by Jack Miles
From the very earliest moments, Christian theology praised God for subjecting himself to ordinary human birth. If he had gone on from there to consummate an ordinary human marriage, would Christian theology have withheld its praise? Surely it would not have been difficult for such an action to be accommodated in, for example, the early Christian hymn celebrating
Christ Jesus,
who, being in the form of God,
did not count equality with God
a thing to be clung to,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born as men are born.
And being in every way like a man,
he humbled himself further and was obedient unto death,
even death on a cross.
(Phil. 2:5–8)
If God’s surrender of his godlikeness and his descent into the welter of human generation could be celebrated at one point, why not at all points? Would the experience of sex be any less proper to the condition of being “in every way like a man” than the experience of birth?
That such a step was logically possible raises the question of whether and why it was psychologically impossible. Historically, it might be noted, the Gospels were written at a time when celibacy was thought the proper condition for any philosopher. Sexual arousal was to be eschewed as a disturbance of that ataraxia, or inner serenity, which was the pinnacle of wisdom. Historically, then, the Gospel writers, writing in Greek for Greek-speakers, may have portrayed Jesus as celibate simply because this is how sages in Hellenistic culture were conventionally portrayed.
As a matter of literary characterization, however, what the Old Testament shows God thinking about sexual arousal matters more than what Hellenistic culture thought about it. Indirectly, God characterized himself when, for example, in a passage quoted earlier, the Lord said that he was sending Babylon to rape Jerusalem because of her infidelity to him. Yes, the marriage was metaphorical, and so the rape is metaphorical as well, just a lurid evocation of military defeat. Moreover, because the Lord’s relationship with Israel is essentially a relationship with the men of the nation, Israel’s infidelity to him is essentially a male sin. When the Lord cries out, “Ugh! Your adulteries, your squeals of pleasure, / Your vile prostitution!” (Jer. 13:27), he means, in the first instance, to demean the men of the nation by comparing them to a sexually aroused woman. All the same, the comparison would not be demeaning if such arousal were not thought repugnant in itself.
Speaking through Ezekiel, the Lord made the same demeaning comparison even more explicitly:
At the entry to every lane you made yourself cubicles, defiling your beauty and spreading your legs to all and sundry in countless acts of prostitution. You have fornicated even with your neighbors, the Egyptians with their huge erections, provoking my anger with further acts of harlotry.… So then, whore, hear the word of the Lord.… For all this, I will assemble all the lovers whom you pleasured, whether you loved them or not. Yes, I shall assemble them around you and strip you bare in front of them, and let them ogle your bare body from head to toe. I will pass on you the sentence that adulterers and murderers receive; I shall hand you over to their jealous fury; … they will rip off your finery, take away your jewelry and leave you stark naked. Then they will call a public assembly to deal with you—to stone you to death and hack you to pieces with their swords, to burn down your cubicles and wreak justice upon you, while many other women look on. (Ezek. 16:25–26, 35–41)
In ancient Israel, adultery was a capital offense (Deut. 22:22). Scenes like this did occur. What merits attention here, however, is the Lord’s apparent repugnance toward sexual desire and sexual activity themselves—toward the obscene spreading of the female legs and the obscene size of the male member. God spoke this way again at Ezekiel 23 when he compared Jerusalem to a whore named Oholibah:
She began whoring worse than ever, remembering her youth, when she had played around in Egypt. She had been in love with those lechers, back then, with their donkey erections, ejaculating as violently as horses. “You craved the debauchery of your youth, when they used to pinch your nipples in Egypt and fondle your young breasts. And so, Oholibah, Lord Yahweh says this: ‘I shall set all your lovers against you. You recoil from them now, but I shall bring them to assail you from all directions: men from Babylon, men from Chaldea, men from Pekod and Shoa and Koa, and all those men from Assyria.’ ” (19–23)
Once again male apostasy is compared to female debauchery, and once again Israel’s enemies are compared to men gathered to punish an adulteress, but along the way the act of copulation itself is made to seem bestial and revolting.
Yet such scenes do not exhaust the full range of God’s feelings, and perhaps the best clue to the rest of the repertory lies in a book of the Bible in which God himself does not appear. The Song of Songs—read for centuries as an allegory of the relationship between God and, variously, Israel, the church, or the individual soul—is now recognized to be secular love poetry, one of the oldest surviving examples of the genre. Yet the Song of Songs, though secular in itself, is nonetheless relevant to any consideration of the Lord’s attitude toward sexual arousal, because it provides a kind of extended footnote on the marital metaphor. It shows us what should be understood when the Lord uses words like bride, bridegroom, husband, and wife.
This is particularly the case as regards the place of female desire in any sexual relationship. The speakers in the Song of Songs are a young, unmarried couple. Both are passionate, but her ardor may well exceed his:
On my bed at night I seek my heart’s desire.
I seek him, but I cannot find him!
Let me arise then and go about the city.
In the streets, on the corners I will seek my heart’s desire.
I seek him, but I do not find him!
The watchmen come upon me
as they make their nightly rounds.
“Have you seen my heart’s desire?”
Just as I leave them
I find my heart’s desire.
I embrace him and will not let him go,
till I bring him to my mother’s home
into the very room where she conceived me!
(3:1–4)
The image of an amorous young woman, alone on the streets of a dark city, avidly seeking her lover is deliberately audacious. Though her lover is evidently a man of whom her parents approve, she cannot take to the streets without awakening, for the reader, echoes of Ezekiel’s language about another kind of woman in the streets. The point, of course, is that what was made repugnant there is made beautiful here.
When this young woman’s lover speaks, he says things like:
I have come into my garden,
O my sister, O my bride,
I have gathered my myrrh, I have plucked my fragrant herbs,
Let me eat my honey and my honeycomb,
Let me drink my wine and my milk.
(5:1)
The Song of Songs presents sexual pleasure as the supreme luxury, the luxury of luxuries. Luxury, rather than the fruitfulness of procreation, is the mood the poet creates by turning the pleasure the couple have in each other’s company into the centerpiece of an arrangement including many other sensuous and delicious pleasures—of food and drink, fabric and fragrance—all in a setting of perfectly protected languor.
I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem,
by the gazelles, by the wild deer,
Do not rouse, do not wake my love,
before it please.
(2:7)
The Genesis command to be fruitful and multiply is forgotten in the Song of Songs. The lovers do not promise each other offspring as numerous as the stars of the sky. Children are never mentioned in this poem, yet the mood is one of bounty and joy. If all this bounteous goodness is summoned up when John addresses Jesus as bridegroom, just as it is whenever God uses the same word of himself, is there any reason why Jesus may not become a bridegroom in the physical as well
as the spiritual sense of the word?
Jesus may seem to suggest a reason for celibacy when he answers a question that links sexuality and mortality in a deliberately provocative way:
Sadducees [aristocratic priests] approached him, maintaining as they do that there is no resurrection, and they challenged him as follows: “Teacher, Moses wrote that if a man dies childless, the man’s brother must marry the widow and raise up heirs for his dead brother. But what of seven brothers? The first died childless, and the second married the widow. Then he died childless, and the third married the widow, and so on until all seven had died, and then the woman herself died. After the resurrection, whose wife will she be? All seven of them were married to her!”
Jesus said to them, “The children of this world marry and are given in marriage, but those who merit resurrection from the dead in the world to come will neither marry nor be given in marriage, for they will be immortal. As children of the resurrection, they will be children of God and equal to the angels. (Luke 20:27–36)
Belief in the immortality of the soul and, for the just, an eventual resurrection of the body was common among the Pharisees, whose views Jesus shares. By contrast, the Sadducees—members of the priestly clan of Zadok, who administer the Temple and exercise, in addition, as much civil authority as the Romans allow the Jews—believe in neither. The conundrum that the Sadducees pose to Jesus appears to be a standard argument of theirs against the Pharisees. Rather than answer the question, Jesus questions the question and finds it irrelevant to the condition of those who will have risen from the dead. The risen, he says, will neither marry (if they are men) nor be given in marriage (if they are women). Jesus knows, as his questioners do not, that the resurrection of the just will begin with him. He is to be, in Paul’s later phrase (Col. 1:18), “the firstborn from the dead.” This being the case, his celibacy might serve as a sign that this cosmic transformation is at hand.
But then again, it need not. There is a difference, after all, between transformation and simple abolition. If sexuality were to be simply abolished, why resurrect the body at all? Why not simply allow the soul, already understood to be immortal, to live on incorporeally? The issue may be put more bluntly as the question, If there is no marriage after the resurrection, is there sex? But this question may be usefully joined to another question: Were Adam and Eve married? In some sense, obviously, they were; their union could not have been more legitimate than it was. Yet in another sense their union was like the union of the unmarried lovers of the Song of Songs. The silence of that poem about procreation is suggestively like the silence of Genesis 2, where the Lord creates the first woman not to bear children but rather because “It is not good for the man to be alone” (2:18). In that vision of the creation of the human species, procreation begins only “after the fall,” when immortality has been lost; paradise, though it clearly includes sexual union, seems not to involve reproduction. The recovery of immortality could entail, then, a return to just this condition, which, whatever it might be called, would not be marriage as the Sadducees imagine it.
As for the angels, the statement that resurrected men and women are “equal to the angels” refers rather to angelic immortality than to supposed angelic asexuality. Angels were imagined by both Jesus and his hearers to be physically male rather than sexlessly neuter. According to a Jewish legend preserved in the Book of Jubilees, the holiness of the angels is signaled by the fact that they are all born circumcised. True, their only available sexual partners (angelic homosexuality aside) are human; and as we saw when discussing the Nephilim, God has forbidden such miscegenation or hybridization. But it seems at the very least gratuitous to suppose that God will forbid sexual congress within the human species simply because the just have become “equal to the angels” in their immortality.
At John 12:24, Jesus uses an arresting image for death and resurrection:
Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies,
it remains but a single grain.
Yet if it dies, it yields a rich harvest.
In I Corinthians 15:35–56, Paul seizes Jesus’ image and plays variations on it like a jazz saxophonist. Think of plants in all their spectacular shape, size, and variety—everything from the orchid to the redwood. Compared to them, their seeds are nothing: so small, so drab, and, by comparison, so uniform. Just as we cannot predict the delicacy of the orchid or the grandeur of the redwood by looking at their seeds, so, Paul says (in his own language, of course), we cannot predict what our risen bodies will be like by looking at the “seed” bodies we now inhabit.
And as for bodily life in general, so also, it would seem to follow, for sexual life. Rather than abolished, sexuality will be transformed in ways that are beyond predicting or imagining. If in its broadest outlines, the story of the Bible is the story of how God first turned his blessings of fertility and dominion into curses and then turned his curses back into blessings, then there would seem to be little reason why God Incarnate, as the “firstborn from the dead,” may not marry. Although God clearly abhors adultery, especially female adultery, and although his abhorrence verges, in his very angriest moments, on disgust with female sexual desire and even with the sexual act itself, his otherwise positive use of marriage as a metaphor for his relationship with Israel strongly suggests that he must now think of real marriage in a similarly positive way for himself. And when we say the word marriage, we must not imagine anything less ardent or less abandoned than the feelings given utterance in the Song of Songs.
All this being the case, there is, to repeat, every reason to assume that if Jesus had not died early, he would have married. In the Gospels, all of his key followers are married men, and none of them seems to have thought that imitating Jesus entailed celibacy. When we meet some of them later in the New Testament, well after his death and resurrection, they are all still married. Deeper understanding of and commitment to him have not changed their minds on this point. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, we should assume that God Incarnate, precisely because he is God Incarnate, is capable of marriage and even, at some point, likely to marry. Certainly, this is what others of either sex would assume of him, not knowing his divine second identity. But even if they did know it, they could coherently make the same assumption.
Their making it adds only another element of suspense to this complex character’s self-revelation. The end of virginity is a major border-crossing event in a man’s life. For God Incarnate, a first sexual experience would be at the same time a new and distinct crossing from the divine to the human condition analogous to if less significant than the one he made at birth. Jesus apparently never makes that crossing, but it matters much to the character of his interactions with women that he could have made it. He is not a eunuch. He has taken no vow of celibacy. Hailed by God’s prophet as the divine bridegroom, he may someday be a human bridegroom as well.
And yet is this divine bridegroom, whether humanly married or humanly single, to be slaughtered as a sacrificial beast? Only some days or weeks earlier, John was greeting him as “the Lamb of God.” What strange marriage awaits a bridegroom who is also a lamb? These disturbing questions arise just as God Incarnate is about to have the longest conversation that the Bible records between God and a woman.
HE ADMITS, BUT TO A HERETIC, THAT HE IS THE MESSIAH
The Bible’s narrative parsimony, to repeat a point made earlier, requires that every detail provided carry a great deal of weight. The New Testament’s most frequent way of meeting this requirement is via the kind of allusion to the Old Testament that can make an otherwise mute detail eloquent simply by association. An Old Testament place-name rich with association becomes a remarkably telling detail in the episode that begins when Jesus, traveling from Judea through Samaria to Galilee, stops, tired and thirsty, at Jacob’s Well,
near the land that Jacob gave to his son Joseph.… Jesus, tired from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon. When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesu
s said to her, “Give me a drink.” His disciples had left for town to buy food. The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew. How can it be that you ask me, a Samaritan, for a drink?” (Jews do not mix with Samaritans.) (John 4:5–9)
Jacob, who was given the name Israel, had twelve sons, whose descendants are collectively called the “children of Israel,” or Israelites. Judah, Jacob’s fourth son by his first wife, Leah, is the ancestor of the Jews, the dominant group in the land as the scene opens. Joseph, Jacob’s first son by his second (but favored) wife, Rachel, is the ancestor of the Samaritans, the Jews’ principal local rival. (The name Samaritan comes from the Greek pronunciation of the name of a long-destroyed city in their territory.)
Galilee, Jesus’ home region, is linked to Samaria both ethnically and historically. The Galileans, like the Samaritans, trace their ancestry to other sons of Jacob than Judah (a Nazarene like Jesus could have been counted a descendant of Jacob’s son Zebulon). Galilee, like Samaria, was conquered, occupied, and settled by Assyria in the eighth century B.C.E., while Judea withstood Assyria, falling to Babylonia only in the sixth century B.C.E.
The Galileans have come to be counted as virtual Jews because they take the Jewish side on the largest religious point at issue between the Jews and the Samaritans—namely, the proper place for the ritual sacrifice of animals. For the Jews, the rebuilt Jerusalem Temple is the only legitimate place for such sacrifice. The Samaritans, for centuries, have had a rival temple in Shechem, the very “land that Jacob gave to his son Joseph.” By acknowledging Jerusalem as the shrine city of all Israel, the Galileans have cast their lot with the Jews and against the Samaritans and are allowed into the Jewish Temple as equals.
Depending on the circumstances, however, the Galileans seem to be in something of a mixed category. To the Samaritans of Shechem, Jesus seems a Jew, but twice in the Gospel of John Jews from Judea take him to be a Samaritan. Galilee, like Samaria, had been spurned as heterodox and illegitimate by the Judean exiles when they returned from Babylon in the late sixth century B.C.E. The key problem was that the Samaritans and Galileans alike had intermarried with settlers brought in by Assyria and (or so it was feared and alleged) had introduced alien practices into the ancestral religion. The dispute that divided the Jews from the Samaritans at that time thus initially divided the Jews from the Galileans as well. However, during an interlude of independence from foreign rule (164–64 B.C.E.), a Hellenized Jewish dynasty ruling from Jerusalem successfully imposed its Jerusalem-centered religious establishment on a number of non-Jewish or irregularly Israelite groups within the territory that it controlled. Galilee was one of these territories. As Jesus begins his career this conquest is recent, Galilee is heavily settled by Greek immigrants, and both the orthodoxy and the loyalty of the Galileans remain somewhat suspect in Jerusalem—as if to say, “Scratch a Galilean, and find a Samaritan.”