“I can’t compromise conviction,” he says in the film. With the documentary, she filmed her father attending talks by Baldock and overall standing by his belief that the Bible condemns homosexuality as a sin. When she was a teenager, her pastor father discovered that she was a lesbian and responded with a letter full of Bible verses imploring her to repent and forsake her identity. Roggio melded this research with her own personal story. Hundreds of millions of Bibles with the wrong translation had been published, and conservative religion and conservative politics soon banded together to push an anti-gay agenda. In the next translation in 1971, the committee changed the translation from homosexual to “sexual perverts” – but by then the damage was done. There, they discovered correspondence between the head of the translation committee and a gay seminary student in which the committee head conceded with the student’s point about the mistranslation. The director and producer Sharon “Rocky” Roggio documents the journey of the Christian author Kathy Baldock and Ed Oxford, an advocate and gay man who grew up Southern Baptist, as they dug through archives at the Yale Sterling Memorial Library. While people could take it to mean man bedding man, within the context of the time, scholars believed that arsenokoitai alluded more to abusive, predatory behavior and pederasty than it does homosexuality. The film hinges its premise on the fact that the word “homosexual” appeared for the first time in the Bible in 1946, in an apparent mistranslation of the ancient Greek words malakoi – defined as someone effeminate who gives themselves up to a soft, decadent, lazy and indolent way of living – and arsenokoitai – a compound word that roughly translates to “male bed”.
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