Searill,
Yes I was addressing your comments. They are common and the reason is most people read the bible in an effort to find scriptures that support what they know, or their own biases. That is called eisegesis and its been talked about quite extensively on here.
The bible’s internal culture is totally foreign to us at this point. Slavery, weird marriage arrangements the list goes on and on.
Everyone assumes the apostle Paul was a rabid homophobe. But we have to look at the culture of the time to try to understand what he was talking about.
Aside from Romans, the only other New Testament reference to homosexuality occurs in two passages known as "vice lists," in which Paul casually mentions the "arsenokoitai" as a group of sinners. People spend a lot of time debating about the translation of this word, because it appears only rarely in ancient writings. Even the translators of the NIV couldn't seem to make up their minds about it; it's translated as "homosexual offenders" in 1 Corinthians, but as "perverts" in 1 Timothy.
The word arsenokoitai is a compound word in Greek, and the parts of the word make reference to "male" and "bed," which indicates that this word probably referred to some kind of male homosexual behavior. The same Greek words ("male" and "bed") appear in the Greek translation of the Leviticus passage I'm going to discuss in a moment, which tells men not to lie ("bed") with a man ("male"), giving support to this theory. On the other hand, we must be careful not to assume too much; Greek compound words don't always mean what they might appear to mean. "Cyclops" in Greek is a compound word literally meaning "round eye," but we know from ancient literature that a cyclops was a mythical giant man having only one eye - which makes sense once we get the connection, but isn't something we could have figured out without all the literary references.
Still, I think that it's fairly safe to assume that the arsenokoitai of Paul's day were men engaging in some kind of homosexual behavior. But what kind of behavior? That's pretty much impossible to know for sure. Whatever it is, it would have to be something fairly common and well-known to Paul's audience; these are very short lists of common sinners (e.g. thieves, greedy, liars, etc.) everyone would be readily acquainted with. The most likely explanation is that Paul is referring to a practice that was fairly common in the Greek culture of his day - married men who had sex with male youths on the side.
The extramarital relationships of men with boys in ancient Greece are infamous even today. Archaeological and literary evidence prove that these relationships were common for centuries in Greece, though they were frowned upon by many even while they were publicly practiced. This would make a perfect target for Paul's vice lists, and it would explain why, in both lists, he mentions the sin of the arsenokoitai separately after he mentions adultery - because technically, by Greek thought, having a boy on the side wasn't adultery.
