Bishops Approve “Gay-Washed” Bible

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Sep 30, 2025

Happy St. Jerome’s Day! Or maybe not so happy. News broke yesterday on the Catholic Bible Talk blog that a Catholic Edition of the New Revised Standard Version updated edition (NRSVue) has been approved by the USCCB. According to the Friendship Press YouTube channel, from which Catholic Bible Talk got the news:

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has granted an Imprimatur for the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition, Catholic Edition. This means that the NRSVue, Catholic Edition is approved for publication and “permitted for private use and study by the Catholic faithful.” The NRSVue, Catholic Edition is available for publishing partners to license and publish in print and digital formats. Those interested in securing a license for the NRSVue, CE should contact Riggins Rights Management at [email protected]. Please join us in celebrating this milestone and looking forward to the publication of the NRSVue, Catholic Edition in the near future! The National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA (NCC) owns the rights to NRSVue Bible translation, as well as the Revised Standard Version (RSV) and their derivatives, including the Catholic Editions. Friendship Press, the publishing arm of the NCC, manages the NCC’s Scripture translations along with the Bible Translation and Utilization Committee.

I wrote an article for Catholic Answers three years ago trying to stop, or slow down, an imprimatur for the NRSVue. In my article I quote Robert A.J. Gagnon, a Protestant Scripture scholar whose work is respected across denominational lines, particularly on the Bible and homosexuality. It was Gagnon who first warned that the NRSVue “gaywashes” the Bible, writing in a January 5, 2022 Facebook post:

They have now changed ‘sodomites’ to the nebulous ‘men who engage in illicit sex,’ [in 1 Corinthians 6:9] which does not indicate to English readers the connection to homosexual practice provided by the Greek word, contrary to both morphology and context. A textual note added by the NRSVue committee claims that the term is unclear. It isn’t.

The footnote was later changed from “Meaning of Gk uncertain” to “Meaning of Gk uncertain, possibly men who have sex with men.” Nevertheless as to the main text, as Gagnon wrote in 2022:

The NRSVue now becomes the first major modern English committee translation of the Bible to eliminate any reference to homosexual practice.

The Washington Times picked up the story a day after Gagnon’s 2022 post. In an article titled “Updated Bible’s interpretation of sodomy stirs debate: Scholars dispute claim ancient Greek word means only illicit sex,” the Times writes:

At issue: Does arsenokoitai (ἀρσενοκοῖται), a Greek word used only twice in the New Testament, mean all same-sex relations or only illicit ones?

You can see the problem in how the Times—and the NRSVue’s translators—frame the issue. It is an ideological novelty to say that the Bible makes moral distinctions between different types of homosexual relationships. Even the NRSVue’s translators, at least in that 2022 Washington Times article, did not defend their actions. Each of them claimed not to know which one of them changed the verses. As I joked in my Catholic Answers article, “The responses are like Aaron’s in the Golden Calf story: I put this gold in there and this calf just kind of popped out.”

The NRSVue translation committee changed its tune in this fascinating interview two months ago. I was unaware, until I watched it, that the director of the NRSVue committee is Catholic. The translators address the gay-washing controversy at about the 40 minute mark. They take sharp exception to any suggestion that their vague translation of ἀρσενοκοῖται was ideologically motivated. Several times they reference how they were being called before “a body” to defend some of their choices. That “body” may well have been the USCCB.

In my 2022 Catholic Answers article, I wrote:

Fortunately, Catholics have the authority of the Magisterium to guide us—and guard us....The bishops should use that same authority to prevent the publication of an NRSVue-Catholic Edition until such time as the NRSVue’s errors are corrected.

But according to a comment posted at the Catholic Bible Talk blog today:

This just in: there will be no changes to the text of the NRSVue-CE, Friendhip Press responded to my inquiry this morning and confirmed it:

“There are no differences in the text for the Catholic Edition—it is the same as the base text for all books shared by Catholics and Protestants. The NRSVue errata is publicly available at https://nrsvue.scribenet.com/errata. The errata lists all corrections to the text that have been made since its initial publication. These apply to the base text of the NRSVue as well as derivative editions.”

The USCCB’s website now includes the “New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition, Catholic Edition, Friendship Press” as an Approved Translation of the Bible.