Open a mid-century English Bible to 1 Corinthians 6:9and you may find a word the apostles never wrote: homosexuals. That noun first appears in a major English Bible in the 1946 Revised Standard Version. It is not a discovery about Greek. It is a modern English decision that taught generations of readers that Scripture condemns homosexuality. It does not.
The thesis is straightforward. Homosexuality, as an identity and orientation, is a nineteenth-century category. The Hebrew and Greek texts lack that category. What they do contain—purity-code sex prohibitions, rare disputed nouns, and a passage about passion against nature—does not map onto the modern word. The 1946 RSV fused two uncertain Greek terms into one clinical English noun and made the equation look biblical. The equation is the invention.
A word the ancients did not have
Nineteenth-century writers coined homosexuality to name a kind of person, not merely an act. Ancient writers talked about acts, roles, excess, and shame—not a fixed minority orientation. If the Bible never possessed the category, it cannot have condemned it. That is how language works.
So when a preacher says “the Bible condemns homosexuality,” the sentence already smuggles in a modern noun. The honest question is narrower: what do the relevant texts actually forbid, and to whom?
Leviticus forbids an act, not an orientation
Leviticus 18:22and 20:13 are real. The King James Version of 18:22 says, “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.” Leviticus 20:13prescribes death for both parties. Denying those verses is bad faith; reading them as a blanket condemnation of gay people is worse scholarship.
They sit inside a priestly purity code that also regulates diet, fabric mixtures, and menstrual uncleanness. They prohibit a specific male-male sexual act in that legal world. They do not define a sexual orientation, invent a psychology of desire, or address women who love women. The Hebrew has no word for homosexual. What it condemns is an act under a holiness regime that modern Christians do not otherwise treat as binding. The leap from “this act is forbidden in Torah” to “the Bible condemns homosexuality” is the modern move.
What the 1946 page invented
The RSV New Testament appeared in 1946 from Thomas Nelson. Luther A. Weigle of Yale chaired the committee for the International Council of Religious Education. The complete RSV Bible followed in 1952. At 1 Corinthians 6:9, as David Fearon later read it, the list of those who will not inherit the kingdom includes the immoral, idolaters, adulterers, homosexuals, and thieves. A footnote confessed the compression: “Two Greek words are rendered by this expression.”
That footnote is the whole case in miniature. The translators did not find a Greek word that already meant the modern English noun. They took malakoi and arsenokoitai—two rare, disputed terms—and answered both with one clinical identity word. The second edition of the RSV New Testament, in 1971, dropped homosexuals and put sexual perverts instead—still one English phrase for both Greek words, still a moral diagnosis, but no longer the identity noun. Cite “RSV 1946” for sexual perverts and you are citing the later printing; the 1946 text said homosexuals.
Two Greek words that will not carry the load
Malakos means soft: cloth, food, or a man judged morally soft. In the Corinthian vice list it is a noun, soft men. The King James Version said effeminate. Dale Martin’s 1996 essay argues that malakos means effeminate in a broad ancient sense—luxury, cowardice, or a man taking a role other men called feminine—whether or not the sex was with men. Linda Belleville, writing in The Bible Translator in 2011, prefers “male prostitutes.” Neither reading equals “gay men.”
Arsenokoitēs is rarer still. It appears in 1 Corinthians 6:9and 1 Timothy 1:10, and almost nowhere earlier. It compounds arsēn, male, and koitē, bed. Belleville glosses it as men who bed men and notes the echo of the Septuagint of Leviticus. Martin’s objection is linguistic: you cannot define a word by snapping it in half. Etymology is a clue, not a verdict, and this word is badly attested. Proposals run from pederasty and prostitution to exploitative sex or any male-male intercourse.
Robin Scroggs’s The New Testament and Homosexuality (1983) set the Corinthian language in Greco-Roman pederasty rather than in a modern orientation. William Loader thinks arsenokoitai probably names the active partner and malakoi the passive one—and says probably because certainty is not on offer. David F. Wright’s 1984 lexical article argues against a prostitution-only reading. Robert A. J. Gagnon argues that the texts reject same-sex intercourse as such. The field is split. What it is not split on is this smaller fact: neither Greek noun is the modern English word homosexual, and collapsing both into that word was a translator’s choice.
English before 1946 was blunt—and still not that word
Older English was frank in another dialect. The King James Version of 1 Corinthians 6:9says “nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind.” Martin’s survey of earlier renderings of arsenokoitēs includes Wycliffe’s “thei that don leccherie with men” and Tyndale’s “abusars of them selves with the mankynde.” Those phrases name acts. None is homosexual; none invents a sexual orientation for Scripture to hate.
Romans 1 discusses same-sex desire without either Corinthian noun. Bernadette Brooten’s Love Between Women (1996) studies early Christian responses to female homoeroticism. That archive matters. It still does not hand you a biblical doctrine of homosexuality as an identity class.
The letter, the retreat, and the marketplace
In October 1959, David Fearon, then twenty-one and in seminary, wrote to Weigle. Kathy Baldock has published an account of the exchange she and Ed Oxford found among Weigle’s papers at Yale. Fearon objected to collapsing the two Greek words into homosexuals. On her telling, Weigle replied on November 3 that an error was possible, suggested something like “those who participate in homosexual vices,” and said the letters would be filed for a revision. That is not a confession that Paul approved of anything—only that the English noun was a poor fit.
The 1971 RSV’s switch to sexual perverts retreats from the clinical identity term without acquitting anyone. The New Revised Standard Version, as Belleville quotes it, separates the terms: male prostitutes, sodomites. The Updated Edition, out digitally by early 2022, reads “male prostitutes” and “men who engage in illicit sex,” with the same footnote on each: “Meaning of Gk uncertain.” That footnote is more honest than a sermon. The 2022 documentary 1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture, directed by Sharon Roggio, treats the RSV choice as a cultural turning point. The letters are real. The lexical point does not need the film: the word was put there, then softened, and the Greek under it remains disputed.
What the Bible does not do
The Bible does not condemn homosexuality, because homosexuality is not a biblical category. Leviticus prohibits a male-male sex act inside a purity code that Christians otherwise discard. Paul lists two rare Greek nouns whose meanings scholars still fight over, and a passage about passions framed in terms of nature and excess. None of that is a theology of sexual orientation. The 1946 RSV made it look like one by printing homosexuals where the Greek offered no such noun. The 1971 revision backed away from the word. Later editions still mark the Greek as uncertain.
You can still argue, as Gagnon and Wright do, that certain acts are rejected. You cannot honestly say the Bible condemns gay people as such, or that Scripture has always spoken the language of 1946. That language is English, mid-century, and optional. The shock is not that a committee once chose a bad word. The shock is how many pulpits mistook the choice for the text.
Sources
Kathy Baldock, “As a 21-year-old Seminarian, David Fearon Challenged the RSV Translators On the Word ‘Homosexual,’” Christian Ethics Today, reprinting Baptist News Global, 2023.
Linda L. Belleville, “The Challenges of Translating Arsenokoitai and Malakoi in 1 Corinthians 6.9: A Reassessment in Light of Koine Greek and First-Century Cultural Mores,” The Bible Translator 62, no. 1 (2011): 22–29.
Bernadette J. Brooten, Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism, University of Chicago Press, 1996.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo3612923.html
Robert A. J. Gagnon, The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics, Abingdon Press, 2002.
https://www.abingdonpress.com/product/9780687022793/
William Loader, The New Testament on Sexuality, Eerdmans, 2012.
https://www.eerdmans.com/9780802867247/the-new-testament-on-sexuality/
William Loader, “Understanding Paul on Same-Sex Relations.”
https://billloader.com/LoaderUnderstandingPaulSameSex.pdf
Dale B. Martin, “Arsenokoités and Malakos: Meanings and Consequences,” in Robert L. Brawley, ed., Biblical Ethics and Homosexuality: Listening to Scripture, Westminster John Knox Press, 1996.
“Revised Standard Version (1946–1977),” Bible Research, on the 1946 New Testament, the committee chaired by Luther A. Weigle, and the 1971 second edition.
https://www.bible-researcher.com/rsv.html
Sharon Roggio, director, 1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture, 2022.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1946:_The_Mistranslation_That_Shifted_Culture
Robin Scroggs, The New Testament and Homosexuality: Contextual Background for Contemporary Debate, Fortress Press, 1983.
https://www.fortresspress.com/store/product/9780800618544/The-New-Testament-and-Homosexuality
David F. Wright, “Homosexuals or Prostitutes? The Meaning of arsenokoitai (1 Cor 6:9, 1 Tim 1:10),” Vigiliae Christianae 38 (1984): 125–153.
King James Version, Leviticus 18:22, Leviticus 20:13, and 1 Corinthians 6:9–10.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+6%3A9-10&version=KJV
New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition, 1 Corinthians 6:9–10, with the footnotes “Meaning of Gk uncertain.”
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+6%3A9-10&version=NRSVUE
Revised Standard Version, 1 Corinthians 6:9, second edition of the New Testament, 1971.
https://www.blueletterbible.org/rsv/1co/6/9/s_1068009
Mark A. Kellner, “Updated Bible’s interpretation of sodomy stirs debate,” The Washington Times, January 6, 2022, quoting Robert A. J. Gagnon.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/jan/6/updated-bibles-interpretation-sodomy-stirs-debate/