The book of Leviticus takes another hit

The Delhi High Court has ruled that a 160-year-old law prohibiting something called sex "against the order of nature" (usually understood as gay sex) violates the principle of equality before the law and is thus unconstitutional. So where did this weird law come from? Answer: from India's colonial overload, Great Britain. And where did Britain get this law? Answer: from the book of Leviticus by way of Paul's letter to the Romans.

For some reason I cannot fathom, Paul, who is famous for dispensing with the Mosaic law in favor of what he called "freedom in Christ," is nonetheless construed by obtuse readers to be both advocating and applying the Mosaic law in Romans 1, especially in the passage in which he mentions males lusting after males and doing what is unseemly. People unacquainted with either dialectical reasoning or Paul's theology fail to realize that the long passage from 1:19 through 1:32 in which he reprises the standard Jewish accusations against non-Jews who knew nothing about the Mosaic law (see chapter 13 in the book "The Wisdom of Solomon" for a more detailed account of gentile depravity) is the anti-thesis against which he argues beginning in Romans 2 and against which he has stated his thesis--viz, the just shall live by faith--in 1:17. If being outside the Mosaic law makes a person by definition an outlaw, Paul must have been one of those outlaws disparaged in 1:19-32. Instead, Paul argues that the Mosaic law is literally a dead letter and has no meaning any longer because Christ's death and resurrection have ended its authority and purpose.

Dialectical reasoning is the standard way ancient people educated in the Greek manner argued. Today, we seem to understand only expository and analytical reasoning, so the contemporary naive reader thinks that Paul is explaining his position in 1:19-32 when he is really presenting an opposing position (i.e., outside the law are only outlaws) against which he will argue in the rest of his letter. People forget that Paul is defending his theology of faith and freedom before a group of Roman Christians, mostly Jewish, who did not know Paul and who were likely hostile to his abandonment of Mosaic law. If you want to understand the depth of the Jewish Christian reaction against Paul, all you need do is read the Gospel of Matthew in which the evangelist puts in the mouth of Jesus a no-holds barred condemnation of Paul (and of his followers) as being the least in the kingdom for teaching that the law is no more. Not so, the evangelist has Jesus say. The law is eternal. Not so much as even a jot of it will ever go away.

Paul's opponents outlived him and got the best revenge: they reinterpreted his theology and reinvented him as a proponent of the law. The great apostle of freedom became the great supporter of the law (or at least of the parts of the law that partisans found useful to impose on others). This is now the standard, official reading of Paul's once radical theology, a reading supported by churches, popes, bishops, reverends, theologians, assorted legalists, and other enemies of freedom. Imagine: the great apostle of freedom as a ventriloquist's dummy for tyrants. Paul must be rolling over in his grave in fury and frustration!