Does jesus speak of homosexuality
This article is part of the What Did Jesus Teach? series.
Silence Equals Support?
In a article for Slate online, Will Oremus asked a provocative question: Was Jesus a homophobe?1
The article was occasioned by a story about a gay teenager in Ohio who was suing his high college after school officials prohibited him from wearing a T-shirt that said, “Jesus Is Not a Homophobe.”
Oremus was less concerned about the legal issues of the story than he was about the accuracy of the expression on the shirt. Oremus suggests that Jesus’s views on homosexuality were more inclusive than Paul’s. He writes,
While it’s reasonable to assume that Jesus and his fellow Jews in first-century Palestine would have disapproved of lgbtq+ sex, there is no register of his ever having mentioned homosexuality, let alone expressed particular revulsion about it. . . . Never in the Bible does Jesus himself offer an explicit prohibition of homosexuality.
Oremus seems to suggest that since Jesus never explicitly mentioned homosexuality, he must not have been very concerned about it.
There are at least two reas
What the New Testament Says about Homosexuality
The Fourth R Volume May-June
Mainline Christian denominations in this country are bitterly divided over the question of homosexuality. For this reason it is crucial to ask what light, if any, the New Testament sheds on this controversial issue. Most people apparently take for granted that the Brand-new Testament expresses mighty opposition to homosexuality, but this simply is not the case. The six propositions that trails, considered cumulatively, guide to the finding that the Modern Testament does not provide any straightforward guidance for comprehending and making verdicts about homosexuality in the modern nature.
Proposition 1: Strictly speaking, the Unused Testament says nothing at all about homosexuality.
There is not a single Greek word or expression in the entire New Testament that should be translated into English as “homosexual” or “homosexuality.” In fact, the very notion of “homosexuality”—like that of “heterosexuality,” “bisexuality,” and even “sexual orientation”—is essentially a up-to-date concept that would simply have been unintelligible to
What Does the Bible Say About Homosexuality?
What Does The Bible Utter About Homosexuality?
Introduction
For the last two decades, Pew Research Center has reported that one of the most enduring ethical issues across Christian traditions is sexual diversity. For many Christians, one of the most frequently first-asked questions on this topic is, “What does the Bible say about attraction to someone of the matching sex?”
Although its unlikely that the biblical authors had any notion of sexual orientation (for example, the term homosexual wasn't even coined until the adv 19th century) for many people of faith, the Bible is looked to for timeless guidance on what it means to honor God with our lives; and this most certainly includes our sexuality.
Before we can spring into how it is that Christians can maintain the authority of the Bible and also affirm sexual diversity, it might be helpful if we started with a short but clear overview of some of the assumptions informing many Christian approaches to understanding the Bible.
What is the Bible?
For Christians to whom the Bible
If homosexuality is a sin, why didn’t Jesus ever mention it?
Answer
Many who assist same-sex marriage and lgbtq+ rights argue that, since Jesus never mentioned homosexuality, He did not regard it to be sinful. After all, the argument goes, if homosexuality is bad, why did Jesus treat it as a non-issue?
It is technically correct that Jesus did not specifically address homosexuality in the Gospel accounts; however, He did speak clearly about sexuality in general. Concerning marriage, Jesus stated, “At the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh[.]’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, enable no one separate” (Matthew –6). Here Jesus clearly referred to Adam and Eve and affirmed God’s intended design for marriage and sexuality.
For those who follow Jesus, sexual practices are limited. Rather than take a permissive view of sexual immorality and divorce, Jesus affirmed that people are either to be s