On fornication,, not sure what you are getting at. The bible is clear about sex w/o love comitment involved.
Like you , well actually unlike you I HATE DESPISE **marriage events** Big marriages ALWAYS end up as divorces.
LOve makes a union, a ceremony is not necessary.
I am going to answer this separately.
I did not say anything about sex without love. That is actually the point people that fall in love and make love and stay together are married. But the truth changes a lot. Casual sex is not only a sin but the way people look at it sets up a sequence of worse sins. People thinking that casual sex does not marry you think they can get forgiveness and it is done and over with but no…your married and if have sex with some else it is adultery. And it just get worse from there. It is clear that God intended for people that have sex to stay together Here is the long explanation for fornication, if you have any questions let me know….
Fornication
This word is another prime example of why we should not make up words and stick them in the Bible, because they cause misunderstandings and false beliefs that can span over a thousand years and ultimately cause people to sin. The word fornication is not in the scriptures nor is its definition.
Fornication is based on concept of porneia which mostly pertains to prostitutes. Which was not a negative term in the Greco-Roman culture. But the Christian religion thought differently. The New Testament was written mostly in Greek, a Pagan Language. When the Apostles were writing the New Testament they were tasked with using a Pagan language that did not reflect Christian morals. So the Christians adjusted the Greek words and definitions to convey their thoughts. There are variances to the Greek word porneia that define various sexual activities throughout the New Testament …. all of which are in the scriptures and all of which Christianity considers sinful.
The false beliefs associated with the word fornication started a long long time ago. If you noticed there was no wedding ceremony or vows in Eden. And then you can read the rest of the Bible and find no requirement for wedding ceremonies or vows. Yep! That is right the Bible does not state a requirement for a wedding ceremony to be married in the Old or New Testament. People formed marriages as God described… For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh. Genesis 2:24 Neither the Old or New Testament state a requirement for wedding ceremonies. It was about1500 years after the biblical period that Christianity as in the Protestants developed a requirement for weddings ceremonies and vows, and that is a fact. You think; What about the Wedding in Cana? Actually the words wed or wedding does not appear anywhere in the scriptures. The event in Cana was called a marriage. More on this in the “History of Marriage.” But for the record the Protestant requirement for a wedding ceremony was a good thing. But still not a biblical requirement.
Today a lot of modern translations lump all these sexual activities under the phrase sexual immorality. But back in the older translations they lumped all these Greek words for sinful sexual activities into the word fornication. But then they added another meaning to fornication….saying that if two single people have sex it is a sin. Which is false….as I have explained wedding ceremonies were not required until the mid 1500’s.
Now for the details on the languages, definitions, and history…..
noun
πορνεία
prostitution, whoring, harlotry, whoredom,
συνουσία
fornication, coition, intercourse, copulation
From the Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance
illicit sexual intercourse
adultery, fornication, homosexuality, lesbianism, intercourse with animals etc. sexual intercourse with close relatives; Lev. Sexual intercourse with a divorced man or woman; Mk. 10:11-12 The worship of idols of the defilement of idolatry, as incurred by eating the sacrifices offered to idols etc
But Fornication is not a translational error it is man-made word that made its way into the 15th through the 17th century English translations of the Bible, but still this word did not originate in these Bibles.
When the Greek text was translated into the Latin Vulgate, (circa 404 AD)
the word porneia and its variants were translated to the Latin word fornica which does not mean sex or prostitutes but rather where they would gather and wait for their customers. Then it was translated to the English word fornication and was used in the original Tyndale, Geneva, and King James Version of the Bible.
Like I said, part of the problem was that the New Testament was an attempt to write Christian moral standards using a Pagan language…ie the Greek language that did not have words that reflected Christian standards. The Greeks - Romans did not have the same moral standards that Christians had. For example; If you told a Roman solider that he sinned, it meant that his arrow missed the target….no moral implication. So the Christians writers were taking Greek words and adjusting them to have moral definitions. Why?
Well in this case, in the Greco-Roman culture various sexual activities were not considered immoral. It did not matter if it was temple prostitutes or orgies. Married Roman men were free to have sex with who they wanted …female or male. By Christian standards this was a disgusting arrangement. In the Roman culture adultery was not a sin, rather it was illegal to have sex with someone else’s wife. So Christian writers were tasked with conveying sexual morality to a culture that was without sexual morals and their language reflected the absence of the words to describe sexual immorality. Now was all this confusing to the translators of the scriptures, it is a matter of debate.
Like I said, Porneia in the Greek society is mostly a reference to prostitution which was not wrong in their culture. For example pornography, is an ancient Greek word that means writings or paintings of prostitutes and they where not even considered vulgar, many Roman homes had murals of sex acts and or prostitutes on their walls.
So then in the actual scriptures the Greek word Porneia and its variances appear several times. In all cases the Christian writers were using them to point out some form of sexual immorality.
Examples:
πορνείας·…
porneias … Sexual immorality
πορνείᾳ …
porneiai … Sexual immorality in the plural
πορνεῦσαι … To commit sexual immorality involving sexual acts
πορνείαν … Idolatry involving sexual acts
πόρνος … A person that practices sexual immorality
πόρνοι … Refering to as a group of the sexually immoral
πορνεῖαι … inflectional, more or less dirty thoughts
Appearing in these scriptures….
Matthew 5:32, 5:19, Mark 7:21, John 8:4, Acts 15:20, 5:29, 21:25, Romans 1:29* 1st Corinthians 5:1, 5:9, 5:10, 6:13, 6:18, 7:2, 10:8, 2nd Corinthians 12:21, Galatians 5:19, Ephesians 5:3, Colossians 3:5, 1st Thessalonians 4:3, Jude 1:7, Revelation 2:14, 2:14, 2:20, 2:21, 9:21, 14:8, 17:2, 17:4, 18:3, 18:19, 19:2
But in no case does sexual immorality simply apply to two unmarried people having sex, for a very good reason. The New Testament does not have a lot to say about romantic love. But to say that Porneia-fornication, is sex outside of wedlock would be inaccurate, since the Bible has no requirements for wedding ceremonies or vows. For most of our history marriages were formed by the union alone. In other words when a couple joined this consummated the marriage. And so it was for most of our known history …two unmarried people would have sex to be married.
Definitely not to say people…families did not celebrate a marriage….like the marriage at Cana. In fact the story of the marriage at Cana picks up at the reception. The Bible tells us nothing about the marriage, not even who was getting married or why it was important to Christ and His mother.
The evolution of the word Fornicate or Fornication
Fornicate comes from a Latin root word fornix, which means arch or vaulted ceiling. In Ancient Rome, it was known that prostitutes would wait for their customers out of the hot sun or rain in areas that had cover… vaulted ceilings. The Latin word fornix became a euphemism for brothels and the Latin verb fornicare referred to a man visiting a brothel. Meaning a man being serviced by prostitutes.
So then St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate translation of the scriptures used a variant of that….fornicatio and lumped all the Greek variances of porneia under that word. The first recorded use of the word fornicate in English is in the 14th century, in a poem called the Cursor Mundi.
The first English Bibles to use the word fornication was the Bishop’s Bible---Church of England 1568, the Catholic Bible called the Douay-Rheims Bible (early 1600’s) and then the Protestant Bibles followed suite examples; the Tyndale Bible Geneva Bible and the King James Version of the Bible, 16th and 17th centuries respectively.
Continued....
