Why do some historians dispute the evidence?

The evidence that the Church 'married' same-sex couples over most or even some of its 2000 years is passionately disputed.

The passion often breaks into personal attack on the scholars who disagree, and into a general dismissal of the whole case.

But there is good sense in the better material, and it must be considered. There are several points of dispute. Please email in if you can fill in gaps here.

Criticising John Boswell's work

It is easy to criticise some of John Boswell's work. His translations contain some obvious errors. He has an insufficient grasp of the liturgical context of the material that he uses, which can make his work look naive. None of his material was actually new and the adelphopoiesis ceremonies were known in other books in the US long before Boswell. His contribution is to list them and translate them in a single book. Even then other texts containing the same rite have been discovered since. He even omitted to note that the Eastern church in his own country continues to celebrate Eastern rites today, and that has included this one.

However, he did draw attention to the documents and no one denies that they exist. No one maintains that they are forgeries.

The points at issue seem to be two:

• was adelphopoesis like marriage or fundamentally different?
• were these a brief departure from Christian teaching? and

Was adelphopoiesis like marriage or fundamentally different?

This is dealt with under the question How Far is Marriage similar to the Making of Brothers?

It applies here because those who wish to say that the sworn kinships were not like marriage point to differences that they claim are decisive.

The ceremonies themselves stress the concept of love strongly, but some maintain that this is about the love of Christians generally. The reading from John 17 confirms this interpretation, except that the ceremonies never unite groups of believers, but only one individual to another, as monogamous marriage does. A similar attitude to 'love' is taken in the blessings of heterosexual couples.

Heterosexual marriages are constructed from the same blessing ceremony, and the last of the three prayers that differentiate them is noticeably similar. This suggests a considerable degree of similarity. The differences may well be the key factors. These consist primarily in the relative equality of the couple - something not possible when they are not of the same sex. This is discussed under the difference between marriage and same sex unions.

Were these unions a brief departure from Christian teaching?

Well, the question of whether it is brief or has been there all along is difficult.

The text for the ceremonies was being copied and translated between the 9th - 15th centuries.

There are grounds for saying that they went back earlier, but the argument does not seem to be very strong. Even if Sergius and Bacchus were sworn brothers, this would have been a civil relationship, as were marriages at that period. So there's little purpose in debating it.

There are historical references to the rite over the following centuries, and it would appear to have continued. It is still valid to this day and there is at least one published account of its use in the last decade, though its use is less widespread. The rite would seem to have been much less widely used in the last 500 years.

Even those who maintain that the Church was always been against homosexuality acknowledge that the medieval period was an untypical exception. This change in atttiude of Church and the documented change in attitudes of the courts seems to coincide with the reduced evdience for the adelphopoiesis ceremony after medieval times.

The discussions on sexuality within Christianity will not be resolved in these paragraphs. It is possible to attempt to summarise it, but so attempts so far have left the arguments on each side too condensed to be meaningful.

Those who believe that the teachings of Christianity are fundamentally opposed to homosexuality will, of course, maintain that the many heresies have been followed in the the name of the Church, and that adelphopoiesis is one of them.

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In Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, John Boswell made a case that his own church, the Roman Catholic Church, is intrinsically gay-friendly and that this is evident historically. For criticism of his argument, see the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association (GALHA) website, which contains the text of pamphlet against this work. The contributions did not intend to touch on Boswell's work on adelphopoiesis, which had not been written at that time. This is primarily aimed at showing that Christianity has always been irrevocably opposed to homosexuality. www.galha.org/ptt/lib/hic/index.html

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