Homosexuality and the Bible

(This is a concise version of an argument I put together last year that I may flesh out further because my blog posts always need to be incredibly verbose.)

Christians commonly will cite 1Corinthians 6:9 and 1Timothy 1:10 as verses that call out homosexuality as a sin. However, both verses in the original Greek use the word "αρσενοκοιται", which is a word found nowhere else in 1st century Greek literature, because Paul made it up. The truth is, nobody really knows what it means, so people have had to guess. 

Modern English is a relatively young language, really dating back to the publication of the King James Bible and Shakespeare's works. There are lots of older languages that had the Bible before that, most notably, German. In German Bibles, "αρσενοκοιται" is translated into "Knabenschänder", a word which we do know the meaning of; it's "boy molester". 

Now of course some scholars will make the claim that Paul's "αρσενοκοιται" is a neologism that comes from the Greek version of Leviticus 20:13, which in the KJV reads "If a man also lie with mankind," or in Greek, the phrase ends with "ἄρσενος κοίτην". However, there's a problem with this translation as well. This command comes in the middle of a list of defined sexual sins, mostly reading "If a man lie with..." In the original Hebrew, each and every one of those instances of "man" is the same Hebrew word, "אִישׁ", so one might expect that verse 13 would read: if an "אִישׁ" lie with an "אִישׁ"; but it doesn't. It reads: if an "אִישׁ" lie with a "זָכָר". Why use a different word here, unless you mean a different concept? "זָכָר" is translated into a number of different English words, but one of them is "child". Indeed, looking at the German again, they translate it "Knaben" or "boy". 

Throughout the Bible there are a lot of sexual sins listed, and almost every one comes with an explanation of why it's a sin. Why is homosexuality a sin? I don't know, but if all the verses that are claimed to be about homosexuality are actually about paedophilia, is any explanation needed?