The Degradation of the Ancient World

Pagan "Glories" Versus the Church of the Lord

The classical pagan world was a cesspit.  These days our moralistic, sniffy culture has (Victorian-like) decided that what went on in Roman and Greek households ought not to be mentioned.  Instead it must be made a matter of collective amnesia.  Sarah Ruden has done us all a favour by putting the degradation and filth front and centre once again.

On the matter of homosexuality in general, she affirms that Paul's Jewish household would have held to the "bread-and-butter" teaching of the Old Covenant scriptures and the rabbis.  "Jewish teaching was clear," she writes.  "Homosexual acts were an abomination."  [Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined In His Own Time (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010), p. 48.]  But the Greco-Roman world was another matter entirely.

She continues, describing the norm in towns throughout the Empire:

Among the female prostitutes on the streets, or in the windows or doorways of brothels, were males, on average a lot younger. . . . [Paul] would know from his non-Jewish friends that household slaves normally were less respected as outlets for bodily functions than were the household toilets, and that a sanctioned role of slave boys was anal sex with free adults.  [Ibid.]

Anal sex with household slave boys was supposed to be violent and an act of rape.

Libertine Twisting Unto Destruction

Have Nothing to Do With the "Komos"

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread, they say.  Never has this been more the case than in our day when modern pagans attempt to exegete or explain the teaching of the Holy Bible.  The modern world has form in this regard: its overwhelming predisposition is to see the West and its dominant cultural motifs liberated from the constraints and commands of the Scripture.

One facile trick to carry out this vast libertine exercise is to misinterpret the Bible--carelessly or callously, it matters not.  Consequently, we have learnt over the years, never to take anything said by Unbelievers about the Bible and its teachings without a very big dose of salt.

Not that the Bible is a wax nose to be twisted at will.  The message and teachings of Scripture are pretty plain to any fair minded reader, with only some things hard or difficult to understand.  The Bible itself warns against such twisting:

. . . as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.  [II Peter 3:16]

The Real Dark Ages

Intellectual Snobbery Plays Tricks on Both the Dead and the Living

The dominant narrative of Western history runs something like this: the classical age (Greece, Alexander, and Rome) represents a crowning glory of human achievement.  This age was marked by an explosion of refined cultural achievement, knowledge, discovery, and scientific advance.  It was followed by the Dark Ages when the West came under the aegis of the Christian faith and its attendant superstition.  During nigh on a thousand dark years, the West lived in penury, illness, and degradation, presided over by tyrannical feudal despots and a superstitious religion.

Then came the Enlightenment which threw off the shackles of religious superstition and began to recover the glories of the classical age.  Out of the resulting explosion of knowledge and cultural advances of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment came the Western dominance of the world--culturally, politically, academically, scientifically, and so forth.

But as Voltaire observed, "history" is a trick the living play upon the dead.