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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Johannes Pilch who wrote (56396)	7/15/1999 12:41:00 AM
From: Achilles	Respond to of 67261

>Well consider the language in which Paul's letters have come to us, and read his comments as touching homosexuality in that language. Then read the relevant texts on homosexuality from the prevalent biblical text used by Jews during the Hellenistic-Jewish period. Then you will see an almost word for word transferal of the condemnation of homosexuality from the Old Testament to the New.< I've looked at Romans 1.25-26, 1 Cor. 6.8ff., 1 Tim. 1.9 in the Greek NT and compared them to LXX text of Lev. 18.22. Although these texts are talking about the same thing, I don't see anything that would justify a claim that Paul was quoting or paraphrasing Leviticus. Perhaps I've missed the passage you mean. >>How do you know [homosexuality was rampant amongst pagan leaders of Jesus' era]?<< > Its called reading. It is quite commonly known that during the age previous, Plato had lauded homosexuality, Nero, at about the time of St. Paul was about to “marry” the boy Sporus, and since 14 of the first 15 Roman emperors were homosexual (or at least bisexual), this little incident was relatively insignificant.< It is probably best to leave Plato out of this discussion, since he died almost 400 years before the early church, and Greek social life changed greatly over these centuries. In Rome, attitudes were strikingly different anyway. We can assume that there were such activities, and we find references in their literature. The scurrilous material found (e.g.) in Suetonius' Lives make for very entertaining reading, but most of it should be approached with skepticism: exaggerations of sexual (and other) misdeeds were used to blacken the character of a 'bad' emperor after he was dead. Indeed, one school of thought argues that the fact that such rumours are reported and seem to be designed to disgust the reader suggests that the Roman upper classes were in fact quite straight-laced.