GAY TRUTH

What is the view of the traditional literature of the Jews? How do the Mishnah and targums view Old Testament references to homosexuality? The Revisionist Answer The traditional literature of the Jews as found in the Mishnah and elsewhere does not interpret the sin of Sodom as homosexuality. This literature is unclear in its understanding of the severity of homosexuality. More recent writings of the Jews have greater importance than does this ancient tradition. The Traditional Jewish Answer The Mishnah and those various targums that discuss homosexuality take the biblical passages as condemning it. The Mishnah (Sanh. 7:1–9:1) restates the penalty of death and groups homosexuality with adultery, incest, and murder. Yet it allows for atonement for the sin of homosexuality, as for adultery and murder. Later Jewish writings, such as the works of Philo and Josephus, follow the interpretation of the Mishnah and strongly condemn homosexual vice

The effect of the repeated “handed over” is not to imply any increasing depth of depravity, implying a downward spiral of degradation, since what is described in vv 26–27 is no different from and no worse than the state depicted more briefly in v 24. But the repetition of the same phrase, “For this cause God handed them over,” increases the solemnity and seriousness of the charge being made, the awfulness of the state to which man has come by virtue of turning his back on God, literally, the God-forsaken character of his plight. The description which follows is a characteristic expression of Jewish antipathy toward the practice of homosexuality so prevalent in the Greco-Roman world . Paul’s attitude to homosexual practice is unambiguous. The third appearance of the word “changed” (cf. vv 23 and 25) seems to imply that the action described (“changing the natural use to that which is contrary to nature”) is of a piece with and direct result of the basic corruption of the glory and t...