Rehearsing Sodomy

Having surveyed the literature of the Second Temple period and of rabbinic Judaism, I now turn to the world of Christianity. In this chapter I will discuss a wide variety of texts from the Ecumenical Church of the first Christian millennium. Most of these texts come from the first six Christian centuries with the exception of some later eastern Christian material, including a ninth-century Syriac exegete. I must remind the reader that my analysis of the interpretation of Genesis 19 and Judges 19–21 is focused on the role homophobia plays in that interpretation. I am not studying the acceptance or rejection of same-sex desire and homoerotic relationships, per se, in early Christianity (or rabbinic Judaism, for that matter). In Christianity, the story of Sodom becomes caught up with the history of homophobia through the development of what I term the homophobic reading of the narrative. This reading emerges by the fourth century and eventually gives birth, in the eleventh-century Latin West, to the word/concept of sodomy (cf. Jordan 1997). In the history of homophobia, this is an event of profound consequences, under the shadow of which we still live. Nevertheless, the medieval invention of sodomy is an event rehearsed on a number of occasions in this earlier period. The name of Sodom is used to denote a type of person who is not a resident of the city, or an abstract behavioural pattern, understood to be exemplified by the city. This chapter is partially structured around four such rehearsals.