SCRIPTURE
8Now we know that the law is good, if one uses it legitimately. 9This means understanding that the law is laid down not for the innocent but for the lawless and disobedient, for the godless and sinful, for the unholy and profane, for those who kill their father or mother, for murderers,10fornicators, sodomites, slave-traders, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to the sound teaching 11that conforms to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, which he entrusted to me. (1 Timothy 1:8-11, NRSV)
WHAT
Several years ago, I had the privilege of leading a group of pilgrims from the church I was serving to the Holy Land. Our guide, Jacob, brought us one day to the north of Israel, to the area of the Golan Heights which had been captured from Syria by Israel during the Six-Day War of 1967. It has been in Israeli hands ever since. Prior to our bus ride, I encountered a news report about an Israeli child in the area to which we were headed who was killed by stepping on a mine, probably left over from that war. When we arrived in the Golan, it was beautiful, but its history was a vivid reminder of war still ongoing.
Later, we went to one of the sites believed to be where John the Baptist ministered. There was a church there dedicated to John, and surrounding it was a beautiful, wooded area with several inviting walking paths. It was like a historical park would be back home. I was tempted to set out and enjoy walking those paths and contemplate this sacred place. However, what held me back were the signs I saw.
Posted along the path on either side were bright yellow signs printed in English, Hebrew, and Arabic – “DANGER MINES!” Having just been to the Golan Heights and been reminded of the war Israel was still fighting, and having heard the tragic story of a young Israeli boy who accidently stepped on one of those old mines, I decided to enjoy the view from a distance.
As I read today’s passage about the law, I thought about that visit to Israel. I realized that the paths at that John the Baptist park were like the law, as Paul saw it. The main point Paul seems to be making is that the Jewish law is like a path with warning signs which mark danger. The law is good, just as those walking paths are good. But its function is quite limited, as the places one could go on the walking paths were limited. The law can only point out, says Paul, where the dangers are, as the path with those signs pointed out where the danger was.
Paul, having left Timothy in charge of the church in Ephesus, was aware that there were some teachers there who were very keen on the latest “fad philosophy-du-jour,” Gnosticism (as we saw in the previous commentaries). But he also knew that there were others who still favored the Jewish law. It was regarded as, N. T. Wright points out, “the basis not only of personal morality but of the whole Jewish way of life.” Apparently, some of the Jewish Christian elders in Ephesus were making the law central to their teaching. This was a common problem Paul had to deal with, as we see in Paul’s other letters, particularly Galatians. And that, he says, is like sending people off for a walk on a path that only tells them where the danger is but not how to get through it safely.
Now we know that the law is good, if one uses it legitimately. (1 Timothy 1:8, NRSV)
For Paul, the law is good, but one has to know what it is good for – what it can and cannot do. It is very good at pointing out where the dangers lie. If you want to know what not to do, the Jewish law will tell you. It will give you an outline, clearly marking several types of attitudes and behaviors with the word DANGER, DANGER! Stay on the path and do not wander off of it or you risk destruction! But as Bishop Wright says, the law “won’t encourage you to think through and live out the attractive, outgoing life of love and service which was, for Paul, what being a Christian was all about.”
Paul then lists for Timothy people for whom the teaching of the law ought to be useful: it is helpful for people who are prone to wander off the clearly marked path into danger areas filled with mines:
…the lawless and disobedient, for the godless and sinful, for the unholy and profane, for those who kill their father or mother, for murderers, fornicators, sodomites, slave-traders, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to the sound teaching that conforms to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, which he entrusted to me. (1 Timothy 1:9-11, NRSV)
Bishop Wright says:
“The implication throughout is: well, if they want to teach the law, that’s fine, but it presumes that their hearers are people of this sort – whereas, if they are working in a Christian community, their hearers ought not to be people of that sort!”
I want to say a word about the Greek word translated here as “sodomites,” which is the word arsenokoitēs. This verse, 1 Timothy 1:10, along with 1 Corinthians 6:9 (which is the only other use of the same Greek word in the Bible), is often used to justify exclusion of homosexuals from full participation in the church. “The Bible, including the New Testament, clearly condemns homosexuality,” is the logic. And this verse is often quoted. I want to take you on this little detour because: 1) homosexuality is such a hot topic in our society right now, 2) many people struggle to know how they feel about it, especially disciples trying to be faithful to scripture, and 3) this verse shows how knowing a little biblical Greek can help us.
While I cannot go into a full examination here of the topic of homosexuality in the Bible, let’s briefly look at how various English translations render the Greek word arsenokoitēs in 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10. I list them in roughly the chronological order that the translations were made:
Wow, what a range of translations! Which is it – sodomites, perverts, homosexuals, same sex intercourse, or men who have sex with men? These words do not all mean the same thing. There are all kinds of ways to be perverted sexually. Are same sex relationships between women included? They’re not mentioned. And what does it mean in the early translations to defile or abuse oneself with mankynde/mankind? Seems like there’s all sorts of ways to do that, too.
The following table gives a balcony level view from my perspective of where each translation fits according to its theological bent from liberal/progressive to evangelical/conservative. Of course, most translators see their version as “correct” and therefore neutral, translations. But “from the balcony,” i.e., a high level view, one can detect the theological bent of each translation. Some, such as the Tyndale, King James, and American Standard, were written long before the modern debates about homosexuality. They have their own theological biases, but not necessarily on this issue. Others, such as the Revised English Bible and the Greek Orthodox Study Bible, are not written from an American or even Protestant perspective, so again, they lie outside of the modern debates about homosexuality. Thus, their translations can be quite instructive:
Why are there so many ways of translating arsenokoitēs? While not exact, why does the translation seem well correlated with theological bent? And why does “homosexual” as the translation seem to emerge late in the translation history?
One reason for the variety of translations is that arsenokoitēs is so hard to translate. It only appears in these two verses that I cited. So we don’t have multiple verses to compare and help us out. It literally means “people of the man-bed” or disturbingly, “people of the man-child bed.” It is made up of two parts. The first is arrhēn or arsēn, which itself derives from airō meaning “to lift up, take up,” or figuratively, “to raise.” So, arrhēn or arsēn means male in the sense of “strong for lifting” as opposed to anēr which refers to the male human just as gyne refers to the female. Strong’s Bible Concordance lists “man-child” as one of its meanings. The second part is koitē, meaning “a place for laying down, resting, or sleeping” as in a bed or couch. It also can refer to the marriage bed as in the place of conception. The ending tēs means “people of…” Putting all these word parts together, we get “people of the man-bed,” or “people of the man-child bed,” which is why it is often translated by the modern English word “homosexual” (male with male variety but not female with female variety).
Look again at all the ways this difficult-to-translate word gets rendered into English:
· Abusers of themselves with mankind
· Homosexual
· Sodomites
· Men who have sex with men
· Them that defile themselves with mankind
· Perverts
Each of these translations (I believe, even if the translators themselves would not agree with me) represents the theological bent of the translators toward same sex relationships with each having their own bias. “Homosexual” only emerged as a translation in the mid-20th century, about the same time as the evangelical movement came to life.
To me, the meaning of this word arsenokoitēs is sufficiently obscure that we need to dig a little deeper. Let’s dig into the culture of the time.
Parsing a word in any language like this to extract meaning is misleading at best and dangerous at worst, even in English. For example, if someone just learning but not yet familiar with English did this, they would think they should park their car on a parkway and drive it on a driveway. That could easily get them hurt because a parkway is for driving and a driveway is for parking! We would want our new English-speaker to know more about the broader cultural contexts of these expressions before settling on the meaning of finely parsed words. And so must we in hearing what these Scriptures are revealing.
The letters of 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy were both written in the latter half of the first century A.D. when the Roman Empire ruled. Male with male sex was common and culturally accepted. (Female with female sex is rarely mentioned in surviving documents of the period.) William Barclay points out that in ancient Greece and Rome, few people were exclusively homosexual. It was a period of great sexual experimentation, and the bisexual lifestyle was considerably more common than most people today would imagine. He notes that Socrates had sexual relations with other males, as also did his student, Plato, whose dialogue The Symposium -- often regarded as one of the greatest of all literary works on love – was based on his own sexual encounters with boys. Tellingly for our cultural understanding, fourteen out of the first fifteen Roman emperors had relationships with other men (usually as well as women), at least on a temporary basis. At the time when Paul was writing, Nero was emperor; and, though he too had relationships with women, he also embarked on a blatant search for sexual pleasure with several male partners. On one occasion, he took a young boy named Sporus, had him castrated, and then “married” him in an elaborate ceremony before taking him home in procession to the imperial palace, where he would serve the emperor’s pleasure.
There was one important caveat however, A Roman citizen's political liberty (libertas) was defined in part by the right to preserve his body from physical compulsion, which included both corporal punishment and sexual abuse. This is the cultural value lying behind the stories of Paul saving himself from further punishment at the hands of Roman authorities by revealing that he was, in fact, a Roman citizen (see Acts 22:25 for an example). Because he was a Roman citizen, Paul was claiming the right to libertas.
Roman society was patriarchal and ruled by the male head of the household. Masculinity was seen as the capacity to govern oneself and others of lower status. Lack of self-control, including in managing one's sex life, indicated that a man was incapable of governing others; too much indulgence in “low sensual pleasure” threatened to erode the elite male's identity as a cultured person.
In the Roman system, sexual conquest was aligned with Rome’s imperialism, i.e., the expansion of the Empire by conquest. The “conquest mentality” was part of a “cult of virility” as it still is in much modern sports culture. “Trash talk” and the threat of conquest is valued today to establish one’s dominance in the ensuing contest. It is not only common, but expected, that two boxers will “trash talk” each other before the big fight to establish their dominance. Or that the two Super Bowl teams will do the same the week before the big game.
This “cult of virility” particularly shaped Roman homosexual practices. The Roman ideal of masculinity was not threatened by same sex relations so long as the one caveat was observed: that the freeborn Roman man of virility take the dominant role. Modern scholars of Roman history and culture view expressions of Roman male sexuality in terms of a “penetrator-penetrated” binary model. Allowing himself to be penetrated threatened his liberty as a free citizen as well as his sexual integrity. But being the “conqueror,” i.e., the penetrator, was acceptable. This explains why pederasty, i.e., man with boy sexual relations – such as Nero had with Sporus -- was socially acceptable in Roman culture. The use of the boy was acceptable in the submissive role as a symbol of conquest and the dominant male’s virility.
It was expected and socially acceptable for a freeborn Roman man to want sex with BOTH female and male partners. But when engaging in sexual activity outside marriage a Roman man was supposed to act on his desires only with those of lower social status, such as slaves and prostitutes (who were often slaves). Gender per se did not determine whether a sexual partner was culturally acceptable, so long as the caveat of the freeborn male playing the dominant role was observed. While it was considered immoral to have sex with another freeborn man's wife, his marriageable daughter, his underage son, or with the freeborn man himself, and sexual use of another man's slave was subject to the owner's permission, same sex relations were thus not considered immoral per se.
So, the Roman culture’s view of homosexuality -- the cultural umbrella under which Paul wrote these two lists of vices -- was not one of mutual love and commitment. It was one of submission and dominance, which could easily lead to violence, rape, and abuse, especially of young boys and slaves. It was the prevailing culture’s acceptance and even promotion of dominance of one over another, the antithesis of “love thy neighbor” that Jesus commanded, that Paul was condemning. That would explain why female with female same sex relations is not even mentioned. One can make a similar case for the other vices on Paul’s lists being the antithesis of the royal law of “love God” and “love neighbor.” “Love” itself was not being condemned but rather lifted up. Behavior that did not express love is condemned.
Given this reality of the culture within which Paul lived and wrote, and given the fact that arsenokoitēs can also mean sleeping with a “man-child,” it is entirely possible that this is what Paul says keeps one out of the kingdom of God, not committed, monogamous same sex relationships.
Well, that was a lengthy trip down a side road. I hope you enjoyed the scenery! Given how homosexuality is a modern cultural flash point, and given that English translations of v. 10 vary all over the map, I wanted to take that diversion and show you that scenery as you reflect deeply to make up your own mind.
Back to the larger context of this passage, the point of it all seems to be, as Bishop Wright points out, not so much to list various types of bad behavior for their own sake, but to say:
“The law is fine, if you want a map of where all the dangers lie. There are indeed dangerous types of behavior out there, and the gospel message of Jesus, through which God’s glory is truly revealed (verse 11), is just as much opposed to them as the Jewish law is. But don’t imagine that by teaching the Jewish law you will do more than put up some more signposts warning people about these dangers. What’s far more important is to explore the gospel itself, the message which was entrusted to Paul and the other apostles.”
Paul moves ahead with his letter in our next commentary. He will begin by expressing gratitude for God’s mercy.
APPLY
The law is good and it is given by God. But it has a legitimate use and is not without limits. The Bible is good and it is given by God. But it too has legitimate use and is not without limits. Cultural awareness is one of those limits.
PRAYER
Merciful God, Paul shows us that though the law is good, and given by you, it has legitimate and illegitimate uses. The Bible is good, and given by you. But it, too, has legitimate and illegitimate uses. The Bible has been used to exclude people from faith in Christ. That must be an illegitimate use. Because of that, we really need to do the hard work of digging deep, and not accepting slogan theology, to really understand what you are truly saying to us through passages like this one. So speak Lord, for your servant is listening. In Christ. Amen.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. In Bob’s opening illustration, how is a path at John the Baptist Church in Israel like the law?
2. For Paul, the law is good, but one has to know what it is good for. What is that legitimate use of the law for Paul? What are the law’s limitations?
3. Why are there so many different English translations of arsenokoitēs in v. 10? Where else in the New Testament is this word used? Do you see any trend in these translations over time? What do you think Paul meant by his use of the word arsenokoitēs?
4. What seems to be Paul’s overall point in this passage?
How can you apply these insights in your life?