How do you answer the verse that says homosexuals will not go to heaven?

Possible Egyptian gay kiss, 2300 BC, <br>from the British Museum

Possible Egyptian gay kiss, 2300 BC,
from the British Museum

Rick Brentlinger Answers -

Thanks for the good question. The verse that is alleged to say, 'homosexuals will not go to heaven' is 1 Cor 6:9.

"Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders

nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God." -1 Cor 6:9, NIV

There are many problems with translating the Greek word, arsenokoites, as homosexual offenders.

First, arsenokoites was NEVER used in the first century to mean homosexual. To help us define arsenokoites, I've listed on my website the first 56 historical uses of the rare Greek word arsenokoites.

The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG®), The Greek Language Thesaurus, is a research center at the University of California, Irvine. Founded in 1972 the TLG has collected and digitized most literary texts written in Greek, from Homer in the 8th century BC to the fall of Byzantium in AD 1453.

Considering every extant Greek manuscript available today, the word arsenokoites only occurs 77 times in approximately 2400 years of Greek history. 46 of those times, it appears in a quotation from 1 Corinthians 6:9 or 1 Timothy 1:10 and is not defined in those uses.

Second, the concept of homosexuality and the word homosexual are relatively modern. The English word homosexual begins showing up in dictionaries around 1890.

There was no Greek word in the first century AD which has the same semantic range as our modern word, homosexual. Because the concept of an exclusive gay or lesbian orientation was not common in the first century, to impose our modern concept on scripture is to add something to scripture which scripture never said.

Third, because there are no extant Greek manuscripts which use the word, arsenokoites, with our modern meaning of homosexual, modern scholars are simply giving their "best guess" as to its meaning, based on breaking down arsenokoites into its parts, arsen, meaning man and koite, mean bed, used euphemistically to mean having sex.

As noted at the define arsenokoites link above, that is not an accurate way to discover the meaning of ancient words.

Fourth, it is a terrible sin to guess at the meaning of a Biblical word, as scholars have done with arsenokoites, and with their guess, harm hundreds of millions of gays and lesbians. They've made the Bible say something it never said in the Greek language as originally given.

By translating arsenokoites as homosexual, they've made the Bible condemn lesbians in 1 Cor 6:9 and 1 Tim 1:10. The word arsenokoites is a masculine word and refers to men, not women.