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 The
Wiles and Guiles of a Campaign Against Priestly Celibacy
by Luiz Sérgio Solimeo
In a previous article on the apostolic origins
of celibacy, I wrote:
Among the Apostles, only Saint
Peter is known to have been married because his mother-in-law
is mentioned in the Gospels. Some of the others might have
been married but there is a clear indication that they left
everything, including their families, to follow Christ.1
A reader disagreed, saying that all
I needed to do was to check a passage of Saint Paul’s
First Epistle to the Corinthians (9:5) to find that all the
Apostles were married, Saint Paul inclusive. For the sake
of truth, I was requested to correct the article. It so happens
that the truth demands that I reaffirm what I wrote.
According to the translation sent
by the reader, Saint Paul wrote: “Don’t we have
the right to take a believing wife along with us, as
do the other apostles and the Lord’s brothers and Cephas?”
Divergent Translations
This translation, taken from the Protestant
New International Version of the Bible, appears to leave no
doubt that “the other apostles,” including “Cephas”
(i.e., Saint Peter), were married. The King James version
provides a somewhat different translation: “Have we not
power to lead about a sister, a wife, as well as other apostles,
and as the brethren of the Lord, and Cephas?”
The classical Catholic translation
of the Bible into English, commonly referred to as the Douay-Rheims
version, gives us a text that excludes the interpretation
that all the Apostles, Saint Paul inclusive, were married:
“Have we not power to carry about a woman, a sister,
as well as the rest of the apostles, and the brethren of the
Lord, and Cephas?”
An objection could be raised that
the Douay-Rheims version does not translate the text directly
from the Greek but from a Latin version known as the Vulgate.
This Latin text reads mulierem sororem or “a woman
sister.” A return to the original Greek should dispel
any discrepancies in this regard.
The Real Meaning of Adelphên
Gunaika
What are the Greek words which have
been translated as “believing wife,” “a sister,
a wife,” or “a woman, a sister”? The key words
(transliterated into Latin characters) are: adelphên
gunaika.
Gunaika (the accusative or
objective form of gunê) can mean both “a
woman” and “a wife.” This happens, incidentally,
in Romance languages like French, Spanish, and Portuguese,
in which femme, mujer, and mulher, respectively,
can have both meanings.
To avoid any ambiguity as to the meaning,
Saint Paul qualified the word gunaika with the word
adelphên (the objective form of adelphê),
which means “a sister,” thus making a composite
expression translating literally into “a sister woman.”
To understand the meaning of the expression
“sister woman,” some historical background is needed.
Among the Jews, it was the custom for pious ladies to follow
their spiritual masters to aid them in their domestic needs.
The Gospels record the fact that pious women followed the
Divine Master and served Him. In Saint Matthew’s Gospel,
one reads:
And there were there many women
afar off, who had followed Jesus from Galilee, ministering
unto Him; among whom was Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother
of James and Joseph, and the mother of the sons of Zebedee
(27:55-56).2
Likewise, Saint Luke writes:
And it came to pass afterwards,
that He traveled through the cities and towns, preaching
and evangelizing the kingdom of God; and the twelve with
Him. And certain women who had been healed of evil
spirits and infirmities: Mary who is called Magdalene, out
of whom seven devils were gone forth, and Joanna the wife
of Chusa, Herod’s steward, and Susanna, and many others
who ministered unto Him of their substance (8:1-3).
The Greek word employed by both Saint
Matthew and Saint Luke referring to these pious women who
followed and served Our Lord is the same word used by Saint
Paul: gunaikes.3 None of the exegetes
thought of translating the expression as “wives.”
The Apostle of the Gentiles
Returning to Saint Paul, the context of the
Epistle to the Corinthians does not warrant any conclusion
that the Apostle was claiming some right to take a wife with
him since a little earlier (7:7-8), he had made clear that
he was not married and had no intention to marry. He preferred
perfect chastity to the married state which he, nonetheless,
held in high esteem. In that passage, addressing both the
single and widowed, he writes:
For I would that all men were
even as myself: but every one hath his proper gift from
God; one after this manner, and another after that. But
I say to the unmarried, and to the widows: It is good for
them if they so continue, even as I.
In his Theology of Saint Paul, Fr.
Fernand Prat, S.J., states:
If there is one thing certain, it
is that the Apostle lived in celibacy, for the discordant
voice of Clement of Alexandria only accentuates the harmony
of Catholic tradition in this respect. That he considered
virginity as more excellent than marriage it is impossible
to doubt, and the efforts of some heterodox writers to escape
this annoying testimony have ended in putting it in the
clearest light.4
In a more recent study analyzing the
Fathers and other ecclesiastical writers, Fr. Christian Cochini,
S.J., also affirms that most of these attest to Saint Paul’s
state of celibacy concluding, “The largest group rejects
the idea of marriage for the apostle and affirms that Paul
was single before believing in Christ and remained so.”5
He further extends this belief when
writing about Saint John:
Jesus’ special love for
the apostle John is frequently attested in the Gospels and
other texts of the New Testament. Tradition was unanimous
in crediting this preference on the part of the Lord to
his beloved apostle’s state of perpetual virginity.6
Translating a Protestant Agenda
Protestant reformers began to question
the validity of the Latin Vulgate about this text of Saint
Paul because they opposed priestly celibacy. Theodore de Beze
(1519-1605), a Calvinist leader, was one of the first to replace
the translation of adelphên gunaika with “sister
wife.” This translation was refuted by, among others,
the scholarly Catholic Scripture commentator Cornelius á
Lapide (1567-1637) from the standpoint of philology as well
as from a scriptural and patristic context.7
One is therefore perplexed to see
such mistranslations reappear – even in versions approved
by Catholic sources. This can be seen in the translation of
the passage of Saint Paul in the New American Bible, which
is sponsored by the Bishop’s Committee of the Confraternity
of Christian Doctrine of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
In its 1970 edition, we read: “Do we not have the
right to marry a believing woman like the rest of the
apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?”
This translation is totally contrary
to Catholic exegetic tradition and appears to have been tailored
to favor campaigns for the abolition of priestly celibacy
carried out by associations of married ex-priests.
The 1991 edition of the same Bible
on the web site of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops
avoids the verb “to marry,” but the sense of the
Protestant mistranslation favoring an end to priestly celibacy
remains: “Do we not have the right to take along a
Christian wife, as do the rest of the apostles, and the
brothers of the Lord, and Kephas?”
As I wrote in the previous article,
even if several Apostles had been previously married –
and the only inkling found in the Scriptures relates to Saint
Peter – it is certain that all of them, including the
Prince of the Apostles, lived in perfect chastity after the
divine calling.
Thus, in the Gospels, one reads that
Saint Peter asked Our Lord:
What about us? We left all we had
to follow you. The Divine Master answered: “I tell
you solemnly, there is no one who has left house, wife,
brothers, parents, or children for the sake of the kingdom
of God, who will not be given repayment many times over
in this present time and, in the world to come, eternal
life (Luke 18:28-30; cf. Matt. 19:27-30, Mark 10:20-21).
A Firm Apostolic Tradition
Rather than repeat all the arguments of the
previous article, I will conclude with the words with which
Father Cochini closed his accurate study of more than 400
pages, solidly establishing the Apostolic tradition on this
matter:
Let us conclude that the obligation
demanded from married deacons, priests, and bishops to observe
perfect continence with their wives is not, in the Church,
the fruit of a belated development, but on the contrary,
in the full meaning of the term, an unwritten tradition
of apostolic origin that, so far as we know, found its first
canonical expression in the 4th century.
“Ut quod apostoli docuerunt,
et ipsa servavit antiquitas, nos quoque custodiamus”
- “What the apostles taught, and what antiquity itself
observed, let us endeavor also to keep.” The affirmation
of the Fathers of [the Council of] Carthage [390] will remain
an essential link with the origins.
May it help the Churches of the
East and of the West, who are both referring to it, achieve
a stronger awareness of their common inheritance.8
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