In a debate with Allie Beth Stuckey and a young man named Paul, he brings up several Greek words to try to show that the Bible is not speaking against homosexuality. The claim was that
1) The Hebrew word for kadesh is a cult male prostitute so Leviticus is not speaking against homosexuality but against prostitution. But this isn’t the case. The word kadesh is not even found anywhere in Leviticus.
2) The second claim was that arsenokoitai or its variant found in 1 Cor 6:9 in its earliest form meant economic exploitation. This is not the case either. It means a man who slept with another man.
3) The third attempt is to claim that malakoi, the Greek word in 1 Cor 6:9. The young man Paul says that this word is used for effeminate men castrating themselves for the goddess of Athena.
So let’s look at claim #3. Malakoi is a Greek term that was used more commonly and means “soft.”
We see it used in several places in the gospels representative of soft clothing (Mt 11:8 and Luke 7:25). The context here in 1 Cor 6:9 is clearly in the context of sexual immorality and more effeminate men looking to get male sex partners.
The word is often used of a morally weak man who is a slave of pleasure. But it also has strong sexual connotations. Context determines if it is sexual or not and in 1 Corinthians it is clearly sexual in nature.
In the first century, Philo of Alexandria (20 BC – 50 AD) uses the term for men who make themselves sexually available and weak (De Specialibus Legibus 3.37–42).
“And he [the Law] commands that the males who imitate women be expelled; for those who have transformed their nature into something foreign, being men, so as to make themselves soft (malakoi) and to overturn their manliness, he drives out of the community as shameful and unlawful persons. And seeing men mounting upon men, and women upon women, he regards this as one of the greatest evils; for it is nothing other than lack of self-control in pleasure and a passion contrary to nature.”
When combined with the the word arsenokoitai, the person of malakoi takes on the effeminate, receiving end of the male homosexual act.
So was this “effeminate men castrating themselves for the goddess of Athena” as the young man Paul claims? No, that isn’t true.
Some gods did have males who prostituted themselvves to the gods. But it wasn’t Athena. And the word used wasn’t malakoi, it was Galloi. Malkoi was effeminate men who were morally soft because of their pursuit of pleasure, specifically homosexual pleasures. Galloi were the ones who castrated themselves to their gods.
Many years later, there was a Latin equivalent of the Greek work malakoi and that was mollis. (Juvenal, Satire 2.110–115).
“Grieving mothers—see your sons made women, priests of Cybele, their manhood gone.”
But this was not the case in the first century. Juvenal was written in the second century so around 100 years later.
The word malakoi was never used in the 1st Century Graeco-Roman world to mean a man who had castrated himself for worship. That word was Galloi. Or another close equivalent was eunouchos ().
So the claim is false. It is a person trying to strong-arm another to believe that which is not true by citing information that does not exist. The young man Paul also says this is in Romans 1. It isn’t.