"Homosexuality" in the Greco-Roman world vs. today  

In the Bible days, Greco-Roman society celebrated male-male sex.  This was in great contrast to the Jewish culture of ancient Israel where any male-male sex appears to have been extremely closeted due to religious taboos.  According to the Greeks, women were married to supply one with legitimate offspring, but all of a man’s real life occurred outside the home—away from his house-servant-wife who stayed at home and had no life.

Along these lines, the philosophers sang the praises of adult male relationships with boys and male youths (pederasty).  At their best, adult males saw pederasty as being primarily a mentoring relationship—although they sang praises of the sex, too.  Pederasty was so common and praised that some scholars go so far as to argue that the only male-male sex this culture knew of was pederast.  As for the ethics of pederasty, the only real argument seems to have been whether boy prostitutes and boy slaves purchased as sex toys were abuses of the ideal pederastic relationship, for these involved little, if any, mentoring.  It should be noted that youth-adult relationships were also common in Judaism, for rabbinical sources envision twelve as the ideal age for Jewish girls at first marriage.

Today, male-male relationships are said to be “homosexual”—a word coined in the late 19^th century.  Homosexuals by definition are “persons sexually attracted to persons of the same sex.”  Thus, we often speak of a person’s “sexual orientation”—gay, lesbian, bisexual or heterosexual.  In contrast, pederasty is at base a debate over age of consent (i.e., youth-adult relationships).  The point is that the morality of “homosexuality” and “pederasty” are separate questions, and the current debate over homosexuality has virtually nothing in common with the culture of youth-adult relationships known to the ancient Greek philosophers and their biblical critics.

Therefore, even if the Bible condemns the “homosexuality” of the Greco-Roman society, we can only say for certain that it was condemning some or at most all forms of pederasty, not modern homosexuality.  Why?  Because we would be violating the historical context of these texts if we fail to wrestle with the truth that homosexuality in our historical context isn’t even remotely like that which occurred in the Greco-Roman world.  Homosexuality today may be a sin in the eyes of some, but you won’t prove it by referring to texts that at most are merely condemning pederasty!