With Romans 1 behind us, we are now roughly halfway through the Scripture passages usually brought into this conversation.
And here is where that leaves us: halfway through, without a clear condemnation of same-sex relationships.
Now we head to Corinth.
1 Corinthians 6:9 “Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! Neither sexually immoral people, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor passive homosexual partners (malakos), nor dominant homosexual partners (arsenokoitēs)…”
(We’ll take on the second word, arsenokoitēs, in the next post.)
Here’s a confession. Going into my study, I thought this would be the easy one. Plenty of people treat Romans 1 as the key text, but I expected this verse to settle things: a simple list of people who will not inherit the kingdom of God, with homosexuals named right there on it.
It turned out not to be that simple, especially once I set Paul’s words next to the words of Jesus.
Notice something about that translation. In English, it reads “passive homosexual partners.” In Greek, it’s a single word: malakos. Translators had to make a choice about what that word means. Many older English Bibles rendered it “effeminate,” “weaklings,” or “wantons.” The first English Bible to put “homosexuals” in this verse was the Revised Standard Version in 1946, and the RSV itself dropped the word in its 1971 revision.
So the question we face with many of our Bibles today is whether translators have chosen well.
Note: Every translation is an act of interpretation, and translation committees work under real pressures: their own theological commitments, centuries of tradition, and readers who expect familiar wording. Too often, it shows. The ESV calls Tychicus and Epaphras faithful “ministers” (Ephesians 6:21; Colossians 1:7), but calls Phoebe a “servant” (Romans 16:1), though Paul uses the same Greek word for all three. For much of the twentieth century, English Bibles turned Junia, a woman Paul calls "prominent among the apostles" (Romans 16:7, NRSV), into a man named “Junias.” Translation choices are never entirely neutral.
What Does “Soft” Mean?
Malakos shows up all over ancient Greek writing, so we have a good sense of what it meant.
The basic meaning is simple: soft. Soft clothing. Soft bedding. Soft to the touch.
When the word described a person’s character, it meant soft in a moral sense. In a culture that prized rugged, warlike masculinity, that was an insult. A soft man was lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent, unable to endure hardship. In a word, unmanly.
The ideal man was a warrior, a hard worker, brave. Women were imagined as his opposite: timid, weak, in need of protection. To call a man malakos was to say he was more like a woman than the culture believed a man ought to be.
That’s why much of the research describes malakos as a word for effeminacy, in the broad sense of a man acting like what a patriarchal culture considered the “softer” sex, rather than a word for homosexuality.
Yes, the term could be thrown at a man who was penetrated by another man. But even there, the judgment was cultural rather than moral. The shame wasn’t the sex act itself. It was a man playing the woman’s part in a climate of patriarchy.
The word covered the whole range of what a “real man” wasn’t, and writers like Josephus and Plutarch use it that way. Very often, the malakos man in ancient writing is the one who has given himself over to excess and grown soft in luxury.
Hold on to that one. It’s going to matter.
Not Just About Gay Men
This is where my old assumptions really started to crack. Malakos wasn’t only used of men who had sex with men. It was regularly used of men who had sex with women.
In the Greco-Roman world, a man could be called malakos for primping and dressing up to catch women’s attention. New Testament scholar Dale Martin and Christian philosopher David Bentley Hart both point to these common heterosexual uses as evidence that malakos was never a word for homosexuality in the first place.
The Roman playwright Plautus even carried the word into Latin as malacus and pinned it on an adulterer, the kind of pampered seducer who goes after other men’s wives.
If I had to name a modern equivalent, I’d reach for today’s slang: fuckboy. I don’t use the word to be crude. I use it because it’s the closest thing we have. A fuckboy is a womanizer, a man who sleeps around with no intention of a relationship, and someone thoroughly absorbed in himself.
Some translations have already moved in this direction. Hart renders the word “feckless sensualists” in his translation of the New Testament. The New Jerusalem Bible, a Catholic translation, renders it “the self-indulgent.”
So here is the problem with reading malakos as “homosexual.” The word names something else. It could be hurled as an insult at a man who was penetrated, yes, but writers in Paul’s own day also used it for straight men.
Which leaves us with the real question: what did Paul mean by it?
Which Meaning Did Paul Intend?
There are really two options.
The broad meaning: Paul uses malakos the way most of his world did, for people who are soft, lazy, cowardly, and spoiled. In that case, his list includes the pampered and self-indulgent, people who use others for their own desires with no thought for the people they use.
The narrow meaning: Paul uses malakos in its narrower, insulting sense, for a man who is penetrated by another man.
The narrow reading runs into a serious problem. In that insulting sense, the word could apply to any man who was penetrated, including those who had no say in it. In Paul’s world, that meant enslaved men and boys who could not refuse their masters.
Is Paul really saying that victims of sexual abuse will not inherit the kingdom of God? I can’t believe that.
So to make the narrow reading work, we have to narrow it even further: not every penetrated man, only the willing ones. But Paul never says that. He doesn’t define the word or qualify it. He simply drops it into a list.
When a someone means a word in a specialized sense, he usually spells it out. Paul doesn’t. So it makes the most sense to read malakos the way his world commonly used it, and the same way, as we’re about to see, that Jesus used it: for morally soft people who luxuriate in comfort and live with little care for anyone else.
Why Only Corinth?
Here’s a detail that’s easy to miss. Paul uses malakos only once, here in his letter to Corinth.
He writes a very similar list to Timothy, who was serving the church in Ephesus. That list includes arsenokoitēs, the word we’ll look at next time. But malakos isn’t there (1 Timothy 1:9-10).
Why would the word show up in Corinth’s list and not in Ephesus’s?
If malakos is about going soft in luxury, Corinth answers the question.
The Corinth Paul knew was a boomtown. Rome had leveled the old Greek city in 146 BC, and Julius Caesar refounded it as a Roman colony in 44 BC. By Paul’s day it was the capital of its province and, by some estimates, the largest city in Greece. It sat on a narrow isthmus between two seas, with a port on each side, and trade and money poured through it.
Corinth had a reputation long before the Romans rebuilt it, and it was a reputation for money and pleasure. The old city was so commercial that even sex was a luxury trade, famous for its expensive courtesans. Athenian comic writers even coined a verb from the city’s name, korinthiazesthai, “to act like a Corinthian,” as slang for taking part in that trade.
The same reputation produced a proverb: not everyone can afford the trip to Corinth. Ancient writers explained it by the price of the city’s pleasures, which only the rich could pay.
That reputation outlived the old city. Writers were still repeating the proverb in the decades before Paul arrived. And Paul’s Corinth was booming: rich, competitive, and full of new money. Think of it as the Las Vegas of Paul’s world.
That’s the life malakos describes: not one particular sin, but the soft, self-indulgent life that grows in a place like that. It makes sense that Paul would warn this church, and only this church, about it.
How Jesus Used the Word
For me, what finally settles it is Jesus. Malakos shows up in the Gospels too, and Jesus is the one using it.
After John the Baptist’s disciples leave, Jesus turns to the crowd and asks what they went out into the wilderness to see. “A reed shaken by the wind?” (Matthew 11:7).
Then he asks again. Did they go out to see a man dressed in soft clothing? Of course not. “Behold, those who wear soft clothing are in the houses of kings” (Matthew 11:8; see also Luke 7:25).
That word for “soft”? It’s malakos.
Jesus is drawing a contrast. John wore rough camel’s hair (Matthew 3:4). He didn’t bend with the wind. He stood up to the powerful, all the way to losing his head. The people in soft clothing are his opposite: comfortable, pampered, living in palaces, and bending whichever way the political wind blows.
The connection is hard to miss. The ones who wear soft clothing are soft themselves. They’re the reeds in the wind, people with no moral backbone.
As he often did, Jesus makes a cutting point about the powerful without naming them. He likely had Herod Antipas in mind, the ruler who had John arrested and later beheaded, or the Herodian court around him.
Where Does This Leave Us?
Let’s put the pieces together.
The word itself: Malakos means “soft,” and in a moral sense it describes the pampered and self-indulgent.
Its everyday use: Writers in Paul’s world used it regularly for straight men, womanizers included.
Paul’s use: He uses it only once, in a letter to a famously wealthy boomtown.
Jesus’ use: He uses it for wealthy, comfortable people in royal palaces who bend with the wind.
Taken together, I’ve come to believe malakos can’t be claimed to speak of homosexuality at all. It describes rich, spoiled people who use others and stand for nothing but their own interests.
What matters most to me is that this reading lets Jesus and Paul speak with one voice. When Paul reaches for a word Jesus used, I want to hear it the way Jesus meant it.
And if that’s right, this word should make a lot of us more uncomfortable than it makes our gay neighbors. Many of us in the Western church live with comforts Herod’s court never dreamed of. The question malakos asks isn’t who we sleep with. It’s whether comfort has made us soft: whether we use people, bend with the wind, and stand for nothing but ourselves.
That one stings a little. It did for me.
In the next post, we’ll turn to the second word in Paul’s list, arsenokoitēs, which shows up again in 1 Timothy 1:10.