Apostle Paul's writings defend homosexuals.

• Position: Your Life

For the past 10 years, cryptographer Michael Wood, designer of the REDOC-II encryption system, has been using his decoding skills to help biblical scholars more accurately decipher the first-century meanings of words and symbols used by the New Testament authors. His most recent findings are convincing a growing number of biblical scholars and theologians that many of the actual messages contained in the New Testament on the subject of homosexuality are quite different from what has been thought previously.

"When his writings are properly translated, it's clear that Apostle Paul not only did not condemn homosexuals, but he openly defended them against the religious views of his day," says Wood, who provides documentation to support his findings in Pauline Paradoxes Decoded.

Wood maintains that Paul used the Greek word arsenokoites to exclude rapers of boys from God's Kingdom, not homosexuals, as conventional Bibles say. "Wood's analysis of arsenokoites as concerning pederasty, rather than homosexuality, was convincing at the linguistic level," notes Chris Tilling of St. Mellitus College, author of Paul's Divine Christology.

William Berg, who has a Ph.D. in Classical Languages from...