The biblical case against homosexuality does not depend upon one disputed English translation, one isolated Greek word, or one obscure Old Testament passage. It is cumulative.
Genesis establishes God's created sexual order: male and female.
Leviticus explicitly condemns a male lying with a male as with a woman.
Romans 1 condemns women exchanging natural sexual relations and men abandoning relations with women and desiring one another.
First Corinthians 6 uses arsenokoitai, a term whose components closely correspond to the Greek wording of the prohibition in Leviticus.
First Timothy uses arsenokoitai again.
Ancient extrabiblical evidence, including the Sibylline Oracles, provides further evidence for the arsenokoit- word family in an ancient context that condemns male same-sex intercourse.
Then Romans 1:32 goes even further. Paul does not merely condemn those who practice the sins he has described. He condemns those who “give hearty approval to those who practice them.”
That verse creates a problem not merely for the homosexual movement, but for churches that have decided that “love” requires affirming what Scripture condemns.
It does not.
This is why the increasingly popular “1946” argument is so misleading.
Yes, the Revised Standard Version published in 1946 was the first major English translation to use the modern English word “homosexuals” in 1 Corinthians 6:9.
So what?
The English word is not the doctrine.
Christian teaching concerning same-sex intercourse existed long before 1946 because the biblical texts themselves existed long before 1946.
Older English translations did not need the twentieth-century word “homosexual” to communicate the prohibition. They used the vocabulary available to them. The King James Version spoke of those who were “abusers of themselves with mankind.” The American Standard Version likewise used older terminology.
Changing the English label does not change the underlying Greek.
Paul did not write in English.
He wrote:
ἀρσενοκοῖται — arsenokoitai.
And Paul lived roughly nineteen centuries before the RSV translators sat down to produce their translation.
The relevant question therefore is not:
“When did the word homosexual first appear in an English Bible?”
That question is largely a distraction.
The real question is:
“What behavior were the biblical authors describing and condemning?”
That takes us straight back to Leviticus, Romans, Corinthians, Timothy, and the ancient linguistic evidence.
The 1946 argument cannot make those texts disappear.
One of the most aggressive attempts to reinterpret Scripture concerns arsenokoitai.
It is frequently asserted online that the word actually means “pedophile,” “child molester,” “male prostitute,” or “sexual exploiter.”
But asserting a definition is not the same thing as demonstrating one.
The connection between Paul's terminology and the Septuagint is enormously important.
Leviticus 18:22 in the Greek Old Testament uses arsēn, “male,” together with koitē, “bed,” in its prohibition of a male lying sexually with another male.
Leviticus 20:13 again places the same concepts together.
Paul then employs the compound:
arsenokoitēs.
That is not insignificant.
The linguistic trail leads backward toward Leviticus, where the prohibited act is already described.
Leviticus does not say:
“You shall not molest a boy.”
It does not say:
“You shall not exploit a slave.”
It does not say:
“You shall not hire a male prostitute.”
It prohibits a male lying sexually with a male as with a woman.
Trying to force “pedophile” into arsenokoitai therefore does not solve the problem. It merely relocates it while ignoring the Old Testament linguistic background.
The extrabiblical evidence deserves considerably more attention than it normally receives.
The Sibylline Oracles contain the related verbal form arsenokoitein. This matters because we are sometimes told that Paul's word is so rare and mysterious that nobody can confidently determine what kind of sexual activity it described.
Except ancient usage did not vanish after Paul.
The Sibylline material exists within an ancient Jewish and Christian moral tradition that explicitly condemns male-male sexual intercourse. The appearance of the arsenokoit- word family in that environment provides an independent piece of evidence against attempts to sever Paul's terminology from homosexual intercourse.
And suddenly the supposed mystery is not quite so mysterious.
We have the Greek Leviticus.
We have Paul.
We have subsequent ancient usage.
We have ancient Jewish and Christian sexual ethics.
We have centuries of Christian interpretation predating 1946.
Yet we are expected to believe that twentieth- and twenty-first-century revisionists finally discovered that everybody had somehow missed the point.
That requires considerably more faith than simply reading the texts in their historical context.
Even if someone could make arsenokoitai disappear entirely, Romans 1 would still remain.
Paul describes women exchanging natural sexual relations for those contrary to nature.
Then he writes:
“and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts.”
Notice Paul's language.
Men with men.
Toward one another.
That is extremely inconvenient for the claim that Paul was merely condemning adult men exploiting boys.
Paul describes reciprocal same-sex desire.
Nor can the passage simply be reduced to prostitution. Paul does not say that men abandoned women for prostitutes. His contrast is sexual: women with women and men with men rather than the male-female order.
And then comes the verse that modern affirming theology would rather rush past:
“and although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them.”
Paul condemns both practice and approval.
That means a church cannot escape the force of Romans 1 merely by saying:
“We don't personally practice homosexuality. We just affirm people who do.”
That is precisely the distinction Romans 1:32 refuses to permit.
When churches bless homosexual relationships, celebrate homosexual marriages, fly Pride flags, install practicing homosexual clergy, or teach Christians that homosexual relationships can be holy before God, the issue is no longer merely what unbelievers are doing.
The question becomes whether professing Christians are giving approval to what Scripture condemns.
Romans 1:32 answers that question with terrifying clarity.
This debate has become an endless exercise in semantic escape.
Leviticus supposedly does not mean homosexual intercourse.
Romans 1 supposedly does not mean homosexual intercourse.
Arsenokoitai supposedly means pedophiles.
Jesus supposedly overturned the Old Testament sexual ethic without ever saying so.
And the entire historic Christian understanding supposedly resulted from an English translation published in 1946.
At some point we have to stop playing lexical whack-a-mole and simply read the texts together.
Genesis: male and female.
Leviticus: a male shall not lie with a male as with a woman.
Romans: women with women and men with men.
1 Corinthians: arsenokoitai.
1 Timothy: arsenokoitai again.
Romans 1:32: condemnation extends to approving the practices Paul has condemned.
Ancient extrabiblical evidence: related arsenokoit- terminology appears within an ancient moral tradition explicitly hostile to male same-sex intercourse.
That is the cumulative case.
No 1946 translator created it.
No modern English word created it.
And redefining arsenokoitai cannot erase Romans 1.
The biblical conclusion is not complicated:
Homosexual practice is sin.
Scripture does not recognize homosexual marriage as marriage. It does not describe same-sex sexual relationships as holy. It does not present homosexual desire as an alternative created sexual order that Christians are commanded to affirm.
And Christianity has no authority to rewrite those conclusions because Western culture changed its sexual morality.
Paul gives the proper Gospel conclusion immediately after his warning in 1 Corinthians 6:
“Such were some of you.”
Not:
“Such are some of you, and God affirms you exactly as you are.”
But:
“you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
That is Christianity.
The Gospel does not redefine sin.
It calls sinners out of it.
The homosexual needs the same thing the fornicator needs, the adulterer needs, the drunkard needs, the idolater needs, and every other sinner needs:
Repentance. Forgiveness. A changed life. Jesus Christ.
The Church does homosexuals no favor by lying to them about what Scripture says.
Romans 1:32 makes approval itself part of the warning.
The Christian therefore cannot allow culture to dictate what Scripture is permitted to mean. We do not begin with modern sexual ideology and then manipulate Hebrew and Greek until the Bible finally agrees with us.
We begin with Scripture.
And when Scripture contradicts our desires, our desires are what must change.
God's Word does not need to repent. We do.