Romans. Craig S. Keener

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Romans - Craig S. Keener


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reasons, that unwanted babies be abandoned on trash heaps.90 Although the matter is debated, there is still reason to believe that Greeks abandoned female babies more often than male babies, given the disparity in genders and consequent disparity in age at marriage. On average, Greek men seem to have married around age thirty, marrying young women twelve years their junior. This meant that young men in that society looked for other sexual outlets before marriage: slaves, prostitutes, and (more affordably) each other. The particular sexual practices dominant varied from one Greek city-state to another, but in this period the old traditions of Athens were most influential.

      Pederasty and Other Exploitation

      Views Regarding Homosexual Behavior in Antiquity

      More often, people regarded it as a personal preference or a common practice. Some even defended it as being preferable to heterosexual affection, which was said to be driven by animal passion rather than philosophic appreciation. Anal intercourse was common enough that men also used it at times with women (perhaps prostitutes), as attested on some of the many ancient vase paintings that would today be classified as pornographic.

      Interpreting Paul

      Most readers today would share Paul’s revulsion against the dominant forms of homosexual practice in his day: pederasty in both its voluntary and involuntary forms. Some scholars (especially Scroggs) argue that Paul opposed merely pederasty or other kinds of sexual exploitation. Critics of this proposal sometimes too readily dismiss the evidence for it: as we have observed, pederasty was in fact the dominant expression of homosexual activity in the ancient Mediterranean world.

      But did Paul limit his criticism to simply those forms that remain most offensive in Western culture today? The dominant practice was not the only practice, and the word “pederast” was already available. More importantly, as most commentators (e.g., Jewett, Byrne) point out, he specifies lesbian as well as male homosexual behavior, and it is the same-sex element of the behavior that he explicitly targets.

      The same criticism may be leveled against the view that Paul merely rejects homosexual behavior in the way that some philosophers did, as a failure to control one’s appetites (comparable to gluttony). Rather, Paul’s rejection of homosexual behavior belongs to his larger Jewish sexual ethic, which rejects all sexual behavior outside heterosexual marriage. His “against nature” argument echoes philosophic arguments that other Diaspora Jews had already applied to homosexual behavior in general. Readers today may agree or disagree with Paul, but some modern attempts, no matter how valiant, to make him more palatable to certain Western liberal values have failed to persuade a number of commentators, including this one.

      At the same time, we must not exaggerate what Paul is saying. He uses the examples of idolatry and homosexual behavior because Jewish people recognized these as exclusively Gentile vices. This recognition plays into Paul’s strategy to expose all sin as deadly (1:28–32), hence all persons as sinners (3:23). Paul is not providing pastoral counsel here to believers struggling with homosexual temptation, and he is certainly not granting license to abuse those who practice homosexual behavior. (Nor would he grant license to denounce this vice while tolerating heterosexual behavior outside marriage, a condemnation that consumes considerably more space in his letters.) Given how common bisexual practice was, Paul undoubtedly worked closely with many believers who had come from this background (some of whom were still tempted by it; cf. the likeliest interpretation of arsenokoite¯s in 1 Cor 6:9–11). Paul’s message here would be more analogous to a preacher appealing to an audience on the basis of their shared values regarding homosexual behavior—then leading them to consider their own vices.

      Various Vices (1:28–32)


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