http://anthropologist.livejournal.com/1314574.html
==> Adam and Steve
- CuteOldGuy
- 05-16-2012, 11:09 PM
I personally think this is a non-issue, but I ran across this perspective today. I'll admit, I haven't heard this before, and I won't vouch for the veracity of the author. Still, it bears some consideration.
http://anthropologist.livejournal.com/1314574.html
==> Adam and Steve
http://anthropologist.livejournal.com/1314574.html
==> Adam and Steve
- I B Hankering
- 05-17-2012, 10:30 AM
A rebuttal to LBGT activist Professor John Boswell’s revisionist works:
http://www.williamapercy.com/wiki/in...he_Middle_Ages
"Boswell's attempt to find medieval precedents for gay marriages is misleading. True, he has assembled neglected documents in Greek and Old Slavic tongues from various archives that bless male couples. Not one of his 'many' Orthodox liturgies, however, sanctions carnal unions; in fact, they always specify 'spiritual brotherhood' or 'absence of scandal.'
This clearly implies that they are not, unlike heterosexual marriages, to be carnal. Churches which demanded celibacy for monks and bishops and allowed matrimony only for those too weak to abstain from sex altogether would hardly have sanctioned what they called “unnatural” sex or the 'abominable sin against nature.” In neither the Jewish nor the Christian scriptures is there a single endorsement of samesex sex. 'The Old Testament', on the other hand, imposed death on 'males who lie with males as with females' and St. Paul condemned not only men who slept with men, but lesbianism, thus going beyond the Jewish scriptures. Not a single Christian Father, Penitentialist, Scholastic or Canonist, Protestant Reformer or Catholic Counter-Reformer or even any Orthodox, Coptic or Nertorian ever wrote even a neutral, much less a kind, word about sodomites.
"Boswell’s new tome, Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe follows the same pattern as his Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality. Both have frequent, complex footnotes in numerous languages. Both exonerate Christians, particularly Roman Catholics, from guilt for persecution of gays, for which they have not apologized as they have for their anti-Semitism. Instead of detailing the denunciations, trials, tortures and executions of sodomites by the Church itself and by lay authorities inspired by Christian homophobia as Bullough, Compton, Goodich, Dynes, Lauritson and Johansson have done, Boswell has perversely tried to whitewash the homophobia of Christians who lived before 1200.
"Christian marriage was designed to reduce concupiscence and to provide heirs, not to give mutual pleasure or even to provide companionship. Boswell imagined that these same-sex unions, as he described them, that he found in Greek and Slavic had parallels in Latin for Catholics but that they have been lost. That may be, but such asexual brotherhoods can serve as precursors for modern (homosexual) gay marriage only by a wide stretch of the imagination and with blatant disregard for both scripture and tradition.
"Boswell was honest enough to translate in one of his liturgies for spiritual brotherhood a prohibition against sodomy but then he twisted the facts by claiming unconvincingly that sodomy was “not understood by Jews or Christians of the Middle Ages as a reference to homosexual love”. Despite Boswell's assertion that there was not much criticism of his earlier work, his tired old argument, following the disputed Ezekiel 16:49, that Sodom was destroyed for inhospitality has been amply refuted by all competent scholars, Christian, Jewish and atheist. In the battle of gays and lesbians for equality, distorting the past by 'uncovering' liturgies for samesex carnal unions will do no more good than blaming homophobia or even homosexuality itself on capitalist oppression as many Marxists have done. Instead of trying to rewrite history to justify their current desires, gay scholars must recognize Christianity and Judaism as sources of homophobia. Christian denunciation of sodomy has been continual.
"All Boswell’s erudition and hairsplitting can't make a gay marriage out of a spiritual bonding. The modern redefinition of marriage as primarily for companionship and as a source of mutual pleasure, support, or comfort which he discusses would have been incomprehensible to medieval (clerical) theorists. Boswell can’t name a single pair, except perhaps Basil I who assassinated his lover Michael III, blessed by the liturgies that he found. Some couples, even those so blessed, may indeed have had homosexual relations, but the Orthodox Church, which condemned sodomites to death, did not, as he implies, intend for them to. Although some medieval Christians deemed the sins of the flesh whether lust, sloth or gluttony less grave than those of the spirit anger, envy, greed and pride none ever condoned any sexual act outside marriage and even within it permitted it only for procreation. Even if one lusted after one’s own wife, one committed adultery. Churches with such antisexual attitudes did not conceivably authorize homosex of any sort, under any condition, much less construct liturgies to sanctify the joining together of two sodomites for sex.
". . . it will not help to distort history in an overenthusiastic attempt to find precedents.
"Whether there were gays in the Middle Ages as Boswell stated in his earlier book and insisted in an article, or even homosexuals (understood as a type of person), as opposed to merely persons indulging in sodomy, is an ongoing debate. But that established churches condoned such 'sins' and created liturgies to bless couples so engaged (the love so decadent and unnatural it was not even supposed to be mentioned among Christians) is an anachronistic twist not heretofore imagined and should not be taken seriously."
Another rebuttal:
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/pwh/bosdisc-carlson.asp
"The fact that the ARSENOKOITHS is already a rare term, euphemistic, and apparently coined within a small Christian community to allude to a Levitical prohibition readily explains why other Christian writers would use words that were either more current or provocative. . . .
"The rest of Boswell's analysis is a discussion of the later Byzantine usage of the term. From a methodological standpoint, this evidence is not all that probative, because words can change meaning over time. In fact, this appears to be the case: after the word dropped out of use for some time, it was brought back to mean 'anal intercourse,' similar to the sense development of the English word 'sodomy.' This later meaning makes more sense if the term originally related to homosexuality rather than prostitution.
"Not only is his Byzantine analysis methologically poor, his treatment of one of the examples is positively misleading: He buries the argument into a footnote, makes a mild concession ('though somewhat ambiguous'), boldly asserts the meaning he wishes it would say ('strongly implies an equation . . . with GUNAIKES ATIMOI, i.e. , female prostitutes' [ sic , actually 'shameless women']), presents the word within a seven-line mass of untranslated, untransliterated Greek, and then says it is of too late origin in any case. [Boswell at 350 n.43].
"While this technique may intimidate the average reader, who does not know Greek, the quotation actually has a very interesting clause:
Often the evidence about a word's meaning in a certain context is not conclusive but merely indicative. When the best and strongest evidence consistently points to the same conclusion, however, we can become more confident. In this case, the immediate context of the word ARSENOKOITHS, all throughout the New Testament, its Septuagint parallels, and its usage among the Apostolic Fathers, like Polycarp, all point to a meaning of a homosexual and not a male prostitute. Boswell's general argument, apart from a facile consideration of the context, relies too much on the argument from silence and an egregious etymological analysis. Whatever one thinks of the residual uncertainty in concluding that ARSENOKOITHS means a homosexual, one can say that this sense is much more probable than Boswell's."
http://www.williamapercy.com/wiki/in...he_Middle_Ages
"Boswell's attempt to find medieval precedents for gay marriages is misleading. True, he has assembled neglected documents in Greek and Old Slavic tongues from various archives that bless male couples. Not one of his 'many' Orthodox liturgies, however, sanctions carnal unions; in fact, they always specify 'spiritual brotherhood' or 'absence of scandal.'
This clearly implies that they are not, unlike heterosexual marriages, to be carnal. Churches which demanded celibacy for monks and bishops and allowed matrimony only for those too weak to abstain from sex altogether would hardly have sanctioned what they called “unnatural” sex or the 'abominable sin against nature.” In neither the Jewish nor the Christian scriptures is there a single endorsement of samesex sex. 'The Old Testament', on the other hand, imposed death on 'males who lie with males as with females' and St. Paul condemned not only men who slept with men, but lesbianism, thus going beyond the Jewish scriptures. Not a single Christian Father, Penitentialist, Scholastic or Canonist, Protestant Reformer or Catholic Counter-Reformer or even any Orthodox, Coptic or Nertorian ever wrote even a neutral, much less a kind, word about sodomites."Boswell’s new tome, Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe follows the same pattern as his Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality. Both have frequent, complex footnotes in numerous languages. Both exonerate Christians, particularly Roman Catholics, from guilt for persecution of gays, for which they have not apologized as they have for their anti-Semitism. Instead of detailing the denunciations, trials, tortures and executions of sodomites by the Church itself and by lay authorities inspired by Christian homophobia as Bullough, Compton, Goodich, Dynes, Lauritson and Johansson have done, Boswell has perversely tried to whitewash the homophobia of Christians who lived before 1200.
"Christian marriage was designed to reduce concupiscence and to provide heirs, not to give mutual pleasure or even to provide companionship. Boswell imagined that these same-sex unions, as he described them, that he found in Greek and Slavic had parallels in Latin for Catholics but that they have been lost. That may be, but such asexual brotherhoods can serve as precursors for modern (homosexual) gay marriage only by a wide stretch of the imagination and with blatant disregard for both scripture and tradition.
"Boswell was honest enough to translate in one of his liturgies for spiritual brotherhood a prohibition against sodomy but then he twisted the facts by claiming unconvincingly that sodomy was “not understood by Jews or Christians of the Middle Ages as a reference to homosexual love”. Despite Boswell's assertion that there was not much criticism of his earlier work, his tired old argument, following the disputed Ezekiel 16:49, that Sodom was destroyed for inhospitality has been amply refuted by all competent scholars, Christian, Jewish and atheist. In the battle of gays and lesbians for equality, distorting the past by 'uncovering' liturgies for samesex carnal unions will do no more good than blaming homophobia or even homosexuality itself on capitalist oppression as many Marxists have done. Instead of trying to rewrite history to justify their current desires, gay scholars must recognize Christianity and Judaism as sources of homophobia. Christian denunciation of sodomy has been continual.
"All Boswell’s erudition and hairsplitting can't make a gay marriage out of a spiritual bonding. The modern redefinition of marriage as primarily for companionship and as a source of mutual pleasure, support, or comfort which he discusses would have been incomprehensible to medieval (clerical) theorists. Boswell can’t name a single pair, except perhaps Basil I who assassinated his lover Michael III, blessed by the liturgies that he found. Some couples, even those so blessed, may indeed have had homosexual relations, but the Orthodox Church, which condemned sodomites to death, did not, as he implies, intend for them to. Although some medieval Christians deemed the sins of the flesh whether lust, sloth or gluttony less grave than those of the spirit anger, envy, greed and pride none ever condoned any sexual act outside marriage and even within it permitted it only for procreation. Even if one lusted after one’s own wife, one committed adultery. Churches with such antisexual attitudes did not conceivably authorize homosex of any sort, under any condition, much less construct liturgies to sanctify the joining together of two sodomites for sex.
". . . it will not help to distort history in an overenthusiastic attempt to find precedents.
"Whether there were gays in the Middle Ages as Boswell stated in his earlier book and insisted in an article, or even homosexuals (understood as a type of person), as opposed to merely persons indulging in sodomy, is an ongoing debate. But that established churches condoned such 'sins' and created liturgies to bless couples so engaged (the love so decadent and unnatural it was not even supposed to be mentioned among Christians) is an anachronistic twist not heretofore imagined and should not be taken seriously."
Another rebuttal:
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/pwh/bosdisc-carlson.asp
"The fact that the ARSENOKOITHS is already a rare term, euphemistic, and apparently coined within a small Christian community to allude to a Levitical prohibition readily explains why other Christian writers would use words that were either more current or provocative. . . .
"The rest of Boswell's analysis is a discussion of the later Byzantine usage of the term. From a methodological standpoint, this evidence is not all that probative, because words can change meaning over time. In fact, this appears to be the case: after the word dropped out of use for some time, it was brought back to mean 'anal intercourse,' similar to the sense development of the English word 'sodomy.' This later meaning makes more sense if the term originally related to homosexuality rather than prostitution.
"Not only is his Byzantine analysis methologically poor, his treatment of one of the examples is positively misleading: He buries the argument into a footnote, makes a mild concession ('though somewhat ambiguous'), boldly asserts the meaning he wishes it would say ('strongly implies an equation . . . with GUNAIKES ATIMOI, i.e. , female prostitutes' [ sic , actually 'shameless women']), presents the word within a seven-line mass of untranslated, untransliterated Greek, and then says it is of too late origin in any case. [Boswell at 350 n.43].
"While this technique may intimidate the average reader, who does not know Greek, the quotation actually has a very interesting clause:
hOI DE ECW TOUTWN REMBOMENOI, TAS PARA FUSIN hHDONAS METERXONTAI, ARSENOKOITEIN EPIZHTOUNTES, . . .
But those who roam outside of these, they seek after pleasures against nature, desiring to [ARSENOKOITEIN]. (Translation mine.)"Compare the similar phrase 'PARA FUSIN' (against nature) in Rm1:26. The connection between the arsenokoitai and the GUNAIKES ATIMOI is far from clear: 'KAI TIS ME: hHSUKAZWN ALLA REMBOMENOS, TOIS KATHGORHMASI KOINWNHSEI THS ATIMOU GUNAIKOS.' (and anyone who is not quiet but roams, shares in the accusations of the shameless woman.) (Translation mine). The roaming is referring to those 'roaming the streets who accept the designs of adultery, fornication, and theft' also in the passage.
Often the evidence about a word's meaning in a certain context is not conclusive but merely indicative. When the best and strongest evidence consistently points to the same conclusion, however, we can become more confident. In this case, the immediate context of the word ARSENOKOITHS, all throughout the New Testament, its Septuagint parallels, and its usage among the Apostolic Fathers, like Polycarp, all point to a meaning of a homosexual and not a male prostitute. Boswell's general argument, apart from a facile consideration of the context, relies too much on the argument from silence and an egregious etymological analysis. Whatever one thinks of the residual uncertainty in concluding that ARSENOKOITHS means a homosexual, one can say that this sense is much more probable than Boswell's."