The Septembert 2006 Challenge: arsenokoiati

In 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, Paul says that arsenokoiati will not inherit the Kingdom of God. If the word arsenokoiati could be translated as "homosexuals", then the same-sex relationship debate would be over for Christadelphians. I have argued that arsenokoiati cannot be translated like that. If you believe that arsenokoiati means homosexuals, please tell me why.

Received 27th April 2007

You write that arsenokoites is "a difficult-some would say impossible-word to translate." Who would say it is impossible? What are their qualifications? I'm an undergraduate majoring in ancient Greek, and after seeing your article I referenced the Greek-English Lexicon of Liddell and Scott. The definition the book gives is quite simple: lying with men, N.T. I also asked my professor who is a native speaker of modern Greek and a scholar in classical Greek what the meaning of arsenokoites was. There was no doubt that the word meant to have sex with a man. The word as you have faithfully pointed out in your article is a compound word comprised of arsen, which means male, and koites, from which we get the word coitus or sexual intercourse. It was understood in ancient times that sexual intercourse would be between a man and a woman, and so a word such as gunokoites (sex with a woman) would be redundant. As you also note about 500 years after the New Testament was written John the Faster claims that arsenokoites can occur between a man and his wife. This is obviously due to an evolution of the word whereby it meant anal-intercourse. It would be natural that the word for sex with men would mean anal-intercourse.

My Reply, Published 28th April 2007

The range of translations of arsenokoites and the dispute surrounding it is documented in Dale B. Martin's article.1 The range of different translations for arsenokoites in different New Testament translations alone shows that there is doubt about what the word meant.

It is a compound word, but the etymology of a word does not determine its meaning, as I described. The etymological fallacy is described in standard linguistics text books.2 James Barr devotes chapter 6 of The Semantics of Biblical Language to this topic. In the first paragraph of that chapter he writes "Etymology is not, and does not profess to be, a guide to the semantic value of words in their current usage, and such value has to be determined from the current usage and not from the derivation."

Five hundred years is a substantial length of time, and there is plenty of time for the meaning of the word to have changed. Unfortunately the Penitential of John the Faster is the oldest extant use of the term where context enables us to determine its meaning. However, if the word is derived from the Septuagint translation of Leviticus it is likely that it meant "anal sex" when it was first coined, as well as when it was used by John the Faster, suggesting that it meant "anal sex" when Paul used it—but this is merely suggestion, hardly proof.

Modern lexicons, such as Liddell and Scott, do not define what ancient words mean. They are simply references of what the compilers thought the word to mean. They are not infallible sources, and when ancient sources and modern lexicons disagree about what a word means, the modern lexicons are always wrong.