Embraced by God...

Welcome to hell: As promised, I will now give you the most joyous reading experience of your life! Even though there is quite a bit more that needs to be said about these passages, I will limit your pain to only a discussion of the two key Greek words at question: "malakos" and "arsenokoitai." During the past 20 years scholarship has begun to give these verses a greatly needed review. The situation is that your Bible at home—even if it’s quite new—still reflects old scholarship on these terms. Unfortunately, there is a long lag time between advances in scholarship and seeing the updated versions of the texts at a Bible store near you.

MALAKOS: Of the two terms being debated, "malakos" is an extremely common word with many meanings—most commonly it referred to something as being "soft." In moral terms, it condemns or mocks anything seen by Greek male society as "soft," such as cowardice or laziness. All these negative "soft" failings were seen as feminine qualities. It was a blanket condemnation of all effeminacy as defined by Greek male society--not 20th century USA. It had nothing to do with limp wrists, nor did it determine with whom one had sex. Instead, this was a culturally based women-bashing term that has no place in a modern Christian’s belief system.

In the ancient Greek world-view, women were pretty much worthless except as the bearers of legitimate offspring. In no context did they compare favorably with men, not even remotely. Thus, effeminacy was quite a cut-down. In contrast to today, Greek males saw womanizers as being effeminate (too interested in worthless pursuits), and male-male sex was typically argued by philosophers as being far more manly (not effeminate) than heterosexual sex, for it was associated with athletics, learning and books, not the delicate, pretty ways of women.

Dale Martin summarizes his research on malakos, saying:

"There is no question, then, about what malakos referred to in the ancient world. In moral contexts it always referred either obviously or obliquely to the feminine. There is no historical reason to take malakos as a specific reference to the penetrated man in homosexual intercourse. It is even less defensible to narrow that reference down further to mean 'male prostitute.' The meaning of the word is clear, even if too broad to be taken to refer to a single act or role. Malakos means 'effeminate'" ("Arsenokoites and Malakos: Meanings and Consequences," in Biblical Ethics and Homosexuality: Listening to Scripture, ed. by Robert L. Brawley, Knox Press, 1996), p.128.

The history of the term is that for hundreds of years prior to the Reformation in the 16^th century, malakos was typically thought to mean "masturbators," then advances in scholarship led to what is probably the correct translation, "the effeminate." From then on, effeminacy became the preferred translation until early in the 20th century. Yet, perhaps due to scholarship’s misunderstanding of what constituted effeminacy in ancient Greek male society, the term was used increasingly to condemn either homosexuals en mass, subgroups within homosexuality or male prostitutes.

ARSENOKOITES: The funny thing about this word is that as soon as scholars have finished admitting this is an extremely rare word that cannot be accurately defined, they set forth to tell you what it actually means. Realize this, there are zero known occurrences of arsenokoites in historically remaining ancient Greek literature predating this New Testament reference. ZERO! Even if Paul coined the term, the Bible itself offers no help, for in the whole Bible arsenokoites is found only in these two passages’ sin lists, so we have no context to help define the term—everything else is pure conjecture, not fag-damning facts.

Later literature is also of no certitude, for it can only tell us various meanings for the term that existed in other centuries--meanings often change but even if they don't, how many terms have only one possible definition--doesn't context often shade meanings as well? So I can tell you what this scholar says it means and what that scholar says it means but at the end of the day where has it taken us when the facts are they're actually trying to pass off "educated guesses" as proof that God hates/loves fags.

One more thing, some scholars will try to snow you with a faulty method of doing "word studies." In this method, they'll pull compound words like arsenokoites apart (arsen / koites), define each half (male / bed), then stick the word back together again with the combined definitions (FAGGOT!). Sounds great but....hmmm....okay, here's my thought: if this doesn't work on English words, then why does it work on ancient Greek words? You can't simply pick a compound word apart that you don't know and say it means the combination of all the smaller words contained therein. Do you get it? Try it with the following words: foot/ball (soccer?); under/stand (to stand under?); dark/room (simply a room that’s dark?); hall/mark (a crayon mark on the wallpaper?); pee/been (something you ask a small child before bed?); AND ARE YOU BEGINNING TO BELIEVE ME?

Furthermore, even when this approach gets the definition approximately right, you’ve still lost all the nuances that truly bring the term to life—you’ve just got the corpse of the term, not its spirit. Therefore, I salute Dale Martin's confession that "I should be clear about my claims here. I am not claiming to know what arsenokoites meant, I am claiming that no one knows what it meant" (Martin, p.123). Despite my praises of Martin, he, too, couldn’t resist guessing the mystery word, saying it seems to have referred to some sort of economic exploitation by means of sex but not necessarily limited to male-male sex.

Concluding thought: Thanks for reading the appendix, I wasn’t sure if it was worth including but you changed my mind.