Hey friends, so I’ll be taking an unexpected break from 7 Deadly Sins and Friday posts this week. It turned out this week’s passage from 1 Corinthians spawned FOUR posts, so rather than the usual content, I’m going to post all four of these and call it a week. We’ll return to regularly schedule Bar Chaplain articles next week. Thanks!

In our preparation for this 1 Corinthians study, Jessi, Joe, and I knew chapter 6 would be perhaps the most sensitive in the whole letter. In this chapter, Paul builds a case for how Christians should interact with one another when there is a dispute. Paul wants them not to take one another to courts outside the church but to settle arguments internally, lest their discord present the whole church in a negative light to those watching from the outside. Additionally, the Corinthian courts were absurdly biased in favor of those with wealth, and given the economic diversity within the young church, Paul saw the potential for wealthy Corinthian Christians to steamroll the church’s poorer members. From Paul’s point of view, it was best to avoid the complex and corrupt Corinthian court system whenever possible and keep judgments within the church.

All this fits perfectly within the argument about judgment Paul has built over the last two chapters. But, in the midst of Paul’s case for equitable treatment of one another, the apostle gives one of his infamous “vice lists” in verses 9 and 10, and this is where things get thorny for modern readers. Periodically in his letters, Paul would rattle off a quick list of unacceptable behaviors with little context or explanation. While readers in Paul’s day would have understood his word choices, modern Christians’ attempts to translate these vice lists and apply them to our settings have had painful consequences. For example, translated with 1st Century Corinth in mind, the vice list in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 might read something like this:

Don’t you know that people who are unjust won’t inherit God’s kingdom? Don’t be deceived. Those who are sexually immoral, those who worship false gods, adulterers, those who engage in male prostitution and perversion, thieves, the greedy, drunks, slanderers, and swindlers won’t inherit God’s kingdom.

There are two Greek words in this list which Christians debate heavily today: malakoi (which I chose to translate “male prostitution”) and arsenokoitai (which I chose to translate “perversion”). Both of these are simplifications, and to understand them fully, we need some background info on ancient Greek and Roman culture.

Malakoi literally means “soft” or “luxurious” and refers to male prostitutes, especially those who tended the ancient Greek temples. This is already pretty unseemly from Paul’s point of view, but things get darker. Aside from maybe Emperor Nero’s marriage to Pythagoras (which may or may not have been consensual because it’s Nero), a consensual romantic relationship between two adult men was unheard of at this point in history; however, it was common and socially acceptable for wealthy Greek men to have both a wife and a male slave kept for sexual pleasure. Given malakoi’s placement right after idolatry and adultery, the term most likely encompasses these related ancient customs of ritual prostitution and sex slavery, and Paul pairs malakoi with the next big sexual vice of Corinth: arsenokoitai.

At its most literal, arsenokoitai means “men who go to bed,” but the word had the connotation of a sexual pervert, and it’s likely Paul uses the term to call out a specific cultural vice. Ancient Greek artisans and nobles regularly engaged in “pederasty,” the socially acceptable practice of taking on a young male apprentice who would also be his teacher’s lover. Just how rampant was pederasty in ancient Greece? Well, Plato’s Symposium (considered one of the all-time great philosophical works about love) regards pederasty as one of the purest forms of love in Greek society. This practice would have been repugnant to Paul, just as it is repugnant to us today, so of course it makes Paul’s list.

Now, here’s the problem:
Over years of translation, Paul’s mentions of malakoi and arsenokoitai were rendered as things like “men who lie with men” (NIV), “sodomites” (NRSV), or “the effeminate” (KJV), and these translation choices disregard the context of Paul’s writing. (Sidebar: the choice of “sodomites” is particularly intriguing since, according to Ezekiel 16, the “sin of sodom” was inhospitality toward those in need— a crime of which the Corinthians were also guilty, but more on that a couple of chapters from now.) In his use of these terms, Paul was pointing to specific issues in Corinth, but contemporary translators have grafted these issues onto our debates around LGBTQ relationships. Over the centuries, we’ve put words into Paul’s mouth, so we need to peel back these layers and try to return to what the apostle originally meant.

Frankly, I don’t know how a 1st Century Jewish convert to Christianity would regard modern relationships between consenting adults of the same sex. Paul is the only New Testament author to mention same-sex attraction, and he only references it offhandedly in two other places: 1 Timothy 1 (which, like 1 Corinthians 6, deploys arsenokoitai in a vice list) and Romans 1 (which is debatable in its meaning). As a reformed Pharisee, Paul would have studied the Holiness Code, and these laws do prohibit sex between two men, but they also prohibit crossbreeding animals, crop rotation, blended fabrics, and all sorts of other things we do today without a second thought. Jesus’s teachings, Paul’s letters, and Peter’s vision in Acts 10 throw many of these traditional laws into question for Christians in Paul’s day and today. So whether LGBTQ relationships are prohibited is largely a matter of interpretation, and our readings of these verses probably say a lot more about us and our biases than about Paul and Corinth.

I think it speaks volumes that Paul only mentions even malakoi and arsenokoitai in passing; he saves his longer rebukes for issues like judging one another, resolving disputes in the church, and preoccupation with the things of this world. The overall point of 1 Corinthians 6 has little to do with modern LGBTQ relationships (if there’s any connection at all), so let’s set this aside and look at Paul’s larger point in the next post.