Boston Globe, October
3, 2010
What
the Bible actually says
Sex and the scriptures
By Lisa Wangsness
In 2006, the biblical
scholar Michael Coogan watched the debate over whether to end
gay marriage in Massachusetts with growing frustration. Supporters
of the ban claimed they had God on their side, and they waved
signs loaded with biblical references to buttress their views.
“Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” was a popular one.
For Coogan, a religious studies professor at Stonehill College
and director of publications for the Harvard Semitic Museum, the
display illustrated a growing problem in the US culture wars:
Many contemporary readers haven’t read the Bible in its entirety,
so they have incomplete information about what the Bible says
on human sexuality. And those who have read the whole thing often
quote it selectively, ignoring its cultural and historical context.
At the same time, Coogan
says, biblical historians haven’t done enough to inform the
public debate, focusing more on high-level scholarship than on
bringing their knowledge to a broad audience.
Coogan’s new book,
“God and Sex: What the Bible Really Says,” is his attempt
to bridge these gaps. In it he argues that today’s readers
are often unaware of how the Bible was written — it was not,
as he writes in the introduction, “delivered by humanity
as a complete book, written by God and shrink-wrapped in a shipment
from Amazon or available for download on a Kindle.”
In fact, he writes,
the current scholarly consensus is that it was written by many
authors, mostly men, over the course of 1,000 years or so —
a span of time and geography that inevitably leads to questions,
inconsistencies, and cultural misunderstanding. Those who take
its meaning literally, isolating single passages to guide modern
behavior, he argues, do so at their peril.
In “God and Sex,”
Coogan attempts to distill what the Bible says about an array
of topics related to human sexuality often in the news —
abortion, homosexuality, divorce, and the role of women in the
church — and to help contemporary readers sort through its
meanings.
Coogan spoke to Ideas
from his home in Concord.
IDEAS: What’s
the problem with contemporary readers using the Bible as instruction
manual?
COOGAN: Contemporary
policy makers, pundits, and preachers use the Bible...as a kind
of unquestioned authority....[The] Ten Commandments themselves
contain values we no longer accept. They presume the existence
of slavery — and if God is the author of the Ten Commandments,
then God approves of slavery.
IDEAS: The Ten Commandments
don’t say much about sexuality, actually, do they?
COOGAN: All they say
is thou shalt not commit adultery....It doesn’t say anything
about prostitution, premarital sex, birth control, abortion.
IDEAS: And yet a number
of biblical heroes indulge in that particular sin.
COOGAN: One of the
most important characters in the Bible is King David, and David’s
affair with Bathsheba...he sleeps with this woman and then arranges
to have her husband killed. So David is guilty of not just illicit
sex, but also of murder.
IDEAS: One of the things
we hear most from gay marriage opponents is that the God-sanctioned
version of marriage is one man and one woman.
COOGAN: Not in the
Bible. Later, monogamy became the norm. In the New Testament,
Jesus talks about it that way. But certainly in ancient Israel,
polygamy, for those who could afford it,...was widespread and
was completely accepted.
IDEAS: What does the
Bible say about abortion?
COOGAN: The Bible doesn’t
mention it at all....It’s not surprising, because in ancient
agrarian societies, children were valuable assets.
IDEAS: Were Adam and
Eve married?
COOGAN: That’s
one of the interesting issues of translation — in Hebrew
the word for “wife” and the word for “woman”
were the same word....Certainly there is no marriage ceremony
described in the Garden of Eden.
IDEAS: Those who view
homosexuality as a sin often cite Leviticus, where sex between
men appears next to bestiality in a list of prohibited sexual
behaviors.
COOGAN: I think those
prohibitions...have to do in part with a kind of aversion to mixing
categories....You shouldn’t wear a garment made out of wool
and linen, because that’s mixing categories. You shouldn’t
plow with two different kinds of animals, that’s mixing categories.
Some of the dietary laws can also be explained that way. A man
sleeping with a man feminizes the other man, removes him from
his category, just as bestiality would.
IDEAS: Other readers
of the Bible see subtle indications that the Bible sanctions homosexuality
— in the relationship between King David and Jonathan, for
example.
COOGAN: Since the ’80s
or so, some gay activists have said, “But wait...David says
of Jonathan, ‘Your love for me is more wonderful than the
love of women,’ so they must have been lovers in physical
sense.”...The problem with that is first of all that David’s
affair with Bathsheba would suggest that David was not what we
could call exclusively homosexual in orientation....I think the
relationship between David and Jonathan was not that they were
technically lovers, but rather that they had a profound, close
relationship.
It has also been claimed
that Paul in the New Testament was homosexual. There is no basis
for that. He wasn’t married; he tells us that himself. But...we
don’t know why....It’s also claimed, I think preposterously,
that Jesus was gay.
IDEAS: What does Jesus
say about homosexuality?
COOGAN: Not a word.
IDEAS: The Catholic
Church requires priests to be celibate, and most Catholic saints
were celibate. What is the biblical basis for that?
COOGAN: The primary
biblical basis is the writings of Paul, especially in his first
letter to the Corinthians where he urges people to remain unmarried
if they can....But the reason (for) that is...Paul believed that
Jesus was going to return in very near future, in his own lifetime.
So there was no sense in getting married because Jesus was coming
and there was going to be a whole new world.
IDEAS: What does Jesus
say about divorce?
COOGAN: It depends
upon which gospel you are reading....In the gospel of Mark, the
earliest gospel, Jesus is quoted as saying whoever divorces his
wife and marries another woman has committed adultery against
her....In another gospel he is quoted as saying whoever divorces
his wife, except for indecency, [commits adultery]...so there
is an exception.
IDEAS: Given all these
inconsistencies, how should contemporary readers look to the Bible
on these questions?
COOGAN: I use the analogy
of the Constitution, because it too is very much a product of
a different time and it reflects the values of its framers, but...underlying
the Constitution is a profound ideal, and I think underlying the
Bible are a number of profound ideals as well....In my view...the
underlying message of the Bible as a whole is loving the neighbor
as oneself.
IDEAS: Some might disagree
with the premise of that analogy.
COOGAN: The point I’m
trying to make is...that everyone, whether they are aware of it
or not, uses the Bible selectively. And I think it’s important
to reflect on and articulate criteria for saying, “This part
of the Bible I will continue to accept, [but not] this part that
talks about women as property or not wearing garments made of
[both] wool and linen.”...If you are not going to accept
that, why? Perhaps it’s not consistent with the higher ideals
everyone finds in the Bible.
Lisa Wangsness is
a Globe reporter. She can be reached at lwangsness@globe.com.
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