History and theology lesson Brucie (credit goes to my good friend Reverend Bill Carey who has actually studied theology, history and the original Greek and Hebrew for the past forty years).
1. It wasn't until about five hundred years ago when the Moors invaded Europe that homosexuality was linked to Sodom according the Christian thought. The link was first incorperated into the Quran. The Moors, upon invading Europe, were shocked to find same-sex marriages taking place, and taught the Christians that God hated homosexuality and had destroyed Sodom for it. This time, the message took hold in Catholicism, and beginning in the west and moving to the east, same-sex marriages ceased.
2. The whole reason it was incorporated into the Quaran was due to a Catholic writer who at the time whose views were dismissed as erroneous, since he based them on a misunderstanding of a political commentary on Athens. That commentary was by a Greek philosopher concerning Athens. The philosopher had wished to emphasize that Athenian society had become corrupt, obsessed with wealth, neglecting the poor. To emphasize his point, although he described daily life in Athens to a T, he never called it Athens; he called it Sodom. His original readers would have understood his point, and would have recognized the description of Athens immediately. But reading much later, this confused Catholic misunderstood the article completely, missed the point, and thought it was an actual description of Sodom. (It apparently never occurred to him that a pagan philosopher who lived nearly 2000 years after Sodom was destroyed wouldn't have had access to previously unknown, detailed information about the city.) Since pederasty was a normal part of life in Sodom, the philosopher had mentioned it as part of daily life. But he didn't view it as a problem, and it was by no means the focus of his article. But it was what the Catholic theologian seized upon. He concluded, erroneously of course, that the men of Sodom were pursuing the supposedly good-looking young angels for sex, and that's why God destroyed Sodom. He wrote this, but to their credit, most theologians of his time ignored his writing. In fact, they wrote precious little about Sodom. Unfortunately, more modern translators have done them a disservice, because any time they wrote about pederasty, which they did often, the modern translators tended to render it as sodomy. As I mentioned, Catholicism as a whole pretty much ignored what that theologian wrote about Sodom, and the Catholic church continued to perform same-sex marriages for both male and female couples for centuries. But someone else read what that theologian wrote, and he didn't ignore it. That person was Mohammad. He read it, and believed it. He incorporated the story into the Quran.
3. English translations disagree on many things including what the Jude verse says in the Greek. The KJV refer to "strange flesh" in Jude 1:7, when the Greek does not. Other versions refer to sexual perversion in that verse, when the Greek does not. What the Greek actually says Jude 7 talks about the people of these cities giving themselves over to fornication (definition: sexual activity outside of marriage, primarially shrine prostitution) and “going after strange flesh.” What does that last part mean? The truth is, no one can say for sure. But the translation isn’t correct. The Greek does not say “strange flesh,” but rather “other flesh.” The word for other is “heteras”. Exactly what the phrase means is uncertain. But given the fact that the word translated as flesh is also the word for meat, it is quite possible that it is referring to the practices of cannibalism associated with early Canaanite culture. Sodom was a Moloch worshipping theocracy, such practices where part of the bill.
4. While you obviously ignore the Ezekial verse regarding Sodom, the Mishnah, early portions of the Talmund (a Jewish Biblical commentary) actually goes into great detail. Sodom was unfathomably cruel to strangers and the poor. If you where poor they'd give you a marked coin that would be useless in payment, and wait until you starve to death until they recollect their coins for the next unlucky customer. If you needed a bed, they would provide one for you, but would stretch or mutilate you if you didn't fit the beds size. Once the people of Sodom had found out that P'lotit, Lot’s daughter, had secretly given food to a stranger who was near starvation, and they burned her in public. Another time, when they discovered that a teenage girl had fed a starving beggar, they smeared honey all over her and placed her upon the city wall, so that she died from the stings of the bees and/or wasps attracted by the honey. Some traditions hold that it was the "cry" of the young girl hung from the walls which reached God as described in Gen 18:20.
5. As for the origin of the term Sodomite or Sodomy, they don't date back to the Bible or even relate to the people of Sodom, but rather Christian monks who would molest their boys. Those words where later added in English translations to refer to male prostitutes.
Does that about cover it ?
