![\"Romans](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/361\/2013\/10\/vaticanus.jpg\")
Whenever I\u2019m debating with someone who authoritatively declares that the Bible condemns homosexuality, and who cites the infamous Romans 1:26-27 as proof, I almost always offer this rejoinder: \u201cWhat do you make of the vocative at the beginning of Romans 2?\u201d<\/p>\n
The question is admittedly pretentious on my part but I\u2019ve found it effective, because those often most eager to wield the Bible as an authoritative weapon are also often those who have read it only in translation, and not very closely at that.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s not an idle question.<\/p>\n
Anyone who has engaged the issue of sexuality and the Bible has at some point contended with Romans 1:26-27: \u201cFor this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.\u201d (NRSV)<\/p>\n
Sounds pretty bad, and indeed, so does the entire last half of the first chapter of Romans. Who, broadly, is being described here? Most agree it\u2019s the Gentiles, and most agree that what is being represented here is boilerplate, Hellenistic Jewish material that attacks the Gentiles. But the condemnatory nature of the verses from 1:18-32 also fits awkwardly, if at all, with the spirit of the rest of the epistle, which goes from talking about the \u201cuprightness of God\u201d in the early verses to suddenly referring to the \u201canger of God\u201d here, an anger that God uses to \u201chand over\u201d these people to all manner of horrible behaviors.<\/p>\n
But then, they\u2019re Gentiles. They\u2019re rotten, horrible individuals. Did you hear the sorts of things they do? In fact, as pointed out by scholar Calvin Porter, \u201cthey\u201d recurs in this section with striking concentration, with repetition of the third-person pronoun \u03b1\u1f50\u03c4\u03cc\u03c2 thirteen times, the reflexive (\u201cthemselves\u201d) once, and third-person plural verbs over and over: \u201cNo other section of Romans contains such a concentration,\u201d he observes.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s even more striking, notes Porter, is what comes next: an abrupt change to the second person in Romans 2:1:<\/p>\n
\u201cTherefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things.\u201d<\/p>\n
Here, then, is the vocative in the Greek, \u201cOh man,\u201d a grammatical case used for direct address: \u1f66 \u1f04\u03bd\u03b8\u03c1\u03c9\u03c0\u03b5. And this takes us to the question I have posed to those who repeat 1:26-27 in condemnation. Who\u2019s the \u1f04\u03bd\u03b8\u03c1\u03c9\u03c0\u03bf\u03c2 that Paul\u2019s addressing here?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s actually a very big question.<\/p>\n
Scholarship has been preoccupied often with the content of verses 1:26-27 to the distraction of its context. Scholars such as James Miller<\/a> and Mark D. Smith<\/a> have gone back and forth as to whether the behavior described in those verses can be considered \u201chomosexual\u201d from our culture\u2019s standpoint, or whether they refer to something else entirely. But an even more interesting angle surfaced in Roy Bowen Ward\u2019s<\/a> entry into the fray: \u201cIt is still open to question whether these two verses represent Paul\u2019s voice or the voice of a rhetorical spokesperson in Rom 1:18-32, whom the apostle criticizes beginning in Rom 2:1.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s right. Some scholarship of late, of which Porter\u2019s article<\/a> is the most thorough example, has noted that Romans 1:18-32 does not represent Paul\u2019s view, but the prevailing view of Gentiles among many Jews at the time, which this apostle to the Gentiles feels compelled to refute. Building off of the scholarship of J.C. O\u2019Neill<\/a> (who calls it \u201ca traditional tract which belongs essentially to the missionary literature of Hellenistic Judaism\u201d) and E.P. Sanders<\/a> (who explains that \u201cPaul takes over to an unusual degree homiletical material from Diaspora Judaism\u201d), Porter ultimately concludes that \u201cin 2:1-16, as well as through Romans as a whole, Paul, as part of his Gentile mission, challenges, argues against, and refutes both the content of the discourse and the practice of using such discourses. If that is the case then the ideas in Rom. 1.18-32 are not Paul\u2019s. They are ideas which obstruct Paul\u2019s Gentile mission theology and practice.\u201d<\/p>\n Other explanations of what \u1f66 \u1f04\u03bd\u03b8\u03c1\u03c9\u03c0\u03b5 is doing here are less satisfactory. Some have suggested that Paul is sincerely making these condemnations, stressing here (but only here) God\u2019s anger instead of his kindness (as in 2:4), and then he imagines some onlooker applauding what he\u2019s saying and turns to address him, condemning him for judging but somehow still agreeing with the content of what was just said.<\/p>\n Porter\u2019s argument (which he thoroughly supports with rhetorical models from antiquity) makes much more sense: that the arguments present in the last half of Romans 1 were typical of those made by Hellenistic Jews to distinguish themselves from the Gentiles (thus the repeated use of \u201cthey\u201d as noted before), and Paul, as an apostle to the Gentiles, finds this condemnation problematic and thus seeks to refute it, leading up ultimately to his similar conclusion in Romans 14:13, using strikingly similar language to that in 2:1: \u201cLet us therefore no longer pass judgment on one another, but resolve instead never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of another.\u201d<\/p>\n Paul goes on to offer advice on healing the rifts between Jew and Gentile, so Porter\u2019s reading is compelling, and certainly the best I\u2019ve seen for answering the question of who\u2019s being addressed in 2:1: \u201cThe shift to the direct address, the second person singular, along with the coordinating conjunction, \u03b4\u03b9\u03cc, indicates that the reader who agrees with or is responsible for 1.18-32 is now the person addressed.\u201d<\/p>\n Of course, there will be all sorts of arguments apologizing for the words of 2:1 so that one can keep the words of 1:26-27 as a straight-up, unambiguous condemnation, which one can then rely upon to rationalize all manner of discrimination against gays and lesbians. But the flurry of scholarship on this score, not to mention all of that preoccupied with the words of 1:26-27 themselves, should in the very least make it clear that it\u2019s not all that clear.<\/p>\n It\u2019s yet another example of how close study of the Bible \u2013 in this case, the function of a single word \u2013 raises far more questions than it does answers.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Whenever I\u2019m debating with someone who authoritatively declares that the Bible condemns homosexuality, and who cites the infamous Romans 1:26-27 as proof, I almost always offer this rejoinder: What do you make of the vocative at the beginning of Romans 2? It’s not an idle question.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1591,"featured_media":8668,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[110],"tags":[539,137,215],"class_list":["post-588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-christian-issues","tag-homosexual","tag-lgbt-2","tag-romans"],"yoast_head":"\n
\n![\"Don](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/361\/2013\/06\/burrows.jpg\" "\\"Don")
About Don M. Burrows<\/strong>
\nDon M. Burrows is a former journalist and current college preparatory school teacher. Don holds a Ph.D. in Classical Studies from the University of Minnesota. A former Christian fundamentalist, Don is now a member of the United Church of Christ and contends most firmly that the Bible cannot be read or explored without appreciating its ancient, historical context. Don lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two young children. Don blogs at Nota Bene<\/a> and can also be found on Facebook<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"