sodomites

 When Jesus comes along in the New testament He never has an encounter with any sodomites. There is never mention of anything other than adultery and fornication in the four Gospels. There is mention of sodomy in other parts of the New testament, but Jesus never encounters one. Where did they go? They appear and disappear repeatedly throughout the Old testament. And just to be clear in the New testament sodomy is preached against and was encountered outside of Israel.

Let's take a brief look at the old old ancient old testament. The old testament was completed about 500 years before Jesus came. It ended with a bunch of unhappy prophecies from God. To put this in perspective it was similar to about how long ago it was that the King James version Bible was translated from Greek and Hebrew. That was about 400 years ago. We don't really know anything about the specifics of how it got translated in today's world without studying the subject from history. In other words the general man on the street doesn't go around saying wow that King James he was so awesome to translate the Bible into English. People may say that occasionally but we really have no idea how it actually occurred. And that's my perception of where people were at with the Old testament in Jesus time. They knew God had conveyed the information to prophets and they knew it was written down and was now a collection of books called the Old testament.

 Back to sodomy. The first significant encounter we see in the Bible with sodomy is Sodom. God becomes very unhappy and rains fire down from heaven and destroys Sodom and Gomorrah and all the surrounding towns. Interestingly God does not destroy Zoar, which was marked for destruction. God seems to become merciful at the strangest times. I'm certainly hopeful he will be extremely merciful on my judgment Day.

The next time we see sodomy getting out of control is with the tribe of Benjamin. A man and wife spend the night in a town of benjamites. They want to rape the man all night, but they settle for the wife. He then takes her dead body, cuts it up into 12 pieces, and sends it around to all the other tribes. He appeals for them to decide what should be done. They ask God and God says go wipe out Benjamin. This turns into a rather bloody ordeal, but eventually they do wipe out all but about 200 of the men. They kill all the women and children.

 Then Israel transitions to a kingship or Kingdom. Before this things were run by judges and the religious community. But eventually they end up being run by Kings. Some kings are tolerant of sodomy and others are not. According to the books of Moses sodomites are to be killed, but there are a few mentions of sodomites during the time of the Kings. At one point there were houses of the sodomites next to the temple in Jerusalem.

Eventually the kingdom becomes so corrupted that God has Nebuchadnezzar come and haul away all the people to Babylon. If memory serves there were about 60,000 Jews left at that time. They spend 70 years in Babylon. Then they come back from Babylon and rebuild some of Jerusalem and repopulate some of Israel. During all of these writings I am unaware of any sodomites. Neither do there appear to be any from then on. Jesus comes on the scene 500 years later.

 The book of Romans in the New testament preaches against sodomy and there are a couple of other places in the New testament. The book of Revelation refers to sodomy in a negative light.