Marriage as we know it in the modern world is actually a fairly recent invention. While it may come as a surprise to many of us, marriage is not what has always defined a “family”. In fact, on the timeline of Human existence, marriage as we know it did not even exist until the invention of—the Church.
A Brief History of Marriage
On the timeline of Human existence, homo sapiens have existed as families of hunter-gatherers for tens of thousands of years. Families consisted of loosely organized groups of as many as 30 people or more, often with several male leaders, and multiple women shared by them, along with their children.
About 12,000 years ago, various cradles of civilization began to emerge as the earliest forms of agriculture and farming were forming all over the world. As the culture of tribalism became less and less efficient for the managing of farms and settlements that grew larger and larger, as Human knowledge and civilization increased, the concept of marriage would slowly develop within the evolving local culture.
Marriage, to use the term very loosely, grew into a way to manage one’s family, and by that I mean one’s property. And when I say “one’s” what I really mean to say is a man’s. The primary purpose of marriage was to bind women to men. Through marriage, a woman became a man’s property.
Marriage would evolve to create a social mechanism that helped to guarantee that a man’s children were his biological heirs. Having your father’s name became very important for social identity.
The ancient world was most decidedly a man’s world; with rare exception, it was highly patriarchal.
The earliest known recorded evidence of what we can call something close to modern “marriage” of one man to one woman dates from about 2350 B.C., in Mesopotamia. But while this is evidence of what we might call monogamy, it was not, to say the least, the norm.
Over the next several hundred years, marriage would evolve into a widespread institution, one that was embraced by the ancient Egyptians, Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans.
But keep in mind, marriage in the ancient world, even well into the height of the Roman Empire, had little to do with love or even with religion. This is not to say that love was not often involved with marriage, but it wasn’t a requirement or even necessary for ancient marriages.
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Marriage In the Bible
When we see “marriage” referenced or mentioned in the Bible, it’s very easy to mix definitions and think that the “marriage” being discussed in whatever passage of the Bible is the same form of marriage we have today.
The various forms of “marriage” we see and read about in the Bible are not even close to what we know marriage as. Also, just because we see marriage mentioned in Torah, the Law, does not mean that GOD specifically ordained or commanded marriage. The Law can mention “beards”, that doesn’t necessarily mean God is commanding you to have one; although, that actually is a law … but let’s not go there right now.
What the Law did do for marriage was give men an ‘out’, so to speak, in a way that appears to want to protect men from ridicule; not so much the woman. Women had little to no rights in marriage at all. And we see this throughout the ancient cultures.
In marriage ceremonies of ancient Greece, a father would hand over his daughter with the words: “I pledge my daughter for the purpose of producing legitimate offspring.” It had nothing to do with religion. Often marriages were arranged in order to unite families for reasons of wealth and/or political position.
Marriage within the ancient Hebrew culture, men were free to take several wives and even give them back if they were unhappy with them. It was highly (gasp!) polyamorous, and not at all monogamous.
Married Greeks and Romans were also quite open and polyamorous with marriages. Men were free to satisfy their sexual desires with concubines and prostitutes—of either sex, male or female. Same-sex marriages were common, not prevalent, but still common. Wives were required to stay home and tend to the household. And if a wife failed to produce children, their husbands could literally just give them back and marry someone else.
God Did Not Create Marriage
What the Church of today attempts to say is that marriage is an institution that God created. This is on it’s face a bald-faced lie.
GOD did not create marriage.
Even within the pages of Torah, the Law of God, not once does God ever say someone must marry; nor does God ever say one must be married before having sex, as the Church is so fond of hammering as one of the most egregious of sins!
A Law condemning sex before marriage is just not there! This is a manufactured law by the Church, a manufactured “sin”, if you will.
Pastors will quote everything from Torah to Hebrews trying to manufacture a law that doesn’t exist, “Oh but it’s implied.”
Hogwash. It doesn’t exist because GOD never created nor had anything to do with the institution of marriage. Period.
The Church Created Its Own Form of Marriage
Marriage within the context of Human history has been an evolving construct and perhaps no institution on the face of the Earth has been more influential in that evolution, for better or for worse, than the Christian Church.
The Church likes to assume that everything it has ever done has been the will of God. If you’re a Protestant (as opposed to a Roman Catholic), you should be in vehement disagreement with this assumption. It was after all the Protestant Reformation who exposed hundreds of the Church’s errors—including its assembly of the Bible!
Protestants are the ones who changed the Bible, dropping numerous books from it, because, according to the Protestant Reformers, the Church erred in adding those books to the Bible.
This correction of the Church as well as the Church’s Bible should also open our minds into realizing that the Church has not always been listening to God—even as Protestants we STILL fail to listen to GOD.
This is a long way of saying that just because the Church says marriage is the will of God, doesn’t mean the Church is telling the truth, or even really listening to God.
What the Church IS really, really good at—is listening to its own self-serving assumptions, its man-made traditions, and little more.
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Paul and Marriage
Even though he was never married, Paul appears to be THE expert on the topic. He’s perhaps the singular driving force for the Church’s views on marriage. There is no doubt that the prolific Paul had an opinion on just about everything, and what he thought marriage should be in first century Rome, was no exception.
Paul gives us a glimpse of what marriage was like, socio-politically, in the first century. Women were treated more like property. Men were the head of the family. Paul attempts to get men to treat their wives more like people instead of just property, which was a good thing.
Paul definitely disliked same-sex marriages, even though as a Hellenized Roman citizen, he well-knew that same-sex relationships were a common norm.
“God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because they were homosexuals, Keith! He destroyed Rome for that same sin too!”
No, that is not why GOD judged and destroyed those cites. GOD destroyed the cities of of Sodom and Gomorrah because of their violence, specifically rape; not because they had same-sex marriages. And GOD did not destroy Rome because of same-sex unions either. Rome literally lasted over 1,000 years. Political corruption, high taxes, and bad fiscal management is what destroyed Rome. It was not about sex.
Getting back to Paul … At the end of the day, we need to keep in mind that Paul is not God. Paul is indeed a product of his very turbulent Greco-Roman environment. Just because you read something Paul says in the Bible, does NOT mean that Paul’s opinion is that of GOD’s.
The early Church put Paul’s writings into its Bible because this particular band or faction of Christians were a product of Paul’s version of Christianity. What many modern Christians do not know is that there were many factions, many denominations if you will, of Christian thought coming out of the first century. Paul’s brand of Christian thought was but ONE of MANY. And Paul’s version of Christianity was not the largest faction. The so-called “Jewish Christians” were.
Just because Paul’s brand or version of Christianity won the day by getting selected by Constantine to become the official religion of Rome, does NOT mean that this was GOD’s doing.
“Woe to the man who believes the size of his church is indicative of God’s blessing.” —Unknown
Although your personally chosen pet church (denomination) has likely taught you that “Paul was the greatest apostle who ever lived!”, keep in mind that your church is also a product of the Bible that the Roman Catholics assembled; a Bible which has Paul as basically it’s central teacher.
Paul literally makes up half the New Testament; he even overrides the words of Jesus and the Prophets; even the words of GOD do not stand against the all-powerful Paul. He’s literally that powerful and influential within the Church.
But Paul isn’t really that Jewish. For starters, Paul’s scholarship was terrible. Despite being taught Hebrew by the esteemed Gamaliel, Paul misquotes Torah on numerous occasions. Paul was also at deep odds with the hand-picked Apostles of Jesus, even getting into public arguments with Peter and James. Paul, by his own admission, was also punished by GOD; a punishment GOD refused to remove.
Because of all of these things and more, I am very much a proponent of taking Paul’s words with a grain of salt and not as the will or words of GOD.
Regarding marriage, Paul attempts to cement the very patriarchal period culture he found himself within by telling wives to submit to their husbands and then brings in (his own version of) the Church to support is patriarchal views.
Was it really GOD’s will for women to be kept as slaves? No, it wasn’t. Paul also tells slaves to obey their masters. Was it really GOD’s will that people keep others as slaves? No, it wasn’t.
But most of modern Human culture has advanced beyond what Paul’s culture produced. Most of us in the modern era are no longer patriarchal. Women are true equals with men in the modern era. Took us long enough … but other religions still have a long way to go.
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The Church Takes Over Marriage
With the power of Constantine’s State behind them, the once tiny faction of Christianity ruled by Paul, would become the mighty Roman Catholic Church and all but take over the institution of marriage. It would be an event that would change not just the face of marriage, but what the world itself would become.
It is debatable whether or not the Church’s takeover of marriage was ultimately beneficial. Knowing that the Church isn’t always listening to GOD, my first thought for the Church taking over marriage is simply to follow the money.
Even within Church-sanctioned marriages, women were still the property of their husbands. The Church forbidding divorce is something counter to what we see in the Law, which is allowing for divorce.
While nowhere within the Law of God do we see GOD proscribing marriage, as I noted earlier, there is a mechanism for dissolving them—and it didn’t have anything to do with GOD. Rather, it allowed for how men could get out of a marriage amicably without her family hunting him down to kill him. Again, follow the money.
After Constantine’s takeover of Christianity, the church would declare that a priest needed to bless one’s marriage in order for it to become legally recognized both by the State and by God. Seriously? (Sorry, you might note my tone growing somewhat sarcastic from this point on.)
You can also bet there was a nice “gift” that needed to be paid to the priest for officiating the event and the rental of the church as well. Again, follow the money.
By the eighth century, marriage had become widely accepted in the Church as a “sacrament”, that is a ceremony to bestow God’s grace. In other words, at least according to the Catholic Church, your marriage wasn’t valid before God unless the Church had its hand in it, or rather your pocket.
During the ecumenical Council of Trent, circa 1563, at the same time the Catholic Church was reaffirming its Bible that Protestants had just dropped a bunch of books out of, the sacrament of marriage was written into the Church as canon law.
The Church now dictated that marriage was exclusive to itself, meaning: marriage was something God mandated; men needed to show some respect to their wives (actually something good we got from Paul); marriage was only to be between a man and a woman (again, Paul didn’t like same-sex unions even though they were ubiquitous throughout Greece and Rome at the time).
But the Church still held that men were the head of the household, with their wives more or less becoming slaves to their wishes.
The Dark Side of Church Marriage
Unfortunately, there was also a darker side to the Church’s doctrine that declared “the twain shall be one flesh,” that is, giving a husband and wife exclusive access to each other’s body. It created something that literally took centuries to correct—a man could rape his wife without consequence. And there was no escape for a woman saddled with an abusive husband.
I was born in the 1960’s. Even within this era, a woman divorcing her abusive husband was looked down upon, like you had a scarlet “D” sewn onto your chest. My drunk reprobate father raped and beat the hell out of my mother, putting her in the hospital several times; but because of the Church and the culture it had wrought, my mother had no legal recourse. A police officer even told my bruised and bleeding mother in the hospital, “Maybe next time you’ll learn to keep your damn mouth shut.”
This is the kind of culture we had back then. And it was likely much worse in previous decades and centuries.
Sure, we look at that now as, I dare say “fucked up”, but this is the cultural environment the Church created. It would not be until the 1970’s and ‘80’s that the State would finally step in and wrestle control of marriage away from the Church and bring some real sanity to people in union.
Even today, many Christian denominations and independent churches teach that as a wife, your husband is lord over you. This is also a lie. I even wrote about this … note the link below.
Marriage and Our Modern Era
Now within the Information Age, the Church is struggling, not just to maintain membership, but to stay relevant in a modern world that is rejecting it’s doctrines, rejecting it’s self-serving dogmas, and rejecting its godless man-made traditions that it is still trying to peddle as the “Word of God”.
Through archeology (like the Dead Sea Scrolls, et. al.) and paleography (the study of ancient documents, like the Bible and other extant documents) modern scholars now know more about the Bible, and Jesus, and the Apostles than even Luther, Calvin, and the other Reformers knew or perhaps even suspected.
With instant searches of ancient records, not to mention searching the whole Bible in both Hebrew, Greek and our native translations, long forgotten narratives are emerging from history and from within the pages of the Bible we are only now rediscovering.
These tools are now open and available to everyone—much to the Church’s chagrin. The knowledge of the ancients is now on wholesale display for all of us to see—and it’s an embarrassment to the Church, a genie of truth that the Church is now desperately trying to put back into the bottle to keep such knowledge out of your view.
We are learning that the whole doctrine of Sola Scriptura (basically that the Bible is inerrant, infallible, and wholly inspired) is not at all factual and no longer believable. Sola Scriptura is in fact a rather recent belief manufactured by the Reformers who came after Luther. Going back even further, we see that the ancient Hebrew scribes under King Hezekiah literally rewrote the Law of God with, as the prophet Jeremiah states, “their lying pens”.
What this means to us in the modern era is that a kind of Second Reformation is afoot; the Church’s unholy stranglehold on the hearts and minds of people in general, and marriage in particular, is over.
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GOD did not say that they hate same-sex unions. GOD did not write that men were the head of anything. GOD did not say that marriage was only between one man and one woman. The Hebrews, in fact, had many husbands and many wives. It was the lying Church who demanded monogamy, it was not GOD.
Conclusion
While we can certainly debate the pros and cons of non-monogamous, same-sex, or even open marriages as what the ancients had, what we can no longer do in all honesty is demand that GOD is somehow on whatever side we decide to take.
GOD is silent on these issues, even if the ancient lying priests weren’t.
In the end, the ONLY Law of GOD that applies to us is what Jesus quotes:
“Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself.”
Meaning, treat each other as you would want to be treated. All the Law and teachings of the Prophets are hung from, extend from, this one Law, the Greatest of the Commandments.
