Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality:

...Jerome, held that all those who violated the order of nature in this way had been struck dead at the moment of the Nativity...

...Though the new American states soon began to drop the death penalty and France decriminalized sodomy entirely in 1791, executions in England increased in number in the early nineteenth century...

...The thirteenth century was a great age for secular and ecclesiastical codification, but the attitudes incorporated in these harsh laws presumably go back much earlier...

...Reviewers have regularly applauded the scope and erudition 6f this book, and quite rightly...

...Some early penitentials, as Keith Thomas has shown, make sodomy as serious as murder, or worse...

...Boswell argues that there is no reason for rendering the kedeshim of Kings 14:24 as "sodomites" (as the King James translators do...

...This theory puzzled commentators, since Vergil was supposed to have survived...

...Published civilian statistics and unpublished naval records indicate that over a hundred hangings occurred between 1800 and 1835...

...The first is that the Bible does not take so negative a stand on homosexuality as is popularly supposed...

...But this is to miss the point that Justinian felt he was wearing the mantle of moral and religious respectability when he castrated bishops for this crime and marched them through the streets of Constantinople...

...From St...

...There were, however, some surprisingly late persecutions...

...Boswell ascribes the ferocity of Justinian's persecution (the one well-known early instance of law enforcement) solely to that testy emperor's personal bias and political animosities...

...Boswell strains heroically to interpret the arsenokoitai of I Corinthians 6:9 as other than homosexuals, but despite all his scholarly exegesis, his argument left this reader unconvinced...

...The infliction of capital punishment probably reached its peak in the sixteenth century, and had all but died out by the eighteenth...

...John Bos well's ambitious and scholarly new study tries to establish two main theses...

...Surely it is significant that the only word the Old Testament has for homosexuals means literally "holy men": in this association of homosexuality with the despised aboriginal CanaanConcerned to get Christianity off the hook, Boswell is perplexed to explain the increasing intolerance of homosexuality after the fall of Rome...

...During the next five hundred years burnings, hangings, beheadings, and judicial drownings and castrations took place in France, Flanders, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and in the Americas...

...A wave of religious hysteria which swept Holland in 1730 led to the death of sixty men and boys - this in a traditionally tolerant country which had much earlier given up burning heretics and witches...

...Justinian's famous edict of 538 blaming earthquakes, plagues, and famines on homosexuals invoked the Sodom story in its preamble...

...His preferred solution is that the realization of Europe after the fall of Rome caused the change, rural communities being, he thinks, less tolerant of sexual minorities than urban ones...

...A mortal legend, originating perhaps with St...

...Michael Goodich, in a recent study (The Unmentionable Vice: Homosexuality in the Later Medieval Period) has now shown that the Papal Inquisition, from its start in 1233, was also given the charge of hunting down sodomites as well as heretics...

...All in all, after eight years of looking, I have been able to document over four hundred executions of men and women, a figure which must surely represent only a small fraction of the real total...

...The fact is that we have few trial records of any sort from before that date...

...Sherwin Bailey, in his standard study of early laws, dating from 1955, took this view...

...It has generally been assumed that capital laws were not enforced against women...

...John Chrysostom in the fourth century to Jeremy Collier in the eighteenth, there were divines who called for the enforcement of the law in its full rigor...

...He points out, reasonably enough, that the Sodom story tells of two angels threatened with rape and that, on this account, it is hardly appropriate to take it as a blanket condemnation of consensual acts: it does not appear to have been read that way in Old Testament times or in the Talmud...

...Boswell's work will be an inexhaustible source and an inescapable point of departure for future scholars and apologists...

...Massachusetts's first law code transcribed Leviticus ("If a man lyeth with a man . . .") verbatim and a unique law condemning lesbians to death, passed in New Haven in 1655, incorporated Romans 1:26 in its text...

...To discount the anathemas of the leading spokesmen of Greek Christianity (Chrysostom) and Latin Christianity (Augustine) as somehow untypical of early Christian attitudes is an odd procedure, to say the least...

...But surely the point is that the early church chose to keep this prohibition while dismissing others as inessential to Christians...

...It uncovers hundreds of interesting and relevant new documents, theological and literary, hitherto unknown or unanalyzed, in an impressive range of languages...

...But Boswell finds it difficult to defend this theory in the light of the fact that Aquinas wrote and the Inquisition searched in a later age when urbanization was again the tendency...

...Jurists in the middle ages and the Renaissance regularly cite Leviticus 20:13 and Romans 1: 26-27 to justify capital punishment for male homosexuals and lesbians...

...And of course, there still remains the unambiguous reference of Romans 1, which was the real prop of legal and moral condemnation...

...The current issue of the Journal of Homosexuality, devoted to history, reprints the record of a remarkable trial at Halberstadt in 1721 which led to the beheading of a woman who had "married" another woman and lived with her as man and wife...

...It is exhilarating to see all this learning under control and marshaled to make significant points...

...But Boswell's arguments look too much like special pleading...

...Concerned to get Christianity off the hook, he is perplexed to explain this...

...In making sodomy preeminently the sin of Sodom, the Fathers of the Church were, one might argue, more homophobic than the earlier Jews...

...This, of course, overlooks the findings of Ford and Beach that preliter-ate societies have generally leaned towards toleration...

...At the time of the Revolution the death penalty was in force in all thirteen colonies...

...Opinions will differ here, but it seems to me Bos-well has only a very limited success in this attempt...

...ite cults lies the most likely origin of the Levitical law...

...This lethal policy appears to derive mainly from biblical precept and Christian moral theology...

...Boswell does admit that the Mediterranean world moved from tolerance of homosexuality in classical times to intolerance after the rise of Christianity...

...But we now know of executions for lesbianism in most of the European countries mentioned above, England being the notable exception...

...But in ignoring the important Talmudic gloss on the word he loses the best key we have to an understanding of Jewish prejudice...

...Boswell's second contention is that Christian society, taken as a whole, was not strongly condemnatory of homosexuality until the age of Aquinas, who emerges as rather the intellectual villain of this study...

...Even the prolific notes fascinate while they inform...

...Boswell dismisses the Levitical proscription as merely reflecting Jewish ritual concerns, like their food laws...

...One would indeed like to think that the early Christian church had not fostered the hatred and fear that led to the later terrorism...

...But though the presently known record of executions date from after 1200, it is hard to believe that stringently hostile attitudes did not develop till then...

...Louis Crompton THE EARLIEST execution for homosexuality in Western Christian Europe presently known to us was of a Swiss Count who was burned in Basel in 1277...

...It has long been known that the Inquisition in Spain sought out, sentenced, and burned homosexuals...

...It is a pity that it is, at the same time, vitiated by a determination to construe all its voluminous evidence in the light of an untenable leading idea...

...By placing intolerance towards gay people in the context of intolerance toward other minority groups in the middle ages-Jews, Moslems, lepers, etc.-it enlightens and stimulates...

...Hangings in these jurisdictions occurred as early as 1625 (at Jamestown) and as late as 1780 (at Hanna's Town, Pennsylvania...