Passage

1 Timothy 1.10

Book: 1 Timothy · NASB95

Verse

"and immoral men and homosexuals and kidnappers and liars and perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound teaching," (1 Timothy 1:10, NASB95)

Immediate context (±2 verses)

NASB95 (NASB95)

"8. But we know that the Law is good, if one uses it lawfully, 9. realizing the fact that law is not made for a righteous person, but for those who are lawless and rebellious, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers"

"10. and immoral men and homosexuals and kidnappers and liars and perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound teaching,"

"11. according to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, with which I have been entrusted. 12. I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, because He considered me faithful, putting me into service," (1 Timothy 1:8-12, NASB95)

Setting

Speaker: Paul, writing to Timothy. The Pauline authorship of the Pastorals is debated in critical scholarship; conservative scholarship (Marshall, Knight, Mounce, Köstenberger) defends Pauline authorship, with the letter dated c. AD 62-66 between the first and second Roman imprisonments.
Audience: Timothy at Ephesus, charged with confronting false teachers in the Ephesian church (1:3). The vice-list of 1:9-10 is presented as the kind of life that the Mosaic Law was designed to restrain, a foil to the false teachers' misuse of the Law.
Location: Paul writing from Macedonia (1:3); Timothy reading at Ephesus.
Time period: c. AD 62-66.

Theological reading

The verse occurs within a vice-list (1:9-10) structured loosely on the second table of the Decalogue. The list moves from the most fundamental violations (parricide / murder, 6th commandment) through sexual sin (7th commandment) to the load-bearing term andrapodistais (8th commandment) and on to false witness (9th commandment). The structure is not coincidental: Paul is using the Decalogue's pattern to demonstrate that the true function of the Law is to restrain wickedness, against the false teachers' speculative misuse of it (1:7).

The load-bearing term: andrapodistais (slave-traders / kidnappers).

This is the lexical centerpiece of the verse and the ground of one of the strongest scriptural arguments against chattel slavery, load-bearing for Defining Chattel Slavery and Biblical Servitude (ris3n).

The Greek noun andrapodistēs (here in dative plural andrapodistais) is built from andrapodon, "human-footed creature," a brutal slang term for a human being treated as a chattel slave (as opposed to anēr, a free man). The -istēs suffix denotes an agent: andrapodistēs is therefore "one who makes people into andrapoda", a slave-maker, slave-dealer, kidnapper-for-the-slave-market. NASB95 translates "kidnappers" to capture the violent acquisition aspect; ESV reads "enslavers"; NIV "slave traders"; KJV "menstealers." All four glosses point to the same referent: the Greco-Roman slave trade.

Greco-Roman legal background. In classical Athenian law, andrapodismos (the cognate noun for the act) was a capital offense, codified in the graphē andrapodismou, the public prosecution for kidnapping-into-slavery (cf. Demosthenes, Against Polycles; Lysias, Against Eratosthenes). Roman law preserved the same condemnation: the Lex Fabia de plagiariis (date debated, possibly 2nd c. BC) made plagium, the kidnapping or enslavement of a free person, a serious crime, though enforcement was uneven and the protections did not extend to those already enslaved. The point: even pagan Greco-Roman law recognized that the acquisition of slaves by violent kidnapping was a distinct crime, even when the institution of slavery itself was accepted.

Septuagint background. The LXX uses andrapodistēs-family vocabulary in contexts of condemnation. Critically, Exodus 21:16 LXX renders the Hebrew capital prohibition, "He who kidnaps a man, whether he sells him or he is found in his possession, shall surely be put to death", using language of which andrapodismos is the natural Greek summary. Deuteronomy 24:7 reinforces the same prohibition specifically for kidnapping fellow Israelites. The Mosaic Law treats man-stealing as a capital offense, equivalent in seriousness to murder and adultery.

The exegetical implication. The transatlantic chattel slave trade, by which African human beings were violently kidnapped, transported, and sold as property, is exactly what andrapodismos names. Every link of the slave-trade chain (the African raiders, the Middle Passage shippers, the auction-block buyers) participates in the very crime Paul lists alongside murder, sexual immorality, and perjury as "contrary to sound teaching, according to the glorious gospel of the blessed God." This is not an inference from general Christian principles; it is the direct application of an explicit Pauline vice-list. As 19th-century abolitionists (Granville Sharp, The Just Limitation of Slavery in the Laws of God, 1776; Theodore Dwight Weld, The Bible Against Slavery, 1837; Frederick Douglass) repeatedly argued: the antebellum American slave trade fell squarely under 1 Timothy 1:10's condemnation, and any Christian defense of it had to exegetically eliminate the verse to proceed.

Distinguishing OT bondservice and chattel slavery. A central confusion in modern atheist-apologetic engagements (e.g., the "the Bible endorses slavery" charge) is the conflation of OT bondservice (a debt-relief and limited-term institution, with sabbatical release in Exodus 21 and Jubilee in Leviticus 25) with race-based perpetual chattel slavery (the system condemned by andrapodistais). The two systems are categorically different in mode of acquisition (debt-default vs. kidnapping), duration (term-limited vs. perpetual), and inheritability (released at Jubilee vs. heritable for generations). 1 Timothy 1:10, sitting on top of Exodus 21:16, condemns the acquisition mechanism of chattel slavery as a capital offense. See Defining Chattel Slavery and Biblical Servitude (ris3n) for the full ris3n argument.

The vice-list more broadly. Beyond andrapodistais, the list pairs pornois (sexually immoral, broad term) and arsenokoitais (men who lie with males, the term Paul coined or appropriated at 1 Corinthians 6:9, see arsenokoitēs below). The list is functioning Decalogically: parents (5th), murderers (6th), sexual offenders (7th), kidnappers / slave-traders (8th, for the OT, "stealing" includes the most severe form of theft, the theft of a person), liars and perjurers (9th). The Decalogical structure shows that Paul's ethics are not a Christian innovation in tension with the OT, they are the OT moral law in continuity with the gospel ("according to the glorious gospel," v. 11).

The lexical debate over arsenokoitais. Modern readings dispute whether arsenokoitai refers to homosexual practice generally (the traditional reading, Marshall, Schreiner, Köstenberger), to specifically exploitative same-sex practice such as pederasty or temple prostitution (Boswell, Scroggs, Vines), or, on the most revisionist reading, to economic exploitation correlated with same-sex acts (Martin). The conservative consensus reads arsenokoitēs as Paul's coinage from the LXX of Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 (meta arsenos … koitēn gynaikos), making it a direct reference to homosexual practice as such. The placement of arsenokoitais immediately before andrapodistais in the vice-list suggests that Paul is not equating the two but listing distinct violations, against the revisionist attempt to subsume the sexual term under the slavery term.

Patristic / scholarly note

Patristic. John Chrysostom (Homilies on 1 Timothy 3, c. AD 393) treats andrapodistais as a clear condemnation of the slave-trade, contrasting it with the household slavery of his own day, which he tolerated but consistently undermined ethically (cf. Homilies on 1 Corinthians 19, on 1 Cor 7:21-23, urging manumission). Augustine (City of God XIX.15, c. AD 426) treats human enslavement as a consequence of sin, not a creational order, citing the original equality of human beings in Genesis 1:27, the broader anthropological argument that 1 Timothy 1:10 specifies legally.

Reformation. Calvin (Commentary on 1 Timothy, 1556) reads plagiarii (the Latin Vulgate's rendering, "kidnappers / man-stealers") as condemning every form of unjust acquisition of human beings: "those who reduce free men to slavery, or who steal the slaves of others." The Reformation tradition broadly, Luther, Bullinger, Beza, read the verse as a flat prohibition of the slave-trade as institutionally distinct from the question of bondservice for debt.

Modern conservative scholarship. I. Howard Marshall (The Pastoral Epistles ICC, 1999) gives the fullest recent treatment of andrapodistais, situating it in Greco-Roman legal background and identifying its function in the Decalogical structure. George W. Knight III (The Pastoral Epistles NIGTC, 1992) is similarly thorough. William Mounce (Pastoral Epistles WBC, 2000) and Andreas Köstenberger (1-2 Timothy and Titus EBTC, 2017) reinforce the same readings. Philip Towner (The Letters to Timothy and Titus NICNT, 2006) treats the verse extensively in connection with the Pauline vice-list tradition.

Anti-slavery / abolitionist reception. Granville Sharp (The Just Limitation of Slavery in the Laws of God, 1776) argued, drawing on 1 Timothy 1:10 alongside Exodus 21:16 and Deuteronomy 24:7, that the British slave trade was condemned by Scripture as a capital crime. Theodore Dwight Weld (The Bible Against Slavery, 1837) made andrapodistais a centerpiece of the American abolitionist case. Frederick Douglass repeatedly invoked the verse in distinguishing the "slaveholding religion" of the South from "the Christianity of Christ." The verse was so load-bearing that pro-slavery exegetes (e.g., Thornton Stringfellow) had to argue that andrapodistais referred only to kidnapping free citizens, not to the African slave trade, a strained position widely regarded as exegetically failed.

Tension. The historic Christian failure to consistently apply 1 Timothy 1:10 to the actual practice of the church, many Christians for many centuries owned slaves and defended slavery, is a serious moral-historical wound, addressed at length in Christianity in Africa - Roots, Distortions, and Reclamation (ris3n). The verse itself stands as a permanent indictment of that failure.

Connection to other passages

Exodus 21.16, "He who kidnaps a man … shall surely be put to death", the Mosaic capital prohibition that andrapodistais echoes
Deuteronomy 24.7, kidnapping a fellow Israelite is a capital offense
Genesis 1.27, the imago-Dei foundation for the dignity that andrapodismos violates
Acts 17.26, anthropological monogenism; the unity-of-humanity doctrine that grounds anti-racism
1 Corinthians 6.9-11, the parallel Pauline vice-list, sharing arsenokoitai and pornoi
Galatians 3.28, "neither slave nor free", the redemptive-eschatological correlate
Philemon 1.15-16, Paul to Philemon: "no longer as a slave, but … a beloved brother", the practical Pauline application
Revelation 18.13, Babylon's commerce, including "slaves and human lives", the eschatological condemnation of the slave-economy

Key words

G0405 - andrapodistēs (pending), andrapodistēs (slave-trader / kidnapper), the load-bearing term
G0733 - arsenokoitēs (pending), arsenokoitēs (man who lies with a male), Pauline coinage from LXX Lev 18:22 / 20:13
G4205 - pornos (pending), pornos (sexually immoral), broad sexual-sin term
G3551 - nomos, nomos (law), the Mosaic Law whose right use Paul defends
G5198 - hygiainō (pending), hygiainō (to be sound / healthy), the "sound teaching" verb characteristic of the Pastorals
G2098 - euangelion, euangelion (gospel), the standard against which the vice-list is measured