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Rahab,

THE HARLOT OF JERICHO

Reverend Robert W. Wood

In the following article, written especially for this issue of ONE, Reverend Wood, author of CHRIST AND THE HOMOSEXUAL,* offers the controversial thesis that at critical moments in spiritual history God totally rejects popular judgments of morality and often chooses for His highest missions those whom the world scorns and despises.

A Scriptural passage along the same lines reads (I Cor. 1:27, 28), "God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; and base things of the world, and things which are despised hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to naught things that are."

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The discussion of the role of Rahab, which Reverened Wood presents, will stir some to review the vital part played in the history of Christianity by the deep love affair between Jonathan and David. Not only was this one of the most touching homosexual love affairs of all time, but it was because of this love that Jonathan more than once turned against his own father, King Saul, and saved David from assassination at Saul's hands.

Had Jonathan not so acted David would have been killed and the house of David. from which all four Gospels state that Jesus was descended, would never have been established. This being the case, can honest Christians deny, or refuse to acknowledge the debt they owe to homosexual love? For that matter, can honest Jews likewise deny that had not those two young men been deeply in love and acted in each other's interests, that Jewish history too would be a very different thing?

* CHRIST AND THE HOMOSEXUAL, by Robert W. Wood, Vantage Press, New York, $3.95, 221 pp.