This study has had a very limited focus. It has aimed at elucidating the meaning of those New Testament texts that have been used in support of the practice of clerical celibacy and clerical continence, particularly in the Latin church throughout the ages but especially during the patristic era and the period of the first canonical literature on the subject.
As an exegetical study, the pages of this book have been dedicated to the meaning of specific texts within their own literary, historical, and social contexts. The texts chosen for study are those that have been particularly highlighted in two significant monographs on clerical celibacy written in the last half of the twentieth century—namely, the works of Christian Cochini and Stefan Heid. Cochini’s study was an important source for the many articles and a short book on the topic by Alphons Maria Stickler, who devoted a good part of his academic career to the study of clerical celibacy and the related practice of clerical continence.
The principal concern of these three authors has been the history of the development of the related practices, particularly from the perspective of the writings of some of the Fathers of the Church, the canons of several councils (for the most part, regional church councils), and the early papal decretals. These historical sources were, in and of themselves, not the focus of the current study. They served the purposes of this study insofar as they witnessed to the use of a limited number of scriptural texts that were cited in support of the developing practice and discipline.
What this study has endeavored to do is to analyze time-honored scriptural texts with the aid of contemporary historical, literary, and linguistic methods. Use of these methods enables us to better understand what the first Christian generations understood when they heard these words of Scripture. Taken from the historical circumstances in which they were written and the literary contexts in which they are found, these texts were heard again in different historical circumstances and embodied in different literary contexts in such a way that a new interpretation was attributed to them. This new interpretation was often far removed from the meaning of the texts in the first years of the Christian church.
Words were retained but their meaning was changed. Taking the texts out of their literary context often meant that little attention was paid to the remainder of the scriptural book in which these texts are found. Taking the texts out of their historical context meant that they acquired a timelessness that they did not originally have. Ultimately the historical reality of revelation was neglected and the law of the incarnation was ignored.
The texts that served as the subject of our study were those most frequently cited in the historical sources for the ecclesiastical practice of clerical continence, from which the Western Church’s discipline of clerical celibacy has emerged. These same texts understandably recur in contemporary historical studies, but they are generally not subject to the same rigors of historical and literary research as are the patristic and early canonical texts in which they occur.
From the gospels come such passages as “we have left everything and followed you” (Mark 10:28; Matt 19:27) and “there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 19:12). From the letters of the apostle Paul come exhortations such as “do not deprive one another except perhaps by agreement for a set time, to devote yourselves to prayer” (1 Cor 7:5)—a passage often cited in abbreviated form as “deprive one another to devote yourselves to prayer—and “let even those who have wives be as if they had none” (1 Cor 7:29). The letters also contain such self-referential passages as “I say that it is well for them to remain unmarried as I am” (1 Cor 7:8) and “do we not have the right to be accompanied by a believing wife, as do the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?” (1 Cor 9:5). From epistles attributed to Paul, but arguably not written by him, comes the famous unius uxoris vir adage whose classic interpretation, propter continentiam futuram, is attributed to Pope Siricius I. The phrase itself is found in 1 Timothy 3:2, 12 and Titus 1:6.
This short overview of the principal scriptural texts cited in the historical sources and current literature suggests that the texts can be gathered together and analyzed in three groups—namely, (1) the gospel narratives about Jesus and his disciples, (2) the letters written by Paul, especially his First Letter to the Corinthians, and (3) the Pastoral-Epistles, especially the quasi-legislative First Letter to Timothy and the Letter to Titus.
The gospel stories about Jesus and his disciples are literary narratives. The most ancient of these is the Gospel according to Mark.1 The fact that they are narratives, stories, must be taken into account if they are to be read and heard with due understanding. The reading of a story demands its own hermeneutic.
The gospel stories were not written as historical accounts—certainly not by the standards of contemporary historiography—but they are the principal sources available to us as we endeavor to know what Jesus and his disciples did, to know what he said to his disciples and they to him. As stories rather than as modern biographies or histories, the gospels often do not provide us with the details we would like. Any story—and this certainly includes the gospel stories—is selective. Authors pick and choose what they want to write in the light of their aim. The aim of the gospel stories is ultimately theological. The Synoptic stories, in particular, attempt to portray the claim of the Kingdom of God on Jesus of Nazareth and those who listened to him.
Jesus’ own life story bears witness to the Kingdom of God, which “has come near,” as Jesus proclaimed at the beginning of his public ministry (Mark 1:15). For the sake of the kingdom, Jesus adopted a celibate lifestyle, to which a single New Testament text bears witness—namely, Matthew 19:12. Excoriated for his celibate lifestyle, Jesus defended himself with a startling image. He speaks about those who have who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.
The coming of the kingdom colored all that Jesus did and said, even with regard to marriage. He had reason to defend himself with regard to his lifestyle because contemporary society took it for granted that men should be married. Faithful Jewish men were expected to marry not only because marriage led to progeny but also because marriage was incumbent upon God’s people to whom the Lord had said, “Be fruitful and multiply” (Gen 1:28).
That marriage was, in fidelity to God’s command, the normal and normative way of life for first-century Jewish men is not to be overlooked when Jesus issued the call to discipleship, “Follow me” (Mark 1:17). Rabbinic texts, often attributed to the Schools of Hillel and Shammai, the great rabbis whose influence on first-century CE Jewish culture was so strong, sought to understand the specifics of a religious response to God’s “Be fruitful and multiply.” The celibate lifestyle was not among the appropriate responses under consideration. Marriage was a social reality, the purpose of which was procreation. In turn, this suggests that marriage without sexual intercourse was not marriage in the way that people understood it. The rabbinic texts were written long after the gospels were written, but, like the gospels, they were conservative in nature. They attempted to preserve the tradition and, in so doing, attest to the culture of marriage in first-century Jewish Palestine, albeit from later perspectives.
At that time—the time of Jesus—Palestine was under Roman domination. Among the evangelists, Luke particularly drew attention to the Roman reality of the world in which Jesus lived and preached. Roman laws on marriage had been enacted a few decades before Jesus came on the scene. These laws had as their primary purpose to increase population among the Roman elite. It is virtually impossible to know whether and to what extent the laws were enforced in the provinces, but they were the law of the Empire and contributed a culture of marriage for the sake of progeny that existed in Jesus’ day.
In this context, it is all but certain that Simon Peter was not the only disciple of Jesus to have been married. Were they not to have been considered contraveners of God’s will, all of Jesus’ disciples would have married. The sources are silent about their marriages but, as has been noted, the sources are selective and were written not to provide biographical data about the members of Jesus’ company but to provide an impression of the claim of the coming kingdom on them. In order that the gospel be proclaimed, Jesus’ disciples left their homes, families, and livelihood, but the separation appears not to have been permanent.
As for Cephas, their spokesperson and eventual leader, Paul affirms that he was accompanied by his wife as he fulfilled the mission of preaching the Gospel. The sometimes fanciful and often graphic apocryphal literature of later years builds on the tradition that Peter was indeed a married man, with family.
Peter and Paul were contemporaries.2 We know far more about Paul than we do about Peter—not only because of what Luke writes about Paul in the Acts of the Apostles but also, and especially, because of what he himself has written in letters to various churches. The letters are revealing in many different ways. One thing they reveal is that their author was a faithful Jew—a trait confirmed by Luke in Acts—whose Weltanschaung, his overall view of reality, was colored not only by his belief in Jesus as Lord but also by a conviction that Jesus was to appear, as Christ and Lord, in the not-too-distant future.3
This future appearance of Jesus, the Parousia, provided a Christian slant for Paul’s apocalyptic Judaism. The world to come would feature the presence of Jesus as Lord. The expectation of an imminent end-time—“the appointed time has grown short,” he writes to the Corinthians (1 Cor 7:29)—provides an eschatological lens through which Paul’s letters must be seen if they are to be understood.
About a quarter of a century after Jesus’ death and resurrection some members of the Church of God at Corinth wrote a letter to Paul in which they mentioned an idea that so troubled them that they wanted Paul’s clarification. The troubling thought was that “it is well for a man not to touch a woman” (1 Cor 7:1). Some people in their community had apparently adopted this as a supposedly Christian principle. It may be that this came from a misunderstanding of Paul’s message about the world to come. If the time was as short as Paul implied, if the end times already impinged upon their existence, then marriage and sex were out of the question for a believer.
In the seventh chapter of his First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul gives a detailed response to the concern that the troubled Corinthians had voiced. Far from being the sexual ascetic that many of our contemporaries see him to be, Paul was a realist with regard to human sexuality. He realized that sexual passions were strong, so his first bit of advice was that people should be married. Each man should have his own wife and each woman should have her own husband.4 He goes on to say that sexual intercourse belongs to the reality of marriage and that each of the spouses owes to the other the satisfaction of her or his sexual needs.
Abstinence from marital intercourse can be allowed but only on the fulfillment of three conditions—namely, (1) that the purpose of the time of abstinence be prayer, (2) that the partners mutually agree to the abstinence, and (3) that the period of abstinence be for a relatively short period of time, after which they should resume a normal marital life. In setting down these conditions, Paul anticipates three ideas that will later be found in rabbinic texts. At bottom, Paul’s ideas on the reality of marriage derive from his Jewish culture.
Jewish rabbis allowed for a short period in which a man might not have sexual intercourse with his wife. They accepted the possibility that sometimes a man’s occupation might require a physical separation from his wife but they did not want this period of time to be unduly prolonged. It was to be as short as possible. Some rabbis raised the issue of a period of physical separation for the sake of prayer, accepting its legitimacy on the condition of spousal agreement.
The advice on marriage and marital intercourse in 1 Corinthians 7 that reflects the Jewish matrix of Paul’s thought is primarily addressed to married couples. “Let each one remain in the condition in which you were called”5 is a principle that comes repeatedly to the fore in the chapter. If couples are married, then they should continue to live and act as married couples. The coming of the eschaton and their call to be believers should not deter them from the way of life that had been theirs when they were called. Eschatological enthusiasm should not put them in a situation where they might be tempted by Satan.
Paul’s words of advice were directed to the community at large whose members were married. The apostle made no special provisions for the leadership of the community, those who exercised the charisms about which he writes in chapters 12 and 14 of the letter. At no point does he suggest that these charismatic leaders forgo sexual intercourse with their spouses.
Paul’s advice to those not yet married continues to be formulated in the light of the “remain in the condition in which you were called” principle. It is well, the apostle writes to virgins, the nonmarried, to remain as they are.6 It is his own bit of advice. He acknowledges that he has no commandment of the Lord in this regard.7
Paul’s advice stems from his opinion about the impending crisis, the eschaton, which he expects to occur in a relatively short period of time. Paul does not enter into details but the Jewish matrix of his thoughts on marriage and sexuality suggest that the imminent eschaton would render marriage and the exercise of sexual intercourse within marriage as socially unfruitful. The impending crisis would not allow for any children to be born of the marriage to grow to adulthood, when they could become responsible members of society.
Paul does not say that his advice to those not yet married, the parthenoi, as he calls them, is specifically directed to those charismatically called to leadership within the community. His words about remaining in the condition in which they were called—meaning their not-yet-married situation—are his words of advice for all not yet married believers in the community at Corinth.
Even in face of the impending eschaton, marriage is not to be considered a sin. Passions may be strong and sexual immorality is to be resolutely avoided. Therefore, Paul suggests that a remark he addressed “to the unmarried and widows” is applicable to the not yet married as well. “It is better to marry than to be aflame with passion”8 is a realistic principle for all to follow. Nevertheless, says Paul, in the relatively short time remaining before the eschaton, someone who marries does well but the person who refrains from marriage will do better.
The eschatological perspective that, along with a Jewish understanding of marriage, dominates Paul’s thought on marriage and sexuality, leads him to convey a sense of eschatological urgency as he writes, “Let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it” (1 Cor 7:29–31). As is often the case with many of the New Testament’s eschatological sayings, the saying is tinged with a bit of hyperbole. Earlier in his letter Paul had reminded his addressees that they lived in this world and that they were not to take the advice of a previous letter as if it meant that they had to leave this world.9
Were the apostle’s addressees not to mourn with those wept and not to rejoice with those who were rejoicing, not to buy things that were needed and have no dealings with the world, indeed, were they not to marry at all, they would have to leave the world. It was not Paul’s intention that the believers in Corinth should leave this world. Mourning and weeping, buying and dealing with the world, and marrying were the way that the believer was to live until the end time. Indeed, in what may have been the last of his extant letters, Paul told God’s holy people in Rome, “Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep,”10 These words would be utter nonsense were 1 Corinthians 7:29–31 to be anything other than the hyperbolic, eschatologically phrased challenge that it is.
As for Paul himself, it is likely that he heeded his own advice. As a faithful and zealous Jew of the Pharisaic persuasion, he would have heeded God’s command to be fruitful and multiply. His zeal for the Law would not have allowed him to refrain from marrying. That he was once married is implicitly confirmed in 1 Corinthians 7 when Paul compares himself not to the not yet married, the parthenoi, but to those who had once married but no longer were, the agamoi kai chērai, the unmarried and widows.
Paul would not remarry for the end was at hand, the time was short. Another comparison between himself and others that the apostle makes confirms his unmarried status at the time that he wrote to the Corinthians. Speaking of the rights that he was willing to forgo, among which was his right to receive financial support from the Corinthians, Paul asks a pertinent rhetorical question, “Do we not have the right to be accompanied by a believing wife, as do the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?”11
The negatively phrased rhetorical question posed by one who was a master of rhetoric demanded an affirmative response. No one had to speak the answer aloud but all who listened to the reading of Paul’s letter knew that he was affirming his right to be accompanied by a believing woman as his wife. He had the same rights as the other apostles and brothers of the Lord, the same rights as Peter who did not fail to avail himself of the use of his rights.
It has been said that the Pastoral Epistles are key to an understanding of the origins of the discipline of priestly continence from which the Western discipline of clerical celibacy has emerged.12 There are three pertinent texts—namely, those in which a bishop is required to be “married only once” (1 Tim 3:2), a deacon is required to be “married only once” (1 Tim 3:12), and an elder to be named bishop was required to be “married only once” (Titus 1:6).
The Fathers of the Church and the early decretalists considered 1 Timothy and Titus to have been written by the apostle Paul whose name they bear. Contemporary biblical scholars, however, consider the texts to have been written under Paul’s aegis in an attempt to show that the apostle’s teaching was relevant for an age different from the one in which he lived. They suppose a situation different from those that the apostle encountered at Corinth and elsewhere. While their primary purpose may have been to retain the doctrinal purity of Paul’s teaching even as it was being actualized in a new situation, a purpose of almost equal importance was their concern for the organization and good reputation of believing communities in the Greco-Roman world toward the end of the first century CE.
In order that this latter purpose be fulfilled, 1 Timothy and Titus set out the qualities that the leaders of the church, primarily the top-tiered leaders who served as overseers or supervisors (episkopoi), should have. Those who assisted in church leadership, the servers (diakonoi), were expected to have similar qualities. These qualities were set down in lists that resemble the catalogues of virtues and vices created by the philosophic moralists of the day. Such lists were used to encourage people to live a life of virtue and eschew a life of vice. In effect, they served as a standard of what was considered upright and respectable behavior.
It is likely that the Epistle to Titus was written before the First Letter to Timothy. Its author created his own version of the popular list in order to say that any elder to be considered for appointment as an overseer of a community of believers should be a person who was deemed respectable in the social world of Greco-Roman society. Any idea of an imminent Parousia, so important for Paul, was no longer on his horizon. His horizon was less temporal13 than it was social; he was concerned that others look upon the community of believers and find a group of people that they could respect.
They should be able to find as their leader a person who was above reproach. As the author of Titus spells out, the implications of the leader of the community being above reproach, the first thing that he specifies is that an elder who was eligible for an appointment as an episkopos should be married only once (Titus 1:6). In similar fashion, the author of 1 Timothy specifies that the episkopos should be married only once (1 Tim 3:2). The requirement that a server or assistant be married only once (1 Tim 3:12) is buried further down on the list of qualifications that a server should have, but a closer look at the text reveals that the author has divided the list of qualifications into two groups and that he be married only once heads up the second part of the list.
There are two important issues to be considered with regard to the Pastorals’ “married only once”—mias gynaikas anēr in Greek and unius uxoris vir in the Latin Vulgate and subsequent Western discussion. These are, respectively, the obligatory nature of the requirement and the specific meaning of the wording.
As for the obligatory nature of the requirement, all three texts that use the expression speak of the requirement as something that is mandatory. There are no conditions attached. It is no more optional for the leader of the community to be married only once than it is optional for him to be a lover of goodness (Titus 1:8) or an apt teacher (1 Tim 3:2). Any attempt to introduce conditions, as if the text read, “if he is married, he should be ‘married only once,’” is an example of eisegeis, reading into the text something that is not there.
The second issue that warrants consideration is the meaning of the “married only once” phrase, three words in English, three words in the original Greek, and three words in the Western (Latin) interpretive tradition of the Greek. The Greek is somewhat more ambivalent than is the English-language translation, “married only once.” The Greek actually reads “a one-woman man.” Such a rendering of the text points more readily to the problem of interpretation than does “married only once.”
What does it mean to be a “one-woman man” in a society where the Greek gynē, meaning “woman,” can specifically and in context mean “wife”? Does the requirement that a leader of the Church be a “one-woman man” mean that he should have but a single wife during the course of his life even if he had divorced his wife or she him, or his wife had predeceased him? Does the requirement of being a “one-woman man” mean that he should not take a second woman as wife while the first is still living, thus avoiding bigamy? Or does the requirement of being a “one-woman man” mean that he does not have another woman or other women on the side?
From a purely linguistic point of view the three-word expression, mias gynaikas anēr phrase, variously translated as “unius uxoris vir” and as “married only once,” admits of all three interpretations. The interpreter must turn to the context of the expression in order to ascertain what the expression means. The narrow literary context is clear enough. It is a catalogue of virtues.
Broader contexts must therefore be taken into consideration. In an ever-widening circle, these broader contexts are (1) the teaching of the Pastorals on marriage, (2) the legacy of Paul on marriage and sexual immorality, and (3) the social situation in which not only Paul wrote his authentic epistles but also the social situation of those who wrote in his name. When these several factors are taken into consideration the requirement that a leader of the church be married only once means that he be married and that he remain faithful to his wife.
Unfortunately—at least from a contemporary perspective—the author(s) of the Pastorals does not use the specific language of marriage, the root gam-, in setting down the requirement. Had he done so and explicitly stated that a leader of the Church who had lost his wife through death should adopt a countercultural approach and not remarry after the loss of his wife, we would know that he meant to exclude a second marriage. But Paul allows for the possibility of a second marriage after the death of a spouse. And 1 Timothy not only allows but urges the remarriage of a young widow. Accordingly, the wider context of the “married only once” precludes the possibility that it bans a lifestyle that Paul had allowed.
Had the author(s) of the Pastorals used the specific language of marriage, with words derived from the root gam-, we would have known that he was speaking about marriage and not about a Platonic relationship with the woman to whom the community leader was once married.
Absent the use of specific marital language, the “married only once” requirement of Titus 1:6 and 1 Timothy 3:2, 12 means that Church leaders were required to be married and that they be faithful to their respective spouses. The Pastorals codified, as it were, the social requirement of Jesus’ first disciples who heeded the Lord’s command to “be fruitful and multiply.” This allowed them to have their wives at their side as they led the church and proclaimed the Gospel of salvation.
1 Markan priority is the reason why I have generally referenced Mark first when a saying or incident is to be found in more than one gospel.
2 Cf. 1 Cor 9:5; Gal 2:7–14.
3 Cf. 1 Thess 4:15, 17.
4 Cf. 1 Cor 7:2.
5 Cf. 1 Cor 7:17, 20, 24.
6 Cf. 1 Cor 7:26.
7 Cf. 1 Cor 7:25.
8 Cf. 1 Cor 7:8.
9 Cf. 1 Cor 5:10.
10 Cf. Rom 12:15
11 Cf. 1 Cor 9:5.
12 See Heid, Celibacy in the Early Church, 40.
13 The point should not be pushed overly far. Although the idea of an imminent Parousia is not found in the Pastoral Epistles, their author(s) use the language of appearance (epiphaneia) in such a way that the existence of a believing community is situated between two appearances of the Lord Jesus Christ. The texts attest to a hope in a future appearance but give no indication that this future appearance is in the proximate future.