JBL 138, no.

1 (2019): 221–240
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.15699/jbl.1381.2019.522595

More Evidence Pertaining to

“Their Females” in Romans 1:26

david j. murphy
david.murphy20@verizon.net
New York, NY 10025

According to the standard view, the “females” of Rom 1:26b have sexual inter-
course with other females. According to an older interpretation, however, they
engage in nonprocreative sex with men. In this article, I present hitherto unno-
ticed material in support of the latter interpretation. First, when χρῆσις/χράομαι
(“use”) denotes a sex act, its subject is the man, and the context involves penetra-
tion. It is doubtful that χρῆσις in Rom 1:26b refers to female–female sex. Second,
I cite three additional ancient writers who deem male–female nonprocreative sex
“unnatural.” Third, discrepant views among earlier Byzantine writers (Anasta-
sius, Arethas, and Greek redactors of Pseudo-Methodius’s Apocalypse) reinforce
how the female–female interpretation was not the prevailing one in the early
centuries. Fourth, linguistic features of Rom 1:27a more readily support the anal–
oral interpretation than the female–female interpretation.

διὰ τοῦτο παρέδωκεν αὐτοὺς ὁ Θεὸς εἰς πάθη ἀτιμίας· αἵ τε γὰρ θήλειαι αὐτῶν
μετήλλαξαν τὴν φυσικὴν χρῆσιν εἰς τὴν παρὰ φύσιν, ὁμοίως τε καὶ οἱ ἄρσενες
ἀφέντες τὴν φυσικὴν χρῆσιν τῆς θηλείας ἐξεκαύθησαν ἐν τῇ ὀρέξει αὐτῶν εἰς
ἀλλήλους, ἄρσενες ἐν ἄρσεσιν τὴν ἀσχημοσύνην κατεργαζόμενοι … (Rom 1:26‒27)
Because of this God handed them over to passions of dishonor; for both their
females exchanged the natural use for the one contrary to nature, and in like man-
ner also the males, letting go the natural use of the female, were enkindled in their
appetite toward one another, males on/in males working unseemliness …”1

According to the standard interpretation, the “females” of Rom 1:26 took up

sexual relations with each other. A rival of this “female‒female” interpretation
(henceforth FF) is the view that the females took up anal and/or oral sex with men
(henceforth AO). Although it is the interpretation attested first in the church, AO
has been revived only recently. Despite some three decades of debate over FF and

1 All translations in this article are my own. The siglum Σ stands for “scholion/scholia.” I

thank David Frederickson, Michael Stoller, and the Journal’s two anonymous reviewers for their
comments on an earlier version of this article.

221
222 Journal of Biblical Literature 138, no. 1 (2019)

AO, however, there remains hitherto unnoticed evidence that bears on the linguis-
tic and cultural assumptions that Paul and his readers will have brought to this text.2
In this article I present material that further supports AO: (1) evidence that sexual
χρῆσις presumed penetration, and the female was not its subject; (2) three addi-
tional expressions of the belief that anal/oral sex between males and females vio-
lates natural law; (3) diverse readings of Rom 1:26 by earlier Byzantine writers,
which help show that FF was not originally the prevailing view; and (4) linguistic
features of 1:27 that help interpret 1:26.
The focus of the present article is philological and historical. The results, how-
ever, are not without relevance to issues in our own time. Romans 1:26‒27 has
become known among the “clobber verses” used by those who argue that Paul
condemns both male and female same-sex relations. If AO stands as plausible,
however, Rom 1:26b cannot be considered a condemnation of female homoeroti-
cism, since females’ unnatural couplings with males would be the matter. It would
follow that female–female erotic relations receive no mention in the Bible, for no
other passage can be construed as addressing them. Second, if our passage does not
concern female homoeroticism, then it does not articulate a generic category of
homoeroticism differentiated into female–female and male–male expressions. At
the very least, caution should temper attempts to apply Rom 1:26‒27 to debates
about same-sex relationships among those who seek to regulate practice by what
they understand as the apostle’s meaning.

2 Tomy knowledge, AO was first resurrected in modern times by Hermann L. Strack and
Paul Billerbeck in StrB, 3:68. For the state of the question, see Hans Debel, “Unnatural Intercourse
in Romans 1:26‒27: Homosexual or Heterosexual?,” in The Letter to the Romans, ed. Udo Schnelle,
BETL 226 (Leuven: Peeters, 2009), 631‒40. Debel argues on behalf of AO. The only new argument
I have seen since Debel is the claim that we have no ancient evidence that women asserted control
over the manner of intercourse with men (Preston Sprinkle, People to Be Loved: Why Homosexuality
Is Not Just an Issue [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2015], 212 n. 29; William R. G. Loader, “Homo­
sexuality and the Bible,” in Two Views on Homosexuality, the Bible and the Church, ed. Preston
Sprinkle, Counterpoints: Bible and Theology [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016], 17‒48, here 38).
Against this: (1) females in 1:26 do assert agency toward men, for they change the mode of
intercourse; and (2) females did offer themselves to males for anal or oral sex for various reasons,
even to experience pleasure; see, e.g. Aristophanes, Plut. 149–152; Seneca (the Elder), Controv.
1.2.22; Valerius Maximus, Facta et dicta memorabilia 2.5.6; Ovid, Ars 2.679; Martial, Epigr. 3.87,
4.84, 9.67.3, 11.43, 11.78, 11.104.13‒22; Carmina priapea 3.7‒8; Anth. Pal. 5.54 = Dioscurides 7;
Augustine, Bon. conj. 11‒12, Nupt. 2.59; Gen. Rab. 55:V 2.B; b. Yebam. 34b. Evidence from art
about anal and oral sex is found in Martin F. Kilmer, Greek Erotica on Attic Red-Figure Vases
(London: Duckworth, 1993); and John R. Clarke, Roman Sex: 100 B.C.–A.D. 250 (New York:
Abrams, 2003). Tituli of prostitutes who advertised fellatio appear in Thomas A. McGinn, The
Economy of Prostitution in the Roman World: A Study of Social History and the Brothel (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2004), appendix 3; see also Anise K. Strong, Prostitutes and Matrons
in the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 137‒38, 207, 259 n. 64.
 Murphy: “Their Females” in Romans 1:26 223

I.  Xρῆσις and Penetration

For understanding the females’ action in Rom 1:26b, David E. Fredrickson has
pointed to the importance of χρῆσις | χράομαι, a complex that can denote one per-
son’s sexual “use” of another (LSJ, s.v. “χράομαι,” C.IV.2; BDAG, s.v. “χράομαι,” 3).3
When it refers to the act of intercourse, χρῆσις is assigned to the male, who is
expected to penetrate the other and thus “use” that person—a woman, a boy, a male
slave.4 It is no surprise that Fredrickson found no case in ancient Greek where one
female is said to enjoy sexual χρῆσις of another female. Based on an extensive sur-
vey of χρῆσις and χράομαι in Greek literature, I carry Fredrickson’s conclusion for-
ward two steps.5 First, sexual χρῆσις presumes penetration. An active or penetrative
partner A penetrates a passive or receptive partner B. Second, A is often described
as “using” B or having “use of ” B simpliciter, with no further predicate ascribed to
B, as in the examples in n. 4 above. In Rom 1:27, the males had “χρῆσις of the female”
simpliciter. If B is said to have χρῆσις of A, however, as a rule this relation is not
expressed simpliciter but rather under some specification that defines A’s role in the
relationship, for example, “use of ” A as husband or lover or the like. I have not

3 David E. Fredrickson, “Natural and Unnatural Use in Romans 1:24‒27,” in Homosexuality,

Science and the “Plain Sense” of Scripture, ed. David L. Balch (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000),
197‒222.
4 E.g., fallen angels had “ ‘use’ of the female” (τοῦ θήλεος … ἡ χρῆσις) (Theodoret, Graec.

affect. curatio 3.91); the Massagetae “ ‘use’ each other’s wives” (Strabo, Geogr. 11.8.6); “to have
‘used’ the same courtesan” (μίᾳ ἑταίρᾳ κεχρῆσθαι) (Basil, Ep. 160.3); “intending to ‘use’/‘having
used’ ” a comely boy (χρησόμενος αὐτῷ … κεχρῆσθαι τῷ παιδί) (Hieronymus of Rhodes, fr. 35
Wehrli = Athenaeus, Deipn. 13.82). Christian writers employ χρῆσις for a husband’s act of inter­
course with his wife (Clement, Strom. 3.11.71.4; Justin, Dial. 110; Athenagoras, Leg. 32.1) or with
a concubine (Epiphanius, Pan. 3.458). On the sexual sense of χρήσασθαι, see further Debel,
“Unnatural Intercourse,” 639‒40; Joseph A. Marchal, “The Usefulness of an Onesimus: The Sexual
Use of Slaves and Paul’s Letter to Philemon,” JBL 130 (2011): 749‒70, esp. 753‒54, https://doi.org/
10.2307/23488277; C. W. Marshal and Pauline Ripat, “Enjoying a Slave Woman in P.Oxy. LXXIV
5019,” ZPE 191 (2014): 231‒34. For this sense of the Latin utor | usus (Oxford Latin Dictionary,
s.v. “usus,” 10), see James N. Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1982), 198. Although life admitted variation, Greek and Roman writers generally
framed a man’s sexual relations with women, boys, slaves, and noncitizen males in an insertive–
receptive paradigm. A balanced analysis of this paradigm is found in Craig Williams, Roman
Homosexuality, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 18‒19, 183‒97, 258‒62.
Sandra Boehringer shows how female–female relations eluded it (L’homosexualité féminine dans
l’antiquité grecque et romaine, CEA.G 135 [Paris: Belles Lettres, 2007]).
5 I have checked all 4,030 instances of χρῆσις in the TLG into the fifth century CE. Of the

verb, χράομαι, I have checked all 21,845 instances in the same time period in first-person singular,
third-person singular, third-person plural indicative, subjunctive, and optative, and infinitive and
feminine participle. Most instances of course do not refer to erotic contexts.
224 Journal of Biblical Literature 138, no. 1 (2019)

found χρῆσις used in the way that FF needs, that is, to have as its object a partner
whom a female “uses” in a sex act with no further specification.
Discussion of legal cases in Greek rhetoric illustrates how A’s sexual χρῆσις of
B was assumed to entail penetration.
1. In a speech ascribed to Lysias, Alcibiades and his cousin Axiochus take
turns sleeping with the teenaged daughter of one of them—they knew not which—
and if one man “would use and have her” (ξυνεκοιμῶντο καὶ ταύτῃ, καὶ εἰ μὲν χρῷτο
καὶ ἔχοι), the other would claim to be her father (fr. 5.8 Carey = Athen. XII.48).
They covered up the incest, whosever it was.
2. The pseudo-Demosthenic Against Neaera is a defense on a charge of seduc-
ing a woman with whom the defendant could not have intercourse legally. The
defendant admits that he “used the person” (χρῆσθαι τῇ ἀνθρώπῳ) but denies that
he committed the crime of seduction because the girl is a prostitute (67; cf. “he has
used [κέχρηται] her many times,” 71). Necessary for the charge of seduction is the
assumption that he penetrated the girl—an action that the defendant does not deny.
3. In a scholion on Hermogenes’s De statibus abridged from Sopater’s com-
mentary (fifth century CE), the husband has killed a eunuch whom he found hav-
ing amorous relations with his wife. The prosecution argues that, since the eunuch
“lacks the ability to have χρῆσις” (λείπει δὲ τὸ καὶ τὴν χρῆσιν ἔχειν δύνασθαι), the
husband cannot argue in defense that the eunuch was committing adultery.6
The expectation that sexual χρῆσις entailed penetration was so strong that to
two subordinate males penetrating superior females—ass on horse and man on
goddess—Dio Chrysostom can accord χρῆσις “of ” those powerful females, how-
ever perilous that “use” might be (Serv. 21). The same expectation is implicit in
Epiphanius’s explanation of why St. Joseph’s sons were from another wife: “for he
has not ‘used’ the virgin at all” (οὐδὲ γὰρ κέχρηται τῇ παρθένῳ ὅλως, Pan. 1.2.28.7.6
[GCS 25]). When it refers to A’s “use of ” B in a sex act, χρῆσις does not mean “pen-
etration,” but I have found no instance where A’s χρῆσις does not involve penetra-
tion.
When women or boys are the subjects of χρῆσις‒χράομαι in erotic contexts,
these subordinate partners are said to “use” sexual couplings with men (“acts of
‘marriage,’ ” γάμοις, Demosthenes, Cor. 129; “intercourse,” συνουσίαις, Aristotle,
Pol. 7.16, 1335a24; “erotic couplings,” ἐρωτικαῖς ὁμιλίαις, Aristotle, fr. 611 Rose;
“sowing and plowing,” Plutarch, Conj. praec. 42 [144b]) or “embraces” (Eusebius,
Praep. ev. 7.835), or to “use” sex toys (Herodas, Mimiambi 6.29). They “use” their
own body parts (Lysias, Epist. fr. 463 Carey; Galen, De usu partium 14.2, 14.9, 14.10
[Helmreich 2:286, 313, 319]) or, as often, “sexual experiences,” ἀφροδίσια, or

6 Scholia in Hermogenem, in Christian Walz, Rhetores Graeci, 9 vols. (Stuttgart and Tübingen:

J. G. Cotta, 1832–1836; repr., Osnabruck: Otto Zeller, 1968), 5:96.16‒18.

 Murphy: “Their Females” in Romans 1:26 225

“pleasures,” ἡδοναί. As noted above, when they have χρῆσις “of ” a man in an erotic
context, the man is described under some relational specification, for example, “as
a lover” (Plutarch, Galb. 19.5) or as a husband (John Chrysostom, Hom. Matt. 68.4
[PG 58:645]).
I know only two passages in which a woman’s χρῆσις might denote her “use
of ” a man simpliciter in a sex act. First, Pseudo-Plutarch reports that Pythagoras,
Epicurus, and Democritus say that females as well as males produce seed, since the
female has testes turned backwards and therefore has an appetite for χρῆσις (ὄρεξιν
ἔχει περὶ τὰς χρήσεις [Plac. philos.] 5.ε´ [905b]). Here as in Rom 1:26, though, χρῆ-
σις takes no genitive object, and it goes beyond the text to read in “of the male.” It
is more consistent with the scope of female χρῆσις to understand an activity, not
the man, as the implied object. Galen writes in this manner of female animals in
heat, when they have a drive to “ ‘use’ intercourse” (ὀργᾶν … χρήσασθαι συνουσίᾳ,
De crisibus 1.9).
The second passage is in the pseudonymous epistle of Clement of Rome to
James: “the first adultery is for the husband not to ‘use’ only his own wife and for
the wife not to ‘use’ only her own husband” (πρώτη μοιχεία ἐστὶν τὸ ἄνδρα μὴ ἰδίᾳ
μόνῃ χρήσασθαι γυναικὶ καὶ γυναῖκα μὴ ἰδίῳ μόνῳ χρήσασθαι ἀνδρί, 8.2).7 It is not
clear, however, whether χρήσασθαι denotes an act or an erotic relationship in a
general sense. Rufinus (ca. 404‒405 CE) rendered the thought in the latter way: “for
the wife not to save herself only for her own husband” (mulierem non proprio tan-
tum se servare viro).8 It is worth noting, too, that these passages presume male
penetration of the female.
Treatment of our verse by Didymus the Blind underscores how it would be
strange for an ancient Greek writer to say that the female has “use of the male”
simpliciter in a sex act. Writing his Commentary on Zechariah in around 387 CE,
Didymus seems to be the first Greek Christian writer to associate Rom 1:26 with
female‒female sex.9 He makes use of Rom 1:26 twice. In book 2, presenting an
altered form of Rom 1:22‒29, Didymus enlists “the apostle” to “explain” (ἑρμήνυσεν)
the sinful mind of idolators. One of Didymus’s alterations is to transpose Rom 1:26
to follow a denunciation of the males based on Rom 1:27. A second is to delete
“letting go the natural use” (ἀφέντες τὴν φυσικὴν χρῆσιν) in the description of the
males and to transpose its specification, “of the female” (τῆς θηλείας), into 1:26 to

7 Clement of Rome, Epitome de gestis Petri praemetaphrastica 152.4. Cf. Die Pseudoklemen­

tinen I. Homilien, 3rd ed., ed. Bernhard Rehm and Georg Strecker, GCS 42 (Berlin: Akademie,
1992), 5‒22. The text originated ca. 260 in Syria and was reworked ca. 300‒320.
8 Bronwen Neil, “Rufinus’ Translation of the Epistola Clementis ad Iacobum,” Aug 43 (2003):

25‒39; and on the date, 25‒26.

9 For the date, see Robert C. Hill, Didymus the Blind, Commentary on Zechariah, FC 111

(Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 3‒5. I use the text established by Louis
Doutreleau, Sur Zacharie: Texte inédit d’ après un papyrus de Toura, 3 vols., SC 83‒85 (Paris: Cerf,
1962).
226 Journal of Biblical Literature 138, no. 1 (2019)

yield ὡσαύτως καὶ αἱ θήλειαι αὐτῶν μετήλλαξαν τὴν φυσικὴν χρῆσιν τῆς θηλείας εἰς
τὴν παρὰ φύσιν (“And in like manner also their females exchanged the natural use
of the female for the one contrary to nature,” 2.208).10 This transposition of τῆς
θηλείας is inept. If Didymus means the genitive as subjective, “the female’s natural
use [of someone else],” it is awkwardly redundant right after the subject, αἱ θήλειαι.
Moreover, a genitive adjacent to χρῆσις is invariably objective, for χρῆσις is a rela­
tional term. Objective genitive would leave “the males” as the subjects of χρῆσις,
entailing that they continue to have “use” of the female after the “exchange”—that
is, entailing AO.11 Since Didymus says nothing more here about the females, it is
not clear whether he thinks that they have unnatural sex with men after the
“exchange.” In book 4, without acknowledging Paul, Didymus rearranges and
adapts Rom 1:26‒28 to denounce sinners in their conceit of knowledge. He closes
with the words “but also [ἀλλὰ καί] their females, abandoning the natural use of
the female, also undergo things [καὶ πάθουσιν] contrary to nature—but also women
[ἀλλὰ καὶ γυναῖκες] go mad like whores [πορνικῶς] over women” (4.52). Didymus
again is inserting “of the female” after “natural use.” It is not clear whether the
anaphoric ἀλλὰ καὶ γυναῖκες clause is meant to define what the females do in the
prior ἀλλὰ καί clause or to enumerate an additional sin, so that females undergo
unnatural χρῆσις with men and have sex with each other.12 On either construal,
Didymus steers clear of defining the scope of χρῆσις.13 On the contrary, he erases
it from the end of the first clause by substituting πάθουσιν for Paul’s τήν (which, in
the phrase εἰς τὴν παρὰ φύσιν [Rom 1:26], refers back to χρῆσιν). This erasure fore-
grounds the females’ passivity and avoids making them the subjects of χρῆσις. The
fact that Didymus will not state that women took up χρῆσις of women when they
“go mad” over them makes it look as though he senses that one woman does not
have χρῆσις of another in a sex act in ancient Greek linguistic practice and think-
ing.14
Exemplifying this thinking ex altera parte, Clement of Alexandria omits Paul’s
“of the female” when he quotes Rom 1:27 about the males (Paed. 2.10.86), as though

10 The insertion of τῆς θηλείας into Rom 1:26 appears also in Redactio 4 of Pseudo-

Methodius’s Apocalypse; see below, III.B.

11 Hill’s “their women giving up natural intercourse with women” (Didymus the Blind, 152)

cannot be right. Prior to the “exchange,” the females were not having sex with females, while to
construe χρῆσις in its first appearance merely as “interpersonal dealings” but as “sexual use” in its
implied second appearance creates a glaring equivocation.
12 The former is the view of Jeramy Townsley, “Paul, the Goddess Religions, and Queer Sects:

Romans 1:23‒28,” JBL 130 (2011): 707‒28, here 713, https://doi.org/10.2307/23488275. Didymus
does not state anything here in book 4 about Paul’s meaning.
13 Anaphora of ἀλλὰ καί also appears in Didymus’s Fr. Ps. 1074 Mühlenberg, lines 38‒39, but

it has the different function of restating as metaphor the content of the previous ἀλλὰ καί clause.
14 Robert A. J. Gagnon simply reads in “of the male as a sexual partner” in Rom 1:26 as the

object of the “natural use” that the females abandoned (The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts
and Hermeneutics [Nashville: Abingdon, 2001], 298).
 Murphy: “Their Females” in Romans 1:26 227

it is obvious that a male’s “natural use” in a sex act will be “of ” a female. Xρῆσις,
then, does not designate simply any sexual act.15
I have found only one possible counterexample to this last conclusion. Both
language and the demands of context, however, show that it is not so. In another
scholion on Hermogenes, Sopater presents a lover fruitlessly in love with a youth
(Walz, Rhetores Graeci, 5:140.26‒32). The youth for his part “was using” a courte-
san, and then, “in the place of the courtesan, a soldier” (τὸ μειράκιον ἑταίρᾳ ἐχρῆτο,
ἀνθ’ ἑταίρας δὲ στρατιώτῃ). By governing the two datives, ἐχρῆτο attributes to the
youth the same role with the soldier as with the courtesan. He must have taken the
active role with her. Although it inverts stereotypes for a youth to be active and a
soldier passive, that configuration fits our passage. When the youth is subsequently
found murdered, “lover” and soldier accuse each other. As material for budding
lawyers’ speeches in the rhetorical schools, such cases, most often fictional, had to
supply a credible reason for suspects to be accused. It is clear why the jilted lover
should be a suspect, but our text supplies no reason why the soldier, if he were the
active partner, would murder his paramour, who had preferred him to the rejected
lover and to the courtesan. If the youth was the active partner, however, the soldier
would be shamed or worse if that dynamic of the affair became known, and violence
would be a plausible reaction to actual or prospective disclosure. We hear of
opprobrium spurring a passive partner to murder a boastful lover (Plutarch, Amat.
768f), or a soldier, mocked as pathic, to vindicate his manhood through violence
(Suetonius, Cal. 56‒58).16 Further, before the murder is discovered, the soldier
makes a remark that appears corrupt in the manuscript, but if ἔφη οὐ χρήσειν τὸ
μειράκιον can imply that he thinks the youth would not “furnish” gifts (see LSJ, s.v.
“χράω,” B.I; or “lend”?), we have a second possible motive.17 Many school declama-
tions featured off-beat erotic scenarios—for example, a husband murders a woman
who, he says, penetrated his wife (Seneca the Elder, Contr. 1.2.23) —and homo-
sexual prostitution figured among them.18 A declamation could well have fea-
tured a venal and hotheaded soldier, perhaps a mercenary, who gives himself for
sex for compensation; Polybius reveals that such occurred even under Roman
military discipline.19 We do hear of older males and even soldiers as receptive

15 Contra ibid., 297; and William Loader, The New Testament on Sexuality, Attitudes towards

Sexuality in Judaism and Christianity in the Hellenistic Greco-Roman Era (Grand Rapids: Eerd­
mans, 2012), 309.
16 I owe the Plutarch reference to Andrew Lear. I also thank Malcolm Heath for discussing

this passage; the interpretation is my own.

17 I am grateful to Dr. Elisabetta Lugato of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice for

confirming by autopsy that Walz’s report of the reading of MS Marc. gr. 433 (coll. 765) is correct.
18 Donald A. Russell, Greek Declamation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983),

9, 35.
19 Polybius, Hist. 6.37.9: “if any soldier in the bloom of youth should be found making illicit

use [παραχρησάμενος] of his body” (cf. 31.25.4‒5). For these as references to prostitution by
Roman soldiers, see Ramsay MacMullen, “Attitudes to Greek Love,” Historia 31 (1982): 484‒502,
228 Journal of Biblical Literature 138, no. 1 (2019)

partners.20 Although my suggestions remain speculative, Sopater’s lacunose

account is explained if ἐχρῆτο entails penetration. It is not explained if ἐχρῆτο
entails nothing more than “having sex with.”
We are justified, then, to conclude that Paul and his readers would not expect
χρῆσις as used in Rom 1:26‒27 to denote a female’s “use of ” anyone in a sex act.
Paul looks at intercourse from the point of view, first, of the penetrated female, and
then from that of the penetrating male. Only the male has “use of ” the other part-
ner. In “natural” χρῆσις, the females are penetrated by males, and they do not have
“use” of anyone. In “unnatural” χρῆσις, the females again are penetrated by males,
and again they do not have “use” of anyone. They have only switched the orifice
they present for penetration. They are the subjects of the exchange but not subjects
of χρῆσις.
Moreover, the absence of a genitive object of χρῆσις in Rom 1:26b causes prob-
lems for FF. What is to happen in “χρῆσις against nature” if we have two females?
If neither penetrates the other, there is no χρῆσις. From the penetrative assumptions
encoded in the word, it follows that for a woman to have χρῆσις of another woman,
she must assume an insertive role.
But could Paul, then, have had in mind the tribade, a woman whom a few
ancient writers portrayed as assuming a man’s role in sex because she had an
enlarged clitoris or the like?21 The answer must be no.
Our few references to tribades begin with Latin authors in the earlier first
century CE, and in Greek, only in the second. A tribade is said to penetrate females
and males (Martial Epigr. 7.67.1‒3; Seneca, Epist. 95.21), using perhaps an enlarged

here 490 n. 22; and Craige B. Champion, Cultural Politics in Polybius’s Histories, HCS 41 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004), 58.
20 For soldiers in the passive role, see Eubulus fr. 118 (Poetae Comici Graeci, ed. R. Kassel

and C. Austin [Berlin: de Gruyter, 1983–]); Theopompus, FGH 115 F 224 and 225; Polybius, Hist.
6.37.9 (= 8.9.11‒12); Phaedrus, Append. 8; Suetonius, Dom. 10.5; Sara Elise Phang, The Marriage
of Roman Soldiers (13 BC ‒AD 235): Law and Family in the Imperial Army, CSCT 24 (Leiden: Brill,
2001), 282‒94. On passive males older than or coeval to active partners, see Amy Richlin, “Not
before Homosexuality: The Materiality of the Cinaedus and the Roman Law against Love between
Men,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 3 (1993): 523‒73; Rabun Taylor, “Two Pathic Subcultures
in Ancient Rome,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 7 (1997): 319‒71; Williams, Roman Homo­
sexuality, 43‒46, 90‒99, 212‒45; Thomas K. Hubbard, “Peer Homosexuality,” in A Companion to
Greek and Roman Sexualities, ed. Thomas K. Hubbard, Blackwell Companions to the Ancient
World 100 (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2014), 128–49, here 131, 142‒46.
21 The seventeenth-century anatomist Caspar Bartholin the Elder is the first I know who

took this view of Rom 1:26. He wrote of the clitoris: “in certain women it grows into the size of a
penis: to such an extent that sometimes some women misuse the clitoris in place of a man’s penis
and share sex together, and they call these women ‘rubbers’; and I think the Apostle Paul talks
about these in Rom 1:26” (Anatomicae institutiones corporis humani, utriusque sexus historiam et
declarationem exhibentes [Strasbourg: Scher, 1626], 141). The word him (eum), printed by mistake
after “Paul,” was expunged in the 1641 edition (Leiden apud Franciscum Hackium). Bartholin had
not mentioned Paul’s epistle in his 1611 Wittenberg edition.
 Murphy: “Their Females” in Romans 1:26 229

clitoris (Martial, Epigr. 1.90.6‒8) or dildo (Seneca the Elder, Contr. 1.2.23; Lucian
[Am.] 28; Suda ο [III.518:19–23 Adler], 169 s.v. “ὄλισβος”). Tribades are “man-faced,
not wanting to take it from men, approaching women just as men do” (see Lucian,
Dial. meretr. 5.2). It is an error to think that already in the first and second century,
τριβάς meant simply a woman who has sex with females, although it is so glossed
in late antique and Byzantine scholarship.22 In our early references, some tribades
took male partners, and not all female homoeroticism was called tribadism. Rather,
a tribade was a woman criticized for trying to act like a man, and it is not clear that
she was not largely a product of male imagination.23 The rarity of tribades in lit-
erature, to say nothing of the fictive elements of their representation, makes it
unlikely that Paul has them in mind in Rom 1:26, where he speaks about the gen-
erality of “their females.”

II.  Nonprocreative Male–Female Sex as παρὰ φύσιν

Defending FF, Bernadette Brooten criticized James Miller’s case for AO

because, she said, Miller failed to cite an ancient source that defines anal or oral sex
as against nature.24 Diana Swancutt replied with passages from various ancient
authors who brand anal or oral sex between male and female as παρὰ φύσιν.25

22 Pace Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary,

AB 33 (New York: Doubleday, 1993), 285; and Bernadette J. Brooten, Love between Women: Early
Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996),
42‒57, 143‒73. The word τριβάς is given as a synonym of ἑταιρίστρια and/or λεσβία in Byzantine
lexica (citations in Giuseppe Russo, Contestazione e conservazione: Luciano nell’ esegesi di Aretha,
BzA 297 [Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011], 131) and in three scholia of Arethas of Caesarea, viz., Σ Lucian
[Am.] 28.2 and Dial. meretr. 5.2.28 (pp. 205, 277 Rabe; on their Arethan provenance, see Russo,
Contestazione, 3‒9), and Σ Clement of Alexandria, Paed. 161.8 Marcovich. On Arethas and Rom
1:26, see further in III.A below.
23 On tribas and hetaeristria, see David Halperin, “The First Homosexuality?,” in The Sleep of

Reason: Erotic Experience and Sexual Ethics in Ancient Greece and Rome, ed. Martha C. Nussbaum
and Juha Sihvola (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 229‒68; Diana Swancutt, “Still before
Sexuality: ‘Greek’ Androgyny, the Roman Imperial Politics of Masculinity and the Roman Invention
of the Tribas,” in Mapping Gender in Ancient Religious Discourses, ed. Todd Penner and Caroline
Vander Stichele, BibInt 84 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 11‒61; Boehringer, L’homosexualité féminine,
261‒314.
24 James Miller, “The Practices of Romans 1:26‒27: Homosexual or Heterosexual?” NovT 37

(1995): 1‒11; Brooten, Love between Women, 248 n. 99.

25 Diana Swancutt, “The Disease of ‘Effemination’: The Charge of Effeminacy and the Verdict

of God (Romans 1:18‒2:16),” in New Testament Masculinities, ed. Stephen D. Moore and Janice
Capel Anderson, SemeiaSt 45 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 193‒233, here 209‒10; Swancutt, “Sexing the
Pauline Body of Christ: Scriptural Sex in the Context of the American Christian Culture War,” in
Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discipline, ed. Virginia Burrus
230 Journal of Biblical Literature 138, no. 1 (2019)

Because this evidence continues to go unnoticed by proponents of FF, I supplement

it with three further writers from within a century of Paul.
1. Around 160 CE, Justin Martyr tells of a Christian woman who thought it
would no longer be holy to sleep with her husband because “against the law of
nature and against justice, he continually kept trying to create passages of pleasure”
(παρὰ τὸν τῆς φύσεως νόμον καὶ παρὰ τὸ δίκαιον πόρους ἡδονῆς ἐκ παντὸς πειρωμένῳ
ποιεῖσθαι, 2 Apol. 2.4‒5). Justin is speaking in a double-entendre of the husband’s
attempts to have anal and/or oral sex with his wife, for one meaning of πόρος is
“bodily passage,” as often in Aristotle’s biological works and later (e.g. Clement of
Alexandria, Paed. 2.10.83‒87, 3.3.21.4; see LSJ, s.v. “πόρος,” I.6.b).26
2. When interpreting dreams in which men have sex with their mothers,
Artemidorus notes that “some” say that full frontal (σύγχρωτα or πρόσχρωτα) is the
only sexual position that is according to nature. Artemidorus later states on his own
authority that full frontal is the only position that nature teaches humans. To this
position he contrasts positions in which the mother is turned away, on her knees,
standing, or “on top” (Onir. 1.79). The first three of these can be found associated
with anal intercourse in ancient erotic art (see sources in n. 2 above). In his chapter
on dreams, among sex acts “against nature” Artemidorus includes fellatio (1.80),
having already pronounced it παρὰ φύσιν for a woman to receive semen by mouth
(1.79). In 1.80 as well he puts dreams in which a woman penetrates (περαίνῃ)
another woman. That is unnatural because the active woman takes on a man’s role.
Brooten neglected this nuance when she adduced the passage to prove that Artemi-
dorus considered female–female sex as such unnatural. In fact, for females Artemi-
dorus explicitly prescribes only the missionary position as natural, and he does not
mention nonpenetrative female–female sex.27
3. In Martial, Ponticus is upbraided for masturbating: “Believe that the Nature
of Things herself says to you: ‘That which you squander with your fingers, Ponticus,
is a human’ ” (ipsam crede tibi naturam dicere rerum: ‘Istud quod digitis, Pontice,
perdis, homo est,’ Epigr. 9.41.9‒10). On that reasoning, both anal and oral sex are
against nature. Martial does not develop a natural law ethic tied to procreation,
since another speaker says that nature supplies a boy’s anus for men to enjoy
(11.22.9‒10). I mention 9.41 only to underscore that principles on which anal or
oral sex could be deemed unnatural were familiar in the first century.

and Catherine Keller, Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquia (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2006), 65‒98, here 78.
26 See Robert M. Grant, “A Woman of Rome: The Matron in Justin, 2 Apology 2.1‒9,” CH 54

(1985): 461‒72, here 466; Denis Minns and Paul Parvis, Justin, Philosopher and Martyr: Apologies,
OECT (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 273 n. 7.
27 On Artemidorus’s sexual categories, see John J. Winkler, The Constraints of Desire: The

Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece (New York: Routledge, 1990), 36‒44.
 Murphy: “Their Females” in Romans 1:26 231

III. Discrepant Byzantine Interpretations of Romans 1:26

A strike against FF is the fact that only AO is attested during the first three
centuries after Paul.28 We first find FF set forth unambiguously in around 384, when
the commentator known as Ambrosiaster abandoned his own earlier allegiance to
AO to argue for FF in later editions of his Romans commentary.29 Shortly thereaf-
ter, as we saw above, Didymus the Blind sketched a form of FF. Even as FF was
gaining popularity, other interpreters such as Augustine continued to voice AO. As
late as the tenth century, Arethas (ca. 860‒932), archbishop of Caesarea, could
express different views at different times about “the females” activity in Rom 1:26.
In scholia that he wrote in his manuscript of Christian apologists, Arethas accepted
AO on authority of an unidentified “Anastasius.” In his Refutation of the Byzantine
patriarch, Nicholas, however, Arethas articulated a form of FF. Moreover, a third
approach, which I shall dub family dishonor (FD), is found in the late seventh-
century Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius. Clearly, FF was not the “default” during
Christianity’s earlier centuries.
1. The first three wives of Byzantine emperor Leo VI (reigned 886‒912) had
died without leaving him an heir. Despite his own previous sanctions against “third
marriages,” Leo sought to make his mistress his fourth wife and thus legitimatize
the son she had borne him—the future Constantine IX Porphyrogenitus. During
the ecclesiastical maneuvering around this issue, Arethas switched sides from
opposing Leo’s fourth marriage to defending it. After Leo’s death, tussles continued
between Arethas and Nicholas, who had opposed the marriage. In the Refutation,
Arethas contends that widows should be allowed to remarry. He warns that if they
cannot remarry, widows will take up sexual relations with women. Arethas invokes
Paul as an authority:
καὶ τί τὸ ἐντεῦθεν; … ἀλλήλαις τῶν θηλειῶν ἐπιμαινομένων τὴν φυσικὴν χρῆσιν, ᾗ
καὶ Παύλῳ τῷ θείῳ δοκεῖ, μεταλλάττειν καὶ πρὸς ἑταιριστρίας ἀναφέρεσθαι καὶ
τριβάδας.

28 Many ancient and early medieval interpretations are collected by Townsley, “Paul, the

Goddess Religions,” 707‒28; and Townsley, “Queer Sects in Patristic Commentaries on Romans
1:26‒27: Goddess Cults, Free Will and ‘Sex Contrary to Nature’?,” JAAR 81 (2013): 56‒79. Origen
(Comm. Rom. fr. 14.11) and Athanasius (C. gent. 26) associated Rom 1:26 with goddess cults, but
I group their discussions under AO because female sacred sex workers generally serviced men
(cf., e.g., Eusebius, Praep. ev. 7.2.4‒6; his γυναικῶν … παράνομοι ὁμιλίαι in Laud. Const. 8 and Vit.
Const. 3.55 are probably heterosexual [“lawless couplings of/with women”], for the context
concerns males). On the ambiguity of masculos et feminas inter se (“males and women among
themselves”) in Tertullian, Cor. 6.1, see Townsley, “Queer Sects,” 71; and Theodore S. de Bruyn,
“Ambrosiaster’s Interpretations of Romans 1:26‒27,” VC 65 (2011): 463‒83, here 475‒76.
29 See now Theodore S. de Bruyn, Stephen A. Cooper, and David G. Hunter, Ambrosiaster’s

Commentary on the Pauline Epistles: Romans, WGRW 41 (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2018).
232 Journal of Biblical Literature 138, no. 1 (2019)

And what will result from that? … the females will go mad for each other and,
as it seems to the divine Paul too, will exchange the natural use and have recourse
to prostitutes and tribades. (Scripta minora 14.2, p. 134.9‒13 Westerink)30

Arethas’s style has been described as “a tortuous, allusive, and equivocal Greek,
whose complexity may well reflect the conflicts in its author’s mind.”31 Here it is
not clear whether the unnatural-making feature of the widows’ conduct is homo-
eroticism per se or their connection to hetairistriai and tribades. Likewise, it is not
clear whether the latter two groups are synecdoche for all the widows’ prospective
female lovers or threaten to become their principal ones. In any case, since his
business in the Refutation is not exegesis but polemic, Arethas need only raise
doubt against Nicholas’s ban on remarriage; he does not need to present an analy-
sis of Rom 1:26. It is probably sufficient to suppose that he brings in tribades as
paradigmatic unnatural females in order to drive home the awful consequences of
Nicholas’s opposition to remarriage.32
On the other hand, in two scholia that he wrote in his manuscript of apolo-
getical works, Arethas presents AO as the sense of Rom 1:26. This manuscript,
Parisinus graecus 451 (= P), was copied by Baanes between September 913 and
August 914. One of the treatises in P is the Paedagogus of Clement of Alexandria.
Although Baanes wrote many scholia in other parts of P, almost all of P’s scholia to
the Paedagogus are in Arethas’s hand.33 In his chapter on procreation, Clement says
that Moses forbade eating hyena meat in order to condemn pederasty—for male
hyenas, says Clement, copulate mostly with each other (Paed. 2.10.85‒86).34 Along
the way, Clement quotes Rom 1:26‒27. As a gloss on “for their females,” Arethas
writes the following scholion: “ ‘Clearly not mounting each other, but offering
themselves to the men in this way [viz. contrary to nature]’; so Anastasius in his
exegetical work on the Epistle to the Corinthians” (Σ 121.33 Marcovich). We know
nothing about this Anastasius, nor do we know whether this scholion stood already
in the exemplar of P.35

30 Leendert G. Westerink, Arethae archiepiscopi Caesariensis Scripta minora, 2 vols., BSGRT

(Leipzig: Teubner, 1968–1972).

31 Robert Browning, review of Arethae archiepiscopi Caesariensis Scripta minora, by

Leendert G. Westerink, vol. 1, ClR 20 (1970): 331‒33, here 331.

32 For Arethas’s fascination with tribades, see n. 22 above; and Alan Cameron, “Love (and

Marriage) between Women,” GRBS 39 (1998): 137‒56, here 146‒49.

33 Designated as P2 by Otto Stählin, Protrepticus und Paedagogus, vol. 1 of Clemens

Alexandrinus, GCS 12 (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1905); and Miroslav Marcovich, Clementis Alexandrini
Paedagogus, VCSup 61 (Leiden: Brill, 2002).
34 Hyena meat is not forbidden in the Torah. Clement found this interdiction in the Epistle

of Barnabas; see William R. Schoedel, “Same-Sex Eros: Paul and the Greco-Roman Tradition,” in
Balch, Homosexuality, Science, 43‒72, here 64‒66.
35 Brooten (Love between Women, 337‒38) and Townsley (“Queer Sects,” 70) recorded

Anastasius’s adherence to AO but did not realize that Arethas wrote the scholion.
 Murphy: “Their Females” in Romans 1:26 233

When he comes to Clement’s denunciation of women who frequent sooth­

sayers and cultists, Arethas draws on Rom 1:26 of his own volition. About these
women, Clement had written:
Some men they keep, others they pray [to obtain], and still others the soothsay-
ers promise them. They do not know that they are deceived and are giving them-
selves out as vessels of pleasure to men who want sex [λαγνεύειν ἐθέλουσιν], and,
taking the most shameful dishonor in exchange for their purity [τὴν δὲ ἁγνείαν
τὴν σφῶν τῆς αἰσχίστης ἀντικαταλλαττόμεναι ὕβρεως], they think the most blame­
worthy corruption is the work of an oracle. (Paed. 3.4.28.4)

Glossing τὴν δὲ ἁγνείαν, Arethas comments:

This seems to me to indicate an excess of shamefulness, which also the blessed
Apostle Paul got at [ὑπέφηνεν] by saying, “and their females exchanged the natu-
ral use for that against nature,” on the pretense of being free of contact with men’s
genitals in the way that pertains to the use of the female [προφάσει τοῦ ἀνέπαφοι
εἶναι ἀνδρείων μορίων κατὰ τὴν τοῦ θήλεος χρῆσιν], for the sake of purity I suppose.
(Σ 165.10 Marcovich)

The subjects of “on the pretense of being free … etc.” are the lewd women in
Clement, the fraudulence of whose purity (ἁγνεία) Arethas is trying to explain. In
contrast to Σ 121.33, the first-person forms, as they do often in Arethas’s scholia,
signal that Σ 165.10 is Arethas’s own composition. It looks as though he has been
reminded of Rom 1:26 by Clement’s ἀντικαταλλαττόμεναι, recalls Anastasius’s com-
ment, and applies Anastasius’s interpretation to the females’ activity in Clement.
The words “free of contact … in the way that pertains to [κατά] the use of the
female” can only mean that these women have nonvaginal sex with men, not that
they have sex with women or have no sex at all. Clement’s denunciation, which
Arethas seeks to illuminate with the Pauline citation, shows these lewd women as
man-chasers throughout; the dishonor for which they exchange their purity, they
incur with men. By switching their mode of coupling from penile–vaginal inter-
course, “the use of the female,” to another mode, these women pretend that their
activity does not count as “real sex.”
We cannot date these three texts more precisely than after 914, the date on
the manuscript and the probable terminus post quem for the Refutation.36 To
judge from Arethas’s scholia on various authors, however, it would be foreign to
the practice of this opinionated cleric to adopt without comment an explanation
that he took to be wrong.37 Because he did not find tribades in Rom 1:26 in his
scholia when he could have, I deem AO more likely to have been Arethas’s own
view when he wrote Σ 165.10. Given his political opportunism, it is plausible that

36 On the date of the Refutation, see Westerink, Arethae archiepiscopi Caesariensis, 1:122.
37 On Arethas’s activity and habits as a scholiast, see Nigel G. Wilson, Scholars of Byzantium,

rev. ed. (London: Duckworth, 1996), 120‒35.

234 Journal of Biblical Literature 138, no. 1 (2019)

he exploited FF in the Refutation for rhetorical reasons against Nicholas without

subscribing to it.
2. In the latter half of the seventh century, an unknown writer penned in
Syriac what has become known as the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius. The orig-
inal has been provisionally reconstructed from two later Syriac redactions (M and
V), four redactions of a Greek version made perhaps around the year 700, a Latin
translation made from the Greek before 727, and a summary extract in Syriac made
by the Nestorian bishop Solomon of Basra (fl. 1222).38 What concerns us is the
author’s depiction of Christians’ sins, which are presented in this faux prophecy as
meriting God’s wrath in a coming Arab conquest. The Syriac V redaction, after
recounting how “the men” imitate prostitutes and do shameful deeds, including
male–male sex, describes female prostitutes coupling singly with a father and his
son and brothers and their male relatives. The text then quotes “the apostle Paul”
from Rom 1:27 and 1:26, inverting the order of those verses as Didymus had done.
I translate G. J. Reinink’s German translation: “their men abandoned natural inter-
course with women and burned with lust for each other, and man did shameful
things with man. In the same way also the women abandoned natural intercourse
with men and did what was unnatural.”39 Although the V redaction does not make
explicit whether the women’s “unnatural” intercourse was with men or women,
Solomon of Basra has the women in the narrative portion committing “fornication
… female with female,” and he recasts the quotation from Paul to say, “and likewise

38 The Syriac has been reconstructed and translated into German by G. J. Reinink, Die

syrische Apokalypse des Pseudo-Methodius, CSCO 540‒541, Scriptores Syri 220‒221 (Leuven:
Peeters, 1993). The same was done for Greek redaction 1 and Latin redaction 1 by W. J. Aerts and
G. A. A. Kortekaas, Die Apokalypse des Pseudo-Methodius: Die ältesten griechischen und lateinischen
Übersetzungen, CSCO 97‒98 (Leuven: Peeters, 1998), and see now Benjamin Garstad, Apocalypse
Pseudo-Methodius: An Alexandrian World Chronicle, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 14
(Cam­bridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). All four Greek redactions had been edited by
Anastasios Lolos, Die Apokalypse des Ps.-Methodios, BKP 83 (Meisenheim am Glan: Hain, 1976),
and Lolos, Die dritte und vierte Redaktion des Ps.-Methodios, BKP 94 (Meisenheim am Glan: Hain,
1978). Solomon’s Book of the Bee was edited and translated by Ernest A. Wallis Budge (The Book
of the Bee: The Syriac Text ed. from the Manuscripts in London, Oxford, and Munich, Analecta
Oxoniensia: Semitic Series 1.2 [Oxford: Clarendon, 1886]).
39 Reinink, Die syrische Apokalypse, 221.44: “Und darum sprach der Apostel Paulus: ‘Ihre

Männer haben verlassen den natürlichen Verkehr mit den Weibern und sind aneinander in Lust
entbrannt, und haben Mann mit Mann Schande getrieben. Desgleichen haben auch die Frauen
den natürlichen Verkehr mit den Männern verlassen und sich unnatürlich benommen’” (Apoc.
11.7). Reinink notes that sections 11.6‒7, like other sections with erotic content, do not appear in
the M redaction. I am grateful to Daniel King for informing me per litteras that a literal translation
of Rom 1:26b as it is rendered in the Peshitta (fifth century) would be “their women changed their
accustomed usages and [started to] behave in ways that were not natural.” Daniel King provides
a more literary translation in Daniel King (English translation) and George A. Kiraz (text), The
Syriac Peshiṭ ta Bible with English Translation: Romans‒Corinthians (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias,
2013), 4‒7. The words “with men,” present in the Syriac Ps.-Methodius, are not in the Peshitta.
 Murphy: “Their Females” in Romans 1:26 235

also the women did work lewdness, and, contrary to nature, had intercourse with
one another” (Book of the Bee 53, p. 124 Budge).
Different from these are redactions 1 and 4 of the Greek. The Greek narrative
portion makes no reference to male‒male sex. Romans 1:26b with an imperfect
tense verb and with no reference to Paul is detached and inserted into the narrative
portion as commentary. The women are not called prostitutes. After the narrative
portion, Rom 1:26‒27 is quoted in traditional word order, although redaction 4,
like Didymus, inserts τῆς θηλείας into 1:26b. Redaction 3 merely quotes Rom 1:26b
and 1:27b without citing Paul, while it invents couplings of brothers with sisters.
Latin redaction 1 follows Greek redaction 1.40
While FF is explicit in Solomon of Basra, the Greek redactions efface homo-
eroticism from the narrative portion and from their adaptions of Paul. Instead, the
females’ sin in the Greek redactions is one woman’s coupling with many males from
one family.41 I designate this interpretation of Rom 1:26b as family dishonor.
Although the Greek and Latin versions present the apostle’s words as prophecy (“it
seems that he lifted his voice before the time,” πρὸ χρόνων εἰκότως ἀνέκραξε [redac-
tions 1 and 4]; ante temporum seriem fortassis exclamans ait [Latin redaction 1,
11.7]), I classify family dishonor as an interpretation because it assays to state the
apostle’s meaning (see “foretelling these things,” ταῦτα προλέγων [redaction 4,
11.7]). Family dishonor thus joins AO and FF as a third interpretation of Rom 1:26
voiced during the earlier Byzantine period. Its appearance makes it hard to suppose
that already FF had established itself as the accepted view of Rom 1:26. These
diverse views in the Greek church reinforce a conclusion that arises also from
Ambrosiaster’s need to argue for FF in the Latin church—that FF does not reflect
a primitive understanding about Paul’s “females” but gained sway much later.42

IV.  The Males of Romans 1:27 and the Females

Interpreters still too often treat FF as though its rightness is obvious, giving
but a cursory look at the evidence for AO while putting undue weight on ὁμοίως in
1.27a.43 (We can dismiss family dishonor.) Jamie Banister’s finding, however, has

40 Cf. Ps.-Methodius, Apoc. 11.6‒7 in the editions of Lolos and Aerts and Kortekaas cited in

n. 38 above.
41 A son’s coupling with his father’s wife/woman is biblically prohibited (Lev 18:7, Deut 23:1,

27:20, 1 Cor 5:1).

42 Hippolytus reports that the heretical Naassenes also had an interpretation of “natural use”

in Rom 1:26‒27 (Haer. 5.7.18), but his promise to explain it is not fulfilled in the text that we have.
43 Cf., e.g., Innocent Himbaza, Adrien Schenker and Jean-Baptiste Edart, The Bible on the

Question of Homosexuality (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 94:
“The parallel construction between 1:26b and 1:27a … allows us to relativize this rather marginal
interpretation [i.e., AO]. Paul himself highlights this construction by the use of the word ‘likewise.’ ”
236 Journal of Biblical Literature 138, no. 1 (2019)

not been refuted—namely, that there is no contemporary parallel for a conjunctive

ὁμοίως clause that operates backwards, so to speak, to provide clarification of an
otherwise vague or ambiguous antecedent clause.44 On the contrary, all thirty-eight
instances of ὁμοίως τε καί in TLG support Banister—that is, after an antecedent
clause already understandable on its own, ὁμοίως introduces a clause whose argu-
ment is co-oriented with the previous clause’s argument.45 To read female homo-
eroticism back into 1:26 because we have male homoeroticism in the next verse is
to reverse the way conjunctive ὁμοίως functions.
In fact, there is not symmetry between what is said of the females in 1:26 and
what is said of the males in 1:27. First, before the “exchange,” the males had “χρῆσις
of the female.” The female, on the other hand, is not said to have had χρῆσις of
anyone, and as we have sought to establish, females are not the subjects of χρῆσις
of a person in a sex act. Second, nominative and dative ἄρσενες ἐν ἄρσεσιν demar-
cate two groups of males: actors and those acted upon. There is no corresponding
mutuality or active‒passive differentiation among our females in 1:26b, all of whom
performed the same action, that is, “exchanged.” The text does not authorize us to
import from 1:27a into 1:26b a set of active females and a set of passive females.46
As we saw, ancient references to tribades do not serve as legitimate parallels by
which to interpret 1:26b.
Since ὁμοίως co-orients two actions or states, however, we need to specify what
these are in our passage. What Paul explicitly attributes to both sexes are passions
of dishonor (πάθη ἀτιμίας, 1:26), appetites (ἐπιθυμίαις, 1:24) that drive them to
dishonor their bodies (ἀτιμάζεσθαι τὰ σώματα) by turning from natural χρῆσις to
unnatural χρῆσις. Since Paul repeats “the natural use” from 1:26, one would think
that this phrase in 1:27 denotes the same referent that it denoted there. In light of
what we surveyed in sections I and II, it is obvious that anal or oral sex would not
be thought to form part of “the natural use” of females by males. The compelling
conclusion about τὴν φυσικὴν χρῆσιν in both 1:26 and 1:27 is that it denotes vaginal

44 Jamie Α. Banister, “ Ὁμοίως and the Use of Parallelism in Romans 1:26‒27,” JBL 128 (2009):

569‒90, https://doi.org/10.2307/25610204. Arland J. Hultgren (Paul’s Letter to the Romans: A

Commentary [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012], 99) cites Banister while assuming the backwards
operation of ὁμοίως that Banister’s research rules out.
45 Of ὁμοίως τε/δὲ καί, Helena Maquieira writes, “Cuando une oraciones o partes más

amplias del discurso … ὁμοίως suele utilizarse para introducir una estructura que abunda en el
mismo sentido discursivo de la estructura precedente. Es estas condiciones, ὁμοίως suele expresar
adición, es decir, añade un argumento con la misma orientación que el precedente” (“Usos
Conjuntivos de ὁμοίως en Platón y la Oratoria Clásica,” in Ágalma: Ofrenda desde la filología clásica
a Manuel García Teijeiro, ed. Ángel Martínez Fernández et al., Lingüística y Filología 80 [Vallado­
lid: Univsidad de Valladolid, 2014], 199‒206, here 203‒4).
46 This refutes Thomas R. Schreiner, who writes, “no evidence exists in these two verses that

Paul addresses sexual sins among women that can be differentiated from the same sexual practices
indicated in verse 27” (“A New Testament Perspective on Homosexuality,” Them 31 [2006]: 62‒75,
here 68 n. 24).
 Murphy: “Their Females” in Romans 1:26 237

sex. That is what the males and females in Paul’s “archaeology of idolatry” abandon
in common.
Contributing to the difficulty of fixing Paul’s meaning, though, is the ambigu-
ous scope of the predicate in ἀφέντες τὴν φυσικὴν χρῆσιν τῆς θηλείας in 1:27. On
AO, the males drop only the natural use of the female, with the option left open
that they may continue unnatural use of the female. On FF, the males drop all use
of the female, with Paul merely adding that use of the female is the natural use. In
other words, on AO, the attributive modifier φυσικήν has a restrictive value (e.g.,
“the old walls of the city,” not the new ones), and on FF, a nonrestrictive, merely
ascriptive value (e.g., “the old walls of the city,” surrounding the city and being old).
This is a “semantic distinction between reference to the complete and to the not-
complete subset of possible referents.”47 In 1:26, φυσικήν had restrictive value, for
“natural” and “against nature” are exhaustive contraries. When the noun phrase τὴν
φυσικὴν χρῆσιν is repeated in 1:27, one expects φυσικήν to retain the value that it
had in 1:26. Paul retains restrictive value of an attributive modifier elsewhere when
he repeats the same or a synonymous noun phrase, for example:
Rom 2:28: ὁ ἐν τῷ φανερῷ … ἡ ἐν τῷ φανερῷ
he who is [a Jew] outwardly … that which is [circumcision] outwardly
Rom 11:21‒24: τῶν κατὰ φύσιν κλάδων … ἐκ τῆς κατὰ φύσιν ἐξεκόπης
ἀγριελαίου
the natural branches … the olive tree [wild] by nature
1 Cor 11: 24‒25: εἰς τὴν ἐμὴν ἀνάμνησιν bis
in remembrance of me
The fact that Paul now adds a second modifier, the genitive τῆς θηλείας, does not
bar φυσικήν from retaining its restrictive use. Restrictive adjectives and genitive
modifiers can combine on the same head term.48
Some New Testament Greek teaching materials claim that a modifier in first
attributive position (Article | Modifier | Noun) has ascriptive value, and in second
position (Article | Noun | Article | Modifier), restrictive.49 This is not a general rule,

47 Stéphanie J. Bakker, The Noun Phrase in Ancient Greek: A Functional Analysis of the Order

and Articulation of NP Constituents in Herodotus, Amsterdam Studies in Classical Philology 15

(Leiden: Brill, 2009), 229; cf. 228‒30; and A. M. Devine and Laurence D. Stephens, Discontinuous
Syntax: Hyperbaton in Greek (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 26‒27, 49.
48 See, e.g., τὰ δοκοῦντα μέλη τοῦ σώματος (“the seemly members of the body,” 1 Cor 12:22);

τὰ κατώτερα μέρη τῆς γῆς (“the lower parts of the earth,” Eph 4:9); τῇ πρώτῃ ἡμέρᾳ τῶν ἀζύμων
(“on the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread,” Mark 14:12). From Philo: πρὸς τὴν φυσικὴν
τοῦ πυρὸς κίνησιν ἐπικουφίσασα (“having made itself light in line with the natural motion of fire,”
Aet. 33); λιπόντες τὴν ἀναγκαιοτάτην τάξιν εὐσεβείας καὶ ὁσιότητος (“having deserted their most
indispensable post of piety and holiness,” Spec. 1.54); τὸ θνητὸν ἡμῶν τῆς ψυχῆς μέρος (“the mortal
part of our soul,” Fug. 69).
49 David Alan Black, Learn to Read New Testament Greek, 3rd ed. (Nashville: Broadman &
238 Journal of Biblical Literature 138, no. 1 (2019)

for it pertains only to pragmatically neutral word order. When they take contrastive
focus, restrictive modifiers in Greek tend to be fronted.50 The example adduced by
David Alan Black and Gerald L. Stevens of ascriptive value, ὁ ἀγαθὸς ἄνθρωπος (“the
good man,” Luke 6:45), actually has restrictive value. Others can be multiplied (e.g.,
John 2:10‒11, Luke 8:15, 10:42, 14:9‒10). In Paul, first position modifiers of restric-
tive value include ἡ ὕπανδρος γυνή (“the married woman,” Rom 7:2), τῶν κατὰ φύσιν
κλαδῶν (“the natural branches,” 11:21), τῷ ἀγαθῷ ἔργῳ (“to the good conduct,”
13:3), τοὺς κακοὺς ἐργάτας (“the bad laborers,” Phil 3:2).
Normally, we rely on a modifier’s sense and on context to determine whether
it has restrictive or ascriptive value. In our passage, however, context is the ques-
tion. Paul does not make explicit whether the males, after giving up natural rela-
tions with females, still have unnatural relations with females. Instead, he goes on
to condemn male–male relations. One may ask after all whether the polarity in 1:27
is simply male–female versus same-sex.
Although the ambiguous reference of “use of the female” in 1:27a makes cer-
tainty elusive, AO fits the text better than does FF. Had Paul wanted to hammer
home the point that the males stopped penetrating females tout court, as FF
requires, better had he not written φυσικήν. Its presence gives us something on the
order of “he threw out the red apple and bit into the pear,” where “red” introduces
confusion over whether the chap has but two fruits or whether he also has, say, a
yellow apple, which he is not eating now. To suppose that Paul sows this confusion
into his epistle violates the interpretive principle of charity.
Because Greek word order is largely determined on the pragmatic register of
discourse, constituent order in 1:27 is not a decisive indicator of the semantic value
of φυσικήν. Nevertheless, AO better accommodates Paul’s word order than FF.
More salient elements tend to appear early in a clause or phrase, and a preposed
articular modifier generally is more salient than its noun or postverbal constituents
like those in n. 48 above.51 Its fronted position marks φυσικήν as salient in 1:26 and
1:27. In 1:26, φυσικήν received narrow focus presumably for two reasons: it is new
information, and it stands in contrast to its upcoming contrary, παρὰ φύσιν.52 In
1:27, φυσικὴν χρῆσιν has become part of the given information of the discourse, so

Holman, 2009), 44; Gerald L. Stevens, New Testament Greek Intermediate: From Morphology to
Translation (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2009), 102.
50 See Devine and Stephens, Discontinuous Syntax, 29‒30, 40‒49.
51 See Carlotta Viti, “Rheme before Theme in the Noun Phrase: A Case Study from Ancient

Greek,” Studies in Language 32 (2008): 894‒915; Viti, “Genitive Word Order in Ancient Greek: A
Functional Analysis of Word Order Freedom in the Noun Phrase,” Glotta 84 (2008): 203‒38;
Bakker, Noun Phrase, chapters 3‒4; G. G. A. Celano, “Word Order,” in Encyclopedia of Ancient
Greek Language and Linguistics, ed. Georgios K. Giannakis, 3 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 3:532‒39,
here 538.
52 The modifiers in Paul’s iterated noun phrases quoted above display contrastive focus, as

do, e.g., τὸν καλὸν οἶνον (“the good wine,” bis John 2:10‒11), τὴν ἀγαθὴν μερίδα (“the good part,”
Luke 10:42), τὸν ἔσχατον τόπον (“the last place,” Luke 14: 9‒10).
 Murphy: “Their Females” in Romans 1:26 239

that φυσικήν can no longer receive attention as something new. Nevertheless, it is

fronted again, for it retains contrastive focus and thus is marked as more salient
than the postposed τῆς θηλείας.53 That the males drop their use of females is a piece
of information of less value on the pragmatic register than is the fact that it is the
natural use that they drop. With this point made, Paul no more mentions the
females. His rhetorical onkos builds from a participial phrase about female objects
to the verb, ἐξεκαύθησαν (“were enkindled”), which dramatizes the impurity com-
mitted by “males on males,” ἄρσενες ἐν ἄρσεσιν—an allusion to the only form of
same-sex coupling forbidden in the Torah.54
When a restrictive modifier defines a subset of the head term, the speaker may
leave unmentioned the residual subset of which the predicate is not predicated.
Compare “those running in the stadium [οἱ ἐν σταδίῳ τρέχοντες] all run, but one
takes the prize” (1 Cor 9:24). The restrictive modifier, ἐν σταδίῳ, defines one set of
runners. Paul’s purpose does not require him to mention residual sets of runners,
for whom one prize per group need not be a restriction. Saying that at the last
trumpet, the dead will be raised (1 Cor 15:52), Paul need not mention trumpets at
whose blast the dead will not rise. The author of Acts need not mention times not
reserved to the Father’s authority (1:7). Plutarch presents the same structure: “set-
ting aside their private reproaches against each other, they sacrificed in common”
(Solon 16.3). He need not mention public Athenian reproaches—against Megara,
for example (cf. 12.3). Diodorus Siculus describes huge snakes whose coils impede
the natural movement of elephants’ legs (Bib. hist. 3.37.9). He need not mention
ineffectual, struggling leg movements. The AO reading of 1:27a is consistent with
these. Dropping natural use of the female does not entail that the males drop unnat-
ural use. Romans 1:27a, then, does not entail FF, for to conclude without circular-
ity that “the [use] against nature” in 1:26b is female–female, FF’s proponent needs
the males to drop unnatural “use” of the female.
Strong indications favor AO and militate against FF. We do justice to Rom
1:26‒27 and meet no positive defeaters if we conclude that the males drop the
natural sex act with females, do the unnatural act with females, and indulge their
lusts further in (unnatural) sex with males. The anal/oral interpretation gives us
males of more diversified lusts even than does FF. To argue from 1:27 that the
53 Normally, the head noun precedes a modifying genitive and is more salient. In addition

to sources cited in n. 51 above, see Jenny Heimerdinger, “Word Order in Koine Greek: Using a
Text-Critical Approach to Study Word Order Patterns in the Greek Text of Acts,” FNT 9 (1996):
139‒80, here 171. See also Viti, “Genitive Word Order,” 228: “Genitives denoting non-important
humans are postposed.” Also Bakker, Noun Phrase, 121: “The pronominal modifier is more, the
postnominal modifier less salient than the noun in between” (cf. 120‒125); and 300: “Given”
information can be preposed as the most salient element of the noun phrase “when the speaker/
writer considers it to be the most important or relevant part of the message.”
54 Cf. LXX: καὶ μετὰ ἄρσενος οὐ κοιμηθήσῃ κοίτην γυναικός (“and with a male do not lie the

lying of a woman,” Lev 18:22), ὃς ἂν κοιμηθῇ μετὰ ἄρσενος κοίτην γυναικός (“whoever with a male
lies the lying of a woman,” Lev 20:13).
240 Journal of Biblical Literature 138, no. 1 (2019)

females in 1:26 let go of males altogether and take up sex with females requires
auxiliary premises that the text does not supply.

V. Conclusion

I have sought to supplement previous discussions of Paul’s “females” by pre-

senting hitherto neglected evidence. It supports the recently revived but ancient
interpretation (AO) according to which the females have anal or oral sex with
males, not sex with other females (FF). Our finding in section I that females were
not said to exercise sexual “use,” χρῆσις, of a person is in my view fatal to FF. Addi-
tional proof in section II that anal and oral sex were considered “against nature”
further dismantles a key objection to AO. Evidence in section III that AO retained
proponents well into the Byzantine period, helps show that FF was not the early
church’s standard view. In section IV, linguistic features of Rom 1:27 were shown
to favor AO. It is time we stop treating FF as the default reading. On the contrary,
FF lacks material support, while our evidence favors AO and raises very severe
objections to FF. The stronger conclusion is that Paul’s females in Rom 1:26 are
meant to be having nonvaginal sex with males.
As I observed at the outset, if AO stands, then it is false that the Bible contains
a condemnation of female homoeroticism. Further, if “lesbians” are absent from
the passage, we cannot locate in Rom 1:26‒27 a genus, homoeroticism, differenti-
ated into male–male and female–female species. Whatever Paul might have said
about female–female eroticism, we lack grounds to suppose that he is saying it here.
Even if one hesitates to adopt AO, caution should restrain the reflex to treat as fact
the usual assumptions that Rom 1:26b is “what the Bible says about lesbians,” or
that 1:26‒27 is Paul’s formulation of a generic homoeroticism. We do well to be slow
to enlist Rom 1:26b in debates over same-sex relationships.