JBL 137, no. 2 (2018): 383–398 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.15699/jbl.1372.2018.345030 Can a Man Commit πορνεία with His Wife? david wheeler-reed jennifer w. knust
[email protected] [email protected] Albertus Magnus College, Boston University, New Haven, CT, 06511 Boston MA 02215 dale b. martin
[email protected] Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511 In Classical and Hellenistic Greek, apart from use by Jewish and Christian authors, πορνεία meant “prostitution.” Different words from the same word group (built on πορν-) all had something to do with prostitution. Πόρνη denoted a female prostitute, while πόρνος referred to a male prostitute who might be paid for sex with a man or a woman. Τὸ πορνεῖον referred to a brothel, and some form of the verb πορνεύω referred to one prostituting oneself or someone else. Πορνο- τρόφος referred to a pimp. Somewhere along the way, a group of words that in Greek and Latin seem to have originally referred simply to prostitution became in English a word referring, in most people’s usage, to any sexual intercourse outside the bonds of marriage. But is that all that Paul or other New Testament writers mean when they condemn or warn against πορνεία? In other words, does πορνεία when used by a New Testament writer refer only to “extramarital sex” between a man and a woman, or does it include other activities also? This article suggests that the answer varies depending on whom you ask. Recent scholars have tended to understand the term πορνεία simply as “sex outside marriage.”1 This point of view, however, is mistaken, whether the subject is ancient Greece or the later writings of Jews and Christians, and misrepresents the 1 See, e.g., Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013).