Paul Among the People by Sarah Ruden

Author:Sarah Ruden [Ruden, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307379023
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2012-06-20T04:00:00+00:00

Since women were supposed to stop at nothing once they got started, Greek and Roman husbands had the opposite notion to that of Victorian husbands as to why they could be sexually selfish: it wasn’t that women, or good women, were not responsive; it was that any woman was all too responsive. If you indulged your wife, you nursed a monster. You must marry a very young, very sheltered girl and make sure that she never took it into her head that she was there for anything besides childbearing. The poet Lucretius (mid–first century B.C.), for example, warns husbands against letting their wives move their hips during sex, which was supposed to send the semen off course.

Paul’s Jewish tradition put some equal sexual duties and restrictions on husbands and wives, but there also the aim was pregnancy: a couple had to have sex around the time the wife ovulated, and must not have sex when she could not conceive. Paul comes up with something altogether new: husbands and wives must have sex with each other on demand, because they both need it—it’s the reason they got married. According to these verses, they may need it equally. The rules for marriage treat human sexuality as a part of nature that needs expression.

History or, if you like, providence may have worked rather ironically to our benefit. Paul’s main concern was to make room for celibacy, which could give his followers more freedom and a closer relationship with God; and he also sought communal order and rationality in this time of change and excitement. But nevertheless his new rules give the proper basis for marriage, the erotic one; and they also address the chief reasons that marriages break down: the failure of partners to act generously toward each other, keeping intimacy after any passion is gone; and the loss of trust, typical when men have greater freedom and a smaller stake in the relationship.

The supreme serendipity is that, in founding communities that could shelter the celibate, Paul changed people’s experience of their emotions and their bodies in ways that inevitably changed marriage, though the new kind did not send down deep roots until the modern age and the end of the authoritarianism that began to blight the church in the generations after Paul. But real marriage is as secure a part of the Christian charter, and as different from anything before or since, as the command to turn the other cheek.

Greco-Roman literature gives an idea of the questions Christians may have been asking about this choice now in their own hands: faithful marriage or celibacy.

First of all, where were the parents? Parents married off their children, by right. I don’t know any factual pre-Christian case of a child’s defiance, which would have led to public outrage, disinheritance, or even death.g

Greek New Comedy and Roman comedy show the kind of fantasies people had when they could not choose their own spouses. But since the stories are set in the real, everyday Greco-Roman world, the

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