Philo and Josephus

He still gets it wrong...

My last article dove into the question of translating arsenokoitai and a point that I made is that within all the Biblical, apocryphal, and Jewish writings there is no particular evidence that same-sex intercourse (outside of questions of prostitution and pederasty) would have been a focus of Paul’s religious discourse.

Put another way: Homosexual sex was certainly taboo, Paul would have accepted it as such, the Judaism of his day would have assumed it to be so.

I granted that.

However!

It really wasn’t the big problem that Paul was dealing with in front of him and that arsenokoitai is really dealing with a question of pederasty.

So what about Loader? Haven’t you read his work? What about Philo and Josephus?

Let’s deal with them.

We’ll start with Josephus. Josephus is problematic as a source of Jewish thought. Is he a traitor or a translator of Jewish culture and religion? His self-lauding as amazing all the Rabbi’s at the age of 14 is certainly worthy of skepticism. His work is important but far from canonical.

One place that he (and Philo) are suspect is in their interpretation of Sodom’s sin. Their works are later than Paul and break with typical Judaism as they follow the Platonic line not adopted by Apocryphal and Talmudic works. Their hellenized interpretation of male-male sex is only taken up by later Christian writers, and even then, their writings describe cases of promiscuity, drunkenness, and rape.

Josephus certainly held to the cultural and religious taboo.

His work Against Apion gives us the following in its discussion of the commandment against adultery and his understanding of its interpretation:

Τίνες δ᾽ οἱ περὶ γάμων νόμοι; μῖξιν μόνην οἶδεν ὁ νόμος τὴν κατὰ φύσιν τὴν πρὸς γυναῖκα καὶ ταύτην, εἰ μέλλοι τέκνων ἕνεκα γίνεσθαι. τὴν δὲ πρὸς ἄρρενας ἀρρένων ἐστύγηκεν καὶ θάνατος τοὐπιτίμιον, εἴ τις ἐπιχειρήσειεν.

What then are our laws about marriage? That law allows only the intercourse which is according to nature, of a man with his wife, and only for the procreation of children. It abhors that of a male with a male, and death is the penalty for engaging in it.

This is the point that I have already granted. Whether Josephus is representative of Sanhedrin thought and interpretation or not is a debate left for the scholars of that field. I believe that he is certainly representative of the religion and culture of the day that Paul certainly would have accepted.

Let us remember, however, that Josephus was writing for a different purpose and into a situation removed from the Pauline experience. Paul was not responding to Apion’s charge of religious hypocrisy nor was Paul engaging in a post-Temple defense against his anti-Jewish slander. Apion was a propagandist and provocateur, and was engaging in a smear campaign that called into question the character, morality, and trustworthiness of the Jewish people in ways that resemble modern anti-Semitic caricatures. This wasn’t a treatment of Torah. It was answering accusations against Jewish morality in a Platonic public square.

Josephus simply demonstrates the point granted.

Philo, however, confirms my point.

In Book 3 of his work Special Laws, Philo is dealing with the sexual prohibitions of Leviticus 18 and 20. If one were to lay the texts side-by-side it is obvious that this is his point of reference. Structurally he is working his way through the Levitical teachings. We notice the prohibitions against the various prohibited sexual relationships including prostitution and incest that surround the foundation for arsenokoitai and when we reach the section treating the man-bed question we find this:

VII. (37) Moreover, another evil, much greater than that which we have already mentioned, has made its way among and been let loose upon cities, namely, the love of boys, which formerly was accounted a great infamy even to be spoken of, but which sin is a subject of boasting not only to those who practise it, but even to those who suffer it, and who, being accustomed to bearing the affliction of being treated like women, waste away as to both their souls and bodies, not bearing about them a single spark of a manly character to be kindled into a flame, but having even the hair of their heads conspicuously curled and adorned, and having their faces smeared with vermilion, and paint, and things of that kind, and having their eyes pencilled beneath, and having their skins anointed with fragrant perfumes (for in such persons as these a sweet smell is a most seductive quality), and being well appointed in everything that tends to beauty or elegance, are not ashamed to devote their constant study and endeavours to the task of changing their manly character into an effeminate one.

(Notice the paint of prostitution that Rashi refers to in his commentary on the Talmud!)

Philo continues on this line for another 5 paragraphs and does not take up the question of consensual, relational homosexual sex between man-man or woman-woman. It’s all child abuse, sex trafficking and prostitution.

The fact is that that the earliest interpretation of this section of Leviticus (note that these Levitical prohibitions are not taken up by Josephus) in combination with the later Talmudic commentary strengthens the exegetical evidence for translating arsenokoitai as child prostitution and pederasty.

In summary:

1. Paul was a product of his times. He would have held the same religious taboo against same-sex relations that were held within the culture. That is not a point of contention.

2. Paul wasn’t writing about that. What Paul might have thought about a question not being addressed within his writing is not Biblical canon.

3. Outside of Josephus addressing a particular polemical situation and referring only to the questions of adultery, drunken orgies, and rape (even in the Platonic interpretations of the Sodom story it is never about sex within covenantal relationship between equals) there is no extant material that demonstrate that same-sex relations in the way that we understand them today are a topic of religious conversation in Paul’s time.

4. The earliest near-contemporary (Philo), Talmudic commentary, and translation history indicate that Leviticus 18 and 20 refer to prostitution and pederasty.

5. The most likely translation of arsenokoitai ought to follow that early tradition rather than the imposed reading that Dr. Weima posits.

A couple of endnotes:

1. I appreciate Loader’s work. If you do – awesome. I diverge on some of the Biblical assumptions especially around the interpretation of Sodom and his conclusions about the Leviticus texts that he makes and yet we end up in the same place practically.

2. For the chads out there: dismissing an argument on the basis of anonymity is your choice. There is a difference between dismissing an anonymous article that presents a serious argument and an anonymous piece of criticism that might come across your desk. Protip: If you don’t have a reasoned and researched response: that’s fine. You’re not the target audience anyway.