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 for it.
Where do we learn that in the Bible? From a single Greek word, as used a few times, mostly in the letters of the apostle Paul. A verse like 1 Cor. 6:18 will be presented like this: “Flee from sexual immorality.”
The Greek word porneia is translated ‘sexual immorality’. But its meaning is actually unclear.
As often as Christians say “sexual immorality” you might think the Bible lays it all out.
You might think the meaning of “sexual immorality” is somewhere described. But as it turns out, no New Testament passage says: ‘The following sex acts constitute the serious problem of porneia…”
Christianity solves the problem by just saying that any biblical reference to a “bad” sexual act is porneia, as if that link is obvious.
Even Christian scholars admit there’s problems.
What does porneia actually mean? “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…”
For Christians who like sexual regulations, there tends to be more of them.
The vague category of porneia expands 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.”
The definition of porneia, in Christian usage, tends to be so flexible that the scholar Silke Petersen thinks it just bans whatever people at any given time want banned. As he explains:
“It is a term open for projection of any kind and can denote whatever a person or community does consider not acceptable behavior.”
In the Bible, “porneia” is usually just mentioned.
Scene by scene, it’s just referenced. Take Acts 15:19–20, where James and other apostles are trying to decide what is required of Gentile Christians, a population only recently admitted into the religion. What are they supposed to do?
The Jewish leaders decide they must “abstain from things defiled by idols and from porneia and from what has been strangled and from blood.”
Wel, but…what is porneia?
Is following Old Testament law the idea?
A lot of Christians think so. The problem is that when porneia is used in reference to Old Testament scenes, the scenes are not sex scenes.
In Hebrews 12:16, for example, 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 defines “immorality.”
That idea just seemed to make sense to the religion, and so the teachings of the Bible reduced to little more than: Get married and don’t have sex with anyone else.
It’s an odd meaning to assign to the God of the Bible, which has many stories of heroes having wives, concubines and sex slaves, and sleeping with prostitutes, as with Samson in Judges 16:1–3.
Then many original Christians were slaves, unable to marry or regulate who has access to their sexual bodies.
But scholars get nervous.
Many won’t translate porneia. “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 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. Maybe porneia was a rule 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” actually 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.”
Except that’s not something a prostitute did. In the ancient world, prostitutes were slaves. They weren’t selling. They were sold.
In a 2018 paper, three Bible scholars tracked down all uses of “porneia” in 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.”
Christians often haven’t understood that spirituality is erotic in the Bible.
Very often throughout the Old Testament, prophets see rival deities as sexually aggressive males (cf. Ezekiel 16 & 23, etc.). Deities were seen as the ‘husbands’ of their peoples. The word ‘baal’ just meant ‘husband’ (cf. Hosea 2:18–19, etc.).
Christian scholars know all 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.”
But Christians don’t want to hear that porneia means…unfaithfulness to God. They want to hear that it means policed sex.
It was never clear that any usage of “porneia” referred to people having sex.
Does this seem surprising? Take 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 remember, 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’, the father is probably YHWH, and the wife is Israel. The offense in view, then, is Christians going over to Jewish practices, i.e. Paul’s usual critique of ‘Judaizing’.
The subject could always be: worship of the wrong deity.
For Christians, your deity is Jesus. Not another god. You only can have one.
But Christians passed off the ordinary activity of getting married as their special obedience to God. And the congregation said “Amen.” 🔶
