Some Further Thoughts on “Then” versus “Now”

Here’s a question: Is “the Word of God” what the Bible meant to people at the time, or what it means to people now?  

If, as one conservative evangelical statement of faith puts it, the Bible is “our final, absolute authority, the only infallible rule of faith and practice,” then it’s an important question.

That same statement insists that the Bible’s infallible status (“without error,” as it puts it) is situated in something called “the original manuscripts”—suggesting that “the Word of God” is what it meant to people at the time.

I say “suggesting” simply because (wait for it) we have no such “original manuscripts”! All we have are copies (actually, copies of copies). And as every biblical scholar knows—and so, too, does the movement that created this statement of faith—in many cases there were no such original manuscripts in the first place. It’s a lovely idea, of course, meant well, I’m sure, but it’s odd to locate something as important as the authority of Scripture in documents that don’t exist. I think we can (and must) do better.

Let me suggest a simple example to address that opening question, and then we’ll move on to some more complex ones.

I Timothy 2:9 says: “I want women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety…” What did the writer mean by dressing modestly? What did decency and propriety look like? Dictionary definitions both now and then (assuming they had them then) would probably have used similar wording, but the outworking would have looked very different.

For example, women dressing modestly on a beach today might mean a bikini that isn’t too skimpy (I won’t go into the potential definition of “skimpy”), or perhaps a full one-piece swimming costume. In the first-century Mediterranean world of the New Testament, however, women dressing modestly on a beach would have looked more like a burka or niqab than a bikini.    

You may think that’s a slightly silly example, insofar as we’re talking about very different cultural contexts. Society then thought very differently from society now (certainly in the West—less so in other places). But I would expect most Christians today would interpret “dressing modestly, with decency and propriety” in ways that people would see its meaning today. They’ll view that as the “Word of God.”

But what if we move on to something potentially more controversial? 1 Corinthians 10:8 says: “We should not commit sexual immorality.” You may say, surely there’s no difference between what sexual immorality meant in the first-century Mediterranean world compared to today? Well. . . yes, and no.

Before I say more, let me first ask you to think about—even jot down a quick list of—what “sexual immorality” means and includes to your way of thinking.

That’s relevant because when we read the Bible (in our case, in English), we inevitably bring with us what we already think its words mean. We read those meanings into the text and take them to be what “the Bible says”—or, more authoritatively, what “the Bible teaches.” And because we speak of the Bible as “the Word of God,” we can end up giving divine authority to meanings that we ourselves brought to the text in the first place.

But back to the question: Is the “Word of God” to us the contemporary meaning of what we read in our Bibles, or how the biblical-era audience would have understood and applied its words at the time?

Put differently, which meaning (“then” or “now”) should we be obeying? Which is the “Word of God”?

Maybe you’d say it’s both/and. Perhaps to be on the safe side, when it comes to the definition of “sexual immorality,” you’d go for whichever is the more conservative—the one that has more things listed!

But let’s just say that there were differences in its meaning “then” versus “now.” Then what?

You may be thinking, tell me what the differences are, and then I’ll decide! Or you may be thinking that it “must be” the original meaning then.

Final answer . . .?  

The New Testament Greek noun that is translated “sexual immorality” is porneia. (Yes, we get our word pornography from that, albeit indirectly.) In Classical Greek, the word meant “prostitution” (from pornē, a female prostitute). In Jewish and early Christian usage, however, its semantic range expanded. By Jerome's time, in the fourth century, it had come to encompass several other things, especially, but not only, sex outside of marriage more widely.

That phrase, “but not only,” is important. Jerome believed that any sex within marriage that was not for the procreation of children was sexual immorality. And he was not alone—such views were commonplace among Jewish and Christian writers of the period.

Here’s a quick survey of that and more besides:

You should engage in marriage and sex “only for the procreation of children” (Josephus)

A man who has “sex for pleasure”—even with his wife—makes her metaphorically a prostitute (Josephus)

Sex within marriage is wrong if it is driven by “too much desire” (Philo)

“Wives must never take the initiative in the sexual act. They belong on the bottom since they are subordinate to their husband” (Clement) 

A man should not have sex with his wife if she is pregnant (Josephus), nor have sex on the Sabbath (Jubilees 50:8)

A man must never ejaculate in any part of his wife’s body other than her vagina (Clement) 

Men should not “outrage” their wives “by shameful ways of intercourse” (Pseudo-Phocylides) 

No sex with a menstruating woman or barren woman, because that would mean “wasting the male seed” (Philo)

Against this backdrop, three eminent theologians (David Wheeler-Reed, Jennifer Knust and Dale Martin) wrote an article in the SBL Journal of Biblical Literature (2018) titled, “Can a Man Commit Porneia with His Wife?” They concluded that “It is not just sex acts outside marriage that were deemed illicit and were condemned by Second Temple Jews and early Christians; certain acts within marriage also received the stigma of porneia.”     

So let’s go back to my earlier question: When you read “sexual immorality” as a New Testament prohibition (the porneia word group appears over forty times), are you going to obey the meaning of porneia as it was understood in the biblical era and by the Early Church Fathers, or what those English words mean to you today? Let me take a wild guess.

I can’t help but smile when I think about “the authority” of Scripture being located in those so-called “original manuscripts.” If that’s where its authority is located, that’s surely where its intended meaning as “the Word of God” is located—in what its writers and their contemporaries thought those words meant at the time. I’m not sure we can have it both ways: timelessly the same for some things, not so for others.

Let me close with one further example.

In 1946, with the RSV version of the Bible, a new English word entered the biblical vocabulary—one that had never before been used in any Bible translation: homosexual. The RSV used it to translate a Greek word in 1 Corinthians 6:9, arsenokoitēs (in combination with a separate word, that we’ll come on to in a moment). Conservative evangelical Bible versions, such as the ESV and the NASB, continue to do so to this day.

Several things are interesting about that decision.

One is that the word group homosexual (and, for that matter, heterosexual) did not exist until the late nineteenth century, concurrently with the new awareness of same-sex attraction as an innate orientation (rather than simply unbounded bad behaviour by naturally opposite-sex attracted people, as had previously been assumed). There was no New Testament Greek word for homosexual—the modern category is being “read into” other original words.   

Another interesting thing is that 1 Corinthians 6:9 is the first instance (we know) of the word in any ancient literature. Paul may or may not have made it up (though presumably the Corinthians would have known what he was talking about), yet with no contemporary literature available for reference, its intended meaning at the time is unclear.

Arsenokoitēs is a compound word, from two separate Greek words for “man” and “bed”—so, something to do with men “bedding,” perhaps? Some kind of slang, or euphemism?

As to its meaning, we all know that compound words are more than the sum of their parts (take a “wideboy,” for example).

Conservatives will point to those two separate Greek words (for “man” and “bed”) being found in the LXX (Greek translation) of Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13. But that isn’t in itself telling us what Paul had in mind in arsenokoitēs in 1 Corinthians 6 (unless, of course, we’ve already decided that it “must be”—that those Leviticus verses are “obviously” a roadmap).

Of further interest is that the word pornos also features in 1 Corinthians 6:9 (suggesting that arsenokoitēs is something to be distinguished from the broader category of “sexual immorality”—as the ESV and NASB translate pornos).    

In Martin Luther’s German Bible (1534), he translated arsenokoitēs as Knabenschänder—meaning “molester of boys.” It’s not unreasonable to think that Luther believed Paul was condemning the widespread Greco-Roman practice of pederasty (older men having sex with young teenage boys as part of some weird idea of mentoring).

1 Corinthians 6:9 also condemns an additional Greek word, which both the ESV and NASB ignore in its own right, lumping it in with homosexual. In other words, they take it to be another way of condemning the same thing rather than seeking to translate them separately. That word is malakos, and it appears in only two other verses, Matthew 11:8 and Luke 7:25, where Jesus uses it to describe “men who wear soft clothing.” The word clothing is in italics because it’s not in the original. The Greek says “men who wear soft”—“softies,” one might say. The KJV translated it as “the effeminate.” Again, we are probably into slang and euphemisms as the “Word of God.”

The ESV and NASB chose not to translate malakos as “wearers of soft clothing” in 1 Corinthians 6:9—nor, for that matter, do the Gospels translate it as “homosexuals” in their two instances. Why might that have been? We shouldn’t expect the same English word always to translate a biblical word, of course, but to get from “wearers of soft clothing” or “effeminate” to the modern category of “homosexual” in a single bound (and especially by treating two separate Greek words as if they were one single English word) feels more like ideology than a contextually essential translation.   

So back to our starting point. English words are doing a lot of work when it comes to what the “Word of God” is.

Which is worth remembering next time somebody tells you that they don’t “interpret” the Bible; they just believe what it says. The lingering question is: What exactly is the “it” in “what it says”? Is it the ancient Greek and Hebrew text, the Second Temple era Greek translation of the Hebrew (LXX), the modern English translation (if so, which one), the translator’s choice of particular English words, or the reader who “already knows” what the words must have meant before they even opened their Bible?

This is not simply academic nitpicking, or trying to obfuscate the “plain meaning” of Scripture (unless, of course, we’ve already decided what that plain meaning “must be”). These kinds of questions are crucial, not least when unyielding doctrinal standpoints are founded on the decisions—the church’s posture towards homosexual people being the obvious example.

I leave the married readers to discuss with their spouses which forms of biblical “sexual immorality” they will now be refraining from.