Hong Kong’s Television and Licensing Authority (TELA) issued a statement confirming the receipt of over 2,000 complaints regarding material considered to be offensive in the Bible.

The complaints to TELA pushed for the Bible to be submitted to the Obscene Articles Tribunal to be considered for reclassification as an indecent publication. The complaints describe the inclusion of rape, incest and violence as being offensive. If the Bible were to be reclassified, it could legally only be sold to people over the age of 18 and would have to be packaged with a label warning of the age restriction.

Despite the large influx of complaints, TELA declined to submit the Bible for reclassification and released this statement: “The Bible is a religious text which is part of civilization. It has been passed from generation to generation.”

The outcry regarding the decency of the Bible surfaced in the midst of a media frenzy surrounding a Chinese University’s publication of a sex survey. The survey included references to bestiality and incest and these references won the survey the title of indecent as decreed by a TELA tribunal.