Hy my name is nkosenhle from south africa i want to know what does the bible mean by homosexual offender and why is this confusing a lots of people coz in my head i was thinking an homosexual offender is someone who offends gays, lesbian etc in anyway thru by judging them and more.please correct me if im wrong
Please reply to me as soon as u read this
Dear Nkosenhle,
The term “homosexual offender” is very old English that comes from a bad translation of scripture. Although your reading of it is somewhat refreshing, if not accurate.
Let me share with you what Rev. Jonathan Loppnow and Rev. Paul C. Evans have written concerning the original words that became “homosexual offender” in your particular translation.
In 1 Corinthians 6:9, Paul lists a many activities that will prevent people from inheriting God’s realm. One has been variously translated as effeminate, homosexuals, or sexual perverts. The original Greek text reads malakoi arsenokoitai. The first word means “soft”; the meaning of the second word has been lost. It was once used to refer to a male temple prostitute (as in the verses from the Hebrew Scriptures/Old Testament described above). The early Church interpreted the phrase as referring to people of soft morals — i.e., unethical. From the time of Martin Luther, it was interpreted as referring to masturbation. More recently, it has been translated as referring to homosexuals. Each translator seems to take whatever activity that their society particularly disapproves of and use it in this verse.
It is amazing the number of times that you will see the word “sodomite” or “homosexual” or “pervert” in different translations concerning this text. It is amazing because no one knows exactly what the words of the original text mean! The layperson, unfortunately, has no way of knowing that interpreters are guessing as to the exact meaning of these words. Pastors and laypersons often have to rely upon the authority of those who have written lexicons (dictionaries explaining the meaning of words) of Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic words.
The authors of scriptural lexicons search for the meaning of the word within the scriptures themselves and also go outside of scripture and research literature written around the same time the scriptures were written. If the interpreter is already prejudiced against homosexuality they can translate these words as condemning homosexual sex even based upon little usage of that word in the Scriptures and little if any contemporaneous usage of that word.
The truth is that the word some translators “transform” into “sodomite / homosexual / pervert” in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 is actually TWO words. Some translators combine them because they “think” they go together but they DO NOT KNOW. This uncertainty is reflected in the fact that other translators keep the words separate and translate them “effeminate” and “abusers of themselves with mankind.”
The two words in the original Greek are malakoi and arsenokoitai. Malakoi is a very common Greek word. It literally means “soft.” It is used in Matthew 11:7-18 and Luke 7:24-25 in reference to soft clothing. Scholars have to look at material outside of the Bible in order to try and figure out just what this means. The early church Fathers used the word to mean someone who was “weak” or “soft” in their morals and from the time of the reformation to the 20th century it was usually interpreted as masturbation. In Greek this word never is applied to gay people or homosexual acts in general.
“No new textual data effected the twentieth-century change in translation of this word: only a shift in popular morality. Since few people any longer regard masturbation as the sort of activity which would preclude entrance to heaven, the condemnation has simply been transferred to a group still so widely despised that their exclusion does not trouble translators or theologians.” (See Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century, John Boswell, University of Chicago Press, 1980, page 105-107) Arsenokoitai is discussed in the next section as it is found here and in 1 Timothy 1:8-11.
Note: The Greek language contained no word which compares to the English noun “homosexual” meaning someone of homosexual orientation. In fact the word “homosexual” (meaning someone of homosexual orientation) was not even coined until the late 1800s by German psychologists, and introduced into English only at the beginning of the 1900s. (See Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, John Boswell, University of Chicago Press, 1980, page 42) However, during scriptural times there were a number of Greek words to describe homosexual sex acts and the two words malakois and arsenokoitai do not appear among them (on arsenokoitai see Boswell, pp 345-346).
So to be blunt, the term is a mis-translation of a word that did not exist during biblical times.
God Bless,
Pastor Paul
Editor-in-Chief of Whosoever and Founding and Senior Pastor of Gentle Spirit Christian Church of Atlanta, Rev. Paul M. Turner (he/him) grew up in suburban Chicago and was ordained by the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches in 1989. He and his husband Bill have lived in metro Atlanta since 1994, have been in a committed partnership since the early 1980s and have been legally married since 2015.