this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2026
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[–] Estiar@sh.itjust.works 1 points 10 hours ago

I have an academic article for you! DOI 10.1177/0142064X05057772

In 2005, J David Hester challenge the more than 1500-year-old assumption that eunuchs did not actually mean eunichs, and instead simply meant celibate priests. In fact, eunuchs were not celibate at all. To make a long article short, ancient gender systems were different than our modern understanding of gender. However, the church revised even their understanding of gender to erase the classical understanding of a eunuch. In the ancient world, the inability to procreate was the idea of the inability to have sex. Therefore, eunuchs could not have sex, and if one became a eunuch, they rejected sex. Of course, people in the ancient world were not quite thrilled to see people have pleasure and not have sex. It undermined social order of the time where men dominated all of discourse. They were reviled for their rejection of marriage and sex. They were able to tie the institutions of public male life and private female life together and were quite powerful. It's quite queer, and Jesus would have known the implications of urging people to be eunuchs. In fact, people would have taunted him and his unmarried disciples and called him a eunuch. This led to an order of Christian eunuchs who did live like these other eunuchs. It was a few centuries later at the council of nicaea where it was actually decided to renegotiate what the word "eunuchs" meant in Matthew 19. They drew upon stoic philosophy and changed it into a male-dominated celibate priesthood. After all, eunuchs were a threat to the male-dominated world and men could claim that title of the most devoted. They were attacked by figures like St. Augustine who said that their nature was contrary to nature.

Regarding homosexuality itself, though, we've renegotiated how sex and gender work throughout the ages. According to Dan McClellan's book The Bible Says So, the term that we commonly see as homosexual in the the new testament, malakoi does not refer to a homosexual, but only refers to those who are the "bottom" in sex. A man could even be 'gay' if he took the bottom role in sex with his own wife. To put it in modern terms, femboys will not inherit the kingdom of heaven. With regards to the Hebrew Bible, (or the Old testament,) it's largely the same dynamic. Within the book Leviticus, they believe that it is an abomination before God and therefore their holy people should not engage in such acts else they will be literally vomited out of the land. It was still worse to be a bottom, but for the land to not reject the people, they wanted to put both parties to death. The punishment is more severe here than rape or incest.

So the thing about lgbtq people in the Bible is that we're trying to apply ancient social constructs to our own social constructs that we have 2,000 years later. They certainly aren't one-to-one. I don't believe that the Bible is always true, especially since it contradicts itself quite a lot. I believe it is primarily a book written by mankind and therefore reflects those same errors and biases. Likewise, the church perpetuates those same biases and even inserts more biases.