Fascinating: Christian Right Bigots Are Hiding the Truth -- Early Christians Condoned Gay Marriage

[kpete]

Christian Right Bigots Are Hiding the Truth -- Early Christians Condoned Gay Marriage
Many of the world's religions -- including Christianity -- supported same-sex unions, a reality obscured by modern-day shrill, conservative commentary.
August 22, 2010 |


Through much of history, especially prior to the Fourteenth Century, many Christians did not share the view that marriage was a reward for being heterosexual, nor that a same-sex union was objectionable.

An icon from St. Catherine’s monastery on Mount Sinai illustrates this point. It shows two robed Christian saints getting married. Their pronubus (official witness, or “best man”) is none other than Jesus Christ.

It is a standard Roman portrayal of a wedding. The difference: the two saints are both male, Fourth Century Christian martyrs, Saint Serge and Saint Bacchus, close friends in the Roman army who were purportedly singled out for their secret adherence to Christianity before being tortured and killed.

Their unity, considered romantic by some historians and depicted through the image of marriage at St. Catherine’s monastery, was commemorated in many subsequent liturgies. The late Yale historian John Boswell found evidence for other Christian same-sex marriage ceremonies continuing even into the Eighteenth Century.

more:
http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/147925/christian_right_bigots_are_hiding_the_truth_--_early_christians_condoned_gay_marriage/

[theoldman]

1. The early Christian church blossomed in Greece.

Many Greeks were openly homosexual. It would have been difficult to spread the gospel if homosexuals were portrayed as evil.

[bobbieinok]

2. there was a noted scholar who wrote 1 or more books

about this.

[QC]

4. John Boswell. n/t

[AnArmyVeteran]

3. Wasn't Paul gay? I read that he was.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

6. No, he was dead.

[MisterP]

5. I always laugh when people say "year X had to be more liberal/less intolerant/

less religious than year Y because X is > Y"--as though we had some classical liberal Spirit guiding humanity through its eternal Ascent. local factors, not date, influence and determine culture and prejudices. Whenever someone says to "evolve" or "progress," or denounces "medieval" or "atavistic" policies (as though war wasn't highly organized, economically complex, and relies on the latest human and material sciences), it just means they haven't "evolved" beyond 19th-century stuff like August Comte and imperialist uniliniear "social evolution"