We now know many things that we did not know two or three thousand years ago. We know, for example, that the Earth goes around the Sun, and that the age of the Earth is approximately 4,500,000,000 years, not some 6,000 as biblical literalists have believed. We know that approximately ten percent of individuals in every mammalian species are homosexual. If indeed there is a God, then God created them that way. If the men of Sodom were guilty of something, we must look elsewhere.
We now know, though we only learned it in the twentieth century, that all human males masturbate, and so do fifty percent of women. The sin of Onan was not that he "spilled his seed on the ground," but that he failed to fulfill the Law of the Levirate, by which a man takes to wife the wife of his deceased brother and fathers children, so that the brother may have progeny. And yet churches and religions all over the world burden young men and women with feelings of guilt for a behavior that is natural and normal.
Recently, when I was studying the Gospel of Matthew in its original, Hebrew language, I found that I had a strong dislike of the following verse (Mt. 5:30):
"Also, if your hand seduces you, cut it off. It is better for you to suffer the loss of one of your limbs than all your body in Gehenna." (Some Greek texts even say "right hand.")
My dislike of the verse was not so much as a possible reference to masturbation, but because of its barbarity, extremism, and contempt for what God has created. I was relieved, therefore, to learn that the verse was absent from some of the best and some of the oldest texts of the "Western" (Syro-Latin) tradition, which appears to be older than the Greek textual tradition. In other words, the verse is quite possibly spurious, added by some anemic prude who thought he was improving the text of the Gospel.
Text © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler.
