Porneia: The Making of a Christian Sexual Norm

I. Defining a Biblical Keyword

The late fourth century was, not coincidentally, both the age of mass conversion and the period during which the penitential discipline of the Christian church was standardized: the mainstreaming of the religion generated a need to manage sinners on an unprecedented scale. So an éminence like Gregory of Nyssa found himself instructing a junior bishop on the church's taxonomy of sin.

There is this division among those sins which come about through desire and pleasure: what is called μοιχεία and what is called πορνεία. For some who are more exacting, it is held that the sin pertaining to πορνεία is also μοιχεία, since there is only one legitimate union for both the wife with her husband and the husband with his wife. Everything, therefore, which is not legitimate is completely illegitimate, and he who has what is not his own clearly has what is another's. . . . But since the Fathers have allowed some indulgence toward those who are weaker, the sin is judged within this categorical division: a sin of desire which is accomplished without injustice to someone else is called πορνεία, but that which entails injury and injustice toward another is μοιχεία.

(Gregory of Nyssa, Ep. can. ad Letoium 3)¹

Gregory's letter provides invaluable insights into the mental structures within which late ancient Christians classified sexual misconduct. The church recognized a fundamental division between μοιχεία and πορνεία, often misleadingly translated as "adultery" and "fornication." Μοιχεία was sexual violation of a respectable woman—extramarital sex with a wife, daughter, or widow. Πορνεία was extramarital sex that did not injure a third party such as a husband, father, or male relative who stood in a position of protection over a woman's sexual honor. The nature of the sexual sin, for the fourth-century church, was determined by the woman's place in society.

In this article, I trace the process through which Gregory's understanding of πορνεία prevailed as the dominant meaning of the term. Πορνεία is the lexical and ideological cornerstone of Christian sexual morality. It lies at the heart of the Pauline model of Christian sexuality. Yet, remarkably, its meaning has remained elusive for modern interpreters.² Derived from the Greek πόρνη ("prostitute"), the word passed into Latin as fornicatio and thence into English as "fornication." But "fornication" is effectively limited to ecclesiastical usage. As Carolyn Osiek has noted, "To say that πορνεία means fornication is circular, and the concept of illicit sex only begs the question of what is considered illicit."³ One of the most thoughtful contemporary interpreters of Christian sexuality has warned that "the precise meaning of porneia is simply uncertain given the lack of evidence we have."⁴ This caution is warranted, for the meaning of a word so ideologically charged as πορνεία was neither simple nor static. Yet previous debates over the meaning of the term πορνεία have played out exactly as though there must be a precise and stable meaning out there, which we might recover if only we had just the right evidence.

This article is an attempt to go beyond the sterility of those debates. The premise of this investigation is that we can do better than to translate πορνεία as "sexual immorality" while still appreciating the inherent volatility of the term. Indeed, because any translation so vague inevitably threatens to become little more than a cipher for the interpreter's own views, it is imperative that we try to recover the content and connotation of the term in different texts and contexts. At the same time, we must remain alive to the possibility of radical shifts in the meaning of the term over time and to the probability that any word whose meaning was so rich and layered could have different meanings in different contexts. There are multiple ways that such an investigation should be pursued, but in the present study I try to reconstruct the major shifts in and additions to the meaning of πορνεία across time; focused study of individual texts would be welcome in the wake of this analysis. Here the emphasis is diachronic; the analysis is based on a comprehensive examination of the instances of the word in Greek...