In my last post of the Sin of Sodomy Series I explored the idea that the original meaning of the Bible’s Sodom and Gomorrah narrative had nothing to do with homosexual sin. Based on a thorough review of pre-Christian era Hebrew texts and commentary it is pretty clear that the commonly accepted sin of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were greed and inhospitality.  So then how did the story of Sodom and Gomorrah get sodomized?

To answer that question we need to go back to the start of the Christian era (100 BCE to 100 CE).  During this time, the Palestinian Jews and Jews of the Dispora were confronted by casual hedonistic paganism of the Greco-Roman world.  Horrified by the immorality that was spreading throughout their society, the Jewish world suffered a purity crisis.

In an effort to restore their ideal of orthodox moral purity, Jewish scholars began reinterpreting many Biblical stories with sexual prohibitions were none had existed before.  Concepts like homosexuality, which were only briefly mentioned in the Old Testament, would now take on paramount importance.

The philosophical and spiritual leader of this purity movement was Philo of Alexandria (20 BCE – 50 CE).  Philo was a Jewish philosopher born in Alexandria, who used allegory to harmonize Jewish scriptures with Greek Philosophy.  Philo`s teachings were enthusiastically embraced by early Christians, who incorporated his ideas into the philosophical foundations of Christianity.  It has even been suggested that Philo was the founder of Christianity by virtue of his fusion of ideas present in Jewish scripture and those of Greek mystery religions.  This mishmash of ideas would eventually bear much resemblance to the shape that Christianity eventually would take.

But before we get too far ahead of ourselves here let us examine the reinterpretation that Philo made to the Sodom and Gomorrah story.   As we have already seen, his predecessors saw greed and inhospitality as the city’s chief sin.  However, the austere Philo focuses his criticism on what he sees as the city’s self indulgent enjoyment of food and sex.   Philo’ reinterpretation of the Sodom and Gomorrah story provides us with the version of events that we are familiar with today:

The land of the Sodomites, a part of Canaan afterwards called Palestinian Syria, 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 condemned by the Judge of All…Incapable of bearing such satiety, plunging like cattle, they threw off from their necks the law of nature and applied themselves to…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.

In Philo’s vivid imagination, he leaves no doubt that the chief sin of the Sodomites was homosexual sin.  If the cause of Sodom’s destruction was homosexual sin then it goes to follow that any community that tolerated said sin would be risking the wrath of God.  This would be the viewpoint that would later be embraced wholeheartedly by Christianity.  In the centuries that followed this belief would form the foundation of a homosexual hysteria that would be used to justify all sorts of brutality towards them.