Corinth was known for its immorality.  Even the Corinthian church, the local body of Christ, was plagued by immorality.  In a letter not preserved for us in the Bible, Paul exhorted the Corinthians not to associate with fornicators (see I Cor. 5:9).  Alas, Paul did not mean pagan fornicators, but rather fornicators within the church itself.  Apparently the church, which was almost exclusively made up of Gentiles rather than converted Jews, had no problem with the concept that Christians are free from the Old Testament law.  In fact, a faction within the church was beginning to doubt Paul’s spirituality, possibly because he still obeyed much of the law.

Despite the fact that Paul had planted the church (ca. A.D. 49-51) and had remained in Corinth for 18 months, his relationship with church members was more than a little strained by the time he wrote I Cor., some three years later.  The church members had misunderstood Paul’s first letter and were beginning to question his authority over them.  I say “beginning,” because I Cor. was occasioned by a letter brought to Paul from Corinth (answered in chapters 7-16) by Stephanas, Fortunatus and Achaicus, as well as by news from “Chloe’s household.”  Paul took the opportunity to deal with the problems of the Corinthian church, to answer its questions, and to establish its understanding of his apostolic authority.

Things in Corinth had clearly gotten out of hand.  Some within the church had gone so far as to espouse the slogan, “All things are lawful.”  It was to this slogan and the attendant sexual misconduct that I Cor. 6:12-20 was addressed.  Paul’s task was to convince the Corinthians that there was (and still is) a profound difference, moreover one with eternal consequences, between freedom in Christ and freedom from Christ.

In the first half of chapter 6, Paul wrote concerning a lawsuit which had come to his attention.  It impresses me as being rather ironic that the same body which championed the “All things are lawful” mentality was also chastised by Paul for taking its disputes before civil courts.  “‘All things are lawful,’ but only if they cause me no inconvenience or impinge on one of my rights” seems to describe the Corinthian bottom line.  Paul, who later in chapter 9 explained that he was willing to waive even his rights as an apostle for the sake of the gospel, was horrified by the Corinthian behavior.

He was doubly upset — because church members had disputes with one another in the first place, and because they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, solve those disputes among themselves.  Pointing out that Christians would judge the world at the end of the age, Paul’s stated intent was to shame the Corinthians.  He wanted them not just to feel guilty, but to acknowledge legitimate guilt for embarrassing the body of Christ before the world.  Paul was very clear in saying that it was better to wronged than to take a fellow Christian before any court, much less a secular one.  Paul’s biggest problem seems to have been that the Corinthians weren’t acting like Christians at all.

Chapter 5 began with Paul’s flabbergasted reaction to a report that there was in the church immorality “of such a kind that does not exist even among the Gentiles” (5:1).  Rather than sorrow, the Corinthians’ response to such sin in their midst was arrogance.  They were actually proud of such extreme “freedom in Christ,” or so 6:12-20 would lead me to believe.  The picture we have, then, as we come to 6:9, is of a church that is virtually indistinguishable from its pagan surroundings.  Paul is compelled to remind the Corinthians that the unrighteous, whom they resemble far more than he would like, will not inherit the kingdom of God.

Paul defines the types of persons with whom the Corinthians ought not to associate in chapter 5; he employs a similar “vice list” in chapter 6.  His goal is to get the Corinthians to examine their behavior.  He certainly seems to be warning them that if they continue to act like unrighteous pagans, they will not inherit heaven.  Whether or not one can renounce his or her salvation is beyond the scope of this article, but it must be said that Paul’s warning is serious.  In Paul’s mind, certain things just cannot be.  He lists those who will not inherit the kingdom, homosexuals among them.  Neither “thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers shall inherit the kingdom of God” (6:10).  “And such were some of you,” continues Paul (6:11a).  And such were some of us as well.  If we persist in such sins, if our lives are characterized by giving in to rather than fighting against (even if we fail) such sins, we are doomed according to Paul (so Gordon Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NICNT [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987], 245).  It is good for the Corinthians and for us that Paul ends his section on lawsuits on a positive note.

The Corinthian church was in deep trouble.  It had allowed rampant sin to continue, and far from being repentant, its attitude was one of pride.  Though Christians would judge the very angels of God, the Corinthians were unable to settle their disputes without recourse to secular courts.  And yet they “were washed…were sanctified…were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ” (6:11b).  As real as was Paul’s warning to the Corinthians is his statement of who they are now.  They were vile sinners, they are now Christians; Paul wants them to act like it.  I don’t know who first paraphrased Paul thus, but we find here the implicit imperative to the Corinthians and to us, “Become who you are!”

Part of becoming who we are entails remembering who we were.  Paul’s vice lists were not so generalized as to be meaningless, or merely excerpted from current Greek lists, as some commentators argue.  No, Paul was very careful to tailor his vice lists to his audiences.  The church was having a problem with litigation, hence a list including thieves, covetous ones and swindlers.  Church members had questions about meat offered to idols, hence a list including idolaters.  Corinth and its church were noted for immorality, hence a list including sexual sins.  In chapter 5, Paul told the Corinthians not to associate with sexually immoral people.  In chapter 6, he warned them that God’s kingdom would not be inherited by the sexually immoral and gave three examples of such immorality:  adultery, and two aspects of homosexuality.  The precise meanings of the words I consider to be referring to homosexual activity are hotly debated, and to that debate we now turn our attention.

One of the seeming paradoxes of the Christian life is that we find true freedom only in obedience to God.  It is supremely true for the Christian that freedom and lawlessness are not synonyms.  Paul very much wants to get this through to the Corinthians, and to do so before their “All things are lawful” slogan places them in the company of those who “shall not inherit the kingdom of God” (I Cor. 6:12, 10b).  Not only does Paul’s vice list of I Cor. 6 call to mind particularly Corinthian sins, but also the Holiness Code of Leviticus.  “Of the ten vices in I Cor. 6:9-10, only one (drunkards) is not found in Leviticus 18-20″ (James B. De Young, “The Source and NT Meaning of Arsenokoitai, with Implications for Christian Ethics and Ministry,” The Masters Seminary Journal 3/2 (Fall 1992): 213, transliteration mine).

As we have seen, the Levitical Holiness Code condemns male homosexual activity as a capital crime.  We have also noticed that the wording of the laws reflects heterosexuality as normative for the Israelites about to enter the land of Canaan, “Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman…” We now need to take an even closer look at that wording, specifically at the LXX (Septuagint).  A transliteration of Leviticus 18:22a, quoted above, would be: kai meta arsenos ou koimēthēsē koitēn gynaikos.  We find bed, koitēn, and the same word for man as sexually male, arsenos, as we saw in Romans 1 (a term which refers to males of all ages and could, therefore, include, but not be limited to, a reference to pederasty [Ibid., 214]).  These two words, male and bed are the component parts of the term arsenokoitai found in I Cor. 6.

Paul says that “neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate (malakoi), nor homosexuals (arsenokoitai), nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers shall inherit the kingdom of God” (I Cor. 6:9b-10, NASB, parentheses and emphasis mine).  Though the “correct” translation of both underlined words is debated, it is the second that we have begun to consider.  The fact that arsenokoitai is made up of the Greek words for male and bed is agreed upon by pro-gay and traditional scholars alike.  Consensus ends there.

Sherwin Bailey, among the first pro-gay writers to challenge the traditional translations (there are many) of arsenokoitai, actually comes very close to the current, conservative understanding of the noun.  “He takes the term in I Cor. 6:9 as denoting males who actively engage in homosexual acts, in contrast to malakoi (‘effeminate’), those who engage passively in such acts” (Ibid., 193).  He repudiates, however, the current, conservative conclusion that the noun should be rendered as homosexuals.  He claims, incorrectly according to De Young,* that Paul could “know nothing of inversion as an inherited trait, or inherent condition due to psychological or glandular causes and consequently regards all homosexual practice as evidence of perversion” (D. S. Bailey, Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition [London: Longmans, Green, and Co.. 1955], 38).  His point is that Paul’s focus on homosexual activity, not on homosexual orientation, has relevance for the pervert, but not the invert.  His bottom line is that Paul is irrelevant to a modern discussion of homosexuality and so modern words such as homosexuality (orientation as well as activity) should be avoided when translating his outdated works.

In my article on Romans 1, some time was spent interacting with the work of Robin Scroggs.  His view is that Paul could only have known about pederasty; thus his condemnation of homosexuality must be limited to that one manifestation thereof.  His conclusion is similar to Bailey’s:  since Paul wasn’t talking about what we mean by homosexuality (the monogamous, adult variety), he has nothing to say to us.  Still, although he defines both malakoi and arsenokoitai in pederastic terms, Scroggs was the first to notice the linguistic link between Leviticus 18 & 20 and I Cor. 6.  That link is extremely significant because we know of no pre-Pauline usage of arsenokoitai.  It is not a term used in secular Greek of any period and is fairly rare in patristic Greek.  Scroggs is of the opinion that Paul borrowed the word which is of “Hellenistic coinage, perhaps influenced by awareness of rabbinic terminology” (R. Scroggs,  The New Testament and Homosexuality [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983], 107-8).

*De Young makes a compelling case that the speeches on homoeroticism in Plato’s Symposium presuppose an understanding of homosexual orientation as well as passing pederasty and other homosexual behaviors. (For a full discussion, see James B. De Young, Homosexuality [Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2000], 190, 205-213.)

In his first appendix to Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, Boswell includes what De Young calls “the most influential study of arsenokoitai among contemporary authors” (De Young, 193).  His conclusion is that “there is no reason to believe that either ‘arsenokoitai’ or ‘malakoi’ connoted homosexuality in the time of Paul or for centuries thereafter (John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980], 353, transliteration mine).  Instead he takes the latter to refer “to general moral weakness, with no specific connection to homosexuality” (p. 340) and the former to mean “male sexual agents, i.e., active male prostitutes …capable of the active role with either men or women” (Ibid., 344).

According to Boswell, “Perhaps the most extensive evidence that ‘arsenokoitai’ did not connote ‘homosexual’ or even ‘sodomite’ in the time of Paul is offered by the vast amount of writing extant on the subject of homoerotic sexuality in Greek in which this term does not occur” (Ibid., 345, transliteration mine).  This “evidence” loses its value if the term was not coined by native Greek-speakers (see Scroggs, 107).  It becomes almost ridiculous if, as De Young opines, Paul coined the term himself.

If arsenokoitai means roughly, males who bed males, it makes sense that Paul did not use the more specific terms found in that “vast amount of writing extant on the subject of homoerotic sexuality.”  Paul wanted a general term which would encompass all homoerotic sexuality.  What better place to find one, or the concepts behind one, than in the Levitical prohibitions against any and all male homosexual activity?  And if Paul did coin arsenokoitai, we need not wonder why it does not appear in rabbinic literature.  Scroggs’s notion that the word is Jewish is a good one; De Young’s that it is Pauline, is in my opinion better.

Paul was in the habit of making up words if existing ones did not quite suit his purpose.

In general, statistics show that Paul probably coined many terms. There are 179 words found in Paul and nowhere else in pre-Christian Greek literature. Of these, 89 occur only one time….  In addition, Paul displayed considerable dependence upon the LXX.  He usually quoted from the LXX rather than the Hebrew of the OT when he quoted the OT (De Young, 212).

Moreover, contra Boswell, he was also perfectly capable of invoking “the authority of the old law to justify the morality of the new” (Boswell, 105).  Remember that it was Paul (not deutero-Paul in my opinion) who wrote, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the person of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work” (I Tim. 3:16).  It is untrue that “the Levitical regulations had no hold on Christians and are manifestly irrelevant in explaining Christian hostility to gay sexuality” (Ibid.).  Where I certainly agree with De Young that his thesis cannot be proven, it makes good sense that Paul made the composite term arsenokoitai up of its two constituent nouns found in the Greek version of Leviticus.

If we accept for the sake of argument that arsenokoitai is a Pauline term, there is still room for debate as to what exactly it means.  Scroggs acknowledges the connection between I Cor. and Leviticus, yet limits Paul to prohibitions of pederasty.  Boswell says it has nothing to do with homosexuality per se at all.  An examination of Boswell’s “influential” word study must be our next step.

Whereas a truly thorough treatment of Boswell’s study would be too long and very possibly too boring, we will deal with his main points.  He begins his appendix, “Lexicography and Saint Paul,” with the somewhat daunting statement:

It is not readily apparent to modern English speakers with little knowledge of classical languages that the passage of thousands of years obscures, some-times beyond recovery, the exact meaning of words in the languages of cultures with experiences and life-styles very different from their own (Boswell, 335).

Such a caution should certainly cause us to consider the accuracy of our translations of the Bible. Let us remember that the conservative appeal to the authority and inerrancy of Scripture is an appeal to original manuscripts, not to any modern translation.  Having been so cautioned, however, the modern reader of the Bible may rest assured that most translations available to him or her are the result of careful scholarship.  In other words, one need not have much knowledge of classical languages to read the Bible with confidence.  To be sure, knowledge of Greek and Hebrew is well worth cultivating, if for no other reason than that translation always involves interpretation.  But in the final analysis, I find Boswell’s statement misleading.

Boswell made his statement with the purpose of undermining confidence in modern English translations of the Bible.  Thus, though on the face of it the statement is quite true—that is, the passage of time may well obscure the meaning of words—it fails to account for the fact that the Bible has not been translated by “modern English speakers with little knowledge of classical languages.”  I spend so much time on what may seem a trivial point precisely because I am convinced that it is far from trivial.  Boswell makes the case that the average reader of Scripture has no feel for the languages which underlie his or her translation.  Then he proceeds to argue in terms which would leave in the dust even an above average reader.  His very methodology is bound to overwhelm any reader with no knowledge of linguistics and classical languages.

According to a 1986 journal article by Richard Hayes, Boswell “expressed surprise and some disappointment that the exegetical arguments in his book had been ignored or accepted without challenge by biblical scholars” (R. B. Hayes, “Relations Natural and Unnatural:  A Response to John Boswell’s Exegesis of Romans 1,” The Journal of Religious Ethics 14 (Spring 1986): 184).  Such reactions are not all that surprising.  The liberal community was happy to accept his scholarship and conservatives didn’t take him particularly seriously (he was neither a linguist nor a classicist, but an historian).  Since 1986, there has been plenty of scholarly interaction with Boswell, presumably because his conclusions have made it into the pro-gay mainstream.

If Boswell begins his appendix by highlighting the average reader’s ignorance, he does not continue in that vein.  Rather, he launches into a discussion of the relative imprecision of Koinē Greek words.  As regards the meaning of arsenokoitai, Boswell’s argument is roughly threefold:  1, the term wasn’t used in “the vast amount of writing extant on the subject of homoerotic sexuality in Greek” (Boswell, 345); 2, the word means “active male prostitutes,” not homosexual; and 3, the early church Fathers do not use the term.

The first aspect of Boswell’s argument has been addressed.  To recap:  if, as seems likely, Paul coined the term with the nouns bed, koitēn, and male, arsenos, with Leviticus 18 and 20 in mind, it could not have appeared in secular literature of the period.  The second aspect, that the term doesn’t mean homosexual at all, needs to be considered now.

The component of Boswell’s thesis which is at once the least accessible to the average reader and most problematic to the scholar, is the notion that the prefix, male, arseno- is adjectival rather than objective.  In other words, according to Boswell, the one who does the bedding is male, not the one bedded.  To use one of Boswell’s examples, the English “lady killer” is ambiguous.  If “lady” is adjectival, the phrase refers to a female who kills; if, on the other hand, “lady” is objective, the phrase refers to one who kills women.  In English, we determine whether “lady” is adjectival or objective by observing the context in which the phrase is used.  According to Boswell, at least when the prefix is male, arreno- or arseno-, spelling, not context, is the deciding factor.

Boswell states, “In general, moreover, those compounds in which the form ‘arreno-‘ occurs employ it objectively; those in which ‘arseno-‘ is found use it as an adjective” (Ibid., 343). If Boswell is correct, and overlooking the possibility that arsenokoitai could be an exception to the “general” rule, had Paul intended to say that homosexuals would not inherit the kingdom, he would have used the term arrenokoitai.  The average reader may find this “observation” compelling, or he or she may wonder what the big deal is about an s.  From a scholarly perspective, we must consider whether or not such a spelling change affects meaning.

Boswell admits, “The origin of this distinction (the adjectival/objective distinction mentioned above) and its relation to the general orthographic shift from Attic ‘arren’  to Hellenistic ‘arsen’  have not been carefully examined” (Ibid., parentheses mine).  Wright, however, indicates, “On this subject there has been considerable discussion, but so far as I can discover, no writer has yet suggested the difference is other than one of dialectical diversity” (David F. Wright, “Homosexuals or Prostitutes?” Vigiliae Christianae 38 (1984): 131).  By 1989, and after further study, Wright is far stronger, “[Boswell] reaches this position by construing the word in a manner calculated to evoke from classical linguists only scornful derision….This is patent nonsense; the difference is purely dialectical” (D. F. Wright, “Homosexuality:  The Relevance of the Bible,” The Evangelical Quarterly 61:4 (1989): 297).  Interestingly along these lines, Liddell and Scott’s classical lexicon has no listing for arsenokoitēs, but “the reader is told to cross reference to arrenokoitēs.  Under arrenokoitēs they provide the definition of ‘sodomite’ with a reference to 1 Corinthians 6:9″ (David E. Malick, “The Condemnation of Homosexuality in 1 Corinthians 6:9,” Bibliotheca Sacra 150 (Oct.-Dec. 1993): 483).  In other words, Liddell and Scott consider arreno- and arseno- to be interchangeable.

Also germane to our discussion is Wright’s observation:

In so far as a distinction can be drawn between those compounds of the group (the very small sample of arreno- and arseno- compounds studied by Boswell) in which the first element is the object of the second and those in which it supplies the qualifying gender of the second we must start at the other end, with the second element…In most if not all of the compounds in which the second half is a verb or has verbal force (as is the case with koitēs), the first half denotes its object irrespective of whether it is arreno-or arseno-.  When the second part is substantival, the first half denotes its gender (“Homosexuals or Prostitutes,” 132, parentheses mine).

I will agree with Wright that arsenokoitai, as a masculine noun, denotes men who bed, that is have sexual intercourse with, other men.

As for the third aspect of Boswell’s argument, it suffices to say that he misrepresents the data.  It is not true that early Church Fathers avoid the term.  For example, Boswell claims that Eusebius “quotes Romans 1:26-27 almost verbatim, excoriating homosexual relations in all their manifestations, yet nowhere does he employ the word which supposedly means ‘homosexual’ in Paul’s writings” (Boswell, 346).  Though he does not use the term any more than Paul does in Romans, Eusebius paraphrases Mt. 5:18 using the verb arsenokoitein (Wright, “Homosexuals or Prostitutes,” 127).  This use Boswell discounts as having to do with attitudes of men towards women.  Boswell also fails “to cite all the sources,” e.g., Hippolytus (De Young, 199).  Perhaps most importantly, “Boswell conspicuously misrepresents the witness of Chrysostom, omitting references and asserting what is patently untrue” (Ibid., 200).  According to Boswell,

Saint John Chrysostom probably wrote more about the subject of same-sex sexuality than any other pre-Freudian writer except Peter Damian…. Yet among the dozens of words and phrases used by Chrysostom to name, describe, or characterize homosexual relations, neither “arsenokoitai” nor any derivitive of it occurs in any of these writings (Boswell, 347).

Boswell corrects his statement that Chrysostom uses none of the arsenokoitai word group in a footnote (note 34, 347); alas, not everyone reads footnotes.  More to the point, a footnote wouldn’t have been necessary had he changed his statement to reflect the truth of Chrysostom’s usage.

In all three aspects of his argument, Boswell has failed to demonstrate that arsenokoitai means anything other than male homosexual.  One assumes that his word study has been so influential on other than scholarly grounds.  It appears scholarly, as long as one knows little or nothing about linguistics, classical languages or church history.  The term is a very general one which Paul himself coined, contra Boswell in particular, who opined,