Justin--A person who does not see that Jesus condemned same sex relations is, I think, out of focus. We don't have the exact Aramaic words Jesus spoke for much of anthing, but, in the Koine in which the New Testament was written, the writer of Matthew quotes Jesus as using the word "porneia" in a discussion of marriage and what can defile it. (Matt. 19:9)

"Porneia" was a generic, or catch-all, term for sexual immorality. Under it fell such actions as fornication, adultery, bestiality, and, not suprisingly, what we call now "homosexuality."

The word "porneia" was to same sex relations as the modern English word "vegetables" is to carrots, onions, peas, broccoli, etc. It is used a couple of dozen times in the NT. Translators usually try to narrow the meaning as much as context will permit, but there is never a time when translating it as "sexual immorality" would be incorrect.

When Jews of Jesus' time heard a generic reference to sexual immorality they definitely included same sex relations. Indeed, they was a death penalty offense. That is how seriously they viewed it. In their eyes same sex realtions were , like adultery, an impure mixture.

The ancients, neither gentile nor Jew, didn't really conceptualize anything corresponding to our modern category of homosexuality. For that matter, the OED lists the first use of the term in English in 1897. Havelock Ellis used it, and related terms like "homosexual" as part of an attempt to understand it from a scientific standpoint.

Of course, people had noticed the activity from time immemorial, but nobody that I can think of conceptualized a group of people that were "homosexual." They just thought of it as something some people did sometimes. Anyone might do it, and might even do it a lot. Sometimes it was punished, sometimes merely derided, more or less, good naturedly. The late Plato in The Laws thought it merited expulsion from the city, possibly even the death penalty. Earlier in a work like The Symposium he depicted characters teasing other characters about it.

Shockingly, to us, the only version of it among the Greeks that was semi-accepted is what we call pedophilia or epebephilia. The idea was that physical love between the quite young and the much older was the first rung on a ladder that led to a purely spiritual engergy (almost what we would call grace.) It was Venus leading to Eros.

But same sex marriage was certainly not permitted in Greece even amidst the decadent Hellenistic phase.

Later, Roman legionnaires had a famous rhyme comically mocking Julius Ceasar for, well, winding up on the bottom, so to speak. Juvenal bitterly satirized men who seemed enmeshed in it.

Much later, Dante placed people who engaged in it in the same circle of Hell as the counterfeiters. But he didn't conceive of them as homosexuals-- just as people who had a very sinful habit.

The mention of something countefeit brings us back to Matt. 19:9 and, more generally, how the Jews viewed marriage. The stress was on a man and a woman who become one flesh. Maleness and femaleness were a sine qua non of a pure and genuine union. The union of the two represented the relationship of God to humanity. Christians later amplified this notion, especially as seeing an image of Christ and the Church. Not to have a male and a female is to countefeit the whole shebang.

In graf 4, that should read, "that was a death penalty offense."

My own editing mangled my prose, hehehehe...