By Haley Drolet
As a commuter I never visit my on-campus post box, but the other week I finally decided to check it out. This was an impulsive decision that I soon congratulated myself for when I noticed a pink flyer waiting in my slot. I had a package! Five minutes devoted to coaxing my ridiculous combination into submission was rewarded not with a package slip but a pamphlet entitled “A Biblical Lens on Same-Gender Sexual Activity”. I cringed, not in anger but in a now-customary disappointment. Tucking it into my bag I left campus with a relief to get away.
I am a senior at Gordon College and this is my third year on campus. I spent junior year at Oxford University, an ocean and time difference between me and the increasing tensions faced by Gordon’s LGBTQA+ community. What a stark contrast between there and here. There one of my friends is studying the interaction between Christianity and homosexuality within 19th-20th century literature, reading things like Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Here, I have been told by administration, faculty and peers alike that homosexuality is a topic in direct opposition to my Faith. I hear people praising the release of the biblical stance on homosexuality, “Gordon’s stance”. I listen in confusion as students mock the OneGordon blog. I am hurt when someone says students and faculty should not attend Gordon if they hold views contrary to the traditional tenants they imagine this college representing.
Ooops. Guess I wasn’t suppose to be here. But its too late for me to transfer…
I am not okay with this, with the Gordon College I have come back to. Yet I realized that it is not the college that has changed this past year, it’s me. I arrived here as a conservative evangelical and am leaving as a liberal Anglo-catholic. Oops again. Gordon’s life and conduct statement has not changed since my freshmen year, but my opinion of it has. Does that mean I should not be here, that I should not have come? That I as a member of this community do not have the right to voice my concern, to challenge a practice of my college I believe unjust?
A consequence of being abroad last year is that I recognize neither the Freshman nor the Sophomore class, let alone the visual landscape of our campus. What is worse, however, is finding that I am an exile to this ever-illusive dialogue on homosexuality. When I question classmates I am too often met with “Oh, I don’t know what to think, it is better to stay out of it”. This is just another way of saying “I don’t care”. When I turn to the “adults” I hear that a working group has been secretly elected to meet privately and discuss the issue on my behalf. For Heaven’s sake!
When I took out that pink pamphlet and read it (three times over) I was continually struck by one thing in particular – it seemed to possess final authority on the matter. Must be nice, I wish I did. The footnotes mentioned nothing about translation history and the works cited featured irrelevant references to ex-gay ministries. How annoying.
If we are to have success in this conversation we need both sides to participate with equal legitimacy. We need to have faith that seeks understanding. We need to have liberal and conservative thinkers on this campus. The truth is our understanding of what Paul writes with regards to “homosexual” activity is not clear. The debate is not over and it is not the God-given duty of traditionalists to coax those of differing opinion into redemption. It is time that we discontinue our damaging presuppositions and instead listen to each other. My own presuppositions are the possession of a twenty-year-old, American, heterosexual, female Classics student. Therefore I approach this with humility, as all should, but also with a passion for the marginalized voice, current and ancient, to be heard.
There is something radical I want to suggest to my readers, something I want them to remember when they take up their NIVs: Graeco-Roman authors, their ideas, and their languages are boss and should not be ignored.
I’ve noticed that a lot of Christians rely on English translations of the New Testament to defend their traditional views on gender, sex and marriage. Backed by no small measure of spiritual pride they affirm their own interpretations and claim to be in possession of the true authority of scripture. This is a disheartening and unhelpful habit. Without understanding the classical heritage of early Christianity they participate in faulty hermeneutics. It is not only neglect of antique culture that they demonstrate, but of linguistics as well. Due to this they are subject to misconstruing the Graeco-Roman conceptions of gender and sexuality that underlay the mindset of early Judeo-Christian authors and their audiences. Instead 21st century Christians need to exchange their Victorian notions of sexuality for a historically informed interpretation.
In C.S Lewis’ “On Reading Old Books” he affirms the necessity of being able to trace the long conversation on current issues and modern debates back through the ages. As he well puts it “two heads are better than one (…)” and “we all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period and that means the old books.” This call for literary literacy certainly applies to the current controversy surrounding homoeroticism and the Church.
Ideas of formal sexual orientation did not exist before the modern era. If you approached a 5th century Athenian or Imperial Roman and asked him whether he was hetero- or homosexual, he would simply not comprehend you (not even if you asked him in Greek or Latin). The closest word Greeks had for sexuality was ta aphrodisia ‘the things of Aphrodite’ and this was not a term reserved for male-female relationships. A brief glance through Zimmerman’s Dictionary of Classical Mythology alone will suggest to you the normalcy of homoeroticism. I could chat with you about the penetration model or pederasty (I’d love to in fact) but for now I just want you to be aware of one significant detail: sexual identity is not the product of some universal human experience. The disparity between modern and ancient conceptions of sexual experience should not be dismissed as an insignificant factor in our New Testament hermeneutics. On the contrary, an understanding of it is indispensable.
Finally I want to reconsider that eleven character word which is so significant for two of those clobber passages we think we have come to know so well. I focus specifically on 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 and the use of arsenokoita. If you go to the Classics undergraduate’s favorite website, Perseus, and try to get a definition of arsenokoita you are going to get zero results. Trust me, I only just now tried. The word simply did not exist in Attic Greek and only came into Koine when it was invented by the apostle Paul. It is a hybrid word made of two existing words arsen “man” and koita “beds”. How modern translators think it appropriate to definitively translate these together as “homosexual offenders” will probably never cease to annoy me.
Am I not beating a dead horse when I remind my reader that the term homosexual did not exist until the 19th century? The difficulty with which this term has been continually retranslated is well illustrated if we turn to the King James Bible. Keep in mind that having finished their translation in 1611 AD, the KJB translators also had no access to an English word meaning homosexual or homosexuality. They might have thought to use the word sodomite or catamite, I will grant. Yet they did not.
Instead they render arsenokoita as “abusers of themselves with mankind.” Only in recent versions of the English (NIV, NASB, etc.) does the term homosexual come into use. If Paul intended to target male homoeroticism as the NIV suggests then I am curious to know why he would not have used the term paiderasste instead. Since he did not use this term, the term his audience would have understood as denoting homoeroticism, we should not be so quick to jump to the conclusion that this is what he was condemning. To appeal to the Septuagint’s use of a similar term is also helpful for demonstrating that arsenokoita does not mean homosexuals. In those 1 Kings passages this similar term is used to translate a word denoting male sacred prostitutes.
One final note is that a common translation of arsenokoita for the medieval church was masturbators. Arsen is after all nominative singular. It means “man” not “men”. We can hear echoes of this in the King James: abusers of themselves. So now the term homosexual has been adopted as the replacement. Knowing the history of translation can be key to warding off misinterpretation caused by current societal norms.
Every time I step on campus I can’t help but hum to myself the Beatles song “We Can Work it Out.” It captures so perfectly how I feel about my fractured relationship with my college:
“Try to see it my way, do I have to keep on talking till I can’t go on? While you see it your way, run the risk of knowing that our love may soon be gone. We can work it out, we can work it out. Think of what your saying, you can get it wrong and still you think that it’s alright. Think of what I’m saying, we can work it out and get it straight or say goodnight. We can work it out, we can work it out. Life is very short and there no time, for fussing and fighting my friend…so I will ask you once again. Try to see it my way.”
Student Inqueery 