Paul’s Sexual Morality (Dominion)

Paul brought a totally different perspective.

*How could any man, knowing his limbs consecrated to the Lord, think to entwine them with those of a whore, mingle his sweat with hers, become one flesh with her? But Paul, by proclaiming the body ‘a temple of the Holy Spirit’, was not merely casting as sacrilege attitudes towards sex that most men in Corinth or Rome took for granted. He was also giving to those who serviced them, the bar girls and the painted boys in brothels, the slaves used without compunction by their masters, a glimpse of salvation.   *

*To suffer as Christ had done, to be beaten, and degraded, and abused, was to share in his glory. Adoption by God, so Paul assured his Roman listeners, promised the redemption of their bodies. ‘And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you.’    *

I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.’65     Now, in the wake of a second Temple’s destruction, the darkness seemed only to have thickened. What prospect, then, of light? To this question, the writers of the gospels provided a startling answer: it had already appeared. ‘The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.

’So began a gospel which Christians in due course would attribute to John, youngest of the twelve original disciples of Jesus, and the one whom he had particularly loved. The Logos, which was with God, and was God, and through whom the world was made, had come into the world, and the world had failed to recognize him.

No less than Paul’s letters, it was – in its fusion of Jewish scripture with Greek philosophy – a recognizable monument to the age     Certainly, the notion that light and truth were synonymous was not original to John. It reached back at least to Darius. Yet what followed had no parallel in the utterances of Persian kings, nor of Greek philosophers, nor of Jewish prophets. The Logos – the Word – had become flesh.

His disciples had been fishermen and tax-collectors. They had trodden dusty roads together and slept on hard floors. Then, when the night came of Jesus’ arrest, they had abandoned him. Even Peter, standing by a fire in a courtyard outside where Jesus had been taken, had three times denied him before cockcrow. The betrayal had seemed beyond forgiveness. But then, at the end of the gospel, it had come. John described how the risen Christ had appeared to the disciples as they were out on a lake fishing, and had lit a fire, and had invited them to cook their fish on it. Then, when they had finished eating, he had turned to Peter, and three times asked him, ‘Do you love me?’ Three times Peter had answered that he did. And three times Jesus had commanded him, ‘Feed my sheep     The heady days when Paul had preached the imminent return of Christ were by now a century and     more in the past. Christians might still hourly expect the parousia, but the original, unsettling radicalism of Paul’s own message had been diluted. Letters written in his name and that of Peter now sternly instructed women to submit to their husbands, and slaves to obey their ‘earthly masters in everything’.4 The Christians of Rome were advised not to court death at the hands of Caesar, but rather to ‘honour’ him.

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Related posts:

1. The Resurrection (Dominion)
2. Allied with God (Dominion)
3. Paul (Dominion)
4. Nero’s Sexual Morality (Dominion)