Bradly Fowler of Canton, Michigan, has filed lawsuits against Zondervan Publishers for $60M and Nelson for $10M. His issue is that the bibles published by these companies have caused him grief because they changed their translation in 1982 and 1987 from the words “effeminate” and “abusers of themselves with mankind” to “homosexuals” and “those who practice homosexual behavior.” Fowler admits to being a homosexual and claims that for thousands of years they have been oppressed by religious zealots and their false interpretations of the Bible, when in fact God is in favor of homosexual behavior.
Well then, the question is clear, what does the Bible say? Did someone change the Bible to say something that God did not originally intend it to say? The answer is, Bradley has an impossible uphill battle on his hands. He will have to persuade thinking people to believe that the Greek words malakos and arsenokoitēs were not in the original text of the Greek New Testament, OR that, somewhere in the two thousand year history of the New Testament, these words were changed. Well, he will not be able to prove either. This is simply because these two words are very clearly and unanimously understood through the centuries by Greek scholars to mean both what the older versions render these words to mean in the King James Bible, and what are their modern-day counterparts. Consider these quotes…
James Strong, 1890
malakos – Of uncertain affinity; soft, that is, fine (clothing); figuratively a catamite: – effeminate, soft.
Joseph Thayer, 1885
malakos -
1) soft, soft to the touch
2) metaphorically in a bad sense
2a) effeminate
2a1) of a catamite
2a2) of a boy kept for homosexual relations with a man
2a3) of a male who submits his body to unnatural lewdness
2a4) of a male prostitute
James Strong
arsenokoitēs, ar-sen-ok-oy’-tace
From G730 and G2845; a sodomite: – abuser of (that defile) self with mankind.
Joseph Thayer
arsenokoitēs
1) one who lies with a male as with a female, sodomite, homosexual
These are the standard definitions that anyone can find in any number of reputable and scholarly Greek lexicons. Even Dale Martin in “Arsenokoités and Malakos: Meanings and Consequences” admits that both Hippolytus and Eusebius used these words in a fashion that would indicate that these words indeed refer to homosexual activity.
What is more, while the thousands of extant Greek manuscripts differ in regards to the wording of some passages, they do not differ at any time in history in this passage. That is to say, the words used in this verse in 1 Corinthians can be traced throughout history all the way back to the first century A. D. as the very words that Paul penned to the Corinthian believers.
Of course, Bradley Fowler, no doubt, is connected with numbers of homosexuals who are trying to overturn the Bible’s authority. This dangerous game that he is playing will eventually backfire on him, with an emphasis on the “fire” part. However, in the mean time, it is worth stating in a blog that he is very wrong, and, indeed, sodomites do go to hell for practicising sodomy, as the Bible has said for a long time.
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