So before Pentecost and the birth of the Christian Church, there was no marriage?
I guess not only was it not Adam and Steve, it wasn't even Adam and Eve.
Sorry, but the word "marriage" is not copy-written by Christians. The English language isn't even half as old as Christianity ... let alone any word therein. What an asinine position to take, that your religion has absolute control or ownership over a certain word.
And don't try to dig yourself out of this hole by saying you meant the concept of marriage rather than the word. The concept of marriage is not uniquely Christian. Non-Christians get married all the time, and have been doing so since long before Gabriel visited Mary, let alone before the Christian Church even started.
For THOUSANDS of years of human history, marriage -- the uniting of two people into a family unit -- has had nothing to do with religion. It was purely political. Until the middle ages, those of lower classes weren't even allowed to get married. After all, if there was no property, so what point was there to get married? And no one cared about adultery unless there was offspring. Men were not expected to remain faithful, it's just that any offspring conceived outside a properly blessed marriage "didn't count" because then the two families had not agreed on the exchange of property. It had nothing to do with purity or holiness, let alone with God.
It wasn't until recently in human history that Western Civilization has started to frame marriage in anything other than an exchange of property. The reason gays could not get married is because there would be no natural offspring from a homosexual pairing, and therefore no need for the relationship to be codified. There were gays. Heavens, yes, many famous figures throughout history were known for their homosexual and/or heterosexual philandering. It wasn't even a scandal. That's just the way it was. Sex wasn't reserved for marriage, and marriage wasn't necessarily reserved for sex. The couple was expected to have at least one male offspring, and that was it. The running assumption is that they wouldn't want to have sex (with each other) except to produce that one male offspring. Why would anyone want to spend intimate time with his or her spouse, when there are so many more exciting people out there to have sex with, just for fun?
THAT is what marriage was, originally.
We have most certainly redefined marriage in the last few decades. Interested in going back to the way it was? I didn't think so.
Interested in continuing to redefine it? Fine. Join us in the discussion of how we should define it, and we can talk.
But trying to claim some sort of "ownership" of the concept of marriage, as if it's always been some holy institution is either ignorant or an outright lie. Take your pick.
