Lawmakers in more than a dozen states have introduced resolutions asking the Supreme Court to send marriage back to the states, and the pitch is always the same one: that one-man-one-woman marriage has been the unbroken, self-evident norm across all of human history until courts got involved.The problem is... that isn't true. Evidence has been unearthed of a much longer history of same-sex unions across the faith spectrum. The "tradition" being defended in courts right now turns out to be a lot newer, and a lot less universal, than its defenders are counting on.
Were There Gay Marriages in the Catholic Church?
Historian John Boswell spent the last years of his life hunting through Greek and Latin church manuscripts for references to a forgotten rite called adelphopoiesis, literally "brother-making." What he discovered will shock you. In Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, published the same year he died, Boswell argues that this rite was essentially akin to a wedding between men, blessed by priests in both the Orthodox and Catholic churches for over a thousand years.
And don't be mistaken, this was far more than a gesture of friendship. Surviving copies of the liturgy explain that during the ceremony the two men placed their right hands on the Gospel book (a traditional volume including the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) while holding lit candles, then a priest blessed them with incense and prayed for their "unashamed fidelity" and "sincere love." This same language was borrowed almost word for word from wedding rites of the same era.
The ceremony also invoked the story of two Roman soldiers, Sergius and Bacchus, as the model pair to imitate. Sergius and Bacchus were so devoted to one another that ancient writers used the word erastai (lovers) to describe them. When it was discovered that the two men were secretly Christian in a still-pagan Rome, they were forced to wear women's clothing and march through the streets before they were executed. Now considered martyrs, depictions of the couple still appear in churches across Europe.
The "brother-making" ceremony ended with the two men kissing the Gospel, the priest, and each other.
The earliest surviving manuscripts of the rite date to the 8th–9th century. The Catholic Church stopped performing it by around the 14th century. Formal prohibitions started entering Byzantine/Orthodox canon law (the Kormchaia Book and Nomocanon) after the 13th century, apparently because church authorities worried the rite was being misused. Despite that, priests in Serbia and Montenegro kept performing it anyway, and it survived on the ground in the Balkans into the early 20th century.
Boswell's discoveries landed like an atomic bomb within Christianity. Supportive clergy around the world cited it from the pulpit, while furious critics accused him of reading a modern love story into old paperwork.
Who Were The Couples Behind The Ritual?
And Sergius and Bacchus weren't the only reported same-sex couple of their era. Another little-known story involves Basil I, before he became a Byzantine emperor. As a young man, Basil came to Constantinople completely broke and effectively homeless, carrying little beyond his own good looks. A cleric named Nicholas found him, took him in, and the two were also joined in a church ceremony, after which contemporary sources describe them living together as companions.
Basil eventually went on to seize the throne through a fairly ruthless murder plot, so make of his early piety what you will. But the detail that a future emperor's origin story includes being taken off the street by a man he was then formally bonded to in church is a crucial part of his story that often gets left out.
Does The Bible Point To Any Of This?
Boswell also pointed to the Old Testament, noting that intense same-gender love stories "figure prominently" there, citing the relationships described between David and Jonathan and Ruth and Naomi. Critics pounced on this claim specifically, pointing out that Boswell offered it almost as an aside, without much argument to back it up.
However, the text itself is genuinely striking. In First Samuel, the Bible explicitly says that Jonathan's soul was "knit" to David's, and after Jonathan's death David mourns that his friend's love for him had surpassed the love of women. And then there is Ruth's vow to Naomi:
"But Ruth replied, “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God." (Ruth 1:16 NIV)
Sound familiar? You may recognize it because those words, a vow made between two women, are still read at weddings to this day, even weddings between heterosexual couples.
Why Do Historians Still Argue About It?
Unsurprisingly, the pushback against Boswell's argument came from every direction, including from historians who are themselves gay. Critics argue adelphopoiesis rites formalized a kind of spiritual kinship, not romance, pointing out that the ceremony was sometimes performed between more than two men, or even between a man and a woman, which makes any same-sex marriage interpretation harder to sustain.
Not everyone disagreed, though. Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore, reviewing the book at the time, wrote that Boswell's work "will be of great help to the church in dealing with gay marriages." Boswell's defenders still argue that dismissing every same-sex ritual as merely platonic says more about modern discomfort than about the sources themselves.
What Evidence Exists Beyond Boswell?
Boswell's critics have a fair point: his case leans hard on one narrow set of medieval texts. However, if one zooms out to view the wider historical record, it becomes harder and harder to dismiss that gay marriages have existed for a very long time.
In Ming and Qing Dynasty China, for example, texts have been recovered indicating that men in Fujian province entered a recognized bond called qixiongdi, sworn brotherhood. The younger partner moved in with the elder, and the two ate and slept together like a married couple, sometimes for decades.
Parents on both sides treated the arrangement like an in-law relationship, with the younger man's family contributing toward the elder's eventual wedding to a wife, since the bond did not preclude either man from also marrying a woman and having children.
Long before European contact, more than 150 Native American tribes recognized what is now called Two-Spirit identity, and colonial journals describe men married to men in ceremonies their own communities considered entirely ordinary.
European missionaries were scandalized when they first saw these marriages, but the unions kept happening anyway, in some communities for generations, until colonial marriage law made them illegal.
Further back still, a tomb built around 2400 BCE in Saqqara, Egypt, holds two royal manicurists, Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum, carved embracing nose to nose in a pose Egyptian art otherwise reserved for husbands and wives. It should be noted that figures which could represent the wives and children of the men appear elsewhere on the tomb walls, which is exactly why scholars still argue over whether the two men were husbands, brothers, or something else entirely.
None of this proves any single interpretation. Taken together, though, it means societies on at least three continents, across several thousand years, kept finding formal ways to bind same-sex couples together, long before anyone had a separate word for "gay marriage."
Why Does Any Of This Matter Now?
This is not just an argument for classics professors. Ministers still hear opponents of marriage equality insist that one-man-one-woman marriage is the unbroken norm across all of human history, a claim the legal fight to undo Obergefell v. Hodges leans on directly.
That version of history turns out to be far shakier than the claim assumes, something the wave of state resolutions asking the Supreme Court to revisit the ruling will likely keep testing for years to come.
Queer history keeps turning up in places people do not expect it, the same way a symbol as familiar as the rainbow turns out to have roots reaching back thousands of years.
It's possible that not every claim in Boswell's book holds up to closer scrutiny. But he and the historians who came after him have established one thing: same-sex couples have existed for as long as recorded history has, and they very well may have wed.
Does it matter whether these ancient unions looked exactly like a modern wedding, or only that some form of formal recognition existed at all? If "traditional marriage" has already changed shape more times than most people realize, what does that mean for the argument that it can never change again?
0 comments