Homosexuality in the NRSVue New Testament

⁹ Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! The sexually immoral, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes,^[a] men who engage in illicit sex,^[b]10 thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, swindlers—none of these will inherit the kingdom of God. ¹¹ And this is what some of you used to be. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ^[c] and in the Spirit of our God.

The ESV conflates the two references to homosexuality but adds a footnote:  “The two Greek terms translated by this phrase refer to the passive and active partners in consensual homosexual acts.”  The NRSVue gives footnotes for the two words saying of them both “Meaning of Gk uncertain.”

The original RSV conflates them both as “sexual perverts.”  The original New Revised Standard Version splits the difference, with one softened expression and one that is surprisingly loaded:  “male prostitutes, sodomites.”  The Greek has no reference to Sodom.  The KJV has “nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind.”  Pretty much all of the translations are rather coy on the issue.

Robert A. J. Gagnon, a Bible scholar at a mainline Presbyterian seminary, is the author of The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics .  (See his post on the NRSVue, which goes into more detail on the language issues involved, here.)  The Methodist Arthur Collins draws on his work in this critique (my paragraphing):

The new revision does some interesting things to a couple of NT terms relating to homosexuality, softening the edges and making it easier to say that the NT doesn’t condemn same-sex intercourse.

For instance, the Greek arsenokoitai has been muted to “men who engage in sexual immorality,” when the actual meaning is “men who have sex with men.” The revisers say the term in the original Greek is unclear; it isn’t. Arsenokoitai was coined by rabbis of Second Temple Judaism (the translators of the Septuagint), and then picked up by Christian teachers. It was coined specifically to refer to behavior that Jews and Christians highlighted as wrong, but which the culture around them treated in more nuanced ways.

Likewise, the revisers of the NRSV have rendered the NT Greek malakoi as “male prostitutes,” which locates the basic wrong not in the sexual behavior, per se, but in its being offered for money. And, of course, one may prostitute one’s body with either sex. But malakoi (rendered “Sodomites” in the KJV) means “soft men,” effeminate men, implying men who offer themselves sexually to other men – whether or not money is directly involved.

And yet, the NRSVue does not try to change the Levitical prohibitions against same-sex intercourse (Leviticus 20:13), nor, most importantly, what St. Paul says on the subject in Romans 1:

²⁶ For this reason [idolatry] God gave them over to dishonorable passions. Their females exchanged natural intercourse^[e] for unnatural, ²⁷ and in the same way also the males, giving up natural intercourse^[f] with females, were consumed with their passionate desires for one another. Males committed shameless acts with males and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error. 

The footnotes say the Greek word translated here as “intercourse” is simply “use.”  The translators could have just given “use” and left it ambiguous, but they didn’t.