The context is important, Huff emphasized. “Those familiar with the Torah in the first-century Corinthian setting would have been reading their Bible, the Old Testament in Greek, and they would have known exactly what…Paul is doing. Leviticus 18:22 is in direct view.”
Huff continued:
What is clear and is pretty widely agreed upon throughout [biblical] scholarship is that the Apostle Paul is almost certainly coining the term [“arsenokoitai”] here. He’s combining the two words in Greek found in Leviticus to create a new term, a term that would have been obvious to its original audience and its meaning would have been clear.
As for why Paul didn’t use other ancient Greek words for homosexuality, Huff said the “very simple answer” is that “Paul is a Jew.” In other words, the apostle “knows his audience, is a clever writer and a clear communicator [using] an effective and an efficient manner.”
More Insights From Bible Scholar Wes Huff
Turning to the Greek word “malakoi,” apologist Wes Huff described it as “a well-attested word within broader Greco-Roman literature” that directly translates to “soft men.” In the context, it clearly references male adults who “effeminate themselves in order to attract male [adult] sex partners,” he said. These adults had “a biologically predisposed condition, what we might today call a sexual orientation,” said Huff, adding that the term appeared in ancient medical texts.
“The idea that the Apostle Paul is talking about men who castrate themselves for Athena and men who are involved in sexual slavery is, with all due respect, ridiculous,” Huff said. “By using ‘arsenokoitai’ and ‘malakoi’ together in the same sentence, the way that they’re framed in 1 Corinthians 6:9, the Apostle Paul is identifying the active and passive partners in a sexual act.”
By combining the prefix “arsen” (which provides the male gender) with “koite,” “you have described two participatory individuals engaged in a sexual act where one is doing the giving in the act and the other is doing the taking,” Huff explained, saying he wasn’t meaning to sound crass. “There’s no hint in the terminology or the context that this is exploitative or between anything other than two consenting adults.”
Huff concluded by again praising Allie Beth Stuckey for defending the biblical stance on homosexuality and other hot-button topics. He encouraged other Christians to call out worldly arguments as invalid textual interpretations. “Like I said on the ‘Flagrant’ podcast, this issue [of homosexuality] might be seen as controversial,” said Huff, “but in the Bible, it’s not unclear.”
“What we see in a lot of these attempts to reinterpret the Bible stance on issues like homosexuality and marriage and gender or even abortion, etc., are not honest interactions and interpretations,” said Huff. “They’re ideologically captured ones. [People’s] reinterpretation is often misconstrued and couched as being loving and accepting. But I think we need to be very careful if that’s our perspective.”
Returning to Paul, Huff said the apostle taught that love “rejoices in the truth,” not over unrighteousness. “If you love God as he truly is and you love your neighbor as they truly are before God, you won’t rejoice in sin,” Huff said. “That’s harming those neighbors.”
