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Paul

How he radically redefined marriage

By Roy Bowen Ward

The apostle Paul radically redefined marriage and attitudes toward it for the emerging Christian movement, although this is seldom recognized. Contrary to the popular impression, however, marriage, for Paul, provided the proper context for satisfying sexual desire and for providing erotic pleasure. Within the context of marriage, sex was something to enjoy on the basis of equality and mutuality. To appreciate Paul’s radical redefinition of marriage, we must understand it against the background of contemporaneous Roman attitudes toward sex and marriage. We must also understand what Paul himself said in the full context of his discussion. Paul’s most famous […]

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Endnotes

1.

Sarah B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (New York: Shocken Books, 1975), p. 166.

2.

Plautus, The Captives, 889; Suetonius, Julius Caesar, 52; etc.

3.

Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, 3.2. See Alan Watson, Roman Private Law (Edinburgh: The University Press, 1971), pp. 21ff. Infertility was a common reason for divorce; see Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, pp. 158ff.

4.

Gellius, Attic Nights, 1.6.2; cp. 1.6.6.

5.

Roman History, 54.16.1

6.

On the subject of women’s sexual freedom, see Eva Cantarella, Pandora’s Daughters: The Role and Status of Women in Greek and Roman Antiquity, tr. M.B. Fant (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 140ff.

7.

Cora E. Lutz, Yale Classical Studies, vol. 10 (1947) p. 86, XII.4–8.

8.

See Michael Grant, Eros in Pompeii (New York: William Morrow, 1975). O. Larry Yarbrough points to widespread practices at odds with the position of the moral philosophers, but he categorizes them as “immorality,” in Not Like the Gentiles: Marriage Rules in the Letters of Paul (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1985), p. 63.

9.

Roy Bowen Ward, “PORNEIA and Paul,” in Proceedings: Eastern Great Lakes Biblical Society and Midwestern Society of Biblical Literature 6 (1986), pp. 219–228.

10.

Hans Conzelmann, 1 Corinthians, tr. J.W. Leitch, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), p. 120.

11.

Ars Amatoria, 2.681f., 725–728; 3.793f.

12.

See Victor Paul Furnish, The Moral Teaching of Paul (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2nd edn., 1985), especially chs. 2 and 4.