1963 Difficult text/hard saying

What? know ye not that he which is joined to an harlot is one body? for two, saith he, shall be one flesh. (1 Cor. 6.16)

It may be that we make this text a hard one by trying to find a logical interpretation in what may have been an illogical aside. Even so, we may properly inquire by what process St Paul’s mind was led to throw in this aside – if such it was – as he wrote. Inevitably we bring to such an inquiry certain presuppositions or assumptions; and it is the present writer’s contention that the assumptions brought to the interpretation of this text in the last two or three decades are erroneous in themselves, and so have confused our understanding of it.

The phrase ‘one flesh’ is now widely applied to marriage and only to marriage, i.e. to no other set of relationships. It is assumed further that marriage is described as a ‘one flesh’ relationship because of the ‘fleshly’, that is the sexual, element in it. It is argued next that the ‘one flesh’ relationship is constituted by the sexual union. It is argued further by some that even sexual intercourse with a harlot constitutes a ‘one flesh’ union with her, and 1 Cor. 6.16 is quoted in support.

These assumptions must be called in question and so the argument based on them must be re-examined.

The phrase ‘one flesh’ in the Bible must be interpreted in the light of current Semitic usage. (See T. W. Manson, Ethics and the Gospel, p. 16; and, as examples of OT use of the term, Judges 9.2, Sam. 5.1.) It meant to the Jew very much what being ‘one body’ with Christ means to the Christian, namely membership of a kinship group bound together by the strongest sense of mutual obligation. It is this similarity – ‘one flesh’ and ‘one body’ – which enabled St Paul to pass so easily from one to the other in Eph. 5.30–32; and which enabled his early copyist to gloss the words ‘we are members of (Christ’s) body’ in verse 30 with ‘of his flesh and of his bones’ (as in AV).

The Bible applies the phrase ‘one flesh’ to marriage in this sense: a man leaves the kinship group of his father and mother (with whom he was of ‘one flesh’) and enters into a covenant with (‘cleaves to’) his wife, so creating another such group, within which the same mutual obligations will obtain. This covenant–marriage is a ready-made model for teaching in symbol the covenant–marriage of Yahweh with Israel, and of Christ with the Church. The pagan world was full of stories of the gods becoming bound to humans by having sexual intercourse with them: the Bible stories are not among them. The phrase ‘one flesh’, as used in the Bible, does not carry the sexual overtones now imposed upon it. It is more like the English common law concept of ‘one person’ to describe the man–wife solidarity.

Christian theology has always held the view that sexual intercourse is secondary, both in time and in significance, in the contracting of marriage. In the words of Ulpian, nuptias non concubitus sed consensus facit; and this is true of non-Christian societies also. (In those African traditions which tolerate degrees of sexual freedom before marriage, no ‘marriage’ arises from the intercourse, but only from the exchange of consents by the parties and their families.) It is true in Christendom that an unconsummated marriage has always been, in some circumstances, voidable, when a consummated marriage was not: but the phrasing in the Latin documents makes the order clear: it is always carnali copula subsequente, or subsecuta, i.e. following on the exchange of consent, per verba de praesenti, by which the marriage was ratum, contractum et solemnizatum. (To draw attention to these facts, for facts they are, is in no sense to derogate from the goodness or value of sexual intercourse per se.)

If Christian theology has really accepted that union with a harlot creates a ‘one flesh’ union with her, it is singular that this has not been reflected in the rules for the discipline of marriage. The existence of such a union, or ligamen, would create an impediment to further marriage while the prostitute lived – a position which, so far as I know, the Church has never held. Union with a prostitute is as relevant and irrelevant to subsequent marriage as other acts of fornication are, according to traditional Christian practice.

If, therefore, we approach 1 Cor. 6.16 from the tradition of Christian theology and practice, and not from the novel assumptions outlined above, the text invites a very different interpretation.

Observe that it comes in an Epistle where the dominant symbols are the Temple and the Body; the Christian Church is both, the Temple of God, indwelt by the Spirit of God (3.10ff., 16f.), and the Body of Christ with its several members (6.15 and chapters 12f.); Christians are both living stones and members of the Body and, in both capacities, partakers of the indwelling Spirit. Both symbols, be it observed, are of corporateness, of incorporation into a community; and the incorporation, we know, had its visible signs, Baptism and the Supper of the Lord.

The recurring theme of the Epistle is the question whether those who have ‘communion in the body of Christ’ can have communion also with idols or devils, this too with its visible signs (1 Cor. 10.14f.). This underlies the controversy over eating meat, slain sacrificially in the shambles attached to a pagan temple; it underlies also the reference to the harlot, who was not a modern call-girl or street-walker but a temple prostitute. Throughout the Old Testament, partaking in idolatrous practices is condemned under the imagery of harlotry and fornication; and an echo of it is brought right into this epistle in the reference to Aaron’s idolatrous orgy, when the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play, and ‘committed fornication’, and fell in one day three and twenty thousand (1 Cor. 10.7f.; Exodus 32). Eating in the temple courts and lying with a temple prostitute were both, in the heathen world, having ‘communion with devils’, as the Christian would say (1 Cor. 10.18ff.). St Paul was able to establish the spiritual neutrality of the first, but not that of the second, because of the different ethical quality of the act; but that is the context in which 1 Cor. 6.16 has to be considered …

To argue thus is in no way to minimize the seriousness of the sin involved in union with a prostitute, nor of the spiritual, moral, emotional, social and perhaps physical harm resulting from such a union. It is only to argue that the text has no direct relevance to the Christian understanding of marriage. And, indeed, can we really suppose that St Paul of all men could have used such a relationship ‘to signify unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church’?

The article originally appeared in Theology 66 (522): 491–3. The full text can be found at <https://doi.org/10.1177/0040571X6306652203>.