New Testament letter composed under the guise of a presumably lost letter of the Apostle Paul, the Epistle to the Laodiceans. The books of the New Testament were all or nearly all written by Jewish Christians—that is, Jewish disciples of Christ, who lived in the Roman Empire, and under Roman occupation. Luke, who wrote the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts, is frequently thought of as an exception; scholars are divided as to whether Luke was a Gentile or a Hellenistic Jew. A few scholars identify the author of the Gospel of Mark as probably a Gentile, and similarly for
Homosexuality in the New Testament not read that the one who made them at the beginning 'made them male and female' [Genesis 1:27], and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh' [Genesis 2:24]? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate." (Matthew 19:4-6, NRSV translation; Mark 10:6-9 is a parallel text)Rob Gagnon, an associate professor of New Testament studies, argues it is "obvious" that Jesus' back-to-back references to Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 show that he