by David Kyle Foster
If you’ve ever engaged with an activist, a liberal Christian or just the average person on the street on the subject of homosexuality, you’ve probably encountered this platitude: “Jesus never mentioned homosexuality!” Among those who make such a claim, that statement is one of the quickest, easiest and most common excuses for approving homosexual practice because it gives the appearance of being a biblical argument while being just the opposite.
Does such a claim hold any weight biblically? And if it is true that Jesus never mentioned homosexuality, does that really justify homosexual behavior?
The “Jesus never mentioned it” argument has numerous and serious flaws, so let’s go through them one by one.
- The most obvious point to make is that Jesus didn’t mention any number of sins. For example, He never mentioned child sexual abuse or wife beating. Does that mean that they are no longer sins? He never mentioned transvestism (Deut. 22:5). Does that make it okay now?
- It defies simple logic to claim that the absence of any mention of certain sins by Jesus in the New Testament indicates that He now approves of them. Homosexual practices were condemned in the Old Testament in the strongest of terms (Lev. 18:22; 20:13) and Jesus affirmed those prohibitions (Matt. 5:17-20).
- Additionally, the claim that He must mention a sin for it to be wrong assumes that the purpose of the New Testament was to re-state or to create a new list of forbidden practices. Such an argument unmasks complete ignorance of Scripture on the part of those who make it. These would-be scholars are no scholars at all. They are apologists for those who seek to jettison God’s moral standards (see Rom. 1:28, 32). Until the modern era, no biblical scholar of the past 2,000 years has ever proposed such a ridiculous hermeneutic. Thus, such would-be scholars presume to know better than all of the biblical scholars (Christian or secular) of the past two millennia. They echo Satan’s original deception, “Did God really say”? (Gen. 3:1, NIV).
What Jesus did do was to point out that the religious leaders of His day were inventing laws in an effort to establish their righteousness before God and to show themselves pious before men (Matt. 23:1-7, 27-28).
He also pointed out that their standards and practices for obeying the Mosaic Law fell short of its full meaning. For example, when He pointed out that the sin of adultery could be committed at the heart level, not just physically (Matt. 5:27-28), Jesus was revealing the deeper meaning, scope and intent of the law. He was also establishing the fact that no man could keep the Law in all of its aspects (see also Rom. 3:20, 27-28; James 2:8-11).
4. Most of what Jesus said wasn’t even recorded in the Bible (John 20:30, 21:25; Rev. 22:18-19). So the incompleteness of the biblical accounts of what He said mitigates the claim that Jesus never mentioned homosexual practices.
5. Jesus reaffirmed all of the moral law (Matt. 5:17-20), and chided those who broke the commandments and taught others to do the same (Rom. 1:32).
Here, it’s important to understand that there were different kinds of Old Testament law. The Old Testament contained ritual (ceremonial), sacrificial, civil and moral law. Jesus affirmed its entirety, yet brought to an end the ritual and sacrificial law by fulfilling them.
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