Review—William Loader, Sexuality and the Jesus Tradition
William Loader, Sexuality and the Jesus Tradition. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005.
Reviewed by: Timothy Luckritz Marquis ’02 MAR
William Loader’s new book attempts to incorporate recent New Testament scholarship into a redactional and form-critical analysis of earliest Christian attitudes toward sexuality. With his terminological choice of the “Jesus tradition,” Loader expresses caution about what can be reconstructed based on extant evidence. The book is not a New Testament sexual ethics but an attempt to “know more clearly what was being said” about sexuality in the first Christian century.
The first chapter tackles passages dealing with sexual passion and immorality, beginning with some of Matthew’s sayings from the Sermon on the mount and their synoptic parallels. Loader reads the intensification and internalization of the command against adultery to include a man’s adulterous glance in light of ancient understandings of marriage as property; adultery is the defrauding of a (male) neighbor and, thus, involves wronging one’s fellow man. Loader also follows recent interpretations of the synoptic sayings advocating the severing of limbs to avoid sinning in light of ancient Jewish discussions of sexual misdeeds such as masturbation (thus, severing the “hand”) and pederasty (especially mark’s use of this passage in the context of nurturing children). The second chapter extends these observations to treat discussions of marriage and divorce among New Testament writers, who prohibit divorce across the board except in certain circumstances. The statement in Genesis 2:24 (that the husband and wife become “one flesh”) lies behind many of these passages.
The third (and by far the longest) section discusses passages relating to celibacy, beginning with the synoptic controversy over marriage (and, hence, sex) in the afterlife (mark 12:18–27 and parallels), the unique Matthean statement (19:10–12) in which Jesus’ prohibition against divorce is interpreted as a reason to avoid marriage and become “a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven,” and synoptic accounts calling on disciples to reject their families in order to follow Jesus. Loader remarks that New Testament authors almost never correlate sex and procreation. On the contrary, like the evangelists after him, Paul reads Genesis 2:24 as depicting sex as a quasi-mystical bond between husband and wife. Moreover, Loader agrees with other scholars who read celibacy as a social necessity among early itinerant missionaries whose lifestyle forced them to reject household structures common to the day. In this rejection of familial norms, we may see an authentic and provocative teaching of the historical Jesus.
Loader spends much of this chapter discussing Paul, who also took celibacy as a personal obligation. In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul expresses a preference for celibacy similar to the one found in Matthew 19. Throughout this passage, Paul gives many reasons for why abstinence from sex is “good” but not mandatory: for example, sex and marriage can distract from prayer and preparedness for the eschaton. On the other hand, those who cannot practice self-control should marry in order to avoid the danger of sin. Those Christians who advocated celibacy may also have been anticipating their angelic lives-to-come in the heavenly temple or restoring a sort of pre-Edenic innocence and gender unity. Loader’s discussion of Paul extensively and profitably engages the recent work of YDS’s Judith Gundry-Volf yet inexplicably lacks the relevant insights from The Corinthian Body by Dale B. Martin of Yale’s Religious Studies department. Moreover, the discussion of Galatians 3:28 and relevant parallels would benefit from recent discussions of ancient views of gender as a fluid and hierarchical spectrum.
The reader may well disagree with many of Loader’s readings of particular passages. Yet Loader seems to invite such engagement by carefully surveying recent scholarship, presenting dissenting opinions, and often expressing prudent uncertainty as to the correct interpretation. While this book is framed as a reasoned attempt to distill common sexual values from the Jesus tradition, it succeeds in its larger purpose of highlighting the issues and questions that the diverse voices of earliest Christianity raise about living together as sexual beings.