When I attended Hope College (1995-99), one of our textbooks was A Guide to the New Testament World by Albert A. Bell, Jr. It was published in 1994 by Herald Press. Dr. Bell teaches at Hope College (affiliated with the mainline Reformed Church in America). The book primarily uses the NRSV, and the foreword is by the esteemed Bruce Metzger (who calls the book “a veritable marvel of craftmanship”). In other words, this book is not the product of an amateur historian and does not come from an excessively conservative wing of the church.
Which is what makes Bell’s description of sexuality in the New Testament world all the more striking. I pulled the book down from the shelf last week to get some background information for my sermon on Acts 15. While flipping through the book I stumbled upon this sub-section called “Sexual Deviance” in the chapter on “Greco-Roman Morality and Personal Relations.”
Besides being an important historical summary, these paragraphs demonstrate how much the culture has changed in 20 years. The ancient world’s attitude toward sexuality is looking more and more familiar. What seems strange now is that anyone would dare to retell this history and draw these conclusions.
[Note: For ease of reading, I left out Bell’s footnotes. Besides the parenthetical citations, he references 15 other works. They can be found on pages 244 and 245 in the book.]
