Plato recounted a day when Socrates walked toward the Lyceum and ran into two of his friends, Hippothales and Ctesippus, grown men who were talking to a group of boys. Hippothales told Socrates that they often spoke to young boys and invited the philosopher to join the conversation. Socrates asked Hippothales which of the boys aroused his interest. “Each of us has a different fancy,” he replied. Socrates continued his query, “And who is yours?”¹ This troubling account accurately depicts an unsavory portion of ancient Greek history—the toleration of pederasty, homosexual activity between a man and a boy. Greek men pursued, even courted, boys as young as twelve years old. “In Athens, for a boy to have a homosexual relationship with an adult was considered not only acceptable, but also, under certain conditions, socially approved.”²

Ancient Romans also practiced and approved of homosexuality.³ However, in their earliest history, Roman males considered it effeminate to woo the affections of freeborn males. Homosexual relationships required expressions of subjugation, such as the head of a household forcing himself on his male slave: “For a Roman, the highest expression of virility consisted in putting other men down. It was all too easy, and too paltry, for a real man merely to subject women to his desires. For the powerful and inexhaustible Roman male, women could not suffice.”⁴ It is no wonder that Romans worshipped Priapus, a god of fertility, who protected his garden by raping thieves, male and female.⁵

According to Stanford scholar Susan Treggiari, the consensus among historians is that the Greeks and Romans typified sexual permissiveness: “It has become an orthodoxy among recent scholars that Greeks and Romans defined sexual acts in terms of who did what to whom.”⁶ What is also accepted is that Christianity changed the opinions and the practice of the Roman Empire. Eventually, the Empire legislated against active homosexuality: “It is difficult . . . to avoid thinking of Christianity as one of the causes, not to say the fundamental and decisive cause, of the change in legislative policy, its gradual hardening, and especially the extension of the range of types of homosexual behaviour to be punished.”⁷ Under Emperor Justinian (c. 482-565) the state outlawed homosexuality.⁸ However, long before then, Christians spoke up in defense of biblical sexuality.

Guided by Christ’s teaching on marriage and the Pauline material in Romans 1:26-27 and 1 Corinthians 6: 9-11, the early Christian Fathers decried homosexual activity as a sin against nature. Polycarp, Justin Martyr, and Athenagoras wrote explicitly against homosexuality and its popular ancient form, pederasty, in the first and second centuries. Constantine even legislated against an Egyptian homosexual priesthood during his reign.⁹ The church took a decisive step in the fourth century, at the Council of Elvira (now Granada, c. 305), which stated: “Those who sexually abuse boys may not commune even when death approaches.”¹⁰ The Council also decried the selling of children as sex slaves: “Parents and other Christians who give up their children to sexual abuse are selling others’ bodies, and if they do so or sell their own bodies, they shall not receive communion even at death.”¹¹

Later in the fourth century, Basil of Caesarea wrote in his third canonical letter: “He who is guilty of unseemliness with males will be under discipline for the same time as adulterers.”¹² According to the fifty-eighth canon of the same letter, the adulterers were banished from communion for fifteen years Therefore, from the standpoint of the ancient canon law, homosexual intercourse was treated as morally similar to or worse than the sin of adultery. The Church remained unbending on this issue, despite a strong social pressure to be sexually permissive.

Given the Greek and Roman acceptance of homosexuality, it is difficult to overstate the courage and conviction required by the early Church to write and speak out on behalf of a biblical, sexual ethic. Convinced of the truth of their message, these early Christians paid little heed to public opinion.

Footnotes:

from Kairos Journal

The First Baptist Church in Perryville, Maryland is on Route 40, 1 1/2 miles east of Route 222.