Few topics generate more heat and less light in contemporary religious debate than homosexuality and Scripture. The same six biblical passages are invoked repeatedly by both sides, often stripped of their literary context, their historical background, and in the case of the New Testament, their original Greek. The result is a public conversation conducted largely in slogans rather than exegesis.
This article examines each of the six passages at length — what they say in their original context, how traditional interpreters have read them, and how affirming scholars have challenged those readings. It also covers the broader biblical theology of marriage that traditionalists bring to the debate, and the hermeneutical commitments that ultimately separate the two camps. Whatever position a reader holds, honest engagement with this material requires knowing what the texts actually say before deciding what they mean.
The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is the oldest and most dramatic biblical narrative cited in discussions of homosexuality. In the account, two angels arrive in Sodom and are offered hospitality by Lot, Abraham's nephew. Before the visitors retire for the night, men of the city surround Lot's house and demand that he bring out his guests so that they might "know" them — the Hebrew verb yada, which in context most scholars read as a sexual demand. Lot refuses, offering his daughters instead (a deeply troubling detail the text does not endorse). The angels strike the crowd blind, and God destroys both cities the following morning.
The traditional interpretation has held since at least the second century that the men of Sodom's demand was homosexual in nature, and that this was central to the divine judgment. This reading gave the English language the word "sodomy" and shaped Western legal and religious attitudes for over a millennium.
The challenge to this reading comes from within Scripture itself. The prophet Ezekiel, writing several centuries after the events, identifies Sodom's sins in strikingly different terms: "Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy." (Ezekiel 16:49) Sexual sin is mentioned in the following verse, but pride and failure of hospitality are listed first. The book of Jude (verse 7) refers to Sodom's "sexual immorality and perversion," which traditionalists take as confirmation of the sexual reading, while affirming scholars argue Jude's language may refer to the attempted violation of divine messengers — sex with angels — rather than homosexuality as such.
Jesus references Sodom three times in the Gospels (Matthew 10:15, 11:23–24, Luke 10:12), always in the context of failure to receive strangers and messengers — the hospitality framework — without any explicit reference to sexual conduct. This has led many scholars, including mainstream commentators in the New Interpreter's Bible, to conclude that the ancient Jewish reading of Sodom's sin was broader than the later Western Christian fixation on sexual conduct.
The honest conclusion is that Genesis 19 is ambiguous as a proof text specifically for homosexuality. It describes gang violence and attempted sexual assault — crimes of power and hospitality violation as much as sexual deviance — and the rest of Scripture interprets it in varied ways. Traditionalists are not wrong to note a sexual element in the narrative. Affirming scholars are not wrong to note that the text is a poor basis for a blanket prohibition of consensual same-sex relationships.
Leviticus 18:22 is the most cited single verse in the entire debate: "You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination." Unlike Genesis 19, this verse is direct and unambiguous in what it prohibits. The Hebrew word translated "abomination" — toevah — denotes something ritually impure or detestable, and appears throughout the Hebrew Bible to describe practices associated with pagan worship.
The verse sits within what scholars call the Holiness Code (Leviticus 17–26), a set of regulations given to Israel specifically to mark out the community as distinct from surrounding Canaanite and Egyptian cultures. The Holiness Code covers an extraordinarily wide range of behaviors: sexual ethics, agricultural practices, tattooing, the treatment of foreigners, the wearing of mixed-fabric garments, and the eating of shellfish. The same word toevah is used for the prohibition on eating shellfish (Leviticus 11:10–12).
Traditionalists make two responses to the mixed-fabrics objection. First, they argue that some Levitical laws are ceremonial (applicable only to ancient Israel) while others are moral (universally binding), and that the prohibition on male same-sex intercourse belongs to the moral category because it is grounded in creation order rather than Israelite ritual purity alone. Second, they note that the New Testament explicitly reaffirms the sexual prohibitions while never reaffirming the dietary or agricultural laws, suggesting the early church understood the distinction.
Affirming scholars counter that the New Testament's silence on the Levitical sexual laws is not the same as reaffirmation — Paul's vice lists use different Greek terms, not direct quotations from Leviticus. They also argue that toevah in its ancient context specifically flags behaviors associated with Canaanite cultic prostitution and idolatrous ritual, not a general moral category applicable across all cultures and times. On this reading, Leviticus 18:22 prohibited a specific practice in a specific cultic setting, not all expressions of same-sex attraction in every era.
Leviticus 20:13 repeats the prohibition of Leviticus 18:22 with the addition of penalties: "If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them." This verse appears in a section of Leviticus that attaches penalties to various sexual offenses, including adultery, incest, and bestiality, all of which carry capital sentences in the Mosaic law.
For traditional interpreters, the severity of the penalty confirms the seriousness of the offense and places it on a par with other sexual sins the broader Christian tradition has consistently condemned across the centuries. If adultery and incest are treated as moral absolutes rather than culturally conditioned Israelite rules, they argue, the same logic applies to same-sex intercourse.
Affirming scholars note that Christian theology has never advocated executing adulterers, and that Western legal systems abandoned Mosaic criminal penalties centuries ago. If the penalties are not carried forward into Christian ethics, they ask, on what basis are the prohibitions selectively retained? They also point out that the entire framework of Levitical law was understood by the early church as fulfilled and transformed in Christ — a theological position that complicates straightforward appeals to Mosaic statute for contemporary moral guidance.
Romans 1:26–27 is the most theologically developed New Testament passage on the subject and the one most widely cited in serious theological debate. Paul writes: "For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error."
Several features of this passage require careful attention. First, it is the only biblical text that explicitly references female same-sex behavior, not only male. Second, Paul frames same-sex conduct not as a sin for which people are condemned but as a consequence — God "giving people up" — of a prior, deeper sin: the rejection of the Creator in favor of idolatry (Romans 1:18–25). Third, the language of "natural" and "against nature" (para phusin in Greek) is drawn from Stoic philosophy, where "nature" meant the created order as God intended it — though Stoic writers also used the same phrase to describe non-procreative heterosexual acts.
Traditional interpreters regard this passage as Paul's clearest condemnation of homosexual behavior as such — not merely exploitative or cultic forms of it — because he describes the conduct itself as a sign of disordered desire resulting from idolatry. The reference to women engaging in same-sex relations rules out the argument that Paul was only addressing pederasty or master-slave exploitation.
Affirming scholars raise two major objections. First, they argue that Paul is describing the specific degraded sexual landscape of Greco-Roman pagan worship — particularly the cult prostitution associated with temples to figures such as Aphrodite — not the modern phenomenon of committed, faithful same-sex relationships, which had no conceptual framework in the ancient world. Second, and critically, they point to Romans 2:1, which follows immediately: "Therefore you have no excuse, O man, every one of you who judges. For in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, practice the very same things." On this reading, Romans 1 is a rhetorical setup — Paul is luring his self-righteous Jewish audience into agreeing with his condemnation of Gentile immorality before turning the critique directly back on them in chapter 2. The passage, in this interpretation, is less a systematic sexual ethics and more a homiletical trap about universal human sinfulness.
Whether or not one accepts the affirming reading of Romans 1, the rhetorical structure of Romans 1–2 is real and acknowledged by commentators across the theological spectrum. The passage is not a freestanding moral treatise; it is embedded in Paul's argument about universal guilt and the need for grace.
First Corinthians 6:9–10 is one of several Pauline vice lists — catalogues of behaviors that Paul says exclude people from the kingdom of God. In English translation (ESV), the list includes "the sexually immoral, idolaters, adulterers, men who practice homosexuality, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, swindlers." The phrase "men who practice homosexuality" in the ESV translates two separate Greek words: malakoi and arsenokoitai.
Malakoi literally means "soft ones." In classical Greek it was used to describe men who were considered effeminate, passive, or lacking in self-control. In sexual contexts it was sometimes used for the passive partner in male sexual relations, often in the context of exploitation or prostitution. The NIV has translated it "male prostitutes." The King James Version used "effeminate." Some scholars argue it refers to a broader moral category of self-indulgence rather than sexual conduct specifically.
Arsenokoitai is rarer and more contested. The word does not appear in any Greek text prior to Paul's use here, which has led some scholars to conclude that Paul may have coined it from the Septuagint (the Greek Old Testament) version of Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, where the words arsen (male) and koite (bed) appear in close proximity. If so, Paul may have deliberately constructed a term to evoke the Levitical prohibition. Traditionalists take this as confirmation that Paul intended to condemn male same-sex intercourse in general.
Affirming scholars respond that even if Paul coined the term from Leviticus, its precise meaning in a first-century Greco-Roman context may have been narrower than modern translations suggest — possibly referring specifically to men who exploit younger males, or to the active partner in commercial sexual exploitation. They note that the word appears in later Greek texts alongside terms for economic exploitation rather than in straightforwardly sexual contexts, suggesting the term may have carried connotations of coercion or abuse rather than consensual same-sex relations.
The honest assessment is that translation of these two terms is genuinely uncertain, and that the certainty projected by popular English Bible editions is not warranted by the underlying Greek. This does not mean the passage is without moral content — it means the moral content requires careful handling rather than casual citation.
The third New Testament passage is 1 Timothy 1:9–10, which appears in a discussion of the proper purpose of the Mosaic law: "...the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who strike their fathers and mothers, for murderers, the sexually immoral, men who practice homosexuality, enslavers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine."
The same Greek term arsenokoitai appears here, translated again as "men who practice homosexuality" in the ESV. The same translation debates apply. What is notable in this passage is its immediate context: Paul places arsenokoitai alongside "enslavers" — a term that in the nineteenth century was cited by abolitionists as a Pauline condemnation of the slave trade. If "enslavers" in this list is taken as a universal moral prohibition rather than a culturally specific reference, it strengthens the case for reading the surrounding terms as universal prohibitions too. Conversely, if arsenokoitai referred specifically to the sexual exploitation of enslaved persons — a common practice in the Roman world — then enslaving and sexual exploitation of the enslaved may be related concepts in the list rather than independent items.
The passage also emphasizes that the law's purpose is not to condemn the righteous but to expose the lawless. This framing has led some pastoral theologians to caution against deploying these vice lists as instruments of social condemnation rather than as mirrors for personal examination — precisely the use Paul appears to be making of them.
Traditionalists frequently note that while Jesus never explicitly addresses homosexuality, he does affirm a specific understanding of marriage. In Matthew 19:4–6, responding to a question about divorce from Pharisees, Jesus quotes Genesis: "Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, 'Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate." Mark 10:6–9 is a parallel account.
Traditional interpreters argue that Jesus's appeal to the creation narrative — "from the beginning" — signals that male-female complementarity in marriage is not a cultural arrangement but a creation ordinance embedded in human nature itself. This is sometimes called the "creation order" argument, and it forms the backbone of the traditional position's New Testament case: even without a direct Dominical prohibition of homosexuality, Jesus's positive affirmation of male-female marriage defines the normative framework within which human sexuality is meant to operate.
Affirming theologians make two responses. First, Jesus was answering a question about divorce, not issuing a comprehensive sexual ethics. The passage establishes the permanence of marriage, not a definition of who may enter it. Second, the absence of any statement by Jesus about same-sex relationships — in a culture where pederasty was widespread and visible — is itself significant. Whether that silence is read as implicit condemnation (he assumed the Levitical framework) or as conspicuous omission (he had opportunity to condemn it and did not) depends on prior interpretive commitments.
Paul's letter to the Ephesians develops the most theologically rich positive account of marriage in the New Testament. Drawing on Genesis 2:24, Paul writes: "Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church."
For traditional theologians, this passage does more than regulate conduct — it assigns marriage a sacramental and symbolic significance in which the differentiation of husband and wife images the differentiation of Christ and the Church. On this reading, the male-female structure of marriage is not incidental to its theological meaning but intrinsic to it: the husband's self-giving love images Christ's love for the Church; the wife's responsive trust images the Church's relationship to Christ. A same-sex union, however loving, cannot carry this particular symbolic weight because the gender differentiation is part of what the symbol requires.
Affirming theologians respond that this interpretation reads more into the analogy than Paul intends. Paul's point, they argue, is about the depth and self-sacrifice of marital love — a husband should love his wife as Christ loved the Church, giving himself up for her — not about gender as a theological category. The analogy, on this reading, is about the quality of the relationship, not its gender composition, and same-sex couples are capable of the same self-giving love Paul describes.
The traditional position rests on three interlocking arguments. First, the creation order argument: Genesis 1–2 establishes male-female complementarity as the design intention for human sexuality, and every biblical reference to marriage assumes this framework. Second, the consistency argument: prohibitions on male same-sex intercourse appear in the Law (Leviticus), in Paul's theological writing (Romans), and in his practical pastoral letters (1 Corinthians, 1 Timothy), suggesting a consistent moral tradition rather than a culturally contingent rule. Third, the New Testament reaffirmation argument: while the ceremonial and dietary laws of Leviticus are not carried forward in the New Testament, the sexual ethics are — both by Paul's explicit references and by the broader framework of the creation order Jesus affirms.
This is the position of the Southern Baptist Convention, the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox churches, and the majority of evangelical Protestant denominations globally. It is also the majority position among Christians worldwide when non-Western churches are included — a fact that tends to be underreported in Western media coverage of the debate.
The affirming position rests on its own set of interlocking arguments. First, the contextual argument: the biblical authors were addressing specific practices in their own cultural settings — gang sexual violence (Genesis 19), Canaanite cultic prostitution (Leviticus), Greco-Roman pagan excess and exploitation (Romans 1), and commercial sexual abuse (1 Corinthians, 1 Timothy) — none of which maps onto modern committed, faithful same-sex relationships. Second, the translation argument: the Greek terms in the New Testament are contested, and their rendering as "homosexuality" in modern English Bibles reflects twentieth-century interpretive choices, not self-evident lexical meanings. Third, the hermeneutical argument: the central trajectory of Scripture — from law toward grace, from exclusion toward inclusion, from ethnic particularity toward universal community — supports a reading that extends the covenant community's full membership to gay and lesbian Christians in committed relationships.
Denominations including The Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ, the Presbyterian Church (USA), and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America have moved formally in this direction. The Methodist Church in Britain voted in 2023 to allow same-sex marriages in its churches, marking a significant shift in a denomination with global reach.
Beneath both positions lies a deeper question that neither side can avoid: how does a community apply ancient texts to situations those texts did not anticipate? The Bible was written before the modern understanding of sexual orientation as a persistent, unchosen characteristic. The ancient world knew of same-sex acts; it had no concept of a gay person in the contemporary sense — someone whose emotional and sexual life is consistently oriented toward persons of the same sex from adolescence onward.
Traditionalists argue that this distinction is irrelevant: the Bible addresses acts, not orientations, and the acts remain prohibited regardless of the psychological framework used to describe the person performing them. Affirming scholars argue that the distinction is everything: the biblical authors were condemning exploitative or idolatrous acts, and the question of a faithful, committed same-sex relationship was simply not within their frame of reference — meaning the texts neither address nor prohibit what they had no category to imagine.
This is not a question that can be settled by reading the six passages more carefully. It is a question about how Scripture functions as moral authority — whether it provides timeless rules to be applied directly, or moral wisdom to be interpreted through the lens of the whole biblical narrative, cultural context, and ongoing theological reflection. Honest participants on both sides acknowledge this is the real divide, and that it is not resolved by citing Leviticus or by dismissing it.
The six core passages — Genesis 19, Leviticus 18:22, Leviticus 20:13, Romans 1:26–27, 1 Corinthians 6:9–10, and 1 Timothy 1:9–10 — constitute the entire explicit biblical basis for both sides of this argument. There are no hidden texts, no suppressed passages waiting to be discovered. The debate is entirely about what these six passages mean in their original languages, in their literary and historical contexts, and how much weight those ancient contexts should carry for communities living two or three thousand years later.
What the texts say is largely agreed upon. What they mean — and for whom, and in what circumstances — is the genuine controversy. Anyone who tells you that question has an obvious answer that requires no serious engagement with the scholarship has not read the scholarship. That applies equally to traditionalists who wave Leviticus as a conversation-ender and to affirming Christians who dismiss the same passages as simply irrelevant. The texts are real. The debate is real. The scholarship on both sides is serious. It deserves to be treated that way.
Source: Pride Month Triggers Annual British Competition To Quote The Six Bible Verses — The London Prat | The Six Bible Verses For Pride Month — Bohiney.com