It's common knowledge. Not only was he black, he was openly gay and it wasn't frowned upon by the church. I had a German friend come back to town and I asked if he could help me with some passages in one of my German Bibles from the 1800s.
So we went to Leviticus 18:22 and he’s translating it for me word for word. In the English where it says “Man shall not lie with man, for it is an abomination,” the German version says “Man shall not lie with young boys as he does with women, for it is an abomination.”
I said, “What?! Are you sure?”
He said, “Yes!”
Then we went to Leviticus 20:13— same thing, “Young boys.”
So we went to 1 Corinthians to see how they translated arsenokoitai (original greek word) and instead of homosexuals it said, “Boy molesters will not inherit the kingdom of god.”
I then grabbed my facsimile copy of Martin Luther’s original German translation from 1534. My friend is reading through it for me and he says, “Ed, this says the same thing!”
They use the word knabenschander. Knaben is boy, schander is molester.
This word “boy molesters” carried through the next several centuries of German Bible translations. Knabenschander is also in 1 Timothy 1:10.
So the interesting thing is, I asked if they ever changed the word arsenokoitai to homosexual in modern translations. So my friend found it and told me, “The first time homosexual appears in a German translation is 1983.”
