Re: Marriage, With Child, Sex and motherhood.

Quoting R A Brown <ray@...>:

> Michael Adams wrote:
> > People forget that marriage for many centuries was a SECULAR
> > thing, only during the middle ages with the rise of the Catholic
> > church and its records keeping, did marriage become religious,
>
> I hate to disillusion you, but Christians were having Christian marriage
> long before the Middle Ages. Indeed, during the 'Dark Ages' that
> followed the gradual break up of the western Roman Empire, there were
> precious few civil authorities to regulate secular marriage - and that
> was way before the Middle Ages.
Depends a bit what you mean by "Christian marrige". From what I've read, it was
only in the 9th century that the idea became accepted in Gaul/Francia/France
that a proper marriage needed to be conducted by a priest, and I imagine
similar things hold for at least the rest of western Europe, but this, of
course, doesn't mean that previous generations of Christians did not think
marriage an institution with religious significance.

                                                    Andreas

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