Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century

The standard account of Christianity and homosexuality runs something like this: scripture condemned it, the Church consistently enforced that condemnation, and whatever tolerance existed in the pre-Christian world was extinguished under the weight of theological certainty. John Boswell’s opening move — sustained across nearly four hundred pages of dense philological and historical argument — is to identify this story as a retrospective projection rather than a finding. Medieval Christendom was not uniformly hostile to same-sex love; the hostility that did emerge was historically contingent, late-arriving, and driven by social and legal forces that had little to do with scripture. It is a remarkable thesis, and one that deserves a more rigorous reckoning than either its admirers or its detractors have typically given it.

The Core Claim

Boswell’s argument operates on two levels. The first is philological: that the biblical and patristic texts most frequently cited as condemning homosexuality have been systematically mistranslated and misread, and that the condemnation is, in significant part, a construction of subsequent interpretation rather than a finding of the original sources. The second is historical: that early medieval Christianity accommodated, and in some cases celebrated, intense same-sex love, and that widespread intolerance emerged only in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries — coinciding not with any theological shift but with a broader social consolidation that targeted all minorities, Jews and heretics alongside sodomites.

The philological argument turns on a small number of Greek words of disputed meaning. Boswell’s treatment of arsenokoitai — the term in 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10 that most modern translations render as referring to homosexual acts — is characteristically meticulous. He argues that the word’s compound structure and pattern of usage cannot support the confident translation tradition has imposed on it, and that it more plausibly refers to economic exploitation or a specific form of male prostitution. Whether or not this argument ultimately succeeds, it is the kind of argument that deserves engagement rather than dismissal.

Where the Argument Is Strongest

The recovery of neglected sources is the book’s most unambiguous contribution. Boswell assembles a substantial body of lyric poetry, hagiographic literature, and liturgical material from the early medieval period that attests to the public celebration of passionate male friendship, and in some cases something that reads as considerably more than friendship. The gay subculture he identifies in medieval urban centres — with its own literature, argot, and recognisable social forms — is not the invention of a wishful reader; the sources are there, and most historians had simply not been looking.

The historical periodisation argument is also largely convincing. Boswell demonstrates that the intensification of hostility toward same-sex relations in the high Middle Ages corresponds with the rise of systematic persecution more broadly — the Inquisition, the expulsion of Jewish communities, the codification of heresy law — and that this correlation demands a sociological explanation that purely theological accounts cannot provide. Whatever one thinks of his positive claims about earlier tolerance, the negative claim that theological hostility cannot by itself explain the historical pattern is difficult to refute.

The discussion of Saints Sergius and Bacchus is among the book’s most arresting passages, and the most revealing about both its strengths and its risks. The fourth-century soldier-martyrs, executed under Galerius for their Christian faith, are described in their passio with language — erastai, beloved companions united in a single soul — that carries unmistakable erotic weight in the classical tradition Boswell is trained to read. The later elaboration of this in his 1994 work Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe connects Sergius and Bacchus to the adelphopoiesis ritual: a Byzantine liturgical rite, preserved in manuscripts from the eighth century onward, in which two men were formally united before the altar through prayer, the joining of hands, and the exchange of a kiss following communion. An icon at Saint Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai — compositionally arresting — depicts the two saints flanking Christ in an arrangement that closely resembles Byzantine marriage iconography, with Christ positioned as the officiant between them. Boswell read this as representing ecclesiastical blessing of a union analogous to the adelphopoiesis rite, an argument that is neither self-evidently correct nor self-evidently absurd.

Where It Strains

The methodological vulnerability is the mirror image of the book’s strength. Boswell is an extraordinarily learned reader of medieval Latin and Greek, and his philological precision serves him well in close textual analysis. But the larger historical argument requires him to move between textual interpretation and social history in ways that are not always controlled. Identifying that passionate friendship was celebrated in a given literary corpus does not establish that the underlying relationships were sexual, and Boswell sometimes slides between these registers without acknowledging the gap.

The adelphopoiesis argument, though seriously mounted, has attracted the most damaging criticism. Brent Shaw’s review in The New Republic following the 1994 book was devastating in its specificity: the rite, Shaw argued, is unambiguously a ceremony of spiritual kinship, its language continuous with the rhetoric of monastic brotherhood, and Boswell’s translations at several key points distort the Greek in the direction his thesis requires. Robin Darling Young made similar objections with particular force regarding the hagiographic sources. These are not ideologically motivated dismissals but philological disputes of the kind Boswell himself invited by making philology his primary weapon.

The Sergius and Bacchus icon at Saint Catherine’s is a case where the evidentiary logic becomes strained. The crowns depicted above the saints’ heads are standard in martyrological iconography — they are the crowns of martyrdom, not the wedding crowns of Byzantine marriage ceremony — and the compositional similarity to marriage iconography may reflect the limited visual vocabulary available to Byzantine artists for depicting divine blessing rather than a substantive claim about the nature of the saints’ union. The icon is suggestive; Boswell’s reading of it as confirmatory evidence of institutionalised same-sex union asks more of the image than it can bear.

There is also a broader anachronism problem that runs beneath the surface of the whole project. Boswell is committed to the position that gay people — identifiable as such across historical periods — exist as a transhistorical type, a position directly at odds with the Foucauldian constructionist view that homosexual identity is a nineteenth-century invention. This essentialist premise shapes what he looks for and what he finds, and it is never adequately defended. The medieval sources he reads may attest to something important about same-sex love and its social accommodation, while nonetheless failing to attest to anything resembling a stable sexual identity in the modern sense. The historical debate between these positions was, partly as a result of this book, never properly resolved.

Verdict

Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality is, in the end, a work of committed scholarship that wins some of its arguments and loses others, but that transformed the field it entered regardless. Its demonstration that Christian hostility to homosexuality was neither scripturally inevitable nor historically uniform was important and is not seriously disputed. Its more ambitious positive claims — about the liturgical institutionalisation of same-sex unions, about the Sergius and Bacchus tradition as a form of ecclesiastical gay marriage, about the adelphopoiesis rite as something cognate with matrimony — remain genuinely contested, and the philological challenges to them have never been fully answered. Boswell, who died of AIDS in 1994 at forty-seven, did not live to respond. Read it as a work that opened durable questions about the relationship between religious institutions, social tolerance, and sexual life, and approach the specific historical claims with the scepticism they invite and the seriousness they deserve.