Did Jesus Really Affirm A Gay Couple Or Did He Have Compassion For A Sex Slave?

A few Sundays ago I was asked by a friend of mine to visit her church. I said I would but I had been putting it off because, well it was a long drive for me. I know that sounds selfish but that is the truth, anyways, I finally made good on my words and decided to visit last Sunday. To my surprise, when I looked at the program, the sermon topic was titled Jesus Affirmed a Gay Couple. I thought to myself, well this should be interesting, how is he gonna pull this off. The pastor went on to site Matthew 8:5-13, which is the parable about a roman centurion who asked Jesus to heal his servant. Jesus says take me to him but the roman says he is not worthy to have Jesus in his home and asks him to just speak the words and heal the servant that way. Jesus then agrees and does.
How does this relate to the sermon topic you may think, so did I. He then goes into the original Greek translation of the bible to prove his point. He says the original Greek uses the word pais to refer to the servant and not the word doulos to refer to the servant. The reason why this is important is that both words refer to a person who is a slave but a doulos is a “regular” slave, while a pais is “ his master’s male lover”. So in this pastor’s conclusion, the fact that Jesus never addressed the roman’s “gayness” nor did he refuse to cure the roman’s pais, which by the way, the pastor was calling the roman’s boyfriend, he in fact was ok with the situation and thus affirmed a gay couple.

I decided to do a little sleuthing on my own and found out that the original Greek translation did indeed call the roman’s servant his pais. I then found out the true meaning of the word pais is not “his master’s male lover” but “a boy slave who is his master’s male lover”, in other words, a pais is a sex slave. Now it all came clear to me. The pastor was working off of misinformation. He did not have the full translation of the word pais. I think what happened here is simple. Jesus actually knew what was going on to begin with when the man approached him with the request to cure his sex slave. Jesus did so because he had compassion in his heart for the underprivileged, oppressed and more than likely depressed sex slave the roman had in his home. This made more sense to me. The key words here are sex slave. The slave has no say so what so ever in the so called relationship. Lets not forget that the pais was usually a boy. How can anyone think of a boy as someone who is a consenter of a relationship How can anyone with a reasonable mind even think of a man and his sex slave as a couple anyway, whether that sex slave was a male or female?
One has to also remember that Jesus was born a member of the Jewish community. The roman knew this, just as well as everyone else that knew of Jesus. In the Jewish community it was well known, at the time ,of the roman practice of having a pais. This was one of the many reasons that the Jewish community looked down at the roman’s. There was no reason for Jesus to actually say anything to the roman about how he did not condone the fact that he had a pais, the roman would already know this beforehand. This may be the reason why the roman stated to Jesus that he was not worthy to have Jesus come into his home. Also, since when does the fact that a person does not address a wrongdoing mean that they condone it? When a person with a compassionate heart buys a homeless drug addict a hamburger and gives it to him without the lecture about how drugs are bad, does that mean that the compassionate person condones the drug use? No, it does not. The same principle applies here as well.

This is another case of a person latching on to a half truth and running with it and twisting the true meaning of a passage in the bible as is often done. This is also the reason why one should always read the passages yourself and do the research to understand the times before drawing any conclusions to any passages in the bible.