This disparity particularly perplexed me in light of Paul's declaration in Galatians 3:26-29: "You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise" (NIV).

How revolutionary! In these verses, God announces: All that sonship involves in the Old Testament - favored status, inheritance, authority, covenant blessing - now accrues to everyone who believes in Christ Jesus.

All God's children, male and female, are sons. All, regardless of gender, inherit everything God has promised.

Some truth offends us. Some confounds us. Yet, we welcome truth when our spirit receives what the Holy Spirit speaks, even before our mind can grasp it or our emotions embrace it.

So I received what God says about sonship, even while pondering why much of the New Testament seemed to relegate women to the invisible and decidedly unequal status of Old Testament daughters.

Unafraid of my questions - in fact, delighted by them - the Spirit of God sent me on a treasure hunt. Since Paul seemed the most intent on lifting up men and putting down women, the Spirit sent me to Paul's 13 letters, Romans through Philemon, instructing me to begin with the King James Version (KJV), the long-trusted English translation first published in 1611.

Searching the KJV concordance, I found the English word "man" and its derivatives 329 times in Paul's epistles. I found "woman" and its derivatives a total of 39 times. Quite a discrepancy!

But the Spirit of God pressed me to dig deeper and, in particular, to probe those 329 occurrences of the term "man" in Paul's writings. Consequently, I looked up the two Greek words most often translated "man" in English-language New Testaments: aner and anthropos.

Aner means "man" or "husband." According to Vine's Expository Dictionary, it refers to a man "in distinction from a woman" and "is never used of the female sex." Anthropos, on the other hand, refers to "'a human being, male or female,' without reference to sex or nationality." Hence the term anthropology, the study of humans.

Aha. One of two main words rendered "man" in English New Testaments actually means "human." But if translators render the two very different Greek terms with the same English word, we who read the Bible in English have difficulty knowing when women are included and when they are not.

Is this a regrettable oversight? Did the King James translators intend always to communicate the inclusive meaning "human" or "humankind" when they made the sweeping decision to translate anthropos as "man"?

Let's consider a similar question: The signers of the Declaration of Independence said, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Did these primarily Christian men intend for the phrase, "all men," to signify, "all people," including women? Their actions in creating the new government say no. 

Nearly two centuries after King James I authorized an English-language Bible, the founders of this new nation withheld from women rights they themselves had fought a war to retain. Women could not vote, sit on a jury or hold office. Most basic of all, women had no citizenship.

Women were expected to marry. Yet, says author David T. Morgan, "marriage ended a woman's legal identity, for upon saying 'I do' she ceased to have property rights, a right to the money she earned, the right to have custody of her children in case of divorce, and she could not testify in court or sit on a jury. Nor could she vote or attend a university, a law school, or a medical school. If a woman were abused by her husband or her father, there was no legal remedy for her."

Our founding fathers did not consider it self-evident that women are equal to men. So did King James think more highly of women than they? No. In fact, he openly expressed contempt for women.

Rejecting a proposal to teach his daughter Latin, the king said, "To make women learned and foxes tame has the same effect - to make them more cunning."

On another occasion, "when a learned maid was presented to King James for an English rarity, because she could speake and rite pure Latine, Greeke and Hebrew, the King ask'd 'But can she spin?'"

King James disparaged women - and openly preferred men. In James I, Otto F. Scott writes:

"[The English] knew the king's leaning toward handsome young men and were not naive about its meaning. But James had kept his tendencies under at least quasi-control for many years and had not succumbed completely to his inclinations since the days of Esme' Stuart. Since then he had married and fathered three living children and had played the role of family man with some success. Suddenly, at the age of forty-one, he relapsed completely; openly succumbed to homosexuality and fell in love with a nineteen-year-old youth of no great intelligence."

"His new favorite was perfect for him in every way - including a capacity for bisexuality. James liked men who liked women; he was not jealous of their heterosexual affairs. On the contrary, he enjoyed hearing details; they seemed to help convince him of women's inferiority."

Some historians reject the idea of James' homosexuality, based on the king's public writings denouncing the practice as sin. However, his private letters to and from his "favorites," his public shows of physical affection toward them and the secret passage between bedrooms tell a different story. Even those who debate James' sexual preference agree on his gender preference: King James 1 demonstrated a strong bias toward men and a low view of women.

It's no wonder that the Bible translation this king commissioned consistently renders anthropos as "man," thus obscuring the presence of both genders and muddying what the original Scriptures - and the much-maligned apostle Paul - make clear.

When I crunched the numbers for Paul's letters, the results stunned me. According to my calculations (which surely include errors, but accurately reveal the surprising picture), the word aner (man, husband) appears in Paul's letters 60 times. Of those occurrences, 40 clearly refer to husbands, with 34 of them so translated.

Bottom line: Out of 329 occurrences of the term "man" in the KJV, only 24 translate the Greek word for "man." Thus, KJV translators used the word "man" 305 times more than Paul did. Let that sink in: 305 times, the KJV says "man" when the original says something else.

Of those 305 times, 127 translate anthropos. That is, 127 times, Paul wrote anthropos to clearly include both men and women or if speaking of a man, to focus, not on his maleness, but on his humanness. Yet every time the Greek word for "human" appears in Paul's letters, the KJV renders it "man."

What's more, "man" appears 178 additional times in the KJV version of Paul's epistles - when it translates neither aner nor anthropos. In perhaps five instances, translators so rendered the Greek word for "male" or a similar gender-specific term. The rest of these 178 occurrences of "man" translators simply inserted into the English text.

Where the Greek says "all," KJV says, "all men." Where the Greek says "any," KJV says, "any man." Where the Greek says, "none," KJV says, "no man." Where the Greek says "these" or "such" or "a certain one," KJV says, "these men" or "such men" or "a certain man."

Occasionally, KJV adds the word "man" after an adjective describing people. For example, KJV renders "not many wise" as "not many wise men" (1 Cor. 1:26), "righteous" as "a righteous man" (Rom. 5:7) and "covetous" as "covetous man" (Eph. 5:5).

In some passages, this slight change has huge implications. For example, when Paul chastises the Corinthian believers for going to non-Christian judges to settle their legal matters, the KJV renders his words this way: "Is it so, that there is not a wise man among you? no, not one that shall be able to judge between his brethren?" Yet, the original Greek does not convey the idea that only men can judge disputes. Indeed, quite the opposite. As the New Living Translation asks, "Isn't there anyone in all the church who is wise enough to decide these arguments?" (1 Cor. 6:5, italics mine).