• Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Well… A lot of their biblical evidence is less a rewrite and more of a translation issue. Take the whole Sodom and Gehmorra story about tje two angels that everyone is so keen to turn into a condemnation of the gays.

    In the OG text the words used to describe the angels were analog to genderless forms of the word “master” and because there were two of them they were always referred to by genderless they/them plural… Which is probably why there were two of them. We are probably supposed to imply the perceived gender of the angels was irrelevant to the tale.

    The first Latin and English translations off of Hebrew however used gendered terms for the two angels that coded them as male. Stuff like “Masters” “Lords” that kind of thing in large part because those societies were respectively fairly misogynistic and not primed to interpret either of the two genderless entities as possibility female coded. Then you see the anti same sex interpretation gain popularity in the case of England and France at the time they were going through a population crash via plague which caused amoung other things criminalization of same sex unions as a threat to sexual replacement of a sharply diminished population. So really we can trace this story being interpreted as God’s condemnation of the gays rather then just regular old rapists around the same time the word “sodomy” came into the lexicon in the 1300’s and the first waves of plague.