Posted on 11/20/2014 5:35:32 AM PST by xzins
For the first seventy or so years of Christianity's existence, the Greco-Roman world paid it relatively little attention. There were persecutions here and there (like the one that claimed the lives of Peter and Paul). But, for the most part, it wasn’t until the second century that their pagan neighbors began to focus their attention on just how different Christians were.
As Michael J. Kruger of Reformed Theological Seminary wrote at The Gospel Coalition, one major difference was that “Christians would not pay homage to the other ‘gods’ ” of the Roman world. Since paying homage to these “gods” was a civic as well as a religious duty, this refusal caused Christians to be viewed with suspicion. Incredibly, some pagans even accused Christians of atheism!
As Kruger notes, there was another area in which Christians stood out like the proverbial sore thumb: and that was sex. As Kruger writes, “While it was not unusual for Roman citizens to have multiple sexual partners, homosexual encounters, and engagement with temple prostitutes, Christians stood out precisely because they refused to engage in these practices.”
Thus Tertullian, the second-century apologist who has been called the “Father of Western Theology,” wrote that Christians “do not hesitate to share our earthly goods with one another. All things are common among us except our wives.”
The author of the second century “Epistle to Diognetus” wrote that Christians speak and dress like their neighbors and added “[Christians] share their meals, but not their sexual partners.”
Obviously, Christians regarded sexual ethics as a mark of what it meant to be what Peter called “a peculiar people.”
But that still leaves us with the question “why?” Were they and the God they worshipped “killjoys” who were opposed to pleasure? That’s how they and we have often been depicted, that is, when they (and we) weren’t being accused of trying to subjugate and oppress women.
To understand why all of this is, to borrow a phrase from the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, “nonsense on stilts,” you need to understand the world into which Christianity was born and how revolutionary the Christian message concerning sex really was.
That’s one of the subjects of “Paul Among The People” by classicist Sarah Ruden.
The “Paul” being referred to was of course the apostle Paul, whom many moderns at best regard as “grumpy” when it came to women and sex.
As Ruden says, “Paul was not a 20th-century feminist . . . but [modern women are] the beneficiaries of a very long list of reforms. [And] Paul, I think, got all that started.”
To understand why that’s the case, it helps to remember that much of the sexual activity Michael Kruger refers to was far from-consensual. It was little more than “institutionalized violence,” which included “the rape of slaves, prostitution, and violence against wives and children.”
Paul’s denunciation of the sexual mores of his time was a part of his larger message “of all people being sacred children of God” and an expression of outrage at how they were being treated.
In other words, it was a message of true freedom.
Thus, when Christians refused to share their wives, it was a gift to their wives, who, in pagan society, had no say in the matter. When they honored women pledged to perpetual virginity, they were setting young women free from being treated as assets by their father in cementing alliances with other families.
Christians weren’t anti-sex, they were pro-human dignity. So much so that their sexual morality and vision for marriage shaped and transformed the culture around them. Not the other way around.
And that’s something modern Christians would do very well to remember.
I wonder who invented that screwed up idea. It certainly didn't come from the Messiah, who taught that is attachment to goods that is the problem and charity a blessing. Yet when everyone owns everything in common, the individual owns nothing, and there is no charity. At that point, the priests control everything, which is an invitation to an institutionalized Church that impoverishes the people and an impending moral disaster in the potential corruption of the priesthood.
Socialists want to ruin the Christian middle class with the strife attendant to depravity, which leaves them in charge.
It’s a poor description of Tertullian who was not a communalist. He meant sharing and lack of attachment to things, tying into Jesus’ admonition that we not ‘lay up treasures on earth where moth and rust corrupt...’.
The idea comes from Acts 2 and 4, and is generally misinterpreted by those who fail to recognize
Acts 2:44 All the believers were together and had everything in common. 45 Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need
Acts 4: 32 All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had
It’s a poor description of Tertullian who was not a communalist. He meant sharing and lack of attachment to things, tying into Jesus’ admonition that we not ‘lay up treasures on earth where moth and rust corrupt...’.
The idea comes from Acts 2 and 4, and is generally misinterpreted by those who fail to recognize its local character. Paul, for example, worked to provide for his own needs elsewhere in the Bible.
Acts 2:44 All the believers were together and had everything in common. 45 Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need
Acts 4: 32 All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had
While it was not unusual for Roman citizens to have multiple sexual partners, homosexual encounters, and engagement with temple prostitutes,
...............
This is the world we are returning to. The last act of the brave new world will be human sacrifice because homosexuality and human sacrifice go hand in hand.
The commandment not to commit adultery and thus to be faithful is written in stone by the very finger of God and is not subject to modification. It reflects precisely His will in regard to how we treat both our own bodies and the bodies of others. This will of God does not extend merely to a chosen few, but to all people who ever are born under the sun. Those who violate this commandment suffer for it, both temporally and eternally.
Well, that didn’t last very long. Find a male Christian writer who - if he mentions the subject at all - doesn’t say wives have an absolution obligation to provide sex on demand.
According to some scholars, Jewish polygamy conflicted with Roman monogamy at the time of the early Christian church:
“When the Christian Church came into being, polygamy was still practiced by the Jews. It is true that we find no references to it in the New Testament; and from this some have inferred that it must have fallen into disuse, and that at the time of our Lord the Jewish people had become monogamous. But the conclusion appears to be unwarranted. Josephus in two places speaks of polygamy as a recognized institution: and Justin Martyr makes it a matter of reproach to Trypho that the Jewish teachers permitted a man to have several wives. Indeed when in 212 A.D. the lex Antoniana de civitate gave the rights of Roman Citizenship to great numbers of Jews, it was found necessary to tolerate polygamy among them, even though it was against Roman law for a citizen to have more than one wife. In 285 A.D. a constitution of Diocletian and Maximian interdicted polygamy to all subjects of the empire without exception. But with the Jews, at least, the enactment failed of its effect; and in 393 A.D. a special law was issued by Theodosius to compel the Jews to relinquish this national custom. Even so they were not induced to conform.”
[Joyce, George (1933). Christian Marriage: An Historical and Doctrinal Study. Sheed and Ward. p. 560.]
Presuming this to be more or less accurate, then it would not seem illogical to infer that Paul was attempting to downplay the not-infrequent Jewish (and therefore also early Christian) polygamy to the largely monogamous Romans in his attempts to proselytize them.
In history, Paul’s implicit tolerance of polygamy in the 1st century AD seems to have morphed a century later into an explicit requirement of monogamy. By the time of Tertullian, who lived at the turn of the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, monogamy is lawful, but polygamy is not:
“We do not indeed forbid the union of man and woman, blest by God as the seminary of the human race, and devised for the replenishment of the earth and the furnishing of the world and therefore permitted, yet singly. For Adam was the one husband of Eve, and Eve his one wife, one woman, one rib.”
[Alexander Roberts, James Donalson, Arthur Cleveland Cox. The Ante-Nicene Fathers: The Writings of the Fathers Down to A.D. 325 Volume IV Fathers of the Third Century -Tertullian Part 4; Minucius Felix; Commodian; Origen. Parts First and Second. Chronologically arranged, with brief notes and prefaces. From the material on Ad Uxorem libri duo, chapt.II. 1885 Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan]
From a historical, theological, and philosophical perspective, in my opinion, Paul’s most notable influence is the successful evangelizing of the lower class Jewish MONOTHEISTIC Christian religion to the middle class and previously POLYTHEISTIC Romans and Greeks. Again from a historical, theological and philosopical perspective, I think that this is a ripening of a movement which probably began before or during the time of Akhenaton in Egypt in 1300 BC.
Thus the doctrine of monogamy in modern Christianity seems to have been an absorption of Roman social convention and law in the 2nd century AD in contrast to something that Christians, OT Jews and NT Jews held in the 1st century AD in the process of redefining Christianity as practiced in that time by Christian Jews to be something more palatable to Romans.
The idea comes from Acts 2 and 4, and is generally misinterpreted by those who fail to recognize its local character.
It was also practiced by a group in a city that Jesus had said would be destroyed in "their generation" -- Jerusalem, which was destroyed in 70 A.D. They were under a much more specific deadline than other Christian groups, and they likely saw themselves as the last chance for many Jews to survive the coming destruction, so people sacrificed work time to preaching. Jesus also said that when they saw the armies gathering around Jerusalem, they needed to flee; selling their goods and possessions was part of the preparation for fleeing.
Outside of Jerusalem, they likely reverted to the more common practices; giving was still voluntary, but most people lived in more ordinary family groups and earning your own and your family's keep was prioritized over preaching. Not that preaching ended or that church leaders weren't supported, but as a community they weren't under the same kind of pressure to communicate to the surrounding people as the Christian in Jerusalem had been.
... and at some point henceforth, the Jewish-originated Christian church became subsumed by, and transmogrified into, the ROMAN CATHOLIC church.
Our pastor just has a series on “Living in Exile”. He made the point that the Jews were called by God to be seperate from the other nation. Jerusalem was the light on the hill that the other nations could look at as an example.
Christians on the other hand are called to be in the world and bringing light to the people they meet.
My sense is that many converts to Christianity were polygamous. Leadership in the church, however, required a person have only “one wife”. Many take that injunction in different directions, but they have in common that they all hold to no more than one wife.
If you are referencing what Paul actually wrote in Timothy 3:2 (is that what you are referencing? —you are not clear), it was that bishops could only have one wife.
I emphasize that Paul wrote this because it is not the word of Jesus; it is the word of Paul.
This infers by the way that others who were not bishops could have and sometimes did have more than one wife— totally in conformance, historically, with what one would expect from OT law and Jewish custom.
Otherwise making such a distinction for bishops makes no logical sense whatsoever.
And this leaves unresolved the issue of what a bishop and his duties are defined to be, and does not explain why a woman cannot be a bishop, or why.
Whatever one reads into this particular passage, it is not IMHO very convincing, clear leadership.
Yes, it makes no sense to require only one wife for a bishop/deacon unless some Christians were having more than one wife. (I do not accept that this means a bishop MUST be married, but it must mean that a bishop must be monogamous.)
(I do not accept that this means a bishop MUST be married, but it must mean that a bishop must be monogamous.)
Of course (IMHO). I do note that the modern Roman Catholic church forbids its priests to marry, which is approximately the opposite conclusion if one equates bishops and/or deacons with Roman Catholic priests. I am sure this is all deep theological waters, and I do not mean to give the impression to anyone that I am a theologian (life is complex enough for me without that challenge). In any case, the operant phrase in the original archaic Greek is "mias gunaikos andra" -- "one-woman man." So if one wants to be literal, then Paul in 1 Timothy 3:12 prescribes that the bishop/deacon have at most one woman as a sexual partner.
> Paul’s genius wasn’t in creating monogamy, but in his
> ability to communicate an Oriental religion to a Western
> audience, along with carefully discerning which
> commandments were universal for all mankind vs. those
> created as cultural markers for Israel.
I don’t believe I’ve ever seen this articulated so well.
Mind if I use it?
Please do. I’m trying to turn it into a meme. ;)
Thanks for posting that; I was trying to figure-out where I could find it again.
Actual polygamy was unknown in the Greco-Roman world of Paul's time. He may have been referring to men who had dissolved a previous marriage to a pagan wife when they became Christians. You can understand how that might complicate matters, to say nothing of the possibility of the bishop/elder apostatizing and returning to his first wife, etc.
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