We are in the midst of searching for the Bible’s attitude toward homosexuality. Last week, I finished talking about the Jewish Scriptures and found there to be no condemnation there. Now we will turn to the three passages in the New Testament that are used to condemn homosexuality. I Corinthians 6:9 is often used that way:
“Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders….” (NIV)
And what could be more clear than that? Well, the picture gets murky when we use the King James Version:
“…Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind…”
And the story takes yet another twist in the English Standard Version, where the last two groups on the list are combined into one:
“…Do not be deceived: neither the sexual immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality…”
Why is there such intense disagreement between the translations? It is clear that Paul means to condemn some group or groups, but it is not clear which ones. The two controversial Greek words which show up in that list are malakoi and arsenokoitai, respectively. The translation difficulty stems from the fact that neither Paul only uses the word this one time, so it impossible to know from other contexts if he thinks malakoi means ‘homosexual.’
Malakoi is variously translated above as “the effeminate”, “male prostitutes”, and one-half of “men who practice homosexuality.” If the Greeks were going to turn the masculine plural noun ‘malakoi’ into an adjective, they would be saying that the object was soft. So wax would be malakos when it was hot but the opposite of malakos when it was cold. Paul here applies it to people, and the masculine ending probably means he had men in mind. It is difficult to say what a “soft male” is or why such a person would be cast off from the kingdom, but it is certainly an enormous and unjustified jump for the NIV and ESV to assume a connection to homosexuality. The KJV is the most faithful to the Greek to simply translate the word as “effeminate.” Translated this way, we can see that there is no necessary connection between softness and sexuality, as the NIV and ESV have it. “Softness” could mean many things. For instance, there are two Christian books I read several years ago that both denounce “soft” males: The Silence of Adam by Larry Crab, and Wild at Heart by John Elderidge. The softness described in males in those two books has no necessary connection with sexuality. That is, they were writing books condemning soft, passive, heterosexual males. Furthermore, other ancient Greek texts speak of a ‘soft man’ as a man who is pampered or cowardly. But never until the ESV-translators got on their moral high-horse did the word mean ‘homosexual.’
The NIV is bad here, but even so, we get no condemnation of homosexuality: they translate malakoi as a 'male prostitute.' Condemning male prostitution is no more to condemn all homosexuality than condemning heterosexual prostitution is to condemn all heterosexuality. But they do make the mysterious jump from “soft male” to “soft male in the area of sexuality.” This is supposed to be God’s Word, and those who don’t know Greek take a translation at face value. So translating malakoi as male prostitutes without knowing what this word actually refers to is quite dangerous. I’m sure Paul would have condemned male prostitution if he had gotten around to it, but we just don’t know if he does so in this passage.
Much more dangerous is the English Standard Version, which claims to know definitively that malakoi are “men who practice homosexual acts”. The two words malakoi and arsenokoitai are combined by these translators as two halves of a pair, with the malakoi being the passive partner in the male sex act and arsenokoitai the active partner. It is first of all worth noting that the NIV and the ESV are in conflict on this point, because obviously the group that gets money for gay sex is not the same group as the group that plays the passive partner in the male sex act. So at least one of these translations is necessarily in error, and possibly both.
Certainly, the interpretation that the male sex act is described here is a possible interpretation. But an interpretation must be much more than just possible in order to condemn someone’s lifestyle. It must be definite! The question of whether malakoi are passively gay men or male prostitutes may be an interesting dissertation topic for someone in seminary, but it has no place masquerading as Divinely-inspired truth. The truth is that we just don’t know what malakoi means. Paul simply never tells us! “Softness” as applied to people could mean any number of things, including the passive heterosexual male in Wild at Heart. I can’t see any other conclusion than that the ESV translators are homophobic.
