Free Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace With Marriage by Elizabeth Gilbert Page A

that story.
    But the New Testament--which is to say, the arrival of Jesus Christ--invalidated all those old family loyalties to a degree that was truly socially revolutionary. Instead of perpetuating the tribal notion of "the chosen people against the world," Jesus (who was an unmarried man, in marked contrast to the great patriarchal heroes of the Old Testament) taught that we are all chosen people, that we are all brothers and sisters united within one human family. Now, this was an utterly radical idea that could never possibly fly in a traditional tribal system. You cannot embrace a stranger as your brother, after all, unless you are willing to renounce your real biological brother, thus capsizing an ancient code that binds you in sacred obligation to your blood relatives while setting you in auto-opposition to the unclean outsider. But that sort of fierce clan loyalty was exactly what Christianity sought to overturn. As Jesus taught: "If any man come to me and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple" (Luke 14:26).
    But this created a problem, of course. If you're going to deconstruct the entire social structure of the human family, what do you replace that structure with ? The early Christian plan was staggeringly idealistic, even downright utopian: Create an exact replica of heaven right here on earth. "Renounce marriage and imitate the angels," instructed John of Damascus around A.D. 730, explaining the new Christian ideal in no uncertain terms. And how do you go about imitating angels? By repressing your human urges, of course. By cutting away all your natural human ties. By holding in check all your desires and loyalties, except the yearning to be one with God. Among the heavenly hosts of angels, after all, there existed no husbands or wives, no mothers or fathers, no ancestor worship, no blood ties, no blood vengeance, no passion, no envy, no bodies--and, most especially, no sex.
    So that was to be the new human paradigm, as modeled by Christ's own example: celibacy, fellowship, and absolute purity.
    This rejection of sexuality and marriage represented a massive departure from any Old Testament way of thinking. Hebrew society, by contrast, had always held marriage to be the most moral and dignified of all social arrangements (in fact, Jewish priests were required to be married men), and within that bond of matrimony there had always come a frank assumption of sex. Of course, adultery and random fornication were criminalized activities in ancient Jewish society, but nobody forbade a husband and wife from making love to each other, or from enjoying it. Sex within marriage was not a sin; sex within marriage was . . . marriage. Sex, after all, was how Jewish babies were made--and how can you build up the tribe without making more Jewish babies?
    But the early Christian visionaries weren't interested in making Christians in the biological sense (as infants who came from the womb); instead, they were interested in converting Christians in the intellectual sense (as adults who came to salvation through individual choice). Christianity wasn't something you had to be born into; Christianity was something that you selected as an adult, through the grace and sacrament of baptism. Since there would always be more potential Christians to convert, there was no need for anybody to sully himself by generating new babies through vile sexual congress. And if there was no need anymore for babies, then it naturally stood to reason that there was no need anymore for marriage.
    Remember, too, that Christianity was an apocalyptic religion--even more so at the beginning of its history than now. Early Christians were expecting the End of Days to arrive at any moment, perhaps as early as tomorrow afternoon, so they were not especially interested in launching future dynasties. Effectively, the future did not exist for these people. With Armageddon