Translation without bias

A man in Michigan has brought a $60 million lawsuit against Zondervan Publishing and a $10 million suit against Thomas Nelson Publishing. Both publish Bibles. His claim is the Bibles produced by these companies mistakenly translates some obscure Greek words into "homosexual" and those translations were used to make him an outcast from his family and his church. While I have my doubts such a lawsuit is the best way to go (damn activist judges persecuting Christians again), especially for those amounts, I agree with the underlying claim and see this is at least a way to highlight the issue.

Through a few clicks I came to a site that traces the translation of "malakoi," one of those obscure Greek words. The first in recognizable English was the Tyndale Bible of 1526 when the word was translated as "weakling" (perhaps referring to moral weakness), which is about as close as one can get. For about 400 years it was also translated as "effeminate." It isn't until 1933 is it translated as "men who lie down with males" and 1958 before "homosexuality" appears. It is only then the meaning could be applied to lesbians. This change in translation did not come about through new linguistic evidence of the original word, but is the result of cultural influence on modern translators, leading them to add bias to the English. This article goes on to spell out how the word has been translated in the handful of other places it appears in the Bible and then looks at how other Greek writers, such as Plato, Aristotle, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus used the term. None of them refer to "men lying with men."