The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible by Robert J

Author:Robert J.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Published: 2010-05-03T04:00:00+00:00

“Go, and sin no more”

The notion of an easygoing, sexually tolerant Jesus is prevalent among defenders of homosexual practice.

After all, one of the most striking and consistent aspects of the portrait of Jesus received from the Gospels was his willingness to befriend and even make close disciples of social outcasts, including prostitutes, tax-collectors, hated Roman soldiers, Samaritans, and lepers.

However, as Robert A. J. Gagnon argues in his precise exegetical work, The Bible and Homosexual Practice, a close examination of the Gospels belies the portrait of the easygoing, sexually broadminded Jesus.

Jesus may have been forgiving of the woman taken in adultery, but his actual attitude toward adultery itself went far beyond what any sage of Judaism, then or since, taught.

In Matthew 5:27, Jesus says: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you, everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart!”

According to the Gospels, for Jesus the will of God is expressed in the indissoluble marriage bond, which, echoing Genesis, he ties to the very fabric of creation. In Mark, Jesus notes that “from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female,” and therefore “a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two but one flesh.”

It is because of this total physical and spiritual union, Jesus says, that divorce is simply not permissible: “What God has joined together, no man may separate.”

Comments Gagnon: “The whole point of Jesus’s stance in Mark 10:1–12 is not to broaden the Torah’s openness to alternative forms of sexuality but rather to narrow or constrain the Torah’s sexual ethic to disallow any sexual union other than a monogamous, lifelong marriage to a person of the opposite sex.”10

Jesus did indeed forgive the woman taken in adultery, but he said, “Go, and sin no more” and not, “Go ahead and do what feels right to you . . . since whom you sleep with doesn’t matter anyway.”

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