What did jesus say about same sex marriage
This article is part of the What Did Jesus Teach? series.
Silence Equals Support?
In a article for Slate online, Will Oremus asked a provocative question: Was Jesus a homophobe?1
The article was occasioned by a story about a gay teenager in Ohio who was suing his high institution after school officials prohibited him from wearing a T-shirt that said, “Jesus Is Not a Homophobe.”
Oremus was less concerned about the legal issues of the story than he was about the accuracy of the statement on the shirt. Oremus suggests that Jesus’s views on homosexuality were more inclusive than Paul’s. He writes,
While it’s reasonable to assume that Jesus and his fellow Jews in first-century Palestine would have disapproved of gay sex, there is no write down of his ever having mentioned homosexuality, let alone expressed particular revulsion about it. . . . Never in the Bible does Jesus himself offer an explicit prohibition of homosexuality.
Oremus seems to suggest that since Jesus never explicitly mentioned homosexuality, he must not have been very concerned about it.
There are at least two reas
A Secret Same-Sex Marriage in Scripture?
So even if the centurion and his servant did have a sexual relationship, it does not follow that Jesus’ miracle affirmed every aspect of that relationship. In fact, the word “relationship” is really a euphemism, because this would be a case of an older man purchasing a younger male for sexual purposes, or what we would call a “sex slave.” I doubt that the revisionist critic would describe this episode by saying, “Jesus restores a master-slave relationship by a miracle of healing and then holds up a sex-trafficker as an example of faith for all to follow.”
The authors of this article admit that this relationship may seem “repugnant,” but they define it away by saying that marriage in the same period period was also basically a kind of slavery, so what’s the big deal? They scribble, “In that culture, if you were a gay man who wanted a male ‘spouse,’ you achieved this, like your heterosexual counterparts, through a commercial transaction—purchasing someone to serve that purpose. A servant purchased to attend this purpose was often called a p The Bible defines marriage in Genesis as a union between one man and one woman. Jesus Christ upholds this definition of marriage in Matthew , as does the Apostle Paul in Ephesians Any and all sexual activity which takes place outside of this context is treated as sinful, what Jesus calls ‘sexual immorality’ in Mark Further to this, same-sex practice is specifically highlighted as sinful a number of times in Scripture. In God’s Law, for example, condemnations of same-sex practice are given in Leviticus and Further references are made in the New Testament. For example, in Romans , amid echoes to the Genesis creation account, both male and female same-sex verb are treated as sinful. Further references to the sinfulness of same-sex practice can be seen in 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy The Scriptures are, therefore, consistent in their prohibition of same-sex sexual activity, across other periods of salvation history and within different cultural settings. Although the Scriptures are clear on sexual ethics, they also Answer What does the Bible tutor about same-sex practice?
What does the Bible say about gay marriage?
The Bible says nothing about gay marriage directly, but it does set down the foundational principles of what constitutes marriagein God’s eyes. Every reference to marriage in the Bible indicates a union of male and female. The first description of marriage coincides with the creation of Eve in Genesis 2. According to that passage, marriage takes place when “a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh” (Genesis ).
In passages that contain instructions regarding marriage, such as 1 Corinthians –16 and Ephesians –33, the Bible clearly identifies marriage as being between a man and a woman. Biblically speaking, marriage is the union of a gentleman and a woman in a lifetime commitment. Primary purposes of marriage are to illustrate the relationship between Christ and the church (see Ephesians –33) and to build a family and provide a stable, secure environment for that family to expand. As families prosper, so does society at large, and solid families contribute to stable soci