On sexuality and the Bible On this website I have left out a note “Sex Adventures of
the Gurus” (Life
and Soul Magazine, Chipping Norton, UK, December 2001, p. 36) and also a
note in Swedish “Om Sai Baba” [“About Sai Baba”] (Sökaren, 1/2000, p. 15).
Both were written because of discussions in the resp. magazines about several
reports that Sai Baba would have devoted himself to homosexual and pedophile
activities with a number of devotees. Similar reports have surfaced about other
gurus. Instead of the two notes, I here want to write
my thoughts about sexuality and, especially, discuss the “Fall of Man” in the
Bible and human sexuality. At the end I have added a note about Mary Magdalene
and Jesus, for very actual reasons due to the DaVinci Code… But isn’t ’Elohim pluralis
majestatis? A hypothesis about the
trees in Eden A secret history of
Christianity and the Church? How come that sexuality has
become a subject of such a great attention in the context of religion and
faith? I suppose that it has to do with an age-old power game. Every normal
human being will at least sometimes have sexual feelings (even if he or she doesn’t
admit it), since these also have purely biological causes. If this is branded
as sinful, one has an instrument of control. Almost each and every human being
will then have at least potential (even if unconscious) feelings of shame and
guilt and is more easily manipulated by power-hungry institutions. The fake
morality of the church and declaring sex as sin have contributed to a perverse
situation in our society, which has begun to be overcome only in later decades.
It has caused much discord and suffering in marriages and families. Children
have been raised with prudery and prejudice and with that become “prepared” for
a marriage, which at least in the sexual sense couldn’t become very happy. And
if sexuality doesn’t work in a marriage, its happiness is incomplete, maybe
only apparent or pretended, or one has in resignation accepted something that
one didn’t know could be much better. Obvious symptoms for this is that in our
society advertisements and other things have such an effect through using at least
hidden (or even open) hints on sexuality, and even more the remarkable extent
of a manifold sex industry including even extreme forms of pornography. This
could never has become as “successful” as it actually is without profiting from
suppressed sexual needs in our society. Can all this really be conform with the
Bible? (Cf. this article.) Still much worse is all the daily appearance of
sexual violence and the horribly common abuse of children. There can be little
doubt that one of the factors in the background of this is sexual frustration in
a society with a double morality, which is not stated to excuse perpetrators in
any way, but only to indicate that the social symptomatology involved is much
more complex than we like to think and involves factors most of us don’t want to
see... I wish to state that I
am a Christian. I regard myself as a Gnostic Christian. But it is obvious that
the Churches’ version of “Christianity” differs from the true teachings of
Jesus and has become a dear instrument of power, which in many cases even has
become contradictory to Jesus’ teachings. One basic historic reason
for sexual suppression, bigotry and prudery on the whole will be related to
suppression of women in the society. In a patriarch society, men will have
wanted to be certain that their women wouldn’t bring a “cuckoo’s egg” into
their nest, i.e. a child of another man. An immature man cannot love a child
that isn’t his own, at least not if brought into the family in such a way (no
matter that it could never be the innocent child’s fault). Therefore, rules and
restrictions arouse in many societies designed to as far as possible prevent
that women would have undue contact with other men than their “owner” (actually
a more suitable word than “husband” in this context...). It even went so far
that a woman wasn’t supposed to enjoy sex, since then she might also be tempted
to enjoy it with another man. The extreme expression of this insanity is the so
called “female circumcision” (better: “castration”) of removing the clitoris of
young girls in certain primitive cultures, to make enjoying sex impossible for
them as women. And yet the clitoris was given them by God, since He created
them that way! If anything here is a sin, that certainly is one! Men in such
cultures don’t understand how they actually indirectly castrate themselves that
way, since they will never have much joy of sex with a woman who hates it...
One symptom of this is how interested they are in Western women... but usually
only for sex... Another reason may well be the suppression of a
divine principle in the human being. As Eastern tantrism teaches, and even
certain Gnostic Christian groups did, sexuality is related to a creative energy
in the human being that we have more or less hidden inside, since this is how
God created us. Through spiritual sexuality, this energy can awaken and the
human being reach an elevated spiritual state, a higher consciousness and
at the end even enlightenment. This is, of course, not acceptable to a power-oriented religion,
since awakened people will not participate in the power game. The sheep must
remain sheep and not emancipate themselves from the worldly powers of the
Church. Such a sexuality is an aspect of love, both human and divine
love. Sexuality without love will rather drag us further down in the darkness of
materialism. But when two persons join in love, things we are normally
not aware of happen on a subtle level. Not only do the bodies join, but also the
souls, and there is an exchange of subtle energies, which nurtures the souls of
both. This can eventually lead to a spiritual awakening. It is, however, clear
that sexuality in lovewill not automatically lead to a
spiritualization, but it will be the other way around. Who is already on a
spiritual path and practices loving sexuality can that way experience a
spiritual enhancement. From the Christian aspect, this is also a
situation in which Jesus’
words are valid: “For where two or three
are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” (Mat. 18.20)!
(So how could “three”
fit here? When applicable, the “third” would be a soul coming to incarnate, or a
soul already there –
in case the woman is pregnant.) The question if sexuality and the Bible has
achieved a special actuality because of the “DaVinci Code” story and
allegations that Jesus and Mary Magdalene would have been married and even had
a child together. That means that Jesus would have had sex! He and Mary
Magdalene would have lived together in sin! OR WOULD THEY?
Maybe there is something else behind the veils of the stir-up this has
caused... some far greater and deeper secret than the ordinary non-critical
Bible-reader would ever get in his or her mind... There is a lot to say about how sexuality is
connected with the Bible. But I will here stick to what is considered to be
fundamental in this respect, the so-called “Fall of Man”. First Eve, then Adam,
ate from the “tree of knowledge” and were, as a consequence, thrown out from But we first notice that
there are two stories of creation in the Bible. Genesis 1 states that
the gods – in Hebrew ’Elohim, which actually is the plural of ’Eloah, meaning
god – created humans in their image. Here the plural is obvious in the Bible:
“Let US make men in OUR image” (Gen. 1.26). They were created man and
woman, which means that also the woman was created in their image, and they
should reproduce well. So they should have sex with each other… I insist on using the
word ’Elohim literally, as it is written, i.e. in plural! More about this
below. The second creation of man
comes in Genesis 2. We here meet Jahveh ’Elohim – hence one of the gods, named
Jahveh – who first creates Adam and then Eve. He quite clearly makes his own
creation and he forbids Adam to eat from the “tree of knowledge”. This
prohibition is stated in Gen. 2.17, but Eve is not created before Gen. 2.22.
When the prohibition was given, Adam, therefore, didn’t have any possible
partner for sexuality! Not even animals had yet been created in It seems that such an
interpretation may be justified by the fact that the word “know”, which has to
do with knowledge, in the Bible also means “have intercourse with” (“And Adam
knew Eve his wife; and she conceived…”, Gen. 4.1). The word that is used in
this double sense is yada‘. But the “tree of knowledge” is not called
after yada‘. It is called ‘az ha-da‘at in the Hebrew text. Da‘at
is another word for knowledge, wisdom, which has no double meaning. It
cannot also mean intercourse. So here things don’t fit. The common translation
is (Gen. 2.17): “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (King James’
version), but the actual Hebrew words are merely “tree of the knowledge good
and evil” (no “of”), which can also be interpreted as “tree of the knowledge
for good and for evil”, i.e., a knowledge which can be used for the good or for
the evil. In an earlier version of the Swedish Bible this was the translation
used [1]. [One may comment that
priests and clerics have often used their knowledge for the evil of controlling
and manipulating people...] Another important detail
seems to have been overlooked during 2000 years. First Eve ate the fruit alone,
then she gave it to Adam, and he ate it alone. How could that have to do with
sexuality? In that case they would have “eaten the fruit” together. And
it could be expected (even if not necessarily) that Eve would get pregnant at
that moment, but she didn’t before Gen. 4.1. It is then told that,
through eating the fruit, their eyes opened and they saw what they shouldn’t see.
Among other things, they saw that they were “naked”, which they should
obviously not have seen. The gods said (again in plural in the Bible) “Behold,
the man is become as one of US, to know good and evil” (Gen. 3.22). They
obviously acquired some kind of wisdom this way! How can one acquire that from
once having sexual intercourse? If that were so, human beings would be the
wisest in the creation… Adam and Eve were then
sent out from It is obvious that
“eating from the tree of knowledge” can have nothing to do with sexuality. This
fits “neither in the front nor in the back”, as the Germans say. The fruit of
that tree must be something else, but what? It is interesting to note that the “tree of
life” in the Hebrew text is actually called “tree of [the] lives”, ‘az
ha-chayiym, since chayiym is the plural of chai = “life” (ha
= “the”).
SUMMARY The first sentence in the Bible reads, in the
common translation: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth”.
The Hebrew word here translated as God is ’Elohim. It is a linguistic fact that
no-one can deny that the word is plural and literally means “gods”. One has,
therefore, wanted to explain this as pluralis majestatis. This doesn’t
seem to be something common in Hebrew. It rather looks like an excuse for
sweeping a painful question under the carpet… In Hebrew, the sentence
reads: Bere’shiyt bara’ ’Elohim ’et ha shamayim ve-’et ha ’arez. Some
want to translate like this: “In the beginning the gods created the heaven and
the earth”, but this doesn’t fit, because the verb bara’ = “create” is
in singular. Furthermore, the word for “heaven”, shamay, is also in
plural: Shamayim. But there is a solution of the problem. According to cabbalistic
sources the word bere’shiyt doesn’t only mean “beginning”, but it can
also mean “the first one”, the first entity that ever was, the highest God. The
little word ’et can be regarded as an accusative particle, but can also
be translated as “with” (in ve-’et, ve means “and”, hence “and
with”). We now arrive at the following translation, which fits grammatically:
“The First One created the gods [together] with the heavens and with the
earth”. This translation then talks about an original creator, who first
created “gods” and cosmic worlds, one of which is the earth. According to Gen.
2, Jahveh would be one of these gods, the ’Elohim. The ’Elohim are by many
regarded as gods of creation, who in their turn created other beings – men,
animals and plants, like Jahveh did. The conventional and
“dogmatically approved” translation of bere’shiyt is based on be
= “in, at” and re’shiyt = “beginning”. But according to dictionaries
(such as Gesenius’ Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon) re’shiyt also
means “the first (of its kind)” and be can also mean a reference to the
“origin”. Thus bere’shiyt can also be understood as a
somewhat tautological expression meaning “the original first one” (or “the very
first one”). A cabbalistic interpretation is that of a combination of beyt
= “house, abode” and the word re’sh = “the highest one, the Lord”,
placed inside beyt (between be and yt). This is said to
mean “the Lord in His abode”. But there are more
noticeable things in the sentence. If one still wants to translate as “in ...
beginning” it should be “in A beginning” and not “in THE beginning” (which
would have to be bare’shiyt – a contraction of be-ha-re’shiyt
– and not bere’shiyt). That may seem to make little difference,
but it is actually stated in an undetermined sense, almost as if there had been
more than one beginning (i.e., “in one of the beginnings”). Or it could be a
genitive, like “in the beginning of” God’s creation. This, too, seems to make
little difference, but the verb “create” would then have to be in another
grammatical form [1]. Such little inconsistencies again disappear if we accept
the cabbalistic suggestion that bere’shiyt could be understood to mean
“the first one”. In the course of the 19th century, one managed to decipher the
clay plates with cuneiform writing found in In Enûma elish it
is described how a number of gods fought wars in cosmic worlds, and how thereby
the earth was formed. They then created human beings on earth. Other clay plates
describe that the first attempts failed. But then the experiments were
successful and man was created. Created to serve the gods. [2] These gods had revolted
against the highest god, the original creator Apsû. He had, together with his
consort, the original mother and goddess Tiâmat, created the first gods, who
turned away from them and then made their own creations. Apsû and Tiâmat are
“painted in black” and described as evil. But it would certainly be very
remarkable if the original creator couple would be evil! This must be seen in
connection with the revolt of the created gods against them, striving for
independence. Don’t we here see a more
original version of the “Fall of Man (Gods)”? Isn’t actually the revolt against
Apsû and Tiâmat – who are clearly described as the first entities, which ever
were – the real “Fall”? Apsû and Tiâmat may, by the way, be regarded as the
male and female side of the original creator. Then the gods they created
established religions on earth to make man believe that they would be
the original creators, and especially one of them. In the
Jewish-Christian religion, this one is called Jahveh. Another painful fact for
theology is that research into the history of religions has in the later
decades clearly revealed that the original Hebrew religion wasn’t monotheistic,
but began to be so in the Egyptian exile [3]. In the beginning, there were
several gods and goddesses. The highest god is there called ’El ‘Eliyon. One of
his sons is Jahveh, who has a consort, the goddess ’Asherah. In
monotheistic-patriarch attempts ’Asherah was later “forbidden” in the religion.
Later books of the Bible state that it would be forbidden to plant a tree at
Jahveh’s altar (Deut. 16,21, where the Hebrew text has ’asherah).
’Asherah’s symbol is a tree. The word ’asherah occurs more than 40 times
in the Bible, but is commonly translated as “tree” or “grove”. Hence, it became
forbidden to put up an image or a symbol of ’Asherah at the altar of Jahveh.
(It is remarkable that the word ’asherah appears in the Bible both as
male and as female: When it is in the male form, it obviously refers to the
symbol of the goddess, when it is female to the goddess herself.) There
have been astonishingly few attempts to seek an explanation of what the trees
in In order to find an
interpretation, which makes more sense I searched several Hebrew dictionaries.
The word ‘az is commonly translated as “tree” or “wood”. Only few
dictionaries also mention the translation as “branch”. This stroke my mind. A
branch is actually a tree branch, but the word can also be used for a branching
of a path or road. Could the two trees have to do with two possible paths of
life? Interestingly, one
dictionary mentions that ‘az is etymologically related to the Greek word
ozos, which means “branch”. But only few Hebrew dictionaries directly
state “branch” as an alternative translation. If we now adopt that
meaning of the word, one may establish the following hypothesis. To “eat from
the tree of life” would then mean a life path, one branch of two possible life
paths, which involves living out of intuition, feeling and emotion, out of “the
heart”. The path of the life-giving soul. To “eat from the tree of knowledge”
would then mean to walk another life path on which we live out of our rational
mind and the ego, suppressing the soul-self to become an unconscious self. The
path of the cold ratio. This is, of course, speculative but definitely makes
more sense than the “sexual” misinterpretation of the “tree of knowledge”. (It has been suggested
that “eating from the tree of life” would be living from spiritual food, or
rather energies, an “eating from the tree of knowledge” would be living from
physical food. It seems difficult to find a logical association of the latter
to “knowledge”, and if we were supposed to live from spiritual energies, why
were we created with a digestive system?) First there is the
allegation that Mary Magdalene would have been a prostitute. There is nothing
in the Bible that gives evidence that she and the prostitute mentioned in Luke
7.36-50 would be the same person. The first who claimed that they would be the
same, apparently in an effort to discredit Mary Magdalene, was the pope Gregor
I in 591. In 1969 the Church at the Second Vatican Council declared this to be
a mistake and withdrew from such a linkage. The
same person or not: Note that Jesus forgave the prostitute. How can we
then want to be so hypocritical that we would then condemn a person He forgave?
But this a side issue, since they will not be the same person. Since
God (or the gods...) created us man and woman and gave us sexual organs it is
obvious that sexuality is God-given and actually divine. It can, of course, be
abused (almost anything can be abused). But there can be no abuse in enjoying
it – why should otherwise God have given the woman a clitoris? She doesn’t
necessarily need it (its only purpose seems to be to enable the orgasm) since
she could become pregnant without enjoying sex, but the man would hardly make a
woman pregnant without enjoying it. Obviously, God wants us to enjoy the sexual
union. That is not an abuse. The greatest abuse is, however, when one of the
two is forced to participate in it against her or his will. True sex is an act
of love, a union in love. Sex only for joy alone is not really what it should
be, but if both participate voluntarily and no one is forced to, what can be
wrong with it then? What harm would that cause? Of course, sex could become an
addiction. Then, again, it becomes wrong or abusive. But the sexual union in mutual
love can never be wrong. Love is the criterion and the key! So
why should we want to “castrate” Jesus and expect Him to behave like a eunuch?
What would be lost to Christianity if He would have been married? Nothing!
There is the idea that the marriage in Kana (John 2.1-11) was actually his own
marriage to Mary Magdalene. There is no contradiction to that in the Bible, but
this remains a possible interpretation. And if we allow for that possibility,
why should they not have had children? There are indications in
just a few apocryphal texts that Mary Magdalene and Jesus would have been a
couple. One of them is the Gospel of Philippus. Theologians date this Gospel to the
later first or early second century and claim that it, therefore, must be
invented, since it was written too late. This only proves one thing: That the
oldest manuscript we still have could be dated to around the year 200, that is:
The paper (or rather papyrus) on which it is written. It doesn’t
disprove that the information in it could be much older – either handed
down in an oral tradition, or contained in still earlier texts, which have been
lost. Manuscript dating offers no proof that the contents in itself is wrong. Tradition
has it that Mary Magdalene, her and Jesus’ daughter and a few others had
escaped from Israel in a boat or small ship and after a long journey gone
ashore in the Camargue in Southern France, where to day a town is named after
them: Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer
(see “History” > The Provençal Legend on the webpage). Or maybe
Mary Magdalene was still pregnant when they arrived. This would then be the
beginning of a Jesus blood line in As
I have discussed in my book Reincarnation,
Christianity and the Dogma of the Church the liturgy of the Church
doesn’t have one single prayer that Christ should soon return! It looks like
the Church doesn’t want him to return, since that would be the end of its
power. It would have to hand over the power to Him and be scolded by Him for
all the wrong it has done. “We enjoy the power, Christ can wait”… So
if there actually is a blood-line of genes, which originated from Jesus, the
Church would probably want to extinguish it! In
the South of France there was a big and important Christian community, the
Cathars. Their view of the world differed a lot from the one of the Church, and
they even taught reincarnation. They strictly adhered to Jesus’ teachings. For
example, they took His words “Thoult shalt not kill” so literally, that they
were vegetarians. In the 13th century they were completely eradicated in a genocide
organized by the Church, a holocaust against the Cathars. The motivation was
that they would have been “heretics”. But why such a complete genocide against
them, to a much larger extent than against any other “heretics”? Could a secret
motivation be that one actually wanted to eradicate a Jesus blood-line, which could
be supposed to exist among the Cathars? Wouldn’t
it be a very clever strategy if Jesus, who was killed by adversaries, secretly
left a blood-line they couldn’t really fight? Like his parents escaped Herod’s
child-slaughtering through going to The
extraordinarily complete holocaust against the Cathars (no Cathar was left to
survive – not even a child, a woman nor an old man), under the excuse of “heresy”
– one such “heresy” being their belief in reincarnation! – to me seems to
rather confirm such ideas of a secret Jesus blood-line in a part of humanity,
since this could make much sense to the perpetrators as a secret motivation…
and there is much hope that the attempt to eradicate His blood-line wasn’t 100
% effective… that yet some of it survived and is here still to day… and that
the future will show what good will come out of it… As concerns
sexuality, it has been claimed that the Cathars were against it. It isn’t
that simple as it has been put by some who advocate abstinence. The Cathars
taught reincarnation and that this world is on the dark side of a duality. Our
aim should be to no more have to be in this world. Sexuality brings forth new bodies
for souls to reincarnate in, and the real idea behind their attitude to
sexuality is that we should give souls less opportunities to reincarnate in this
world! A secret history of
Christianity and the Church? In view of the developments
as they have actually been throughout 2000 years, the following hypothesis
seems probable or at least possible. Negative powers were
largely in control of humanity 2000 years ago. Then Jesus came and began
to teach a new spirituality, a new religious view, which slowly revealed
information about such a negative control of humanity and showed a way to
freedom. The negative powers were very disturbed about this and, manipulating
the high priest Kaiphas, succeeded in having Jesus killed. Their hope was that
after that the movement he had started would slowly dissolve and disappear. But
the contrary occurred. The movement grew stronger. The death of Jesus
effectively became a sacrifice that gave much more power to that movement. So the
negative powers developed a clever strategy. They wanted to change Christianity
to serve their own interest. First, they infiltrated the early Christianity,
using Paul – a person who had never known Jesus and had started as a persecutor
of Christians – as a probably more or less unconscious instrument for reshaping
Christianity to a new form. Paulinian Christianity gradually took power over
Christian Gnosticism. Through the emperor Constantine, the power of the
Paulinian (pseudo-)Christianity was established as a Church. The more original
Gnostic Christianity became declared as heresy. A Church that with brute power
cracked down on opponents and competitive movements through murderous crusades,
inquisition, burning of “witches”, promoting wars, etc., and so on, and so
forth…, in actions which ran contrary to Jesus’ teachings! The negative powers
had succeeded in their strategy… and these powers still rule much of humanity… In view of this
hypothetical “secret history”, the above discussion of a possible connection
between the holocaust against the Cathars and a possible bloodline of Jesus
makes still more sense… As a further hypothesis we may, in the view of
this, assume that the form of Christianity, which was the nearest to the
original teachings of Jesus, was the mainstream of the Gnostic Christianity. It
was at least not later than the Paulinian Christianity and it arose nearly 300
years earlier than the Dogma of the Church, which was founded at the Council of
Nicaea in 325. The Cathar version of Gnostic Christianity might have been the
most real Christianity we have ever had... The world view of Gnostic
Christianity, which taught reincarnation, fits best to phenomena like
spontaneous memories of past lives and regression experiences.
See the recently published article
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/biblianazar/esp_biblianazar_50.htm
Spotless conception?
Mary is said to have received Jesus through a
“spotless conception” through the Holy Spirit. However, the Bible testifies that
Jesus had brothers – see Acts 1,14:
“These all continued with one accord in prayer and
supplication, with the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his
brethren”
and Gal 1,19: “But other of the apostles saw I none, save James the Lord's
brother”! Hence she obviously also had “spotted conceptions” ... How can a
derailed theology consider a normal conception as “spotted”? Mary obviously had
sex several times and conceived these brothers, and yet she is considered to be
“pure and spotless”. This must then be valid as well for all women who conceive
in love! Two Christs? Maybe there are two Christs. The
real one, who appeared to us incarnated as Jesus, and a Pseudo-Christ created by
the Dogma, who should serve the politics of a profanized Church. The New book by
the Pope: Jesus of Nazareth, who as he began to write it may still have
been Joseph Ratzinger, denies as expected a relationship between Mary Magdalene
and Jesus. This will also be true –
in relation to the second Jesus, the one created by the Dogma, and maybe only
for him... “You see better with the
heart. The essential is invisible to the eyes.” Antoine de
Saint-Exupéry: The Little Prince, Chapter XXI References:
1.
Åke Lundqvist: Vildåsnans
törst, Albert Bonniers, Falun, 2006 (a Swedish book about the Hebrew
Bible).
2.
Alexander Heidel:
The
Babylonian Genesis,
3. Ein Gott Allein?, lectures at a Colloquium ed. by Walter
Dietrich and Martin A. Klopfenstein, Universitätsverlag, Freiburg ( [Note:
In transliteration from Hebrew ’ is used as a notation for the letter ’aleph
and ‘ as a notation for the letter ‘ayin. Furthermore the
transliteration is done according to the letters in the corresponding
Hebrew word and not, as otherwise common, quite phonetically. Therefore, e.g.: bere’shiyt
and not bere’shīt with a long “i”, i.e. “ee”, since the word in
Hebrew writing actually has the combination “iy”, i.e. a vowel “i” assigned to
the previous letter followed by the consonant “y” as a sign for the prolongation
of the “i” sound.] Appendix One strange and quite naïve website touching
this subject is “Ambrosian!”,
which advocates: Yet the author (who simply calls himself
“Ambrosian!” and has no impressum on his webpage, hiding in anonymity) also
states this about masturbation as an answer to a question in his “Guestbook I”: He, furthermore, advocates “technological
procreation”, from his “Guest Book II”: How far can you get from God’s creation? Replace it with a luciferian way?
Produce zombies, biorobots, instead of real humans? This would fit as a motive for a
science-fiction horror movie... such as “Invasion of the Artificial Freaks”... To me, this appears
symptomatic of a person having serious sexual inhibitions as a result of some
past traumatization, or of being brought up in an atmosphere of sexual bigotry,
in which sex was branded as being dirty and sinful... In any case the quoted
ideas don’t make real sense together. He wants to explain the Tree of Knowledge as
follows (see here): “The
Bible uses the phrase ‘Be fruitful and multiply’ numerous times. ... To be
‘fruitful’ means to be productive ... and have children. The bible uses
‘fruitful’ in this context to mean ‘have sex.’ Can it have a similar meaning
when referring to the ‘forbidden fruit’ of the tree of knowledge? It can
clearly be inferred to have the same meaning. So we can agree at this time that
eating the ‘forbidden fruit’ from the tree of knowledge was in fact the sexual
act.” We can hardly agree, this is a way of twisting things
to make them fit... The Bible in Genesis 1 uses a word that has in
English been translated as “be fruitful”. The Hebrew word is phru, which
actually means “flourish”, i.e. to thrive, to prosper, and doesn’t have any
direct relation to “fruit”. It seems to fit in the translation, but not
really in the original text. It would furthermore be strange that Genesis
1 would demand from us to have sex while Genesis 2 would forbid it... if
this interpretation were true... Now I hope that not someone will suggest that “phru
sounds like fruit”. That would be an amateurish “etymology”, an unscientific
lack of linguistic understanding. Then we could also (by the same logic) claim
that “six” sounds like “sex”, and that children shouldn’t use that word, but be
taught to count: one, two, three, four, five, bad, seven, eight... Another organization which advocates what one
might call “mental castration” is Celibrate. They mostly refer to Paul, who devaluated women in
a way Jesus never did. They also quote some verses in which Jesus seems to
teach celibacy, but leave those out in which he does not, such as Mathew
19.4-8. As a comment to Matthew 19.10-12 they claim: “some are made that way [‘eunuchs’] by men (renounce sex
due to bad or traumatic experiences, or due to the lurid way in which sex is
portrayed in present day society)”. The remark in parenthesis refers to a pathological
condition of being traumatized by a bad experience and the “lurid way”
certainly would include bigotry in the education and upbringing of children...
We were not created “eunuchs”, but some became such due to whatever
circumstances. Of course, everyone is free and justified in
making his or her own choice. Jesus’ words
clearly indicate that we should respect the person’s
choice, but hardly more than that. However, it seems that they are not few who
are mislead in the motivation... In the case of a traumatization in the past,
this is a condition that can be healed so that a fulfilled partnership becomes
possible (if a partnership relation is something the person wants and he or she
doesn’t prefer to be single, which is in that
a case also a choice to be respected).
Sexuality and the Bible
But isn’t ’Elohim pluralis majestatis?
Babylonian sources
A hypothesis about the trees in Eden
Mary Magdalene and Jesus
A: To each his own. It’s simply fulfilling a physical need and most people
choose sex but some choose to take care of this need themselves. It’s a
natural and healthy act if done moderately so don’t feel like you’re doing
something wrong. Ambrosian!
A: Artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, they are working on an
artificial womb but are far from perfecting it.