What Does the Bible Say About Homosexuality: 1 Corinthians 6:9–10

What Do Malakoi and Arsenokoitai Really Mean?

By: Dr. Gregory S. Neal

Among the biblical passages most frequently cited against LGBTQ+ people, 1 Corinthians 6:9–10 often appears to be one of the most straightforward. Here, Paul lists several kinds of people who will not “inherit the kingdom of God,” and modern translations have rendered two of the terms, either individually or together, as “homosexuals,” “homosexual offenders,” “male prostitutes,” “sodomites,” “effeminate,” “men who have sex with men,” and other similar expressions. If we begin with those translations, the seemingly unavoidable conclusion is that Paul explicitly condemned homosexual people and homosexual relationships.

There is, however, a serious problem with that conclusion. Paul didn’t use a word meaning “homosexual,” nor did he possess our modern conceptual framework of sexual orientation. The two Greek words at issue, malakoi and arsenokoitai, are considerably more difficult to translate than many English versions will admit, and neither corresponds neatly to the modern categories “gay,” “homosexual,” or even “men who have sex with men.” Indeed, the history of their translation illustrates one of the central problems in the debate over the Bible and homosexuality: rather than allowing the ancient language to remain ancient, interpreters have repeatedly imported modern concepts of sexuality into a first-century text and then treated those concepts as though they had been there all along.

This doesn’t mean that Paul would have approved of contemporary same-sex relationships; indeed, I rather doubt it. Paul was a first-century Jew whose sexual assumptions were formed within the religious and cultural inheritance of Judaism as it intersected with the Greco-Roman world that understood sex, gender, status, desire, and the body very differently from the way we do today. But there’s an important distinction between what we might reasonably infer Paul would have believed and what Paul actually says in 1 Corinthians 6:9–10. Historical reconstruction may tell us something about Paul’s probable assumptions, but exegesis requires us to deal with the words he actually wrote, and those words are malakoi and arsenokoitai.

The Problem Begins with Translation

The NRSVue renders 1 Corinthians 6:9–10 with the terms “male prostitutes” and “men who engage in illicit sex,” while acknowledging in its marginal notes that the meanings of the Greek words are uncertain. Earlier translations have ranged from “effeminate” and “abusers of themselves with mankind” to “sodomites,” “sexual perverts,” and “homosexuals.” The sheer variety of alternative translations here should indicate to us that we’re not dealing with two Greek words whose meanings are either lexically or contextually self-evident.

While in graduate school at Duke in the early 1990s, I had the privilege of taking a seminar on the Pauline Epistles with Dale Martin, one of the premier New Testament scholars of the late twentieth century. In that course, Martin spent considerable time discussing the semantic range of several Greek terms, including malakoi and arsenokoitai, and the difficulties involved in assigning overly precise meanings to words whose usage is broader, rarer, or more context-dependent than many English translations suggest. Five years later, Martin published an article offering a fuller assessment of that material, in which he traced the history of English translations and noted a significant shift during the twentieth century in how these two words, in particular, were rendered. Earlier translations generally described particular actions, roles, or moral conditions, while later translations increasingly employed modern categories of homosexual identity. In other words, as Western culture increasingly came to classify people in terms of homosexual and heterosexual identities, translators began reading those categories back into Paul.

That observation should make us cautious. The task of translation isn’t merely to replace a Greek word with an English word that seems roughly similar; translation involves carrying meaning from one linguistic and cultural world into another. When the receptor language contains a concept that did not exist, or did not function in the same way, within the source culture, the risk of anachronism becomes especially serious. A translation may sound clear precisely because it has concealed the historical difficulty. That’s what happens when malakoi and arsenokoitai become “homosexuals.”

Malakoi: The “Soft” Ones

The easier of the two words to deal with is μαλακοί (malakoi), the plural form of μαλακός (malakos), but even here “easier” is relative. The basic meaning of the word is simply “soft.” In Matthew 11:8 and Luke 7:25, for example, Jesus uses the same word in reference to “soft” clothing. Nothing sexual is involved.

When malakos was applied to a man, however, its range of meanings became much broader and more culturally loaded. In ancient masculine ideology, a man could be called malakos because he was thought to be weak, cowardly, lazy, decadent, given over to luxury, morally undisciplined, overly concerned with his appearance, excessively devoted to pleasure, or otherwise insufficiently masculine. Because ancient Mediterranean cultures frequently associated masculinity with strength, self-mastery, activity, and dominance, while femininity was associated with softness, passivity, and submission, a man who took the receptive role in sex with another male could certainly be called malakos. But sexual receptivity wasn’t what defined the category. A man could also be regarded as malakos in heterosexual relations if his behavior was perceived as excessively passive, self-indulgent, subordinate to a woman, or otherwise inconsistent with ancient ideals of masculine self-mastery. The category therefore can’t be reduced to “the receptive partner in male-male intercourse.” Indeed, sexual connotations were only one manifestation of a much larger cultural category. In his article, Martin points to ancient texts in which lazy men, cowards, men given to indulgence in luxuries such as fine food, wine, and clothing, and even men regarded as excessively devoted to women or sexual pleasure could be condemned as malakoi. The word belonged to an ancient system of cultural expectations about proper masculine behavior.

For that reason, translating malakoi as “homosexuals” is highly problematic. It takes an ancient insult rooted in assumptions about masculinity—about what makes a “real man,” or, as we might say today, “who wears the pants” in a relationship—and converts it into a modern identity category defined principally by the sex toward which a person experiences enduring romantic and sexual attraction. Those are simply not the same thing.

Even translating the word as “male prostitutes,” as some modern versions have done, goes too far. While malakoi could describe males who were sexually receptive or penetrated, the word had a much wider semantic range than prostitution or even sexual behavior itself. In fact, there is something quite revealing about the assumption that malakoi must be sexual in 1 Corinthians 6:9. Once interpreters become convinced that Paul is talking about homosexuality, they tend to make malakoi the passive homosexual partner and arsenokoitai the active homosexual partner, thereby allowing the two terms to define one another. But that neat pairing is an interpretation layered over the text, not something the Greek requires or clearly indicates.

A dynamic translation therefore ought to preserve the idiomatic sense of moral “softness” without importing a modern sexual identity into the word. Something like “the self-indulgent” or even “men given over to decadent self-indulgence” comes considerably closer to the ancient moral category, although even this expansive English phrase fails to capture all of its gendered assumptions.

Arsenokoitai: A Word We Should Be Much Less Certain About

The second term, ἀρσενοκοῖται (arsenokoitai), is far more difficult. Its singular form, ἀρσενοκοίτης (arsenokoitēs), appears to be formed from two recognizable Greek elements: ἄρσην (arsēn), meaning “male,” and κοίτη (koitē), meaning “bed,” often with a sexual connotation. This has led generations of interpreters to reason that the word must simply mean “men who bed males” or “men who have sex with men.” That conclusion, however, is much less certain than is often assumed.

It is plausible that the word is connected to the Greek translation of Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13. In both passages, the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible) places forms of arsēn (“male”) and koitē (“bed”) in close proximity in its prohibitions against a male lying sexually with another male, and many scholars suspect that this language contributed to the formation of arsenokoitēs. I think that connection is likely. But even if the Levitical connection is correct, we still haven’t determined what the resulting compound meant when Paul used it. Word origin and word meaning are related, but they aren’t identical.

In linguistics, we don’t determine the meaning of a compound word merely by separating it into its component parts. Etymology can help us understand where a word came from, but meaning is established principally through usage and context. That creates a particular difficulty with arsenokoitēs, because 1 Corinthians 6 is its earliest surviving occurrence, and the word remains relatively uncommon in subsequent Greek literature. It appears again in 1 Timothy 1:10 and in later non-canonical Christian and Jewish texts, often in vice lists whose surrounding terms provide important clues to its meaning. Its rarity isn’t unique; the New Testament contains many uncommon words, some with no surviving earlier usage at all. What matters is what that scarcity of evidence requires from the interpreter. Without a substantial body of contemporary usage, the meaning of arsenokoitēs can’t responsibly be established by taking arsēn, adding koitē, and assuming that the resulting compound must encompass every instance of sex between males.

The later contexts in which the word appears are therefore especially important. As Martin emphasizes, arsenokoitēs and related forms repeatedly occur in settings involving economic injustice, exploitation, robbery, fraud, coercion, and abuse of power. One significant example occurs in the Sibylline Oracles, where a related verbal form appears amid prohibitions against theft, withholding wages, oppressing the poor, unjust enrichment, and other forms of exploitation. Similar associations appear elsewhere.

These patterns have led Martin and other scholars to suggest that arsenokoitēs may have referred to a form of exploitation carried out through sex, perhaps involving prostitution, coercion, slavery, or other forms of sexual and economic abuse. While the evidence doesn’t allow us to define the word with absolute precision, the context of its usage does not justify the common assumption that arsenokoitai conveys an unqualified sense of: “men who have sex with men.”

The problem with many modern translations, then, isn’t merely that they choose one possible interpretation. It’s that they often suppress the uncertainty altogether, replacing a rare and disputed Greek term with a modern category that appears far more precise than the ancient evidence permits.

Some scholars understand arsenokoitai more broadly than Martin does, but I find Martin’s attention to actual usage, semantic context, exploitation, and the dangers of etymological overconfidence persuasive. More importantly, nothing in that scholarly disagreement requires us to translate arsenokoitai as “homosexuals,” because “homosexual” names a modern category of sexual orientation that the Greek word itself does not express.

Sexual Acts Are Not the Same Thing as Sexual Orientation

This distinction is frequently blurred in contemporary arguments about the passage. Someone will say, “Paul clearly knew that men had sex with men, therefore Paul knew about homosexuality.” But that doesn’t follow.

Of course, Paul knew that men sometimes had sex with men. No serious affirming interpretation requires pretending otherwise. Paul also knew that women sometimes had sexual relations with women, as Romans 1 almost certainly demonstrates, and ancient Greeks and Romans wrote about same-sex desire and behavior, sometimes at considerable length. But the existence of same-sex desire is not the same thing as possessing the modern concept of sexual orientation.

Paul’s world did not organize people into heterosexual and homosexual identities analogous to ours. Ancient sexual ethics were structured much more closely around gender, social status, questions of who does the penetrating, dominance and submission, freedom and slavery, age, masculinity and femininity, culturally legitimate versus culturally illegitimate partners, and the preservation of social hierarchy. A free adult male could be married to and sexually involved with a particular woman while also having sexual relations with enslaved males, prostitutes, or younger males without thereby being placed into a social identity category equivalent to what we mean when we say someone is “gay” or “bisexual.”

That difference becomes especially obvious with malakoi. In the ancient system that Martin describes in his article, a man could be condemned as “soft” because he was passive, luxurious, cowardly, undisciplined, excessively interested in pleasure, or insufficiently masculine in some other way. The category runs across what we would call sexual orientations because sexual orientation isn’t what the category is measuring. When an English translation replaces those categories with “homosexuals,” it doesn’t make Paul easier to understand; it changes what Paul is actually trying to say.

The Context of 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 Is Critical

The immediate context deserves much more attention than it usually receives. 1 Corinthians 6:9–10 doesn’t occur in a theological discussion of marriage or sexual ethics. It appears in the middle of Paul’s criticism of a congregation that is tearing itself apart through litigation, fraud, exploitation, sexual misconduct, status competition, and the misuse of Christian freedom.

The opening portion of chapter 6 concerns lawsuits between believers. Paul is appalled that members of the church are dragging one another before civil courts rather than resolving their disputes within the community. His accusation immediately before the vice list is striking: “But you yourselves wrong and defraud, and believers at that.” He then asks, “Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God?”

There is a verbal and conceptual connection here that is easy to overlook. Paul has just accused the Corinthians of injustice, and he immediately warns that the unjust will not inherit God’s kingdom. The vice list that follows includes sexual immorality, idolatry, adultery, theft, greed, drunkenness, verbal abuse, and robbery or swindling. The surrounding argument deals with how people use, mistreat, cheat, exploit, and otherwise harm one another, and it is within this context that Paul uses the word arsenokoitai. If the word conveyed connotations of sexual exploitation, coercion, or the use of another person for sexual or economic advantage, it fits seamlessly into Paul’s condemnation of practices that harm others and fracture the communal life of the church. A more expansive meaning, one that encompasses every instance of sexual activity between males, follows less naturally from the immediate rhetorical setting and does nothing to explain why the term appears where it does.

In other words, the passage is much broader than a moralizing list of sexual taboos that should be avoided. That is how the list is often treated, but doing so tears it away from the argument in which Paul placed it. Rather, Paul is describing practices, dispositions, and patterns of behavior that generate harm, exploit or misuse others, disorder human relationships, and contradict the transformed communal character of those who belong to Christ. Even those items that may not appear immediately interpersonal to modern readers, such as drunkenness and idolatry, are understood by Paul as destructive because they undermine self-control, distort relationships, and orient people away from God and toward behaviors that damage both individuals and communities. None of these vices addresses the ontological nature of the persons involved; they describe what people do, how they behave in ways that violate others, and the ways in which their lives become oriented away from justice, mutuality, self-control, and the life of Christ. Those who oppose LGBTQ+ inclusion may certainly believe that same-sex relationships belong within that category, but at this point such a conclusion can only be reached by importing that judgment into the passage itself. It doesn’t arise naturally from Paul’s language or argument; it comes instead from a prior conviction about same-sex relationships, often reinforced by cultural or emotional discomfort, and is then read back into the text as though Paul had stated it.

A Better Dynamic-Equivalent Translation

Because both malakoi and arsenokoitai present genuine lexical and contextual difficulties, no translation can eliminate interpretation altogether. Still, I think we can do better than either “homosexuals” or “men who have sex with men,” both of which imply considerably more precision than the Greek warrants.

Following Martin’s analysis, I would render 1 Corinthians 6:9–10 something like this:

Do you not know that those who practice injustice will not inherit the kingdom of God? Don’t deceive yourselves: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor those given over to decadent self-indulgence, nor men who sexually exploit others, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor abusers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

I would accompany the two disputed expressions with a translator’s note:

Malakoi literally means “soft men” and could refer broadly to men regarded in ancient culture as weak, decadent, effeminate, or lacking self-control; it could include sexually passive men but was not limited to them. Arsenokoitai is a rare and disputed term, likely involving some form of male sexual exploitation; its exact meaning cannot be established with certainty.

I wouldn’t claim that this translation is final or indisputable. “Men who sexually exploit others” has an enormous advantage over “homosexuals”: it does not import a modern sexual identity into a first-century text whose vocabulary does not contain that category.

Paul Probably Wouldn’t Have Been Affirming

There’s an understandable temptation among affirming Christians to solve the problem by arguing that Paul was only condemning exploitative same-sex behavior and that, had he encountered a loving, monogamous gay or lesbian couple, he would have approved. While I would personally love to believe that to be the case, I don’t think we can responsibly say it. Instead, I think it’s more likely that Paul probably wouldn’t have been affirming in the modern sense. His comments in Romans 1, his Jewish scriptural and theological inheritance, and his broader cultural assumptions make it likely that he regarded same-sex sexual relations negatively. But recognizing that historical probability is very different from saying that malakoi and arsenokoitai are Paul’s words for “homosexuals,” because they aren’t.

The more important question is why Paul would likely have reacted negatively and whether the assumptions that would have shaped his reaction, then, are the same assumptions Christians should hold, today. Paul’s discussion in Romans 1, for example, suggests that he understood same-sex desire within a framework of idolatry, exchange, disorder, and departure from what he regarded as a natural heterosexual pattern. As my article on Romans 1 outlines, Paul inherited this understanding from his own theological and cultural context; it wasn’t a revelation of Christ, nor does it coordinate well with his own theology of grace and salvation by faith and not by works, but that’s beside the point. Paul’s understanding is built upon a very different sexual anthropology from our modern understanding of enduring sexual orientation resulting from a complex interaction of genetic, biological, and developmental factors. And this is where the historical distance between Paul’s world and ours becomes theologically significant.

What Paul Believed and What We Know

Modern research doesn’t support the idea that gay people are heterosexuals who have somehow exchanged their natural orientation for an unnatural one. Nor does contemporary science reduce sexual orientation to a single cause. The evidence points instead toward a complex interaction of biological, developmental, genetic, and environmental factors, with large genetic studies indicating a polygenic rather than single-gene contribution to same-sex sexual orientation and behavior.

Paul didn’t know any of that, nor should we expect him to have known it. Paul was not a geneticist, psychologist, endocrinologist, or modern theorist of human sexuality. He lived in the first century. Like every biblical writer, he interpreted human existence using the intellectual, cultural, and scientific resources available to him. That observation need not threaten Christian faith unless we have already decided that inspiration requires the biblical authors to possess information unavailable to their time and culture.

It Is Okay for Paul to Be Wrong

This brings us to a point that some Christians will find uncomfortable but that I think we need to say plainly: it’s okay for Paul to be wrong.

Paul can be wrong about the causes and character of same-sex desire without ceasing to be Paul, without ceasing to be a profound witness to the Gospel, and without making Scripture meaningless. A doctrine of inspiration that requires Paul to possess a twenty-first century understanding of sexuality asks something of Scripture that Scripture never asks of itself. We already recognize this fact in other biblical circumstances, even if we’re reluctant to name it. In 1 Corinthians 11, only a few chapters after the passage under discussion, Paul appeals to “nature” itself to argue that long hair is degrading to a man and glorious for a woman. Yet what Paul regarded as naturally obvious was heavily conditioned by ancient assumptions about gender and propriety. What was presented as “nature” could reflect what a particular culture regarded as conventional and appropriate. We don’t preserve Paul’s hairstyle regulations as timeless biological truths simply because he appealed to nature, nor do most Christians believe they must reproduce every first-century assumption about women, slavery, social hierarchy, political government, or the structure of the cosmos in order to take Scripture seriously.

Why, then, should sexuality be uniquely exempt from historical and theological discernment? Respecting Paul means allowing him to be a first-century Jewish Christian apostle rather than transforming him into a twenty-first-century sexologist. We can listen seriously to his theological concerns about fidelity, holiness, justice, exploitation, self-control, mutual responsibility, and the integrity of Christian community while also recognizing that the framework through which he understood human sexuality was historically limited.

The question isn’t whether Paul personally would have approved of our conclusions. He probably wouldn’t have. The question is whether Christians are required to share every assumption through which Paul reached his conclusions. We’re not. Even Paul, himself, wasn’t sure of all of his assumptions, and we don’t have to go any further for evidence for this than the before-mentioned reference to hair length. Just a few sentences after he made his argument in 1 Corinthians 11, after rambling for several verses in an attempt to defend it, he then concluded in verse 16 with: “But if anyone is disposed to be contentious—we have no such custom, nor do the churches of God.” If Paul could say “it’s not worth fighting over” if one disagrees with his opinion, perhaps the church should learn a thing or two from that.

“And This Is What Some of You Used to Be”

The next verse is also frequently used against LGBTQ+ people. After listing the various wrongdoers, Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 6:11:

And this is what some of you used to be. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.

This has sometimes been turned into an argument for conversion therapy or “ex-gay” theology: some Corinthians supposedly “used to be homosexual,” but after coming to Christ they ceased being homosexual. That was how the verse was understood and applied to me, when I was going through conversion therapy, and that interpretation generated in me an enormous amount of shame. However, the conclusion depends entirely upon putting “homosexual” into verse 9 in the first place.

Paul says nothing about anyone’s sexual orientation changing. He doesn’t describe people who were once attracted to members of their own sex becoming attracted to members of another sex. He is talking about people whose former ways of living were incompatible with the new life of the Christian community: people who had been greedy, fraudulent, sexually irresponsible, idolatrous, drunken, abusive, exploitative, and unjust. The transformation Paul celebrates is baptismal and moral: “you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified.” It is about identity in Christ and participation in a transformed community. Nothing in the passage describes the change of one’s sexual orientation, nor does it justify the horrors of conversion therapy.

So Does 1 Corinthians 6:9–10 Condemn Homosexuality?

If by “homosexuality” we mean the modern phenomenon of people whose enduring capacity for romantic and sexual attraction is primarily directed toward members of their own sex, then the answer is no. Paul does not address that phenomenon in 1 Corinthians 6:9–10 because he doesn’t possess that category.

That conclusion doesn’t require us to pretend that Paul was secretly affirming. It doesn’t require us to claim that every same-sex encounter in antiquity involved prostitution, pederasty, rape, slavery, or coercion. It doesn’t require us to deny that Paul probably viewed same-sex relations negatively within his own cultural and theological framework. It requires only that we carefully distinguish between ancient and modern categories.

Malakoi doesn’t mean “gay men.” It refers to an ancient category of male softness, weakness, decadence, effeminacy, or self-indulgence that could, sometimes, possibly include sexual passivity but was never synonymous with homosexual orientation. Arsenokoitai doesn’t mean “homosexuals.” It is a rare and difficult word whose precise meaning remains disputed, and a very strong case can be made that exploitation and the misuse of another person for economic or personal gain lies near the center of its semantic field. Neither word connects with concepts of modern sexual orientation, and that is the point too often lost in contemporary arguments.

1 Corinthians 6:9–10 isn’t a first-century anticipation of twenty-first-century debates about whether gay Christians can exist, fall in love, build households, marry, remain sexually faithful, raise children, participate in the life of the church, and grow together in grace. Paul never asks that question. Perhaps, had someone asked him, his first-century answer would have been no. Or, he might have drawn a connection between his understanding of grace and faith as being the bedrock of salvation and taken a more affirming approach. I don’t know, but I suspect it would more likely have been the former.

But Christians aren’t required to pretend that every answer a first-century apostle might have given to a question he never encountered must become an unalterable answer for every culture and every age. Our responsibility is deeper than that. We have to take Scripture seriously enough to understand what its writers actually said, and the assumptions through which they said it, while undertaking the theological work of discerning how the Gospel speaks in a world where our knowledge of human beings has changed.

When we do that, 1 Corinthians 6:9–10 has a great deal to say to us. It condemns injustice, exploitation, greed, adultery, abuse, drunkenness, fraud, sexual irresponsibility, and ways of living that use and abuse other human beings rather than loving them. It calls Christians into a community shaped by holiness, justice, self-control, and grace.

What it does not give us is the word “homosexual.” Some translators supplied that word to the text, and others have taken and run with it. Before we use it to exclude LGBTQ+ people from the church, condemn their marriages, question their salvation, or tell them that they cannot faithfully love the person they love, we should at least have the honesty to admit that it wasn’t Paul’s word, it wasn’t Paul’s category, and it wasn’t the question Paul was answering. 

A Referenced work.

Dale B. Martin, “Arsenokoités and Malakos: Meanings and Consequences,” in Biblical Ethics & Homosexuality: Listening to Scripture, ed. Robert L. Brawley (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 117–36; reprinted as chap. 3 in Dale B. Martin, Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 37–50.

To explore more about the New Testament and Homosexuality, view or listen to our Episode: The Bible and Homosexuality: The New Testament

To explore more about the Old Testament and Homosexuality, view or listen to our Episode: The Bible and Homosexuality: The Old Testament