The Gay Bible question doesn't have an easy answer, and here's why.

In case you've been living under a rock for the past thirty years, there is an ongoing discussion about gays and the Bible. One side is saying that Paul clearly states that being gay is the worst sin imaginable, the side is saying that Paul is sort of okay with it, but he is against certain homosexual practices.

Now while I usually use this space for pop-theology, I am actually a proper theologian, sort of. I have a degree in this stuff. And unfortunately, neither side can really claim an emphatic victory on this stance, but neither is either side wrong.

So let us take a look at the big issue.

Paul writes in 1^st Corinthians 6:9 about sexual immorality, idolatry, adultery, thieves, revellers, drunkards and swindlers. And he mentions men who partake in homosexual activity. None of these can enter heaven. Or at least that's how the passage has been read. But there is a problem with this reading, Paul may not have said homosexuality at all. And that's where we meet a sticky wicket.

In Greek, the language Paul was writing, he uses two words: malakoi and arsenokoitai. Then in the 1500s, a good time after Paul has dies, the struggle to translate them began. And the words chosen were buggerer or sodomite.

This has set the tone for much Christian thinking on the subject of male homosexuality since that time. And this is problematic because it may not be a fair translation of those words.

There is something we have to understand about translations, they aren't straight forward. Words fall out of use or change their meaning. And when we are dealing with words from ancient times, they are even more problematic. An example in Hebrew, and so in our Bibles, is the word vav, or wow. It appears a lot, and we have no idea what it means.We can't just go and look in a dictionary to figure out what a word means, we have to look at what makes up a word, its context, and where else it's used.

That's where we hit a brick wall with Paul: arsenokoitai isn't used much, if at all, outside of Paul's writings. When Greek writers mention homosexuality they use a word like paiderasste which is more common to describe gay men at the time. Had Paul chosen this word instead of his own then the 'Bible says it's bad' brigade would have a much stronger point.

The problem the other side has, the 'Bible doesn't mention homosexuality' brigade, is that it sort of does. Arsenokoitai is literally made up of two parts, man and coitus, or 'to bed'. And this is where all the fun starts for those of us who are Bible scholars, and oh boy does this word open a huge can of worms. And this is why I have been focussing on Paul so far.

Paul is significant in the New Testament because he alone mentions homosexual activity of any kind. And yes, arsenokoitai does imply some form of homosexual activity, there is no getting around that.

That these writings are in the New Testament mean that we can not write them off as being a peculiarity to Judaism, or that they are somehow part of an older, obsolete law. That it is mentioned in the New Testament means this is a message to the Greek world (in Bible terms, our world) and not an ethnoreligious issue like Kosher and circumcision. But...

But there is a link in this word to the Jewish scriptures, mainly Leviticus 18:22. This is where our issue of translating arsenokoitai really gets interesting.

Paul is writing in Greek. He speaks Greek, most people in the Roman Empire spoke Greek. And even though Leviticus was originally written in Hebrew, the version which is most often quoted in the New Testament is the Greek version, the Septuagint. There the word arsenokoitai starts to be used, but again, not exactly to mean homosexual, in a way.

You see, the actual quote is problematic: You shall not lie with a male as with a woman. It seems self explanatory, only trust me, as with everything else we do in theology, it's a nightmare.

There is a caveat present in this verse which is uncommon. Other parts of the Bible deal with sexual sins, there are commands against sleeping with animals for instance, and they don't include the phrase 'as with a woman'. And that isn't because those were unisex commandments, there are separate ones for men and women. So it would appear that a man shall not lie with a goat in any manner, but shall not lie with a man as he would a woman. And this is fascinating.

Women and men were viewed differently in ancient times, they possessed vastly different social status. Not like today, we aren't talking about a gender income gap or representation in business. I mean women were property, akin to cattle for the most part.

Men on the other hand, well they had status, they had rights.

So to make a man into a woman was to reduce him from human to something akin to a beast. To treat a man 'as a woman' was to strip him of all dignity, all place in society, to deny him any vestige of self-esteem.

It is no wonder that even today we hear about stories of male rape from Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. It is still seen that for a man to be treated 'as a woman' that they are no longer human. Once we dehumanise people, it is much easier to commit atrocities against them.

Had Leviticus left out that simple phrase 'as with a woman', exactly as it does with other sexual sins, then a lot of this confusion would be cleared up. As it stands, since the passage Paul is referring to is ambiguous, we cannot use that to clear up ambiguity.

So what does this little technicality in language have to do with Paul and the gay men? More than we first think.

We've already looked at one Greek word which would be far more applicable to describe homosexuality than arenokoitai, and that was paiderasste, or even lakkoproktoi if we really want to just describe the act. Neither of those accepted words were used by Paul.

There is another word which some have argued should be in Corinthians: paiderastes or paiderastïs, boy lover. Paul avoids this word too, and that throws a fly in the ointment of the 'Bible only hates boy lovers, not gays' brigade. See, this stuff isn't easy.

And why does Paul use the passage from Leviticus at all? Surely he must know that it's ambiguous, that it too can be dismissed as a heirloom, a holdover from a different time. It is unlikely that any Greek speaker in Chloe's gathering in Corinth would be well versed enough in Septuagint Torah teachings to assume Paul meant 'gay', so it's a peculiar word for Paul to use if his message was an outright 'don't be gay'.

Placing Paul in context, he doesn't use the word arsenokoitai in isolation, he pairs it with malakoi. While this isn't a simple word to translate, it is a bit easier since this word does appear in places outside of the Pauline corpus. This could be the 'classical' gay man, the fop or dandy who spends a long time on his appearance, and is maybe a little effeminate with it. Placing these two words together gives us a different idea, and that is why some people think that it has far more to do with 'effeminising' a man, lowering his status to a woman, than our translations currently allow for.

There seems to be more an issue with power and status than with relationship here. It is even possible that these two phrases together are only discussing the use of forced male prostitution where one party is playing the role of the submissive. So not a transvestite who chooses to wear women's clothing, or someone with gender identity issues, rather it hints at a transaction of power where one party dominates another for his own needs, while stripping the other of dignity or playing upon the submissive nature of another. The idea that these two words convey a consenting adult relationship just isn't obvious.

At the same time, there is a chance that Paul meant exactly what we've translated him to say. Leviticus might have no ambiguity. The problem is that I cannot commit to that as a Bible scholar living in the 20^th Century. To the best of my learning, these phrases are far from cut and dried on either side.

And that is where I would like to end this blog, it is longer than usual, and it is quite different to what I usually write. Hopefully this will give you some idea as to why just using the Bible alone as a reason to base all social and theological thought is problematic. The Bible is problematic.

Of course we have not covered patterns of inclusion and any later development of thought, that would take much longer to cover and brings up huge questions on Biblical interpretation and inerrancy. I also hope that I have not offended any of you, I do value you all as readers. I just wanted to give you a little insight to why the questions I am asked on the Bible are rarely straight forward, on either side of an argument.

Thank you for your time.