Earlier, I got into a bit of a tiff over a post at Smarter Cop about family values or something like that. Without rehashing the whole thing, I wanted to explore the topic a little bit in some other directions. Really serious Christians are very interested in the importance of the family, which I can appreciate, because it’s certainly important. I just take issue with the fact that they believe the family is the monolithic structure which has existed unchanged in all civilizations throughout history in its exact same form as now. This is just historically not true. (And here’s another article on this, and another).

More than that, I realized that there is one compelling controversy over families at the very heart of Christianity itself. Just look at the circumstances of Jesus’s family. Basically, Jesus is born of an adulterous extramarital union. Sure, that union was with God, but it still violated the laws of the day. By Mosaic law, she should have been stoned to death:

Deuteronomy 22:22 “If a man is found sleeping with another man’s wife, both the man who slept with her and the woman must die.”

Leviticus 20:10 “If a man commits adultery with another man’s wife–with the wife of his neighbor–both the adulterer and the adulteress must be put to death.”

But she wasn’t, because God doesn’t always play by the rules. His love moves through people in ways that aren’t always easy for everyone to fathom.

Besides the example of his questionable birth, Jesus was also single (according to orthodox interpretation, anyway). He didn’t get married. He didn’t have kids. Instead he travelled around with a band of strange men and a possible former prostitute. And as Robyn eloquently added:

It Jewish society you had to married to be allowed to teach scripture. This was just a fact of life. To be called Rabbi or teacher you needed to be married. It was a sin to call oneself or allow one’s self to be called Rabbi if you were unmarried. If Christ is sinless then he had to have been married, if he wasn’t married then he hasn’t fulfilled the requirements to be the messiah.

He’s hardly a shining example of the family values Christians trumpet from the mountaintops. I’m not trying to “bring Jesus down” as some readers of this post seem to have thought. I’m merely trying to point out that even at the heart of Christian stories, there is a very strong example of their being more ways to go through life than the ideal nuclear family unit everyone seems to be married to.

Coincidentally, Doctor Recommended has a post about ape ejaculate, and scientific evidence that monogamy is NOT historically or biologically the norm. Plus, in one of the comments, somebody mentions how polygyny was completely commonplace in the Bible.