Same Sex Unions and the Early Church

There's been a lot of dust kicked up lately about gay marriage.

State senators are looking over the ins and outs, Vermont and California are steeling for legal battles... while the President and the Pope have both made their opinion crystal clear.

Marriage, they say, is meant to be between a man and a woman. That's the way it's meant to be, that's the way it is now, and that's the way it's always been.

Well, that's not exactly true.

A few years ago, a Yale religious historian named John Boswell found evidence of a well-established religious rite, called the Office of Same-Sex Union or Order for Uniting Two Men. The Greek name for the rite was adelphopoiia.

Quote: Boswell found records of same sex unions in such diverse archives as those in the Vatican, in St. Petersburg, in Paris, Istanbul, and in Sinai, covering a period from the 8th to 18th centuries. Nor is he the first to make such a discovery. The Dominican Jacques Goar (1601-1653) includes such ceremonies in a printed collection of Greek prayer books.

It was practiced from the earliest days of Christianity... using the martyrs St. Serge and St. Bacchus as models.

Icons of the Roman soldiers and lovers show the two men being married by Jesus Christ, standing just as a bride and groom did in rituals of the period.

Even modern novenas to the saintly pair refer to them as exemplars of courage and love. They were martyred by the Emperor Maximian, dragged through the streets of Rome wearing women's clothing.

It's not just the icons and Boswell's research that shows evidence of widespread same-sex unions -- archeologists have found same-sex partners buried as spouses in grave sites dating back to the 300s, the dawn of the Catholic church.

What's interesting is that the Jesuits -- at least the Catholic scholars at Fordham University -- are also unable to exactly do away with Boswell's claims about the significance of the adelphopoiia rite. In their online archives, they present two versions of the rite in addition to a record of the union between St. Theodore of Sykeon and the Patriarch Thomas from The Life of St. Theodore of Sykeon.

Their prose gets a little petulant at times.

Quote: Boswell was not able to show that any high church body gave approval to such a use of the rite, but was able to show, as most critics allow, that the rite was both fairly widespread [he had about 70 manuscripts], and that it probably was used by some same-sex couples to give some outward sign to their relationship. There are contrary indications about the entire ceremony. The late 18th century Orthodox law text known as the Pedalion or Rudder does indicate that the ceremony was [ab]used in this way. From a much earlier date, St. Theodore of Studium in his Reform Rules seems to relate the ceremony to marriage.

(I have to admit, I get a kick out of the "contrary indications" and "[ab]used" bits. I love it when academics squirm.)

One of the other notable items from that first Fordham link is that in the Eastern Orthodox church, there are some places where the rite is still practiced. In Roman Catholicism, same-sex unions were offically banned in the 1700s, but the Jesuits at Fordham mention witnesses of "modern usage" in Albanian congregations.

Personally, what I'd like to know is how exactly they were banned in the West, bearing in mind this took place some 200 years after the sacraments, including marriage, were codified at the Council of Trent. Was it an infallible decree? What exactly did the Pope say?

I suppose I could just buckle down, wedge my academic hat on my pointed little head and read Boswell's book....

If you'd like to discuss this further, you can jump into the conversation over at Cross and Flame, a wonderful interfaith discussion board. Opinions and positions are widely varied... so be polite.

Posted by grant at September 08, 2003 12:14 PM