Dr Gordon Wenham, Professor of Old Testament studies at Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education, said that evangelicals should not be intimidated by “the charge of being old-fashioned”.

“It is the so-called liberals who are really taking us back to the Dark Ages,” he said.

Dr Wenham was addressing the National Evangelical Anglican Congress at Blackpool’s Winter Gardens in a discussion about “grace, licence and the homosexuality debate”.

The congress is organised by the Church of England Evangelical Council, which represents the fastest-growing and wealthiest wing of the established Church.

Dr Wenham, a leading evangelical scholar whose work is recognised internationally, said pre-biblical attitudes to homosexuality in places such as Mesopotamia were “remarkably modern” and Greece and Rome also tolerated homosexual practices.

He said: “Many Greeks thought it was part of a young man’s education to have sex with an older man. The ancients discussed how far the practices were the result of upbringing or heredity.”

In the ancient Orient, there was also widespread tolerance of homosexual acts as long as there was consent, he said.

“Thus pre-biblical attitudes to homosexuality were remarkably modern. It is one example among many of how so-called modern attitudes are really ancient paganism raising its head again.”

Other examples he cited were “religious pluralism, abolition of Sunday as universal rest day, abortion, cremation, easy divorce”.

He continued: “That is why the Bible is still relevant. It spoke to cultures which in many respects are so similar to our own. We should not be intimidated by the charge of being old-fashioned. It is the so-called liberals who are really taking us back to the Dark Ages.”

In the same debate Dr Andrew Goddard, tutor in Christian ethics at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, said that single people should not be marginalised and homosexuals should not be made to feel they have to hide and lie about themselves.

Meanwhile, senior evangelicals are to fight plans to give them a separate province in the worldwide Anglican Communion as a way of averting schism over homosexual bishops and same-sex blessings.

There are 38 provinces in the Church, determined by the geographical boundaries of countries or continents.

A new province or “jurisdiction” that crosses national boundaries would cater for traditionalists and evangelicals by giving them an autonomous archbishop who was considered biblically orthodox on the issue of homosexuality.

It is one idea that will be considered by the 38 primates who have been called to an extraordinary meeting in London next month by Dr Rowan Wiliams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Dr Williams has said that a “realignment” of the 70-million-strong Anglican Church may be inevitable after protests from traditionalists and evangelicals over the election of the gay, divorced father of two, Canon Gene Robinson, as Bishop of New Hampshire in the United States.

In a recent article in the traditionalist weekly New Directions, Dr Williams wrote: “I suspect that those who speak of new alignments and new patterns, of the weakening of territorial jurisdiction and the like, are seeing the situation pretty accurately.”

But Dr Tom Wright, the Bishop of Durham, England’s fourth most senior bishop and a leading evangelical New Testament scholar, said that a new province would set a precedent that would lead to the Church splintering into different factions.

Dr Wright said yesterday: “There are many reasons, historical and theological and practical, for not creating a separate province. Once you create a different structure for one group, it is very difficult to see why you should not create different structures for several other groups.

“You would end up having as many Anglican Churches as there are separate interests.”

He said it would not be desirable to create flying bishops for evangelicals as was done for traditionalists in the Church of England when women were ordained priests. He said: “We are in uncharted waters. We do not know where the next iceberg is coming from.”

The preferred solution of some senior church leaders at the conference in Blackpool would be the suspension or expulsion of liberal provinces that deviate from biblical orthodoxy over homosexuality.

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