So...

[Occhidiangela]

1. As I said, I wonder how the illiterates dealt with the fact that they had to trust someone else to read all that stuff. You now get into the style of each parish priest, who was literate, and who could read it all and bring out salient points.

2. There is a more about marriage in the Bible than Paul's letters, which illustrates once again the problems of not reading the whole book. Indeed, Jesus comments on marriage as a spiritual joining in the 4 primary Gospels.

3. Marting Luther, 1400's, broke that grip of The Church on reading the book. You have heard of Protestants, right? Some of my best friends are Protestants. ;) Before that, there were at least two centuries before the Canon was established. What did Christians do then? I gather that some churches, primarily in Greece and Asia minor, took the guidance as a good model for action.

We now head to the Greek Orthodox practices, in which my Brother was married and to which faith he converted. Tied to them were Russian and Slavic Orthodox practices. Again, the chattel idea stayed bound to the newer idea for some time. There were many varietals of Church who did not see things the way the Bishop of Rome saw it. Some got attacked, see the Cathars, some became reformers, some made their own way.

But the idea, the ideal, has been around since the various commentaries and Gospels were written, and for what it's worth, in the srpreading of the Faith and the adapting of it by folks who encountered it, the ideas infiltrated each society it spread to.

But I did not say that it was a clean sweep. That ideal had to compete with other models of marriage. Which takes me down to the matter of cases.

Priests are not clones. No matter how faithful to the party line, they each bring a certain style to their parish. So, given the wealth of material available, I find it very hard to believe that for the past millenium clergymen have confined their guidance to marrying couples to one or two bits of the New Testament.

Through the process of scholarship necessary to get ordained, to be able to read the Scriptures, to copy them over in the case of monks, brains were put to work. Were that not the case, we would never have heard of Dominicans, Jesuits, Franciscans, etc.

I do not fall for the modern trap of seeing the Catholic Church as monolithic. It's not, it has its factions and sects, its schools of thought. Nor for that matter is Christianity even remotely monolithic. There is so much to work with that, last I checked, there are about 2000 flavors based on the same basic set of principles.

Baskin and Robbins must be envious.