When Christianity made up its sex rules

Let’s talk about “porneia”

When you sign up for Christianity, the faith is explained as a lot of rules about sex. God hates people having “bad” sex—and is watching.

And all of this, interestingly, is attributed to a single Greek word, as used a few times, mostly in the letters of Paul. It seems so clear, like in 1 Cor. 6:18: “Flee from sexual immorality.”

The word is porneia. But its meaning, interestingly, is unclear

Surely, one imagines, this ‘immorality’ has been spelled out, sex act by sex act.

Or so you’d think? But as it turns out, no New Testament passage says: ‘The following sex acts are porneia…”

Typically it’s just mentioned. In Acts 15:19–20, James and others think over what the Gentile Christians are supposed to do. There is no effort, interestingly, to explain Old Testament law to them.

What the Jewish Christians want the Gentile Christians to do is:

“…abstain from things defiled by idols and from porneia and from what has been strangled and from blood.”

But what is “porneia”?

It’s a bit of a mystery, as Christian scholars have been admitting for awhile. “The N.T. evidence is not at all clear,” as Bruce Malina puts it, back in 1972.

Or as John Boswell wrote back in 1980:

“…many English translators content themselves with the vague word ‘immorality.’ This is safe enough, since whatever else ‘πορνεία’ may be, it is certainly ‘immoral,’ but the term is misleadingly general.”

Or James W. Thompson in 2010: “While porneia means ‘unlawful sexual intercourse,’ in the New Testament it is often ambiguous…”

Is Old Testament law the reference?

A lot of Christians like that idea. Whatever sex acts seem to be “bad” in the Old Testament end up getting called porneia.

But when porneia is used in reference to Old Testament scenes, they’re not sex scenes. In Hebrews 12:16, Esau is called a pornos for having “sold his birthright for a single meal.”

The reference here is Genesis 25:34, when Jacob got his brother to sell him the family “blessing” for a bowl of soup. There’s no sex in the story.

In 1 Corinthians 10:8, Paul points to another Old Testament story as the key example of porneia. As that verse reads:

“We should not commit porneia, as some of them did — and in one day twenty-three thousand of them died.”

The reference is to Numbers 25, an episode during the Exodus. Instead of going the distance to the Promised Land, some Israelites wanted to settle in a pagan city and worship that city’s god. They were all killed.

Christians like the idea that marital state is what establishes “immorality.”

That is, married sex is ‘moral’ and everything else is ‘immoral’. The religion is explained as: you need to keep to those monogamous marriages.

It’s an odd meaning to assign to the God of the Bible, since He doesn’t seem to much care about monogamy. In the Old Testament, it’s basically unknown. This is a text in which polygamy is the norm.

The hero Abraham has sex with slaves. Many kings have concubines. The lovers in the Song of Songs don’t seem to be married. The slave Esther has unmarried sex. (Slaves couldn’t be married.)

Heroes sleep with prostitutes, as with Samson in Judges 16:1–3. If God banned prostitution, He forgot to say so.

But Christian leaders assure that God mostly wants you to get married, and porneia is avoided by having sex only with your spouse.

Christians like the idea of more sex acts being banned.

The definition of porneia, on cue, can expand like an accordion. For John MacArthur, it “refers to any illicit sexual intercourse, whether or not either of the parties is married. It was a broad term…”

For David Instone-Brewer: “While it is true that porneia can refer to illegitimate marriage and to premarital unfaithfulness, it can also refer to any number of other sexual offenses.”

But scholars start getting nervous.

Many won’t translate porneia, interestingly. “I prefer to leave the term untranslated in most cases,” notes John Kampen in a 1994 paper.

David C. Parker writes in 1997: “The Greek word porneia, whose meaning constitutes a separate important problem, will be left untranslated…”

In 2004, Ann Nyland explains in her Source translation of the New Testament: “No equivalent English term.”

Sarah Ruden, the famed translator of ancient Greek literature, takes a stab at the porneia problem in her 2010 book Paul Among the People. She thinks the word suggests ‘prostitution’, which in ancient Rome would mean one thing: sex with a slave.

Could porneia be a warning against treating people like slaves? Ruden writes:

“If I had been one of Paul’s typical early readers, whatever else I understood from his use of the word, I would have picked up that treating another human being as a thing was no longer okay.”

Lately, secular scholars are trying to figure out what “porneia” means.

In 2011, Kyle Harper made some waves with a paper, “Porneia: The Making of a Christian Sexual Norm.” He began by noting how the definition of the word seems to oddly fluctuate in early Christianity, and that “its meaning has remained elusive for modern interpreters.”

He supplies some information. Porneia is often said to refer to prostitution, but in Greek, he notes, “πορνεία does not mean ‘prostitution’ in the abstract sense of ‘the institution of venal sex’.”

What it means is: “the practice of selling access to one’s body.”

That’s not something a prostitute did.

In the ancient world, again, prostitutes were slaves. They weren’t selling. They were sold.

In a 2018 paper “Can a Man Commit πορνεία with His Wife?,” three Bible scholars, David Wheeler-Reed, Jennifer W. Knust and Dale B. Martin, tracked down all usages of porneia in ancient Greek sources.

It was a rare word, and marital state did not seem to be the concern. Demosthenes, the Athenian statesman, used porneia to describe a man who “has allowed himself to be ‘screwed’ by many other men” — not sexually, but in the sense of being taken advantage of by them.

A Greek historian, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, identified an instance of porneia in “slaves selling themselves sexually to raise money with which to buy their own freedom.”

For Greek speakers, porneia seems to have been an unauthorized sale of sex. To sell sex wasn’t a problem, only the terms of these transactions.

Is ‘porneia’ related to idolatry?

It does seem that when people in the Bible worship the wrong god, there’s suddenly a lot of alarm about porneia. A biblical book called the Wisdom of Solomon looks back on the Old Testament, and explains:

“For the invention of idols was the beginning of porneia, and the discovery of them the corruption of life.” (14:12)

Maybe improper worship is involved even in the scene of Esau and the soup. Lentils were the usual food of mourning. Abraham likely had just died — and his grandson didn’t care.

Improper worship is certainly the subject of the porneia in Numbers 25. The Israelites were executed “who were joined to Baal-peor” (25:5).

Similarly, in Acts 15:19–20, the Gentiles are told to avoid porneia along with “things defiled by idols” and “what has been strangled and from blood.” In a study of the references to sacrificial meat, Ben Witherington III notes the context for these offenses seems to be “an act of pagan worship.”

The spirituality of the Bible has its own language.

And what Christians often haven’t understood is how erotic the imagery around deities can get. In Ezekiel 16 & 23, other gods are depicted as very sexual males. They were discussed as ‘men’.

Deities were seen as the ‘husbands’ of their peoples. The word ‘baal’ just meant ‘husband’ (cf. Hosea 2:18–19, etc.).

The discussion of worshipping deities can get very erotic, as if it was humans having sex—when worship in temple spaces is the actual subject.

Christian scholars know this, as I was reminded when reading a recent commentary on 1 Corinthians by Roy E. Ciampa and Brian S. Rosner. There it is…on page 249:

“As it turns out, most of the references to prostitution in Paul’s Bible are figurative, referring to Israel’s unfaithfulness to the Lord and worship of other gods, which also help explain Paul’s treatment of porneia in terms of unfaithfulness to God.”

Christianity likes the idea of policed marriage.

God likes marriage, they said, so a ceremony was developed! Clerics perform it. Everyone has their ‘role’ to perform in the Christian theater.

All along, it wasn’t clear that any usage of porneia referred to people having sex. Does that seem surprising? Surely there’s sex, for example, in 1 Corinthians 5:1, where Paul writes:

“It is actually reported that there is porneia among you, and of a kind that even pagans do not tolerate: A man is sleeping with his father’s wife.”

A man is sleeping with his father’s wife! What is more clearly a pointer to sex than this?

But in the Bible, deities were ‘husbands’.

YHWH was the “husband” of the Israelites, as Jesus is the “husband” of the new Christians (cf. Mk 2:19; Mt 9:15; Lk 5:34; Jn 3:29; Eph 5:22, etc.).

When Paul refers to the ‘father’s wife’, in a divine logic, the father might be YHWH, and the wife might be Israel.

The actual offense, then, might be Christians going over to Jewish practices, which would just be Paul’s usual critique of ‘Judaizing’.

The subject of porneia could always be: worship of the wrong deity. For Christians, your deity is Jesus.

But do Christians even care about the details?

Let’s be honest. They used a strange, vague word to create a system of clerically-regulated marriages. They passed it off as their special obedience to the Creator of Everything, for which they’ll be sent to Heaven.

And the congregation said “Amen.” 🔶