Who Was The Virgin Mary?

Despite virginity being a myth, why has Mary’s virginity been considered so important? What does this tell us about the relationship between Christianity and sex? And what else do we know about this woman? Joining Kate today to help her get to know more about Mary, her life and its influence is author and historian Sir Diarmaid Macculloch. This episode was edited by Tim Arstall. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

  Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:35Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely birdtwisters! It's me, Kate Lister! How are you doing? Festive greetings! Before I can let you go any further into this episode, I do have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects you should be an adult too. Are you all of those things? Are you? Can you tick them all off? Because if you can't be off with you, you're letting everybody else down and holding up the show. Right, have they gone? Okay, let's crack on.

• 1:07Kate Lister?

  Strolling around Nazareth in the first century, you'd be forgiven for not knowing that, well, according to the Bible at least, something pretty seismic is about to go down. It's just a sleepy village of a few hundred people, and one of them happens to be this girl called Mary. Oh, she seems nice enough, but boy, oh, boy, is her life about to change. And what I want to know, though, is who was she? Who was she before the Bible and before we stuck tea towels on our heads to play Mary in the school nativity? Who was the real Mary? What kind of woman did she grow up to be? And just how difficult would it have been to parent someone who claimed to be the son of God? Yeah, there's no mum's net for that one.

• 1:52Kate Lister?

  I have got just the guest who's going to help us get to know Mary a little bit better.

• 2:23Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. There is no denying it, Betwixters, the sound of those jingly bells are getting louder and louder. I can almost see the sleigh over the horizon. And to celebrate that fact, we have decided to re-gift you a popular episode from earlier this year on the Virgin Mary. You see what we've done there? Virgin Mary, Christmas, Christmas, Virgin Mary. Oh, it is festive. It's a fascinating chat with Sir Dermot McCulloch, though. He's brilliant. He is a marvellous historian of sex and Christianity, and there's not many of them around, and he is here to help us find out more about the historical Virgin Mary. Spoiler alert: she didn't stay a virgin for very long.

• 3:09Kate Lister?

  Without further ado, let's do this.

• 3:18Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Sir Professor Dermot McCulloch.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  Professor Sir Dermot McCulloch? How about Professor McCulloch? That might simplify things.

• 3:29Kate Lister?

  Do you not like to whip out the sir? I would.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  Oh, well, if you want to whip out the sir, fine by me.

• 3:35Kate Lister?

  Do you ever use it? Like, just use it on driving insurance documents and things like that?

• 3:39Speaker 01

  It's just terribly complicated, and it's thanks to a mistake of King Edward VII.

• 3:44Kate Lister?

  Oh, hello.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  Who was told that Anglican clergy could not use a knighthood when they were addressed, because clergy aren't supposed to kill people, and you see knights do that as part of their occupation. This was totally wrong. But there we are. If you enter a game of Cluedo, you obey all the silly rules, and so I try not to use it myself.

• 4:05Kate Lister?

  That is a fabulous historical nugget, and we've only just got going. You were the author of, well, many, many, many books, but for the purposes of this show, the book Lower Than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity. Dermot, what on earth possessed you to write this book?

• 4:22Speaker 01

  Fifty years, well, actually seventy three years of being a gay man.

• 4:27Kate Lister?

  There you go, that'll do it.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  And about fifty years of being a historian. And these two things come together. Very early in my career, a wise old clergyman said to me, well, one day you ought to write a book because you're a historian of the history of sex. And I sort of said, uh huh. But that came back to me after I'd finished a completely different sort of book, a biography of Thomas Cromwell, which I published in twenty nineteen, I think it was. Anyway, what was I going to do next? I didn't want to do that sort of book again. I didn't want to do something detailed on Tudor history, looking at bits of parchment, that sort of thing. So I thought, right, I'll do my other thing, which is big windy generalisation books about huge topics.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  And what better, I thought, than the church and attitudes to sex because it's so absolutely topical. In the Christian world and beyond it, every religion at the moment is now obsessed with the subject of sex and people's genitals, which wasn't the really big consideration in many religions over the years, Christianity included.

• 5:36Kate Lister?

  I often think that, like, if you could get Jesus here and sort of show him around, he'd say, like, why are you so concerned with who's going to the toilet? Well, that wasn't the point of what I was trying to do.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Exactly. And on the vexed topic of same-sex relations, which exercises all sorts of religions now, Jesus Christ said, nothing, nothing whatsoever. And therefore you think, well, what, is it that important? But now everyone is obsessed by it. You think, what, it's a bad idea burning people alive, but Christians did it for a very long time. And they burned people alive mostly for what the bread and wine in the Eucharist meant. Or what sort of church government you had, or what the trinitism meant. And now the whole balance has shifted and that needs dealing with.

• 6:27Kate Lister?

  That is strange, isn't it, that that's happened? Because you have this weird paradox, is that a lot of people would think that Christianity is a faith that. Isn't interested in sex because sort of there's an overriding narrative of like thou shalt not unless it's in certain circumstances. But when you actually break it down, if you're going around all the time saying, don't have sex, are you having sex? Who's having sex? Why are you having sex? Stop having sex. Are you thinking about having sex? That's not a group of people who have no issues with sex.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  No, it isn't. And the thing is that Christianity has Achinterlanda background and it is a Jewish background on the one hand, but it's also a Greek background. And if you look at those two worlds at the time of the coming of Jesus, they were already quite obsessed by saying who should have sex in what circumstances. The Jews in particular, who were extremely excited about marriage and actually very unenthusiastic about even celibacy. Whereas the Greeks had, and the Romans with them, had a very different attitude to sex. It was all about free males and free men ran the show.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  And everything should be okay for them. And everyone else is sort of ancillary to that. That's women. That's actually also young males. They're all part of the primary world of the free man, which in Latin would be pater familias, the father of the family. It's all centred on that pater familias.

• 7:57Kate Lister?

  It is, isn't it? And when it comes to women and sex, because we're actually here today to talk about the Virgin Mary. That is a very interesting dichotomy that emerges is the veneration of the virgin, but also how other women are treated in biblical texts, because there is actually quite a lot of sex in the Bible. Even if they're running around saying, don't do that, there's quite a lot of it. I mean, there's two sisters early on who were said to want lovers with genitals the size of donkeys or something absolutely.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:26Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Prophet Ezekiel.

• 8:28Kate Lister?

  That's the one.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  I'm surprised and shocked you've looked that up. The naughty bits of the Hebrew scripture. The Hebrew scripture, which Christians call the Old Testament, is absolutely enthusiastic about physical sex. It's got a book called The Song of Songs. Which Christians think is about marriage, but actually it isn't. There's not really a mention of marriage in it. It's about love and sexual love. And a lot of it may have been written by women. Most of the Bible, written by men, but it is the consensus of scholarship these days that these are texts which include a lot of writing or singing by women. Women could sing more than they wrote.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  And you can identify songs in the Old Testament, which may have been composed by women, certainly sung by them.

• 9:19Kate Lister?

  Wow, I didn't know that. What's the evidence for that? Why do they say that they were sung by women?

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Because women are not the literate class in the ancient world. But they have quite clearly a world of dance, of song, and that is part of society. And so their song may be passed down from generation to generation of women. But in the end, it may be written down by men and form part of a biblical narrative.

• 9:46Kate Lister?

  Wow. When you go to like much older faiths like Babylon, you get someone like Inanna. And we've got records of she sings songs as well, quite rude ones, the Song of Inanna.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. So there's nothing exceptional about Jews. They reflect the norm in the ancient world, particularly the Eastern Mediterranean.

• 10:04Kate Lister?

  So let's talk virgins then. We've got, as you're laying the groundwork here, a group of people that are quite enthusiastic about sex. It certainly doesn't seem to be a don't do that, don't have sexual pleasure type of a world. They have their own hangups and we can get into that. When does this idea of venerating virginity come in?

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Well, firstly, the Jews and the Hebrew scripture which they created are not enthusiastic about celibacy. They like their women virgins because that's helpful for the men who are going to marry them. But there is no sort of cult of virginity in the Hebrew scripture. And there isn't actually in the New Testament. That's the texts which Christians created for the life of Christ. I mean, you think of the great world of monks and nuns, which we'll no doubt go on to talk about. It is not there in the New Testament. And monks and nuns have always found problems justifying their existence in terms of the New Testament. So you have to think, well, where does it come from?

• 11:05Speaker 01

  When there's hardly any reference to anything which looks like monasticism in the New Testament. In fact, the one reference which you might say looks like a monastic community, people sharing goods, for instance, is in the book of Acts. And the story is that it failed. So that's really not a good basis for monasticism. You do find it in the Christian church pretty early, but not that early. What I mean is the second century of what we call AD or the common era CE, rather than anno domini. So second century. And where do we find it? We find it in Syria, in the eastern Mediterranean, West Asia, if you prefer. And you have to think, well, where's it come from?

• 11:50Speaker 01

  It's there in Christianity. And you're getting monks or people who look like monks and nuns by the end of the second century. Well, my suggestion, not just me, is that we look eastwards. Because the Syrians were the great traders of the ancient world. They're very commercially minded, energetic people. And they traded beyond the frontiers of the Roman Empire, which they were in. And where would they trade? They'd trade to the great empires of the east, East Asia, China, of course, but also, crucially, India. And what would our Christian Syrian traders in the second century find when they got to India?

• 12:31Speaker 01

  They'd find monks and nuns, Buddhist monks and nuns, Hindu monks and nuns. And I can see them, and this is entirely speculation, but I can't see any other explanation. I can see them saying, this is rather good. We're traders, we'll trade back this idea within our Christian faith. And that's why you get monks and nuns developing within Syrian Christianity. I think the sources are Hindu and Buddhist, they are not biblical.

• 13:02Kate Lister?

  A lot is made of the fact that Jesus allegedly didn't get married and didn't have children. And so the followers of perhaps virginity are following his example, but not a lot about that's mentioned in the Bible, full stop.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  You're right. I think Jesus was a single man with no family and no children. Because some of the disciples are clearly delineated, sketched out as married people. The apostle Peter, for instance, is notorious. He's got a mother-in-law, so must have a wife if he's got a mother-in-law. But Jesus does look like a celibate, but there are quite a few people in his time who were founding cults or who were prophets within Judaism, who were also single. So it's a thing. It's not just a Jesus thing. It is now often said that, oh, well, it's clear his wife was Mary Magdalene. Now, that's nonsense.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  There is no ancient evidence of that whatsoever, and the evidence often is modern fakery. So let's just clear that one out of the way. So we have a single man, yes, but leading a set of disciples, some of whom are called the twelve apostles, some who are just apostles, some of whom are just disciples, and there are lots of married people. And you look at the early Christian communities there in the New Testament, and they look like families. They look like families in the port cities of the eastern Mediterranean. There's no hint that they're getting together in monasteries. That is, again, jumping to the second century. It's a second-century thing.

• 14:35Kate Lister?

  Let's talk Mary then, because I'm endlessly fascinated by how you understand Mary within the Christian pantheon. Because one of the central tenets is there's one God, but there's the Trinity, but there aren't goddesses. But there's Mary, and people pray to Mary, and she has shrines, and she has devotees. So she is occupying that place of being a goddess, but she's not a goddess.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  No, and you have to put the word eventually into everything you just said. Eventually, she has shrines, but not to start with. What have you got to start with? You have the story of a boy, Jesus, who is born of Mary. That's quite clear. It's there all through the New Testament texts. But there is also something odd about this boy. Mary went on to have a husband, Joseph, and it is, we are told, that they were already engaged when it became apparent that Mary was pregnant. And it is quite clear that Joseph was not the father of Jesus. That's clear from all sorts of aspects of the four Gospels.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  And then stories are attached to the birth of this baby from Mary. Let's keep that, that's definite, from Mary. But the stories are extraordinary, aren't they? They feather out in two of the Gospels, Luke and Matthew, into the most extraordinary events. Angels, the coming of an angel to Mary and also to Joseph in one of the Gospels. Uh, there are shepherds, there's a journey to Bethlehem. The funny thing is that everything else in the Gospel does not suggest any relationship between Jesus, Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem. And to cut a long story short, I think that all the things we hear in school nativity plays at Christmas,

• 16:26Speaker 01

  they're all myth. Except for Jesus was born of Mary, her husband was Joseph. That's historical fact. Everything else is added. Why? Why is it added? It's added to make sense of something you mentioned in passing, that this is the birth of God, in a sense, from a human mother. But also a human mother in which the story obstinately says that the father of the baby is not her husband, Joseph. And very early on, non-Christians said, wow, look at that. That basically means he's illegitimate, he's the son of someone else.

• 17:06Kate Lister?

  That joke has been around for a while then.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  Since the second century, at least. I suspect it reflects reality. This birth of Jesus is not in the normal family setting of Judaism. And the two stories, Luke and Matthew, very different stories about the birth of Jesus squarely face up to that. And they are saying, yep, this is a different sort of birth. It's a human birth, yes, but it is not the sort of birth you'd expect. Now, it seems to me that when you strip away all the miracle stories, what the miracles are trying to say is, yes, this is a really special birth. And it has the most special things about it.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  The powers of the world, King Herod, all that sort of worldly power is defeated by this birth. And that's a message of liberation. It's a message of good news, which it reflects off the reality at the middle, that this is an irregular birth. It's a birth, if you like, by the Holy Spirit, who is the spirit of randomness, of the unexpected. And that's what's built in particularly into Luke's story, because it is Mary is pregnant by the Holy Spirit. So that's the basis from which you're working. Mary is a girl from Galilee, who does marry a man called Joseph. They have children.

• 18:32Kate Lister?

  And that's true.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  It is true. It's in their Gospels and it's sort of casually put in there. Jesus' brothers and sisters came up and he wasn't best pleased when they appeared. He's never actually very pleased when his family, including his mother, come along. And that clearly reflects some sort of reality. What I think it reflects is arguments within the church after Jesus' death and resurrection about who should lead the church. Should it be family members or should it be inspired people like the apostle Paul? And so the stories of the Gospels are actually written by that latter group, the non-family people saying, yeah, hang on, the family are not actually the priority in the church.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  It is us lot. It is everyone who believes in Jesus. And Jesus actually is made to say that in the Gospels. The family appear and he looks around. He's been told, your brothers and sisters are here. And he looks around and says, these are my brothers and sisters. Not my family is the implication, including Mary, including Mary.

• 19:39Kate Lister?

  He can be quite snotty with her on occasions, can't he? You know, a sort of bit of a petulant adolescent, I suppose. But then I was gonna say he's only human, but he's not supposed to be only.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Well, he's only human. He is as human as divine. It is making a theological point. They're telling stories which are meant to show you what we would technically call this jargon word theology. But they're talking about truth. It's a different sort of truth from the banal historical fact, for instance, that the Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066 is not that sort of historical truth. It is truth about this most important story of all. The birth of Jesus, the life of Jesus, the death of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus.

• 20:22Kate Lister?

  So that puts a different spin on things because if you remember that he has siblings, then Mary, the Virgin Mary, there should be a sort of a bracket afterwards, Virgin for a bit, Mary, because presumably she didn't stay a virgin then.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  She didn't. This has always embarrassed the church that you can't get away from the fact that in the New Testament, in the Gospels, it talks about the brothers and sisters of Jesus. And you can get up to the number seven by the names of those who aren't actually named in the New Testament as relatives of Jesus and at least two sisters. And the church simply forgot about this or explained it away in later centuries, right up to the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, when the Protestants, of course, said, well, our religion is Bible and we go back to the Bible. And the more radical of them said, well, actually, Jesus had brothers and sisters. And actually, many Protestants were shocked by that.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  But it's no less than the truth in the Bible. And so Protestants who said this were really on the outside, but they had seen the reality.

• 21:38Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Dermot and Mary after this short break.

• 21:49Kate Lister?

  Hello Betwixters, I am jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there, and the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of them really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.

• 22:31Kate Lister?

  I buy completely into the idea that Mary and Joseph were real historical figures, that Jesus was the real historical person, whether you have faith around that or not. Jesus a person who had some quite groovy ideas. But we sort of see this, the veneration of the virgin building over time. And when does that start to happen?

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Well, once more, significantly, it's Syria in the second century. Just at the time that I'm seeing the first monks and nuns, Syrian theologians start talking a lot more about virginity than the New Testament had done. So we have writings, texts from that period. One of them has a terribly complicated name, I will say it. It is the Prot Evangelium of James. This means a sort of gospel prelude of James. And it fills in the bits which are missing in the New Testament. And this is the infancy of Mary, the life of young Mary, and the birth of Jesus.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  And this is where we get the first references to Mary being perpetually virgin, virgin all the time.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  With most extraordinary stories attached to it, that a midwife comes along and investigates Mary and is sceptical that she's been a virgin. And the midwife inserts, shall we say, some fingers into the Blessed Virgin Mary and is he immediately punished from heaven by it because her hand catches fire.

• 24:04Kate Lister?

  Oh my god, that wasn't in my school nativity. Wow.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  Oh no, but this is in the Prote Evangelium of James. And then, of course, an angel is told miraculously to restore the hand to this unfortunate person because she's been taught a lesson. And that is that Mary is a ever-virgin. And that's a really important dropping off, or starting off, point from the idea of Mary being a virgin throughout her life. And at the time, this text, this Prote Evangelium, was thought eccentric. It was not mainstream and it took about 150 years before people all over the Christian world started saying, oh, you know, I see the point of this Syrian text. And so it becomes really important, really important.

• 24:52Kate Lister?

  Had they just not read the Bible bit where Jesus has brothers and sisters before they came up with this Mary and her flame-retardant vagina story?

• 25:00Speaker 01

  It is because suddenly it really matters that purity, virginity, celibacy are central. Because by and large, increasingly, theology, talking about God, is being done by celibates, by virgins, by monks, by nuns. And it is their priorities which now decide what the Church's priorities are. And monasticism was just such a success story in the early Church. It spread from Syria all over the place. By the fourth and fifth century, monks and nuns and monasteries and nunneries were there everywhere in the Christian world and they were the people doing the thinking, doing the talking.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  And of course, there is a sort of consequence of that, a spin-off from that, that marriage had become a second best. What is the big story is virginity and getting to heaven is easier for virgins and celibates than it is for married people.

• 25:58Kate Lister?

  Well, now we have a conundrum that the early church found itself getting knotted up into quite regularly. If you want everyone to be a virgin, hurrah, go and be a virgin. But we are going to run out of little Christians pretty quickly. If somebody has to be having sex, so how are we going to square that circle?

• 26:15Speaker 01

  Well, we'd just have to tolerate marriage.

• 26:18Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  It is rather tolerating marriage. And one early theologian, my Ori Gen by name, came from Alexandria, did say that anyone who's had sex shouldn't have anything to do with worship immediately afterwards. It's too yucky. It's too disrespectful. And this actually may be why you get separate church buildings from the second and third century. Because these are places you don't have sex in. I, I hope you don't.

• 26:46Kate Lister?

  I do not.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  And from then on, marriage is there, of course, has to be there because most Christians still are getting married and having kids. But it is not really the church's concern. It's interesting how little the early church talked about marriage. And the fascinating fact, this is a killer fact, which I tell people about sex in the early church. In the early church, there was no such thing as a church wedding. We now argue about whether same-sex people should get married in church. Well, in the early church, no one got married in church. And I'm talking up to the fourth and fifth century here. It's not a thing you associate with church. And even then, it's a very slow process.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Church weddings became the norm in the very eastern part of the church in the seventh century. In Western Europe, the world of the Catholic Church, it's the 12th century. Well, Christian marriage is a sort of a medieval invention.

• 27:45Kate Lister?

  It's new. It would have been very baffling to the people who actually wrote the scriptures, the idea of that.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. But on the other hand, a lot of clergy in the early church, probably the majority, were married. They weren't monks, but they were married with kids. So that's something which, again, the medieval world in the West changed. And Mary is part of the process of doing this. There is a lady called Tekla, who was supposed to be a big mate of Paul of Tarsus, the Apostle Paul. You see, developing in the Syrian church, again, interesting, in the fourth and fifth centuries. And then Mary, soon after that, spread throughout the Christian world. So we really are talking quite late in the development of Christianity.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  And there are a lot of shrines, you see, the shrines of Our Lady, shrines of St Mary are fifth century onwards. And again, very many of them medieval.

• 28:41Kate Lister?

  Someone else that you see coming out in medieval theology, it has been described by some scholars as misogyny that develops within the church around sort of like your Saint Jeromes and your early four, things like that. And they're contrasting Mary with Eve. This sort of battle starts to emerge. Could you speak to that a little bit? Like, did Eve's role develop as well from somebody that went scrumping in the garden of Eve when she shouldn't have done?

• 29:08Speaker 01

  Well, already the Jews had made this the basic of a cosmic story. Adam and Eve are the people who betrayed us all by disobeying God. And remember, it's Eve who does the first disobeying. She sort of eggs Adam on to eat the fruit.

• 29:24Kate Lister?

  Let the whole side down.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes, yes. Of course, it's not an apple in the Old Testament. It's a fruit to the tree. Got to be an everything, and there are lots of early explanations. Point is, it's already there in the way that Jews see their religion. A cosmic disaster caused by you and me, or our mum and dad, rather, Adam and Eve. So that part of the story is there before Mary, before Jesus. But then, as Mary's role grows, and in the second century, you can begin to see bishops and theologians already saying this. Well, if Eve destroyed everything, then clearly Jesus is mother, simply by being his mother, put it all right. And she is the one who reverses the fall of humanity, simply by being the mother of God.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  And then the implications of that, it's very physical, you can't get away from it being physical. But the embarrassment around how much sex might be involved. And then, for instance, once you start saying it's the Holy Spirit, in the sense of a bit of God, who was the father of Jesus. Well, how did he and Mary link up? Which orifice, may one ask, is the way in which the Holy Spirit makes the connection? And no prizes for guessing, it is not the normal one by which children are made. It's any other available orifice.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  It could be the nose, for instance, because one theory among theologians was it is the sweet savour of the Holy Spirit's message, which is conveyed to Mary's nose. Actually, that's not very easy to express in art, which I think is one reason it why wasn't very popular. But the big one which most theologians thought is most plausible is the ear. It's an orifice and Mary listens to what the angel says and she is given the message by the ear. So a lot of medieval art shows that. It shows the image of what's called the annunciation, Mary being announced that Jesus is coming.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  The angel announces it to her and that's what she hears. So it's all done via the ear.

• 31:40Kate Lister?

  Is there a correlation between some medieval and later iconography I've seen of Eve being whispered to by the serpent then? If this ear-

• 31:48Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly, exactly. It all makes beautiful symmetry.

• 31:52Kate Lister?

  It does.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  And this is a second century idea. One theologian called Irenaeus is the heart of this, that they are a corresponding set of women. And particularly if you're speaking Latin, which he didn't, he was a Greek speaker, but soon there were Latin speakers doing theology. And the great thing is that Eva's name is Eva. Yeah. Well, our lady Mary is addressed by the angel Hale.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  Mary, and in Latin that is Ave, A V E. You see, it's the other way around from Eva. It's a beautiful piece of poetry, and anyone who speaks Latin sees the point. So it's a lovely way of expressing this sense of reversal. That all harm done by Eve and Adam is reversed by the second Adam, who is Jesus, and the second Eve, who is Mary.

• 32:50Kate Lister?

  And there was a lot of debate around what kind of sex was going on in the Garden of Eden. I remember Saint Augustine came up with a really interesting theory of how Adam and Eve were having sex. It was like by osmosis, almost, lying next to each other.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  Augustine is not terribly specific, because he doesn't want to be yucky. But what he's describing, and clearly intends, is that it must be a fairly conventional form of sex as we know it.

• 33:17Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  But it mustn't have the awful connotations of losing control, which does seem to be to be a rather usual.

• 33:26Kate Lister?

  Very controlled sex.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  Characteristic of sex. And he says this very specifically. It's about losing control after the fall.

• 33:33Kate Lister?

  That's interesting.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  And that's why it's so tainted. But he's insistent, and I think this is a very healthy insistence, that sex was there, at least potentially, before the fall of Adam and Eve. Now, the importance of that is someone you've mentioned in passing, Jerome, a Latin-speaking theologian of the time of Augustine, who absolutely detested sex. And he argued, and many other theologians, particularly in the Eastern Church, argued that sex wasn't there before the fall of Adam and Eve. It is part of the thing which Satan brought in. And actually, it is therefore satanic. Sex is satanic, according to such theologians.

• 34:17Kate Lister?

  That's where it comes from.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, and Augustine, who... Many see it as a gloomy old thing. Actually, it's saying something much more healthy. He is saying, no, sex is part of God's plan. We've mucked it up because we've fallen. But it's still there as part of God's plan. And that means that marriage is also part of God's plan. And we must respect it. I had to learn this about Augustine, because I always thought gloomy old Augustine, da, da, da. But then I started reading more Augustine. I saw the point that he's writing really against Saint Jerome and really rigorous grim theologians like that. To say, yeah, marriage is good.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  He wrote a treatise called Of the Good of Marriage, De Bono Coniugali. Which he did pair with treatises about how good virginity was. But interestingly, in the treatise on virginity, he's very insistent on humility. He's very aware that virgins and celibates may be giving themselves heirs at the expense of the marriage. And there's so much which is fascinating and sympathetic in Augustine. We must give him credit for what he did.

• 35:30Kate Lister?

  Wasn't he a bit of a scallywag in his youth as well, Augustine?

• 35:33Speaker 01

  Well, he was doing what a conventional young Roman man would do. He had a mistress until it came to be time to get married. And he lived with the mistress for a very long time, sixteen plus years. They had a son, who I think may have been an accident. Because in Latin he was called Aideo Datus, which means given by God. And it suggests to me that God had made that decision, not the couple. But it doesn't matter really. The big thing is that he was a man who knew the joys of marriage, a link with another person. He knew passion. And he was prepared to respect it and try and give them a meaning for it in Christianity.

• 36:16Kate Lister?

  I'd never thought of him that way before. I've always thought of him as one of the dour, thou shalt not gloomy. Early Christian teachers, but when you actually point that out, yeah.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, a bit like gloomy old Paul, you know, Paul Lutares, who was always thought was a gloomy old chap as well. He wrote something fascinating about marriage and already you begin to get the sense that marriages are given by God thing. It is mystical because he said in one of his epistles, each partner in the marriage, the boy and the girl, the bride and the groom, they have equal duties to each other in a sexual way. Their body is owned by the other person. Any old Roman would have said, yeah, of course, my wife's body is my property. But no, Paul is saying, that too, that too. Yes, but the wife owns the husband's body. That's really radical. It sounds like our love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage sort of attitude to marriage. But that's a modern thing. We've sort of

• 37:09Speaker 01

  had to rediscover that from Paul.

• 37:17Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Dermot and Mary after this short break.

• 37:28Kate Lister?

  Hello, Betwixters. I'm jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right. It took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there. And the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.

• 38:10Kate Lister?

  When you're looking at the early Christian church and the biblical scriptures, is there as much an emphasis on male virginity as there is on women's virginity? Does that play a part?

• 38:20Speaker 01

  In scripture, not at all.

• 38:22Kate Lister?

  No, of course not.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  And particularly the Hebrew scripture. No, it is part of this new movement in the second to fifth centuries when monasticism crystallized. There's a fascinating symptom of that, and it is the art around angels. Now, let me tell you a fascinating fact about angels in the Bible. They do not have wings.

• 38:46Kate Lister?

  No.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  There are supernatural creatures in the Bible who do have wings, but they're called cherubim and seraphim, and they're not angels. Wings for angels came in in Christian art in the fourth and fifth centuries. And they clearly borrowed them from somewhere else. And the reason that it's suddenly happening is that now they are identified by with monks. Monks get to heaven quickly, so do angels, and the best way to do that is by having wings, which they had not done in any biblical reference. Check all references to angel in the Bible and you'll see that.

• 39:24Kate Lister?

  I'm gonna write a letter to my old Sunday school teacher and just point this stuff out and just be like, excuse me, we need some corrections.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  It's gonna ruin those school nativity plays, isn't it? What are they gonna wear?

• 39:35Kate Lister?

  It will do, especially when I tell them that thing about the angel hand catching on fire, my goodness.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, yes, that was a naughty angel making the poor, poorer lady's hand burn. But he did put it right.

• 39:47Kate Lister?

  As a final question, though, I could talk to you about this forever and ever and ever. Where do you think the status of virginity is? This is a huge question. The status of virginity is today within the Christian faith. Do you think that it can be challenged? It can be dismantled? Do you think it's as important? Because what we know now through medical research is that virginity is really a nonsense. You can't prove it. It's a entirely social construct.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  Yes, and actually the ancient world knew that too.

• 40:15Kate Lister?

  Did they?

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, the, the idea of the hymen, for instance, is a fourth, third, fourth century medical innovation. Well, where is it now? It's where it always could have been and often should have been and was. And that is that it can be extremely liberating to liberate yourself from sex. That was clearly what appealed to all those monks and nuns back in the ancient world, because they were liberated from all the conventions, all the tyrannies of the family system, the patrified families, particularly women. And women's relationship with sex was not what it was today. It was extremely uncomfortable. It was at the behest of men. It could kill you.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  And so it would be rather nice alternative to go off and be an abbess somewhere. And the appeal is still there. We're going through a phase in our society, particularly Western society, where sex, sex, sex is everything. And actually, sex is often quite uncomfortable, quite miserable. And even if it isn't, it is not the be all and end all of fulfilment. And the celibate life continues to show us that. The Protestant Reformation rejected it completely. They said that celibacy, monks, nuns are all part of this big con trick, which we Protestants are rescuing the world from. That was an overreaction. That was chucking out the baby with the bathwater.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  But now that the churches are often coming together, I think we can be much more sensible and balanced and measured about virginity and celibacy.

• 41:49Kate Lister?

  Dermot, you have been fascinating. Thank you so much for giving us some of your very precious time. I've thoroughly enjoyed myself.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  I've enjoyed myself too.

• 41:58Kate Lister?

  If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? Do you have a social media presence or are you smart?

• 42:03Speaker 01

  I am on Facebook, but generally you could just Google around and I'm around a lot there. I wrote this book, which you mentioned, Learn the Angels. I actually read the audiobook of it. So if you want to go on listening to me, you can just find the audiobook Penguin and there I am. But otherwise there is the book in Kindle and text form. And please do go and have a look.

• 42:24Kate Lister?

  Thank you so much for coming by. You've been wonderful.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure.

• 42:33Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Dermot for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever you get your podcasts. I know everybody says that to you on every single podcast, but we really do mean it. Consider it a Christmas gift to us. Coming up, we have got a special episode on how pornography has changed through history and a special episode that was recorded at our first ever live show earlier this year, where Eleanor Yaniger and I played Shag, Marry, Kill with Historical Kings. And all of that is coming your way. And if you'd like us to explore a subject, or if you just wanted to say hello, or maybe you just wanted to say merry crumble, well then you can email us at [email protected]. This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.

• 43:15Kate Lister?

  Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.