Jim Coppoc.

I’m back. Pastor life has been extra busy in these difficult times, so I ended up taking a bit of an unplanned hiatus from this column. I received a question today, though, that moved me to start writing again, and offer my answer publicly. The question was this: “does 1 Timothy 1:10 really say that homosexuality is wrong?” The answer to that question is both more and less complicated than one might think.

The word “homosexual” did not appear in any version of the Christian Bible prior to the year 1946, in the “Revised Standard Version” (RSV). Before the RSV, translations varied, but usually had something to do with sexual exploitation. Martin Luther’s Bible, for example, used the word “Knabenschänder” instead, or “boy molester.” The lead translator who first inserted “homosexual” into the RSV, Luther Allan Weigle, later admitted he was wrong and apologized. By the time this apology was issued, though, other translations had already adopted Weigle’s wording, where you can still find it today.

So the answer to the question is that 1 Timothy 1:10 doesn’t discuss homosexuality at all, good or bad. This raises the new question, though, “How did such an egregious error happen in the first place?” The answer to that question begins in Leviticus, and ends in the culture wars of 1940s America.

In Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, most English translations read, “[man] shall not lie with man as with a woman.” This wording (or something like it) first appeared in the Tyndale Bible in 1534, and was adopted a few decades later by the King James Bible, which influenced many later translations. It is not even close to the original Hebrew.

In its original form, Leviticus 18:22 instructs men not to “lie down with” (have sex with) other men “in the bed of a wife/woman.” The word for “bed” plainly appears in the original text, but out of deference to the first English translations it somehow still gets taken out. Thus, a verse about homosexual adultery becomes a verse about homosexuality in general.

When Paul was writing the letter that prompted the first question, he wanted to reorient the early Christian church to basic Judeo-Christian mores. The most plausible theory is that he was looking for a shorthand word that means “men who lie with men in their wives’ beds,” so he coined the term “ἀρσενοκοίτης” (“arsenokoites”), which is really a combination of two Greek words meaning “man” and “bed.” To our knowledge, no one else had used this word before. Paul made it up.

How do we know that Paul did not mean “homosexual” when he made up the word, “arsenokoites”? Because Greek has plenty of words that do mean homosexual, and he chose not to use any of them.

Of course, the danger of using a brand new, completely made up word is that sometimes people 1,900 years later might not know exactly what you mean. So when Luther Allan Weigle stumbled across the word “man-bed” in the year 1946, during the early Cold War demonization of communists, homosexuals, peaceniks, etc – he took a leap he should not have taken, and assumed it meant something it did not.

That is the story of how “homosexual” came to be in the Bible. If you look up your church’s beliefs, even the most “bible believing” churches usually include a line about trusting the Bible “in its original autograph.” In the original autograph, neither Leviticus nor Paul’s letters discussed homosexuality as we understand it today.

If you have a burning Bible question, feel free to send it to jimatripley@gmail.com, or find me on Facebook. I will get you the best, most accurate answer I can. And I just might include it in the next column.

Jim Coppoc serves Ripley United Church of Christ at 400 S. Main Street in Traer. After a long career in both academia and human services, he has settled into a comfortable existence as a writer, part-time “Bridge Pastor,” and full-time musician in the memory care unit at the Iowa Veterans Home. You can find Jim online at www.facebook.com/jim.at.ripley.