It’s not often that Calvin Seminary professors review movies, but recently Dr. Jeffrey Weima, Professor of New Testament at Calvin Theology Seminary, did just that. The movie is a 2022 documentary, 1946: The Mistranslation that Shifted Culture, directed by Sharon Roggio.  The film alleges that by mistranslating a brace of Greek words in 1 Corinthians 6:9, the 1946 Revised Standard Version of the New Testament and the scholars who produced it helped fuel negative attitudes towards LGBTQ+ people among Bible-believing Christians, doing incalculable damage to queer Christians over the past three-quarters of a century. 

Weima found the movie a provocation. His review is posted on the Abide Project website (available here). For those of you unfamiliar with things Christian Reformed, Weima co-chaired a synodically-authorized study committee tasked with laying out the biblical evidence to support the church’s opposition to same-sex sexual relationships. Abide is a CRC group organized around the goal, as they themselves say, of striving “for the sake of the true Gospel, the faithfulness of Christ’s Church, the glory of God, and the good of His people . . .  to uphold the beautiful, Biblical, confessional, and historic understanding of human sexuality” (taken from the Abide Project website).

Weima begins his review with undisguised scorn, quoting Proverbs to the effect that one should not “answer a fool according to his folly.” He goes on to say that “the logic of the central argument” of the movie “is so problematic and weak that it can be judged to be foolishness.” He feels compelled nevertheless to answer against the advice from Proverbs because the film has had some play among CRC people, including an online panel discussion with the director sponsored by Hesed Project, a CRC group in favor of affirming LGBTQ people in the church (and opposed to Abide).

The tone of Weima’s review drew a careful but sharp response from Kathy Vandergrift, a founding member of Hesed. In an open letter, she asked Weima whether his review violates the standards of the CRC Code of Conduct, including such things as honesty in one’s presentation, fair representation of the words and motives of others, respect, charity towards those with whom one disagrees, and a willingness to change and grow, standards I will try not to violate myself in this piece.

I judge Vandergrift’s response to Weima sufficient in the matter of tone, although I will return at the end of this piece to a few comments about the overall effect of the movie and Weima’s response to it. My concern is with Weima’s biblical argument. Does he get the Bible right? To answer that question, allow me briefly to muck about in the weeds of the particular issue at the heart of Weima’s complaint.

The key question for the film and for Weima’s response is the proper translation of two of Greek words in 1 Corinthians 6:9. In this verse, the Apostle Paul asks rhetorically, “Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God?” He then reels off a list of “wrongdoers.” It includes “the sexually immoral, idol worshipers, adulterers, malakoi, arsenokoitai, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, slanderers, and people who rip off other people. Paul is painting with a broad brush. Whatever one makes of this list, it should make a lot of Christians uncomfortable.

The words left untranslated are the words in question in the movie and in Weima’s response to the movie. The first of them, malakoi, means “soft,” It has a variety of extended meanings including, but not confined to, “effeminate.” The second word, arsenokoitēs, is evidently, as Weima says, a Pauline coinage. It comes from the Septuagint translation of Leviticus 20:13, the first clause of which reads (in Greek): hos an koimēthē meta arsenos koitēn gynaikos, something like “Whoever sleeps with a male as if sexually bedding a woman . . ..” It’s rough Greek for a rough bit of Hebrew. Paul appears to have taken two of the words, “male” (arsenos) and “bed” (koitēn), and combined them to mean something like “man-bedding” as in a man sexually bedding down another man.

So, in 1 Corinthians 6:9 we have in a list of vices the evocative sequencing of a word that can mean “effeminate” and a word borrowed from Leviticus that seems to mean “man-bedding.” It could well mean, as Weima has it, respectively, “the passive and [the] active partner in any same-sex relationship.” I’ll come back to the “any” in that sentence below.

But now, consider what the RSV did with those words: it combined them into a single English word—a word heretofore never used in any English translation, “homosexuals.” In other words, it read the two words together in the manner that Weima does above, and decided to translate them with a word that at the time was not breathed in polite company: “homosexual:” Neither “the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor thieves . . .will inherit the kingdom of God.” 

As the movie points out—and as was pointed out to the RSV translation committee before the RSV was published—this translation cannot be right. Not only does it combine two words in Paul’s list, compressing them into a single English word, which is dubious on the face of it, but the word they choose, “homosexuals,” represents a concept that did not exist in antiquity. Ancient people did not have a category of homosexuals as opposed to heterosexuals. The idea of a sexual orientation had not occurred to them. If these words in fact refer to sex between men, it’s not to what these men are but to what they do.

This Weima readily admits. He says, “It’s true that the word “homosexual” is not the best way to translate the key Greek term in 1 Cor. 6:9,” and for just the reason I cited above. But he does not seem to see the full implication of that admission. The question is what’s being ruled and ruled out in Paul’s words. How should we read this passage and others like it?

The words used in the list are words for distortions of things that otherwise may be proper and worthy. Take for example the word for a greedy person, pleonektēs. One might ask the question, when does desire, ordinarily a good thing, tip over into pleonexia, greed? The ancient world framed these things differently from the way we in a 21^st century capitalistic culture frame them. We have a whole industry, advertising, dedicated to what ancient Romans might have thought of as pleonexia, “improper greed.” Our economy runs on greed. So when one considers Paul’s list one has to perform a cultural conversion: what does pleonexia mean in 21^st century America? Not easy to answer.

The same questions have to be considered in trying to understand Paul’s sexual ethics, but here they are much more complicated. When Paul thought about sexual relationships between people of the same sex, how would he have thought of it? It’s hard to know exactly, but it seems likely that he would have thought of it as disconnected sex—sex disconnected from the relationships that held people together in these early churches. Pagan sex. Not necessarily sex in the context of pagan cults, although that may have occurred to him, which is why in 1 Corinthians 6:9 he includes among a list of sexual offenders “idol worshipers.” “Idolaters,” as the RSV has it, again is imprecise. The word in Greek specifies idol worship: the liturgy of the pagan gods. And such liturgies could include sex. But for Paul it was probably broader than this: pagan sex in general. The sexual practices of “those people.” Sex indulged in by people outside of his community.

And thinking of pagan sex, his mind goes to Leviticus 20:13, from where he takes his word for men bedding men. Leviticus 20:13, as is also true of the parallel text in Leviticus 18:22, is part of what is commonly called the “Holiness Code.” In these chapters, the rules are concerned with sexual relationships that would be likely to disrupt the community. Some violate ordinary rules of consanguinity: don’t have sex with your mother or your sister. But others are of a different sort: don’t have sex with your daughter-in-law, even if your son, her husband, is dead. It would be disruptive of community. And included in these rules is the rule against bedding another man.

Note that these rules are entirely written from the point of view of the man. They assume extended households in which a man might have daily contact with the widow of his son. Even the vocabulary the writers use (scrambled by the tone-deaf NIV) is indicative of close community: “don’t uncover her nakedness.” The rules assume male initiative. They do not countenance consent on the part of the man’s sexual partners, for what in these close patriarchal communities would consent look like? Would the daughter-in-law be able to withhold consent if the patriarch decided to uncover her nakedness?

This is what Paul sees from the point of view of his communities in the 1^st century. He has no way to see homosexual relationships in the context of a committed relationship, no way for gay guys to become part of the community alongside of heterosexual and lesbian couples. He knows this kind of sex only as alien sex, pagan sex, sex that would disrupt, perhaps destroy these fragile early Christian communities.

So now, ask the question again, what is Paul ruling out here? Is he ruling out same-sex marriage in the 21^stcentury? If trying to understand pleonexia in the 21^st century is hard, how do we understand sexual relationships when everything—family, community, love itself—has been reshaped by the contours of our culture? 

I do not ask Professor Weima to agree entirely or at all with my analysis here, but I do ask whether it is plausible? And if plausible, then perhaps the movie is not so foolish as Weima takes it for. 

There’s more to said here. It’s not just getting the words right. This is the fundamental error of evangelicals. They suppose it is only about the text, which is precisely what Weima says: “What matters is the meaning of this word [arsenokoitai] intended by Paul (emphasis in the original). But it’s not. It’s not just the “meaning” of Paul’s words; it’s what we do with that meaning that matters. It’s not just what the words mean in the text; it’s what the words mean in our culter.

Meanings have contexts. Not just literary contexts but social contexts. Theological contexts. Let me return briefly to where I started, with Weima’s explanation for Paul’s vocabulary in 1 Corinthians 6:9 and to that “any” of his. At this point in his discussion, he is trying to argue that the two terms together, malakos and arsenokoitai, describe not only an abusive same-sex relationship but, as he explains it, “the passive and active partner in any same-sex relationship.”

Back to that “any.” Weima’s statement seems to me a heterosexual stereotype of male same-sex relationships. It betrays a sense of role in sexual relationships that hides within it the idea of a power differential. It’s the who’s on top idea of sex. And this idea of sex goes deep in the culture. Or should I say, in Christian culture? All that talk about who’s on top: male headship and all that.

Which is where I want to end: with the consequences of our rule making. The 1946 movie spends considerable time on the damage done to people by rules and theologies about sexuality. Weima appears to believe that the pain expressed by the principals in the movie is manufactured; I do not believe so. But regardless, the pain of the LGBTQ community with regard to church is real. Weima does not mention is that the rule against gay sex in Leviticus 20:13 leads to death: “They shall surely die,” it reads. And over history they did die. They died from violence visited on them. They died from violence they in despair visited upon themselves. They still die.

In 1946, the year for which the movie was named, homosexuality was still criminalized. Men who had sex with other men were rounded up, hounded by the authorities, sentenced to jail. It’s only a few years later, in 1952, the year that the full RSV appeared, that the brilliant Alan Turing was prosecuted for homosexuality and chemically castrated. He died, an apparent suicide, in 1954. His death led in Britain to changing the rules, decriminalizing homosexuality.  

Did the mistaken RSV translation contribute to the persecution of LGBTQ people in those years, as the movie alleges? Did it influence subsequent translations? Did it help give divine sanction to those who even now claim that queer sex is always wrong? I don’t know how to answer that question. But I do not think it foolish to ask it. Nor to say, as does the movie, that translations have consequences. As do HSR reports. And denominational decisions. And such debates are not just about the words of the text of the Bible but about people, people who live and breathe and worship and pray and, yes, love each other.

Clay