Sounds good, makes me not feel so alone in history now.

I don't know why but I really want to find out if there were any gay couples in the bible. Either it really wasn't that big of a deal, or there were no gay people back then 🙁

Sweet thanks for those links!

I'll have to check them out in a couple days – our internet provider is doing maintenance for all their customers thursday and friday, so most likely no internet >.< (thank goodness I have some books to read).Will check them out when I can get back on, thanks again!

Actually – interestingly – this is in star observer

http://www.starobserver.com.au/play/entertainment-play/2012/10/25/great-composers-secret-passions/87486

“There’s a big controversy around how Tchaikovsky died, with some people arguing he was forced to commit suicide or risk exposure of his sexuality.”

Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality is widely acknowledged, but little is known about exactly how comfortable he was with his sexuality. His marriage to Antonina Miliukova lasted less than three months, and most of his friendships were with gay men

The truth is homosexuality wasn't a big deal when Jesus was around. The rabid homophobia with connecting homosexuality with Sodom and other verses in the Bible didn't come until centuries later by bigoted Bible translaters.

My take on Sodom for instance:

http://rottenqueerchristian.blogspot.com/2012/06/footnotes.html

Hhmmm – thats a very short sentence for a complex (and very interesting) subject. (Canonisation)

When you say – "the Bible" – which bible do you mean ? When Jesus talks about "The scriptures" hes not talkiing about what we call the Old Testament and would have (at least) included the Oral Torah (which the Jews believed in the time of Jesus – and many still do) – was given to Moses at the same time he got the 10 commandments. These meant that Jewish interpretation of the Bible can be VERY different to ours today.

Then there are books in some bibles (e.g. the Catholic Bible) that arent in the Protestant Bible. In fact the 14 Apocryphal books WERE in the English bibles (such as the 1611 King James) UNTIL 1880 – the English Revised Version So the bible the protestants use changed substantiallu (from 80 books down to 66 books) quite recently.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_of_the_Bible

Then there are differences between the original versions of text that are used as the basis of what we call the bible.

For example the ending of mark http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_16

This link from above – also discusses the difference sources used to generate the various bibles

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_of_the_Bible

and Lets not forget about things like the "Secret Gospel of Mark" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Gospel_of_Mark

Also there are some cases where the current bible STILL has deliberate misstranlations. For example – John 16:13 uses a Neuter pronoun but the popular english Translations all use a masculine one. It should be noted a major theological point hinges on this and great debates raged for a considerable time on the Gender of the Holy Spirit – but what you read is NOT accurate.Nonetheless – in other places – (such as the the fact that the Old testament Hebrew uses "She" to refer to the Holy Spirit). In those cases – translators hold (reasonably) that grammatical gender has no correlation with actual Gender. Point here is there are inconsistancies in the way such things are translated – done not for accuracy but to match an already decided theological position.

My point being – that canonisation was a process that produced different results – the new translations that we tend to use this days; whilst not adding or removing books – do tend to look across more of the older surviving texts (although how they weigh them is also a complex and interesting topic) in order to be assured we are closer to the originals (which of course we dont have). Whilst its reasonable to note that many of the differences arent that significant it opens the question – WHICH ONE was written by God ? (My answer to that was I dont believe it matters – God knew what would happen) However – this is a problem for those who believe GOD wrote the bible 100% word for word because there ARE differing words – both in the old texts we use to construct the bible and in the translations..

And Modern Politics STILL have a significant impact on our Bibles. For example – The USA religious right Lobbied hard and successfully in 1997 to ensure that the Zondervan New International Inclusive Language bible – which translated pronouns accurately – was NEVER to be published in the USA. The CNP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_for_National_Policy) are just one of such groups that lobby very hard to ensure current bibles are NOT corrected based on current scholarship.

Some of these changes significantly alter understanding…

For example – Matthew 11:12 is translated by the NIV as

"From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven has been subjected to violence,[a] and violent people have been raiding it."

however we now know that these are specific Legal Terms – and so what the author was actually saying was along the lines of

"From the time of John the baptist, Heaven's Kingdon has been used and robbed by people who have no Legal right to it. This prevents those who do have a legal right to it from enjoying thir own property"

(There are quite a lot of examples of this – for example – now we know that in new testament times there were two legal forms of divorce available to jews.; Any Matter Divorce and Sexual Immorality – based on Exodus 21:10-11.

Any Matter divorce was becoming more popular by Jesus's times – but was ONLY available to men (where as Sexual Immorality was available to both men and women). There was a large amount of debate going on in rabbinic circles on whether "Any Matter" was OK. Matthew 19:3-8 is actually someone asking Jesus if Any Matter Divorce is OK – and Jesus was saying – he did not like the Any Matter Divorce LAW ! It was a specific legal question based on a specific law… Thats quite important to understand when you translate the bible … and misunderstanding / miss translation of this point has altered our divorce laws for centuries.