YouSaid · the spoken record

Diarmaid MacCulloch

lines on the record
69
first
2026-01-21
most recent
2026-01-21
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “Culture and Jewish culture. So there it is. It's there in Paul, of course, in the New Testament, very, very marginally. He has one purple passage on it, which is not really so much about same-sex relationships. It's about idolatry. And the example he uses of people indulging in idolatry is one of same-sex relationships. That's the beginning of the epistle to the Romans. And then various epistles have lists of people who aren't going to get to heaven. And it's a funny old mix because it can be quite minor human pecadillos for people who won't get to heaven. And in two of those lists, there are two sets of people called Arsena Koitai and Malakoi. It is not quite clear what these mean. Arsenakoitai is slang term probably. It's a very rare term in Greek. So it's probably something.”

    2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “It comes from two different places. First, it comes from Judaism, which increasingly emphasized procreation within marriage. It's a religion which is very concerned with increasing the number of the chosen people. So it is there, and that means that there is something of a strand of homophobia within the Jewish tradition on same-sex relationships. But it's also, curiously, from within the Greek world, there is a deeply world-denying austere strain of Jewish philosophy, which is against really any former sex. And within that, Christians took up that idea and applied it to the existing suspicion of hostility to same-sex relationships within Judaism. You see that particularly within the church, the Christian church in Alexandria, which is one of the meeting places of Greek.”

    2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Was deprived of a straight route to heaven. But the way you can get round that is by getting monks to pray for you and do the penances which you deserve to do as a shedder of blood. So there is a sequence of things, not just the eleventh or twelfth century. That's the culmination of a process which you can see beginning really in the 8th and 9th centuries.”

    2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “That's exactly what it's about. And that is a process of changing the Eucharist over the previous two or three hundred years into making the Eucharist a uniquely powerful thing, which you do as much as possible if you're a priest. Monasteries are redesigned, monastic churches were redesigned so that now they didn't just have one altar at which the Eucharist took place. They had multiple altars, side altars, at which masses could be celebrated for saving the souls of particular people, mostly members of the nobility who had paid for setting up the monastery and the prayers of the monks are there to save the souls of the nobility of Europe for the very good reason that Christianity still disapproved of the shedding of blood. And anyone who is involved in that, which meant the entire nobility of medieval Europe,”

    2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “None go off and be a nun and found a new monastery. And this is an enormously popular story in Anglo-Saxon England. But it's a story which would make no sense after the twelfth century if you look at it closely, because marriage is supposed to be about procreation. The church tells you that. And otherwise there is no marriage. It's one of the ways you can get out of a marriage in Roman Catholic theology if no sex has taken place. That's how Henry VIII got out of one of his marriages by saying it had never taken place. He'd never had sex with that woman, a phrase later reused.”

    2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Chaste. The people involved get married and they remain virgins as a token of their purity. And there are saints' stories like this. In England we have a very famous saint, Saint Ethel Dida, who became the first abbess of Eley, which is now a wonderful great Romanesque and Gothic cathedral in eastern England, but it started life as an Anglo Saxon monastery founded by this princess, Ethelda, who is not just a princess, she'd been married twice to do different Anglo Saxon kings, and in both cases she had refused to give them sex, which is a bit disconcerting if you're a king, because what you want is an heir to the throne. She must have been an extraordinary lady. Anyway, second marriage they gave up. The king said, All right, you win, you clearly want to be a”

    2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “From this great change in the nature of Western priesthood through int views about marriage because the logic of making all clergy celibate is that the laity are now the only people who are practicing sex within marriage of course otherwise it's illicit but now you've got this situation what because of a celibate clergy logically you have a what you might call copulating laity and that's something new in the history of marriage in Christianity it means in the end that what you must say about a marriage is that it must be open to the possibility of procreation now if you look back in church history Christian history before that there are a lot of instances of marriage which are deliberately celibate”

    2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “And therefore, what a priest does in celebrating the mass, so called as it's called in the West, the Eucharist, is so powerful that you want that person who does it the priest to be as pure as possible, and there is a very short leap in talking about purity to sexual purity. And so in the 11th and 12th century, for the very first time in Christian history, all the clergy of the West must be celibate. They must be virgins, just like monks. Monks are not the same as clergy, not the same as priests at all. But now from now on there is a gradual amalgamation of these roles. You might call it a confusion of the role of the celibate monk with that of the priest. And this is a 12th century development. It has extraordinary consequences. They ripple away.”

    2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “It is because of changing ideas about the Eucharist, the bread and wine and what they mean in the Christian life, increasingly the Western Church emphasized that bread and wine in Eucharist are body and blood of Christ the Saviour, and that they are created or made into that by the act of a priest”

    2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah, exactly by the 12th century. Yes, part of the great revolution. Of thinking about marriage and sex in the 12th century, but that's 1200 years more than half of Christian history. We must, I'm sure we will, talk about the importance of the 12th century in the West, which transformed so many different things about marriage and sex.”

    2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “history, they haven't gone with this pawline idea. They are not interested in equality and they're not interested in equality and marriage either. Because actually, you have to realize that throughout Christian history and not just Christian history, marriage has been a contract between two men. The father of the bride and the father of the groom. It is not primarily a contract between the bride and the groom, the young people, as they mostly are, who get married. It's a family thing.”

    2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “You can see this in the great Greek theologian John Chrysostom, who said it's about an equality of esteem or chastity or financial support, anything but a physical body. Now, the Western tradition didn't do that very interestingly, and the medieval Western Church, for instance, the canon lawyers who were creating a new legal system for the church and Christians generally, canon lawyers look to this text in Paul. And they emphasize that marriage is about physicality, so much so that the church for the first time really said that marriage was characterized by procreation must be characterized by the possibility of procreation. So you get this coming back, but actually at most times in Christian”

    2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Wife's body is not her own, it belongs to the husband. That's what you'd expect, any ancient culture. But then it reverses it. And it says likewise the man's body is not his own, but is owned by his wife. Now that is really extraordinary, and it is new. It is our mystical statement that the relationship between man and woman is a relationship of physicality. This is about bodies, but it is also a relationship with the assumption that there is something mystical about marriage which makes it a central part of Christianity. And actually, most generations of the church since in the last two thousand years have put that aside, particularly in Eastern Orthodox Christianity. They've spiritualized it away so it is no longer about bodies.”

    2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I do. I can't see where it came from. Otherwise, the crucial test is circumcision versus baptism, and it is there in remarkable fragments within the New Testament record, that set of writings which the Christian community created on top of the Hebrew scripture, which became its Old Testament. Well, the New Testament contains the writings of Paul, which are the oldest writings within the New Testament. And there are texts within what we now call one and two Corinthians, that is two letters to the Christian community in Corinth, in which in the first one, chapter seven now, there is an essay by Paul on marriage, and it contains a most extraordinary statement about the relationship of married people, the bride and the groom, the man and the woman. And it says in a very conventional ancient way that the”

    2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “now will allow women will welcome women even to be clerical people within it clergy within it have an ordained role within it”

    2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Of Jesus doing baptism, but John did. So here is what became the way you become a Christian. And of course, unlike circumcision, it's something which both men and women can receive, and they did. So yes, you're right. In that sense, Christianity had structured itself towards equality, but in so many ways the history of the last 2000 years is a stealthy march away from that idea in order to impose the normal patterns of the ancient world, which are male-centered and which women have a subordinate role. That's the history of Christianity, and that may be something which is now changing. Well, it certainly is changing since the 19th century. We've seen in the ways in which women have increasingly asserted themselves in the Christian faith on an equal basis so much so that so many churches”

    2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Intellectually it's trying to, yes, and it's great liturgical action is an affirmation of equality between the sexes. That is baptism. When you compare that with the entry right into Judaism, which is male circumcision, you see the difference, that to be in a sense fully Jewish is to be a man capable of being circumcised. Now, Christianity introduced a new form of initiation to the religion and that is baptism. It's very difficult to see where it came from. It's not a prominent feature of Judaism before or any of the religions around, but it's their very early indeed so that that leader who became subordinate to Jesus in the Christian faith, John, was known as the Baptist because this was the thing he did and we don't really have any record.”

    2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Form and conversely monogamy was a feature of two great civilizations behind Christianity, which were not at all monotheistic, that is Greek and Roman civilizations, most unusually in the ancient world were monogamous, and I strongly suspect we may talk about this more, that this is the reason that Christianity decided to stick with monogamy against its cultural background in Judaism because it wanted to make an impression on Greek and Roman society. So you've got to be monogamous, otherwise that society will just not listen to you.”

    2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “A good question They are not always closely correlated. They certainly weren't in Judaism. Judaism is a form of religion in which, let's call it very precisely polygyny rather than polygamy. Polygyny was a feature of Judaism really into the 20th century in cultures where there were Jewish communities in Islam, then polygyny survived within living memory. There are people alive, Jewish people alive, who would have known that polygynous context. In the West, it is further back with Judaism. It's a 12th century when Jews ceased to allow polygamy in such circumstances. And I suspect that is because the pressures of Western society around them, Western Christian society forced them into a monogamous.”

    2026-01-21 · Conversations with Tyler · Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source