Introduction
I’ve generally refrained from writing about this topic because it hardly has anything to do with my purpose here. But I received feedback that this topic was missing and it was suggested that I should write about it. So I am.
Before I begin, I will only be talking about male homosexuality. The reason is simple. Scripture largely does not single out female behavior. It is rarely concerned with females qua female. The rules that apply to men generally also apply to women. In general, the moral precepts that apply to men apply to women implicitly through gendered language. As explained here, the language used in scripture will often imply male agency even when the context is obviously giving agency to females or otherwise speaking of what females should do.
This is very important because many people who don’t know anything about how the ancient languages work will mistakenly conclude that the Bible only banned male homosexuality but not female homosexuality. This is the kind of conclusion that only someone who was ignorant of ancient languages could make. English speakers will find it difficult to accept that in ancient Greek you could say something highly-gendered and explicit like “one-wife husband” and have it also mean “one-husband wife.” You couldn’t say something like this in English and have it make sense.
Such things are beyond the scope of this article, but nonetheless worth keeping in mind in case your concern is with female homosexuality (or transmen).
The New Testament
The tradiitional Christian teaching on homosexuality centers on three passages attributed to Paul:
For this reason God gave them over to dishonorable passions. For their females exchanged natural sexual relations for ones that are against nature, and in the same way the males also abandoned natural sexual relations with females and burned with intense desire for one another, males committing shameful acts with other males, and receiving in themselves the due penalty of their error.
Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the Kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor passive homosexual partners, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor the verbally abusive, nor swindlers, will inherit the Kingdom of God.
But we know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully, knowing this, that the law is not meant for a righteous person, but for the lawless and rebellious, the ungodly and sinners, the unholy and worldly-minded, those who kill their father or mother, murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice homosexuality, kidnappers, liars, perjurers, and if there is any other thing contrary to sound doctrine that conforms to the glorious good news of the blessed God, which was entrusted to me.
There are other passages of interest, but we’ll discuss them later. For now, we’re going to focus on the ones that use explicit language (rather than explicit context) to establish the Christian teaching.
The Debate
Let’s look at some objections that have been made:
The word that is wrongly translated as ‘homosexuals’ in some modern Bibles is ἀρσενοκοῖται (Arsenokoitai), a word first coined by Paul. So then what exactly does the original greek word (Arsenokoitai) mean? It does mean male lying, but to abstract homosexuality in general from this is illogical.
A better way to understand what Paul may have meant by Arsenokoitai is to look for other instances of the word in the following writings of his time. This approach demonstrates several telling facts. First, two early church writers who dealt with the subject of homosexual behavior extensively, never used this word in their discussions of same-sex behavior. The word shows up in their writing, but not in places where they discuss homosexuality. This suggests that they didn’t believe Paul’s term referred to homosexual behavior.
A similar pattern is found in other writings of their time. There are hundreds of Greek writings from this time period that refers to homosexual activity using terms other than Arsenokoitai. If Apostle Paul had intended to refer generally to homosexual sex, or to one of the partners in gay-male sex, he had other more commonly used and well known words he could have picked. He wouldn’t have had to resort to this ambiguous compound word, which future generations would find difficult to translate. Apparently Apostle Paul was trying to refer to some more obscure type of behavior.
Scholars have identified only 73 times this term is used in the six centuries after Paul. (There are no known instances before Paul). In virtually every instance the term appears in a list of sins (like Paul’s) without any story line or other context to shed light on its meaning. There are, however, a few helpful exceptions. The examples suggest that Arsenokoitai refers to instances in which one male uses his superior power or position to take sexual advantage of another.
We will show (1) that these statements and conclusions are incorrect; (2) that Paul did not invent the word arsenokoites out of nowhere but borrowed it from an important older and reliable source where the meaning was plain; and (3) that general homosexuality is actually the logical conclusion of what the word means.
For example, imagine a future translator coming across the word “lady-killer” two thousand years from now and wanting to know what it means. It’s clear the phrase is made from two words, lady and killer. So, it must mean a woman who kills, right? Or is it a person who kills ladies? The difficulty in obtaining a good translation is clear, when in reality the word lady-killer was a word used in the 1970s to refer to men who women supposedly found irresistible.
The problem with this argument is that it relies on ambiguity in the English language. Does it mean “killer of ladies” or “a lady who kills.” But, as we will see, no such ambiguity exists in the Greek. Whether it means “bedder of men” or “a man who beds [men]” the meaning is identical. Semantic games like these suggest that the person making the argument has an ideological stance that they are trying to force the language to conform to, rather than letting the language dictate what their ideological stance should be. This is backwards.
These examples suggest that Arsenokoitai refers to instances in which one male uses his superior power or position to take sexual advantage of another.
This type of person is a close kin to a thief and a greedy person — the two Greek words that most often follow Arsenokoitai in the lists of sins centuries after Paul first created it. A thief, greedy person, and a male who uses his power to forcefully obtain sex, are all seizing something that does not rightfully belong to them. Thus, it’s concluded that Aresenokoitai is best understood as a reference to men who force themselves sexually onto others, and not homosexuals in general.
As we will see in the section on Jesus’s teaching below, for a man to have sexual relations with a man is a kind of theft. For such a man to refrain from doing so with a woman (or else to serve God instead) is stealing from the rights of another. Each man has a duty to express their sexuality by either mating with a woman for life or else to be celibate: mastering themselves by redirecting their sexuality into a duty to God. There is no third option. By establishing that sexuality was reserved only for heterosexual marriage, Jesus explicitly excluding and forbid all non-marital sexuality.
Homosexuality is implicitly disallowed as it is contained in the subset of all sexuality that was forbidden. There was no need even to mention it because it is disallowed by default.
The point is, the argument above isn’t particularly well thought out. And, of course, Leviticus doesn’t contain that idea.
The Law
Without further ado, the core teaching on homosexuality comes from the Law:
“You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.”
“If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them.”
This is not particularly ambiguous or nuanced.
Most Christians believe this portion of the Law—which includes the bans on incest, child sacrifice, bestiality, and adultery—is binding on Christians. After all, the punishment for most of these crimes was death. This included homosexuality.
Notably, sibling incest—a detestable and wicked practice—resulted in banishment, not death. This does not indicate the sibling incest is now perfectly fine for Christians, rather it it indicates that homosexuality was considered even worse than sibling incest.
But this is Hebrew. Paul wrote in Greek, not Hebrew. So what does the Greek say?
The Septuagint
The Septuagint was the Old Testament that Jesus and most of the prophets used. Some, like Paul—a fully trained Pharisee—had fluency in both languages and access to both scriptures, which will turn out to be extremely important. But for now, let’s look at those verses in Greek:
καὶ μετὰ ἄρσενος οὐ κοιμηθήσῃ κοίτην γυναικός· βδέλυγμα γάρ ἐστιν.
Kai meta arsenos ou koimēthēsē koitēn gynaikos; bdelygma gar estin.
and with a male not shall you lie/sleep (in the) bed of a woman an abomination for it is
καὶ ὃς ἂν κοιμηθῇ μετὰ ἄρσενος κοίτην γυναικός, βδέλυγμα ἐποίησαν ἀμφότεροι· θανάτῳ θανατούσθωσαν, ἔνοχοί εἰσιν.
Kai hos an koimēthē meta arsenos koitēn gynaikos, bdelygma epoiēsan amphoteroi; thanatō thanatousthōsan, enochoi eisin.
and whoever might lie/sleep with a male (in the) bed of a woman an abomination they have commited both of them with death let them be put to death guilty they are
In the original Hebrew and Greek, there was no space between words or punctutation. Thus, when Paul read the septuagint he didn’t read “…ἄρσενος κοίτην…” (with the space) he read “…ἄρσενοςκοίτην…” (without the space).
The word Paul used was ἀρσενοκοῖται (arsenokoitai), which is almost identical to the “word” ἄρσενοςκοίτην (arsenoskoitēn) found in the Septuagint. Go ahead and say them out loud. Understand exactly how similar they sound.
Paul’s is a compound word made up of the individual word ἀρσεν- (meaning “male”) and κοῖται (meaning “bed”) with the letter omicron (o) forming the linguistic connecting glue. In English, the extra vowel functions like a hyphen does in English (e.g. “man-bedder”). Paul replaced the “ος” (to change the case from being the genitive “of a male” to just “male”), switched “ην” to “αι” in order to switch to a different part of speech, and then combined it with a standard combining vowel. To wit:
- ἄρσενος (genitive; noun) => ἀρσενο- (stem) plus -ο- (combing vowel)
- κοίτην (accusative; noun) => κοῖται (nominative plural agent, or verb-derived, noun)
And that’s it. The result is a plural, masculine, nominative meaning “[those who do] male bedding.”
Thus, only in the very strictest and narrow sense can it be said that Paul’s use is a neologism. All he did was take a ‘word’ from the Septuagint and make minor adjustments to it to fit it into his new sentence. You can say it was a new use, but not that it was a new meaning. Moreover, there is no reason to conclude that such an informal use of language was unusual or unclear.
The bottom line is this: had Paul said arsenos and koitēn separately instead of arsenokoites together the meaning would not have been any different at all. Paul used a different linguistic convention and that’s all he did.
The antagonist’s grammatical position here is that Paul added a simple connector to two words and changed the case to suit his sentence structure. That’s almost like saying “because he added a dash to “man-bedder” instead of saying “man bedder” that he invented a completely new word. If that’s your entire argument, then you really don’t have an argument at all.
It’s worth pausing here to emphasize that Paul’s version is actually the more explicit of the two. In the Septuagint, you have two nouns that rely on the surrounding words (including verbs) to establish their meaning. But Paul converted this to an agent noun. This allows him to express the concept more directly using fewer words by implying action. It’s like converting “of the bed of a man” to “man bedder.” It is more direct, but means the same thing.
Paul’s Perspective
Paul was unique. He was a Pharisee, so he would have had access to—and use of—the Hebrew version of scripture. But he also was a Roman citizen, the Apostle to the Gentiles, who was extremely fluent in Greek, as his use of the compound word indicates. Consequently, he was also intimately familiar with the Greek version of scripture.
So unlike others, we can be sure he understood the ban on homosexuality in the Pentateuch in both Hebrew and Greek. With Paul, we don’t have to worry about translation differences. This also means that whatever the teaching was in Hebrew, that’s how we should understand the Greek (and vice versa).
Paul’s multifaceted understanding is why, in Romans 1:26-27, he uses completely different terminology to express the same concepts that he expressed in 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy. If Paul had only expressed his opposition to homosexuality in just one way, perhaps you could make the argument that there was ambiguity. But he didn’t, and so you can’t.
All of this explains why…
Because of what we know about Paul, it makes sense that he used the term this way while others chose different terms. There really is nothing wrong or unusual about this.
Now, let’s get back to one of the claims:
Actually it is not “male lying.” The word for lying is different in the Hebrew and Greek of Leviticus. The word means male bedding, where “bed” is a euphemism for “having sex with.” Instead of saying “lie in the bed of a male” he said, more succinctly, “male bedder.”
If Paul’s use was really a neologism, then where did he get it from? As we saw above, he got it from the Septuagint. Having gotten it from the Septuagint, the meaning of the passages in Leviticus provide the context and meaning behind what Paul wrote. Thus, logically speaking, the skeptics’ conclusion that Paul wasn’t talking about general homosexuality does not logically follow from Paul stating a neologism. Indeed, the exact opposite is the case, because Paul got his idea from Leviticus where general homosexuality was forbidden.
Let’s explore this more closely.
The Ancient Witness
Let’s talk about logic: if Paul really did create the term, then where he derived the term from in the past is, logically, far more important than how it was used in the future long after he ‘invented’ it. In general when we want to know what a word means, we look backwards not forwards.
It is utterly obvious that Paul was referencing the LXX version of the Old Testament. There isn’t even another candidate explanation. Paul obviously didn’t invent the term ἀρσενοκοῖται (arsenokoitai) completely out of the void, he borrowed it from the ancient witness, slightly modifying it according to common linguistic principles in order to compactly fit the concept into his sentence. The whole point is that without the ancient witness and tradition of Leviticus, Paul would have just used a different word (as other writers chose to do). There is no evidence that he invented the word out of nothing.
The skeptic’s argument above doesn’t even make logical sense. Either Paul “invented” the term and the term should be understood as a reference to the Septuagint and the Septuagint’s meaning or he didn’t invent it and the premise of that whole argument against the tranditional Christian teaching fails to its own incorrect assumptions.
Now let’s consider the 21st century objections to Christian sexual morality in light of the ancient witness. There is no contemporary evidence—to Paul—that the creative alternative modern explanations for what homosexual might mean (such as power differentials or religious prostitution) are plausible. Indeed, that explanation is largely and admittedly anachronistic:
Languages change. Often. I’ve documented this here and here. What relevance does a reference from medieval Greek have to what Paul wrote? Very little indeed. In fact, the evidence is extremely thin:
In 71 examples after Paul, it wasn’t explicitly used in highly specific way. Such a rare word—man-bedder—must have been understood generically from the base words alone without needing further clarification. Apparently, everyone understood without any additional context required. So, why should two unclear anecdotes of specific examples rule the day? I can think of no reason why they should.
Aristides wrote in the 2nd century, so he wasn’t even a contemporary of Paul. Furthermore, an adult male raping a young boy is unambiguously homosexuality. Just because it was used anecdotally alongside other sins (e.g. rape) does not have any bearing at all on whether or not Paul meant it in such a restricted sense. The fact that Aristides used the word alongside additional context makes it clear, to me at least, that the word itself was not sufficient to make the case. If anything, the fact that 71 out of 73 uses of the word provides no additional context suggest that it had a general, non-specific meaning.
Hippolytus wrote even later, during the late 2nd and early 3rd century, well over a century after Paul wrote. In his example a male figure has homosex with another male figure. So what if one of the male had superior power over another? As above, just because it is rape doesn’t mean it isn’t homosexuality. There is absolutely nothing wrong with using a general term to condemn a specific behavior. It is logically invalid to conclude that the word pertains to misusing superior power or position for sexual advantage over another of the same sex.
The explicit anecdotal examples of homosexuality are also explicit cases of the general prohibition! From what I can tell from the above, all 73 instances of the word after Paul can easily apply to general homosexuality, but only two of them can straightforwardly apply to the restricted definition.
An Atheist Mythicist’s Perspective
I wanted to include the perspective of a non-Christian who was aggressively pro-LBGTQ many years ago. It is my common practice to cite people who disagree with me in order to show that their arguments support my position. This helps keep me from being accussed of bias, as even my ‘enemies’ agree with me.
Gay Christians: The word used here for ‘abusers of themselves with mankind’ is found first in Paul’s letters, and only became common in later Greek, and only much later did it become synonymous with gay sex. If Paul wanted to talk about gay sex, there were perfectly good ways of saying it.
I say: Don’t buy it. It is odd that Paul uses this word, it probably does mean he had some interesting reason. And probably the forger of 1 Tim used it to sound more like Paul. But please, the Greek is really obvious. If Paul had used this word to mean something else, he must have known a large number of his readers would have understood it as being about men having sex with men. If I write “and those sinners, were so bad, they were murdering and manhumping, and stuff”, its pretty clear what I mean. You may correctly assume I had some reason for using that bizarre term, but it wouldn’t be ambiguous what it meant. Just because someone 550 years later writes “what a sick guy, he was even manhumping his wife”, wouldn’t make it any less obvious. No, both Paul and the writer of 1 Timothy meant gay sex. And (see my comments on Romans above), so let’s just say they got it wrong.
In my study on these passages, this is precisely the conclusion that I arrived at. Paul’s colloquial use of a compound word isn’t any less clear than if he had left them separate. It is rather obvious what Paul is referring to. Even without the reference to the Septuagint, nobody would have misunderstood what he had to say. But then you throw in what we know about the Septuagint, and it becomes even more obvious what Paul was doing.
The question, then, is not whether or not Paul rejected homosexuality, but whether or not you reject Paul. Are you choosing the faith of the Bible or are you choosing homosexuality. It really must be one or the other. To wit:
Either the Bible got it wrong (and is thus a myth) or it got it right (and should be obeyed). Choose this day who you will serve.
Jesus on Marriage
Jesus’s teaching on marriage and the three types of eunuchs invalidates any possibility of gay marriage. Homosexuals (and transwomen)—like some eunuchs and heterosexual men—are infertile by choice. Jesus said these men cannot marry. They are forbidden from intimate relationships. Celibacy is the only option.
(You can read more in “Towards a Definition of Marriage“)
The key point is that Jesus didn’t even consider all heterosexual unions between an infertile man (a eunuch) and a fertile woman as a valid marriage, let alone homosexual unions! Because a homosexual union is inherently infertile, no homosexual union at all can ever be licit. Even setting aside Leviticus or Paul’s teachings, it is absurd to think that Jesus would have been fine with fertile men having relations with other fertile men instead of (1) celibacy or (2) marrying a woman. Jesus’ words alone refute that possibility.
Did you ever wonder why Jesus was concerned with male anatomy with respect to a man’s ability to marry? This may seem strange to readers, but it is because Jesus understood that only the sexual act itself is marriage (as described in “What Constitutes Biblical Marriage). Unlike modern man’s consent-based marriage, Jesus did not see marriage as a consensual union between two consenting adults in form of consenting witnesses in an official ceremony overseen by the consent of the church and the State. By forbidding marriage to certain men, Jesus was forbidding sexual activities between anyone other than a heterosexual marriage between a female and a fully intact male. And, once established in this way, marriage was for life.
In short, whether a person was gay, lesbian, straight, trans, eunuch, or any other letter of the alphabet, no one was permitted to engage in sexual activity of any kind unless it was (1) between an unmarried man and woman having sex to establish the marriage; or (2) the continuing act between the aforementioned married-for-life couple. All other sexual activity is illicit.
This is why the Christian church teaches that men with gay proclivities must remain celibate. It is the teaching of Jesus. If a Christian man is choosing not to marry a woman, he is choosing a life of celibacy in service to Christ.
In light of Jesus’ teaching, it is a logical contradiction to conclude the Paul taught a mutually exclusive doctrine, one where he approved of a loving and consensual homosexual union. Rather, Paul obviously agreed with Leviticus and Jesus that such things were illicit abominations. It’s simply not possible to read the Bible in its totality and conclude otherwise.