Does the Bible Condemn Homosexuality? Guest Interview with Jeffrey Siker
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Chris Huntley
4.8 • 745 Ratings
🗓️ 14 March 2023
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
One of the few ways people today actually appeal to the Old Testament is to condemn same-sex sexual relations (while they ignore much of everything else it says).
Such people usually take it as obvious that the New Testament condemns them as well. But DOES the Bible condemn homosexuality? As it turns this a lively debate among biblical scholars, and the dominant view among critical scholars is not at all what you might expect. Their reasons for holding this view is even less widely known.
In this episode I interview biblical scholar Jeffrey Siker (PhD, Princeton Theological Seminary) long time professor of New Testament (who is also an ordained Presbyterian minister) who explains why in fact the Bible does NOT condemn homosexuality.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. The only show, where a six-time New York Times |
| 0:09.6 | best-selling author and world-renowned Bible scholar, uncovers the many fascinating, little-known |
| 0:15.1 | facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the rise of Christianity. I'm your host, Megan Lewis. Let's begin. |
| 0:24.3 | I'd like to welcome you to this special edition of the misquoting Jesus podcast. This week, |
| 0:31.2 | I'm not being interviewed by Megan. I'm interviewing a fellow scholar and friend of mine, Jeffrey Seiker, who is an expert on |
| 0:41.1 | a large number of things, including questions dealing with homosexuality in the Bible. |
| 0:46.7 | I've known Jeff Secker for, God, I don't know, 40 years. Forty years. |
| 0:50.9 | Forty years. Jeff was two years behind me at Princeton Theological Seminary in our PhD programs. |
| 0:57.8 | Jeff had come to Princeton in, I guess, in 1983. |
| 1:01.9 | He did a master's degree at Yale before coming to Princeton Seminary. |
| 1:05.6 | And when he graduated from Princeton Seminary, he went on for a long-term teaching career at Loyola Marymount University in California and Los Angeles. |
| 1:17.7 | This was an interesting teaching career for him because Jeff is actually a Presbyterian, and Loyola of Marymount is Jesuit. |
| 1:26.0 | Yes, it is. |
| 1:27.0 | So he's a wide-ranging guy. Jeff is a professor of |
| 1:30.5 | theological studies there in the Department of Theological Studies. He was the chair of that |
| 1:35.2 | department for a long time. He also is the chair of classics at archaeology. Not at the same time. |
| 1:42.0 | Not at the same time, luckily. And Jeff has done a lot of things in a lot of different areas. |
| 1:47.0 | One of his main interests is actually in Jewish and Christian relationships in the ancient world. |
| 1:52.0 | For a spell, he was a fellow at the Hartman Institute for Jewish Christian relations in Jerusalem for a couple summers. |
| 2:00.0 | Jeff is an accomplished author and scholar, |
| 2:02.9 | principally, of the New Testament. He's an expert in the Bible generally and in early Christianity. |
| 2:09.0 | He has written or edited eight books over the years. The most recent one is on sin. |
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