Was polygamy accepted in the early Christian church?

Factual Questions
21

[quote=“DrDeth, post:14, topic:309572”]

For what it’s worth Wikipedia sez: “However, it was not accepted in ancient Greece or Rome, and has never been accepted in mainstream Christianity (early Mormonism was a notable exception).”

That is not true … there is a lot of history of “Christians” who practiced polygamy on both ends of time line.
In the early period, there is a lot of records that it was practiced among the apostolic believers until about 1000 CE, where they were forced to stop by Rome, due to persecution. It was not accepted by the Roman Christians.
In the latter end. Mormons were not the only ones. It was widely practiced in Europe (was favored by Martin Luther for one), and there is many groups that are offically teaching polygamy as one (not the only) righteous form of marriage, even today.

22

I gave some historical pointers already in other posts … There are plenty of those and if you want I will post a list of references later on.
There is also a plenty of references, even in the New Testament, that directly supports polygamy and nowhere was it discouraged or forbidden.
Roman Christians were so twisted over the years that they can’s see those.

23

Indeed, I would. Because otherwise there’s no reason to tell people to only have one wife.

The only question I’m aware of is whether it was just another way of saying they should never have divorced and remarried.

That said, Joseph sure was okay with putting away Mary for infidelity, which seems odd for a polygamous culture–why not just let her marry them, too? Sure, many think the nativity was written much later than Paul’s works, but that’s still in the early Christian era.

I do think it likely that early Judaism didn’t have a problem with multiple wives. The guy their country was named after himself had multiple wives.

24

The New Testament is largely the remaining doctrine of the Pauline church, which was founded almost entirely independent of the church that Jesus left behind. What Jesus’ church practiced and taught was almost wholly destroyed along with Jerusalem around 70 AD, with the remainder being actively destroyed by the Pauline/Roman church. What does remain is nigh-impossible to date with sufficient accuracy to reliably pit against the canonical gospels.

While I presume that the OP only intends to ask about the Pauline church, which is the one we have today, it’s worth noting that until approximately 150 AD, there were any number of branches of Christianity, each with their own beliefs, many descended from the Jerusalem church.

Jesus’ church seems to have largely started as an outgrowth of St. John the Baptist’s following. We only really know two things about St. John’s religion; one, that it practiced baptism; two, that he was highly critical of divorce.

Of materials that remain that seem convincingly early (i.e probable to be pre-100 AD material), a strong belief in Sophia, women as equals to the other apostles, and the divinity of the bridal chamber all seem to be fairly common. Overall, it’s highly unlikely that women were considered to be inferiors or property as the Roman world considered them. There’s strong evidence that they were held to be equals or, more accurately, the completing half of the male. While it’s very possible that a one-to-one, male-female union (i.e sex) was considered to be spiritual, and something one could do over and over with a multitude of partners (one at a time), there’s no evidence that unbalanced pairings, in bed, nor in marriage, would be viewed as acceptable. And it’s probably more likely that Jesus’ group wasn’t very libertine and the ritual of the bridal chamber really was a one-time deal.

Some early churches were likely fairly libertine, others were decidedly chaste. I don’t think I’ve ever read about one which advocated polygamy.

25

Levirate marriage. In Jewish law it only applied if the decendent was childless and since the primary purpose was to provide him & the widow with an heir it was most definatly expected that the marriage be consumated.

26

Some gnostic Christians didn’t believe in monogamy, that is, they didn’t believe in marriage at all.

Great way to speed the decline of a sect, btw.

For the first 300 or so years there were so many greatly different versions of Christianity some had to be polygamists because they had to have had Warren Jeffs even in those times.

27

I can barely afford the one wife I have so I have no stake in advocating polygamy – meaning marriage of more than one wife to the same man.

In the Old Testament polygamy was not only permitted and practiced, but at times it was mandated.

A levirate marriage (Hebrew: yibbum) is mandated by Deuteronomy 25:5-6 of the Hebrew Bible and obliges a brother to marry the widow of his childless deceased brother, with the firstborn child being treated as that of the deceased brother, (see also Genesis 38:8) which renders the child the heir of the deceased brother and not the genetic father. There is another provision known as halizah (Deuteronomy 25:9-10), which explains that if a man refuses to carry out this ‘duty,’ the woman must spit in his face, take one of his shoes, and the others in the town must always call him ‘the one without a shoe’. This was an act of disrespect because he was too selfish to take his brother’s wife.

In the Bible in Ruth chapter 4, the nearer kinsman refused to take Ruth as a second wife and therefore missed being in the lineage of the Messiah and the house of David.

II Samuel 12 says, “7 Nathan said to David, “You are the man! Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you out of the hand of Saul. 8 And I gave you your master’s house and your master’s wives into your arms and gave you the house of Israel and of Judah. And if this were too little, I would add to you as much more.

God tells David that He gave David multiple wives and would have given him more if he had asked.

In the New Testament many have quoted I Timothy 3:1-3; 3:12; and Titus 1:6 as forbidding multiple wives to leadership, but the literal Greek is “First wife married.” It could be interpreted to mean a divorced man may not be in church leadership, but it certainly does not forbid polygamy. In New Testament Jewish society it would have been interpreted as forbidding unmarried men in church leadership. That was the rule in the Jewish Sanhedrin. A man without at least one wife could not serve in leadership.

In Matthew 19:1-10 Jesus says that God’s original plan was not celibacy but marriage though there are circumstances where celibacy may be practiced.

In I Corinthians 7:25-28 Paul says that in times of distress it is permissible to remain single, but stresses this is his opinion, not from God.

In I Timothy 5:14 Paul tells widows less than 60 years old to get remarried and not try to minister as a single woman. This could not have been practiced without polygamy.

It would have been a simple addition of one sentence in the New Testament if God had wanted to say that though I once commanded polygamy in certain circumstances, I now forbid it. He didn’t.

Mandated monogamy comes not from Christianity or Judaism but from Greek-Roman culture. The Romans despised the Jews for practicing polygamy. The Romans had prostitutes, slave women, and affairs, but only one legal wife to produce heirs. To avoid being persecuted both the Jews and Christians gradually gave up polygamy. To justify their actions they gradually re-interpreted Scripture.
The result is that we have many single, lonely Christian women who are not only tempted by physical desire but having to face life without a marriage partner.

28

If noobs are going to insist on bumping old threads, I do wish that they would at least READ the thread first.

29

Luke 20:24-28

30

Maybe they could try marrying any of the single men available. Just a thought.

31

I guess another aspect nobody mentioned - the early church, especially when the epistles were flying, was probably gaining most new members through converts, not offspring. If polygamy of some sort was not forbidden, then a number of the converts would probably join with multiple wives, especially the richer ones. I assume the list of requirements for “overseer” in Timothy basically was saying “for the leaders in our congregation, they must be adhering to the following rules - including one wife limit.”

I also assume that the Muslim rule - you can have multiple wives if you can afford them - is loosely based on historical practice all over the region. This would be the same logic for levirate marriages - not just to provide the heir, but because in the “good old days” a household with no adult male, led by a woman, was a rarity especially in societies where women held a much lower status. hence every widowed woman needed a “protector” - if not their adult son, then a nearer male relative. (The less kind interpretation was that they were part of the estate…)

IIRC, didn’t Rome have a “Roman Wife” and “Foreign Wife” rule? I thought Cleopatra was Caesar’s foreign wife, and caused a scandal by taking up residence in Rome for a while.

32

The NT “must be the husband of one wife” rule is generally taken to have been a proscription of divorce, not polygamy.

While the Jewish tradition did in theory accommodate polygamy, long before NT times it had fallen out of favour. The standard Jewish marriage contract prohibited it, and the religious tradition regarded monogamy as superior. I don’t know whether Levirate marriage was being practiced at the time of Christ if that would involve polygamy, but I’m pretty sure that no other kind of polygamy was being practiced by first-century Palestinian Jews. Hence, the early Christian church didn’t need to preach or teach against it; it wasn’t a problem they were encountering in practice. Contrast the repeated and strong teachings against divorce, which was regularly practiced in that society.

33

Thank you, Chronos for pointing out the requirement for a man to take his widowed and childless sister-in-law as wife. Her offspring then inherits the dead brother’s name and estates. In this Old Testament era, there weren’t many peoples. So in order to grow a nation, we had to have all our women “barefoot and pregnant”. So there was a need to keep the 20-year-old widow women … er … “productive” … if y’all will pardon that expression.

My comment here is to point out that I believe most if not all the writings form the early church were destroyed when the Roman Church took over the whole operation. Anything that didn’t conform to the doctrine preached by the Catholic Church was forbidden, and my understanding largely destroy or locked away. Thus, we really don’t know what the various early churches believe or practiced.

In my opinion, Christ came to fulfill The Law, not do away with it. Therefore it is never a sin to follow The Law to the letter, it is only sin to expect salvation though following The Law to the letter. A man can have more than one wife, if such is the loving thing to do.

34

The Emperor Nero had 2 wives and 2 husbands, but never more than once spouse at a time.

35

Again suggesting that polygamy was not the norm. Because, otherwise, why would they need to ask “which one”? They presume there can only be one wife. Otherwise there is an obvious answer: “all of them.”

It seems to me that, despite there being no command as such, monogamy has become a de facto standard to the point that people didn’t even question it. Which does lead credence to the “no divorce and remarry” version of the clergy requirements.

Though not perfectly. It’s possible that Christians, not being “under law,” started practicing polygamy. Paul brought up similar concepts.

36

It’s possible, and indeed they wouldn’t even have had to make a “not under law” argument to justify it since, as already noted, the law did not forbid polygamy.

There’s no evidence for it, and on the whole it seems unlikely. Neither the Jews nor the wider Roman/Greek culture practiced polygamy and, if the Christians began to, somebody would have mentioned the fact, even if only to bash Christians with it. Nor does it seem likely that the Christians would have been motivated to; it’s not as though the movement was all about reviving practices or beliefs which the Jews had abandoned.

37

Well … polygamy is expensive … only the very wealthy can afford two wives and all the children … so it’s never been widespread. Is it a good idea today, I’d say no, if anything we should be making less babies. I certainly wouldn’t have two wives, that’s insane IMEIO …

38

Off the top of my head, I can’t recall any NT figure who was married to more than one spouse at the same time. The Samaritan woman at the well had had seven husbands, but that was past tense - she apparently was not good at relationships.

I doubt if polygamy was at all common even in OT times, except among the wealthy. Kings and patriarchs, sure, but that was sort of a status symbol or, in the case of kings like Solomon, a way of forming political alliances.

Esther was one of multiple wives, but married to a non-Jew.

The NT seems rather strait-laced about these things. John the Baptist condemned Herod for marrying his sister-in-law, and we have already seen the various prohibitions against church officials being married more than once, whether that means no divorce or no polygamy. And I think St. Paul condemned somebody in the Corinthian church for living with his mother-in-law, which seems to have been a huge sin.

Regards,
Shodan

39

We don’t have a lot of information about the early churches except the ones who were faithful to Paul.

But, we do know the following:

  1. Jesus probably taught something similar to John the Baptist. John the Baptist was highly invested in the sacrament of marriage.
  2. Among the various splinter churches that Jesus and John left behind, the idea of Sophia (the perfection of a perfectly matched man and woman) and the magic of the Bridal Chamber are the most commonly attested.
  3. Of the churches declared heretical by Paul’s church, only one (out of several dozen) was accused of libertine behavior. Given how strenuously the Pauline branch was trying to denigrate the other churches, it seems unlikely that they would have stayed quiet if promiscuity was common among those groups and if Jesus was promiscuous, it seems unlikely that the majority of his churches would have ended up chaste.

Overall, of the few things that I think we could say for certain about the real Jesus’ doctrine, the sanctity of a single man-woman marriage is one of the few things that is almost certainly a part of his teachings.