Soft Male Beds

A funny thing happened to me this week when I was trying to write a devotional on I Corinthians 6. I read verses 9 and 10. Talk about accidentally falling into something big. I am reminded about how important it is to do the meticulous work of careful translation before opening your mouth on an issue.

Here’s what those verses say in the TNIV, the translation I was reading at the time: “Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the Kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor practicing homosexuals nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.”

The phrase “practicing homosexuals” caught my attention. Actually, it was the word “practicing.” In recent years a distinction has been made in some religious circles between those with homosexual orientation and those who engage in homosexual acts. The belief is it is not a sin to be gay as long as you remain celibate. (This line of reasoning acknowledges that homosexuality may be genetic and not a choice after all.) I’m not really interested in commenting here on that school of thought – I’m interested in how the TNIV came up with the phrase “practicing homosexuals.” Surely, I thought, that is a modern notion and not what the ancient text actually says.

So I grabbed half a dozen other Bible translations as well as a Greek Bible and Dictionary to satisfy my curiosity. After reading, all I could say was, “Holy Homophobia!” I wasn’t prepared for the difference between what the Greek text says and how the words are translated.

There are two Greek words at play in verse nine. One is malakoi, translated in the TNIV as “male prostitutes” and the other is arsenekoitai, translated in the TNIV as “practicing homosexuals.”

Here is a list of what I found. First you’ll see the abbreviation of the translation I looked at, then how that translation renders malakoi and next how it renders arsenekoitai.

TNIV / male prostitutes / practicing homosexuals
NRSV / male prostitutes / sodomites
NIV / male prostitutes / homosexual offenders
NASB / effeminate / homosexuals
ESV / men who practice homosexuality*
KJV / effeminate / abusers of themselves with mankind
Actual Greek / soft / male bed

* The ESV has a footnote saying the two Greek terms refer to the passive and active partners in consensual male homosexual acts.

If you wonder how you get from “soft” to “male prostitutes” or “male bed” to “sodomites,” you are not alone. Did I ever stumble onto a hornet’s nest! In the past couple of days I’ve been reading all I can find about these two Greek words and how they have been understood over the years. I’ve read both conservative and liberal arguments and if you want to read those things google “I Corinthians 6:9 translation arguments” and have at it. You can read paragraph after paragraph of speculation about what Paul really meant. My guess is whatever point of view you bring with you into the argument will be the one you leave with. And I feel like the point of view the translators brought with them to the argument was the one they went ahead and translated the verse with. (I find the English Standard Version footnote the most curious example of this.) The translation issues around these two words don’t solve anything – rather, they create all sorts of questions.

There are at least six things to note.

1. Malakoi is used at other times in the New Testament to refer to soft clothing. But Paul certainly couldn’t have had that usage in mind here. He meant soft people. John Wesley thought it meant people who lived in an easy, indolent way. Others sexualize the word. I can see how the King James guys got from soft to “effeminate,” although I wonder what effeminate meant in 1611. (And isn’t that translation offensive to women?) But how do you get from soft (or even effeminate) to “male prostitutes”?

2. Arsenekoitai is a compound word, made up of the Greek words for “male” and “bed.” There is no known usage of it in ancient Greek writings. It appears to be a word coined by Paul and is only used in the Bible here and in a similar list in I Timothy. It is impossible to be certain how to translate the word. Does it mean males who use their beds for illicit purposes? Perhaps it (rather than malakoi) is a reference to the male prostitutes working in the temple of Aphrodite in Corinth. If that’s the case, it could have homosexual overtones, but male prostitutes didn’t exclusively serve male customers. And if it is a reference to male prostitutes, isn’t it then a reference to people who are sexually indiscriminate instead of being sexually responsible? I don’t think all homosexuals are prostitutes any more than I think all heterosexuals are prostitutes.

3. Since we do know arsenekoitai does have the word male in it, if Paul is saying something about homosexuality, lesbians get a free pass.

4. If you are wondering if Paul meant homosexual why he didn’t just use that word, it is because homosexual is a recent term, unknown both in the time the Bible was written and unknown even when the King James Bible was translated. There were other common words for homosexuality at the time of Paul but he doesn’t use them. Why not? There is plenty of speculation on both sides of the issue about Paul’s choice of words but no definitive answer.

5. There are an awful lot of people (again on both sides of the issue) very certain about the meaning of a passage that is fraught with translation difficulty.

6. I can’t imagine what it might feel like for a homosexual person to know these words are unclear and then have them so definitively and negatively translated. Or what it might feel like for a homosexual person who doesn’t know they are unclear to simply read the way most versions of the Bible translate them.

As is often the case, I find the recent translation in The Message by Eugene Peterson helpful. His rendering of I Corinthians 6:9,10 says “Don’t you realize this is not the way to live? Unjust people who don’t care about God will not be joining in his kingdom. Those who use and abuse each other, use and abuse sex, use and abuse the earth and everything in it, don’t qualify as citizens in God’s kingdom.” I think that captures what Paul had in mind without making translation leaps or stigmatizing people with labels and expresses Paul’s meaning in a way that will get us nodding our heads in agreement instead of getting out our megaphones and yelling at each other. What do you think?