Quotes of The Garden of Purity (For Men Only) by Rabbi Shalom Arush

One of the earliest traces of Jewish engagement with the Hellenistic world comes in the earlier sections of the Book of the Watchers (1 Enoch 1–36), composed in Aramaic and now preserved in the collection of writings associated with the ancient figure Enoch, known as 1 Enoch. In 1 Enoch 6–11, which appears to have been composed in the Jewish homeland in the late fourth or early third century BCE, we have a rendering of the myth of the watchers, angels, who lusted after women, who conceived and gave birth to giants—a tradition also preserved in Genesis 6. The giants fought one another, wreaking devastation in their environment, and finally killed one another. The author appears to have applied the myth to the phenomenon of Alexander the Great and the wars among his generals after his death, which then continued over successive generations, especially between the Ptolemies and the Seleucids during the third century BCE, bringing devastation in their wake (Collins 1998, p. 50; Bedenbender 2000, pp. 184–86; Tigchelaar 1996, pp. 172–73; Nickelsburg 2001, pp. 166–71). Sexual adventure contrary to nature, namely heavenly beings with human beings, created chaos. The author made the watchers also responsible for the passing on of the knowledge of smelting iron and making weapons, but also ornaments and cosmetics, which then allegedly corrupted women to become seducers of men (Loader 2007, pp. 18–19, 46–48). Collins sees in 1 Enoch 8–9 an “expression of the author’s reaction to the novelties of the Hellenistic age, which was marked by technological progress, on the one hand, and exposure to Greek attitudes to the human body and sexuality, on the other” (Collins 2002, p. 60). Blaming foreign women in particular for their seductiveness and for carrying secrets of sorcery was ground for forbidding intermarriage between Jewish men and non-Jewish women.

In the slightly later 1 Enoch 13–16, which also centers upon the watchers’ sexual intercourse with women, their actions were all the more condemned, because they were understood to be priests of the heavenly temple. The author uses the breaching of the divine order of creation by crossing forbidden boundaries as an etiology to explain the presence of evil spirits—half heavenly, half human—in the world, bringing sickness and distress. For these spirits emerged from the corpses of the giants, who had slaughtered each other (1 Enoch 15: 8–11; Loader 2007, pp. 31–34). The implication is clear: forbidden sexual liaisons spell disaster. While on its own making no direct links with such behaviors in the non-Jewish world, when set alongside 1 Enoch 6–11, this work is best understood as responding to what was seen as the corrupting influence of Hellenization (Collins 2015, pp. 276–80).

The Hellenistic crisis, which led to the revolt of the Maccabees in the early second century BCE, had a complex background that included competing political and economic forces, as the Seleucids wrested control of the Jewish homeland from the Ptolemies at the end of the third century BCE (Portier-Young 2011, pp. 49–215). Underlying it was also a religious crisis, as Hellenism’s cultural imperialism swayed elites to adopt Hellenistic fashion and would have inevitably raised the issue of intermarriage, though only indirectly attested. 2 Maccabees recorded how the brother of the high priest, Onias III, Jason, corruptly paid Antiochus to enable him to usurp his brother as high priest and then “at once shifted his compatriots over to the Greek way of life” (4:10), setting Jewish laws aside and establishing institutions typical of a Hellenistic city, including a gymnasium. Collins discusses the Jews’ actual motivation, concluding that “there is little evidence that their deeper motives were cultural or religious” (Collins 2001, p. 46). 1 Maccabees noted that Antiochus, himself, “authorized them to observe the ordinances of the Gentiles … So they built a gymnasium in Jerusalem, according to Gentile custom” (1:14). A gymnasium was a center, not only for sports, but also for education, an ephebium (2 Macc 4:9), bringing together peoples of different languages and ethnic backgrounds (Bolyki 2007, p. 136).

One of the customs that caused offense was the practice of naked sports. On one level, it led to attempts by Jewish men to conceal their circumcision to avoid potential embarrassment: they “removed the marks of circumcision” (1 Macc 1:15) (VanderKam 1989, p. 21). They did so by what is described as epispasm, stretching the skin of the penis to create the appearance of having a foreskin, a practice that “prevailed throughout the Hellenistic and Roman ages and attained a plateau in popularity in the first century” (Hall 1988, p. 71; Collins 1973, p. 22). To seek to undo one’s circumcision was seen as an act of denying one’s faith and identity as a Jew, an act of apostasy. Furthermore, the Hellenistic gymnasium was also not far from the temple complex, which raised the possibility that priests might attend. Such nakedness in the context of holy space was considered a serious offense before God (Satlow 1997, pp. 449–51).

The writing, Jubilees (Loader 2007, pp. 113–306)—to which we will return below in discussing the dangers of sexual depravity, to which it described intermarriage exposing people—which retold the stories of Genesis with glosses and expansions to address issues of its day, appears to have its origins in this period. It, too, addressed, the issue of nakedness. In retelling the story of Adam and Eve, their sin, and their need to cover their nakedness, it stated:

Of all the animals and cattle he permitted Adam alone to cover his shame. For this reason it has been commanded in the tablets regarding all those who know the judgment of the law that they cover their shame and not uncover themselves as the nations uncover themselves.

(3:30–31)

Similarly, the story of Ham’s son seeing the genitals of his father (Jub. 7:6–12; cf. Gen 9:20–27) belongs in the realm of such concerns (Loader 2007, pp. 146–49). Jubilees also alluded to the neglect of circumcision or the attempt to do it only partially (Jub. 15:33–34). The concern with nakedness was reflected also in the Testament of Moses, written around the turn of the millennia, according to which Moses predicted that “their young sons will be cut by physicians to bring forward their foreskins” (8:3).

The account in 1 Maccabees suggested indirectly that something more than nakedness was the concern. The words with which 1:15 concludes—“They joined with the Gentiles and sold themselves to do evil”—appear to use biblical phraseology alluding to 2 Kings 17:17 (“they sold themselves to do evil”), concerned with sorcery, and Num 25:3 (“Israel yoked itself [צמד ἐζευγίσθη; cf. LXX ἐτελέσθη] to the Baal of Peor”), an allusion to forbidden intermarriage with non-Jews and linked with the exploits of Phinehas, who executed God’s judgement on perpetrators (25:6–10) (Doran 1990, p. 107; Kugel 2006, p. 79). The imagery of yoking, in particular, was frequently used to depict marriage or sexual union (e.g., Sir 26:7; 2 Cor 6:14), including in the Hellenistic world by Musonius and Hierocles and in an inscription from Mantinea (Deming 2004, p. 143). As Lange writes, “not only did they build a gymnasium and remove their circumcision, thus abandoning the holy covenant, they also joined the nations sexually by way of intermarriage” (Lange 2011, p. 208; similarly, Loader 2011a, pp. 245–48). The concern with sorcery and sexuality might echo the particular warnings of the Book of Watchers about foreign women’s influence (cf. also Jub. 11:7–8, 14–17; 22:16–17).

Appropriating Hellenistic fashions would have touched many areas of life and come into conflict with Jewish law at a number of points beyond just circumcision, nakedness, and intermarriage. These would include food laws, prostitution, male same-sex relations, and sexual promiscuity associated with symposia generally. The period prior to Antiochus’ intervention is to be distinguished from the period when he sought to impose changes, such as forbidding circumcision and observance of the sabbath, and pervert cultic traditions, erecting the offensive altar and probably introducing forbidden acts of revelry into the temple.

In contrast to the implied reference to intermarriage and illicit sexual relations in 1 Macc 1:14–15, in Jubilees, we find extensive explicit warnings about intermarriage, in particular as leading to exposure to the sexual depravity of the non-Jewish world. While these concerns were applicable to the period of the Hellenistic crisis, they would have had currency also after the Maccabean revolt in the Hasmonean period, where some prefer to date the final form of the work.

Jubilees portrayed Abraham as warning Jacob about the dangers which the Gentiles posed:

Separate from the nations, and do not eat with them. Do not act as they do, and do not become their companion, for their actions are something that is impure, and all their ways are defiled and something abominable and detestable.

(22:16)

While the allusion could be to Gentile cultic meals generally, it was more likely targeting symposia. Shimoff notes the influence of the Hellenistic banquet among Jews, pointing to Aristeas and Ben Sira 31:12–19; 32:1–13 (p. 445). The focus was not only on eating forbidden food, such as food containing blood, but doubtless also included the sexual profligacy frequently associated with symposia. Forbidden mixing also included forbidden intermarriage. Jubilees made the dangers explicit. Thus, it depicted Rebecca warning Jacob that “Canaanite women are evil” (27:8) and that “[e]verything that they do (consists of) sexual impurity and lewdness” (25:1)—statements which the author’s hearers would know applied just as much to foreign nations in their Hellenistic context. The failure to heed such warnings, it claimed, led to disaster, citing Judah’s marriage to the Canaanite Bedsuel, which eventually trapped him into engaging unwittingly in incest (41:1–21). While the author employed such warnings within the narrative world of the text, which the author extrapolated, occasionally the author referred to his own, as in the mention of the Kittim, probably referring to the coastal cities of Phoenicia and Philistia, which were significant channels of Hellenistic influence (24:24–30) (Anderson 2005, p. 66).

The author of Jubilees used the story of the abduction of Jacob’s daughter, Dinah, by Shechem of Samaria, as the basis for an extrapolation attacking intermarriage with Gentiles by both women and men and demanding dissolution of existing mixed marriages (30:7–23; as in Ezra 9–10) (Loader 2007, pp. 165–76; Frevel 2011, pp. 239–42). That reflected an additional concern about intermarriage beyond the danger that non-Jews’ sexual depravity represented, namely that Israel’s sacred seed was to be preserved (Hayes 2002, p. 77), because, as Halpern-Amaru observes, Jubilees thus made all the people “adjuncts to the priestly class” (Halpern-Amaru 1999, p. 154), ruling out intermarriage even with converts, who had turned their backs on sexual depravity.

The theme of intermarriage was also significant in the Aramaic Levi Document, upon which Jubilees appears to draw, but it lacks any reference to Hellenism and its alleged sexual depravity (Drawnel 2004, p. 65; Loader 2007, pp. 87–112). Hultgård locates the Aramaic Levi Document in the pre-Maccabean conflicts in the context of anti-Hellenistic movements (pp. 94–95). Objections to intermarriage in times of local conquest by the Hasmonean rulers, who emerged in the aftermath of the Maccabean revolt, may have had more to do with the enslavement of women prisoners—deplored, it seems, in one of the earliest documents produced by the group who settled by the Dead Sea, 4QMMT (Loader 2009, pp. 53–90; Sharp 1997, p. 220)—than with the encounter with foreign culture, though such women would still have been seen as potential sources of moral corruption. Documents of that sect were sometimes more concerned with whom priests married, though the broader concern remained (Loader 2009, pp. 356–59).

The first century CE Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria (ca. 20 BCE–50 CE), is a major resource for observing the attitudes of Jews toward their Hellenistic world (Loader 2011b, pp. 2–258). He wrote extensively. A large body of his works has survived. He was a deeply committed Jew, highly educated in both Jewish tradition and Hellenistic philosophy, and, in addition, well connected in elite circles of both Jews and Roman authorities, with family members holding significant commercial and political positions (Schwartz 2009, pp. 9–31; Schenck 2005, pp. 9–14, 29–48; Borgen 2005, pp. 14–45). He used his wealth of knowledge to advocate for his Jewish faith, primarily, it seems, to boost the confidence of his fellow Jews in the midst of a foreign culture, not only holding on to a tradition, which deserved respect, but which was also superior to the religions and philosophies of the world around them. To this end, he employed the arguments of contemporary Hellenistic philosophy to showcase that superiority through expositions of the laws and heroes of the Jewish scriptures, primarily its first five books, Genesis to Deuteronomy. It is not possible to review all his expositions and their relevance for how he viewed sexual attitudes and behavior in his world. What follows focuses on those sections where he expounds Jewish law (see also Loader 2011b, pp. 188–224).

He was on common ground with his Hellenistic world when condemning adultery. He saw it as “the greatest of crimes” (Decal. 123), a claim repeated in Joseph’s rejection of Potiphar’s wife (Ios. 44a). He saw this confirmed in the fact that in the biblical tradition, as he knew it from the Septuagint translation, it came as the first commandment on the second table of the decalogue and was buttressed later (Decal. 131, similarly 168; Spec. 3.8), though this is not the case in most manuscripts of the original Hebrew (Exod 20:14; Deut 5:18), where it comes second after murder (Loader 2004, pp. 5–8). His supporting arguments, however, were typical of the Hellenistic philosophy of his time. Adultery was the result of excessive uncontrolled passion. The dangers of desire were a constant theme in his writings. Thus, he wrote the following:

For in the first place it has its source in the love of pleasure which enervates the bodies of those who entertain it, relaxes the sinews of the soul and wastes away the means of subsistence, consuming like an unquenchable fire all that it touches and leaving nothing wholesome in human life.

(Decal. 122)

He went on to note how the adulterer led another into the act and also had major family and social consequences. In addition, such excess was out of place in marriage:

Now even natural pleasure is often greatly to blame when the craving for it is immoderate and insatiable, as for instance when it takes the form of voracious gluttony, even though none of the food taken is of the forbidden kind, or again the passionate desire for women shewn by those who in their craze for sexual intercourse behave unchastely, not with the wives of others, but with their own.

(Spec. 3.9)

Similarly, Philo stood on common ground in condemning incest, which he cited as a Persian custom (Spec. 3.13), though Jewish restrictions were tighter than those of his non-Jewish world, and he was critical of Solon’s law permitting marriage to half-sisters, the Spartans for allowing it with sisters but not half-sisters, and the Egyptian lawgiver who allowed both (Spec. 3.22–25). Of Solon, he wrote the following: “With a lavish hand he bestowed on bodies and souls the poisonous bane of incontinence and gave full liberty to marry sisters of every degree whether they belonged to one of their brother’s parents or to both” (Spec. 3.23).

On intermarriage, Philo parted company with his non-Jewish world: “Do not enter into the partnership of marriage with a member of a foreign nation, lest someday conquered by the forces of opposing customs you surrender and stray unawares from the path that leads to piety and turn aside into a pathless wild” (Spec. 3.29). Similarly, he parted company on the prohibition of sexual intercourse during menstruation: “Whenever the menstrual issue occurs, a man must not touch a woman, but must during the period refrain from intercourse and respect the law of nature” (Spec. 3.32). The rationale, however, reflected a common concern: “He must also remember the lesson that the generative seeds should not be wasted fruitlessly for the sake of a gross and untimely pleasure” (Spec. 3.32). The rationale for condemning sex with sterile women was similar: “They too must be branded with reproach, who plough the hard and stony land … For in the quest of mere licentious pleasure like the most lecherous of men they destroy the procreative germs with deliberate purpose” (Spec. 3.34).

Philo reserved some of his strongest condemnations for homosexual relations. “Much graver than the above is another evil, which has ramped its way into the cities, namely pederasty … In former days the very mention of it was a great disgrace” (Spec. 3.37). Many of his objections he would have in common with critics from his world, such as the wasting of semen; female disease; males becoming passive; males losing their virility, which so important in the Roman world (Spec. 3.37), even warning of impotence as a result (Abr. 135); and the depopulation of cities (Spec. 3.32–33, 39; Abr. 135–36).

Those of them who by way of heightening still further their youthful beauty have desired to be completely changed into women and gone on to mutilate their genital organs, are clad in purple like signal benefactors of their native lands, and march in front escorted by a bodyguard, attracting the attention of those who meet them.

(Spec. 3.41)

Like the author of Pseudo-Phocylides, he cited the dangers of hairstyles that seduce: “Mark how conspicuously they braid and adorn the hair of their heads, and how they scrub and paint their faces with cosmetics and pigments and the like, and smother themselves with fragrant unguents” (Spec. 3.37). Like Plato, he depicted such behavior as contrary to nature.

And the lover of such may be assured that he is the subject of the same penalty. He pursues an unnatural pleasure and does his best to render cities desolate and uninhabited by destroying the means of procreation … like a bad husbandman he lets the deep-soiled and fruitful fields lie sterile, by taking steps to keep them from bearing, while he spends his labour night and day on soil from which no growth at all can be expected.

(Spec. 3.39)

But beyond that, Philo appealed to his tradition, citing the death penalty in Lev 20:13 but urging that it be immediate (Spec. 3.38). Philo also addressed what he saw as the causes of such depravity:

The reason is, I think, to be found in the prizes awarded in many nations to licentiousness and effeminacy. Certainly, you may see these hybrids of man and woman continually strutting about through the thick of the market, heading the processions at the feasts, appointed to serve as unholy ministers of holy things, leading the mysteries and initiations and celebrating the rites of Demeter.

(Spec. 3.40)

Philo’s grounds for objection were also reflected in his depiction of the men of Sodom: “The land of the Sodomites … was brimful of innumerable iniquities, particularly such as arise from gluttony and lewdness, and multiplied and enlarged every other possible pleasure with so formidable a menace that it had at last been consumed by the Judge of All” (Abr. 133). Philo cited Menander with approval: “the chief beginning of evils, as one has aptly said, is goods in excess” (Abr. 134). Excess included excessive drinking:

[I]ncapable of bearing such satiety, plunging like cattle, they threw off from their necks the law of nature and applied themselves to deep drinking of strong liquor and dainty feeding and forbidden forms of intercourse … Not only in their mad lust for women did they violate the marriages of their neighbours, but also men mounted males without respect for the sex nature which the active partner shares with the passive (Abr. 135) … Then, as little by little they accustomed those who were by nature men to submit to play the part of women, they saddled them with the formidable curse of a female disease. For not only did they emasculate their bodies by luxury and voluptuousness, but they worked a further degeneration in their souls and, as far as in them lay, were corrupting the whole of mankind.

(Abr. 136)

In Contempl. Philo contrasted the holy meals of the Therapeutae with the drunken banquets in his world:

For waiting there are slaves of the utmost comeliness and beauty, giving the idea that they have come not so much to render service as to give pleasure to the eyes of the beholders by appearing on the scene … [some] who are still boys” … [and others] full-grown lads fresh from the bath and smooth shaven, with their faces smeared with cosmetics and paint under the eyelids and the hair of the head prettily plaited and tightly bound.

(Contempl. 50)

He continued as follows: “In the background are others, grown lads newly bearded with the down just blooming on their cheeks, recently pets of the pederasts, elaborately dressed up for the heavier services, a proof of the opulence of the hosts as those who employ them know, but in reality of their bad taste” (Contempl. 52). He then turned his attention to the two accounts of banquets in which Socrates participated, as depicted in Xenophon and Plato (Contempl. 57). On Plato’s Symposium, he observed the following: “the talk is almost entirely concerned with love, not merely with love-sickness of men for women, or women for men, passions recognized by the laws of nature, but of men for other males differing from them only in age” (Contempl. 59). In this context he cited Aristophanes’ etiological myth, explaining the origins of homosexual and heterosexual attraction on the basis of bodies male, female, and androgynous beings sliced in half by Zeus for their arrogance and, so, ever since seeking their other half: “double-bodied men who were originally brought by unifying forces into cohesion with each other and afterwards came asunder, as an assemblage of separate parts might do when the bond of union which brought them together was loosened”, which he declared as “seductive enough, calculated by the novelty of the notion to beguile the ear” but to be treated by “the disciples of Moses trained from their earliest years to love the truth … with supreme contempt” (Contempl. 63).

Thus, Philo knew of the view that homosexuality is a natural state for some, but like other Jews, rejects it on the basis, not only of the prohibitions of Leviticus, but also on the account of creation in Gen 1:27 according to which God made humans male and female, by implication only male and female (Gen 1:27). Philo condemned same-sex relations between men and between women (see also Szesnat 1999, pp. 140–47). Thus, of life after Noah’s flood, he wrote the following: “But after (the flood) had ceased and come to an end and they had been saved from the evil, he again instructed them through the order (of their leaving the ark) to hasten to procreate, by specifying not that men (should go out) with men nor women with women but females with males” (QG 2.49). He warned of “the mannish-woman as much as the womanish-man” (Virt. 20–21) and deplored the “hybrid, man-woman or woman-man” (Her. 274) (Szesnat 1999, pp. 143).

Men engaging their lusts towards other men might also have been engaging their lusts towards women as well, especially in the context of drunken parties. Thus, he wrote that such a man “not only attacks in his fury the marriage-bed of others, but even plays the pederast and forces the male type of nature to debase and convert itself into the feminine form, just to indulge a polluted and accursed passion” (Spec. 2.50). He knew of the trade in slave boys bought for pederasty and reported of one such slave: “It is said, for instance, that looking at one of the purchasers, an addict of effeminacy, whose face showed that he had nothing of the male about him, he went up to him and said, ‘You should buy me, for you seem to me to need a husband’” (Prob. 124). While, much of the time, he was condemning pederasty, his censure also applied to consenting adults, male and female (Ellis 2003, p, 316). The truly masculine man was “not lured by any of them to embrace like some hybrid, man-woman or woman-man, the pleasant-seeming evils, but holding to its own nature of true manhood has the strength to be victor instead of victim in the wrestling-bout (Her. 274).

Of bestiality, in contrast to homosexual behavior, Philo wrote the following:

Even worse than this is the conduct of some who have emulated the lusts of the Sybarites and those of others even more lascivious than they … These persons begin with making themselves experts in dainty feeding, wine-bibbing and the other pleasures of the belly and the parts below it … Sated with these they reach such a pitch of wantonness, the natural offspring of satiety, that losing their senses they conceive a frantic passion, no longer for human beings male or female, but even for brute beasts.

(Spec. 3.43)

He pointed to the cultural tradition of his world by citing the myth of Pasiphaë, the wife of King Minos of Crete, who mated with a bull, as a result of which the half-beast Minotaur was born (Spec. 3.44) and commented as follows: “Probably, if passions are suffered to go unbridled, there will be other Pasiphaës, and not only women but also men will be frantically in love with wild beasts, which will produce unnatural monsters to serve as monuments of the disgusting excesses of mankind” (Spec. 3.45). The Testament of Solomon similarly alluded to the legend of Onoskelis, the half-human half-donkey offspring of the sodomizing of a donkey by Aristonymos of Ephesus (4:1–5) (Busch 2006, p. 111). It made, however, no references to bestiality in the contemporary society.

Philo saw the prostitute as “a pest, a scourge, a plague-spot – she who has corrupted the graces bestowed by nature, instead of making them, as she should, the ornament of noble conduct” (Spec. 3.51) and differentiated Jewish law on such matters from what he claimed were the norms of his world:

Other nations are permitted after the fourteenth year to deal without interference with harlots and strumpets and all those who make a traffic of their bodies, but with us a courtesan is not even permitted to live, and death is the penalty appointed for women who ply this trade.

(Ios. 43)

The Jewish historian, Josephus, writing in Rome in the late first century CE, is a major source for our history of the Jewish people in the period under review (on sexuality see Loader 2011b, pp. 258–367). Like Philo, he was concerned with presenting the credentials of his Jewish faith and demonstrated its superiority above all else while at the same time being sensitive to his Roman audience. Some of his comments about the sexual behavior of his world were related directly to key figures in his account. His educated Roman audience, who would have applauded his depiction of the depravity of Cleopatra’s Antony, who sought without success to lay both Mariamme, the wife of Herod the Great (37 – 4 BCE), Rome’s puppet king in Jerusalem, and her brother (A.J. 15.25, 30). He reported that in his latter days, Herod was inappropriately fond of his eunuchs (A.J. 16.229) and deeply offended when his son Alexander, in an act of subversion, paid them for sex (A.J. 16.229–234; B.J. 1.488–492). He did not hesitate to report sexual abuses, such as when John Hyrcanus bought 100 boys and 100 virgins and gave them as a gift to the Egyptian king and Cleopatra (A.J. 12.209, 218).

His accounts portrayed the many and varied marriages among elites, which were often political and sometimes involved key Roman figures, such as when Vespasian arranged a wife for Josephus, himself (Vit. 414–415), Caesar arranged a marriage for Herod’s daughter upon his death (B.J. 2.99), and Agrippa I’s daughter, Drusilla, married Felix (A.J. 20.142), though, generally, Josephus disapproved of intermarriage with foreigners and appears to have seen the death of her son and his wife with the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE as divine judgement for the act (A.J. 20.144). He supported the biblical prohibition of same-sex intercourse with the common arguments about it being unnatural, a waste of procreative seed, a symptom of mindless pursuit of pleasure and excess, and leading to the shamefulness of effeminacy. Typically, he shared with Roman critics of homosexual relations the claim that it was a Greek habit (Ap. 2.269) and depicted it as one of the vices of the peoples of Sparta, Elis, and Thebes (Ap. 2.273–275). Rome declared such behavior as stuprum between citizens, though it was allowed among those of lower status, such as foreigners and slaves (Skinner 2005, pp. 199–200; Williams 1999, pp. 96–104; Treggiari 2003, p. 172; Loader 2012, pp. 83–91). Greeks countered the charge of it being a Greek disease by denouncing Roman homosexual practices on account of the fact that they went on way past the age of 30, at which point, according to Greek norms, such relationships should have ceased, and men should have married to beget children (Skinner 2005, pp. 213, 266).

As to be expected, the common Jewish attitudes towards what was seen as the depravity of the Gentile world were echoed in the writings of the Jew Paul, a leading figure in the early decades of the movement of the followers of Jesus. When Paul, for instance, planned to visit Rome, a community with a strongly Jewish constituency, and sought to clear the path of obstacles created by critics among Christian Jews of the way he presented the gospel, he began with common ground, namely a condemnation of same-sex relations. For he knew that this would receive a positive response among his Roman audience, not least because what they commonly saw as such depravity was known in the Roman imperial household in relation to Nero (Jewett 2007, p. 171) and Caligula (Elliott 2008, pp. 79–82; Brownson, p. 157) and was condemned, though Paul’s focus was universal in scope (Loader 2017; Loader 2012, pp. 293–338). His use of the condemnation of same-sex relations to depict the depravity that he, like other Jews, saw in the Gentile world served as a rhetorical ploy to draw in his audience, only to turn on them and declare his fellow Jews guilty of sin and so needing his gospel just as much as Gentiles. It does, however, provide another window through which we see how Jews of the time viewed the Greco-Roman world in which they lived and its sexual mores. In elaborating his condemnation, Paul could at the same time, like other Jews before him, such as the author of Wisdom and Philo, also employ the arguments used in that world by the critics of such behavior.

In a manner typical of his ethical discourses elsewhere, his focus was not so much of the behavior itself as the attitude that he traced to a perversion of the mind resulting from a perverted understanding of God, typical of Gentile idolatry. In this, he followed a pattern, already present in Wisdom, of seeing a perversion in the understanding of who God is leading to states and behaviors that are perverse (Wisd. 13:1–14:31). But, like Philo and others, Paul drew upon what he would have seen as the best of Hellenistic ethical philosophy, though filtered through Jewish presuppositions. Thus, Paul’s warning included a reference to the danger of excessive passions (ἐν ταῖς ἐπιθυμίαις τῶν καρδιῶν αὐτῶν “in the passions of their minds” 1:24, πάθη ἀτιμίας “shameful passions” 26, ἐξεκαύθησαν ἐν τῇ ὀρέξει αὐτῶν “they burned in the passion” 27) (Loader 2017, pp. 131–35; Loader 2012, pp. 93–97; Fredrickson 2000, pp. 199–204; Swancutt 2003, p. 204). Paul’s objection was not to passions themselves but to their misdirection and excess (Ellis 2007, pp. 168–69; Gagnon 2001, p. 178; cf. Martin 2006, p. 59; Fredrickson 2000, p. 205).

He also employed the argument of shame associated with taking a female role or making others do so (τοῦ ἀτιμάζεσθαι τὰ σώματα αὐτῶν ἐν αὐτοῖς “to dishonor their bodies in among themselves” 1:24; εἰς πάθη ἀτιμίας “to shameful passions ” 26; τὴν ἀσχημοσύνην κατεργαζόμενοι “committing what is shameful” 27) (Loader 2017, pp. 135–37), a major concern in his world (Mayordomo-Marín 2008, pp. 99–115; Skinner 2005, pp. 212, 249–51). Malherbe draws attention to the importance of issues of honor and shame as a topic in Hellenistic discussions of marriage in Plutarch Mor. 143B, 754, 769A; Aristotle Eth. nic. 8.14 1163B, 1–5; Xenophon Hier. 3.4; Oec. 7.42; Pseudo-Aristotle Oec. 3.23–25 (Malherbe 2000, pp. 229).

Paul also appealed to arguments from nature, employed also in 2 Enoch 10:2 and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (T. Naph 3:4–5; 4:1; cf. also T. Levi 14:6; T. Benj 9:1): (μετήλλαξαν τὴν φυσικὴν χρῆσιν εἰς τὴν παρὰ φύσιν “they exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural” 1:26, τὴν φυσικὴν χρῆσιν τῆς θηλείας “natural intercourse with the female” 27) (Loader 2017, pp. 137–40; Du Toit 2003, pp. 100–101; Sayler 2005, pp. 85–86; Martin 2006, p. 59; Jewett 2007, pp. 175–76), but unlike Philo (and Plato) not in relation to wasted seed and failure to procreate.

Such arguments served to undergird what he denounced primarily, however, on the basis of the prohibitions in Leviticus 18 and 20 and the assumption implied in Gen 1:27 that there are only male and female people, and anything else is a distortion. As Nolland puts it, “We should not think of Paul drawing his views on homosexuality from his understanding of nature, but rather from revelation, in particular from Lev 18 and 20 in connection with Gen 1” (Nolland 2000, p. 54; cf. Nissinen 1998, p. 107). The focus was not only pederasty, but also mutual, consenting same-sex relations (ἐξεκαύθησαν ἐν τῇ ὀρέξει αὐτῶν εἰς ἀλλήλους “they burned in their passion for one another”). As Mark Smith observes, it is “much more probable that Paul was following the lead of his Jewish forebears, condemning homosexual activity, not because of its potential for dehumanizing relationships, but because males engaged in sexual activity with other males” (Smith 1996, p. 232).

We find a similar combination of values to what we find in Romans 1 in the succinct statement, which gives the title to this essay, which reads in full:

For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality; ⁴that each one of you knows how to control your own body (τὸ ἑαυτοῦ σκεῦος κτᾶσθαι or “manage your own wife”) in holiness and honour, ⁵not with lustful passion, like the Gentiles who do not know God.

(1 Thess 4: 3–5)

Like other Jews using such arguments, such as Philo, Paul did not go so far as to condemn passions absolutely, a difficult step for those who saw them as nevertheless part of how God made human beings; but, we find, under the influence of the popular philosophy, a much greater emphasis on moderation and temperance, especially from the first century CE onwards, in both Jewish and emerging Christian literature. A dualism, such as we find in second century gnostic literature, which deemed passions and the body as something evil in itself or as material entrapment, the work of an errant heavenly being or a dirty aspect of creation to be discarded in the future if not de facto in the present, does not clearly arise in the first century CE. That would later lead some to practice celibacy.

The move towards celibacy in the writings of the Christian movement of the first century appears to have its inspiration elsewhere, in particular in the understandings of the nature of future hope. For we find evidence that some envisaged future hope as one where gender differentiation ceased and human life left sex behind and took angelic form (Loader 2014; Loader 2012, pp. 430–90). Such a view was attributed in Mark 12:25 to Jesus and appears to be assumed by Paul in 1 Corinthians 7 and by the Book of Revelation. It was not the more common Jewish view, which rather saw the future in terms of abundance and fertility (Loader 2014), but appears to have developed in circles who envisaged the age to come as a holy space where following the provisions relating to the earthly temple, sexual relations would be out of place (Loader 2012, pp. 66–73). Already, the understanding of the paradise of the garden of Eden as a sanctuary and thus a place where Adam and Eve had to abstain from copulation would lead in such direction, especially where hope entailed a return to paradise, such as we see in the Book of Revelation. Such a view, which need not have implied a negative view of sexual passion, because it was part of God’s creation, had the potential nevertheless to produce consequences that created controversy. One was the view of some they should live now as they would then. Some appear to have concluded that all believers should therefore abandon sexual relations and become celibate, apparently a view held by some in Corinth, occasioning Paul’s response, which insisted that this was not to be so and that marriage and sexual relations were not to be seen as sin. A similar rejection of this universal demand was attributed in Matthew’s gospel to Jesus himself (Matt 19:10–12). In both instances, we find the argument that to live now as one would then is a calling only for some. John the Baptist, Jesus, and Paul were among those who saw themselves called to celibacy, and Revelation depicted a symbolic number of 144,000 likewise called. Nevertheless, the notion of a sexless utopia had the potential in time to lead to a denigration of sexuality and to find common ground with those Greek moral philosophies, which deemed a passionless state as the ideal.