Paul’s list in 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 is the passage most often quoted on this subject, and it shows the reading problem in miniature. Verses 9 and 10 name people who will not inherit the kingdom of God, including men who have sex with men and the sexually immoral. Verse 11 says that some of Paul’s readers used to be those people and have since been washed.
Read in context, this passage and the others like it say no to same-sex sexual relationships and no to sex outside marriage. Most of the scholars gathered here agree on that meaning: the Bible places sexual intimacy inside the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman, and it treats sex outside that covenant as sin, whoever the partners are.
Where they part is method. One builds a cumulative case and spends much of his energy attacking weak arguments on his own side. One insists that the lists people quote never single out gay people. One, a celibate gay Christian, reads the chapters most often used against him as the place where he was let in. Their differences are worth following because the contested passages belong to different kinds of literature: