‘1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted A Culture’ takes a journalistic, academic approach to substantiate the claims that the word ‘homosexual’ was added in the Bible by mistake. Experts in the film pored over thousands of historical documents, centuries of ancient texts, and Bible translations in many languages. They concluded that two Greek words were mistranslated to mean ‘homosexual’ when the Book was translated from Greek to English.
The proclamation of the film itself is controversial and as expected there has been an organized effort to attack and debunk the documentary’s claims before anyone has even seen the film. Director Roggio and others involved in the making of the documentary have received many threats. Campaigns have been waged to get even innocuous social media posts taken down. An entire book was published to refute the evidence—even though the film has yet to be screened.
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Everything About The Film ‘1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture’
‘1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture‘ is a new documentary directed by Sharon “Rocky” Roggio. As expected, because of its controversial cloak, the documentary has gone viral ahead of its premiere at the DOC NYC Festival among the conservative and Christian communities. A grassroots campaign to promote the film on social media has gotten its official TikTok account more than 185,000 followers.
There are layers to the documentary. First is the realization that the Bible has been translated many times over the centuries, and that human error may have been involved in the process. That may be obvious, but it’s eye-opening. Moreover, there’s coming to terms with the notion that human error could be responsible for the stoking of homophobia. A mindset of hatred, oppression, and religious nationalism that has defined the last 75 years of our existence.
Why The Word ‘Homosexual’ Is In The Bible By Mistake?
In the early 1940s, the team of translators who worked on the Revised Standard Version of the Bible used the word ‘homosexual’ while translating 1 Corinthians 6:9. (It’s a verse that discusses those who shall not inherit the kingdom of God.) According to Roggio, the word was used in lieu of the Greek words “malakoi” and “arsenokoitai,” which translate to “effeminate” and “sexual pervert” — not “homosexual.”
“We’re talking about a word [homosexual] that is a medical term that has a connotation of a group of people that have an orientation, as opposed to what the original Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic texts are referring to, which is an aggressor, somebody who was an abuser — somebody who has abused someone else, and there is a victim on the other side. It’s a very different connotation,” the director declared.
Religious scholars, priests, theologists, linguists, anthropologists, and activists have done decades of research and investigation into the instances where the word appears in the book. They conclude that it was a mistranslation. Roggio claims that the translators did not intentionally use the wrong word. She insisted that the inclusion of the term has been exploited by some fundamentalists to promote a pernicious anti-gay agenda over the past 70-plus years.
In other words, the Biblical assertion that homosexuality is a sin is a ‘mistake’. The cause for the increasing dangers of Christian nationalism is a ‘mistake’. The catalyst for an entire shift in culture, with political repercussions, religious implications, and consequences for LGBT rights, and acceptance was a ‘mistake’. As ‘1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture’ asserts, it was “the misuse of a single word that changed the course of history.”
Why Wasn’t The Mistake Rectified In The 70s?
As the film outlines, years after the translation, when the ‘mistake’ was pointed out, the committee recognized and attempted to correct it. However, by the ’70s, the implications of those verses had become widespread. Moreover, the AIDS crisis arrived in the ’80s, and one could imagine how the ‘mistake’ could have gone completely irrevocable. The homophobic mindset was weaponized by the moral majority, particularly in the merging of politics and religion in the United States.
“A big point of our film has been biblical literalism,” Roggio says. “We do just think that it was a magical book that was just dropped down to us, but these are real people who have made these decisions that impact our real reality. People are going to feel unmoored by this idea that it’s man that has messed up, not God. As much as we are combating biblical literalism, we want our conservative audience to journey with us, in the sense that this is not an attack on God. This is not an attack on the Bible. This is a real issue of a mistranslation.”
What Were The Problems Faced By The Film Production?
“The opposition is quite vocal about our film, trying to debunk it because they’re afraid,” Roggio tells The Daily Beast in an exclusive interview ahead of ‘1946’s New York premiere. “We’re literally unmooring them and pulling the anchors out from underneath.” Roggio noted that those attacks were coming from all sides.
“We’ve been hit by the conservative audience. We’ve been hit by the atheist audience.” She continued, “We’ve been hit by LGBTQ people who have been hurt by the church and who have now left the church, because they feel that we are subscribing to religious supremacy by even playing along in this dialogue.” “‘1946’ [the movie] is not an attack on Christianity or the Bible. It is a quest to discover biblical truth and honor God’s word,” she declares.
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