re arsenokoitai nt meaning of conviction of sin a meta exegetical or methodological essay in article may athos rutgers edu rexlex fnal fnal gov writes i can t post it all at once so it will come piece meal and not daily i look forward to reading it when i got to the library last week it was with the object in view to look at some articles that have appeared over the last few years since my previous look at the literature un fortunately they had moved the journal back issues so i didn t get a look at the articles i was hoping to find i will continue to reserve my own judgment on arsenokoitai until i have seen the latest scholarly work and i can hope that rexlex s posting may give some meat to chew on however what i can do now is to point out the methodological issues what needs to be shown for anything to be concluded in this matter if the article rexlex posts addresses these issues so much the better if not you will perhaps understand why the problem is hard james b deyoung writes in abstractu this study argues that paul coined the term arsenokoitai deriving it from the lxx of lev cf and using it for homosexual orientation and behavior it is only a minor point but let me make it anyway de young has already contradicted his own prior assertion in this abstract that the ancient analysis of these issues was concerned with actions and not with orientation i doubt this will have much bearing on the article as such but thought i should point it out from the start the hypothesis de young is advancing is that paul a coined the word and b his intended meaning for it was in reference to the levitical law the questions i wish to raise are how would one go about confirming the truth of this hypothesis and what follows if one accepts or stipulates for the sake of the discussion that it is correct note that b is independent of a i consider b far more plausible than a which seems merely to be a counsel of despair over finding nothing in the literature contemporary with paul to clarify this word so far as i know paul does not in general invent words anywhere else in his letters unless you have an otherwise established pattern of coinages it is not sound methodology to assume it particularly if he gives no hint in the immedi ate text to fix the coinage s meaning for his audience as yet the extract presents no evidence at all what do we need to confirm or reject the hypothesis which i should say at the outset i find somewhat plausible i certainly know of nothing which makes it an impossible way of construing this problem passage i m going to set aside for the moment the question of whether paul might have coined this usage to look at the more tractable question of what it means for this there are in principle two kinds of evidence that can be adduced internal and external that is we can look at the text of paul s letter for clarification or look outside that to prior or contemporary writings that paul might have relied on or to derivative writings that have some claim of access to paul s meaning the single worst problem with this word in corinthians is that there is no internal evidence for paul s meaning he uses the word totally without an explanation or hint as to his meaning save that its inclusion in a list of negatives implies that it has for him some negative meaning we are left as the only internal clue with the etymology or formation of the word which is indeed the reason that de young and others before him have associated it with the leviticus prohibition of men verbing with other men where verb is some standard euphemism for having sex lie in leviticus bed in greek one problem is that bedders koitai is not as far as i know used that way in greek therefore i offer one serious test which de young s hypothesis must pass or be rejected o find a body of greek texts contemporary with paul or not much prior to his day such that the x koitai formation implies men who have sex with x obviously the best case is to find such usages of arsenokoitai itself such texts would be confirmation that the word can be read that way it is worth emphasizing that compound words are not in general under standable by projecting what the reader may imagine by the juxtaposition of the roots existence of such parallels doesn t prove the hypothesis correct but it goes a long way towards making such a usage whether or not original with paul in the specific case of x arse n possible of comprehension by his readers my test moves in the direction of external evidence if paul does not in his text explain his word and he does not then he has to expect his readers to already know the word which stands against its being a coinage or to expect that it mimics word formations that they do know such that they can guess his meaning without too much floundering external evidence that is texts other than paul s own and lexicographic or social historical considerations that might be adduced then come into the picture if there are other uses of the word not dependent on paul which have sufficient internal contextual evidence or some gloss by a contemporary scribe to show a derogatory reference to male homosexu ality or similar koitai formations used in similar ways then one has grounds for o denying that paul coined the word and o assuming that his readers might understand his meaning do you see the problem if paul coined the word then he requires his readers to share enough context with him to comprehend his coinage and its intent in this case that they would stipulating de young s guess understand him to be referring to the levitical universal prohibition of male male sex this mind you in a context where paul has emphasized at least to other congregations and so one assumes to the corinthians how else to explain cor and the corinthians having to be pulled back from overinterpreting their freedom the non applicability of torah law to his gentile converts among the considerations that make it implausible for paul to have coined the word its first element is archaic arse n is an old attic or ionic form of what in even classical let alone koine times would be assimilated as arre n to me this implies that we are even more than usually needful of external evidence to pin down meaning and usage what is paul doing inventing a word in obsolete attic formation and if he didn t coin the word but picked it up like the others in his list as common terms of derogation then his meaning will be for his readers constrained by that common meaning since he gives no other i cannot emphasize enough that paul does not tell us what he means by this word we and his original readers are guessing they at least had a contemporary context and maybe paul had used this very word and explained it in great detail to them in person but we have no trace of evidence of that and to suppose it is mere fantasy so we are desperately in need of external evidence about this word and it seems to be exceptionally meagre that is precisely the problem i can think of several more or less equally plausible hypotheses about the word a it was a standard gutter term of abuse for some or all maybe very specific maybe very general homosexual male activities b it was a term of abuse used by jews about the awful homosexual greeks which may or may not be consciously associated on their part with the leviticus passage c paul invented the term and again there may or may not be an association with leviticus in his doing so he may or may not intend the word to have an explicit and universal application with absolute and clear boundaries since none of his other words in that list have such character this last seems to me about the least plausible of the hypotheses i m advancing of these i d say off the top of my head that a is most plausible but i still have reservations about that too if the word never appears before paul and in later uses has some evidence of depending on paul then one can opt for paul s coining it if it does appear before him he might still have coined it being unaware of prior use in which case his coinage is inherently confusing but one should normally demote c on the basis of any earlier uses especially if they can be shown to have been at all common in the places paul traveled in either of the a or b cases one has to take into account paul s relation to the community of usage he picked the word up from and whether it be from the greek or jewish communities paul s relations are hardly straight forward there is so far as i have yet seen little or no external evidence to aid us in selecting one of these or some other hypothesis your guess is as good as mine or maybe worse or maybe better depending on a lot of things but it remains so far guesswork and i don t know about you but i for one will not equate human guesswork with the will of god by all means be convinced in your own conscience about what paul is getting at as he says elsewhere on what was in his day a major controversy of somewhat this same character romans hold on to your own belief as between yourself and god and consider the man fortunate who can make his decision without going against his conscience but anybody who eats in a state of doubt is condemned because he is not in good faith and every act done in bad faith is a sin for my part i cannot see any way to resolve paul s meaning in the use of arsenokoitai without directly applicable external evidence and by the nature of such external evidence it will never reach to certainty of constraining paul s own intent paul like humpty dumpty and me and all the rest of us will use words in ways that are personal choices and sometimes leave his readers puzzled if that puzzlement leads you to god it may be blessed if it should lead away as some of paul s words have led some people then paul s intense communicative effort to contrive his meaning in our souls may have some regretable consequences i have always found paul to be a fantastically reliable guide if i read him in the large if i can see him lay out his position in detail and hammer it home time and time again i am much less certain about his meaning in his many brief and cryptic passages such as this one in my usual discursive way i have gone on at great length about the first of my intended meta exegetical points what would be needed to confirm that paul a coined or b in any case meant the word to mean the same as the leviticus prohibition my second point is to stipulate this hypo thesis and follow up what it implies for both his initial readers and for later christians given my verbosity this will be tomorrow night s meditation michael l siemon i say you are gods sons of the mls panix com most high all of you nevertheless or you shall die like men and fall mls ulysses att com like any prince psalm
