The speaker in this video is Brandan Robertson, a queer progressive Christian minister and theologian, author of Queer & Christian: Reclaiming the Bible, Our Faith, and Our Place at the Table (St. Martin's Essentials, 2025). Several of his TikTok videos have appeared in my Facebook feed, and I've watched them with growing irritation. TikTok videos seem to come and go, so I've transcribed this one:
And many of you will know the story because of the great work of the documentary crew 1946. If you've not seen that documentary, you should watch it. Amazing, amazing! But obviously, a fairly innocent translation mistake in 1946 led those English Bible translators to render the mysterious word arsenocoitai which is just a reference to Leviticus 18:22, which is a clear reference to exploitative sexual practice. They innocently chose the word "homosexual' because they thought that was making the Bible more modern, more relatable and now decades later almost every English translation has followed suit and most people assume that the Bible condemns homosexuality.
I haven't read Queer and Christian yet, nor have I seen 1946. In this post I'm going to address what Robertson says in this reel.
It's grotesque and morally tone-deaf to declare blandly that Leviticus condemns copulation between males as an "exploitative sexual practice." First, the Hebrew Bible has no objection to exploitative sexual practices, from selling young women into marriage (Genesis 29, for example) to concubinage to prostitution (Genesis 38) to the sexual enslavement of girls and women taken as booty in war (Numbers 31:15-20, Deuteronomy 21:10-14) to Yahweh himself grooming a girl child for his sexual use (Ezekiel 16).
Second, Leviticus demands the execution of both the "exploiter" and the "exploited"; it's as if I were to rob Brandan Robertson, and he was jailed as well as me. There's no ethical concern there, only an obsession with ritual purity. The same is true of Paul, even if he's right about 'arsenokoitai'; Robin Scroggs proposed that reading in his well-meaning but homophobic 1983 study, and he too overlooked that Paul also condemned the supposedly exploited 'malakoi.' So too did the RSV translators, by conflating the two categories under "homosexuals."
I haven't seen 1946 yet, so I don't know how the translators of the Revised Standard Version saw homosexuality. I do know that in that time and environment, the educated and compassionate view was that it was a disabling mental illness, but also that the homosexual was a predatory danger to the normal. I don't know, then, if their translation was "innocent" or accurately reflected their conception of the male bed. On Robertson's own reading, it still seems a reasonable translation, but like other apologists he wants to define homosexuality very narrowly, to defend styles he finds attractive and erase or demonize others. There's still a great deal of confusion over what "homosexual" refers to, even or especially among academics, and it has been there all along.
Numerous gay Christian apologists have claimed that when Jesus healed a centurion's slave / boy / whatever, he affirmed a gay relationship. I'll have to read Queer and Christian to see if Robertson is one of these. But by gay Christian apologists' criteria that relationship could only have been exploitative.
It's very dishonest to blame antigay sentiment among English-speakers on this one passage alone, given Leviticus and Romans, or the endemic Christian antigay bigotry of centuries before 1946. As I recall, reactionary Christians in the US mostly attacked the Revised Standard Version anyway, hewing to the Authorized (or King James) Version. The waves of antigay repression that swept this country in the 20th century had little or nothing to do with the RSV or the translation of this verse. Does Robertson believe that psychiatry based its hostility to homosexuality on the 1946 RSV rendering of 1 Corinthians 6:9?
