I Wish to Express: The Story He Never Got to Tell — David Fearon and the 1946 Bible Mistranslation

Description

David Fearon grew up in Lennoxville, a small university town in Quebec, knowing two things with certainty: God loved him unconditionally, and he was different from other boys.

At twenty-one, a closeted seminary student of Divinity at McGill University, he read the 1952 Revised Standard Version of 1 Corinthians 6:9–10 and knew the translation was wrong. He spent months crafting a careful, brilliant letter to the head of the RSV translation committee — Dr. Luther Weigle, Dean of Yale Divinity School. Then he mailed it from a post office box, signed only his first and middle names, and told no one.

He went on to serve thirty-five years in ministry, keeping his secret. His partner Joe — known to his congregations as his “cousin” — was at his side for twenty-three of those years.

In 2017, researchers Kathy Baldock and Ed Oxford found his letters in the Yale archives — the only historical documentation explaining why the word “homosexuals” first entered the English Bible in 1946. In 2018, they found him. At eighty years old, Rev. David Fearon came out for the first time — to a standing ovation.

He appears in the documentary 1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture and in Forging a Sacred Weapon: The 1946 Bible Mistranslation Behind Anti-Gay Theology. But neither tells his whole story.

I Wish to Express does. Written by Kathy Baldock from years of close friendship and conversation, this is David Fearon’s story — the one he carried alone for eighty years, finally told in full and offered in his honor.

David Sheldon Fearon died in January 2023 at eighty-four years old. He died knowing that God had used a gay man — him, specifically — to create the only historical proof that the word “homosexuals” did not belong in the Bible.