John Kesler

This may not be a mistranslation. First, using the "more difficult reading is likely to be correct" criterion, it is more likely that a scribe "corrected" the word for camel by changing it to rope than that the "correction" went the other way. Bruce Metzger believes this is indeed what happened.

Second, later rabbinic literature made reference to an elephant passing through the eye of a needle, so it seems plausible that Jesus, too, referenced a large animal to point out the difficulty of the task.

See this source for example:

fta

One Xian apologist assured me there was a gate in Jerusalem called the "Eye of the Needle" which camels regularly walked through, i.e. Jesus was making a clever pun. Can anyone confirm or deny this?

Soul Invictus

I can confirm how utterly stupid this apologetic is.

Diogenes the Cynic

The camel gate thing is bullshit.

yalla

Thanks Julian, I wondered who those saints in Paul were.

Another major "mistranslation", so I have read, is "betrayed" instead of "delivered up".
When used in the context of Judas etc. it completely alters the meaning.

Actually I'm presenting these for verification as I have no Gk. whatsoever.

I suspect these mistranslations are influenced by apologetic motives, pehaps subconciously. In the case of ''to'' vs. ''in'' in Galatians, a change to "in" strongly contradicts "Luke's" version of Paul's vision as an external rather than an internal "event".
Any comments?

Chris Weimer

Diogenes, the male-bedders is almost certainly taken from the Lev. 18.22. See this link for a discussion I was having about it.

Diogenes the Cynic

I'm aware of this argument, and while the LXX translation of Lev. 18:22 does contain the words arsenos and koites separately (and divided by another word), there is still no known usage of arsenokoites as a compound before Paul and the proximity of those two terms in a verse in Leviticus, while suggestive, is not absolute proof of the meaning of Paul's compound. This is particularly true when we add in the fact that there are known attestations of aresenokoites to refer to heterosexuals.

Not only that, but even the Leviticus passage probably only referred to cultic prostitution.

S.C.Carlson

The OED Supplement defines "homosexual" as "pertaining to or characterized by sexual propensity for one's own sex." As far as I am aware, no Greek word, much less arsenokoites, has this meaning.

Stephen

Chris Weimer

Diogenes, I'm confused by this. Can you explain? And yes, I do think it refers only to the Levites, the "abomination" actually meaning ritually unclean.

Diogenes the Cynic

There is a quotation from John the Faster saying, "some men even commit the sin of arsenokoitai with their wives."

There is ( I think a Roman) attestation for aresenokoites being used to refer to male prostitutes who serviced women.

In addition to the hetero references there is also a reference from John Chrysostam who uses it to mean child molestation.

I mentioned above the use of the word to describe Zeus' Rape of Ganymedes in Aristide's Apology. There is one other literary use of the term for male -on-male rape in Hippolytus' Refutatio where it describes the rape of Adam by an evil angel named Naas.

Virtually all of the other attestations I'm aware of occur in vice lists which do not supply sufficient context.

As SCC said above, there wasn't really a Greek word for "homosexual" as we would define the word. The idea of homosexuality as a fixed orientation didn't even exist yet. The ancients didn't think in terms of "gay" and "straight," it was all just behavior and the words described specific acts rather than orientation.

I believe that, circumstantially, aresenokoites is most closely associated with male prostitution (particularly with young, enslaved "rent boys") which was a common practice in Hellenistic cities like Corinth and which was probably the most observable example of "male-bedding" that Paul would have been familiar with.