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, apparently, and seems to be watching for it.

The religion is presented as avoiding “sexual immorality.” But all those sex rules trace back to a single Greek word, as used a few times, mostly in the letters of Paul — like 1 Cor. 6:18: “Flee from sexual immorality.”

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

It seems so grand and imposing: “sexual immorality.”

Surely all that is spelled out, sex act by sex act. Or you’d think. But as it turns out, no New Testament passage actually says: ‘Okay, don’t do these sex acts which constitute porneia.”

It was sure bad. In Acts 15:19–20, James and others think over what the Gentile Christians are supposed to do. There is no effort to explain Old Testament law, it seems. What they want the Gentiles 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. They can even imagine they’re following Old Testament law — except for all the parts they’re not.

There’s problems with seeing porneia as enforcing Old Testament law, however. No Bible passages makes that connection. Many New Testament writers urged Christians not to follow “the law.” And there’s the problem of Gentiles not even knowing what the Jewish ‘law’ was.

Plus, Old Testament rules aren’t that restrictive on sex. Everything from polygamy to unmarried sex to divorce is totally legal. If God banned prostitution, He forgot to say so.

Maybe “porneia” is defined from context.

There’s what Christians like to say. And all the “context” is taken into consideration, and it becomes, for many people, a violation of the rule of marriage. That is, to have sex you have to be married.

Except the Bible doesn’t seem too interested in marriage or monogamy. 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 at all!

But Christian leaders assured that God mostly just wants you to get married, and porneia is explained as: get married before having sex.

Many Christians like the idea of many 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 problems in her 2010 book Paul Among the People. She thinks porneia suggests ‘prostitution’, which in ancient Rome meant sex with a slave.

Maybe it was 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.

That’s important to note, sadly, because until secular Bible scholars came into existence, Christianity pretty much never even looked into the matter.

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” a bad financial transaction?

In Hebrews 12:16, Esau is called a pornos for having “sold his birthright for a single meal.”

The underlying story is Genesis 25:34, when Jacob got his older brother to sell him the family “blessing” for a bowl of soup.

There’s no sex in the story. It seems that Esau commits the porneia violation in some kind of improper sale.

But the porneia trails more generally lead to scenes of improper worship. In 1 Corinthians 10:8, Paul points to another Old Testament story as apparently the central, defining narrative of porneia.

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

That refers 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.

The Israelites were executed “who were joined to Baal-peor” (25:5).

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, or worshipping the wrong god, is involved even in the scene of Esau and the soup. Esau had been drifting away, it seems, to the clutches of other gods. The soup could have been something like a ritual meal. Lentils were the usual food of mourning.

Abraham likely had just died — and his grandson didn’t care.

Let’s think back to Acts 15:19–20, when 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.”

Do Christian scholars know “porneia” is some kind of metaphorical situation?

I have the oddest feeling sometimes, like 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.

It seemed to give some coherence to the Bible. 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 even clear that any usage of porneia even referred to people actually having sex. That may 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 then remember that in the Bible, deities were ‘husbands’.

YHWH was the “husband” of the Israelites, as His son 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.).

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

The activity of “sleeping with the father’s wife” in 1 Corinthians 5:1 might then be something unexpected. The father might be YHWH. The wife might be Israel.

The offense, then, might be Christians going over to Jewish practices, i.e. Paul’s usual critique of ‘Judaizing’.

The subjecct of porneia could always be: worship of the wrong deity.

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 God, for which they’ll be sent to Heaven.

And the congregation said “Amen.” 🔶