1 Timothy 1:10

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The context

Paul writes to Timothy, left in Ephesus to restrain teachers who want to be "teachers of the law" without understanding either the law or their own assertions (1:3–7). Verses 8–11 supply the criterion: the law is good if used lawfully, and it is laid down not for the righteous but for the lawless.

Verse 10 falls inside a vice list running from 1:9 to 1:10, which closes with a catch-all — "whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine" — tied in 1:11 to the gospel. The list is illustrative rather than exhaustive: it shows what the law's diagnostic function looks like when applied.

The words

Arsenokoitai is a compound of arsen ("male") and koite ("bed"), and it is not attested in surviving Greek literature before Paul. The most defensible account of its formation is that it was built from the Greek of Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, where both elements appear in a single clause. Its components are clear; its exact extension is not.

Andrapodistai comes from andrapodon, a person taken captive and sold — slave-dealers, the Greek dress of the offense in Exodus 21:16. It stands beside pornoi (the sexually immoral), pseustai (liars), and epiorkoi (perjurers). Paul's verb is keitai, "laid down": the law names the disease rather than curing it.

What this passage establishes

Paul draws a boundary around apostolic teaching and places these acts outside it. The law, rightly used, exposes them; it does not justify the one who wields it. The verse therefore functions as a criterion for what may be taught in Ephesus, not as a penal code.

What it does not establish

It does not supply a modern taxonomy. A vice list names offenses without mapping their boundaries. Arsenokoitai has no pre-Christian usage to pin it down, and whether it denotes same-sex acts generally or a specific exploitative or commercial form is disputed. The word is plainly negative; it is not a definition.

It does not legislate for the state. Paul is instructing a coworker about what may be taught in a congregation (1:3), in a letter about order in the church. Nothing here assigns civil penalties or tells a magistrate what to do.

It does not settle the questions modern argument presses. The verse names acts. It says nothing about orientation, about temptation as distinct from action, or about how a congregation should treat either. Claims that it addresses those questions import conclusions into a word list.

How the church has read it

Patristic, medieval, and Reformation interpreters alike took arsenokoitai as naming homosexual acts and read the verse within a wider call to chastity, usually alongside Romans 1 and Leviticus. Twentieth-century revisionist readings (Scroggs, Boswell) proposed narrower referents — pederasty, or male prostitution — and critics replied that the word's Levitical formation makes a narrow sense unlikely. The pre-modern reading is not in dispute; what it obliges now is where the argument lies.

First pass, written October 2026. Corrections welcome.

Cited in these answers

Part of Scripture, Opened — the exegetical layer behind every citation on this site. Scripture quotations are from the ESV.