Monday, February 26, 2024

New documentary shows how a mistranslation by the RSV Bible committee shifted a culture and caused harm to LGBTQ+ people











No Bible translation is perfect, but the scholars who created the Revised Standard Version in 1946 got something terribly wrong when—for the first time ever in a Bible translation—they used the word “homosexual” in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, verses that identify those who “will not inherit the Kingdom of God.”

It was the wrong word. It would have gone unnoticed except for a 1959 letter from a young Canadian seminary student to the head of the translation committee, who acknowledged the error and promised to make a correction.

Due to an agreement with the publisher, a new version could not come out until 1971. By then, tens of millions of the uncorrected version of the RSV were published and sold and the damage to LGBTQ+ people was done—as 1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture, a new documentary film, shows.

Read about it in my Free Press column, including a link to watch the documentary.


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