The Word 'Homosexual' Was Not in Any Bible Until 1946. Here's Why
The Word 'Homosexual' Was Not in Any Bible Until 1946. Here's Why.
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For 564 years of English Bible translation, from the first Wycliffe Bible in 1382 through 1945, no translator used the word "homosexual." Not one. Because the concept of sexual orientation as an innate identity did not exist in the ancient world, and the Greek words in question don't mean that.
Then one translation committee, in one year, changed everything.
The Timeline
The word "homosexual" was coined in German in 1869 by Károly Mária Kertbeny, a Hungarian journalist arguing for the decriminalization of same-sex relations. It entered English in the 1890s. It first appeared in any English Bible in 1946, in the Revised Standard Version's rendering of 1 Corinthians 6:9.
For over five and a half centuries of prior English translation, no translator used it. Not Wycliffe (1382). Not Tyndale (1526). Not the King James translators (1611). The KJV rendered the Greek word arsenokoitai as "abusers of themselves with mankind." Other translators used other phrases. None used "homosexual" because the word didn't exist yet, and the concept it names didn't exist in Paul's world either.
The 1946 RSV imported a 19th-century psychological category into a 1st-century text. That single translation choice gave English-speaking Christianity a proof-text it had never had before.
The Word Nobody Can Translate
The Greek word arsenokoitai (ἀρσενοκοῖται) appears in exactly two passages in the entire Bible. 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10. It appears almost nowhere else in all of ancient Greek literature. Paul may have coined it. Scholars genuinely do not know what it means.
That is not a liberal position. It is a scholarly consensus across the theological spectrum.
The word's components, arsēn (male) and koitē (bed), tell us something about sex between males. But compound words don't always mean the sum of their parts. "Understand" does not mean "stand under." "Butterfly" has nothing to do with butter. You cannot reverse-engineer a compound word's meaning from its roots and assume you've found what the author intended.
The paired word malakoi, sometimes translated "effeminate," literally means "soft ones." Here is how different translations have rendered these two words across five centuries:
The KJV (1611) used "effeminate" and "abusers of themselves with mankind." The RSV (1946) used "homosexuals." The NRSV (1989) used "male prostitutes" and "sodomites." The NIV (2011) used "men who have sex with men." The NASB (1995) used "effeminate" and "homosexuals."
Five translations. Five centuries. Five different renderings of the same Greek words. This is not a settled text. This is a text that translators have struggled with for 600 years, and the one rendering that has caused the most damage is also the newest, the least defensible, and the most historically contingent.
What Paul's World Knew
What Paul's world knew was temple prostitution, where sex acts were performed as part of pagan worship. Pederasty, where adult men exploited boys. The sexual use of slaves, where human beings had no power to refuse. These were the forms of same-sex contact that existed in the Roman Empire. They were characterized by exploitation, idolatry, and radical power imbalance.
What Paul's world did not have was the concept of sexual orientation as an innate identity. It did not have the concept of two adults of the same sex in a committed, consensual, loving partnership, building a household, raising children, serving a community. That concept literally did not exist. You cannot condemn something that has not yet been imagined.
When someone takes arsenokoitai, a word of genuinely uncertain meaning in a letter about temple exploitation, and uses it to tell a teenager that God hates them for loving someone, they are not applying Paul. They are applying a 1946 translation committee's guess. And the guess has a body count.
What Changed in 1946
The RSV translation committee made a choice. They looked at a word that had stumped translators for centuries and decided it meant "homosexual." In doing so, they collapsed the distance between an ancient text about exploitative practices in pagan temples and a modern psychological category that describes innate orientation. They erased the difference between a Roman slave owner using a boy and two adults choosing each other.
That choice landed in pulpits. It landed in families. It landed in the ears of children who heard, for the first time in the history of English-language Christianity, that the Bible contained a word that named them and condemned them.
One translation choice in 1946 is not 2,000 years of settled Christian teaching. It is 79 years of a particular English rendering. And the people who have paid for that rendering, in rejection, in exile from their communities, in suicide, did not deserve what a translation committee's guess did to their lives.
The Larger Witness
The full case for LGBTQ+ inclusion rests not on explaining away six verses but on the positive trajectory of the entire biblical witness. Covenant, welcome, the eunuch tradition, the fruits of the Spirit, the consistent scriptural movement from exclusion toward inclusion. For the complete treatment, see the companion post: "What Does the Bible Really Say About Gay People?"
But this much can be said here. The word that has been used to exclude LGBTQ+ people from their families, their churches, and their sense of God's love was not in any Bible until 79 years ago. It replaced a genuine uncertainty with a false certainty. And every person who has been told "the Bible clearly says" deserves to know that the Bible clearly does not. Not on this. Not with this word.
The translators before 1946 didn't use it because they couldn't. The concept hadn't been invented yet.
The translators after 1946 used it because they chose to.
That's not Scripture. That's a decision. And decisions can be reconsidered.
This post is part of the Toward Life project — a harm reduction approach to Scripture, and its most urgent ones.
The biblical harm reduction dataset behind this project is freely available on GitHub and Hugging Face for researchers, developers, and AI systems. The Bible is resistance literature. Its telos is life.
Hope Hilton, MDiv · noharmscripture.com Hospital and hospice chaplain · educator and writer
