The Book of Jude Condemns Sex with Angels

Now I desire to remind you, though you know all things once for all, that the Lord, after saving a people out of the land of Egypt, subsequently destroyed those who did not believe. 6 And angels who did not keep their own domain, but abandoned their proper abode, He has kept in eternal bonds under darkness for the judgment of the great day, 7 just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them, since they in the same way as these indulged in gross immorality and went after strange flesh, are exhibited as an example in undergoing the punishment of eternal fire. Jude 1:5-7 NAS

“The phrase “went after strange flesh” refers to their pursuit of non-human (ie angelic!) “flesh.” The expression sarkos heteras means “flesh of another kind.”

Sodom and Gomorrah’s sin was wickedness and rebellion against God. The careful choice of words indicates that the point of issue with God, and which Jude condemns, is humans attempting to have sex with angels.  The sin was attempting to have sex with someone too different, heteras.

Jude references Sodom in connection to angels, Jude 6, who rebelled against God and left heaven, “abandoned their proper abode.” These fallen angels had sex with earthly women and produced offspring part human and part fallen angel.

When Jude says: “went after strange flesh” he is referring to sex between humans and angels, not homosexual sex between humans and not same sex partnerships. As demonstrated above, many theologians, including many conservative Christians, understand the passage this way.

Three Important Points

  1. Jude 7 links gross immorality and strange flesh, not human flesh, so in context Jude is referring to angels, not to gay men, not to lesbian women, not to bisexuals, not to transsexuals.
  2. Jewish teaching in the first century AD was that the women of Sodom also were trying to have sex with fallen angels so they could have supernatural children, like those in Genesis 6:2-13, who were the product of sex between earthly women and “the sons of God” (fallen angels).

These fallen angels changed the order of their nature and had sexual relations with the daughters of men, Testament of Naphtali 3:3-5. In the Sodom story, the men of Sodom tried to gang rape the angel visitors. These men were attempting to have sex with angels not humans.

  1. The men of Sodom “went after strange flesh,” not sex with someone of the same gender.
 

We can see from Matt. 22:30 and Luke 20:34-36 that angels do not marry, but this does not mean they can’t take human form and have sexual relations, especially when the Bible tells us that people have entertained angels without even knowing it (Heb. 13:2). This means that angels can take on human appearance to such a convincing state that they can’t be distinguished from people. If this is the case, then it would seem logical that an angel (a fallen one) could imitate a human physical form including the sexual organs.