A weapon requires an edge, and an edge requires that the blurry be made sharp. Wisdom moves in the opposite direction.
The Weight of Two Words Translation
is interpretation,
and the erasure of distinction
is how a text becomes a weapon
Dr. Michael A. Smith
Interdisciplinary Scholar | Historian | Public Theologian
Not long ago I helped a friend begin the work of founding a Bible institute in a region far outside the United States, in a culture that carries none of our peculiarly American arguments about Scripture. He is a good man and a serious one. He came out of the same tradition I did. And he insisted, as a condition of the whole enterprise, that every reference in every course be drawn from the King James Version.
I understood the instinct, because I was raised inside it. In the world that formed both of us, the King James Version was not one translation among others. It was the Bible, delivered whole, as though it had descended from heaven bound in leather with a statement of Baptist doctrine printed in the back. To ask which Greek word stood behind an English one was not scholarship. It was the first step toward apostasy.
There is an irony here that took me many years to see. The doctrine of inerrancy, as Warfield and the Princeton theologians formulated it and as the Chicago Statement later codified it, locates inspiration in the original manuscripts. Not in any translation. A man who insists on the King James Version as the sole authority is not defending inerrancy at all. He is defending the judgment calls of a seventeenth-century English committee against the very text his own doctrine calls inspired. The translators of 1611 said as much themselves in their preface, a document almost no one in that tradition has read.
Translation is not transmission. Translation is interpretation, performed by human beings, in a particular century, with the vocabulary and the assumptions that century supplied them. Usually this costs us little. Occasionally it costs a great deal. And nowhere has it cost more than in two Greek words.
Two Words, and What Happened to Them
In the King James Version, 1 Corinthians 6:9 lists among the unrighteous the “effeminate” and the “abusers of themselves with mankind.” Behind those two English phrases stand two Greek words: malakoi and arsenokoitai. The second appears again in 1 Timothy 1:10. Many modern Bibles render the pair as a single English term: “homosexuals,” or “men who practice homosexuality.”
Malakoi means, at its root, soft. Jesus uses the singular form in Matthew 11:8 for fine clothing. Applied to a person in a moral context, it named whatever the surrounding culture despised as unmanly: cowardice, laziness, luxury, an inability to master one’s appetites. Dale Martin has shown that in its sexual uses the word was more often applied to men whose weakness lay in an excessive appetite for women. The effeminate womanizer was a stock figure of ancient satire. Pompey was mocked as a malakos for excessive devotion to his young wife. This is why English Bibles for four centuries reached for broad terms of self-indulgence: Tyndale’s “weaklings,” the Geneva Bible’s “wantons,” Goodspeed’s “sensual,” the New Jerusalem Bible’s “the self-indulgent.”
Arsenokoitai is genuinely harder, and I want to be careful here, because the scholarship is contested and readers deserve to know it. The word is a compound of arsen, male, and koites, bed. Those two words stand adjacent in the Greek of Leviticus 20:13, which makes it probable that Paul or someone before him formed the term with that prohibition in view. Some scholars read the word as a straightforward reference to male same-sex intercourse. Others note that its rare appearances outside the New Testament cluster among sins of economic exploitation, and that Paul places it between adulterers and thieves in one list and between the sexually immoral and slave traders in the other. I do not think the question is settled, and I distrust anyone who tells you that it is.
A Datum Worth Keeping
When Martin Luther translated the passage into German, he rendered the word Knabenschänder: boy-abusers. Luther was no modern. He was not accommodating anything. Working from the Greek, he heard exploitation in the term. Whatever else is true, the reading is not an invention of the last fifty years.
The Mechanism
Here is the point I most want to make, and it is not really a point about sexuality.
Something happened to these two words in the middle of the twentieth century. The Revised Standard Version committee, and after it a generation of translations that took the RSV as a base text, took two distinct Greek words, one broad and ancient and one rare and obscure, and collapsed them into a single modern English category. Not a mistranslation exactly. A fusion. Two things became one thing, and the one thing was a nineteenth-century clinical concept that no ancient language possessed, because the ancient world had no notion of sexual orientation to name.
That is how a text becomes a weapon. Not usually by outright falsification. By the quiet erasure of distinction. A weapon requires an edge, and an edge requires that the blurry be made sharp. Wisdom moves in the opposite direction: it holds distinctions open, tolerates the unresolved, and admits when a word is hard.
I have written before that the Bible can be read as a book of wisdom or wielded as a weapon of war, and that the same pages serve either use depending entirely on what the reader has already decided to do with them. I did not expect to find the cleanest illustration of that claim in a matter of lexicography. But there it is. The weaponizing did not require anyone to add a word to Scripture. It required only that two words be permitted to become one.
What This Asks of Us
I am not asking anyone to abandon a conviction on the strength of an essay. I am asking for something smaller and, I think, harder. Look at the words. Learn what the disagreement actually is. Notice that a position you were taught to regard as the ancient faith may in fact be younger than you are, and that the men most certain they are holding the line are sometimes defending a fence built within living memory.
That is not liberalism. That is the ordinary honesty any text deserves, and Scripture more than most.
PhD candidate, whose dissertation is an intellectual biography of the Nobel laureate physicist Charles H. Townes. He has taught at the college level for nearly four decades and served more than forty years in pastoral ministry. He is the author of From Christian Fundamentalism to Christian Nationalism: A Primer Detailing the Danger to America (2024).
I am always grateful for someone with the credentials offered by Michael A. Smith provides, to read that what I have come to believe have also been discovered by another who has studied much more broadly than I have... And can present his new knowledge in a mature, factual manner without offense...
LOL... I have been failing that recently.Whether because I finally am willing to speak Truth as I have come to learn it... Or whether, it is just logical for me, from a background such as I, to assume that each time a book is touched by other than the author, there will be changes made, many of which will create errors. Especially if the editors have a different interest in doing so...
Note for Readers: Look for more from this contributor in near future as I catch up on time lost here at BRH...
God Bless
Gabby
