Jesus say about gay
If homosexuality is a sin, why didn’t Jesus ever mention it?
Answer
Many who endorse same-sex marriage and male lover rights argue that, since Jesus never mentioned homosexuality, He did not contemplate 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 real 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, grant 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
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 queer teenager in Ohio who was suing his upper school 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 declaration 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 possess disapproved of gay sex, there is no document of his ever having mentioned homosexuality, let alone expressed particular revulsion about it. . . . Never in the Bible does Jesus himself give an explicit prohibition of homosexuality.
Oremus seems to advise 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 significant to ask what light, if any, the New Testament sheds on this controversial issue. Most people apparently presume that the Recent Testament expresses robust opposition to homosexuality, but this simply is not the case. The six propositions that trails, considered cumulatively, conduct to the finding that the Fresh Testament does not provide any blunt guidance for comprehension and making opinions about homosexuality in the modern nature.
Proposition 1: Strictly speaking, the Fresh Testament says nothing at all about homosexuality.
There is not a single Greek word or term 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 current concept that would simply have been unintelligible to
The Bible on Homosexual Behavior
One way to argue against these passages is to make what I call the “shellfish objection.” Keith Sharpe puts it this way: “Until Christian fundamentalists boycott shellfish restaurants, stop wearing poly-cotton T-shirts, and stone to death their wayward offspring, there is no obligation to listen to their diatribes about homosexuality being a sin” (The Gay Gospels, 21).
In other words, if we can disregard rules like the prohibit on eating shellfish in Leviticus , then we should be allowed to disobey other prohibitions from the Old Testament. But this argument confuses the Elderly Testament’s temporary ceremonial laws with its permanent moral laws.
Here’s an analogy to help understand this distinction.
I remember two rules my mom gave me when I was young: hold her hand when I cross the lane and don’t drink what’s under the sink. Today, I possess to follow only the latter rule, since the former is no longer needed to guard me. In fact, it would now do me more impair than good.
Old Testament ritual/ceremonial laws were like mom’s handholding govern. The rea