obscures, sometimes beyond recovery, the exact meaning of words in the languages of cultures with experiences and life-styles very different from their own.¹ A variety of translations for the same phrase in Jeremiah are reproduced below. Although the passage is of little doctrinal import, it is obviously quite difficult to establish any consensus about its precise meaning. Some of the renderings are relatively similar, but there could hardly be more difference between “mad after females” (LXX) and “fed in the morning” (KJV.)

When the word or passage in question is controversial, the difficulties are apt to be aggravated by ambiguities on both sides of the linguistic barrier. It is significant in this context that Greek—the language of early Christian theology—is particularly ill suited to express the sexual attitudes of the Christian religion, since crimes of a sexual nature in classical Greece were designated in terms unrelated to the considerations which made some sexual practices reprehensible in Christian ethics. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that there is often equal imprecision in the languages into which the Greek is being translated, especially English. The strict definitions of such

Translations of Jeremiah 5: 8

Masoretic text:

LXX ”

² [They became horses mad after females]³

Vulgate Equi amatores et emissarii facti sunt [They have become passionate and wandering horses]

LB Wie die vollen müßigen Hengste [Like full, idle stallions]

RDV They are become as amorous horses and stallions

KJV They were as fed horses in the morning

RSV They were well-fed, lusty stallions

JBF C^’étaient des chevaux repus et bien membres [They were wellfed and well-endowed horses]

JBS Son caballos lustrosos y enteros [They are shiny and robust horses]

JB They were well-fed, lusty stallions

JBG Feiste, wohlgebaute Hengste sind sie [Fleshy, well-built stallions they are]

NEB Like a well-fed and lusty stallion

NAB Lustful stallions they are

words as “fornication” and “adultery” observed in moral theology are considerably blurred in common usage, and words such as “prostitute” and “whore” are virtually indefinable. For example, “prostitute” is used to describe, with increasing imprecision, persons who sell their bodies for money, persons who lend their bodies to others for ceremonial purposes (“temple prostitutes”), those whose standards of sexual conduct the speaker considers too loose, and those whom the speaker simply wishes to denigrate.

Salient examples of this sort of semantic difficulty are the Greek words “

“ and “

.” In Attic Greek

were houses of male prostitution, in which

practiced their trade quite legally and with little stigma, as long as they paid the tax on prostitution, the

. In the LXX “

“ clearly has the sense of a male prostituting himself (e.g., Deut. 23:18), but in the Koine of the New Testament “

“ is a feminine singular and no longer applies to male brothels. What it does apply to is less clear: many English translators content themselves with the vague word “immorality.”⁴ This is safe enough, since whatever else “

“ may be, it is certainly “immoral,” but the term is misleadingly general. Since “

“ retains the older meaning of “prostitute,” there is little justification for excluding this sense from “

,” especially when the two words are linked by context, as in 1 Corinthians 6.⁵ “

“ and “

“ are left completely ambiguous by the uncertainty surrounding “

,” being rendered by such varied terms as “whoremonger,” “fornicator,” or “immoral male.”

Similarly, “

“ is widely assumed to be the Greek equivalent of the modern term “adultery,” even though in Attic it could refer to the seduction not only of the wife of a citizen but of his widowed mother, unmarried daughter, sister, or niece as well⁶ and though it is used by New Testament writers (e.g., Matt. 12:39) with connotations obviously broader than “adultery” in its modern sense. Like “

,” “s...