Audio only:
In this episode, Trent responds to evidence for the claim that the medieval Church celebrated a kind of gay wedding ceremony.
Transcription:
Trent:
Some Christians try to rewrite Church history to show that homosexual behavior was ignored or even celebrated. So in today’s episode I’ll be responding to Mason Mennenga’s video “Who Were the first Gay Christians?”
Mason:
LBTQ Christians have existed since the beginning of Christian history. This might come as a surprise to you since many Christians claim that LBTQ relationships are a modern invention, but L-G-B-T-Q people have existed since the beginning of history, and that means that LBTQ Christians have existed since the beginning of Christian history.
Trent:
Mason is actually taking the opposite view of what revisionists normally argue. As you see in my response to the 1946 documentary, which the producers tried to take down by the way, they try to argue that homosexual relationships are modern and so the Bible can’t be condemning because they were unheard of in biblical times.
But of course there have always been people with same-sex attractions. That’s why St. Paul says those who engage in homosexual acts along with other unrepentant sinners will not inherit the kingdom of God but he adds this disclaimer, “And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.”
So there have always been people with same-sex attraction who practiced chastity in church history and those who did not practice chastity.
Mason:
Sergius, and Bachus were high ranking officers in the Roman army, serving in the elite guard of emperor Maximin around the early part of the fourth century, right before Constantine decided to do the second worst thing in Christian history, the first being skill at making music. When Constantine decided to make Christianity the official religion of the empire, Serius and Bachus were so close in their relationship that at some point they went through the right of Adele Oasis, which was a ceremony in the early Christian tradition to unite two people of the same gender in a church recognized relationship. Look at that same gender. Unions and Christianity are older than some heresies.
Trent:
Constantine did not make Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. He granted toleration for Christians with the Edict of Milan in 313 and then Emperor Theodosius made Christianity the State religion in the year 380. And adelphopoiesis not a ceremony to unite two people of the same-gender. It’s a compound word that means “brother” adelpho, and poieo, “make”, or brother maker.
It refers to non-sexual relationships between men that modern, sex obsessed people distort into romantic relationships. Mason then explains the story of the two men’s martyrdom and says the following:
Mason:
Sergio and Bachus were venerated as martyrs and saints a couple of centuries later. Their stories spread rapidly through Christian communities and they were honored for their unwavering faith and courage because they were actually persecuted, not fake, persecuted like some Christians think they are.
Trent:
No, fake persecution is when you think people are trying to commit genocide against you because they simply won’t go along with the mistaken idea that a women can have a penis. In America, non-religious people who burn down buildings get a slap on the wrist if they were protesting racism, but Christians who non-violently pray inside abortion facilities, including ones who are 75 years old, end up spending years in jail. So you tell me who’s being persecuted.
In any case, I’ve skipped a lot of what Mason says because he doesn’t actually give any evidence these two men were in a homosexual relationship, which is fairly common among historical revisionists.
Mason:
They’re referred to as Arista a Greek term that can be translated as lovers or beloved companions. The use of Arista is significant in classical Greek. It typically means an erotic or romantic relationship. However, it can also mean a deep nonsexual friendship. The ambiguity of the term allows for multiple interpretations. Additionally, other terms used in the passion of Serius abacus, such as Syn, Desmos and Del Foy further highlight the depth of their connection. These terms, while not explicitly romantic, suggest a relationship marked by profound emotional and spiritual unity. These
Trent:
These words can have sexual connotations but just because a word can mean this doesn’t mean it does and we shouldn’t assume that without additional evidence, which we’ll see later when we talk about David and Jonathan. For example, Adelpho, as we’ve seen just means brother, like literal brothers or brothers in Christ. And syndesmos means bond, like in Colossians 3:14, “put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.” This can be a bond of friendship or a marriage bond, but since no further romantic context is mentioned in these rites we aren’t justified in using a sexual definition of a word that has a much wider non-sexual meaning.
Mason:
The Greek language of the third century provided a rich vocabulary for expressing various kinds of relationships much more than we have today in American English, ranging from deep friendship to romantic love,
Trent:
And that vocabulary includes specific words to explicitly describe romantic and sexual relationships. Notice that revisionists can’t find explicit sexual descriptions of the saints so they have to say that the language used to describe them could possibly in rare cases be used to describe sexual relationships. But possibility isn’t probability, and without supporting evidence, this is just wishful thinking, not historical interpretation.
Mason:
The text of the passion of Serius and baus emphasizes the deep emotional and spiritual connection between the two. When Baus died, Serius grieved profoundly and baus appeared to him in a vision urging him to remain steadfast in his faith. This intense relationship expressed in both life and death suggests a relationship that went beyond something that was merely platonic.
Trent:
This is one of things I hate the most about LGBT revisionists and the LGBT movement in general. Everything is gay. If two men have any shared interests, then they must be gay. Captain America and Bucky are gay. Frog and Toad are gay. I have an entire episode of my podcast about how LGBT ideology ruins friendships.
This comes up a lot when people read about King David and his Jonathan, the son of King Saul. They read passages like the following and assume the two men must have had a gay relationship: “Jonathan made a covenant with David, because he loved him as his own soul. And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was upon him, and gave it to David” (1 Sam. 18:3-4).
But as Robert Gagnon shows in his study of the Bible and Homosexual practice this language refers to strong familial and even political bonds. He writes,
the language of love is typical between an Overlord and vassals or between two political rulers of roughly equal power for example future vassals of the Assyrian King Asherbanipal were instructed “you must love [him] as yourselves King Hiram of Tyre is described as a “lover” or “friend” of Davids (as in 1 Kings 5:1)” (146)
The author of 1 and second Samuel often describes David’s sexual relationships with women, even the illicit ones like with Bathsheba, but he never mentions any such relationship with Jonathan. Instead, this language refers to brotherly love. The same language is used of intense same-sex familial love, like in Genesis 44:30 which says the soul or life of the patriarch Jacob is bound to the soul of his youngest son Benjamin.
Mason:
The key proponents of this L-G-B-T-Q view of Sergio and Baku is John Boswell, a historian from Yale who has argued in his book Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe, that there were liturgical rights for same-gender unions in medieval Christian Europe. He suggested that these rights and the relationships they sanctified were similar to marriage today, potentially including relationships like Serius and Baku when they went through the right of Delpo Oasis. Boswell’s work has been influential in sparking renewed interest in the possibility of same gender relationships within early Christian tradition. His research into liturgical texts and historical practices challenges conventional narratives and invites a rethinking of the ways that Christian communities have understood and celebrated different forms of romantic love and relationships.
Trent:
LGBT historical revisionism almost always go back to the late Yale University scholar John Boswell. Boswell was an active homosexual and one aim of his work was to give historical support for affirming same-sex relationships. That doesn’t mean he’s automatically wrong, but it should give us pause about his conclusions.
For example, Boswell tried to compare the martyrdom of Sergius and Bacchus to the punishments for homosexuality but David Woods in his 1997 article The Origin of the Cult of SS. Sergius and Bacchus calls these superficial resemblances. Boswell published Same-sex Unions in Pre-modern Europe in 1994, one year before he died of AIDS. Since that time the book has been criticized by a wide variety of scholars, including those who support LGBT ideology.
Camille Paglia, who previously identified as a lesbian while getting her PHD at Yale and now identifies as transgender, wrote the following when the book came out:
Surely, bonding ceremonies are of special interest to feudalism-a word that occurs just once here, and only in a footnote. Boswell has no feeling or sympathy for military or political relationships, which distorts his portrait of medieval society. Indeed, he seems grotesquely incapable of imagining any enthusiasm or intimate bond among men that is not overtly or covertly homosexual . . . Whatever medieval ceremonies of union he may have found, Boswell has not remotely established that they were originally homosexual in our romantic sense.
In 2016 historian Claudine Rapp published an extensive study on adelphopoiesis called Brother-Making in Late Antiquity and Byzantium: Monks, Laymen, and Christian Ritual. She briefly considers Boswell’s arguments in order to get the “elephant in the room” as she calls it out of the way before saying, “the ecclesiastical ritual of brother-making was not formulated with a view to include a sexual dimension.” (47)
Mason:
Certainly there are scholars and Christians who don’t believe serius and bachus were gay lovers. Many Christians, scholars emphasize their shared faith and mutual support as exemplary of Christian brotherhood rather than romantic love. However, regardless if you believe Serius and Bachus were gay lovers or not, their love can teach us so much about relationships in general. I grew up in a conservative Christian environment where men could only be friends with men, and there were certain expectations about what kind of things platonic male friendship meant for each other. That meant that men shouldn’t kiss each other or show much physical affection with each other.
Trent:
First, notice the casual skipping over of the fact that no evidence whatsoever has been presented to show Sergius and Bacchus were gay lovers. Boswell has to go to absurd lengths to try to show this is the case, like when he makes a big deal about icons where their halos and horses touch or how in one icon he says Christ is in the position of the ancient Roman “best man” overseeing the wedding of a husband and wife.
Eastern orthodox scholars have also pointed out that Medieval Byzantine were a lengthy process that involved multiple rites of betrothal and ended with crowning. The entire process also bonds families together, which was the traditional view of marriage, not mere individuals. But Adelphopoiesis is a single rite that doesn’t have these elements so it makes no sense to consider it a form of same-sex marriage.
Second, I will agree with Mason that St Sergius and Bacchus, along with other paired saints, can show the importance of masculine friendships. It’s a tragedy that in our modern western culture everything is sexualized whereas in other cultures two men can hold hands or greet one another with a kiss on the cheek and no one thinks anything of it. But that says more about how we need to change the perversity of our culture than changing male friendships.
Mason:
And while I grew up in a kind of conservative Christian environment where men could be friends with women, there were many expectations about that kind of relationship that wasn’t present in male friendships despite being platonic, regardless, like men not being able to be alone in a room with a woman who isn’t his wife. So in the conservative Christian environment I was raised in, people weren’t supposed to have two intimate of relationships with people of the same gender as yourself, and you were only to have an intimate relationship with someone of a different gender if it was completely exclusive. Yet regardless if you believe Sergio and Bachus were gay or not, they clearly had an extremely intimate relationship with each other to the point that even if they weren’t gay, many conservative Christians today would likely be suspicious about their relationship.
Trent:
Yes, men and women are different. That means I can be alone with men but not women because it is only the latter group to which I have a sexual attraction. And as I said before, it is a tragedy that non-familial love has become synonymous with sex and so we have lost the other loves of the ancient world like philia, the love of friendship, and agape, the love of sacrifice, are subsumed into romantic love, eros.
People might raise eyebrows about icons showing Sergius and Bacchus close together or St. Paul and St. Peter kissing each other on the check. But that doesn’t mean we should impose our modern disordered view of sexuality on past male relationships. Instead, we should recover the virtue of ancient male friendships like the kind between Sergius and Bacchus and David and Jonathan and apply them to male friendships today so that men can have support in a world that criticizes them for so-called toxic masculinity but won’t lift a finger to save them from deaths of despair.
If you’d like to see me approach this topic in an even more in-depth way check out my full review of the issue with Michael Jones over at Inspiring Philosophy which is linked in the description below. Thank you all so much and I hope you have a very blessed day.