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Sex, Gender and Christianity: A 3,000 Year History, with Diarmaid MacCulloch and Mary Beard (Part One)
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Mia Sorrenti
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia sorrenti. More than 3,000 years of Christian history teach us about today's debates on sex, sexuality, gender and tradition. Today's episode is part one of our recent live event with Devin McCulloch, emeritus professor of the history of the Church at Oxford University. McCulloch joined renowned classicist and broadcaster Mary Beard at Union Chapel to discuss Christianity, sex and gender across history. In the 21st century, historically Christian societies have witnessed a profound shift in attitudes to sex and gender, bringing liberation for some and anxiety for others. Drawing on 3,000 years of religious history, McCulloch explores how Jewish and Christian traditions have shaped debates around women, sexuality, family and identity. Let's join our host, Mary Beard, live at Union Chapel.
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Mary Beard
Thank you very much for coming this evening. I'd never been in this amazing chapel before. Absolutely extraordinary. So whatever Dermot says, I will have had a great time because I've got to see this. No pressure, then. No pressure whatsoever. Right. Dermot, I'm sure, is well known to everybody here. He is Emeritus professor of the History of the Church at the University of Oxford. He's a fellow of St. Across College and of Campion hall. And he's written an awesome amount. He's written a real lot. Probably best known for his history of Christianity the first 3,000 years. Right. And I'm really glad that you laughed at that because most people don't see the joke.
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Mia Sorrenti
Right.
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Mary Beard
3,000 years.
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White Claw Surge Announcer
Right.
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Mary Beard
But also for his TV documentaries. And he's won prizes for his academic
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Dermot McCulloch
work,
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Mary Beard
the mega Condell Prize for that big history of Christianity and the Wolfson Prize for an earlier history of the reformation. And since 2012 he's been Sir Dimart McCulloch, Knight of the Realm. Well deserved. Today we're going to be discussing his latest book, Lower Than the A History of Sex and Christianity, which at the end of the last year came out in paperback. It had been published in 2024 in hardback. And I should tell you that, and I will remind you of this again, there are plenty of these to buy if you haven't already bought. Andermott will be available afterwards to sign. It's a long story of Christians encountering and arguing about sex, gender at the family in all its complexity, contradiction, difficulties and annoyances. Sometimes what we're going to do is we're going to talk together for just under an hour until about 8 o', clock, but then we will be opening the floor for discussion and I'll give you another kind of warning of that so that you can have questions ready. Now, I know that many people in the room will have read this book already, but some won't yet have read the book. Can you just sketch a little bit its kind of parameters for us? It's chronological, its geographical parameters. Where are we?
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Dermot McCulloch
It does what it says on the tin in that it is about sex and it is about Christianity. And rather like the big fat book I wrote on Christianity, it covers 3,000 years. So it's got Greeks and Romans and Jews before you get to Jesus Christ. And once you got to Jesus Christ, we're in the story of the Christian church 2,000 years. And I try to take you everywhere. So we start with that small set of Greek speaking Jews who are the first Christians who are described in the New Testament. And then we go out into the Latin speaking world, the world of power. We go east out of the Roman Empire into what is now Iran, tropical name, and to India, to China. That's all part of the story of Christians thinking about sex. And we go on to the present day, well, 2024 to be precise. And the story has no end. It's really important to realize that we're in the middle of the story because Christianity is a very young religion, it has only been around for 2,000 years. And you think of the thousands of years which human beings have experienced each other and experience sex. This is a small part of that history and that's what I'm trying to unpack. It's not an easy task, but I try to give you, the materials you need to talk sensibly about sex.
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Mary Beard
Thank you. That's a great advert, isn't it? For me, this is going to sound a bit boring after what you've just said. What really struck me, and it comes partly in the earlier big history of Christianity, and I think the idea that you can't just parachute down to the lifetime of Jesus and think that you can explain all the kind of things they were worrying about and talking about without putting it in its historical context. Christianity did not spring from nowhere. And there are, there are. I mean, you might help me out here because you're much better at it than me. There are strands in what Christians say about sex, in its many ramifications, that kind of. You can see her engaging with Hellenistic Hellenic tradition or with Judaic tradition.
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Dermot McCulloch
Yeah, you've got those two backgrounds. And of course, behind what Christians call the New Testament is what they call the Old Testament, which is another name for the Hebrew scripture, the Bible of the Jewish people and their tradition. And so all the time in the New Testament, the first Christians are engaging in conversation with that past. But as you said, there is another past enveloping them, and that is the world of Greek culture. The Jews are very conscious that they're in this larger world which goes back in time as much as their culture does. And Christians are working on both those cultures. And the problem about that, as you will realize, is that this involves two entirely different sorts of God. You got the God of the Hebrews, who is a very interventionist God. He gets angry, he punishes his people, he loves his people. And the Hebrew Scripture is the story of that relationship within a people. But then you get to the Greeks, who have gods. Yes, but in a philosopher like Plato, they have come to the conclusion there is God. And that God is so different from the Hebrew God. He doesn't walk around gardens arguing with people. This God is perfection. And the thing about perfection is that you can't change. How can perfection change? It can't get happy or sad. It's just perfection. And so Christianity is stuck with these two entirely opposite views of God. And it spent five centuries arguing about how Jesus Christ, a human being, could also be God. But then which God is the Jewish God or the Greek God? Now, this may sound irrelevant to sex, but I think we'll find it isn't.
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Mary Beard
The other thing that you do, I think it's wonderful, speaking as a classicist, to find that you're actually wanting to put early Christianity back in a Greco Roman and Judaic tradition. Now, that sounds totally obvious when you say it, but for centuries it's not been done. When I was an undergraduate, we couldn't. In the classics faculty in Cambridge, we couldn't study the Christians because they belonged in theology. This kind of book would have been impossible to think about 50, 60 years ago.
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Dermot McCulloch
It is one of the elements in the story that if we're dealing with the Bible and a lot of Christians say, in my opinion, wrongly, you just have to look at the Bible and the Bible will tell you what the story is. Well, there are layers, as is obvious in the New Testament. The obvious, blindingly obvious layer is that it is written in a peculiar sort of marketplace form of Greek, which Jesus would have known something about, because he'd have to bargain in the marketplace with people who spoke Greek, but it's not his language. He would have spoke Aramaic. And that's a layer between Jesus and the text we read about Jesus. It is written in another language straight away.
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Mary Beard
And that adds to the kind of complex diversity of what we're meaning when we talk about Christian views of sex, the family, marriage or whatever. And the other thing that you do, which is hugely liberating, I think, is you just remind us again, totally simple point, that Christians were very different one from another and they didn't all think the same.
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Mary Beard
You know, and some of them thought things that we would now never imagine, we would put in a kind of the Christian box.
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Mia Sorrenti
Yep.
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Dermot McCulloch
The sheer weirdness of Christians over the centuries really is part of the story. And it is not to dismiss Christianity, it is to appreciate the absolute riches of this story as it goes from century to century. And you wouldn't expect it to come up with the same answer about the great questions of human life, would you? Spoiler alert about the book. I have heard so many bishops and the like say the Christian view of sex is that. Well, let me tell you, there is no such thing as a Christian view of sex. The Christian view of sex. There are multiple Christian views. Views of sex. They change by century, they change by continent. And you need to know about this complexity before you can say anything sensible about sex. I wish Christian leaders would just do a bit more reading.
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Shut up.
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Mia Sorrenti
Sorry?
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Dermot McCulloch
Shut up.
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Mary Beard
Shut up. Dermot didn't say that Christianity is ought
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Dermot McCulloch
to shut up because they are reading about Christianity and then thinking about it. When they've done that, they can open their mouths and say something.
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Mary Beard
Yes, well, they've done a bit of work. I think you might have asked what was going to be my next question, which was if now looking back at this book, I mean, you must have finished it, what, three years ago. I wondered what you thought its big takeaway point was, and I suspect it might be connected with the fact that there is no such thing as the Christian view of sex.
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Dermot McCulloch
There is no such thing as a Christian view of sex. That is the takeaway. There are so many other takeaways which no doubt we'll explore, but that's the basic one. And once you've got that as the floor, you can start exploring the story. I have to say that the book is sort of a history of Christianity again, because you need to have that stuff. As you look at what they said about sex, the family, marriage, the lot. The book is very much about marriage, about which Christians of the present day argue a great deal, but they simply don't know the complexities of what they're arguing about.
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Mary Beard
I mean, I kind of thought when I was thinking about what, what was my takeaway when I'd read it, I thought that I'd add to that. I don't know if you think this is right, that the point about sex and all the other things we put into that category. I think that it has always been a fault line, a place of disagreement, not a difficulty, but a kind of a controversy in Christianity from as far back as we can see it. But not just in Christianity. I mean, is there a religion in the world that we know that thinks that it's kind of got sex sorted?
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Dermot McCulloch
No, I don't suppose there is, but there are some religions which are more positive about sex than Christianity. I'm going to say Islam is much more positive about sex. Of course it's got its parameters, its words, rules. But there are so many ways in which Christianity is negative about sexual activity, even for a very long time within marriage. So that needs to be said. Buddhism, Hinduism. Hinduism, of course, is perhaps the most sex positive of the big religions. Again, rules, boundaries, things which one might regard as unfortunate there. But there's a general positivity about the physical side of human relations, which Christianity's not ever been very good at, to put it mildly.
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Mary Beard
Right, I think we're going to come to some of how it's not being good at it in a minute.
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Mary Beard
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Dermot McCulloch
megas tiene las velocidades rapidas y conf.
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Mary Beard
I just wanted to kind of close this opening really with thinking about now, because we've already had a few glimpses about your own sense that you're writing this within a world in which these debates are still happening. What do you think this kind of history puts into? What does it contribute to modern debates? Are there particular misapprehensions that you think that you've stood up to and going along with that? I suppose. What has the reaction to this book been from those leaders of the church who want to say the Christian view of sex is how do you feel it's gone down? What? Well, what's it done? What's this book done?
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Dermot McCulloch
What's it done? I've been very impressed by the number of people who've come along to talk about it, this audience here, but we opened With a launch of the hardback in St. Paul's Cathedral in London and we had a thousand people there, which is splendid. Most of them bought it, which is even better. But I think the trouble about history is that doing it properly and receiving it properly takes quite a bit of time lag. And I would throw in marriage as the big thing which I would like people to talk more intelligently about. Now those of you here who are Christians will know that the church at the moment argues about marriage an enormous amount, particularly it argues about weddings in church for people of the same sex. Many churches in the Western world now have welcomed that. I think of the Church of Scotland, I think of the Episcopal Church of Scotland from which I come. The church in Wales, the Methodists, the Unitarians, they all accept marriage in church, whatever that means for them. Quakers, I could go on mentioning them. And there are churches which don't have done that. And the Church of England is in a total mess about this. It is completely wrecked its decision making process in arguing about this. It's really painful to watch. And yet in all this I did not hear in the Church of England's debate the simple howling fact about marriage and church weddings. And that is that in the early church, the church of the fifth centuries or so, the first five centuries, no one went to church to get married, no one at all. There was no such thing as a church wedding. And in The Western Church, that is a Catholic Church, it was not until the 12th century before people habitually went to church to get married. If you were a king, you probably would go to church to get married, but you did lots of stuff in church. But ordinary people, the vast bulk of the population, did not get married church. And there's a good reason for that, that in the early church from the second century onwards, marriage is a second best. The church doesn't really concern itself with it. There is remarkably little discussion of marriage in the early church. When they're discussing hammer and tongs, the nature of Christ, miaphysitis and diaphragm go on, da da da da. But there isn't that level of discussion about marriage because it's not really the church's business. Of course Christians get married but they don't do it in church. You know how they do it?
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Mary Beard
Well, it's like the Greco Roman world. It's a bit like your kings, if you are very elite, very top notch, there would be a party and there might be be some things that we now write down as marriage rituals and there might somewhere be some kind of priest on Sherlock, but he isn't conducting the service. And for all the time of those early, early Christian centuries in the Roman world, you got married by just saying you were married.
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Dermot McCulloch
Yeah. And having a party, maybe.
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Mary Beard
Having a party, maybe you couldn't have. Order party. You said, we are now married.
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Dermot McCulloch
Right. Okay.
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Mary Beard
And same with divorce. We are now divorced, darling.
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Dermot McCulloch
Yeah, exactly. That's another big. Another big point. We can talk about divorce in a moment. I just want to emphasize that the big wedding in the New Testament, in the Gospel of John, at which Jesus was attending was the wedding at Cana. And I've heard so many pious sermons at marriages about the wedding at Canaan. What was the marriage at Cana? No confetti, no church bells ringing. It was a big party. And the whole point of mentioning it is that it's Jesus first miracle in John's gospel in which he turns water into wine.
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Mary Beard
So he was popular. They haven't got enough.
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Dermot McCulloch
They haven't got enough wine. So that is. That's what an early Christian wedding was. It wasn't even a Christian wedding. It was a Jewish wedding. But that's the standard which our Lord himself, our blessed Lord himself set about weddings. You have a good party at them. That's what they're about.
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Mary Beard
And so if. I mean, your message would be, at least in part, that if we thought about the historical roots of marriage, we'd be slightly less anxious about it because it's not. This is not a originally moment of Christianity.
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Dermot McCulloch
No, I got onto Jesus. Shall I say a bit more about that?
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Mary Beard
Well, I was going to put you onto Jesus, actually. I thought that it would be. Now we've kind of. We've had our little tour de orisan. I thought maybe it would help because this was something that when I read your book, I thought, oh, right, there's something interesting here that it was. It would be nice to know it's not going to take him all evening. Don't worry. What did Jesus say about all this? According to the reports we have.
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Dermot McCulloch
Yes. What would Jesus do? What would Jesus say? Well, even with all the biblical criticism we've done, we can say pretty definitely what Jesus said about sex. Two big things about marriage. First, really important, no divorce. No divorce at all. And we know Jesus said that because it embarrassed early Christians who, being Jews, were used to easy divorce. Your divorce is very easy. And so actually, one of the gospel writers modified what Jesus said. Jesus said, no divorce. And Matthew's gospel says no divorce. Jesus said, oh, except, of course, if a wife's Been committing adultery. Oh, yes, everyone knows that. And then the Apostle Paul, whose writings are actually the earliest writings in the New Testament. Paul disagrees with Jesus about this. He hardly ever mentions what Jesus taught, but on this occasion he says, well, our Lord said no divorce. But I don't agree with that. I say, in the following circumstances, you can have divorce. So this is clearly very difficult for early Christians. And subsequent Christians have disagreed entirely over the centuries about this. So Western Christians, Catholics follow Jesus on no divorce at all. Absolutely no divorce. But the Orthodox in the east, they said, no, we don't actually agree with that. We think you can have three goes at marriage. And when they did come round to have weddings in church, you could have a wedding for each one. Each ceremony should be slightly more gloomy than the previous one. But you see, Christians have always disagreed about divorce. The other big thing now, conservative Christians will like to hear this. Jesus said marriage should be between one man and one woman for life. Yeah. Sounds the sort of thing you might get in the Midwest of the United States, this sort of ceremony. But you need to realize that both the things I've told you about what Jesus said were countercultural because he was a Jew in a world where Jews had easy divorce and also allowed polygamy, or to be more precise, polygyny. In other words, one man and more than one woman. This is perfectly normal in Judaism and remains so in parts of the Jewish world up to the 20th century. So Jesus is absolutely denying the cultural roots from which he comes on this.
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Mary Beard
Yeah. And if you think of the Roman Empire of which is also part Rome, was not that keen on polygamy.
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Dermot McCulloch
No, it was absolutely against it.
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Mary Beard
Yes, it was. Not that keen was a euphemism.
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Dermot McCulloch
Right.
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Mary Beard
Not that keen on polygamy.
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Dermot McCulloch
They were a monogamous society.
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Mary Beard
Yes, they were, but they certainly. Well, I just hinted a bit ago, divorce was, you know, it was an easy contractual end to a marriage. Certainly for the man, it was harder for a woman. But man just had to say, I divorce you, and that's it. Fine. And so the idea of no divorce is. I mean, it looks to us just a bit conservative. He looks, as you say, it looks conservative. And this was a radical. Radical prohibition.
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Dermot McCulloch
Yeah. And it presumably must be because Jesus sees the world scrolling up and coming to an end very quickly. So you don't get out of relationships that you've entered as part of the business, the adventure of becoming a follower of Jesus.
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Mary Beard
Do you think you could just clarify what Jesus might or might not have said about homosexuality? I can, because I think that's another thing where we perhaps need to be straightened out.
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Dermot McCulloch
I think we do. I think we do. So what did Jesus say about homosexuality? Nothing, absolutely nothing. He did make some interesting remarks about eunuchs, actually, which he, in not a disapproving way. And the rather mysterious remarks actually he tries to get three different categories of eunuch and it's only in one gospel. So I think the other gospel writers found this a bit difficult. They dropped it. But it is quite clear he said nothing whatsoever about a subject which seems to obsess Christians in the 21st century. Isn't that odd? So what did Jesus say? So he says these very conspicuous things about marriage which Christians have taken in respect a bit in monogamy. Christians have gone for monogamy, but as we've observed, both the Greeks and the Romans are monogamous people. I do not think that Christianity would have had much purchase in their society if they had stuck to polygamy as the Jews did. So in that case, Christians listened to Jesus because it was convenient to do so for the mission which they were launching into the wider non Jewish world.
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Mary Beard
So where and when do we start to see the beginning, for example, of a sense of the renunciation of the flesh, of celibacy, of virginity as a virtue? Because Jesus, Jesus isn't talking about that either, is he?
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Dermot McCulloch
No, there is. If you think of what happens next, monasticism, monks and nuns, where do you get the justification for them in the Bible? You don't. The Jews did not approve of celibacy. They are very much a marriage centered, family centered religion. And it is not there in the New Testament either. You can tell this in the medieval period when monks and nuns were searching around the Bible for justification of their lifestyle, they couldn't find it. And the only actual thing which sounds a bit like monasticism is the sharing of goods which is recorded in the book of the Acts of the Apostles. And the point of that story is that it failed. This sharing of goods was a disaster and in fact God had to intervene and kill people who weren't sharing their goods. And yet it is not mentioned again in the Bible. So it's post biblical, this celibacy thing. You wonder where it's come from.
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Mary Beard
Where's it come from?
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Dermot McCulloch
Where do you see it first? Well, you see it in Syria and you see it in Syria in the course of the second century, in other words, after the Bible had been written. And there you do get monks and nuns and therefore you have to think, where have they got it? From? Well, the Syrians were the great traders of the eastern Mediterranean, and they're still a wonderfully commercial people by instinct. And their trade took them not just within the Mediterranean basin, but eastwards out of the Roman Empire over the frontier into what is now Iran, then to India, even to China. The Syrian traders getting silk, taking Roman silver there and there they found monasteries, they found Buddhist monasteries, Hindu monasteries, and clearly one or two Christian Syrian traders thought, this is rather good idea, let's export this back home. Let's take the monastic life back into our religion. And so it was. So this is a second century development in Syria. Not as often as said in Egypt. Egypt is later, it's Syria. And this is where it all comes from. This enormously successful institution of the Christian world looks as if it comes from Buddhism and Hinduism.
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Mia Sorrenti
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by me, Mia Sorrenti and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad free episodes and full length recordings, you can become a member@intelligencesquared.com membership and if you'd like to join us at future events, you can find our full events program over@intelligencesquared.com attend. You've been listening to Intelligence Square Squared. Thanks for joining us.