Your entire argument collapses under one Greek word: porneía. It appears all throughout the New Testament and is consistently translated as “fornication” or “sexual immorality” — defined as any sexual activity outside of covenant marriage. Jesus uses it in Matthew 5:32, Paul in 1 Corinthians 6:18, and it’s one of the four foundational prohibitions for Gentile believers in Acts 15:20. You can’t erase that word or redefine it to fit your argument. Whether or not wedding ceremonies are cultural is irrelevant — what matters is covenant. Hebrews 13:4 is explicit: “Marriage is honorable in all, and the bed undefiled: but fornicators and adulterers God will judge.”
Fornication
This is a 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. The word fornication or is not in the scriptures nor is its definition. It is a scam that is a reflection of Christianity’s growing hatred of sex and women after the biblical period.
This stems indirectly from the Greek word porneia means prostitute or associated with 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 words and definitions to convey their thoughts. There are variances to the Greek word porneia that define various sexual activities…. all of which are in the scriptures and all of which Christianity considers sinful.
The false beliefs associated with the word fornication start 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 developed a requirement for weddings ceremonies and vows, and that is a fact.
Christianity has lumped a lot of Greek words for sex acts into the word Fornication as seen in some definitions of the word below, but the word does not appear in any scripture.
Some examples:
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. 18 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 16th and 17th century 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 pornia and its variants were translated to the Latin word fornicatio. Which is associated with prostitutes and arches.
Then translated into 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? 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, it was illegal to have sex with someone else’s wife. So Christian writers were tasked with conveying sexual morality from a culture that was without sexual morals and their language reflected the absence of 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 many Roman homes had murals of sex acts and or prostitutes on their walls.
But in the scriptures the Greek word Porneia and its variances appear several times. In all cases the Christian writers were using them as 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 it 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, is sex outside of wedlock would be inaccurate, since the Bible has no requirements for wedding ceremonies or vows. Marriages were formed by the union and most of the time in early Christianity a lady’s father would chose who they would marry, as was practiced in most Old Testament unions of marriages.
The evolution of the word Fornicate or Fornication
Fornicate comes from a Latin root word, the term fornix 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.
Of course 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 other Protestant Bibles followed suite examples; the Tyndale Bible Geneva Bible and the King James Version of the Bible, 16th and 17th centuries respectively.
So bottom line, marriages in the Bible were formed by the union. This is a biblical and historical fact. Even if the Hebrew families held a marriage celebration,
there was no Hebrew word for wed or wedding nor any biblically stated requirement for ceremonies or vows....just the Bridal Chamber where the couple consummated their marriage. Modern Jews still use a symbolic bridal chamber that is more of a canopy.
The fact that it is the union that forms a marriage still exists in civil laws. In most states and countries a couple that does not have sex after the wedding ceremony (consummate) can get their marriage annulled.
Fornication is a well known case study in how man-made terms and phrases that are false usually develop into false beliefs and skew the meaning of the scriptures and perceptions and as in this case can cause sin. The word fornication is one of the reasons why a lot of Christians believe that wedding ceremonies were required in the Old and New Testament.
For example; a man and a woman fall in love and have sex and then from there on remain together, from the biblical perceptive, they are married. But Christians, believing various false beliefs can condemn them because of what they think Fornication means…two people that have not had a wedding ceremony having sex and living together, ergo the term shacking up.
Then people believing they are “living in sin” may make the couple feel unwelcome in church and could turn them away from Christianity. Which are the only sins that occurred here. The sin of gossip, the sin of falsely accusing people of a sin, and the sin of turning them away Christianity. And then calling their children bastards.
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