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Cake day: June 4th, 2025

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  • Not trying to convince anyone their book is wrong. I just want folks to see that there are better ways of reading it. As a former evangelical myself, but also a priest who deeply loves the Bible, the Christian faith, and Jesus, I think it’s been the case that the Bible has been read incorrectly. Further, as Christians, we’re (speaking of myself here, not assuming you are a Christian) supposed to allow Jesus to be the filter through which we read the whole thing. This is difficult, yes. But it can offer clarity. The evangelical reading tends to say “the sin of Sodom was that they were gay, therefore God is going to unleash wrath on anyone who engages in that or supports it.” But even Jesus Himself says that the sin of Sodom was that they were inhospitable. So if Jesus tells us that it had nothing to do with what we today call “sexual orientation” then it opens up a space for a better understanding of what’s going on. It allows us to see the truly monstrous sins that Sodom and Gomorrah were actually committing (which, to be frank, are the sorts of sins that we see happening in places like Lebanon and Gaza right now, the sins of the Epstein class, the sins of the Catholic Church and other churches coming to light in recent decades). The sin is exploitative sexual violence and the domination of the “outsider.” I can’t help but notice that the same organizations who treat the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah as “homosexuality” tend to be the same ones either engaging in or accommodating the sins of sexual violence and domination. Is it a smoke-screen? Or is it willful ignorance?



  • I will concede that the arsenkoites argument of mine is wanting (and maybe a bit innovative). When I first wrote that in 2015 I was still operating under the assumption of the Hebrew Bible being the “real” Old Testament (a mistake a LOT of scholars make). I’ve since studied more on the importance of the Septuagint (the Greek version of the Jewish Bible that, for centuries, was the Bible) and it’s there that we learn Saint Paul is deriving his term from the Greek version of Leviticus. But this is still only what, two verses?

    Also “homosexual” is a term invented in the 1890s that has its own ideological baggage. Using that term to translate a Greek word is not great because you are injecting a later concept into an ancient text. Somewhere along the way I read about some folks who looked at how old French and Spanish texts (or was it German?) that predated our English versions translated “arsenkoites” and they used a term related to pederasty.