Thanks for posting very helpful. I only want to post the following to be as helpful to you:
In your paragraph 4 you wrote, “And they were also aided in living celibate lives as, for one thing, same-sex relationships were unthinkable”
This is not entirely correct and I think makes the choice of some back then to live celibate lives in service of God look like some escape from their own temptations. As we in the Catholic Church can attest it’s a disaster to encourage men who have SSA to become priests.
No I think most who entered into a celibate life in Biblical times probably had a normal sexual appetite, as today. This is mainly because homosexuality was even MORE celebrated back then (in pagan Rome) than today. It wasn’t “unthinkable” at all.
The fact that those who chose (and still choose today) to live celibate had normal sexual desires makes their sacrifice all the more pleasing to God. He doesn’t make people homosexual in order to force them to be celibate (although that is the ultimate calling for such people if they never develop normal sexual desires). He calls many who have normal sexual desires to be celibate too.
That vocation has nothing to do with whether or not one is afflicted with SSA. Just wanted to make that clear.
This isn’t an easy thing to think or talk about, but when I mean “unthinkable,” consider a few things. First, what we have heard of ancient Rome and also ancient Greece and the acceptance of homosexuality might have been exaggerated and one-sided. It has come largely from the same secular humanists who also try to tell us who Jesus really was and what the Bible really meant and means. Overall, they like to find what they want to find. The average “Greek” or Gentile of that time, too, might be further from what’s portrayed as those in Rome, or in the Roman world of that time. Paul also wrote, too, that men who engaged in homosexual acts received physical punishment for it. In a time before modern technology and medicine, we would have to think that widespread “sexual liberation” would be self-destructive, and people would be able to observe many of the consequences of it. The Jewish religion also most strongly prohibited homosexuality, and the Jews were known throughout the Roman world, having synagogues in cities throughout the region. We have to believe that a Gentile who sincerely became a Christian, to the point of being willing to suffer persecution and death, would know that and consider homosexual conduct, including lust, to be unthinkable. Then consider, too, how Paul wrote about having a gift:
1 Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote unto me: It is good for a man not to touch a woman.
2 Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband.
3 Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto the husband.
4 The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband: and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife.
5 Defraud ye not one the other, except it be with consent for a time, that ye may give yourselves to fasting and prayer; and come together again, that Satan tempt you not for your incontinency.
6 But I speak this by permission, and not of commandment.
7 For I would that all men were even as I myself. But every man hath his proper gift of God, one after this manner, and another after that. (1 Corinthians 7)
Consider, too, how we of this time might suffer if we could go back to the time of the early church and live then, under their conditions. Think of all we’d have to deal without modern society’s help, and all we’d have to do without. So many choices were so different for people then, and happiness often depends on our beliefs and how we perceive things. And, too, even the Gentiles were “superstitious” then, as Paul said, meaning that they feared the judgment of gods even though what they believed was largely error. Today the idea that there is only this life, and one should live for it by doing whatever one likes or thinks he likes, is very influential.
I’m certainly not saying that people with the rightful attraction to the opposite sex didn’t live celibate lives as part of their devotion to God. And perhaps most who did were so. Paul didn’t entirely explain even what he meant about himself. But what is called “same-sex attraction” actually accompanies a diminished attraction for the opposite sex, and it seems to me that there are so many things about life today that feed the thinking that homosexual conduct is acceptable, while the reverse was true in that time. One, as I said, is the state of medicine at that time versus our own. Another is how marriage today is founded on romance. Not to say that romance wasn’t an element back then, either, but just that to someone who might consider a homosexual relationship, not only were the real costs were in front of them, but they could also see that marriage was also about very practical concerns for everyone. How often did a man even choose his own wife?
Now likely one thing that very well may have increased temptation, especially for those more attracted to the same sex than the opposite, is the bringing together of large groups of celibate men with each other and celibate women with each other, which were in turn largely shut away from the world. When that started, I’m not certain.