If you go by the greek translation instead of the more strict hebrew original, then only penetrating other men/boys is forbidden by this. So if you care about whatever is written in the bible go get railed and then stone whoever is fucking you.
The original greek shows that Jesus liked teenage boys
All cult leaders love raping teenagers
Surprise, read Leviticus and dare tell me the Bible itself is not homophobic.
You have to actually fact-check the stuff you post, and to not trust anything that sounds plausible or seems to confirm your biases.
Fuck the homophobia, Christians should have to justify God calling for impaling literal infants with swords before we even talk about the gays.
And the genocide. And the rape. And the slavery. Old testament God was fugged up but their boy Jesus is God so he technically commanded all that OT bullshit personally.
Just deciding that Jesus shouldn’t be portrayed as a white dude would be a start
Preach! 🥰🤘🏼
Trans and bisexual Jew here. As with all questions of Jewish law, the answer can be found, and optionally ignored, in the Talmud:
From where do we derive the prohibition and punishment for homosexual intercourse with a male? It is as the Sages taught in a baraita with regard to the verse: “And if a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death, their blood shall be upon them” (Leviticus 20:13): The word “man” excludes a minor boy. The phrase “lies with a male” is referring to any male, whether he is an adult man or whether he is a minor boy. The phrase “as with a woman [mishkevei isha],” referring to lying with a woman, appears in the plural. The verse teaches you that there are two manners of lying with a woman for which one who engages in intercourse with a woman forbidden to him is punished, vaginal and anal intercourse.
Sanhedrin 54a
Another fun law I just learned by looking this up
A man who engages in intercourse with a male or with an animal, and a woman who engages in intercourse with an animal, are executed by stoning. The animal is likewise stoned to death.
Sanhedrin 54a
The mishna teaches that Rabbi Yehuda says: A bachelor may not herd cattle, nor may two bachelors sleep with one covering. It is taught in the Tosefta (5:10): They said to Rabbi Yehuda: Jews are not suspected of engaging in homosexual intercourse nor of engaging in intercourse with an animal.
Kiddushin 82a
Yea, stone that animal, too!
All this about laying down, but no rules for my ancient farm gloryhole. Everyone wonders how my one sheep stays so healthy without any teeth for grazing. Well boys, put your stones away since its standing room only in here.
Anicient farm gloryhole.
That’s the most beautiful thing I heard all year.
Surprise the educated are bigots too
No. Not surprise.
quite off topic here but i feel the need to clarify. Pedophilia is not evil, a predator is. Now please don’t jump to conclusions here, it is a very misrepresented topic due to its offensive nature. But pedophile is just someone that is attracted, which doesn’t always mean they are predators. More then often it is not there fault (they can just be born like that or it can be caused by trauma), of course they should seek professional help but calling them evil before they do anything makes them not come out and not seek the help they need, thus causing more predators to exist. And just because I’m on thin ice here I will clarify again, I do NOT support pedophilia, I just don’t like when people say pedophile when they mean predator. It is causing the problem to be worse. Hope someone takes this to heart and next time uses the right word, because words we use matter.
I understand that you are against pedophilia.
But people that are pro-pedophilia often use the same or similar arguments. That’s why people have such a kneejerk reaction toward any ‘apologia’, and I’d say rightfully so
Putting a group of people based on what they say in one bag and just having a negative reaction towards it not based on the actual contents of what was said is not rightful at all in my opinion. Don’t get me wrong, I get it. But that does not justify it and won’t stop me from trying to change the world for the better.
To give an example it is like if someone got mad at me for saying that homelessness is a problem and it sucks just because radical communists say that as well… and yes I know that this is very much the case for many people, but I have zero respect for such people. (to clarify obviously I am not a communist and I do no agree with it. In fact my country used to be under the rule of communism and it was not great. I live in Czechia)
Enormity does not mean great size, it means more like great evil. I gave up the fight for this word because with even the BBC misusing it, I was never going to win. Now both meanings appear in the dictionary. What can you do? Most people who are conflating two things don’t care, so they are always going to say “huh. Why so you care so much?” In my case, that only has boring potential answers, but in your case it has an easy answer few are unmoved by, so I would drop the fight for the original meaning of words when society has moved on if I were you.
Linguists define the meaning of a word from its use. You can’t prevent language change as an individual, and this one is always going to get interpreted a particular way. Give up. Already dictionaries literally list figuratively as a meaning for literally. It’s not going to work and it’s not worth your time.
You seem very wise and it’s a shame to see you gave up on things like this. One thing is to not care another is to completely give up in despair…
For me it is not about the word, it is about the impact on the world it has when the word isn’t used correctly. Quite literally there is more kids being abused because people misuse this word. And I would personally feel sick giving up on that (not trying to say you should, I get that everyone can’t fight every battle). So my only ask is even if you don’t want to fight some specific battle, don’t stop others from doing so :D
Quite literally there is more kids being abused because people misuse this word.
No. Absolutely not. People abuse kids because their power and gratification is more important to them than children’s lives. They don’t give a shit about the meaning of words.
You seem to miss my point. When people misuse the word pedophile (what they usually mean is predator) they make it harder for pedophiles to get the help they need and thus creating more predators. Of course I’m not defending them here, it is entirely their own fault, but that doesn’t change the fact that misusing this word and shaming them for feelings that they don’t act upon is making it worse.
Weird to bring it up, considering the post doesn’t use that word.
Literally says “Pedophilia is fucking evil.” Word for word.
The post does use that word though.
Listen, I agree that homosexuality is overjudged by Christians, but isn’t arsenokoitai a Greek word?
Just asking because Leviticus was written in Hebrew. There was a Greek translation, but there should also he a Hebrew source to pull from.
EDIT: I wrote this without reading the full post. That’s my bad. Seems like an obvious loan word now. Egg on my face.
If the ancient hebrews didn’t have a cultural tradition of fucking kids then they may not have had a term specifically for it, maybe it was a loan word?
I don’t think they said they were translating Hebrew. There is a documentary about this (1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture) that is pretty good.
What I’m saying is that a Hebrew version should also exist, which would have its own cultural connotations around whatever word they use. Studying it in tandem with the Greek translation would help reveal the original meaning.
This everlasting and loving god sure does love keeping his literal words awfully hard to pin down.
Maybe it’s a cognate, they used the Greek word because they didn’t have a word for it.
Good point!
I mean, pretty much the first thing you learn if you look into it was that there were hundreds of stories that didn’t make it into the ‘official’ Bible.
Female priests were redacted.
The Bible a lot of people think of as definitive is named after the dude who edited it for the umpteenth time.
Literally called the King James Version haha
John Bible did it first
Not sure if kidding. The book of John genuinely is the foundation for a lot of the bullshit Christians believe though.
you mean Captain Bible?
You don’t trust your King???
Speaking as someone who has read the Torah in Hebrew, this is inaccurate. The Leviticus (ויקרא) line is absolutely about ‘do not lie with a man as you lie with a woman’. However, we can admit the Torah, and Bible is homophobic and also shouldn’t proscribe our daily lives today. ‘Reforming’ the Bible by making stuff up just supports all the other things the Bible also unambiguously supports, such as slavery and misogyny. And transphobia, for that matter.
From my interpretation of reading the passage, the Sodomites were bisexual, since they would have been happy to rape either the male angels or Lot’s daughters. However, the more important point is that they were rapists, and my understanding has always been that they were destroyed for being cruel to guests and the poor (such as the story of a woman giving a loaf of bread to a beggar being punished by being stripped naked, covered in honey, and left to the bees.)
Seeing as you can actually read Hebrew, and have read the Torah in Hebrew… what do you think of the following?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almah
…Scholars thus agree that almah refers to a woman of childbearing age without implying virginity,[6] while an unrelated word, betulah (בְּתוּלָה), best refers to a virgin,[7] as well as the idea of virginity, betulim (בְּתוּלִים).[8]
Although the concept is central to the account of the virgin birth of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, the scholarly consensus is that the words denote a woman’s fertility without concern for her virginity.[1][2][3]
So uh, oops, the idea that Mary was specifically, literally a virgin… is kind of a translation error from going over into Greek.
https://www.jewishvoice.org/read/article/was-mary-virgin
This further explains, amongst many other things… if Joseph is not the literal father of Jesus… then… his lineage is irrelevant.
But his lineage going back to David is highly important to both Christian theology and the contextual, contemporaneous way that this would work in the Jewish culture of the time, that he would possibly be able to be seen as the Jewish Messiah.
So… that’s another dimension of this problem for Christians.
The interpretation/understanding given here is more like… (I think?)… that the Holy Spirit, ie, the sort of ever present, non personified idea of God… well, he/it’s role here is just to make sure the biological conception happens, and perhaps specifically bless it, by way of specifically making it happen… or maybe its more like… imbue it with the pure spiritual essence of God?
“… spiritually God, physically human, and legally the heir of the Kingdom.”
I’m frankly not sure that I’m understanding exactly the idea being proposed here.
I should probably also note that the author of this is a Messianic Jew, ie, one who believes, unlike I think basically most, or perhaps all other variants of Judaism… that Jesus actually is the fulfilment of the Jewish Messiah traditions, where most other Jews do not believe the Messiah has yet arrived.
I would very much appreciate any corrections of misunderstandings I may be having here… I grew up Christian, but my cousins are Jewish, but also they were not highly religious, more like ‘non-practicing Jews’, who partook in the holidays and traditions, but were not like, super duper serious about the theology, so we did not ever really talk about theology.
There’s another theory I’ve heard, that’s based on what seems to have been a fairly common rumor/insult hurled at Christians fairly close to the time of Jesus’ life, which is basically that Mary was raped by a Roman soldier, and Jospeh more or less did a kind of pity-marriage to her, as… she pretty much would have been cast out and viewed as tainted or worthless by her family and society.
Obviously that’s impossible to … ‘verify’, but it does at least strike me as plausibe.
You’ve said a lot of things! I don’t have the time or energy rn to reply to all of them, but about the Joseph thing - yes, his lineage should be irrelevant if he’s not actually Jesus’s father. I’ve seen excuses for why it matters, and I think the original reason is that the virgin thing was added on later, they originally did think he was his father.
And yeah, the virgin thing was the author of one of the gospels (I forget which) wanting to ‘fulfil prophecy’ with Jesus and reading something about how the Greek word meaning virgin or young woman would give birth to a son before something happened (in context something to do with a battle, like as a figure of speech to communicate a length of time). So yeah, it’s about a normal pregnancy, and then it was interpreted as a ‘virgin birth’ which the gospel writer used to make Mary a virgin to ‘fulfill prophecy’ (which is in context nothing to do with the messiah).
I hope that’s not too bumbling to make sense, in any case there are plenty people who’ve explained it much better than me, like the YouTuber Mindshift ;)
This is mostly about Christianity, which I will admit is mostly not my expertise. I will confirm that in the OT the Hebrew word does in context mean a young woman who has conceived a child in the usual way, however.
Hey, that’s more than fair enough!
Yeah its Matthew where that happens, the virgin mistranslation thing… and I think also the geneology thing, but I think the geneology thing is a significant part of other Gospels as well?
But yes, what you’ve explained makes total sense, but that’s probably/possibly because I also watch Mindshift and a good deal of other similar kinds of channels.
I guess I just wanted to 1) have the whole ‘alma’ thing directly verified by someone who can read Hebrew, and 2) make sure I was not unintentionally making some significant error when it comes to trying to parse I guess ‘mainstream’ Judaism vs Messianic Judaism.
As you are not as familiar with Christianity, I am not so familiar with the various modern… branches, would you say? of Judaism.
In this case it’s not really to do with Judaism, but rather the meaning of the Hebrew word ;)
Rabbinic/mainstream orthodox Judaism does have some interesting ideas about Jesus however
Ezekiel made it pretty clear why Sodom was destroyed:
Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom:She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen
This is, of course, mostly ignored
It was about violation of guest right. Lot invited the angels in and gave them bread. When the crowd demanded to violate them, it was better to offer his daughters, because they were his (property), and not his guests. They refused even that, which is when the angels declared that the city was doomed.
Quite, not helping the poor and needy was part of what I said.
Yes I was agreeing with you
This meme seemed inaccurate to me too. Focusing on greek terms rather than hebrew for leviticus struck me as weird.
I found an academics’ discussion about arsenokoitai in Paul: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskBibleScholars/comments/18j1873/meaning_of_arsenokoites/
It seems like the question of the meaning of arsenokoitai is mostly about what paul meant by it. While all the posters above seem to agree paul’s not saying all homosexuals and probably only situations we’d describe as non-consenual, they all describe no firm answer and disagree on many details.
I think this post takes unsettled scholarship about NT greek and presents it as settled scholarship about part of the torah.
Have you read the Septuagint(s) in Ancient Greek though? There’s scholarly dispute over whether the Greek texts came first and in general Hebrew was a dead language akin to Latin today except with a vocabulary of only 9000 words at the time the Old Testament was written. No known medical texts or literature at that time was being written in Hebrew, maybe a few amulets and accounting documents exist prior to the Torah being written. Hebrew as a living, flourishing language was from before contact with the Greeks, maybe 800-1000 years prior. Jews of the time spoke Greek and had for centuries (as did Jesus), and synagogues of the time had Greek inscriptions on their walls.
Some of the criticism I’ve heard is that the writing of the Old Testament during Greek occupation was akin to the Babylonian Captivity where the Jews that considered themselves purists were angry with Jews who had adopted Greek culture and the writing of it was fundamentally reactionary to that, and trying to recreate a culture that in many ways had already been lost. Also, access to the Library of Alexandria and other libraries at the time (no earlier than 300 BC, probably later) seems to have played a large role in helping the reactionary Jews who led the movement that became dominant write a history of the world that put themselves first.
Anyone interested in this kind of perspective is encouraged to learn about and watch interviews with Dr. Ammon Hillman, who has been translating Ancient Greek for 35 years. He is a classical philologist, meaning his education focuses on Greek texts rather than a biblical scholar who only studies the bible. He has many interviews available on youtube and none of his books or media are monetized. He understandably has a huge number of powerful detractors and he is no longer affiliated with any academic institution but he teaches the largest course on Classical Greek online.
According to wikipedia, the original texts of the old testament/torah were written before the hellenistic period. And the language of the common people in the region around the time that Jesus was supposed to live was aramaic, not greek.
and many scholars believe that King David was gay
Had a lot of wives for a gay guy.
So gay he needed multiple beards!
Maybe, just maybe, and that’s if we decide by current labels, he was potentially bisexual ?
I was just making a dumb joke. I’d be surprised if beards were even a thing back then.
Quick, tell me that they also mistranslated the part about shellfish or cloth made with different types of thread…
I prefer instead to just not base my life around a work of fiction.
I like hearing religious themed stories… not just Christian or Jewish… these old stories have a lot of wisdom. I’m not religious though. Agnostic maybe not sure.
Or at the very least, pick a much better one. Maybe stay away from fan forums…
that’s the part that pisses me off the most about so many religious people, they’re just so fucking…lazy…about even their own religion.
i travel alot, stay in hostels cause cheap and you meet new/interesting people, the least interesting people are the bible thumpers who always make nice little show about praying in the public space in the morning and just generally bringing jesus up at every opportunity.
just to fuck with these people i like to ask them what the 10 commandments are…most can’t remember, at which point i say some manner of “…why are you trying to push this shit you clearly don’t know onto me? Moses’s sermon on the mount is like the 1 thing all branch’s of abrahamic religions agree on…”, if they do repeat all 10 i say some manner of “trick question, there’s more than 10…have you even ever actually read Exodus/Deuteronomy?”
these people are just so fucking annoying, they supposedly had some super-powerful moment of revelation, to become a bible thumping moron…yet they can’t even be bothered to do the bare minimum of reading even just their own book let alone actually researching their faith.
all religions have this problem but the american christians are the worst by far, if i thought a book had the answers to all of lifes questions i would be memorizing/anlayzing the fuck out of that shit.
Yeah it’s all performative. I know a few people who are very well taught in christian scriptures and none of them do that kind of shit, or are an active member of any church, for the ones that do believe in God. Even after talking about religion with them for an hour you could think they’re actually atheists
extra annoying is that these half-assed protestants have gotten to my mom, now she won’t stop trying to “convert” me in ever more annoying ways.
she’s never been seriously religious, she’s just…old, isolated because her immediate family broke apart (9 siblings but none of them live close to each other, but also self-inflicted, moving out to bumfuck nowhere), and probably scared of dying like any sane human is.
i don’t care so much about her fleeing to religion to deal with fear of death…but tthese chucklefuck protestants don’t help with the fear of death they just make it even worse by convincing you any family members that don’t join along will burn in hell…which if she found a denomination that was slightly less crazy wouldnt be an issue
they’re just so fucking…lazy…about even their own religion
Most people aren’t going to learn a dead language, because it is time consuming and difficult and not particularly relevant to their material interests. The reason we’re talking about the proper root words and what they mean has nothing to do with our own interest in the Bible as a theological or historical document. We’re only discussing it because we’re dealing with a series of public officials who claim a moralistic posture to do violence to the LGBTQ community.
On the flip side, most orthodox religious folks still just get their dogma the same way we got it - from a handful of scholars with their own socio-economic agendas, looking to make political points.
You didn’t learn Greek. I didn’t learn Greek. I’m not really surprised a church-going soccer mom in Arkansas terrified of her kid getting beaten up for acting queer hasn’t spent a lot of time learning Greek. The translation doesn’t really matter anyway. Its not as though a plain text condemnation of “Thou Shalt Not Kill” has ever dissuaded a religious zealot from doing murder. No more than a humanist lecture on the secular sanctity of life would dissuade an Atheist.
all religions have this problem but the american christians are the worst by far
Humans have a problem, wherein they seek comfort within a tribe of like-minded neighbors to justify their actions in hindsight. Religion is an expression of this tribal mentality. But if you really want to get to the nut of homophobia (or pedophilia or any other social contagion), you have to approach it with a much more material framing.
Until you get to the genuine sociological root of the dysfunction, you’re just yelling at people for thinking wrong. And that’s a lot of noise which never really sways anyone.
Is there a source for that translation of arsenokoitai? DDG wasn’t helpful and just kept giving me the “homosexual” translation.
Yeah I would also like to know.
I would really like for this to be true.
But I fear the source is “trust me bro”
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uX0TgnRh34TddQhG9KDRoDMY3RM6uo6cO8b9NEoxeuA/edit?usp=drivesdk
That was a saved comment from reddit, according to this other post mentioned above.
Dang, thank you, that was actually very interesting to read
Sure sounds like it means male homosexuality …
deleted by creator
