Whatcha call “Reading Way Too Much Into the Text”

Turns out the Roman Centurion and his servant were a married gay couple, according to this extremely tendentious exegete.

More of that semi-permeable membrane of Protestantism at work. It works like this:

1. If a thing is condemned by the Church, but permitted by the Protestant (say, gay marriage) the demand is for an explicit text forbidding it (“Show me where Jesus said one word about not allowing gay marriage! That’s just the Church imposing its purely human ideas on what Jesus came to say.”).

2. Conversely, if a thing is allowed by the Church but condemned by the Protestant, the demand is for an explicit text commanding it. So, for instance, we get demands like, “Where in the Bible do you find anyone asking us to pray to dead people? That’s just the Church imposing it’s purely human ideas on what Jesus came to say.”

In the case of this site, we see strategy #1 in action. However, coupled with that is a secondary strategy consisting of basically ignoring the constant and repeated testimony of Scripture when it does explicitly address homosexual practice (“Oh, that’s just the Old Testament” “Paul was only speaking about homosex when practiced by people who aren’t really gay” “Paul perverted Jesus true message of love. etc.”) and most especially, torturing an ambiguous text until it says what you want. So, in this case, you take a Greek word which the author himself acknowledges has a wide range of meanings and frog march it into a tiny cell where it is only allowed to mean what the author wants it to mean, all while ignoring the bleedin’ obvious fact that the early Church and NT period Judaism regarded homosexual acts as sinful and unnatural. It’s phony as a three dollar bill.

If you look over on the left rail of the page, you find similar attempts to torque the text into the service of gay agitprop. Every reference to love between two people of the same gender becomes “proof” of divine approval for homosexual acts. Even Jesus’ rather obvious allusion to the virtue of celibacy and virginity becomes a proof text that “some are born gay”.

A particularly obvious example of how Latest Real Jesuses are manufactured in the image and likeness of the Manufacturers.