When Love Is Not: Learning from Early Christians

The fever-pitch level of interest in the possible evidence of child/adolescent sexual abuse in “the Epstein files” fits against the background of unusually high interest in the topic in recent years. This suggests it may be a good time to draw attention to the ways–some perhaps surprising–that the horror of the sexual abuse of children relates to the Christian faith and life. Alongside (and long before) the sexual abuse scandals of the modern Roman Catholic Church (and other church bodies), and the accounts of scandalous evangelical leaders reported in sensational periodicals, the Church had a different and remarkable story in relation to this evil.

The sexual use of children remains among the few widely condemned vices in our age, though reconsiderations of a range of other sexual practices warns us that we ought not to presume that this will stay the case for long. This default negative view of child sex use may obscure our reading of ancient sources on the topic, however. When we read ancient texts that speak of “pedophilia,” we are likely to read that term as a negative one. But this misses how dark the picture actually is. As scholars of ancient Christianity have explained at length, we must account for the great difference between how we view the topic and how ancients did. Larry Hurtado (Destroyer of the Gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World, Baylor Press, 2016) and others have documented that in the Roman era the sexual use of children, which included adolescents and young children, was widely tolerated and even celebrated by pagan writers, including Juvenal, Petronius, Horace, Strato, Lucian, and Philostratus. It was even lauded by some lyricists.

Hurtado explores this phenomenon in relation to early pagan and Christian language regarding the practice (pp. 167-8). The pagan default neutral or positive view was reflected in the wide-ranging vocabulary conventionally used for this behavior: paiderastes (παιδεραστής, a lover of boys/children), paiderastéō (παιδεραστέω, to engage in sex with boys/children), and paiderastíā (παιδεραστίᾱ), referring to the practice itself. Importantly, given our (at least for now) cultural condemnation of this behavior, we read these words as accusations, but for the ancients they were not expressions of disapproval; they were merely descriptive.

Hurtado (167) points to the work of John Martens to highlight a fascinating feature of Christianity that emerges into view in this context. Martens has demonstrated that early Christian condemnation of this behavior led to what appears to be a distinctive Christian terminology created precisely in order to refer to it negatively: Christians apparently invented the verb paidophthoreo and the noun paidophthoros in their condemnations of the practice. Instead of being merely descriptive, this invented Christian terminology communicated unmistakable denunciation: “to sexually abuse/corrupt children,” “one who sexually abuses/corrupts children,” and so on. In other words, what the pagans called “love” was called by Christians “abuse/corruption,” reflecting an adamant rejection of pagan “spinning” of a wicked practice. This Christian act of relabeling the behavior and relabeling the man himself as not a “(sexual) lover of children” (paiderastes) but as “a destroyer/corrupter/seducer of children” (paidophthoros) decisively denounced as an evil what the conventional terminology had regarded as at least neutral and which some ancient lyricists extolled as a good. In a battle fought in part through the terms used, early Christians thus “relabelled” the practice rather than agree with the pagan way of normalizing it through neutral or positive vocabulary. We should appreciate in our time what our ancestors did in theirs: the words used–even creating new ones that told the truth–constituted a Christian act of resistance against a culture that had “baptized” a vile act as a loving one.

Hurtado also notes that the earliest examples of this newly invented Christian vocabulary, “to corrupt children,” are found in two second-century texts: the Didache and the Epistle of Barnabas. In both texts, the verb is found in a list of prohibited behaviors (Didache 2.2 and Epistle of Barnabas 19.4), and surrounded by other condemned behaviors such as murder, sorcery, abortion, and stealing. Interestingly, in the Epistle of Barnabas, the term is part of a list of prohibitions introduced as “the Lord’s commandments,” referring to Jesus. Among the earliest textual witnesses in Christianity, then, we find testimony to the counter-cultural, high view of the safety and welfare of children, particularly in relation to adult men, and which regards the protection and care of children as a distinguishing mark of authentic Christianity.

This latter point is important: this terminological invention is one of the many ways early Christian writers carried out an effort to clearly distinguish Christian behavior from that of the wider culture, as well as to warn fellow Christians–perhaps especially new converts–in specific, concrete ways of the deep, wide difference there is, and must be, between Christian and cultural norms of conduct. For this reason, it is all the more interesting that there is no evidence that either of these two ancient texts depended upon the other. Instead, they appear to be carrying forward a common tradition and teaching that precedes even their very early date, reaching back into the apostolic era. Perhaps it was the famous example of Jesus’s welcome of children to himself, over against others who wanted to keep the children from him (Lk. 18:15-17 and parallels), that provoked the strong dominical and not only apostolic association with the proper treatment of children.

The apostolic norm itself is clear enough from, for instance, the Apostle Paul’s instruction to the paterfamilias (Eph. 5 and 6) who was admonished to behave like a Christian and not like the pagan paterfamilias (which he may have been only days or weeks earlier!). This meant he was to love his wife sacrificially, personally educate his children (both sons and daughters), and treat his slave(s) well: in each case the Apostle’s teaching is utterly countercultural to the Greco-Roman ideal of a paterfamilias. And that is the Apostle’s point. The cultural model of “a man’s man” was not merely resisted by Paul and Paul’s Gospel; it was completely turned on its head. On Hurtado’s and Martens’ account, early Christians appeared to participate in this eminent tradition by inventing terminology to clarify that a pagan virtue was in fact a horrible and damnable vice, and knowing the difference (and acting upon it) distinguished the Church from the world.

We can’t help but ask penetrating, and perhaps uncomfortable questions of ourselves and our time when reading these texts. What would it look like to understand Christian distinctiveness in such terms today? How should the sexual maltreatment of children figure in our perception of leaders, and of adults in general? And what vocabulary would we need to use, perhaps even invent, to clarify when toleration is not a virtue?