Does the Bible hate on gays with a weird old Greek word?
Let’s talk about ‘arsenokoita’
When you grow up Christian, they like to tell you that God is horrified by gays, and denounces them. Isn’t it clear in 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10?
Those are the lists of “bad people” as includes homosexuals. Or that’s what a Christian translation says. They don’t tell you about an ancient Greek word—ἀρσενοκοῑται or arsenokoitai—whose meaning is anything but clear.
The debate over the word began in 1980.
That’s the year a young polymath Medieval scholar named John Boswell published Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, as became something of a media bonanza.
At that point, ‘sodomy’, as it was called legally, was still against the law in many parts of America. That was thought to be religious law, enforcing the Bible’s ideas about ‘homosexuality’ being bad.
Boswell’s book was like a wrecking ball through Christian theology and tradition. He maintained that the anti-gay stance was relatively recent, and that the biblical origins were shaky at best.
