The Early Christianization of Marriage: Sex, Procreation, and Ritual

Abstract

This dissertation tells the story of how the ritualization of Christian marriage antedated the appearance of episcopal blessings at Christian wedding ceremonies in the fourth century CE. Various forms of the Christianization of marriage date from the very earliest centuries of Christianity. Many of these efforts were centered on ritualizing the sexual procreative relationship of married Christian couples. Christians used what they viewed as the superior ritual efficacy of their marriages to valorize Christianized marriage as extraordinary action that benefitted both the couple and the children they bore. Christians considered this to set their marriage apart from the marriages of traditional polytheists and Jews. Each chapter reveals a different way that Christians characterized Christian marriage in ritualized terms. Chapter one discusses the Christian position that desire should be controlled in both body and mind within marriage and reveals some of the ritualized means Christians touted for the control of desire, including acts of contemplation. This chapter also reveals that Christians viewed the control of desire within marriage as more than a moral imperative; they also extolled Christian marriage itself as a type of apotropaic therapy that keeps both desire and demons away. The second chapter provides a different and more gendered story of desire. Despite the plentiful anti-desire rhetoric highlighted in chapter one, Christians did not view all desire as destructive. Like traditional polytheists and Jews, Christians embraced the belief that a woman’s gaze shortly before or during coitus could impact the characteristics and abilities of the child that she conceives in that moment. The third chapter elucidates the Christian belief, often based on 1 Cor. 7:14, that Christianized marriage acts as a source of sanctification for both a married couple and any children they bear. This marital sanctification was rooted in, and at times even competed against, other forms of Christian ritual life, especially that of baptism. The fourth chapter highlights the belief among early Christians that their marriage possessed a theurgic efficacy due to humans’ status as the image of God. And it demonstrates how they characterized this theurgic efficacy in ritualizing terms that cast Christians’ image-producing procreation as efficaciously superior to the devotional image-making undertaken by traditional polytheists. The final chapter provides a more narrowed focus by exploring the heavily ritualized nuptial language of the Gospel of Philip from the fourth century CE Nag Hammadi collection. By situating the gospel’s nuptial language in broader discourse on marriage in late antiquity, the chapter reveals the role of materiality in the gospel as it pertains to the Christianization of marriage within the text. In so doing so, this chapter not only affirms the importance of the Gospel of Philip in the study of early Christian marriage, but also contributes to Nag Hammadi studies by establishing how the study of the ritualization of Christian marriage at large casts important new light on the meaning and purpose of the Gospel of Philip’s nuptial imagery, including providing new insights on its use of the specialized Greek nuptial terms numfôn, pastos, and koitôn.