Two Ancient Views on Sex - Beaverland Forum

The Greek and Hebraic traditions take a quite different stance toward sex. The ancient Hebrews considered sex to be most intimately linked to reproduction. Children came out as the fulfillment of God’s blessing and turned into a kind of immortality.
Because in Hebraic thought the flesh meant no evil, they enjoyed sex for its own sake as well. The Hebraic husband expected to find sexual pleasure with his wife while the classical Greek husband typically did not. He expected to find sexual pleasure with courtesans or prostitutes.

Greek Lovemaking—much less associated with reproduction

Sex became a mode of worship in Dionysian rites in Greece while the Hebrew people never legitimized such rites.
The Greek put an emphasis on contests or games as a way of giving value to the self. This attitude also established a favorable atmosphere for Greek sexual adventures. You could not find such an atmosphere, however, in the ancient Hebraic lifestyle.

Sex as conquest became much more typical of Greek thinking.

Greek and Hebrew thought came into close contact in New Testament times. Jesus and his disciples spoke out of a Hebraic background to a predominantly Hellenized world. (The entire Bible was translated into Greek in A.D. 250. The Gospel according to St. John was written in Greek in about A.D. 100.) The fact that Greek thought dominated Hebraic thought in the Christian mainstream helps account for the Christian asceticism. As mentioned earlier, the Hebraic husband expected to find sexual pleasure with his wife while the classical Greek husband typically did not.

The Greeks regarded the body as a tomb that trapped the spirit.

The Hebrews did not take the above view. The Christian asceticism accepted the Greek perspective more than the Hebraic, and Christians have struggled in a peculiar way with the sins of the flesh ever since.
In fact, the zealous Christians feared the sins of the flesh so much that the phallic symbol became so taboo and they deliberately destroyed or knocked the penis off every statue they could get their hands on.
Of all the sexual rites that belonged to the ancient polytheism, none turned out more furiously inveighed against by the zealous propagators of the Christian faith than the ceremonies performed in the worship of Priapus or phallic worship. To the zealots, the phallic symbol appeared not only contrary to the gravity and sanctity of religion, but subversive of the first principles of decency and good order in society. The zealots considered it more fit to be placed in a brothel than a temple.
Despite the negative thought of those zealots, the penis and testes played an important role in much older days. It indeed symbolized honor. Consider such words as testify and testament. In those days, a man would make a vow while clutching his own cock and/or balls, and would make pacts by clutching those of the other.

New Testament Christianity

You might as well look at the Bible as a love story—a tale of God’s love for his creation, written over a period of about 1,400 years. During this long period of history, the images of God changed. During the last two centuries of this period, these images became focused around a historical person, Jesus of Nazareth—instead of a phallic symbol.
While there exist many images of Jesus, the most dominant image in Western Christianity can be traced from Saint Paul, through Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas down to the papal encyclicals and fundamentalist revivals of today. These two modern expressions of Christianity turn out different in many ways, but they both tend to share the same image of Jesus.

Jesus the Ascetic

In this view, Jesus remained an ascetic—a person who practiced strict self-denial, especially in regard to the sins of the flesh. Many artists portrayed Jesus as a long-haired, pale-skinned, immaculately clean person of tender features and intensely blue eyes that look into your soul. You find it hard to imagine him laughing about anything, though his rage at the money changers and his grief at Gethsemane tells us that he turned into a man with strong feelings. Jesus endured the mortification of the flesh, but apparently experienced little of its joy.
Some people find it equally possible to picture a robust Jesus—son of a carpenter. In his youth he probably worked hard at the plane and the lathe. From time to time he strode the dusty roads to Galilee, talking to fishermen, listening to the townsfolk talk, and cursing the fig tree because it didn't bear fruit in the right season. This Jesus, associated with prostitutes and thieves, healed the sick, ate and drank on the Sabbath, and fed the multitude from the abundance of his life. He indeed became a "Lord of all hopefulness, and Lord of all joy". Yet you would still think it difficult to see Jesus as anything but an ascetic in matters of sex—not because of what the New Testament tells us, but because of what it does not tell us.
We know little about his birth, less about his childhood, and nothing at all about his young adulthood. The biblical account of his life touched only the three or four years of his ministry—presumably in his early thirties.

Jesus never married.

So far as we know, he never physically desired a woman. He had little to say about sex or marriage and nothing at all about the art of lovemaking—advanced or otherwise. Those who talk about imitating Jesus in their lives incline toward celibacy and associate sexual desire with sin. But, in fact, we don’t know why Jesus never married or how he felt about sexual desire, or even if these matters interested him at all.

The Worshipers of Dionysus

Dionysus, also commonly known by his Roman name Bacchus, prevailed before Jesus as a god who possessed two distinct attributes. On the one hand, Dionysus turned into the god of wine, agriculture, and fertility. He also became the patron god of the Greek stage. On the other hand, Dionysus represented the outstanding features of mysterious religions such as those practiced at Eleusis. Dionysus helped his followers attain ecstasy as well as personal delivery from the daily world through physical or spiritual intoxication.
Dionysus appeared to be a hybrid of a local Greek nature god and another more potent god imported from Phrygia (the central area of modern day Turkey) through Thrace. The Egyptian fertility god, Min, also influenced Dionysus in the forming its image as a phallic god.
According to one myth, Dionysus came up as the son of the god Zeus and the mortal woman—Semele (daughter of Cadmus of Thebes). Semele lost her life, hit by Zeus’ lightning bolts while Dionysus still snuggled in her womb. Dionysus, however, underwent a second birth from Zeus after developing in his thigh. Zeus then gave the infant to some nymphs to be raised.
In another version, one with more explicit religious overtones, Dionysus, also referred to as Zagreus in this account, came into being as the son of Zeus and Persephone—Queen of the Underworld. Hera let the Titans to lure the infant with toys. They ripped him to shreds and ate everything but Zagreus’ heart, which was saved by either Athena, Rhea, or Demeter. Zeus reproduced his son from the heart and implanted him in Semele who bore a new Dionysus Zagreus. Hence, Dionysus was called “twice born”. The latter account formed a part of the Orphic mythology.

Dionysus and the Maenads

Dionysus, at least the Phrygian Dionysus, turned out a late arrival in the Greek world and mythology. He was hardly mentioned at all in the Homeric epics, and when he was, it was with some hostility. A number of his stories tell us about how Dionysus moved into a city and destroyed those who opposed him.
Euripides wrote his play the Bacchae while staying in the court of King Archelaus of Macedonia. Nowhere do we see Dionysus more destructive and his worship more dangerous than in this play. In Macedonia, Euripides had discovered a more extreme form of the religion of Dionysus than in Athens.
Briefly, Dionysus returned to Thebes, his putative birthplace, where his cousin Pentheus was king. He had returned to punish the women of Thebes for denying that he was a god and born of a god. Pentheus became enraged at the worship of Dionysus and forbade it, but he could not stop the women, including his mother Agave, or even the elder statesmen of the kingdom from swarming to the wilds to join the Maenads (a term given to women under the ecstatic spell of Dionysus) in worship. Dionysus lured Pentheus to the wilds where he was killed by the Maenads and then mutilated by Agave.
While the worshipers of Dionysus could easily think of their god with an erect penis, the average Christian would feel uncomfortable with such an image. In our mythology, Satan has an erect penis, not Christ. In ancient days before Christ, however, many peoples all over the world did indeed worship a phallus as archaeological findings show.
Those who contend that modesty has its place even in our liberated age and that we should not undress our gods, even in our heads, have a point. One obvious advantage of a sexless image of Jesus is that at least it avoids the male chauvinism of phallic worship.