Another General Synod starts tomorrow. My bag is packed, which is just as well as I have to give a talk on Street Pastors and a report to Deanery Synod before I leave. I think I am on top of all the papers – even those which only arrived yesterday – and I feel for those who are in full-time work and have to juggle all this.

One set of papers which arrived yesterday was the list of answers to the Questions submitted, available here. I see that issues around Bible translation are still being raised. Is this in the vain hope that they are suddenly going to change people’s minds in our discussions of sexuality? I rather think that ship has sailed. 

The first example is Question 37 from Mrs Rebecca Cowburn (Ely), addressed to the Chair of the House of Bishops but being answered by the one remaining LLF Lead Bishop, Bishop Martyn Snow. This is about translating ancient Greek. She asks: 

Q.37 What steps, if any, has the House of Bishops taken to consider the findings of the research undertaken by the Revd Andrew Cornes, as outlined in his speech to General Synod in February 2023 (Report of Proceedings 2023 – General Synod February Group of Sessions, pp 161-162) and their application to the ongoing work of the House of Bishops on Living in Love and Faith and, in particular, the conclusion drawn from his findings that, to quote (page 162, para 4), “When Jesus used the word translated as porneia, all Jesus’s hearers would have assumed that he included homosexual sex”?  

This refers to Andrew Cornes saying in his speech to Synod that he had been researching for a book on this for the past seven years; it doesn’t seem to have been published yet, and an online search just revealed a quoted ‘personal communication’ making the same claim, in a book by one of his friends. The passage to which he was referring is the list of sinful thoughts that come out of the heart, in Matthew 15:19.

The answer offered by Bishop Martyn is: 

Research by a whole range of scholars was considered extensively in the first phase of the Living in Love and Faith project, by both the Biblical Studies Group and by the History Group. There is no settled and definitive judgement on whether Andrew Cornes’ view is right, and the exact meaning of porneia and what it includes continues to be disputed and is commonly translated with the generic term ‘sexual immorality’. You can find reference to this in the LLF book p. 247.

Before going any further, it made me very happy to see that a point I made to Bishop Martyn and others at a meeting – that we have the LLF resources but we sometimes seem to forget they exist – has been taken on board! 

However, the question seems to be eliding two things: what Jesus said – what was then translated into Greek as porneia – and what porneia itself means. And the answer doesn’t really address the question.

A related issue comes up in one other Question, Q89 from Mr Luke Appleton (Exeter), asking the Chair of the Faith and Order Commission:

Q.89 What is the Church of England’s current definition of fornication?  

People don’t ask little questions like that unless there is a whole lot going on behind them. I’d be rather tempted to say that most of us currently don’t use the word, but the response from the Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe is instead:

The Church of England does not keep a formal list of definition of terms. The LLF book and resources explore in detail the passages where we find the term as a translation for the original Greek word (pp. 137; 141; 246-252; 283-294. The LLF hub has additional detail on historical understandings of sexual immorality.

The LLF book gets another reference! Celebration time! 

Let’s have a look at those references, though. ‘Fornication’ isn’t in the index to the LLF book but searching pdfs clearly helped whoever composed this answer. P.137 isn’t particularly relevant. P.141 is a reference to the Higton motion of 1987. 

Pp.283-94 is the LLF book’s section on the ‘clobber texts’, including 1 Corinthians 6.9-11 which in many translations has ‘fornicators’ (Greek pornoi) alongside thieves, the greedy, and drunkards – funnily enough, they don’t seem to turn up in Questions, and the same is true of the opening section of 1 Corinthians 6 on taking fellow-Christians to the civil courts. 

But the LLF commentary on this and other ‘clobber texts’ instead focuses on two more groups in this list of those who won’t inherit the Kingdom: the malakoi (literally ‘soft’) and arsenokoitai (literally ‘male-bedders’, a word found nowhere else but echoing ‘men who lie with men’ in Leviticus 18.22), translated in the NRSV as ‘male prostitutes’ and ‘sodomites’. It doesn’t take much work to find out that there are many different understandings of both the Old and New Testament references in their different cultural contexts. But the arrangement of the list of non-inheritors suggests that ‘fornicators’/pornoi are one group, and malakoi and arsenokoitai are other groups (whatever the words mean), rather than those two being sub-categories of fornicator.

This is, of course, Paul not Jesus, so it doesn’t help when considering what Jesus would have included under whatever word ended up being translated as porneia.

For that, and for Andrew Cornes’ original claim, we can turn in the LLF book to pp.246-52, the section on ‘Jesus’ teaching on marriage’ which includes “The term porneia covers a range of sexually immoral practices but can refer more specifically to prostitution, fornication, unchastity, forbidden marriages and, metaphorically, to worshipping any but the one true God”. The passage in question is Matthew 15:19 (Mark 7.22).

Picking up that important point about metaphorical usage, I suggest that those who want to understand the term should refer to Kathy L. Gaca, The Making of Fornication: Eros, ethics and political reform in Greek philosophy and early Christianity (University of California Press, 2003), on ‘what constituted immoral sexual behaviour from an early Christian perspective, what shaped its irregularity, and why fornication had a lurid glow’ (p.19). This is a highly important book, hailed by the classicist Amy Richlin as being ‘among the dozen most important books on the history of sexuality in the ancient Mediterranean’.

On p. 20 Gaca writes:

porneia in the biblical sense of ‘fornication’ should not be confused with porneia in the non-biblical sense. Biblical porneia refers to acts of sexual intercourse and reproduction that deviate from the norm of worshipping God alone. Porneia as ‘fornication’ requires Biblical monotheism to be intelligible as a sexual rule, insofar as sexual intercourse and procreation are fornicating, and forbidden, by virtue of not being dedicated to the Lord alone.’ In the non-Biblical sense, porneia would be ‘prostitution’.

I can’t compress such a rich study into a blog post, but a key point is that she identifies the position that marriage and making love exist only for reproduction as a Pythagorean approach, not the general view of ancient Mediterranean societies. For her, fornication is specifically heterosexual: ‘men and women engaging in sexual intercourse outside of God’s ordinance system’ (124). This would include heterosexual married sex with a polytheistic spouse (158).

So, if I were answering Synod Questions:

Q.37: While the House of Bishops awaits the eventual publication of the research of Revd Andrew Cornes, it is aware of far more research on the meaning of porneia, including that of Professor Kathy Gaca on the importance of distinguishing between Biblical and non-Biblical uses of the word.

Q.89: The word ‘fornication’ is not in common use today, and users should be aware that in its original Biblical context porneia/‘fornication’ was about heterosexual, not same-sex, activity.