• @FourPacketsOfPeanuts
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    3 hours ago

    but look at his appeal to widows and the unmarried in Corinthians

    you are missing that barely a verse earlier he attributes people’s different ability in this regard to the grace of God…

    “I wish that all men were as I am [single and celebate]. But each man has his own gift from God; one has this gift, another has that.” - 1 Cor 7:7

    he recognises people are given different abilities by God. this is not “failure”. Yes, if God has decided that you aren’t for the single celebate life it is better to get married than burn with desire. As Paul makes clear “But if you do marry, you have not sinned” (1 Cor 7:28)

    I understand your hypothesis, but Paul neither says what you want him to say (that sex itself is shameful), not does it stand up as an explaination when it comes to other things Paul says…

    to follow on from your verse above…

    “If a brother has an unbelieving wife and she is willing to live with him, he must not divorce her. 13And if a woman has an unbelieving husband and he is willing to live with her, she must not divorce him. 14For the unbelieving husband is sanctified through his believing wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified through her believing husband. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but now they are holy.” - 1 Cor 7:12

    This is a far cry from the “original sin” and polluting effect of sex espoused by the later catholic church. it’s the exact opposite. a christian women might be having sex with a heathen husband. but far from this polluting her in any way, it does the opposite - she sanctifies (makes holy) her unbelieving husband! and similiarly, children of such a marriage are not polluted by this act of sex with a non-christian. rather “they are made holy” (v14).

    these are not the words of a man who thinks sex is a dirty and pernicious problem.

    later on this same passage, Paul makes it clear that his preference for people to not be married is due to the persecution the church is experiencing:

    "26Because of the present crisis, I think it is good for a man to remain as he is. 27Are you committed to a wife? Do not seek to be released. Are you free of commitment? Do not look for a wife. 28But if you do marry, you have not sinned. And if a virgin marries, she has not sinned. But those who marry will face troubles in this life, and I want to spare you this. " - 1 Cor 7:26-28

    Paul is not acting like someone who finds sex itself shameful. He is acting like someone who has seen the additional suffering caused by persecution to married people (and by natural consequence, people with children). He is echoing Jesus’ words on the matter: “How dreadful it will be in those days [the end times] for pregnant women and nursing mothers!” (Matthew 24:19) In this time (the late 50s AD), Nero has taken over from Claudius and had begun his severe persecution of Christians (Tertullian quoted by Eusebius). This was on top of a famine seen during the time of Claudius (Acts 11:27-29), which you can read in Joesphus caused some families to be in such a desperate state that they resorted to canabalism of children.

    This, together with the expectation that Christ would return soon (“Brothers, time is short… this world in its present form is passing away” - 1 Cor 7:29-31), meant that being single and free to spread the gospel was a priority.

    But I’ll say again - Paul never calls sex in a monogamous marriage “shameful”. In fact he goes to the extraordinary lengths of saying a wife has the right(!) to demand sex from her husband (1 Cor 7:4b).

    Any hypothesis of Paul’s internal thoughts has to accomodate this behaviour and being a “sex repulsed asexual” does not cut it. He was a self confessed “zealous Jew” (Gal 1:14) when it came to Torah defined sin (male homosexual acts, orgies, cultic practices, adultery), but as for lawful marriage, he acknowledges it is what some are called to by God and within which women ought to have conjugal rights.