Transcript History

(417) Was the Apostle Paul Gay? - YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv8DvdlDYss

Transcript:

(00:22) good evening and welcome to our weekly history theology and philosophy Meetup we've been doing this for about four years we had been doing them as in person when we were having in person gatherings but right now during the suspension of that we are live-streaming to you every Tuesday evening my name is John Hamer and I serve as the coordinator of the meetup we always begin with our mission which is to invite everyone into community to continually learn and grow to abolish poverty and end needless suffering to

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(01:33) trying time and if you can't you know into these circumstances we also understand one of our sister programs the encounter world religion center we've talked about that many times so that is they're having their annual discovery week that's become a virtual discovery week it's gonna be next week so beginning on Sunday and there are still slots available actually there's gonna be a lot of people already that are in it and so we think maybe a lot of people who are on who are listening are actually already signed up but it's a

(02:09) pretty exciting experience as you are learning about Hinduism Judaism Buddhism Islam and indigenous North American spirituality and you will also be having guides from each of those traditions who will be on hand to share their own experience their own insights and also to interact with the people who are in the the virtual discovery and of course it will be hosted the entire time by Brian Caruana who is just a very gifted teacher religious studies expert and so anyway we we recommend it it's this is the kind

(02:50) of thing that you if you couldn't make it because the in-person meeting is actually tough and to take a whole week off and and you have some time right now this is a great opportunity next week on Tuesday our lecture is going to be it's entitled the invention of hell and so anyway if you're familiar to familiar with a lot of Christianity and I mean you can imagine that for many Christians anyway the ideas of heaven and hell are very much animating their ideas of afterlife and yet what people often don't even realize is that if you open

(03:36) up the Old Testament the Christian Old Testament the Hebrew Bible there is essentially no mention of Hell whatsoever so God isn't telling Adam and Eve if you are disobedient you're going to go to hell and that's like also not the threat for example that Moses or the prophets are making to the disobedient children of Israel and that is because of course the idea hadn't been invented yet or hadn't been introduced to Judaism and so we're going to look at that and what does the implications of that next week our topic this evening is was the

(04:18) Apostle Paul gay and so last weekend was global LGBT q2i a plus pride and we had a really wonderful celebration of that in our special communion service that we had on Sunday and so traditionally we also have a topic on that theme on our lecture the following week and so this is the one we're going to look at this particularly interesting topic today so this has been anyway the idea that Paul's gay this is not my idea many scholars have actually looked at the evidence and made the case for it and one of these is a controversial but

(05:04) liberal Christian Bishop John Shelby Spong and back all the way in 1991 he wrote a book called rescuing the Bible from fundamental fundamentalism and so he argued that the Apostle Paul in that book actually was a self-loathing loathing and repressed gay male so that claim is obviously very sensational when you say something like that it's also very controversial and so you know he's the Episcopal Archbishop so the Episcopal bishop of New York the Catholic Archbishop of the same City said this is not only shocking it's one

(05:43) of the craziest things I've ever heard so far so not everybody when they heard this idea they're like wow this is you're crazy and so and so I can understand if you heard the topic and you had that kind of reaction that may well have been your reaction to like the Catholic Archbishop of the same City said way back then nevertheless there's some very interesting evidence in this particular case and so we're gonna look at what Jax Wong had to argued in his book and what other scholars have subsequently added to this question and

(06:18) so in the first place we have to kind of define what we're talking about because I think there's a lot of confusion when I even announced the topic I think there was a lot of confusion with when some of the reactions that I had gotten on social media so what do we mean by the term gay and so what I'm gonna be talking about in this lecture is we're looking at innate sexual orientation inborn sexual orientation so the majority of people whose gender identity is male are innately amorously attracted to females and this is what we call

(06:58) heterosexual or straight orientation and most everybody in the world is straight you know at the top of the majority and most everybody therefore probably listening to this lecture although this lecture is going to self-select a little bit out of proportion to the worldwide population is also probably heterosexually oriented in terms of you know you can't help that you were born that way a significant minority however of people whose gender identity is male are innately amorously attracted to other males and we call this homosexual

(07:33) or gay orientation and if you you know do the same thing so for females that's we sometimes call lesbian but it's also it would also be homosexual or gay orientation and so we have that illustration here from a tomb in pi stem Italy from the 5th century you know of two males anyway engaged in amorous activity here's another of Egyptian men nose kissing in ancient Egypt so innate sexual orientation and gender identity so some people like I say are in named innately amorously attracted though to either gender so we talked about was

(08:13) binary before but it's not totally by an area here now that because there's a much more complexity so if the person is attracted to either gender then they're either bisexual or pansexual orientation and then there may well be people who aren't really attracted to anyone sexually and that would be a sexual orientation and so before when I was saying LGBT q2i a some of those things I should read the last bullet point before I tell it also so gender identity and expression are totally separate issues so we've just been talking about

(08:48) orientation but gender identity and expression network are two completely distinct from orientation and so the identity and expressions include things like transgender identity and expression intersex and androgynous identities among others and so that now going back to that list of initials el lesbian g b you know l j-- gay bisexual transgender q of queer - that's two spirits and so the two spirits refers to a traditional identity among indigenous peoples in Canada and the United States so we can talk about that in a different lecture

(09:30) but anyway two spirits I intersects a asexual and so and then we have a plus because there's more complexity even than that but that's the idea and that's why we have that long string of initials as we are inclusive of all of the different diversity that exists naturally in among humans and indeed actually among all kinds of different animal species besides humans so when we are going to be talking about this tonight then when I said was a possible gay I'm looking at innate orientation not activity and so when I'm asking the

(10:11) question is so in such and such a historical figure were they gay or where they're lesbian I'm not saying did that person have sex with other men or did she as a person have sex with other women the reality is men who are naturally heterosexually oriented someone with innate heterosexual inborn heterosexual orientation they're quite able to have sex with other men and indeed that could be culturally normative in plenty of cultures and it is even in the present and certainly it has been historically and then also men who are naturally

(10:49) homosexual II oriented have throughout history and in the present are still quite able to have sex with women and have children and so on and so forth with women and that's always been true so it's really not we're not really talking here about the activity but rather we're talking about the orientation that is inborn so for example we know very well from all of the tropes and actually reality that in prisons and prison populations where the genders are are segregated and so you there's only males and male prisons

(11:28) me females and female prisons heterosexually oriented men in all male prisons may well be sexually active with other men and this does not mean they're gay and it doesn't make them gay it does not affect their innate sexual orientation it is simply a market reality a cultural reality of the the environment in which they find themselves I mean that's been true for things like the Navy in the past too and so when we're looking at this I'm just going to use a couple examples of how we read this kind of evidence of in terms

(12:07) of the activities and them trying to determine if we have any evidence for innate orientation it's going to use for examples to hear from the greco-roman Classical period to from medieval England there's plenty more when I posted this slide on social media people were quick to point out many more English Kings like King James of King James Bible Fame who was his pretty likely to have been gay he certainly had a lot of gay romances in his court and things like that nevertheless that's not my point here in this what I'm trying to

(12:44) do here is looking at how we understand the two different things as we're looking at these four figures and so if we're gonna take Alexander the Great Julius Caesar William Rufus which is to say William the Conqueror's son William the second king of England Richard the lion-hearted Henry the second son one of the famous crusader kings of England and if we're gonna look at activity okay well about what about sex with men so we know Alexander the Great had sex with other men his very famous friend and lover that he had throughout his life

(13:20) Gaius Julius Caesar we have pretty good evidence that in his youth he may have had an affair with male William Rufus there's all kinds of gossip from all of the court years out of his court and all the bishops who were constantly talking about all of the attractive young men that are around the court and and so yes we don't have the firm evidence but it seems fair quite likely Richard the lion-hearted there's been a there's been a lot of idea of it of this there's a magnificent play called the lion in winter where

(13:59) Richard is portrayed as gay and in love with the King of France nevertheless the the actual evidence is a lot more slight than the literature lets us maybe think so anyway that's just activity though and what about sex with women well Alexander the Great also had a wife he definitely had sex with women certainly that's true for for Caesar it does turn out that William Rufus one of the problems that he had essentially as a king one of the things that is helpful for Kings is if you have a son and successor and if you don't

(14:36) ever get married and you don't ever have any sex with women then that doesn't happen and so it didn't happen in his case and he is when he died it was there for his younger brother who became King Henry the first Richard the lion-hearted also failed to get married but he did have sex with other women because he produced illegitimate children okay but what about orientation so how do we judge it it's harder to judge so despite this different questions of activity Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar are aristocrats in the greco-roman world

(15:12) Greece and Rome had their own different ideas about same-sex activity and it was anyway we'll get into it a little bit here based on let's say the amount of love that Alexander had for his male companion it may well be that he's gay the Seether caesar's sort of youthful dalliance didn't really seem to extend throughout the rest of his life and all of his other romances and things like that so probably straight William Rufus as we kind of have indicated there's not really any indication that he was involved with women at all and there's a

(15:55) lot of evidence that he was involved with the courtiers in his court male courtiers and so probably maybe gay I'd say with Richard despite how much I love the the play and movie the line and winter it's probably not convincing so I'd say probably or maybe straight so anyway we can't always tell but it's not based on whether or not there's activity so hopefully we can kind of see the distinction here that we're kind of drawing so the orientation of historical figures really can't be proven from historical records attempts to identify

(16:35) a figure sexual orientation is really part of an inquiry into understanding motivation that falls under the heading of psycho biography which is to say attempting to draw out psychological motivations and those are just going to always involve caution because there's a whole bunch of pitfalls that we can have in general for historical figures especially by the time we're getting to the Middle Ages or antiquity we just rarely have enough detailed evidence we have very little to actually judge based on it we do know in this case of William

(17:15) Rufus he's an unmarried king he preferred the company of men there's no pretty much indication that he is interested in women that doesn't prove anything really at the end of the day we can't say for sure we can just say that that seems like a likely psychological component in his motivations that he has that orientation all right so let's look at some ancient cultural attitudes and practices gay men and women which is to say individuals who have innate or inborn homosexual orientation they've existed throughout

(17:54) history and in all cultures even though not all cultures recognize that no ancient culture however understood the phenomenon in the way that it's understood day so nobody in the past understood genetics they no didn't understand any of this prenatal stuff that I'm accounts for some of the inborn activity inborn orientation they didn't have any idea of that at all however ancient Romans Greeks and Israelites did have their own culturally different and culturally distinct ideas about homosexual activity but I'm gonna say none of those are

(18:39) actually informed by good understandings of orientation and so even though you may well really associate let's say being gay with the ancient Greeks and not with the Israelites nevertheless actually is not because the ancient Greeks were and any a higher percentage where they're any higher percentage innately gay as their orientation than the Israelites it's simply that they had a different customs in their overall society so let's look for first here at Roman which is to say the western part of the Mediterranean the Latin attitudes

(19:35) Roman society was extremely patriarchal the paterfamilias as he was called traditionally the head of the family in other words traditionally held power of life and death even over his wife and children so a disobedient child in theory could be executed by the order of the the head of the family the father males were seen as dominant and active and females were portrayed as submissive and passive and so as far as the Roman attitudes went as long as the man was the active partner as they understood it and then it was irrelevant

(20:20) frankly for the Romans whether the passive partner was female or male so whoever is taking the women's role it doesn't matter however if and so in general Roman Nobles therefore for example could be sexually active with their slaves of either gender was a slave Society however if the male the noblemen took with the woman's role as the Romans understood it in a same-sex relationship in the same sex activity that was then seen though as quite shameful and so that would bring shame on this very manly dominant active portrayal that

(21:07) Romans tried to Roman males anyway tried to portray themselves so the Roman poet could tell us who is a contemporary of Julius Caesar wrote all kinds of erotic love poetry both to female and two males lovers that was extremely popular among the aristocrats of his time there was no shame at all for the Emperor Hadrian the guy who's so famous for building Hadrian's Wall in Britain between England and Scotland the guy who's famous for building the pantheon among other things one of the great builders when the great Emperor's he had a really

(21:50) long term relationship with his male lover Antinous and it was not a problem nobody cared about that in the Roman Empire because it was understood that Hadrian was the active partner that he was the top and so it didn't matter that he had this boy lover who then when that when Antony was died was later worshipped as a God in the eastern part of the Roman Empire and Egypt and so on that was simply understood in Roman attitudes that that's fine by contrast Julius Caesar was shamed by the rumor that as a youth he had been

(22:28) like the boy lover of a client king of their own empire the king of bathin eeeh which is to say a Greek King from Asia Minor from what is now Turkey and so there was a moment when Caesar is having a triumph he's at the height his height and he should be and achieving all of this wonderful status and it's a great day for him and everything like that but a group of rowdy troops that Hail Caesar Ave Oh a Kaiser Regina Bethany I which is to say Hail Caesar Queen of Bithynia so in other words he's being shamed by

(23:10) taking the women's role in terms of the Roman attitudes about same-sex activity this is not in any way a comments really on I'm not even saying here for Antinous for the king of Affinia for Caesar or Hadrian or Catullus in terms of their sexual orientation we have to look deeper for every one of these figures in order to think about their sexual orientation we're just talking about their sexual activity because of the cultural attitudes that Romans had the Latins had in the eastern half of the Empire in the Greek and Hellenistic

(23:51) world the attitude and custom was different than the Roman custom so Greek society promoted male male relationships among the nobility Greek men who spent too much time with women were actually accused of being effeminate because when you if you were a man who's been all this time with women you would have to you'd have to wash because women don't want you to smell you would have to wear women Lee kind of perfume and you'd have to dress up for them and yet the shave or all these kind of things so it was the heterosexual people who are

(24:28) interested in heterosexual activity the men in the Greeks attitude that were viewed as being effeminate and the men who preferred the company of men who were seen as more masculine in the Greek and Hellenistic East this has nothing to do again we their innate inborn sexual orientation this is a cultural attitude and activity so the Greeks also among the nobles had an institution which we call pederasty which is a sexual and educational relationship mentorship between a free adult male and an adolescent males a

(25:09) teenager and this was very common and formalized in Athens and elsewhere you can see it here as a on the pot of a in the Greek man who is essentially wooing an adolescent with a gift and that's this is a frequent part of the custom you have to attract the young the teenager in order to anyway become the mentor and also enter into this relationship unlike in in in Rome so this would have been the relationship that when Caesar as the teenager is living off in the East he's being accused of have conforming to in other words something

(25:51) that would be totally appropriate in the Greek East in bathin eeeh not appropriate in the Latin West so in other words this was seen in the Greek East is something quite appropriate and honorable even for a teenager and then later he'll become the older man in the inn and replicate the cycle right you may be aware of for example the Sacred Band of the Thebes and so this idea in Greek military and this is also true I think for some of you might be like the Spartans there's an elite group though here in Thebes which is one of the other

(26:41) major cities where there was a hundred and fifty male couples and they were understood to be very very fierce warriors because of the love that's shared between the two partners and so since you have three hundred here of which each two are a couple you're going fight to the death to protect your comrade because you're in this very close and sexual relationship and so according to Plutarch as we've read about as he describes this institution each of these pairs consisted of the older lover the erastes and the younger

(27:20) beloved the arame knows but in both cases they're warriors here so I'm just gonna reiterate though that none of these practices and customs even though this is existing in you know very much as part of central to the society none of that means that the participants were gay anymore then it means that men today in US prisons are in prisons anywhere are gay most are absolutely not the proportions has always been you know anyway under 10% of the population are innately oriented homosexual everybody the majority is much more likely to have

(28:08) straight orientation inborn so in contrast to the Romans and the Greeks there's a little bit of a different attitude that the ancient Israelites have there's a couple different attitudes that are presented so in the Bible we do have in the courtly stories so the courtly authors that are writing in the court of Jerusalem that get incorporated into the books of Samuel and kings for example we had the story of King Saul's son Jonathan and Jonathan's love for David and that provided a very strong and powerful biblical precedent for male-male

(28:53) relationships the love that David had for Jonathan the love especially that Jonathan had for David although in the Bible we have this story of Sodom and Gomorrah which tends to have been from not from the time it was written but from the time of let's say Jesus where to now it has been associated with the idea of homosexuality nevertheless as written it probably wasn't meant to portray that at all but rather is talking about violations of guest-host relationships the reality is here the people in Sodom and Gomorrah who they

(29:40) want to commit a gang rape that has nothing to do with it's a it's a special crime that is beyond whether who what gender anybody happens to be in in this in this particular you know horror story that exists there and indeed even even in a kind of a technical circumstance in early modern times when anglo-american legal codes had a crime called sodomy this isn't this isn't related only to same-sex activity but it's related to all non very standard heterosexual intercourse right so in other words you can still commit sodomy as a man and a

(30:24) woman according to the law code so in other words it's not totally meant to be that way and so what we won't spend a whole bunch of time on that but I will say that elsewhere the Hebrew Bibles added toward to attitude toward male male sexual activity is very negative and certainly in the priests code among Levitical Levitical code it's especially negative so the Levitical law in Torah forbids Israelite men from engaging in homosexual sex you must not lie with a man as with a woman that is an abomination Leviticus

(30:59) 18:22 says the law further decrees that Israelite men who lie together must be put to death in Leviticus 20:13 and although some Christians today misquote that these 613 Levitical Commandments Levitical law they don't apply to Christians at all and they do apply only actually to Israelites and specifically the rabbi's do I think protecting and I've read about this particular thing refers really I think only to the people at the as they're wandering in Israel and or the priests nevertheless so how does that evolve so

(31:40) from the time period when those stories and law codes are composed through the Second Temple period in other words through down to the time of Jesus 5:15 down to 70 BC to 70 AD of 70 of the Common Era the religion of Judaism was led by a priestly class the Sadducees and that was focused on the Jerusalem Temple and the animal sacrifices and others other sacrifices and rituals and festivals that were performed there so through the early part of that period observance of Levitical purity law was largely limited to the priestly class

(32:26) and most Jews across of Judea most observant Jews would have actually observed a much more limited number of Commandments so for example circumcision if you're male obey obeying the Sabbath some of the dietary rules observing some of the holidays that would have been what the common people would have done and it's these hundreds of other HUD interests of other Commandments would have been limited to the priestly class that starts to change by the end by the time we get to Jesus's time so as we the Pharisee sect emerges in let's say the

(33:07) middle of the second century BC and moving onward into Jesus's time and through the end of the destruction of the temple the Pharisees promoted the idea that all Jews really should be studying and observing Torah which is to say the law as their central religious component and so instead of focusing as much the way the Sadducees did on on the temple and sacrifice now we really should be studying Torah and also observing having the observance be a lot broader and so although what the Pharisees did and the Pharisee idea here prefigures

(33:49) modern rabbinical Judaism this was still a relatively new idea at the time of Paul so as we're now getting to Paul who we want to be talking the topic of our our lecture so Paul himself says that he was a Pharisee and so he's actually one of the few Pharisees that we're aware of who identify so identify themselves and so we'll look at that Levitical law is also observed primarily then by the Sadducees the Pharisees and then the S scenes and so you may be aware of the Essenes is another second temple Jewish group they're well known because of

(34:28) their compound in Qumran where they kept the scrolls that became the Dead Sea Scrolls alright so all of these folks are not living in their own little bubbles in this time period we talked about the Latin ideas the Greek ideas the Judy and ideas the Jewish ideas there is a lot of interaction throughout all of these centuries between them including in Roman times they're all within the same political Empire together so the Second Temple in Judaism is founded by exiles returning from Babylon in 515 BC at the center of the

(35:13) Persian province of yehud what becomes Judea in 330 BC Alexander of Macedon a person Macedonian but heavily Hellenized so in other words part of the Greek influence and culture conquered the Persian Empire including yeah huge Judea and began the process of hellenizing the Near East although many Judeans resisted hellenization the relationship between jews and greeks was very complex and even those Maccabee kings that that rebelled against hellenization ultimately ended up taking names like Alexander and the coming in other words Greek names and

(35:55) and taking on some of the Hellenistic ideas so judyann's or Jews in the Diaspora communities so there had already been Jews that didn't go back to Judea that were living in Egypt living in Babylon and that those communities that were in the anyway west of Jerusalem are heavily influenced by the greek-speaking world and so Alexandria City founded by Alexander to be the new capital of Egypt there probably more Jews in Alexandria than there were in Jerusalem and maybe even more than there were in Palestine it's a huge community

(36:43) that exists in Alexandria the diaspora Jews spoke Greek and they made a bunch of different accommodations with Hellenism and indeed the first time there's actually a Canon of Hebrew Scriptures is its Greek translation the Septuagint there's a bunch of different Hebrew texts but they aren't all brought together as one Canon one Bible in the Hebrew until many centuries after this of to againt is is put together as the Greek version all right so some of the second temple of g-d in attitudes by the time we're getting to the first century

(37:20) of the Common Era the era of Jesus and Paul second temple Judaism Judea so the people who are actually in Palestine around Jerusalem and the ones in the Diaspora had been exposed to Hellenism for centuries so standard Judean attitude towards homosexuality was that this was an intrinsically foreign and the Jewish word for this is Gentile a foreign custom and they believed that the cause of this custom was pagan idolatry and you probably familiar even with this attitude in modern times the clerical leaders of Iran have claimed

(38:05) quite falsely homosexuality is totally alien to Iran and is simply a foreign custom that is being imposed it's an 8 - everybody it's just that the customs differ so by that time judyann's had already begun to reinterpret then that story of Sodom that we talked about as a commandment or as a morality tale against same-sex activity and the bias that homosexuality is inherently foreign makes it difficult for culture understand why some of its members are born with a gay orientation and so that that doesn't make any sense

(38:47) to them because they have what's ultimately a false idea about how what this is all about ok so what happens if you are both born Judy and if you're born Jewish and then you also are born gay so given that 1st century CE 1st century AD Jews understood gay orientation to be a foreign perversion of nature whose root causes was actually pagan idolatry and living without God's law without Torah if you happen to be born gay and born Judean if you happen to be born both that Jewish and if you for example observed the law as a

(39:29) Pharisee how would you been in account for your own innate attraction to members of your own gender in other words you were born gay you're attracted to members of your own gender nevertheless you were Jewish you haven't been been a pagan and had that caused the homosexuality in you how did it happen alright okay so this is Bishop Spong idea and thesis so if he is correct this question that I just posed was precisely the dilemma faced by Paul so Paul was born maybe just a little after the turn of the first century

(40:09) maybe in the year 5 or so as part of a Jewish or Judean Diaspora community in the Greek speaking city of Tarsus in Alyssia which is now in south southern Turkey so his original name is actual name is Saul so he's named after that ancient King and by his own account he was a Pharisee who observed the Torah the law of Moses initially he says that he was a persecutor of other judyann's who believed that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah and he converted though around 35 to also believing that Jesus was the Messiah and then at that point really

(40:57) became a second founder of the religion that afterwards became known as Christianity so it wasn't yet there was nobody was even being called Christians at the time that Paul converted that's something that comes after Paul is the only writings of a self-described Pharisee to survive I mean Josephus actually calls himself a Pharisee at some point as well but people aren't necessarily believing Josephus but never so he would be the other one if if so because he also does occasionally once mentioned oneself described himself that

(41:30) way later anyway is he's he is like the only one to survive but in any event he is the first of any of Christian authors or any of Christian writers whose writings survived it doesn't mean he's the first Christian to write anything but he's the first one whose writings have come down to us so it's a little bit tough for us to untangle the historical pall from the Christian tradition we have a couple different sources for Paul so in addition to his own letters which are by far and away the most important source we also have

(42:04) many later letters by Paul's disciples who were that were pseudonymous lis written in his name some of those did make it into the Canon even though probably Paul didn't write him there's a bunch more that didn't make it in which Paul also didn't write Paul is also a major character in the New Testament book the Acts of the Apostles and then finally there are many early Christian texts that are written by opponents of Paul who seemed to have written about him obliquely we have to tease out maybe references to Paul in

(42:45) these writings we'll get to that I'm sure stop talk what we mean so in the first place when we are doing the history of early Christianity from my perspective we have to read the book of Acts of the Apostles very very critically the book of Acts was written likely by a Greek speaking Gentile in the 80s of the Common Era which is to say use some years after Paul's death that met had been in 67 because it's our only narrative of Christian history after the lifetime of Jesus Acts is very compelling we have four canonical

(43:27) Gospels for the period of time at the jeat when jesus is alive but acts which is written as the second half of luke's gospel is the only one that goes takes the story onward and talks about the early christianity we know from the four canonical Gospels that they include all kinds of contradictory information from each other and that allows us to get a much stronger picture of the actual historical Jesus than if we only had one of them acts however we only have the one and unfortunately one of the problems is that acts frequently

(44:08) disagrees with Paul's own accounts and probably therefore represents a later revision of his story so in my view as a historian it's a lot easier to where the the text to be preferred always is what Paul is writing himself you know in terms of understanding the time period when that's written and acts as reflecting a later time period and it may not be as aware of Paul of what Paul really was doing and all of that and in fact may have even created the sort of narratives of Paul's first missionary journey and so

(44:49) on there may that may not actually be referring to any actual historical event but it's just a literary creation of the author of Acts okay so with that as a as the kind of the problem and looking at the sources let's go back to that question what if you're born gdn and gay as if we've talked about the traditional Judean concept for the cause of gay orientation is pagan idolatry and so in other words let's just think about it for a second you've seen all of the Greek statues we don't think to talk about Greek gods there's these naked

(45:24) statues and the what the ancient Jews here are saying is you're looking at these perfect male forms and that's causing to form because you are supposed to worship these as gods that that is innately turning you and that's causing you to have to develop these desires and so that's their theory for what you know how people get turned gay obviously we know that's not the case but that's the Jewish idea at the Second Temple period time and Paul largely agrees with that that this is how this happens for the Greeks so in writing his letter to the

(46:04) Romans Romans chapter 1 22 through 27 he says quote exchanging the glory of immortal God for an image shaped like mortal man as a result God has given them up to shameful passions women have exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural and men to burn with lust for one another so Jews he's suggesting here and early Christians rightly do not picture God God is to be invisible unseen on pictured we're not to make idols when you make an idol like this you you develop these ideas in other words you now as a man lust after Apollo

(46:55) as a woman you start lusting after Aphrodite because the statues are so beautiful that you've made these these idols and that's what's causing it according to Paul again let me just say even though he writes it here and it's Scripture he's quite rock that's not how it happens but anyway that's how he thinks it happens for Greeks for Gentiles but obviously this explanation makes no sense for gay Jews living who are living mosaic lot they aren't going to a temple they're not worshipping Apollo and developing this so that he has to ask

(47:29) himself in anyway if in that case why would they burn with the same lust and so Paul for whatever reason is very worried about that why why are some Jews then Jewish men having the same ideas why are they turning gay having in other words the same sex desire and temptation and so in Romans 7 5 through 8 he says had it not been for the law I should never have been acquainted with sin for example I should never have known what it was to covet if the law had not said thou shalt not covet through commandment sin found its opportunity and produced

(48:14) in me all kinds of wrong desires so the idea here is he doesn't he's human he's accepted the general Jewish idea of how Gentiles how Greeks are getting these desires what he's suggesting is because the law keeps saying thou shalt not thou shalt not thou shalt not being told no is the thing that put it in him anyway so it's an interesting idea in terms of his psychology about why and why you might have these particular desires I'm actually going to point out here that the interesting thing here is not that he's correct the interesting thing is

(48:55) that he is is so worried about why would a person have these desires why do you have all of this temptation for same-sex activity right so the law here is causes desires for judyann's for Jews the law is the problem for Paul and Paul actually becomes anti law in his theology okay so why are we even talking about this topic so given that Jesus had not said one word in all of the canonical Gospels about homosexuality it's interesting that Paul would devote so much thought to it in his letter to the Romans so this is his last great

(49:41) magnum opus where he is really developing all of his ideas and yet he dwells on this a fair amount in that letter in addition to this discussion it seems like Paul felt the need to explain why unlike the other apostles he didn't travel with a wife as his companion so in the letter to the Corinthians the first letter to the Corinthians 10:10 he said that the other he could be doing that by right of the way the other apostles all do instead it had been his custom to have young male companions Timothy Titus savannahs tychicus ona

(50:21) CMAs those are going to be his companions and he's essentially saying there's no hard fast rule about it the idea it had been that they're essentially the earliest apostles are male and female pairings and the way the custom had generally developed was that they were be a married couple but Paul is not married and so instead he has young men as his companions and it's seemingly he's been criticized for that okay another point we might mention is that Paul has a lot of talk that he has about a thorn or a bodily ailment this thing

(51:02) that is causing him trouble at one point he in his little letter to feel Amun who is a Christian who is actually the owner of Paul's companion owned a Simas who is a slave he's writing to feel a man hoping actually that feel Amnon will not only set honesty is free but actually that he'll send him back to Paul and Paul describes on a seam assess his beloved brother both in the flesh and in the Lord and in the letter to 2nd Corinthians 12 7 through 9 Paul says a thorn was given me in the flesh a messenger of Satan to harass me

(51:50) to keep me from being too elated three times I sought the Lord about this that it should leave me but he said to me my grace is sufficient for you for my power is made perfect in weakness so he doesn't tell us what this thorn what this temptation that he has that he is praying for God to take it away from him is nevertheless it doesn't go away and instead God has told him that he's got to endure this temptation perpetually because that's how life is so we have those hints I think from Paul's own text which are pretty interesting and but we

(52:41) also have criticism of Paul by the other Christians who are not part of his and who are not on his team anyway but who are his contemporaries and specifically we call these guys the James Ian's or the James is English for a Jacob and so we also sometimes called him the Jacobites the Jacob in church the James II in church so in the text from Paul's enemies led by James the church in Jerusalem they're called the poor the poor of Jerusalem these are led by these this group is led by the Brothers of Jesus James and Jude

(53:24) and in the text that we have that come down to us from their tradition we find what seemed to be anti-gay slurs against Paul so for example the author of Jude so claims to be written by Jude the brother of James and James claims to be the brother of Jesus so he writes to warn Christians quote that certain intruders have stolen in among you who pervert the grace of our God into licentiousness so it's a veiled quote not exactly saying what the licentiousness is but anyway talking about that so who is James so James is the brother of Jesus he's

(54:09) called the just by which they mean that means like just in the sense of being law-abiding because of his devotion to Mosaic law to Torah the Epistle of James in the New Testament I just attributed to him it's not really written by him nevertheless it has him teach many of the same sayings that are attributed to Jesus in the Gospels without attributing to him to Jesus he is the leader of the early Christians in Jerusalem after Jesus's death and this group wait we can't what we can get in the sense of them is a mendicant or

(54:47) begging group who are called the poor and one of the things is that they share all things in common and so we're able to get the sense from several sources on the one hand from Acts and also from Josephus but also most importantly from Paul's own writings also from the James II and church's writings so there are some conflicting views about James an interesting sila outside of the canonical implements in the Gospel of Thomas which many scholars think is probably our most important gospel that didn't actually make it into the Canon

(55:31) one of the passages says no matter where you are you were to go to James the just for whose sake heaven and earth came into being that's Gospel of Thomas 12:2 it's a it's a really kind of a weird various but you can see kind of the implication here of how important James is too this early Christian group that recorded these sayings in the Gospel of Thomas so they're putting him on a pedestal similar to the kind of thing that John the Baptist or even Jesus has by contrast I mean the canonical Gospels the Gospel of Mark

(56:14) they put it portrays Jesus's brother's frankly as antagonistic to Jesus and does not even when Mark makes a list of apostles doesn't include James the brother of Jesus there are other James's that are among the Twelve Apostles but does not include James the just among them Paul though does identify James as the leader of the Jerusalem church and he sedates that he actually met James in the letter to the Galatians and that they came to terms but that there was an ongoing disagreement between them about Mosaic law and the need to obey Mosaic

(56:59) law for Christians so in a kind of a shorthand we can have there's two competing verses here one from Paul in its letter to the Romans the other from the James Ian or Jacob assert in the letter attributed to James so in the first one in Romans we have man is justified by faith and not by works not by the law and contrarily the opposite oppression from James man is justified by works and not by faith alone and you can see why there has been a faith and works debate in Christianity ever since but you can see that the idea is is that

(57:45) Paul has created a more spiritual Christology and system that isn't dependent and in fact actually ultimately rejects for Christians almost all of Jewish law so Paul is the the source here for why when I said before Christians aren't supposed to obey Leviticus and if you hear a Christian quoting Leviticus this is in fact heresy nevertheless in the Jacobin Church in the James Ian Church it was very clear that the the Levitical law that Pharisee law was supposed to be continued to be maintained and this was the center of

(58:25) the opposition between Paul's groups and James's groups so like I told you this basically there is a proto Christian movement called the poor of Jerusalem the group continued to practice Jewish law nevertheless they insisted that their distinct teachings didn't replace law but were added to the law they practiced asceticism they were mendicants which is to say they lived by begging they held property income and and they gave all to the poor and they were poor themselves in the James Ian churches lingo they will refer

(59:03) to you the rich and they say woe to you rich and by that they seemed to be meaning all of the members of Paul's Church the Gentiles and who have been converted across the greek-speaking world Paul talks about what he calls super apostles who are sent against him so as Paul was going around the eastern Mediterranean Greek speaking world and planting Christian churches in Syria in Asia Minor Turkey in Greece the Jacobite Church then would send apostles including even Peter to each of those groups to teach James's view of the law

(59:43) and so according to James 2:10 if a man breaks just one commandment and keeps all the others he is guilty of breaking them all so in other words you have to kill still be circumcised you still have to do all the different things in a little vertical law Paul by contrast in his letters sarcastically calls his opponents quote super apostles and but he also laments because of their success in a letter to Timothy everyone in the province of Asia deserted me so even though even though Paul is the one who planted all

(1:00:19) these communities because of the perceived legitimacy of being Peter G which is to say Jesus is main disciple and also James the head of the church who was Jesus's own brother they are able to send apostles around to Paul's different churches and insist that they actually are the the true representatives or and so Paul at the end when he's writing to the Romans intends he essentially says he's given up there's nothing left for him in the east and he's going to head west to Spain where he's going to start all over

(1:00:51) again although he never actually makes it okay so I'm just setting that up to kind of explain who these critics of Paul were because Christians tend to paper over the division it's already in acts this division is being lessened but we can see the footprints of it in these texts so in Jude Jude compares that these other groups that he's fighting his opponents he says they are in Sodom which in the same manner as they indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural lust he says further these dreamers also defile the flesh

(1:01:34) reject Authority and slander the glorious ones so he's talking about people who he says on the one hand are not following law like the way that the James Ian church thinks they should and he is essentially slurring them with the anti-gay thing and so he's saying that they are engaged in in same-sex activity and so although the dreamers here who he's confronting are unnamed the expansion of his letter in second Peter names them with coated phrases so that calls the people he's talking to the followers of Cain of Balaam and of Korah

(1:02:15) and Randall Helms has gone through and kind of said he decoded that for us and so who are these people so Cora is the enemy of Moses and his name in Hebrew is baldhead and we may be aware that the one thing we know about the historical Paul is that and he was unknown to be bald Kane was the ancestor of the tent dwellers according to Genesis and Paul by profession he says is the tent maker Moses's enemy Balaam had Israel act treacherously against the Lord by eating food sacrificed before the gods of Moab and Paul argued that Christians were

(1:02:59) quite free to do that same thing so in other words if a if a cow of cattle has been sacrificed to Zeus it's possible in according to Paul says in in 1st Corinthians 10 25 even though that's been a sacrifice to a false God you just don't ask any questions if that gets put in front of you and you'll be allowed to eat it which is devil worship as far as the jacobite church is concerned and so this seems to be a critique fairly clearly of Paul which is also again connecting the dots making a slur and suggesting that there's a rumors here

(1:03:38) that they're exploiting about Paul's orientation or Paul's activities so in some this is an intriguing case you know we can't say for sure about this any more than we can about almost any ancient or medieval figure in any event the reality in terms of activity Paul is almost certainly celibate person who avoided marriage and he probably never had sex with anybody in his whole life male or female and he had some very conflicted ideas and attitudes about sex in general and against sex in general nevertheless we can tell that he broke

(1:04:17) with early Christian tradition of having a wife and and a female can apostolic companion and instead served with younger male missionary companions in a way that to his contemporaries seemed like that tradition in the Greek east of having an older male mentor and a younger male companion which they interpreted in the Greek understand anyway as being also sexual relationship and having that kind of slur probably not a sexual relationship but that doesn't talking about orientation and an interest what we do know is that Paul

(1:04:57) mused a lot about the cause of same-sex attraction which is not something that everybody writes about or cares about or even wonders why are people why why is it so tempting to you know why are we tempted to have you know anyway by by him how beautiful other men are a lot of straight guys aren't thinking about that all the time and he does also muse about his own thorn this ongoing sense of temptation that he's prayed multiple times to God to take away but never could be taken away and finally as we saw his enemies seem to have lobbed

(1:05:37) anti-homosexual slurs against him it's not totally spelled out because if it had been they wouldn't have been included in the New Testament and so it's veiled nevertheless it's a fairly intriguing intriguing case and so that's the case that I have for was the Apostle Paul gay all right so there I bet there's been one or two questions or comments all right let me look here and see all right so everybody agrees right so it was not there was nothing controversial in this now after after whatever it's been 30 years since spawn

(1:06:32) Bishop Spong first brought up this idea I will mention one of the places where this case is made one of my favorite biblical New Testament scholars is Randall Helms I've mentioned before let me show this book to you so Randall McGraw Helms and this case this book is called the Bible against itself it's very accessible it's a dense little book but it's very well written so he makes the case to just like Bishop spawn does and it's that's very much worth a read do we get any questions or okay Michael Michael Ferguson hello

(1:07:16) given that Michael asked given that self-loathing Pauline language is reflected in the Book of Mormon eg o wretched man that I am sorrowing because of his flesh would you venture to speculate that internalized Holman egged hippety may have motivated the authorship of these restoration passages so so what ends up happening with Paul Paul is amazingly influential and so if he was if he is an orientation as gay and this is one of the reasons why he has this struggle and why in general he injected this kind of negative attitude

(1:08:03) towards sex in general into Christianity he had a big effect rather everything that went after him you don't have to by being influenced by Paul you don't have to have been gay to have taken on those ideas so in that same sense in the Book of Mormon and the author of the book of Mormon Joseph Smith is not totally fluent in the entire Bible but one of the parts of the Bible that he's especially aware of is a lot of the Paul Pauline language and even the Paul stories from the Acts and so a lot of these ideas of

(1:08:41) revival style Second Great Awakening these 1800s preaching that is done on the frontiers is really pulling back to Paul because the Protestants especially look to Paul and so yeah it could it could very much be influenced by Paul I wouldn't say it's so if that way I wouldn't go so far then beyond that to say I mean it might be internalized home an activity that he's getting that's coming from Paul it's not because the author in this case would necessarily be I mean Joseph Smith is probably pretty clearly I don't know I would I would

(1:09:16) venture to say given his interest in women you know that was ongoing and very well known probably inborn heterosexually oriented but but in any event to that point I just take your point Leon de Burgh responded to our question what other LGBT historical figures do you know and he mentions David Hyrum Smith and he also mentions his amazed that amazing biography of David Hyrum Smith by Valene Avery and so yes absolutely so Joseph Smith's last born son actually born posthumously to just Smith's own death David Hyrum Smith probably again this is

(1:10:01) some speculation always when weird but there's been a lot of research into this he ends up being a member of the first presidency he's a also a poet and an artist we have a painting of his a reproduction of that on our wall and centre place thoughtful leader who had a same-sex relationship but may not have been sexual but in any event was it seemed to have been loving and then also had a mental breakdown so it's a sad story and it's beautifully told by Valene Avery and so it's called mission to madness so that'll be a great one too

(1:10:38) great book to read I absolutely recommend it Leon also says what we say to commentators who say all Pharisees must be married to women if Paul were a Pharisee well so then they're wrong so actually no these commentators though they don't know that so so that what they do is they retro jekt ideas that are happening with later rabbis and so rabbis have certain rules and they have to have done that or they'll say all Jews had to have live according to this kind of Jewish law and they know that from the second century

(1:11:15) when rabbinic Judaism gets going and then they try to retro jekt that into the year 30 in in Galilee or the year 50 in Tarsus and they just simply don't have evidence for that so so yeah that's that's how it's gonna go it's a it's gonna evolve into that in rabbinic Judaism but so people do that they argue that in order to say that Jesus had to have been married we have no evidence at all no evidence whatsoever of Jesus being married certainly there is I would even say the preposition that is not only impossible the proposition that

(1:11:55) Mary Magdalene is married to Jesus is actually a negative proposition negative chance you know as opposed to anything anything reality to that you know so there's so we don't have that but people make that argument without a sufficient evidence they're retro rejecting later rabbinic rules into that time period Elizabeth writes I think it was Churchill who said that the traditions of the Royal Navy were rum sodomy in the lash it's a wonderful poetic phrase yeah I mean that's been a long-standing tradition right so I mean you and so

(1:12:31) there's self I mean be I'm just gonna use you you're even maybe gonna make this point as you go along I'm just gonna I'm just gonna make it ahead of time so there's maybe also self selection so one of the things that might happen is that if a young man maybe knows has it has an own sense of his own innate orientation he may feel less called too you know hunker down and get married to a girl in the village and instead go off to see where he maybe is thinking about rum sodomy in the lash right and so that so the maybe on the one hand maybe

(1:13:06) self-selects on the other hand it's a population that doesn't have any women and that's therefore a culture that happens um Elizabeth goes on there's the story of Damon and Pythias faithful friends in ancient Greece which I read as a child the account I read didn't say they were lovers but they probably were we didn't understand the genetics either until quite recently she says I have an old friend whose first husband was gay he knew it she knew it but this was the 70s and the current wisdom was that homosexuality

(1:13:37) was psychopathy I'm sorry I say psychopathology curable by therapy and the love of a good woman my friend is a good woman and also it's like a therapist it didn't work never never does having a lot but anyway she married again this time to a straight man she's now a grandmother unfortunately that is a very very common story that goes all you know in especially in the restoration tradition especially contain ongoing in Brigham I in Utah Mormonism up until the present generation unfortunately spending too much time with women is still frowned

(1:14:11) upon by some men there are plenty of men who don't like women they just want to have sex with them hellenization I read somewhere this is all Elizabeth still I read somewhere that there was a controversy as to whether the Hebrew or Greek should be the religious language of the Jews Robert Frost said that Paul very nearly theologizing of Christianity did he really think that without the law they wouldn't have coveted etc or I know right from wrong yikes come on well okay so there's several great comments here

(1:14:45) in terms of yeah there's a bunch of heterosexual men who would rather hang out with men anyway other sexual men and like you say spend as little time as possible with women except for for obviously I guess probably like you say for sex and getting their laundry or whatever their whatever their thinking so that's unfortunate part of patriarchy in our society in terms of hellenization yes it was completely possible the reason why I think Judaism didn't go that way specifically was the disaster for Judaism that Christianity represented

(1:15:22) and so when suddenly there was this sect of Judaism that became its own thing Christianity which was clearly based on translating Scriptures into Greek and to introducing all this kind of Greek philosophical ideas into it the rabbi's I think said wait a second we got a tank this back and take a different path because this is obviously leading to problems and so there's always action and reaction and so it may well be that rabbinic Judaism rejected Hellenism and Greek and went back to embrace the Hebrew you know and also the

(1:16:02) prioritizing the Babylonian Talmud and so forth so on because of the disaster I think from the Jewish perspective of Christianity and the coveting thing well you know people did not have just even this modern idea that your friend had about psychology and such people had didn't they didn't have these kind of theories at all the the motivation theory even up until you know in the in the modern age you know when we're even having in modern English philosophers or whatever you know this is a this is a new understanding and so and so yeah

(1:16:41) they did think that causation was from these kinds of these kind of things the kind of things that Paul was meaning he I think you earnestly believe that Neil Douglas has a question what happened to the Jacob II in church it seems like her Christianity is Pauline you're quite right and so Paul an irony Randall helm says oh and irony is that Paul made it went to his grave thinking that he'd totally lost but then he accidentally won afterwards and so what happened so one of the things that unexpectedly happened with

(1:17:16) before too long is that there was a Jewish rebellion the Romans destroyed Jerusalem [Music] the James Ian Church there was a second war to the James Ian Church along with the rest of Judaism got scattered and and once that happened there ceased to be this you know James had been respected as the Bishop of the bishops he was essentially had this stature and authority once that community was scattered there continued to be let's say Jewish observance Jewish law observant Christians but they became a tiny minority as the rest of the community

(1:17:58) grew and ultimately they were viewed as a heresy and were and was ultimately stamped out it took a long time it would have been until late antiquity but most of their texts were left out of the Canon and a lot of them have been lost and so it is the Christianity that we has developed anybody that everybody's from em is from the Pauline component Rowan Wagner says what about using alternate or orientation instead of continuing to say LGBT q2i a plus well you know I think ultimately they have to come up with something I think there's a

(1:18:40) point to to being explicitly inclusive and saying and Vermont remembering to say start saying all the letters even if it's awkward and part of the reason is it's just too easy for there's it's is it been easy historically even for gay men for example to not be particularly tolerance and good about transgender issues much less intersex and other issues you know not believing bisexuals exist even or whatever you know and so I think as a results of that I think it won't maybe sometime in the future we can come up with a way to like you're

(1:19:24) saying alternative or however we're going to call it I always think that just if we just use the letter Q but don't say it stands for anything we just seize that letter I don't know anyway whatever it would be right now I think is fine too to be very explicitly inclusive he also writes oh no this is Leandre also has thoughts on that so he says the word alternative may be understood to mean choice or deviant and so that could be a problem so that might not be the right word also Millennials and younger LGBTQ people

(1:20:00) like the word queer but then older genic sirs and older people tend to not like that they see that so that's a wreck that's one of those things where you reclaim a negative word and so that's happened a lot in in history where you're called something like Quakers you know so they're called Quakers as a negative they're pejorative and that but they embrace it at a certain point and and and just understand they're very positive identity the Quakers have and so queer is a word like that but it has a very negative connotations for some

(1:20:32) older well it could be they could be young too it's especially true in the older generation okay rown says are there books any books from the James followers that survived today yes and so for example the letter of James so several books in the Canon the letter of James the letter of Jude the letters of Peter just thank you I'll see the beginnings the letters to the seven churches and the Book of the Apocalypse and then there's several I'm just gonna try to get a list here that's the ones that are that didn't make it into the

(1:21:07) Canon so the other ones those are the ones that are in the Canon so you can just you have those alright now at home and in your own Bible if you have one but then the Gospel of Hebrews the gospel of Nazarenes and so the gospel of Ebionites there's just fragments of the Gospel of Hebrews that survived pseudo Clementine writings have survived and then the Gospel of Thomas at some point or rather at one of its stages was at James II and writing it's possible possible Q as well comes out of that we don't know but anyway so the but

(1:21:43) generally speaking the it's primarily those books in the Canon and then fragments oh all right and that's that one more question some requests okay so these are so people are asking what about future lectures and so a future lecture that Rowan Wagner is Astrid who is Satan / Lucifer we are gonna do we're gonna touch on this next week when we doing the invention of Hell so we're definitely going to talk about that topic I also did a whole lecture that you'll be able to find on the website called a brief biography of the

(1:22:29) devil and so that one goes into a lot of detail on the Satan / Lucifer / the devil portion and Leon then asks did early Christianity endure an apostasy of authority that would require a restoration if so which of the several Christianity's in the 1st and 2nd centuries were Abbas States so everybody is an apostate - who isn't in your group so you know I mean essentially we use the word apostates when we're referring to the people who aren't in our group and so for the people that that is the mainline of Christianity that's survived

(1:23:14) and of which all Christians that are around today our descendants of this is the group that ultimately became the state religion of the Roman Empire so Nicene Trinitarian Christianity in the early time periods before that develops we call those folks the proto proto Catholic proto Orthodox group the proto Orthodox because they're going to become the ones who win there were lots of other groups that do not are not proto Orthodox that existed in the early times and so that would include the various types of Gnostic groups it would include

(1:23:56) also the the judaising groups so so II be a Knights and then there were other kinds of Christological there was even super Pauline groups so the marcia knights for example so you know oh that was another one of Elizabeth's other points that Paul almost took that Jesus out of Christianity because he didn't really care about Jesus's teachings and so on and so if the márcia Knights had won we would have had something that was more like that because they also were they were also trying to it more or less purge the even

(1:24:35) more of the Jewish inheritance out of Christianity and so yeah there were so from the standpoint of the proto Orthodox the people who became the Christian Church of the Roman Empire the state religion of the Roman Empire all of those other groups were apostates nevertheless from the perspective of all those groups the the mainline churches the apostate group in terms of the latter day restoration tradition Protestants developed an idea as they were breaking with Rome and as they were denying the apostolic succession of the

(1:25:15) bishops which doesn't have very good historical evidence so they're they're right in that extent then they started to suggest that that there had been a great apostasy and so that is a an idea that some more radical Protestants had that Joseph Smith and others Alexander Campbell all of those kind of folks are building on and so they believed that there had been an apostasy a great apostasy in the church and that there needed to be a restoration however what they tried to do was restore the church based on their understanding of what the

(1:25:51) original church would have looked like based on reading the New Testament and specifically the book of Acts but like I argued in this lecture the book of Acts actually doesn't reflect history essentially at all it is rather a literary creation of how the early church they would have liked it to be and so it's crudely by restoring something they're trying to create something that hadn't really ever existed and so I don't know everybody often considers everybody else to be apostates to each other that's all and that so not

(1:26:23) necessarily did anything need need restoring not necessarily but it depends on how your your what your perspective is all right folks very very good thank you for sticking with me I hope you found this Michaels saying gender and sexual minorities is becoming fashionable so we don't have to use our initial salad so you can ponder that until next week yeah we can tell pride Toronto that anyway and we'll see you all next week thank you so much