The Bible and homosexuality

Direct references to homosexual activity in the Bible are relatively few. Traditional Jewish and Christian societies have interpreted these passages as moral imperatives forbidding all forms of homosexual activity, but modern liberal biblical scholarship tends rather to attempt to understand them within the context of the societies which produced them.

Passages in the Old Testament book Leviticus that prohibit "lying with mankind as with womankind: it is abomination" and the story of Sodom and Gomorrah have historically been interpreted as condemning homosexual acts , as have several Pauline passages. Today too some interpreters uphold that understanding of these passages, while other interpreters maintain that they do not condemn homosexuality, saying that historical context suggests other interpretations or that rare or unusual words in the passages may not be referring to homosexuality.

The passages about homosexual individuals and sexual relations in the Hebrew Bible are found primarily in the Torah (the first five books traditionally attributed to Moses ). Leviticus 20 is a comprehensive discourse on detestable sexual acts. Some texts included in the New Testament also reference homosexual individuals and sexual relations, such as the Gospel of Matthew , the Gospel of Luke , and Pauline epistles originally directed to the early Christian churches in Asia Minor . Both references in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament have been interpreted as referring primarily to male homosexual individuals and sexual practices , though the term homosexual was never used as it was not coined until the 19th century. In Frontain, Raymond-Jean (ed.). Reclaiming the Sacred: The Bible in Gay and Lesbian Culture (2nd ed.). "Getting at the "History behind the History" " .