Within Reason - #106 Diarmaid MacCulloch - Sex and Christianity: a Tumultuous History

Episode Date: May 29, 2025

Diarmaid MacCulloch is an English academic and historian, specialising in ecclesiastical history and the history of Christianity. Since 1995, he has been a fellow of St Cross College, Oxford; he was formerly the senior tutor. Buy Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Dermann McCulloch, welcome to the show. Thank you. Through most of Christian history, indeed human history, marriage has been a contract between two men. What do you mean by this quote? It's a fact. The point is that marriage in general, whether it's in Christian society or not, is a contract between families. And so the wishes of the bride and groom in the situation are secondary to dynastic calculation.

on the part of the father of the bride and the father of the groom. Those are the two men involved. So this modern image that a lot of people have of marriage based on love and consent of the two parties involved, when does that begin to become the norm? The norm, it's there really through Greek-o-Roman society. Okay. Where the idea of love is a standard part of the package of marriage.

But it's emerged as a theme of Western society because of that memory in the last 15, 200 years. And so it's the way that we think of marriage now. It was a popular song when I was our lad 60 years ago, love and marriage, love and marriage, go together like a horse and carriage. Well, that's a minority view in human. history. A lot of Christians celebrate marriage as central to a life of faith, the raising of a family, a husband in a role of spiritual leadership, a supportive wife and children. You've written a history of sex in Christianity, lower than the angels, and spend some considerable time talking about the topic of marriage, which of course is intimately tied up with the topic of sex. And

From what I understand, this picture of the centrality of marriage to Christianity is firstly not in strict accord with the scripture, but also isn't in strict accord with how people historically practiced marriage. In accord with scripture, well, marriage is a big metaphor in scripture. In the New Testament, it's a metaphor for the relationship between Christ and his church. And it's there as a huge theme in Judaism, the Hebrew. scripture, what Christians call the Old Testament, is based on the assumption that people get married and they have families and that's the basis of God's purpose for them, but not really

so in early Christianity from the second century onwards. You look at the New Testament. The picture you get there is of a religion evolving but based on families and therefore based on marriage. about a hundred years later, that is not the way that Christians would see their priorities. Their priorities have changed and the priority now is virginity, celibacy, and increasingly an institution associated with them, the monastery, the place where monks and nuns live in community. That became, from the late second century, the ideal of Christian life, not the family. The family is a second best. I'm really interested in the letters of Paul in this regard.

And it might surprise people who aren't very familiar with Paul's writing, but have a vague idea of Christian marriage, to find that he seems quite reluctant to sort of accept the desirability, let's say, of marriage. At various points, I mean, I think the most important quote here is from First Corinthians in verses 8 and 9 of chapter 7 he says now to the unmarried widows and the widows I say it is good for them to stay unmarried as I do but if they cannot control themselves they should marry for it is better to marry than to burn with passion and this reads to me almost like a compromise it's not that marriage is this wonderful thing but rather marriage is a compromise

for people who are burning with passion and it's it's you know if If you really can't control it, then at least get married. That seems quite out of accord with the modern Christian understanding of marriage is something which is desirable. Yes, you've hit on the reluctance of Paul to think of marriage as good, but that's not all Paul. But you've also rightly seized on what is now the seventh chapter of the first epistle of Corinthians, which is a fascinating little essay on marriage. And it's quite a complex one. So Paul there said he didn't regard marriage as for him. We actually don't know whether he actually got married or not.

And he clearly doesn't like second marriages. That's quite common in early Christianity. But he does say some fascinating and positive things in the seventh chapter of one Corinthians about marriage. So one shouldn't dismiss Paul as gloomy old Paul, who is against so. The fascinating passage is in verse three, where he addresses the bride and the groom in a marriage. And he first says to the bride a very conventional thing in the ancient world. He says, your body is the property of your husband. But then he reverses it.

And he says to the husband, the groom, your body is the property of your wife. Now, that's extraordinary, and it's original. It's very unusual in the ancient world. And there, he is actually resonating with the way that Christians, or anybody in the Western world now thinks of marriage. In other words, this is a bond of equality, really quite extraordinary in the ancient world. The idea that the woman in a relationship should have the same rights as the man over each other's bodies. And that word body is significant. This is about sex. And the extraordinary

thing about this passage is just how unpopular it was in subsequent Christian centuries. The Greek church, that is the Church of the East, actually more or less ignored it. But interestingly, the church in the West, that is the church which became the Catholic Church, and later, Protestant Church didn't. It took up this idea. in that verse three, and in particular, when it was creating canon law in the 12th century, canon lawyers, an evolving class of professionals, looked at the Bible, and they looked at this passage as they constructed ways of regulating marriage, particularly in disputes. And they said, oh yeah, actually, bride and groom are equal. They have a sexual duty. That's really important,

a sexual duty to each other. Canon lawyers in the Eastern Church did not do that. So I do rather imply in the book, hurrah for Western Canon lawyers, boo to Eastern canon lawyers. And that reflects a real ambiguity throughout Christian history. Sex is dirty, sex is nasty. That's one big thought.

But then you have this other thought from Paul. Well, actually, it's a mystical relationship between husband and wife. Paul is in so many ways a revolutionary and a progressive for his time, but in so many ways not. You know, some, well, many of the things that Paul writes in the New Testament are not actually written by Paul for a start. And it's interesting to historically place him.

Like you say, this equality of the direction of this marital debt between the man and the woman is radical, and much more in line with what we think of today. However, the idea that this is a marital duty, the idea that you shouldn't deprive your partner, and he says in 1st Corinthians, do not deprive each other, except perhaps for a time of mutual consent,

that seems a bit more out of accord with how we think of it today. There is this idea that sex is part of the duty of marriage. And I don't know to what extent that embedded itself in the history of Christianity too. Again, intermittently, one might say that this is precisely what the canon lawyers said, that if marriage isn't characterized by equality in sexual duty, then it is not a marriage. And so impotence, for instance, became a reason for a nulling man. for saying a marriage never happened in Western canon law, but not in the East.

They kept away from this association between sex and marriage. That's interesting. This is a distinctively Western thing. And I think if you took it forward to another person who's had a bad press, you go forward to Augustine of Hippo in the 4th and 5th century. And you see a man who's often characterized as the gloomy pres predestinarian. But he's actually very interested in marriage. He's a man with a sexual past.

He knows what he feels like, in other words. But he's also aware that some of his theological contemporaries in the Christian church are really hostile to sexual expression, even in marriage. And I name, particularly, I point the finger at Jerome, Jerome of Stridon. And actually, Augustine, though he wouldn't put it like this, was right. against Jerome. And he wrote a fascinating work, which really is basic to Western ideas on marriage, on the good of marriage. De Bono coniugali. It's paired with a book on virginity. And in reading the book on virginity is interesting because there, a big theme in Augustine is humility. In other words, he's saying to celibate's ascetics, don't get yourselves puffed up with your own importance. And then this very very, sophisticated, nuanced view of marriage, which takes you back, as is so often in Christian history, to the first marriage, to Adam and Eve. Yes.

And that's crucial because there you have to think about sex. And Augustine says before Adam and Eve fell into disobedience with Adam, there was already the possibility of sex between them. Of course, it wasn't as rather alarmingly uncontrolled as a sort of sex which you and I might participate in. It is part of God's harmonious project for creation, but it's there. In other words, this is the crucial thing. Sex was not the result of the fall in the Garden of Eden. It has been damaged, like everything else in human life, but it was not. It was part of God's purpose.

Now, again, I come back to the contrast with the Eastern Church, where the crucial theologian, I think you'd say, is Basil the Great in the 4th century. Now, Basil said it was part of the fall. In other words, that all sexual activity, including in marriage, is satanic. It is introduced by Satan. And that gives you an extraordinary contrast within Christianity between the Western tradition looking to Augustine, who's looking to Paul, and then this tradition of Basil and his later admirers,

who think that sex is just bad. Yes, and this mixing together of this badness of sex and its intrinsic connection to marriage is quite interesting too. I learned from reading your book about the history of marriages in churches, which is something you've spoken about a bit as well. And I was surprised to learn, but then when I thought about it, realized it's not all that surprising at all that marriage within a church isn't a thing that's practiced until the middle ages or so?

Well, it depends where you are. But in the east, you get some weddings in church in the 5th century, perhaps. And then in the Western canon, the Western tradition. It is, as you say, very late. It's really the 12th century. In other words, something which the church often calls a sacrament. In fact, it's one of the seven sacraments of the Western Church, wasn't a sacrament for 1,200 years, which is a bit odd for a sacrament. That is a little strange.

I find it so interesting looking at the, sort of comparing the way that certain things are practiced in historical reality versus just the scripture. Another thing that you drew my attention to in the book was the fact that in all of Paul's writing about marriage and the necessity of the sexual relationship and the description of the marital duties, there isn't a mention of childbirth or procreation, which again, thinking about Christians today, raising a family, marriage, having children, be fruitful and multiply. That's what it's all about. It is bizarre then and conspicuous that Paul doesn't mention it. You're right. It is very odd. And when you think that in the Jewish background, marriage and having children are absolutely foundational, they're not in Paul. It does emerge in people pretending to be Paul in the later letters in the New Testament. And then in the Middle Ages in the West, as you might expect from what I've said about Western Canada lawyer, it becomes absolutely.

essential. From the 12th century, marriage and sex leading to procreation is the basis of marriage. But that is in contrast with something else big in the West, which is the real big story and is, I think, the source of this. And that is that now the clergy are all unmarried. From the 12th century, they were officially at least celibate, all of them. And it's easy to forget how unparalleled. that is in Christian history. No other church in the history of Christianity has ever made all the clergy celibate. It is only the Western Latin Church of the 12th century. Now, the consequence of that is that they're building a picture of priests as different sorts of human beings from every other male person in the world, and the difference is sex. Married couples have sex, priests don't. And married couples, therefore, are utterly distinctive in their sexual practice. For one of my historical colleagues put it like this, that a celibate clergy logically demands a copulating laity. And that's the basis of modern Roman Catholic law on marriage,

which is quite a turnaround. Because in the early church, You could get marriages without sex, and there are sort of saints' lives of such couples. And that's just not the case in the high Middle Ages. It's a complete U-turn on the association of sex and marriage. And then Protestantism got rid of it. Shall we move to the 16th century reformation? I would like to. Why not let's?

Because it's often thought that the 16th century reformers, is about a rather technical thing called justification by faith alone. The most important revolutionary thing was to say that clergy, yes, should get married. That it is not their job to show that they're different, but to show that they are like other human beings. And that means sex and marriage. So Luther's revolutionary act was to first say that and then act on it to get married himself to an ex-9. and to have a very happy married life with children. He became the example of how clergy ought to be an example to everybody.

I speak with feeling all this because I am the son of a clergy person. I come from a clerical family and his father was also a priest of the Scottish Christchurch. So this is a family business for me and I was very conscious growing up that we were a sort of model for the little village in which my dad was the rector and that has been the case in the Protestant world since the Reformation

Do you think that the original irrelevance of childbirth and procreation in the time of Paul might have had something to do with a sense of apocalypticism in the early church

it's often thought by historians that Historically speaking, the people involved Jesus himself and maybe Paul with him, believe that the world was about to end. Oh, absolutely. And that might explain why childbirth doesn't really show up as an important issue in the way that it would do in Judaism. You're absolutely right. And I think that that's also the case with Jesus, that the message in the gospels filtered through the later writers is of an apocalyptic faith. There's only going to be one generation of Christians. Christ will come back. and that's the mood in authentic Paul, the authentic letters of Paul in the New Testament.

But then you get the next layer up or onwards, for instance, the so-called pastoral epistles, the two epistles to Timothy and one to Titus, pretending to be by Paul. Now there, you're already getting the feeling of generations, and there you get pseudo-Paul, saying, one of the purposes of marriage is children, the main purpose of marriage, is children, particularly for the woman. So yeah, straight away, once it became painfully clear that the end time was going to be postponed, you've got to think about history. You've got to think about the generations. And that great disappointment of Christ not coming back made the church have to do a lot of careful thinking. We'll get back to Dermann McCulloch in just a

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or by scanning the QR code that's on your screen. Use my link to get 40% off their unlimited access vantage plan. With that said, back to the show. You mentioned earlier Adam and Eve and how the tale of Adam and Eve is tied up with the story of sex. And there are a lot of big question marks over that story. the idea of having Adam and Eve, having children, and having to repopulate the earth and this question of incestuous relationships at the beginning of mankind, there's also a great deal of conspiracy theories that have come about regarding Adam and Eve. And you mention,

at least once in passing in the book, this idea that had cropped up in some Christian circles and still persists in some more radical evangelical circles today that the serpent in the Garden of Eden and the eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is essentially a metaphor for sex and that the thing that enters into creation is sexual practice and this has led to some as I say conspiracy theories about the promulgation of human beings on planet earth I wondered if you might be able to tell us about that um conspiracy theories can you enlarge or what you're talking about i'm thinking of things like the idea that uh there is a child of eve born of the serpent and that is one generation of person and Eve then has children with Adam

and that's another generation of people and you end up with like a racist myth that one race of people are descendants of this illegitimate uh relationship either between Eve and the serpent or somehow with the serpent's involvement and that everybody else is is born of Adam. Yes, you do get these, and it is an attempt, which has no biblical basis at all, to say that there are divisions within the human race. They don't all come from the same source, and particularly as racial theories became part of the West's conquest of the rest of the world. Such matters in the 18th and 19th century became rather crucial. I think of Nakash theology, for instance, which is an invention of the early 19th century, that the serpent was an orangutan, an innocent Methodist biblical commentator called Adam Clark suggested that, and it was then taken up by those who were racist in their outlook to the human race. So this is an aspect of modernity, you might say, that such wacky ideas are based on scripture in some sense but aren't. And the history of the church is littered with such constructions

the imagination because the Bible hasn't provided you with the evidence you're looking for. Yes, that's right. And a lot of the time, the Bible either says very little or nothing at all on quite important issues. I mean, issues like abortion come to mind. But when you talk about the history of sex in Christianity, apart from probably marriage and the position of women, the other big question that always comes up is homosexuality. Yeah. And famously, Jesus says nothing about homosexuality. In the Old Testament, we have the passages from Levicichus, which seem to quite harshly condemn homosexuality, at least in a standard English translation. And then again, in the letters of Paul, you have some indications that homosexuality is among the things that should

be considered sinful. But again, in your book, this is something you have a lot to say about. So I wanted if you could talk us through that. Well, you talk about homosexuality, but this is a very modern con's idea. The word was only invented in the 18 mid-19th century. So what we're looking at, if we're looking at any expressions of opinion in Holy Scripture, is a set of different social relationships. You mentioned Leviticus, for instance. Well, if you look carefully at those passages, it's not actually anything but a condemnation of married men indulging in same-sex relations. In Paul, you've got one purple passage so often quoted from the first chapter of Romans, in which a discussion of idolatry suddenly veers off into a condemnation of same-sex

relations, actually, between women and women and men and men. That's a rather unusual to get the women thrown in. But this is a sort of example of idolatry. The passage actually isn't. about same-sex relations. The same-sex relations condemnation is a sort of illustration of a much more basic theme. If you look at the way John Calvin, for instance, commented on this passage doesn't mention same-sex relations. He sees it's about idolatry,

which is something that really interests him. Yes, this is where Paul says, just for the sake of our listeners, where Paul says, therefore, talking about idolatrous people and saying, therefore he gave them over to their sinful states and he includes giving up, you know, men giving up natural relations with women and becoming consumed with lust for each other

and this kind of thing. So seeming to describe a sort of same-sex behavior, but you're saying that it wasn't interpreted as sort of being about that. No, it is simply illustrating nasty. things that happen once you indulge in idolatry. A word natural is interesting here. Yes. It's not in the Hebrew scripture. Right. It's Greek term. It's coming out of Greek ideas about sex, which can be permissive on the one hand, but they can also be ultra austere. And that's

what Paul is picking up. He's a Greek-speaking Jew who, like many Greek-speaking Jews in his generation has been listening to Greek philosophers. Pythagoras in particular. Pythagoreans are working from Pythagoras' thought long, long ago. So that's rather specialised, and then there are condemnations, lists of things which are nasty, people who will not get into heaven. And among the people who won't get into heaven, more than once, there is a mention of Arsenicaiatai and Malacoy. two Greek words. We don't really know what Arsenaquiatai means. It's a very rare Greek word before Paul. So it's probably a slang term in marketplace Greek. Malacoy is a bit more straightforward because it clearly means soft. So what's going on there? Well, two categories of

something, which probably are about males. And the likelihood is that this is Paul describing something which is a commonplace of Mediterranean society, which is the unequal relationship between an adult male and a teenage boy. This is simply part of Greco-Roman society. The Jews hated it. And therefore, it would be natural for someone like Paul to hate it.

But that's not exactly homosexuality. Because the way in which such a structure works is that it is unequal and it is part of a love lifestyle which will go on to be heterosexual for both parties. This is the way that an adult male organizes his sexual life. And in Greek society, it's to educate the younger partner. And the younger partner goes on to be an adult male. So that's what Arsanacoy, Kai Malakoi seems to be about. That's not modern homosexuality, which is.

is basically an equal relationship between people of the same status and generally, ideally for life. That's a rather different thing. So we're not hearing anything which is particularly relevant to modern society. And then you've already pointed out that Jesus said absolutely nothing about same-sex relations when he said rather a lot of things, for instance, about hypocrisy. And yet in the medieval West, hypocrites were not burned at the stake, and same-sex relations did merit you burning at the stake. And this was quite a problem for the medieval church, because in the West they had evolved a paranoiac hatred, let's face it, of same-sex relationships during the 11th and 12th centuries. They called it sodomy. And to find Jesus not

say anything about it is a bit embarrassing, as it is for homophobes at the present day. What are they going to do? Well, they made up a story. You've already alerted us to this happening in Christian history over Adam and Eve, but the story they made up is quite bizarre, and I have to say it took me by surprise when I came across it in my reading. And this is the story of the great Sodomite massacre of Christmas Eve. And the story, by some anonymous cleric of around 1200, is that on Christmas Eve, the first Christmas Eve, as the baby Jesus was about to enter the manger in Bethlehem, he said, I'm not going to go to God the Father. He said, I'm not going to go there. On this earth, I'm not going to save the earth. It is full of Sodomites. It's unnatural. And I'm not going to save

them. And so God the Father said to him, All right, here on, I'll massacre the lot. And so he duly did kill every Sodomite in the world, and baby Jesus could go down into the manger in Bethlehem. Now, what is this bizarre, horrid story about? It's there in the preaching of friars through the medieval period. You get it casually referred to, for instance, in the writings of mystics, so it's all over the place. What was it about? Well, one friar, a Franciscan friar of the 15th century, Bernardino of Siena, let the cat out of the bag in a sermon.

And he said, well, why did Jesus say nothing about same-sex relations? It's because God had killed them all the previous night. So you see what it's about. It is accounting for something which later generations can't find in scripture and want to. Why didn't Jesus say anything about homosexuality? Well, because there were no homosexuals. Exactly. Somehow they came back, but they're in notice. You don't tend to get this story much in school nativity plays these days. Yes. I must say that it took me back too, as you described, when I came across this. I love these kinds of these niche conspiratorial, strange facets of Christian history. As far as I know, some writers of the time had claimed that it was to be found in the

writings of Augustine, for example. Yeah, the legend classically refers to Jerome and Augustine. And that's how we know. It must be a cleric, because these are people who knew about the ancient world. But actually, you try and match it up with anything that Jerome or Augustine said. It just doesn't fit. And it's just not there. And I think that can give some instruction as to how to interpret Paul in his writings. You mentioned those two important words, Malachi and Arsena Koitae. Arsena Koitae probably seeming to be a mixture of arson, man, and koitai bed. So something like sort of man bed, which I think is where we get this idea of like

men bedding each other. But I have also heard this discussion, also in the context of the Hebrew Bible, that what might be being gotten at here is an unequal sexual relationship of a particular kind. I think the important thing to notice, you've talked about the word homosexuality being coined more recently, but the very concept that we might have today of two men in a loving marital relationship versus what we're probably talking about as present in, especially the Hebrew Bible, which would not be envisioning such a relationship, probably as even possible. They're talking essentially about a particular kind of sex act. Yeah, but of course you do get it in the Hebrew scripture, classically in the story of David and Jonathan.

Yes. Which is coming out at the same era as Achilles and Patroclos. Yes. These are heroic figures of equal status. And it's remarkable that this story survived in the Hebrew scripture. The passage has lots of linguistic peculiarities, which I think indicates that even then some commentators were embarrassed by it. And that goes into the Syriac version, the Peshita as well.

And the climax of the particular Jonathan and David's story is that they embrace each other and cry. And then, as it, the King James version puts it, David exceeded. What can this mean? Well, it's very obvious what it means. And you see ancient scriptural commentators wrestling with this. And then Jerome, of course, has to deal with it, doesn't like sex. and he says, David wept the more. And it's interesting now, looking at evangelical English translation, that they plump for Latin Jerome, who translated the church's scripture into Latin, the Vulgate, and they don't go for the Hebrew scripture, which King James and his translators in 1611 did.

I think it's a splendid irony. Oh, yeah. Now, I should note that I am far from a scholar of the Hebrew text, and I'm not fit to offer an exegesis of what it means to say that David exceeded after this particular embrace. But I should flag that, you know, there are views on this that vary. But how is it then that we go from a text, which seems like officially speaking, It's not about a condemnation of homosexuality in the modern form that we have today. How do we begin to see developing this particular disdain for homosexuality within the Christian tradition if it's not in fact scriptural and basis? Well, it's not scriptural basis, but it is Judaic in basic. Jews in Alexandria in particular, who are within a Greek culture, embrace the austerity of certain Greek philosophers.

And you can see them already producing condemnations of same-sex relations on basis of the Bible, yes, but ignoring the bits which don't suit them. And then this was much reinforced in the 6th, 7th century by Byzantine rulers, who for the first time, unlike their predecessors and the Roman Empire, took up the idea. that homosexuality was bad, or same-sex relationships was bad, then it is much, much reinforced in the Western Church in the 11th and 12th century, because it's now part of a package of things which are bad, particularly when clergy do them. And one is marriage, but same-sex relations are part of that, and all these pollute the main function of a priest, which is to celebrate the mass, to consecrate bread and wine and turn them into the body and blood of God through prayer

and something as bad as marital sex threatens that same-sex relations are going to threaten it even more. Why then this pushing of celibacy as a virtue? I mean, you've spoken about how this is a unique development in the clergy in the Western Catholic church. church. But it does seem that Jesus is supposed to be setting an example for us. We're obviously not supposed to do everything that he does, but one thing he doesn't do is have a relationship with a woman. Paul writes that marriage is okay, but it would be better if you were as I am,

implying that it would be better if people were celibate. And so there seems to be a scriptural basis for saying celibacy is this great virtue. But at the same time, at some point, this idea of having children becomes a good thing in Christianity and then at some point in the priesthood it's seen as better to be celibate like do you think it is historically common and or scripturally legitimate to see celibacy

as a virtue in this sense? Well, a virtue there is nothing in the Bible to justify monasticism the organized community of celibate people, either male or female. There was one passing reference

in the book of Acts to sharing all things in common which points out as a story that it didn't work and this has been a problem for monastic communities ever since that they really can't find much scriptural justification

and virtually nothing in the Hebrew scripture that's a real problem that Jesus, yes apparently celibate with some of his followers but then one of his followers Peter, we know, was married because he had a mother-in-law.

Yes. So there's nothing sort of prescriptive about marriage in New Testament. And we don't know the status of the other disciples. It is likely that a group of wandering people following a preacher are going to be without marital encumbrance, shall we say. And there are other such figures in Jesus' own time in Judaism. who, again, apparently are celibating. But no, no, it's a later thing. All right, it's developed in the Western Church

into this extraordinary institution of complete priestly celibacy. But from the second century, you can see Christianity in general privileging celibacy over marriage and also introducing this non-biblical idea of monastic communities. and one has to ask, where do they get it from?

Well, you look to where it started. It's Syria, late second century. Syria is the great entrepoux of trade in the eastern Mediterranean, trade within the empire, but beyond it, beyond it to India. That's the vast trade between the empire and the Indian silk trade, bullion, etc. Who's running it, Syrians? What do they find in India? They find monasteries, monks, even nuns. And I think they traded this back.

If they were Christians, they traded it within Christianity. And so I would suggest that the origins of monasticism are Hindu and Buddhist within the Christian tradition. There's no obvious other source for it. Right, right. The one strain within Judaism, which you might look to, is the Essene community, which certainly is something. But the remarkable thing is it's not referred to in the New Testament at all. And there is no evidence within the Essine literature that there is any contact with this new offshoot of Judaism. So I don't think that's a very convincing place to look.

Yes, I suppose except for the historical musings of it. at least some scholars that most popularly John the Baptist, and some say even Jesus himself might have been in Essine. However, you're right to say that even if that were the case, it's not something that's highlighted in the scripture. No, it isn't. And you'd make a far better case for saying that Jesus was a Pharisee. So I don't think that really works. Yeah, yeah. I think all of that is a little bit dubious and at best is conjectural. But so, So when I asked a moment ago about this virtue of celibacy, I think it's fascinating that monasticism doesn't show up for a while and might not be Christian in origin, but specifically just the virtue of celibacy on its own, do you think that that is scriptural in the sense that Paul seems to quite clearly say, this is the best way to be, but marriage is a compromise? Doesn't quite say that.

He says, this is the best way for me to be. And then he says a lot, which is really quite positive about marriage for other people. So when he says to those who are unmarried and widows, it is better for you to remain unmarried? That's a view of marriage being for life and beyond life, which is the model of how Christians should relate to God. It's second marriage, which is a real problem. and the early church even within the New Testament is really ambiguous about that

and they went on being ambiguous after that. So I might be misunderstanding you, do you mean to say that this verse might be about people who have been married but are no longer married? Yeah. Which would make sense why he also mentions widows in the same. Well, exactly that's it. And death does not

change that. It's a real problem and of course divorces related to that. The the Western Church took up Jesus' command for no divorce without modification. Yes. And they made that central to the idea that you should only ever get married once. Now, the Eastern Church, which thinks that all sex in marriage is satanic, like everything else,

says you can have several goes at marriage. You can have at least two other marriages in church when church weddings came along. Each must be slightly more gloomy than the previous wedding. but they are all church weddings and that's radically different from the way that the Western church looks on marriage but they're both pointing back to scripture.

It's interesting. I just looked at I think this is the the NIV, the nearly infallible version as that particular passage now to the unmarried and the widows and the NIV has a footnote for the word unmarried and it says or widowers. So I'm not actually

sure where the Greek term is there, but presumably it's something that could mean that. That's really interesting. I hadn't thought about that verse that way before. Well, there's also interesting moment in the pseudo-Parline pastoral letters when a bishop is supposed to be the husband of one wife. Now, what's that about? Is this actually pushing that idea that you shouldn't have someone who's married again, or more interestingly, he must not be a polygamist. We have to remember, and it's not often remembered by Christians, that Judaism is perfectly happy with polygyny, that is one man and several women, and remained so into the 20th century. And that's one of the ways in which Jesus broke with his Jewish tradition by saying marriage is

about monogamy and so there's something which it is possible that the communities of the pastoral epistles had polygamists in them. There seems to be a bit of, I think people perceive a kind of back and forth, particularly on the issue of divorce throughout the biblical literature. You seem to have Old Testament allowances for divorce in particular circumstances. Jesus then saying, like no marriage Matthew's got no divorce Matthew's gospel then saying

no divorce except for adultery and Paul talking about divorce he seems to I can't remember exactly he goes back to sort of no divorce no he doesn't really

and this is very interesting you pick up Matthew and Paul what they're saying really to us is that Jesus's blanket provision no divorce caused embarrassment among early Christians. They didn't want, they wanted divorce. And so Matthew edits the no divorce command to say, yeah, in circumstances of a wife being adulterous, post-divorce. And Paul has a different, slightly different set of things. And very unusually in his discussion of this, he quotes Jesus. He, he, he, he's

doesn't normally ever say anything about what Jesus said. He talks about what Jesus was. But on this occasion, he says, well, the Lord says no divorce, but I don't quite agree with that. I think in these circumstances, you can have divorce. So already there is a conversation in early Christianity about the permissibility of divorce. And it is a conversation which had different outcomes in the Western Church and the Eastern Church. Yeah, do we know much about quite early on and talking sort of maybe around the time of Paul and then just after early church, what the situation on divorce settled on because it does seem like there is a bit of confusion here and a bit of almost like bargaining and compromise. Well, all we've got is a New Testament because we have nothing else from the first century of any significance about what Christians believed or what they were doing.

So we've got these texts and nothing else, but given that we've identified already ambiguities and conversations and disagreements within the New Testament, there's a pretty good indication of how it's starting. Yeah. One thing that I find really interesting is the topic of biblical translation. So we've already talked about this happening in Poole and how this can totally revolutionize the way that we read scripture. I think I was listening to you give a talk. I'm not sure if you talk about it in the book, but I had independently just happened upon the translation of the term, what is it? It would be like epiusiosios for the Lord's Prayer. I just come across this myself and then I heard you speaking about it. In the Lord's Prayer, famously, give us this day our daily bread. But that word daily is this strange hapax legomenon or whatever the version of a hapax legomenon. fact glugamonon is that happens twice because it's in two of the Gospels. And it's this word epiusius, which is a very easy word to understand, because it's of two extremely common Greek elements, Usia, which is substance, and epi, which is like epidermis, it's that which lies above, beyond. So whatever epiucios means, it means that substance which lies beyond the substance. Clearly it does not mean daily. In other words, we have a word in the Lord's Prayer, the most

basic text of Christian prayer, which we don't know the meaning of. And actually, Jerome, who was a really good translator. When he looked at this word in Greek and was translating the Lord's Prayer into Latin, thought, what are I going to do? Well, I was simply translated as I see its meaning, which is super substantialis. He wasn't going for anything like daily. And there it remained within the vulgate version of the Lord's Prayer. And when English Roman Catholics came to translate Jerome from Latin into English in the 16th century to dis-Protestant translations, what were they going to do? Well, they avoided the question and put, give us this day, our super substantial bread. I mean, it's a cop-out, and you see why it wouldn't catch on. And so all through the centuries, that blank has been filled with the common sense word daily.

Yes. But the brutal truth is that in this basic biblical text, there is a word which we simply cannot understand. And that should give us a bit of pause. about the word of God in Scripture. If some of that word of God is actually incomprehensible, then we have to understand that that is the case and not fight it. Yes. It's a shame. They thought, I think in like the late 20th century, they thought they'd discovered a contemporary usage of the word epiucios,

but it turned out to be a slightly different word because they hadn't looked at it closely enough. It's part of a shopping list or something. It's a very rare word, as you say, and its uses tend to be post-biblical. Yes. And not there before. I think the justifications involve things like saying, you know, epi-eos, maybe like upon the substance or essence. And so I've heard this idea of it being like, give us this day our upon the essence bread, as if to say the bread that we need today.

But it's a little bit far-fetched. Yeah, you also get the bread for the morrow. give us this day, our bread for the morrow, which is a one Catholic attempt to deal with it. I think it means enough for the day. Yes, and the other way is to go down, anachronistically, the line of the bread of the mass being beyond substance. That really doesn't work because you're working backwards from a medieval assumption about the mass, let alone anything else. Yeah. So now we're stuck with it, and it's not alone in that.

I point out in the book that there are passages say in their prophets, Ezekiel, where we simply don't know the meaning of the original. I was reading Zephaniah this morning at morning prayer as I took morning prayer. And again, there are honest footnotes about that text, which says Hebrew obscure. Yes. We're faced with that. Yeah. And as far as I know, Arsena Koitai, this important word in First Corinthians, but I think it also should. up in one of the letters of Timothy

is another example of a word that only shows up there. Exactly. And we just don't know what it means. That suggests marketplace slang in Tarsus. It doesn't suggest something on which a couple of thousand

years of homophobia might be based. Oh yeah. I think it's so often forgotten not just that most people reading the Bible in this country are reading a translation of the Greek but that at least when it comes to Jesus you're reading a Greek translation of an Aramaic speaker

sometimes quoting Hebrew scripture there are these layers of translation all of which have to be correctly interpreted for us to get the right message today and yes that's always been the case in the Christian reading of this fascinating library called the Bible and it is a great misunderstanding

which has had far too much much effect, to think of the Bible as the Word of God. The Bible is not the Word of God. Jesus is the Word of God. It says so in the Bible. The beginning of John's Gospel, in the beginning was the word. So let's not mistake the value and importance of the Bible in the Christian tradition for what it is not. What it is is a fascinating library, a conversation about God over centuries.

is. One thing I want to briefly ask you about here near our end is the only other place I think people might point to when thinking about homosexuality is the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. I think people will be more familiar with the idea that this is unclear, but of course the word Sodomite brings to mind this story of Sodom and Gomorrah. And many people say this is a condemnation of God because of homosexual practices. Again, you write about it in the book, but could you give us a thumbnail sketch of what thinks going on there. Yeah, Sodom, the sin of Sodom, at least in Jesus' eyes, was in hospitality. And that's the most common way in which the sin of Sodom was understood in the Hebrew scripture. Around the time of Jesus, particularly with some Jewish commentators, Josephus or Philo of Alexandria, you begin getting this idea that it's about the same-sex aspect of the proffered rape of strangers. but that's a minority view and Jesus didn't use it like that when telling his followers

that if a village does not receive you go on to the next one it will be worse for Sodom than it will be for that in the last days it'll be worse for them than for Sodom and the implication of that is clearly in hospitality but this really crystallised

in the 12th, 11th, 12th centuries in the West, in the writings of the monk Peter Damien, who is really at the heart of the sudden fanatical paranoia about same-sex relations. He calls it Sodomia, as some of his contemporaries have, and this is something quite new at the time. Yeah. As people will likely be aware, this is something which in particular has been debated

back and forth throughout all kinds of apologetics, but it's interesting. to hear a historical perspective on how that idea has evolved. Final question I have for you. I can't help but think about the fact that Pope Francis has just died. Pope Francis has a sort of complicated relationship to so-called progressive issues within the Catholic Church, being himself a Catholic in the head of the Catholic Church, and still thinking that same-sex unions are wrong, still thinking that women will never be a part of the clergy, and yet saying that it's okay to bless same-sex relationships, though I think that might have got blown a little out of proportion,

because, of course, you can bless sinners, and he explains himself, you don't have to be morally perfect in order to be blessed. That's sort of his view, but at the same time is seen as somebody who's incredibly empathetic and a bit more progressive, I think people begin to ask questions about what that means for the future of the church. And given that he's just died and we're about to elect a new pope, well, someone's about to elect a new pope, do you think that an institution like the Catholic Church, which has become so swept up in this historical miscommunication, as you see it, I suppose, will ever be able to develop a more, perhaps you would say biblically accurate nuanced and maybe best described as progressive policy towards these kinds of issues I'm sure it will uh Pope Francis remarkable man and capable of saying who am I to judge

yes about same sex relations uh seems to me to be part of a journey towards something else and it would be very difficult to turn back on that road and it is a favorite theme of mine that the Christian church is a very young institution. It's only been around for 2,000 years, which is like an evening gone, even in human experience. And you wouldn't expect it to come to a final conclusion about anything yet.

And the conclusions that it has come to have been so various, so contradictory within that 2,000 years, that it would be crazy to suppose that there wouldn't be developments. beyond what we have now. And sometimes it does take a while to catch up, but it gets there eventually. I spoke to John Lennox this morning, who reminded me that it was within his and our lifetime

that the Catholic Church finally admitted that Galileo was right after all. So maybe they'll get there eventually, I'm not sure. Dermann McCulloch, thanks for coming on. It's been fun. Thank you. It's been very good. Enjoyable.