Ancient Christian same sex marriage

[Slaney]

Originally Posted by Captain America

Who's this professor; what's his bias, if any.

Don't know, maybe he's peeved that his husband left him for another man

[livingwordunity]

Originally Posted by John Savage

Is this true?

No. It's another lie coming from the left to try to fool people into going against the will of God. Jesus said that the model for marriage is Adam and Eve. Anyone who tries to say that Jesus taught otherwise is a liar.

[InSearchofGrace]

Demolishing Myth that the Church sanctioned Same Sex Unions

10 minute video by Jim Akin

[sw85]

Posted in response to that by a very smart man I know on Facebook:

Boswell's piece was always kind of a stretch. The text of those rites, which have largely fallen out of use in the West but, I'm given to understand, are still used in some form in the Eastern Catholic rites and the Orthodox churches, is largely available to us and it is pretty clear what was ordained was a kind of spiritual brotherhood or sisterhood, not a sexual union. This is evident by the fact that (a) no one ever considered such unions to be sacraments, hence why they were able to fall out of use, and (b) these unions were termed adelphopoiesis, in Greek, "brother-making." The Latin names for these were similar. What is called here the "Order of Uniting Two Men" presumably refers to the <i>Ordo ad fratres faciendum</i>, which is actually a pretty faithful translation of adelphopoiesis: "Order for the making of brothers." This was a probably a successor to or replacement of the more traditional practice of blood-brotherhood, which I imagine the Church probably frowned on owing to its widespread use among pagans and the natural and spiritual significance of blood. In any event, when Boswell says that [Sergius and Bacchus'] union went beyond mere adelphopoiesis, that certainly does not imply that the Church endorsed their going beyond it. (This is all hypothetical anyway, as there is radical doubt as to the historicity of Sergius and Bacchus).

While the early Christian consensus does seem to heavily favor what we call the traditional or heteronormative marital arrangement, it's worth noting they still regarded it as suboptimal. Hence the admonition of St. Paul in his first epistle to the Corinthians that they should marry only if they could not control their passions, and then only as a remedy for those passions. The preferred state was lifelong chastity, and the ideal one chastity plus consecration to God through holy orders. It's hard to imagine such a radically ascetical Church endorsing explicitly sexual unions between two people of the same sex when they regarded heterosexual marriage as a grudging concession. In any event, there's the secondary issue that even if Boswell's interpretation were unambiguously true, and it's far from clear, that wouldn't necessarily prove anything except that the early Church was plagued with theological and doctrinal problems. Which we already know to be true, given that the Church spent the first several centuries defining its doctrines in opposition to the many heresies that threatened it. (People forget that Arianism, formally condemned as heresy in the late 4th century, persisted in many areas as the majority belief for several centuries).

[manualman]

This is just the same old deceptive linguistic trick used by agenda drivers.

In the women's ordination movement, they exploit the ancient practice of "ordaining" deaconesses as a "proof" that women can indeed receive the sacrament of Holy Orders and have in history. They curiously omit the fact that the historical record is quite clear that such deaconesses were clearly not considered to be female deacons who had received the sacrament, but as helpers whose duties were those which men could not properly perform (such as assisting in the baptism of women, which was commonly done naked back then!).

This is just the same sort of shameless deception that refuses to acknowledge the facts when an ignorant reading of the surface would appear to support the conclusion they desire. Such a thing should be grounds for academic repudiation and ignomy.