Laigle’s Forum

by Don Hank

This will be of particular interest to theologians and linguists but it is in fact a debunking of a biblical misinterpretation that is relevant to all of us.

The “gay” agenda has been trying hard to make the Apostle Paul unsay what, according to most translations, he said about homosexuality. One Greek “scholar” has written that the word he used in Corinthians did not mean homosexual at all.

The verse in question is I Cor. 6:9 and the disputed term is arsenokoitai (plural of aresnokoitis). There is no dispute over the rest of the verse.

I found aresnokoitis in my Ancient Greek dictionary “The Classic Greek Dictionary” (Follet, 1948) and the puritanical definition given there is “one guilty of unnatural offenses.” This is homosexual in Prudish and is based on the fact that arseno- meant male (still does in modern GR) and koitos meant “lying (eg, in bed).” The context in Paul’s letter and his remarks on homosexuality elsewhere are clear evidence that he did really mean homosexual.

The translations of Paul’s word here is usually “Sodomite” or “homosexual” in today’s Bibles but “gay” lobbyists are keen on changing that translation and have even sued at least one Bible publisher for using it.

The “gay” lobby has been tampering with this interpretation for so many years that even modern native Greek people often believe (thanks, I surmise, to their international effort to revise the scriptures) that, although the word has survived today and means “homosexual,” it originally supposedly meant “a man who looks at other men” and some are saying that this was once illegal so Paul was just condemning the practice of men looking at other men — man oglers, one might say.

However, there are several reports in the NT of Jesus having looked at men, such as Simon Peter. So that holds no water.

They are basing this mostly on the fact that the stem of the -koitos part is from the verb koitazo, which in Modern Greek means “to look.”

The problem is that, while koitazo means “to look” in modern Greek, in Ancient Greek, koitazo meant “to lie (eg, in bed)” or “to lie down,” as you Bible scholars may know, so this explanation is nonsense.

Even if arsenokoitis did not mean homosexual, there are other passages, such as in Romans 1, that clearly show the early Christians condemned the practice.

Nonetheless, there are many places in the Western world where it is now considered illegal for pastors to preach from those parts of the Bible that condemn homosexual behavior, and this misinterpretation of arsenokoitis is one of the reasons for that ban.