Homosexual was never in the bible
REBUTTING a Pro-Gay Documentary About the Bible
What if the word homosexual was never meant to be in the Bible? That&#;s the question a new documentary called is asking, and it&#;s part of a long-running effort to misinterpret the Bible to utter that it never condemns sexual relationships between people of the same sex. There have been a lot of liberal and self-described gay Christians in the past 40 years who have practiced this kind of Biblical revisionism, and the arguments made in this film track the same tired pattern. Let&#;s see what they get wrong.
The documentary follows its director, Sharon &#;Rocky&#; Roggio, a self-described male lover Christian who interviews people like Ed Oxford and Kathy Baldock who defend the idea the Bible was misunderstood and thus mistranslated on homosexuality. The primary story in the film deals with the Translation Committee of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, or RSV, and their decision to include the word lesbian in First Corinthians , which says the accompanying, &#;Do you not understand that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor th
What Does the Bible Say About Homosexuality?
What Does The Bible Tell About Homosexuality?
Introduction
For the last two decades, Pew Research Center has reported that one of the most enduring ethical issues across Christian traditions is sexual diversity. For many Christians, one of the most frequently first-asked questions on this topic is, “What does the Bible say about attraction to someone of the matching sex?”
Although its unlikely that the biblical authors had any notion of sexual orientation (for example, the term homosexual wasn't even coined until the delayed 19th century) for many people of faith, the Bible is looked to for timeless guidance on what it means to honor God with our lives; and this most certainly includes our sexuality.
Before we can spring into how it is that Christians can maintain the authority of the Bible and also affirm sexual diversity, it might be helpful if we started with a terse but clear overview of some of the assumptions informing many Christian approaches to understanding the Bible.
What is the Bible?
For Christians to whom the Bible is God’s very written word, it is widely understood that God produced its contents through inspired
This article is part of the What Did Jesus Teach? series.
Silence Equals Support?
In a article for Slate online, Will Oremus asked a provocative question: Was Jesus a homophobe?1
The article was occasioned by a story about a homosexual teenager in Ohio who was suing his steep school after school officials prohibited him from wearing a T-shirt that said, “Jesus Is Not a Homophobe.”
Oremus was less concerned about the legal issues of the story than he was about the accuracy of the remark on the shirt. Oremus suggests that Jesus’s views on homosexuality were more inclusive than Paul’s. He writes,
While it’s reasonable to assume that Jesus and his fellow Jews in first-century Palestine would possess disapproved of gay sex, there is no log of his ever having mentioned homosexuality, let alone expressed particular revulsion about it. . . . Never in the Bible does Jesus himself present an explicit prohibition of homosexuality.
Oremus seems to advise that since Jesus never explicitly mentioned homosexuality, he must not have been very concerned about it.
There are at least two reasons that we should be skeptical of this view.
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Was it a mistranslation to add the word homosexual to the Bible in ?
Answer
Terms such as homosexualdid not appear in English Bibles until the twentieth century. Those who claim Scripture fails to condemn same-sex intercourse note this with emphasis. Some, such as the creators of the film The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture, point to as the year the word homosexualwas first used; those translations eventually became the Revised Standard Version. A shape of this criticism suggests Christians came to condemn same-sex intercourse only afterwords like homosexualwere published in Bibles. The implication is that modern translators inappropriately inserted the concept: that prior to no one thought Scripture criticized gay sex.
Such arguments are deeply flawed. The question of which wordcirculated in the ancient world is unique from whether ancient people understood the actionsin ask. Language and history both provide consistent, strong evidence that Scripture was always understood as condemning physical acts associated with the modern term homosexual. The Bible does not disorient pedophilia with homosexuality, as some claim. The Bible has the sam
.
Was it a mistranslation to add the word homosexual to the Bible in ?
Answer
Terms such as homosexualdid not appear in English Bibles until the twentieth century. Those who claim Scripture fails to condemn same-sex intercourse note this with emphasis. Some, such as the creators of the film The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture, point to as the year the word homosexualwas first used; those translations eventually became the Revised Standard Version. A shape of this criticism suggests Christians came to condemn same-sex intercourse only afterwords like homosexualwere published in Bibles. The implication is that modern translators inappropriately inserted the concept: that prior to no one thought Scripture criticized gay sex.
Such arguments are deeply flawed. The question of which wordcirculated in the ancient world is unique from whether ancient people understood the actionsin ask. Language and history both provide consistent, strong evidence that Scripture was always understood as condemning physical acts associated with the modern term homosexual. The Bible does not disorient pedophilia with homosexuality, as some claim. The Bible has the sam
.