Gay Christians Still Say the Darnedest Things!

I still haven't seen the documentary 1946, and I think I'll have to, because it's clearly having an effect on gay Christians, whether or not they've seen it.  As I've mentioned before, the film is about the 1946 Revised Standard Version of the Bible and its translators' decision to use the word "homosexuals" in a list of sinners found in 1 Corinthians 6:9. It was the first time that word had appeared in an English translation of the Bible, and the filmmakers apparently present that decision as the cause of antigay bigotry in English-speaking Christendom forever after.  

It was changed in later editions, but it happens that I have a copy of the 1946 edition and can confirm that the word "homosexuals" is indeed there. The 1989 New Revised Standard Version replaced it with "male prostitutes [and] sodomites," which doesn't seem much of an improvement to me, not reassuring to young Homo-Americans anxious about their eternal destiny. In 2021 the Updated Edition chose "male prostitutes" and "men who engage in illicit sex," adding footnotes to both acknowledging that the meaning of the Greek is "uncertain." If you're wondering how one word ("homosexuals") became three or more, look for my discussion of Robin Scroggs's The New Testament and Homosexuality in this post.

Lately I've been seeing allusions to 1946 in video reels and comments on them on Facebook. I don't think the people involved have seen the movie or even know its name; what they know is that something momentous related to LBGTQ and the Bible happened in 1946. One commenter, for example, wrote that the word "abomination" wasn't even in the Bible until 1946. They evidently were thinking of Leviticus 18:22, which calls sex between males an abomination (that is, hateful) to Yahweh. That translation choice appears in the Authorized Version of 1611, known as the King James Version, so the RSV translators had nothing to do with it. One video maker remarked that all the biblical references to sex between males had been altered somehow in 1946. I'm not completely sure about this one, because some of that guy's videos are intended satirically, but I think he was serious that time.

So it looks like I'll be collecting more gay-Christian folklore clustering vaguely around the year 1946. It's another example of oral tradition and its effect on information -- misinformation, rather.  What's different from other cases I've encountered is that this is relatively new, springing up in the past year. I don't blame it on the Internet, because the tendency predates the Internet and social media by decades.  

Making the Homosexual More Modern and Relatable; or, Let's Go, Brandan!

 

 

[P.S. The embedded video seems to be gone; here's a link to it on YouTube.] 

The speaker in this video is Brandan Robertson, a queer progressive Christian minister and theologian, author of Queer & Christian: Reclaiming the Bible, Our Faith, and Our Place at the Table (St. Martin's Essentials, 2025).  Several of his TikTok videos have appeared in my Facebook feed, and I've watched them with growing irritation.  TikTok videos seem to come and go, so I've transcribed this one:

And many of you will know the story because of the great work of the documentary crew 1946.  If you've not seen that documentary, you should watch it. Amazing, amazing! But obviously, a fairly innocent translation mistake in 1946 led those English Bible translators to render the mysterious word arsenocoitai which is just a reference to Leviticus 18:22, which is a clear reference to exploitative sexual practice. They innocently chose the word "homosexual' because they thought that was making the Bible more modern, more relatable and now decades later almost every English translation has followed suit and most people assume that the Bible condemns homosexuality.

I haven't read Queer and Christian yet, nor have I seen 1946.  In this post I'm going to address what Robertson says in this reel.

It's grotesque and morally tone-deaf to declare blandly that Leviticus condemns copulation between males as an "exploitative sexual practice." First, the Hebrew Bible has no objection to exploitative sexual practices, from selling young women into marriage (Genesis 29, for example) to concubinage to prostitution (Genesis 38) to the sexual enslavement of girls and women taken as booty in war (Numbers 31:15-20, Deuteronomy 21:10-14) to Yahweh himself grooming a girl child for his sexual use (Ezekiel 16). 

Second, Leviticus demands the execution of both the "exploiter" and the "exploited"; it's as if I were to rob Brandan Robertson, and he was jailed as well as me. There's no ethical concern there, only an obsession with ritual purity. The same is true of Paul, even if he's right about 'arsenokoitai'; Robin Scroggs proposed that reading in his well-meaning but homophobic 1983 study, and he too overlooked that Paul also condemned the supposedly exploited 'malakoi.'  So too did the RSV translators, by conflating the two categories under "homosexuals."

I haven't seen 1946 yet, so I don't know how the translators of the Revised Standard Version saw homosexuality. I do know that in that time and environment, the educated and compassionate view was that it was a disabling mental illness, but also that the homosexual was a predatory danger to the normal. I don't know, then, if their translation was "innocent" or accurately reflected their conception of the male bed. On Robertson's own reading, it still seems a reasonable translation, but like other apologists he wants to define homosexuality very narrowly, to defend styles he finds attractive and erase or demonize others.  There's still a great deal of confusion over what "homosexual" refers to, even or especially among academics, and it has been there all along.

Numerous gay Christian apologists have claimed that when Jesus healed a centurion's slave / boy / whatever, he affirmed a gay relationship.  I'll have to read Queer and Christian to see if Robertson is one of these. But by gay Christian apologists' criteria that relationship could only have been exploitative.

It's very dishonest to blame antigay sentiment among English-speakers on this one passage alone, given Leviticus and Romans, or the endemic Christian antigay bigotry of centuries before 1946. As I recall, reactionary Christians in the US mostly attacked the Revised Standard Version anyway, hewing to the Authorized (or King James) Version. The waves of antigay repression that swept this country in the 20th century had little or nothing to do with the RSV or the translation of this verse. Does Robertson believe that psychiatry based its hostility to homosexuality on the 1946 RSV rendering of 1 Corinthians 6:9?