Sex and Salvation: Virginity As A Soteriological Paradigm in Ancient Christianity

Sex and Salvation explores the growth and development of virginity in the cultural contexts of the ancient church. An examination of Greek, Roman, and Jewish literature, which speaks to the issues of virginity, reveals that the Christian understanding of life-long virginity was a foreign concept to the peoples and cultures of the ancient Mediterranean world. In a time when families and authorities demanded that women follow the ancient tradition of marriage and motherhood, a growing number of important Christian authors were calling for a life free from the "dangerous" sexual passions that beset all women.

In Sex and Salvation, author Roger Steven Evans gathers over thirty documents from early Catholic, pseudopigraphical and heterodox letters, epistles, apologies, and canon law that trace the importance of virginity in early Christianity. Evans contends that the sexual ethic established by early Christian authors has reverberated throughout the intervening centuries, and is still being felt in the post modern world of the 21st century.