1946: Behind the Documentary

So often we hear arguments against homosexuality from conservative Christians — friends, family, even legislators — who claim biblical authority. But what if that authority is built on a mistranslation? What if the word homosexual was never meant to be in the Bible at all? That question lies at the heart of today’s conversation. Sara and special Guest Kathy Baldock are diving into the groundbreaking documentary 1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture — a film that reveals how a single mistranslation in the Revised Standard Version of the Bible reshaped decades of belief, policy, and pain for LGBTQ+ people and their families. 

Special Guest: Kathy Baldock

Kathy Baldock, author, LGBTQ+ advocate, and founder of Canyonwalker Connections, based in Reno, Nevada, is a leading expert on historical and present discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community, in particular, discrimination from the socially conservative Christian church and political sectors. Baldock is one of the main researchers featured in the award-winning documentary 1946: The Mistranslation that Shifted Culture. Her next book, Forging a Sacred Weapon: How a 1946 Bible Mistranslation Shifted Culture (Winter 2025), is a historical and contextually-based survey following human sexuality, same-sex behavior, procreation, and Bible translations, as impacted by cultural, social, medical, political, legal, and military influences from ancient to current times. The book focuses on original research into the reasons the word “homosexuals” was included for the first time in the 1946 Revised Standard Version NT Bible. Her first book, Walking the Bridgeless Canyon (2014), pieced together the history of cultural and religious discrimination against LGBTQ+ people and contains personal stories of LGBTQ+ people impacted by non-inclusive theology.

Links from the Show: 

• Walking the Bridgeless Canyon: https://bookshop.org/p/books/walking-the-bridgeless-canyon-repairing-the-breach-between-the-church-and-the-lgbtq-community-kathy-baldock/4512ebf197af2705?ean=9781951136017&next=t 
• Find 1946 here: https://www.1946themovie.com/ 
• Join Mama Dragons today: www.mamadragons.org 

In the Den is made possible by generous donors like you. Help us continue to deliver quality content by becoming a donor today at www.mamadragons.org. 

Transcript

SARA: Hi everyone. Welcome to In the Den with Mama Dragons. A podcast and community to support, educate, and empower parents on the journey of raising happy and healthy LGBTQ+ humans. I’m your host, Sara LaWall. I’m a Mama Dragon myself and an advocate for our queer community. And I’m so glad to be part of this wild and wonderful parenting journey with all of you. Thanks for joining us. We’re so glad you’re here.

So often, we hear arguments against homosexuality from conservative Christians, friends, some of them family, even legislators who claim biblical authority, but what if that authority is built on a mistranslation? What if the word homosexual was never meant to be in the Bible at all? That question lies at the heart of today's conversation. We're diving into the groundbreaking documentary 1946, The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture. A film that reveals how a single mistranslation in the Revised Standard Version of the Bible reshaped decades of belief, policy, and pain for LGBTQ plus people and their families. Joining us in the den is Kathy Baldock, author, speaker, Executive Director of Canyon Walker Connections, and one of the two lead researchers in the film 1946. Kathy is the one who led the work with archives at Yale, uncovered letters challenging the translation, and helped trace how two ancient Greek words came to be translated in 1946 in a way that has had profound consequences. And her scholarship didn't just point out a problem: she maps out how a translation decision became part of Christian theology, legislation, family dynamics, and personal identity. Her voice and work are central in 1946's mission to open up what's been hidden for so long. Kathy, welcome to In the Den. I am so excited to have this conversation with you. 

KATHY: You did a great job on that summary. 

SARA: Thank you! 

KATHY: Good job. 

SARA: Thank you. Well, I have to tell you, this film knocked me out of my seat. I'm sure, like so many people, I was just kind of gobsmacked by everything, and I come from a very progressive religious tradition, and I was still surprised that I did not know much of what the basis of this research was. And so, I'm just really grateful that it's now out in the world and we can be having these conversations. 

KATHY: Right. 

SARA: But I'm hoping we can start with a primer on the premise of this film to set the stage for everyone, this mistranslation of the word homosexual for listeners who may not know the backstory. Can you talk us through what actually happened in 1946? How did the word homosexual end up in the Bible for the first time? 

KATHY: Okay, so when the American Standard Version copyright ran out, 30 years later, the National Council of Churches was allowed to do a new translation. And so, in 1929, it came up for renewal. And so, originally, they got a team of three really high-profile theologians and teachers, academic theologians together to see if there was a need, to see if there was even a need, because the number one Bible, we can all guess, was the King James. And so, the point was to make a Bible that would be readable, that would be understandable, that they could take some of the archaic language out and replace it with modern language. So, that's important because that's going to become problematic. And so the team started their work. They assigned, they vetted a team and they started their work in the early 30s. They assigned first, I believe it was Matthew and Genesis. They had an Old Testament team, a New Testament team, totally different scholars. And at the top of each team was two scholars above them that would have to approve all changes. And then both sets of the committee, both Old and New Testament people, had to approve all changes. And then Luther Weigle, Dr. Luther Weigle, who was the Dean of Yale Divinity at the time, who was in charge of the team, ran the meetings. Good things about Weigle: he was a person that was – he liked consensus. He liked to try to get people to get along. He set that tone in everything, anything you read about him, anything in his records, shows he was a man that really tried to engage conversation and not shut it down, right? So, he engaged, he invited people to give their opinions. 

So we have these two teams, and they start their work. And then the Depression happened. And in the Depression, rightly so, the National Council of Churches, decided to postpone the work because there were other things that were important during the Depression. Although, not a lot of money was put into this venture. None of the translators were paid. The only paid positions were the typists that took the notes, or re-edited things and passed them out to the team. But all of the theologians, all of the – and only men on the team – were not paid. They all volunteered. And they volunteered for more than a decade, many of them, including Weigle, several decades. So when they finally got back together in 1937, the book of 1 Corinthians was assigned. All the other books were assigned in the New Testament, too. New Testament came out in ‘46, which is why people sometimes get confused because the full Bible came out in ‘52. But the New Testament came out in ‘46, where the word was for the first time -- word homosexual. So, on this team were two theologians. And over those two theologians, over the whole New Testament team, was a theologian named James Moffatt, and he's going to become important in this, too. 

Now, all of these things would be unknown. The year that they did the work, the people on the team, the person at the head of the decision-making on the first level, would have been unknown if you don't go through the archives. So none of this is published until the book gets published. So, sometimes I like to say to people that they have this idea that just because we have the internet and we have Claude, and we have ChatGPT, I can just ask a question, and up it pops. No, it doesn't. A lot of things are still buried in archives, and until people like me and other researchers go into archives and make those things public, those things aren't public. So, when new information comes along, people should reassess their assumptions about truths they hold. And this is one of those examples. So, they made this decision in 1937, first of all, the decision, at its core, was a wrong decision because they took two words – and I know Matthew talked last week, and if people haven't heard Matthew's discussion, go back to that too, Matthew Vines. There were two Greek words, arsenokoitai and malakoi. The best translation – we don't know – but the best translation we can get from context, and from understanding Greco-Roman sexual ethics, is that it was likely a prostituted boy. It could have been a man, but a prostituted male. And a person of higher status, or ownership, or could have purchased that prostitute, or that person could have been an enslaved person. Ten to twenty percent of the Roman Empire at the time was enslaved. Rome, a lot of people were enslaved. Any city, any urban area, people were enslaved. And it wasn't like in the Old Testament, where people were picking things in the fields and doing that. These were urban environments, so they were household slaves where people had more of a relationship with their owners. But that doesn't take away the power dynamics. The power dynamics still say that an owner, or someone that purchased a prostituted person, still had absolute rights to their body. There was no such thing as non-consent, even for women. Only what would be called Honorable Women were sort of protected, and Honorable Women were married women. Any other woman that a man had sex with, a prostituted person, an enslaved person, is okay. He wasn't even committing adultery. The definition of adultery would have said that he would have had to have sex with an Honorable Woman. So, when people say, “Oh, let's go back to marriage of the first century.” No, I don't want to because any married woman, she couldn't consent or non-consent to her husband. And, if he slept around with other people, the enslaved people right in his own household or prostituted people, that was not an offense. So when we read these words in Corinthians, the high likelihood is, is that Paul is talking to a mixed audience, a lot of them would have been enslaved people because when people converted, their household converted, right? So their household will go to church. So here we have a slave owner and an enslaved person in the same audience and Paul can't do anything about slavery. He never did anything about slavery, but he can say to the slave owners, “Treat your people with kindness, “ or, “Don't exploit your people. Don't use your people. Don't be like they are in the world, out there in the kingdom, out there in the Greco-Roman Empire. Don't behave like they do. Behave like Christians, where we're supposed to care for one another.” Doesn't mean get rid of your slaves, it means just be careful how you exploit and abuse them. 

So those things are built into those words. Probably, most likely, a prostituted or enslaved boy, and an owner, or a renter of people. And the first thing the team did was, they combined those two words which is problematic to start with because they are not in the same power dynamic, class hierarchical position. They are total ownership, total non-consent, has no power in their life. So that's the first thing they did, was combine them. So, when they combined them, what they did at the time was they looked into their culture, and they said, “What do we see in our culture?” They're doing this work in 1937. How much is known about homosexuality? Not much. How much is – this is a very important point – How much is known about Greco-Roman sexual ethics? This always surprises people. This book, Kenneth J. Dover's book, Greek Homosexuality, written in 1978, is the first academic book written on Greco-Roman sexual ethics and its exploitation and abusive natures. So, I can be gracious towards anyone that did translation work before 1980 say, because they wouldn't have had access to this.

So the team, the RSV team, would not have understood at all, on any level, that the sexual relationships that they're looking at are exploitative, specifically in Corinthians. I mean, there are other verses. We can go, Leviticus is another situation. Romans is another situation. They're all different situations. But I'm talking about 1 Corinthians. In 1 Corinthians, there's a lot of vice lists in the Bible, and this is one of the vice lists. When people do these things, they are not going to get into the Kingdom of Heaven. But in that list is drunkards. Now, how reasonable is that because we now know that alcoholism is a disease, right? So, are we going to send people that have a disease to hell because they're not in a socioeconomic situation where they can get rehabilitation help, or go to a facility to help them? “Okay, off to hell with you.” And then revilers, revilers. I mean, all you have to do is go online for five minutes in most forums and revilers Revive, right? They are right there, revilers are people that speak nasty about other people. Gossipers. Yeah, there's a few of those in the churches, even. And so, it's this list of people, so they're not all sexual sins. But Paul is saying, people that do this stuff, you're not going to make it into heaven, and really key is – before I go back to the translation process – really key in that verse is something that's used all the time, is the verse 11 part of this that says, “And such were some of you.” And that is taken today as saying they're talking about homosexuals, but such were some of you. You used to be homosexual, too. But now you've been washed in the blood of Jesus, and you're not homosexual anymore. That's not what that means. That means your life – most of these people were not converted Jews, they were Gentiles sitting in these churches in Corinth. And he's saying, “You used to be in that kingdom out there. You have a foot in that kingdom out there, the Greco-Roman Empire where, You men, whatever you do with your penises, is great. It's totally fine, as long as it's not with another man's property. But if anything you want to do is fine. You used to be part of that. Now in here, we're trying to develop a different kind of kingdom, a different kind of kingdom that says, everyone is equal, as equal as we can, while you're still enslaved, And as equal as you can while you're still women. It's not true parity, obviously. But we are people that are going to try to treat others with a different kind of set of values.” 

So, back to the translation, then. The translation team looks at this. And they say, what in our culture, because their job is to update archaic language, and so, what in our culture, when we look at it, is a sexual behavior between two males that we see. And, obviously, that would be homosexuality. And as I said, they had no understanding that there was class and gender hierarchies going on at all. And I can tell this. Moffatt, so is the head of this section of the Bible – Dr. James Moffat, Scottish, University of Glasgow, taught there for a while, taught in the UK for a while, came over to the United States in 1929 to take a seat at Union Theological in New York, which is how Weigle ran into him – he had a reputation, but that's how he engaged Weigle and got the only non-American on the team. And so, he wrote a Bible, too. In 1923. Two people on the team did. Edgar Godspeed, who was also on the New Testament, and James Moffat. So Moffat has already written a Bible, the Moffat Bible, 1923. And he started in the 30s to write commentaries, as would be common, on the books that he interpreted. So, in his interpretation for arsenokoitai, for malakoi and arsenokoitai, he did Catamite, which is a boy prostitute. Boy prostitute, from the myth of Ganymede. So it's a boy prostitute. And then for arsenokoitai, he wrote Sodomite. Sodomite's an interesting word. Sodomite has been a very fluid word through history. Sodomite originally meant, in the 12th century, what clergy did with other clergy. That's where the word comes from. So they rubbed their penises on the thighs of other clergy, they mutually masturbated, they did all kinds of sex. But that word was coined because Peter Damien was very concerned that clergy was doing this with clergy, or clergy was doing this with clergy-to-be, younger students. And so, when he wrote to the Pope, he coined this word, Sodomia. But he was talking about what clergy did and within about 100 years, that word – I told you I give long answers I am not a meme person. 

SARA: You are giving us a deep history, and it's great 

KATHY: And so, within about 100 years, this word sodomia, sodomy, came to be used for anything that was not procreative. So, married couples that did non-procreative sex were guilty of sodomy, just as people who, men, males who had sex together, same status of sin. And in this equation of what is right and wrong, even when a woman took a top position, that was considered sodomy. Church theologians, after the 12th century, even considered coitus interruptus, pulling out, to be sodomy. Because sodomy, at this point in history, is something that's not procreative. 

SARA: And so it's interesting that that word also has evolved in our understanding and in our translation and perception. 

KATHY: Totally. I mean, so now we've talked about three words that have evolved that we use so haphazardly today, like, we all have the same understanding, Paul had it, Jesus had it, Augustine had it, Constantine had it. No, no, no, no, no. So we've looked at: Adultery has changed its definition. Sodomy has changed its definition. Homosexual – when it was first coined in 1869, by Carl Kurt Benny, Heterosexual meant a person that had sex with the opposite sex, the same sex, and even animals. A Natural Sexual, was what we would call a Heterosexual. These words – so when I talk to people, I say, “What time period are you talking about?” Because in some time periods, nothing changes for a hundred years, 500 years, that would be a stretch. But as you get closer to, like, 1880, I don't want people to go more than 10 years. And then as you get closer to like, 1920, I don't want people to go more than 5 years without redefining words. The word homosexual in 1980, has a different set of baggage than it does today, right? 

SARA: Yeah, for sure. So these translators conflated two words. 

KATHY: Problem number one. 

SARA: Problem number one. Brought homosexual in its contemporary understanding. 

KATHY: In the 1930s. 

SARA: At that time in the 1930s, and that kind of is the ball that got rolling, that spun out into kind of all of the challenges we've experienced with these passages. 

KATHY: I have proof that Moffat did not understand, because I've read now the commentaries that I was referring to. Moffat wrote a commentary on 1 Corinthians and so, when I read the commentary, the 30-page introduction to, like, “Let me set the stage. This is what's going on in Corinth.” He got some things wrong, but he got this thing really wrong. When he talks about the enslaved population, it's almost like he's talking about the worker bees. Like our worker bees in an affluent town, like say, the Mexican gardener, and the person over here that does the building. It was that sort of tone. Like we've got the worker bees and we've got the plebeians, right? We've got the rich people, and we've got the poor people. Nowhere in his overview for 1 Corinthians, does he even remotely nod to that these people in the lower hierarchies, the lower classes, were sexually exploited. He had no idea. But the problem was, because he saw it that way, he wrote that he interpreted that verse, this is his phrase, “As homosexual love.” 

SARA: Wow. 

KATHY: Homosexual love and so it's right there in 1937. I am convinced that it was James Moffat that brought this suggestion to the table. Absolutely convinced. And there's another reason why. This is, like, insider information, and I didn't used to let this go, but now that the book is so close to coming out, I don't mind saying things, because these things need to be said, like, Who did this? Well, Moffat, the reason I said he was the only non-American, he lived in the UK, and he was also the oldest member of the team. He was born in 1870. So in 1895, he was a 25-year-old young man. Twenty five-year-old young men were a lot older than 25-year-old young men are now. They're a little more aware. And he was also quite an academic. But in 1895, what was going on in London at the time was the Oscar Wilde trials. And that was, like, “the love that dare not speak its name,” was in the paper constantly. It was constant. Both England after this, very much so because of this trial, and the United States before this, starting in the 1870s, because of the Hays Amendment – we were unbelievably high. We had our gates high for censorship. We didn't let anything that had to do with non-normative behavior, I mean in every respect. Like women's rights, reproductive rights. They wouldn't have called it that. But any of those things, we had the highest gate you could imagine. England had a fairly high gate, but after the Oscar Wilde trials, they pulled that thing right up. So we've got no information on Greco-Roman sexual ethics. And we also have almost no information on who homosexuals are, because If they write it, it doesn't get out of where it writes, it certainly doesn't get into the United States. So this work is being done in Germany, starting in the 1870s. It really is full-blown in the 1920s and 30s. They have the only sex institute in the world, Magnus Hirschfeld has opened it in 1919. That facility, that institution, is the picture you see when you see the book burning by Nazis, all those books on the ground? That's the Sex Institute, May 1933. So, when that burned, between 1919 and when it burned, Hirschfeld had collected over 30,000 intakes on people that did sex differently. And it's not just homosexuality. It was women that enjoyed sex. It was people that wanted to cross-dress. It was women that wanted abortions. So anyone that did anything differently, they came to the Sex Institute. And he did these intakes, 130 questions. These were complete records. And all of that is destroyed. 

So now, we have these people sitting in a room at Yale University with no information on homosexuality. We are not even letting it in this country. When Magnus Hirschfeld came to this country to speak, he couldn't speak on homosexuality because the censorship was so high. So he spoke about male-female marital relationships when he got to America. But when he got to speak to German physicians, and he spoke in German, he spoke about homosexuality, because he couldn't get caught by the censorship people. And so, all these problems are happening at the same time. No one knows anything about Greco-Roman sexual ethics. No one knows anything about homosexuality. And the only person that has some kind of personal memory about homosexuality from the UK sat through the Oscar Wilde trials, where it was horrific reporting. And writes about it, and calls it homosexual love, because that is what he envisions. So just a whole cataclysmic storm waiting to happen. But none of this was done in malice. None of it, because they didn't have the tools. So they're just trying to modernize language. 

SARA: Yeah, it's really interesting to hear that even the most scholarly folks, we cannot separate our own life experience and cultural understanding from language. And so thank you for that primer. And I want to shift gears just a little bit. I'm curious to know, now, after that really deep and robust insight into this mistranslation and how the whole process works, which is very interesting. How did you get involved in all this? How did you first come into this learning and decide you needed to pursue this? 

KATHY: I was going through a divorce in 2001, which sounds like forever ago now. And I prefer the title Wasband, Ex is yucky. So my wasband and I, we'd been having difficulties. But I think typical evangelical, submissive wife put up with a lot of crap because I wanted to keep my marriage together. Well, when he finally said, “It's over,” one of the ways I coped was I started hiking every day. You know, a lot of tears. And on one of those hikes, I ran into someone that I'd seen several times, I had had a particularly difficult Saturday morning. And the wasband was being really ugly. And so, I didn't want to go home. And so, when I finished my hike, I saw Neddo starting her hike, so I asked her if she minded if I walked with her, because I didn't want to go home. And I'd seen her quite a bit there, but I'd never spoken to her. And my normal me would have found a way to convince her that she needed what I had. But who needs what I have? When my life is falling apart. So, I didn't try to convince her. I didn't try to evangelize, is the bottom line. But I realized when I got back to her car, and the language she was using, although I didn't have any gay friends that I knew about, but I just found her language to be sort of evasive. Like, I didn't hear husband, or boyfriend, or any of that stuff. That's kind of common, that people would talk about on an hour and a half long hike, you'd hear something about their family. I didn't hear anything about that, and I thought, “Hmm. I wonder if she's a lesbian.” But I liked her. And the other thing was I felt safe with Neddo. And so, we met every Saturday morning to hike. And it just became a regular thing. I wanted her in my life. So I became friends with Neddo. And she avoided the word”‘lesbian.” I avoided the word “convert.” I don't know, you know, just the whole topic. And then about a year into it, a former partner of hers died. It was a fairly tragic death. They found her alone in her apartment. She had forgotten to take some medication she needed, and when Neddo got the news, Neddo was pretty despondent, and one of her first questions was, like, “What happens after death?” I mean, that's a pretty normal question. And the person she thought might be able to answer that would be me. And so, when we got to the trail, she said, “I've got a question to ask you.” And she said, “But before I ask you this question, I have to tell you something about myself.” And she said, “I'm a lesbian.” We were walking up this trail, and I put my arm around her waist and I said, “Is that all you got? Like, you think that's going to chase me away?” Because she said it in like, “I'm going say this, and you're going book on up the trail without me.” And so the conversation just started opening. And it was good because what happened was she started inviting me into her social circles. And I was Neddo's dog-walking friend, I was Neddo's Christian friend, often I didn't have a name. I was just this person because I was the outsider. A conversation partner of mine from my Italian class was a gay man and I was the outsider in all his social circles. And I was the outsider in Neddo's social circles. But I got to be with all of these people that my -- I'm not even going to say faith – my ideology, a rendition of a bastardization of my faith said that these people, their connections, their intimate connections were lust, not love. This is ridiculous. And they had made this choice. But now I was in amongst them. And I could see that that wasn't true. At first, it just made me kinder. And I felt that it was time to do the theology on it. And it took five years to sit down and do the theology. So we're talking about 2006, 2007, that's a long time. But, there's not much material out then. So, like, how the team felt about Greco-Roman sexual ethics, there wasn't much for people like me to read in 2006. 

SARA: In terms of theological interpretations of homosexuality. 

KATHY: Right. Or a kind way of how we are to engage the LGBTQ community. There were a lot of nasty books. That's not what I was looking for. And so, it was really, for me at the time, I felt like I needed to understand this for myself, not have other people tell me what to think. But to understand for myself. And when I started going through the scriptures, it was pretty soon that I realized, these aren't about homosexuals. This is just about people that abuse sex. And so that's the beginning of the journey, and boy, have things progressed in what, 17 years? I mean, wow. 

SARA: Yes, in an amazing way. And so what was the moment when this particular information that led you to be like, “I have to now figure this out. I have to go find the original material.” What led you down that road? 

KATHY: From the first book. The first book, Walking the Bridgeless Canyon, 2014. I knew that the word was introduced in the 1946 New Testament RSV, Revised Standard Version. And I remember when I was doing the research for that, I remember calling Matthew – Matthew Vines. “I can't find a 1946-1952 full bible from the RSV. Do you have one? Because we all say this, but I'd like to see it. I don't have one of those Bibles. I don't have access to one of those Bibles. Do you have one?” And he said, “I think my mom has one.” I said, “Can you do me a favor and go ask your mom, Kim (who's a friend of mine) to take a picture of it so you send me a screencap?” So he talked to her. And she doesn't have one either. And I thought, “Well, this is really interesting that we all say this, but none of us has this Bible. I mean, we can all say things, but I want to see the Bible still.” And so, I've continued to teach this and when I teach along timelines, and if the listeners don't understand what I'm talking about. There's plenty of me online teaching on timelines, and it's really effective teaching, and I hear all the time, how this is the final piece that convinces people that they're okay, or their kids are okay, they're really good stuff. Just Google me, go to YouTube, lots of stuff there. But I would teach on this timeline. And I'd put it up, and I'd say kind of what I said to you. I'd say this team was built, was born between 1870 and 1917. Okay, we've talked about what people know, what the medical community knows, how they're treated socially. No theology around it yet. But what would they have known? They would have known nothing. I'd consistently say as I taught, “I don't think this is a theological translation, I think it's ideological and cultural,” because there's no theology. There's no theology around this topic. 

SARA: Because it doesn't exist. 

KATHY: It doesn’t exist. The first person that takes a crack at theology is Derrick Sherwin Bailey in 1955. Not as good as John Boswell did in 1980. But still, they know nothing. So I'd say, again and again, this is ideological and cultural. But I couldn't prove it, but I know enough about history to feel really comfortable saying it. So in the audience, two different times, was Ed Oxford. And Ed, he had been closeted most of his life. He had even been a missionary to Japan. He was in the American Baptist Church, non-affirming, or at least the piece that he was in, and had gone to seminary. And so, he had done all these things, and here he was in my seminar. First time, I didn't really know he was there. Second time, I see him in the audience. By lunchtime, I see him crying. So I thought, “Yeah, I got to connect with that guy.” So I go to him at lunchtime, and I say, “You're struggling. Can I help you understand something?” And he said, “I've listened to you before. And I've gone to seminary, and I've never heard this. And I've never heard that the first time it got in the Bible was 1946. And why don't I know this? Why don't I know any of this?” And I said, “I don't know.” And he said, “But I think you're telling the truth.” And I thought, “Well, yeah, I'm telling the truth.” So, Ed is a curious guy. And so he decided to go out and buy old Bibles, old commentaries, Bibles, lexicons, things associated with the topic, so that he had a record of change. And I didn't know he was doing this. And the next time I came down, I was actually with the Reformation Project, teaching at a cohort, and we had a public night the last night where area guests were allowed to come in and participate in some kind of teaching and worship. And Ed came to that too and he said to me – I had driven down to Southern California from Nevada. So I had my car with me – and he said, “Why don't you check out of the hotel and come up to my house in Long Beach. I've been collecting Bibles and I'd like you to see them.” And I thought, “When people say collecting Bibles, you imagine, I don't know. I've got 10, 12 of them. Big deal. You've got 10, 12 Bibles, I got 10, 12 Bibles, who cares?” And he said, “No, I've been collecting old things. I've got things from the 16th century.” I'm like, “Who is this character?” So, I thought, he's really serious about this. So I checked out of the hotel and drove up to his house. He also wanted me to go to a church that Ken Fong was pastor of Evergreen Baptist, who had after 11 years, switched 11-year, very slow process, switched his church. I mean, there were a lot of things I wanted to go up for. So when we get to Ed's house and I walk into his dining room, and I'm surrounded by bookcases filled with – I mean, filled with old Bibles and commentaries. And I thought, this is crazy. I feel like I'm in a wing of the Huntington or something. It was just crazy. So what I actually said to him was like, “Give me a bottle of wine and a glass. And go away.” Like, leave me alone. Shoo. Shoo. I mean, that was, he sat with me, obviously. But I couldn't believe that he had the sort of passion to find the truth. And so he became one of the people I answered his phone calls for. And he called me one day, and he said, “The head of this team's Luther Weigle.” I'm like, “Yeah, I know.” And he said,”All of his archives for Luther Weigle are at Yale University. They've kept all of his stuff.” So we went. 

We knew there were 94 banker's boxes of materials. We didn't know what was in there. We had a list, but it wasn't as defined as our intentions were. And when we got there, we found out there were also 22 rolls of microfilm. So, somewhere, we don't know, but somewhere certainly over 100,000 documents. And at the time, I didn't know how translations worked. Ed and I together have done The Living Bible, the New American Standard, the NIV, and the RSV. I mean, people don't do that sort of stuff. I personally don't know anyone else that's gone into translation note archives. None. And so, or I think we've got some street cred, or seminary cred, or something cred. Heaven cred. And I expected to find, like, actual notes that said, “We were discussing this thing and we don't know what to do with these verses. But look at those dirty, filthy homosexuals – I'm just telling you what I expected – look at those dirty, filthy homosexuals.” I knew nothing at the time that there were no books on Greco-Roman sexual ethics. I didn't know all that stuff. I didn't know what I know now. So I'm just making an assumption, like a lot of people that comment on this work make assumptions. Even the people that are supportive of this work still make really bad assumptions and still present this entire case wrongly. You don't have to impose your today on yesterday. If you just tell yesterday's story, it's convincing enough. So I had no idea about all those things. But when we didn't find any of that stuff, when we found lists of words they were working on, or here's what we want to update, I never found the word homosexual in this list. And it's like, where is this conversation? Conversation wasn't there. It was like they had no conversation. And so it was really disappointing. 

SARA: Was the Yale trip where you discovered the letter from Reverend David? 

KATHY: Yeah! 

SARA: Yeah, tell us about that. 

KATHY: So I’m there. This is the trip. 

SARA: Great. 

KATHY: So we find nothing. And then we finally go to the archives, and the archives are a lot of contracts, and publication notices, and how people are receiving it, but there was one roll that had a lot of the letters that came in. And some of them are very funny and in the midst of this one roll of letters. And when I saw at the top of this page, printed out, or typed out, 1 Corinthians, and the word homosexual under it, I thought, “Have we finally found something?” So I actually stopped. I didn't even read past the first paragraph. Ed was two machines away, and I said, “Come over here!” and that's actually in the film. Like, the real footage is there. And then, we brought Peter with us. Ed brought him along specifically to take pictures because we only had a certain number of days. So take a picture of this document. Film this document. And so we read through it, and it's the only thing we found. There was no conversation. But from that Letter to, letter from, letter to, letter from, the letter that Luther Weigle laid out exactly why the team made this translation, that became the gold. Yes, that David confronted it, or said this is problematic. But the gold comes in the response because the response is three single-type pages of their rationale. And I took two weeks to go through one letter, just going through all of his old resources to seeing how valid are they? Would they carry weight today? Would they be considered academic and scholarly? And I knew this was a problem. And so, in the book, I analyze the back and forth. But when I analyze these letters, what I come down to is the limitations, again. They are limited in the letters written in 1959, so seven years after the full Bible comes out. But they are limited in even language about same-sex attraction. Nobody would have said sexual orientation. Nobody in that time would have understood it as a normal variation on human sexuality. When the 50s hit, after the Second World War and after the McCarthy era, man, homosexuality took a spin and a turn. It just became, the assumptions about it were just totally wrong. So we're in this era where assumptions about homosexuality are wrong. There's no scholarly academics on it. So they're trying to have a conversation about something that only one of them has life experience on. They're both limited in language and neither of them has the full academics of Greco-Roman sexual ethics. And so, they go as far as they can. But they can't get any further because they are by time, by the era they are in, completely limited. And it's going to open up but it's not going to open up until the late 60s. Only 10 years later, but as I said, every five years is going to matter at this point. Things are going to change. So you can't even look at what they agreed to in 1959 through today's eyes. You can't look at it through the 70s' eyes. You have to be so aware of where you are on the spectrum of understanding and assumptions. And that's why I think this work is really important because people will take what they believe today and impose it on 2,000 years ago. When you can't even take what you understand today and impose it on 37, 46, 52, 59, 1980, you can't do it. You can't do it. 

SARA: The film really highlights this journey that you're describing to us, and also highlights Reverend David's letter and role in a really beautiful way. Would you briefly share with us a little bit about what that letter was, and who he was when he wrote that letter? He's a very young, young Seminarian, not even ordained yet. 

KATHY: No. He’s 21 years old. He has been in seminary one year. And there are pieces of his life that just come together to make him who he is, to ask this question at this time. Like, sometimes I think, why am I doing this work? My difference is I was born in 56. When I was two years old, my father left. And we lived in a very Irish Catholic neighborhood where divorce was terrible. And my mother didn't have the language. My mother couldn't even tell me why I didn't have a father. She had so much shame, she couldn't tell me. So I lived in this place where I didn't understand things, but I knew something was wrong with me. I lied about that I had a father, that he worked during the day, and he came home at night. And I did this just to cope. But what I realized as I grew up was this gave me a total sensitivity to issues of justice and fairness. Like, I did not understand why there was something wrong with me. When there was nothing wrong with me. But it led me down some bad paths. You know, shame leads you down some bad paths. So when I realized this lesson is playing out again in the life of other people, that can't do something about who they are, that really gave me a heart to understand this. And so David, I write his story in the book. I spent two months with him, going back and forth, not with him in Canada, writing his story to get it right, because he didn't come out until he came to a conference with me. So at the age of 79, he came out. And because he never came out, he never got to tell his story. And so when he got to tell his story, he wanted to tell me every detail of his story, and I wanted to honor him by getting that done. And it seems odd in the book, where I tell his story two different times. I let him get to 21 when he writes the story. And then I let him age and die when we discovered the letters. And so what makes him different is he grew up in this little town called Lenoxville in Quebec. And in that town, there was a university that had been an Anglican seminary, a teaching place for Anglican clergy. And it had turned to a public university, but they still had Latin and Greek and Hebrew. And so, as a student, he took it in, like, college.

And so when he got to – the story's beautifully told in the video, in the movie, you should see the 1946 documentary. It tells the story of him going to his pastor, Reverend Outerbridge, and saying, “You know, I'm struggling. I'm having a crisis of faith,” and by the time he leaves the office, he's got an application to seminary. So, he goes to seminary, and it's underwritten by the United Church of Canada, even with a stipend that he can live. So he goes to McGill University. in the United Church of Canada thread for Divinity School. And he already understands Greek and Hebrew from undergrad school, which is unusual. And so he spends months looking at this, and he's also a very sincere and studious and smart person. And he gets picked as the student, as a freshman, he would go to every church service that they had in the morning and he would hand the professors their favorite versions of the Bible, whether it be a Hebrew Bible, or this version, so he was constantly touching Bibles. But he was just that kind of person. When he was young, he was collecting stamps and studying astronomy. And I tell those stories in the book so that you can understand this is not just, like a kid that stopped, you know, he decided as he was playing baseball one day, you know, I'm going to go write the – no, this is a person that was set up from his childhood. His mother also set him up. She moved churches when she realized her child wasn't getting a good Sunday School education at age six. His mother moved churches. And so this is just a young man that was set up to ask questions. And so when he sees this, his Bible, his denomination had just chosen the RSV as their book of worship but he had been reading the King James his whole life. But now he's in a formal setting, so he reads the RSV, and they get to that verse, and he's like, “How can that be that homosexuals don't go to heaven? I'm a homosexual. I'm going to heaven.” And so he decides to question that. First thing he does is go back to the King James, and then takes months to write a letter that, when I read it, it could have been written today. He misses a couple of points. Not Weigle's letter, but David's letter could have been written today. David was still limited in understanding orientation. But he understood that what was happening in what Paul was talking about was abusive relationships. And he said, that is homosexual vice. And so, I have kept the letters secret until the book comes out, because if someone doesn't understand terminology – as we've been talking this whole time – terminology, words that they're associated with, the baggage that words have imposing different, like, today's views on old stuff, they are going to come out of the letters that I've found with their own lenses applied, with their own interpretation which supports their worldview, which is going to be wrong. It's going to be wrong. And I totally anticipate that happening anyway, but at least when the book comes out, I will have presented my 500 pages of documentation, right? 

SARA: Fair enough. And so, David is writing a letter to the committee to say, “I think you're going in the wrong direction with this translation. This does not feel like it's correct.” 

KATHY: He says more, He says you're going in the wrong direction. He says you're wrong. 

SARA: You're wrong. I was being gracious. 

KATHY: He says you're wrong. And then Weigle writes back and says, essentially, I get it. And he said, “This is wrong. You're right, we're wrong.” But, he says, “Would it be amenable to you if we use ‘those who participate in homosexual practices’?” And David said no. Because, no, that's not enough. It's those who engage in homosexual vices so that would mean rape. That's rape. That's anyone that imposes themselves on a male that imposes themselves on another male, that's rape. But they still can't flesh that out, which is, I think the chapter that I wrote on the letters and analyzing them is going to be really key to people, because I care about lenses. And I'm trying in that chapter to say, “Here are the lenses you NEED to have on, to read these letters. Do not take 2025 and put it on these letters. Don't do it.” And so, Weigle says, “I'm going to take this. I'm going to put it in the file so that the next time we have this conversation we can talk about this.” And it was 13 pages. And it was so clear that nobody else wrote, because when they went to talk about this, they start in 65, defer it, 68, 69, they finally vote on it. And it says in the margin, 13 pages, so they're still holding on to this exchange between Weigle and David. But the unbelievable thing is, okay, so it's only 10 years later but Stonewall has happened. And people are coming out. That's what I said, five years matters. So they did the translation work in ’37. They signed off in ’41. They published in ‘46. They published more broadly in ‘52. David wrote this letter in ‘59. They revisit the topic formally in ‘69. That is 32 years of history in very key times. So when they come to this decision, they have right in front of them, Homosexuals:  those who participate in homosexual vices, those who engage – some of my verbs are wrong – but essentially, those who engage in homosexual practices. And what does the team decide to do? None of those. Because it's now, people are coming out. And they're realizing that this is not about homosexuals doing this thing. This is about people that participate in, they translate it to sexual perverts which, very unfortunately carried baggage, too. 

SARA: Yeah, that doesn't feel a whole lot better. 

KATHY: But sexual perverts I mean, I know heterosexual sexual perverts certainly. So it was better. And the next time, so the wonderful thing is the RSV, the NRSV comes out in ‘71, changes it to sexual perverts. And because now they had a contract in 1959. They made a contract with the publisher three weeks before David's letter arrived, three weeks, that they would not change anything in the RSV for a minimum of 10 years because it wasn't like Kindle print-on-demand, right? These contracts and licenses went out to lots of publishers, and they didn't change it. So they decide October 1st, by contract, not to do any changes. David writes October 22nd. They've made an agreement. They can't go back on it. And they also don't know that this is problematic. In the culture in 1959, it is not problematic, because homosexuality is criminalized. So, of course criminals go to hell, of course they do. But it's going to change by ‘69. It's still not de-pathologized. So when they come to this, they make this choice. But thankfully, the NRSV, which is still the copyright, is still owned by the National Council of Churches, same people that owned it for the 1930s work. They took all their licenses back. And in 2022, they did a new edition, which is the new revised standard version Little ‘u’, little ‘e’, updated edition. And they completely changed it. And now it says, “men who participate in illicit sex.” Illicit is up to cultural interpretation. But it forces you to have a conversation and saying, what is inappropriate sex? And there are lots of examples I know of Baptist ministers and youth leaders doing inappropriate sex. And they would be condemned, because they are using power, hierarchy on other people. And so it's a great translation, but in the meantime, four other Bible translations came out with their revisions. And every one of them doubled down. Some that before that key date of 1980 said, “You know, catamites, and sodomites or men who had sex with prostitutes, all of those conservative ones, to keep a market value and to not lose support of the conservative community, If they were wishy-washy, by 2010, they doubled down. 

SARA: Yeah. I mean, it certainly had an impact, regardless of how the translations have evolved, and that impact has really taken hold, and created some really terrible theology, in my opinion.

KATHY: Terrible. But the problem is most people don't understand Bible translation, right? 

SARA: Right. 

KATHY: So they open it up and they say, “This is The Word of God!” The wonderful thing about going through translation notes is you see humanity in them. You see these humans. So that's another thing I'm trying to do with the book is to say, these are humans. These are humans that have done this work. And a very powerful part of what I've written is, these translations, these mistranslations, came at the time where biblical counseling just started to rise in the mid-50s, 60s. So they're trying to – they're kind of irritated that therapists are kind of in their lane, right? “We're the ones that take care of people's emotional stressful needs,” the pastors, the priests. Now, all of a sudden, we've got this kind of new feel of therapy. So, some of them take the track that says “The Bible can fix everything.” And when they come to this issue of homosexuality, The Bible clearly says it's an issue. 

SARA: And of course, it's hard for religious people, for theologians, for the church writ large to admit it might be wrong. It was wrong. 

KATHY: So now you've got a mistranslation, biblical counseling starting, more translations come out that cement that this – five Bibles say it, and as many as six places – That homosexuality will send you to hell or is a sin. So, right out of that becomes reparative therapy. They just go boom, boom, boom, right in order. 

SARA: So the film is lovely because it really unfolds this journey that you've been sharing with us, your journey. And side by side, the director, Rocky's journey with her dad. And that journey really exposes us to this awareness that while we are simultaneously watching your discoveries, your analysis, the conferences you're at, your teachings, and really shifting people, we're also aware that it doesn't shift everybody, and that there/s still resistance to this awareness, this learning around translation. And I'm just curious how that lands for you. 

KATHY: I'm aware that some people will write off my, I think, really extensive work. They'll try to write it off in many ways to say, you know, she's not really a Christian. She never went to seminary, and as basic as, she's a she. So, knowing that's ahead, I start the book in 3200 BC. So I can put the texts into context. So I'm trying as hard as I can to walk people through watching the texts change from intent and how it even changes by 400 AD. You now, it's no longer about, like, in Leviticus, I completely believe it's about inheritance and about social order. So, you better have a baby that fits into the social order whether it's –I think there's 7 or 8 really good understandings of Leviticus – So, wherever that is, it's not about two equal status men having sex. I believe it's about inheritance and social order. Romans, I think, is a political comment of, like, even the people at the top are getting this wrong. And when you get into idolatry, your behavior just descends to immoderate behavior. It's idolatry and a political statement. When we get to Corinthians, it's about exploitation. By the time we get to 400, those things, and Sodom and Gomorrah, all of them, are interpreted as what is non-procreative is wrong. Paul wouldn't have cared about procreation. He thought the end of the world was coming, right? He saw all the signs at the end of the world. He didn't care about procreation. But within 400 years, right through 1800, these verses are going to be used about procreation. And I end every chapter with an insight section to say to people, “Are you seeing where we are? Are you seeing that it's no longer about this? Are you seeing that if you're a heterosexual couple and you're having sex without the intent of procreation, and enjoying it? Yeah, you were a heretic. You were a heretic at this time.” So, I'm trying constantly. So I'm hoping that as I lay things out slowly, we don't just make the last 2,000 years about this monolithic biblical sexuality. That's insanity. So, I hope that through education, people can have different kinds of conversations, like, “Do you understand it wasn't always like this? Do you understand that when you're saying biblical marriage, biblical sex, that is a term you should never be using because it's amorphic.” It just keeps moving and moving and getting reinterpreted. We've got to talk about what that thing meant at the beginning. What Paul was against? I'm against. Totally. I don't think you should sexually abuse, certainly anyone, but particularly people that have no ability to consent or not consent. Yeah, we're all against that. So, let's focus on that. Let's focus on power hierarchies around sex. So I'm trying to shift conversation. But, as I said in the beginning, I'm not a memes person. I can't obviously, clearly, I can't do this because this is so much to unpack. And there's so much history we have to go through. So I think that people that are serious about this, that are people that want to know, will be convinced. I was speaking in Atlanta last week at a church and so I've been near this woman that came up to me, I think three other times that I've been to this church. She has a gay child. And I never had a conversation with her about her gay child. We'd been at a wedding together. It was just this assumption that everything's fine. But when I talked – I only had 45 minutes – and when I talked about this translation process, and how some Bible’s translation teams, committees, publishers have doubled down, and intentionally double down on this issue, now having the resources of understanding the academics behind sexual ethics of early ancient times, and they still do this? This is intentional. This is not just ignorance anymore. So that's what I talked about. And she came up to me afterwards. And she was crying, and she made sure that her child wasn't anywhere nearby. And she came up to me and she said, “I've always had this tiny piece of me that has held back because I don't want my child to go to hell. So, although I get all this – and she's in a totally affirming church – I get it all, there's still this piece that was holding back that said, “What if I'm doing the wrong thing?” And she said, “And today? That's gone. Gone, because I understand now the process that has happened, that I have put my total faith in this process. And this process is flawed because humans are flawed and humans have done this work.” And I say, “To stay in power.” So I think some people will get it. And it's not my job to convince anybody, but I think I've done a really good job of presenting a case that says if you want to come on board, this is all you should need. This is it. 

SARA: Yes, absolutely yes. That's a great story. I appreciate you sharing that. You've mentioned, and we see your own journey a little bit in the film, but before you began this journey, you were a pretty devout evangelical Christian. I'm curious to hear through all of this, in all these years now, how has your own faith changed? 

KATHY: That is better. And as an educated person – I started college. I went to a really good high school, a public high school, but really high academics. So I started college as a physics major, so clearly in the sciences, yadda yadda. Ended up in engineering. So I have a high respect for academics. Passed that on to my children. Homeschooled my children, even. And I've had this struggle within me my entire adult life of I'm smart, and I care about facts but I'm not so sure I believe in this, the creation stories, in Adam and Eve, in these other stories. So I would kind of put that back in my head and not engage it. I just, I couldn't believe it. But we're supposed to believe it. But taking the approach that I wanted to put the problematic passages into context, I had to engage them. And when I engage them at an academic level to understand why these stories were written, at the time they were written, by the people that are written, to the audience they were written for, I can see the beauty in these stories. So rather than being me, 10 years ago, even, maybe even five years ago, a person that wouldn't engage these stories because they were, they didn't work, you know, for a person with a science mind, they don’t work. So I would just avoid them. But now I understand the intention of these stories. The intention at the time, and I can, better than I ever have before, be able to see the beauty in those stories, and see the connections of these stories, and everything doesn't line up. But they were Jews, they weren't trying to make everything line up. They didn't take the two creation stories and make them line up. They said, “The northern kingdom, this is our story, the southern kingdom, this is our story.” And so, the Hebrew Bible, I have so much more respect for now because I understand the intention now. So I have a respect for the Hebrew Bible that I never had before. And then, when I see what Paul's writings are trying to do, I can respect Paul. I mean, all these people that like, I hate Paul, he hates gays, he hates women. No, I can understand in the context of time. So I can understand the beauty of this entire book. I am very intolerant, though, when people abuse this book for other intentions. And I speak up about it. But my faith is stronger because now I can understand and appreciate this entire text, my faith is richer and I'm actually able to have conversations with people that I would have avoided before. I'm actually a better Christian for having done this work. You know, my faith has grown because of this book. 

SARA: And it's lovely to hear. And I think I appreciate it. And I know so many in our community will appreciate it, too, that there is room for both. There is room for all of it. And to have a deep and abiding faith, even with all of this information, maybe even because of it. So I really appreciate that. Thank you for this extraordinary conversation. Thank you for sharing all of this information with us. I'm so glad that your work is out there as a way for more folks to engage in this conversation and really understand. 

KATHY: Right. I'm trying to find a new way to have this conversation. And so I'm hoping that my work and the book enables thoughtful, humble people to have new conversations that don't get stymied all the time like, “I think it says this, I think it says this.” There's just a lot of ways to enter this conversation. 

SARA: Exactly. I want to remind our listeners that we'll put links in the show notes so that you can link directly to Kathy's webpage, the book, how to see the film. A reminder that we have a Mama Dragons bookshop, and we'll feature the book there, so you can go right to the bookshop and purchase a copy of the book, and help support Mama Dragons at the same time. Kathy, this has been wonderful. Thank you again for the conversation. And thank you, most of all for this great work that you have put into the world.

KATHY: Well, thank you. And thank you for tolerating my long answers. This is complex. Yeah.

SARA: Thank you so much for joining us here In the Den. Did you know that Mama Dragons offers an eLearning program called Parachute? This is an interactive learning platform where you can learn more about how to affirm, support, and celebrate the LGBTQ+ people in your life. Learn more at mamadragons.org/parachute. Or find the link in the episode show notes under links.

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