Ancient Christian same sex marriage

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Is this true?
Contrary to myth, Christianity’s concept of marriage has not been set in stone since the days of Christ, but has constantly evolved as a concept and ritual. Prof. John Boswell, the late Chairman of Yale University’s history department, discovered that in addition to heterosexual marriage ceremonies in ancient Christian church liturgical documents, there were also ceremonies called the “Office of Same-Sex Union” (10th and 11th century), and the “Order for Uniting Two Men” (11th and 12th century).
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anthropologist.livejournal.com/1314574.html
 
dailycatholic.org/issue/2002May/may23tru.htm
That is exactly what John Boswell did. The past Chairman of Yale’s history department was gay and a convert to Catholicism. He resided in New Haven with his long-time companion, and died not too long ago [1994] at age 42 of an AIDS-related illness. Now, in “history according to Boswell,” homosexuality was tolerated in the first centuries of Christianity and homosexual marriages were celebrated liturgically in the Middle Ages.
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If you have a child enrolled in a Medieval History class at a university, you might check out the reading list------there is a good chance he will be exposed to Boswell's "scholarship." His 1980 book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality has become the standard reference for those who want the Church to reverse its traditional teaching against homosexual unions and activities. This book, which Boswell admitted was written to "prove" there was acceptance of homosexuality in the Western Catholic tradition from the beginning of the Christian era until the 14th Century, won the American Book Award for History in 1981.
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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelphopoiesis
 
The Early Church Fathers were uniform in their opposition to homosexual intercourse. In this light, there is a zero percent chance of there being a marriage rite for two members of the same gender.

From what I understand the “rite” in question was designed, in the East, for something along the lines of officially declaring a brotherhood with someone.

That said, I fully expect the inaccurate take of “ZIOMG SAME SEX MARWIGE!” to be what trends, because hey; it’s cool to report inaccurate things about the Church.
 
It seems a bit strange that he calls a 10th century account of two 5th century martyrs the “definitive” account. Sounds a bit like cherry picking sources.
 
I wasn’t raised on a farm, but I know absoiute hogwash when I see it. Look at the timing. Why was this not an issue 500 years ago during the reformation? 200 years ago? 50 years ago? Sniff sniff… agenda.
 
Sounds akin to a very early Christian fraternity initiation ritual, so to speak, not marriage.
 
. . . umm, isn’t anyone suspicious of the timing of this?

Who’s this professor; what’s his bias, if any.

I’m surprised such a thing has been buried all these centuries, until just now, when the Big Push for Sodomite Marriage in on!
 
Theophorus said:
No.

It refers to a sort of spiritual Adoption of a non-blood family member in a non-sexual relationship, much like those old intense platonic friendship’s we were able to have before we sexualised everything in the wake of kinsley and Freud et al
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It ticks me off how everything is sexualised now. I mean this ascends beyond same sex marriage. When did this happen, and why isn’t the Church more aggressive? It condemns things like Twilight and Avatar, yet it doesn’t say anything about the filthy sexualization of the typical American sit-com… Or does it?
 
I could quote bible verse and church teaching until I’m blue in the face but it would seem like overkill for such obvious garbage “history”.
 
John_Savage said:
Is this true?

anthropologist.livejournal.com/1314574.html
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No it is not true.

See Criticism of Boswell:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelphopoiesis#Criticism_of_Boswell
The medieval church showed many examples of honouring close male relationships for their spiritual value, from Aelred of Rievaulx’s book, ‘On Spiritual Friendship’, to the love letters and poetry addressed by many bishops and abbots to their own beloveds.
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In the Western Church, the practice of making ‘sworn brothers’ included liturgical rituals, celebrated in church with the Eucharist, and created legal ties of kinship between the families: an equivalent term for ‘sworn brother’ was ‘wedded brother’. Same -sex weddings, in church, are hardly new, although the earlier meaning was not the same as current usage.
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In 4th and 5th century Macedonia, and later in the Western church, there is archaeological and tombstone evidence of another way in which these relationships were honoured by the church: same – sex pairs buried in shared graves, just as many (opposite – sex) married couples were. A much later example of this is the well – known example of Cardinal John Henry Newman, who specifically asked to be buried alongside his beloved Aubrey St John (a request that does not appear to have caused any surprise to his community)."
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lasalettejourney.blogspot.com/2012/04/terence-weldon-pathological-need-to.html
Sergius, Bacchus, and the growing myth of “early Christian gay marriage”
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Boswell’s claims have been completely debunked by David Woods, Robin Young, and Brent Shaw (to name the first three authors I found during a simple internet search).
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Some samples of the conclusions of their debunking:
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the comparison of the punishment of Sergius and Bacchus to the punishment of those convicted of homosexual offences is misleading at best
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.” – Woods

“the author’s painfully strained effort to recruit Christian history in support of the homosexual cause that he favors is not only a failure, but an embarrassing one.” – Young

“…same-sex marriages forged with the approval of the Christian church, and with its rituals? No. Such a reading is very misleading.” – Shaw

catholicvoteaction.org/americanpapist/index.php?p=8289
Gay Marriage: Reimagining Church History

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Before becoming emperor, Basil was made brother of one John, a native of Achaia, although he had at first resisted entering into a relationship with an underling. According to Boswell’s translation of the historian Theophanes Continuator, Basil "honored [John] with the title protospatarius
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and granted him intimacy with him on account of their earlier shared life in ceremonial union." The word for “intimacy” here is parrhesia, meaning the freedom- of-speech, the boldness, enjoyed by an inferior before his superior. And “earlier . . . union” is more readily translated as “previous association in spiritual brotherhood,” the Greek clause reading: kai tes pros auton parresias metedoke dia ten phthasasan koinonian tes pneumatikes adelphotetos. Contrary to Boswell, koinonia rarely means sexual intercourse, even though, in Boswell’s words, “Basil was thus what modern Americans would call a ‘hunk.’” It is hard to see, by the way, how Figure 13, a reproduction of a manuscript illumination of this episode in Theophanes, bears out either Boswell’s interpretation of this adoption ceremony as a “liturgical union” or his estimation of Basil’s physical allure.

leaderu.com/ftissues/ft9411/articles/darling.html
 
John_Savage said:
Is this true?
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No. It’s another lie coming from the left to try to fool people into going against the will of God. Jesus said that the model for marriage is Adam and Eve. Anyone who tries to say that Jesus taught otherwise is a liar.
 
Posted in response to that by a very smart man I know on Facebook:
Boswell’s piece was always kind of a stretch. The text of those rites, which have largely fallen out of use in the West but, I’m given to understand, are still used in some form in the Eastern Catholic rites and the Orthodox churches, is largely available to us and it is pretty clear what was ordained was a kind of spiritual brotherhood or sisterhood, not a sexual union. This is evident by the fact that (a) no one ever considered such unions to be sacraments, hence why they were able to fall out of use, and (b) these unions were termed adelphopoiesis, in Greek, “brother-making.” The Latin names for these were similar. What is called here the “Order of Uniting Two Men” presumably refers to the Ordo ad fratres faciendum, which is actually a pretty faithful translation of adelphopoiesis: “Order for the making of brothers.” This was a probably a successor to or replacement of the more traditional practice of blood-brotherhood, which I imagine the Church probably frowned on owing to its widespread use among pagans and the natural and spiritual significance of blood. In any event, when Boswell says that [Sergius and Bacchus’] union went beyond mere adelphopoiesis, that certainly does not imply that the Church endorsed their going beyond it. (This is all hypothetical anyway, as there is radical doubt as to the historicity of Sergius and Bacchus).
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While the early Christian consensus does seem to heavily favor what we call the traditional or heteronormative marital arrangement, it’s worth noting they still regarded it as suboptimal. Hence the admonition of St. Paul in his first epistle to the Corinthians that they should marry only if they could not control their passions, and then only as a remedy for those passions. The preferred state was lifelong chastity, and the ideal one chastity plus consecration to God through holy orders. It’s hard to imagine such a radically ascetical Church endorsing explicitly sexual unions between two people of the same sex when they regarded heterosexual marriage as a grudging concession. In any event, there’s the secondary issue that even if Boswell’s interpretation were unambiguously true, and it’s far from clear, that wouldn’t necessarily prove anything except that the early Church was plagued with theological and doctrinal problems. Which we already know to be true, given that the Church spent the first several centuries defining its doctrines in opposition to the many heresies that threatened it. (People forget that Arianism, formally condemned as heresy in the late 4th century, persisted in many areas as the majority belief for several centuries).
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This is just the same old deceptive linguistic trick used by agenda drivers.

In the women’s ordination movement, they exploit the ancient practice of “ordaining” deaconesses as a “proof” that women can indeed receive the sacrament of Holy Orders and have in history. They curiously omit the fact that the historical record is quite clear that such deaconesses were clearly not considered to be female deacons who had received the sacrament, but as helpers whose duties were those which men could not properly perform (such as assisting in the baptism of women, which was commonly done naked back then!).

This is just the same sort of shameless deception that refuses to acknowledge the facts when an ignorant reading of the surface would appear to support the conclusion they desire. Such a thing should be grounds for academic repudiation and ignomy.
 
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