One popular account of church history says the earliest Christians cared about justice and almost nothing else. Rules about private sexual conduct, the sin the King James Bible calls fornication, supposedly came later. They arrived after Constantine made Christianity the faith of the empire, when the church needed to steer people away from challenging power and toward policing their own bodies. The claim can be tested against the sources. It does not hold.
Dr. Esau McCaulley, a New Testament scholar, answers it on several independent lines of evidence. Jewish communities that never had any tie to Constantine held a personal sexual ethic. Jesus knew the category of sexual sin outside marriage. Paul’s teaching restricted the most powerful men in Roman society. Christians writing before Constantine, by McCaulley’s account, wrote about personal holiness constantly. Underneath all of it lies a deeper point: the biblical writers never split justice from holiness in the first place.
What would the evidence look like if the claim were true?
A claim about origins makes predictions. If fornication was a post-Constantine invention, a few things should follow. Jesus and the apostles should show no awareness of sexual sin beyond exploitation. Communities outside the empire’s favor should lack any comparable ethic, since they had no emperor to please. Christian writers before Constantine should be silent on personal sexual holiness. And the ethic itself should serve the powerful, because that is the motive the account assigns to it.
Each prediction can be checked. None comes out the way the account requires.
Did Jesus already know the category?
A common objection is that Jesus said little about sex compared with Paul. McCaulley’s answer starts with audience. “Jesus never leaves the boundaries of Israel,” he points out, so Jesus speaks to people who already share a Jewish moral consensus and builds from there. He has no need to forbid what everyone in the room already rejects. Paul, writing to Gentiles in the Greco-Roman world, has to construct that ethic from the ground up, which is why his letters spell out more.
The consensus shows up in an unexpected place: the arguments Jesus did have. In McCaulley’s words, “when Jesus and the Pharisees are having a fight, they never fight about the particular aspects of sexual morality.” They clash over the Sabbath, purity and authority. Sexual fidelity was never in dispute. Jesus instead presses the standard further: “But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart” (Matthew 5:28). For McCaulley, “what you see from like the Old Testament into the New Testament in Jesus’s own teaching is a raising of the moral stakes.”
The vocabulary matters too. In Matthew 15:19, Jesus lists what defiles a person: “For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies.” Adultery and fornication appear as separate items. Adultery is betraying a spouse, so the list shows Jesus knew a person could sin sexually without taking someone else’s spouse. The Greek word behind “fornications,” porneia, is the same broad term Paul later uses, and McCaulley notes that the standard New Testament lexicons define it as sexual immorality in a general sense, not only exploitation.
The word was in the Gospels, on the lips of Jesus, three centuries before Constantine.
What about communities the empire never favored?
The cleanest test of an “imperial invention” claim is to look at people who had no imperial patron. McCaulley names two.
The first is rabbinic Judaism. Judaism and Christianity went separate ways, and the rabbis never received Constantine’s favor. Yet in McCaulley’s reading, the sexual ethic of early rabbinic Judaism ends up close to what appears in the New Testament, an ethic of personal morality. If that holds, flattery of a Christian emperor cannot explain it. The likelier explanation is a shared inheritance from the Hebrew Scriptures.
The second is the community at Qumran, the people associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls. When Lisa Fields asked him to clarify, McCaulley explained he meant the people who wrote the scrolls, a separatist group living in the wilderness at the time of Jesus and waiting for God to act. They outlawed polygamy, he says, and held what amounts to a traditional sexual ethic. A group that withdrew from society entirely was not crafting rules to serve Rome.
These are McCaulley’s descriptions, and this article does not reproduce the rabbinic or Qumran texts. His own posture toward that gap is instructive: he tells listeners not to treat the matter like a conspiracy theory, because the data is public and anyone can look up what the Qumran texts say about sexual ethics. The argument invites checking rather than asking for trust.
What did Christians write before Constantine?
This is where the claim is most exposed, because it concerns a specific stretch of time. It is also the thinnest link in the case presented here, and it should be named as such. McCaulley lists writers from what he describes as the period when Christianity was illegal: Irenaeus, Ignatius, Polycarp and Justin Martyr. His challenge is to read them and look for an absence of concern about personal holiness. He says the opposite turns up: “you can find in those first three centuries Christians talking about personal holiness over and over and over and over again.” His verdict: “it’s just not historically accurate to say that personal piety became important for the Christians under Constantine.”
This article does not quote those writers, so the strength of this link rests on McCaulley’s characterization of them. A reader who wants to test it can go to the texts directly, which is exactly what McCaulley urges.
He adds an argument from motive. If these Christians had simply told the empire what it wanted to hear, he asks, why would Rome have persecuted them? He points to accounts of bishops arriving at Nicaea bearing the marks of persecution, and to Athanasius, whom he describes as exiled five times. Persecution in those centuries varied by time and place, and these details are McCaulley’s summary of the record. But the logic does not depend on any single detail. A movement inventing rules to win imperial favor is hard to square with a movement the empire kept punishing.
Lisa Fields raised Augustine as an example of heavy emphasis on overcoming sexual sin. That emphasis is real, but Augustine wrote after Constantine, so he cannot decide the origin question. The earlier sources do.
Whom did the ethic actually restrain?
The account assumes that sexual rules serve the powerful by keeping ordinary people docile. McCaulley turns this around by asking who in the Roman world had the most to lose from Paul’s teaching.
Men with money and status in that world had sexual access to slaves and to lower-class women and boys. A wife at home for producing heirs, with others on the side, was a socially accepted arrangement. Paul told those men they could have their own spouse and no one else. Poor women had no such access to surrender. They were the ones being used. “Paul’s sexual ethic was actually counter imperial,” McCaulley says. “He was limiting the power of the most powerful people.”
He then makes the political point plainly: “if you wanted to cozy up to the empire, all you gotta do is tell the empire that like they can do what they wanna do.” Rome’s existing ethic already suited its elite. A teaching that took away their access to enslaved women did not. For an enslaved woman, McCaulley asks, what could be more radical than no longer being at her master’s sexual mercy?
Christian teaching also gave women worth apart from a husband. Some early Christian women chose not to marry and devoted themselves to the Lord, and their neighbors saw a single woman living independently as a threat to social stability. An ethic that made room for that choice worked against the order Rome relied on.
Were justice and holiness ever separate?
The deepest problem is the starting assumption: that a faith concerned with justice could not also be concerned with personal conduct. McCaulley’s reply is that “the Bible is actually sophisticated enough to say two things at the exact same time.” He states it simply: “Personal immorality matters, and structural immorality matters.”
Isaiah, one of the prophets the New Testament quotes most, shows the pattern within a single chapter. He condemns economic accumulation that pushes others out: “Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!” (Isaiah 5:8). Three verses later he condemns private excess: “Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning, that they may follow strong drink; that continue until night, till wine inflame them!” (Isaiah 5:11). Same prophet, same chapter, same word of woe.
Jesus does the same. He announces that he was sent “to preach deliverance to the captives” (Luke 4:18), a claim with real public weight. He also locates sin in the heart’s lust (Matthew 5:28), a place no government policy can reach. McCaulley calls it a modern distortion to claim “that because you care about structural injustice, there is no such thing as personal holiness.”
The early church carried both forward. When the Jerusalem council wrote to Gentile believers, the letter asked them to “abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication” (Acts 15:29). Paul writes to the Ephesians in the same register: “But fornication, and all uncleanness, or covetousness, let it not be once named among you, as becometh saints” (Ephesians 5:3). Sexual sin sits beside economic greed in one sentence. The split the account needs is absent from the text.
Doesn’t the misuse of this teaching prove the critics right?
This is the strongest objection, and it deserves a real answer. Churches have taught sexual ethics in ways that wounded people. Lisa Fields names one group directly: people who were sexually abused as children and who hear sermons on virginity as an accusation, when the choice was taken from them. Purity teaching has often ranked people, praising some as better and labeling others wicked, and that shame can push people away from God.
McCaulley takes this seriously. He warns that preachers can turn holiness into an applause line without noticing who is in the room, someone trapped in an abusive marriage or someone carrying sexual sin. And he concedes that the church has preached a standard of perfection from the pulpit that clergy themselves have not lived.
But misuse answers a different question than origin. Lisa Fields states the principle: “you don’t combat the misuse of scripture by misusing it.” McCaulley targets a specific shortcut: placing a charged label beside a Christian idea and treating the idea as refuted. If someone who practices white supremacy also holds a sexual ethic, the ethic does not thereby become white supremacy. A person you distrust might say the sky is blue, but “the blueness of the sky exists apart from the person who said it.” His conclusion: “we just gotta be more like intellectually serious than that.”
Christians across Africa, South America and parts of Asia hold a traditional sexual ethic. Explaining that away as internalized white supremacy, McCaulley argues, makes white supremacy an all-powerful force that leaves no one, including his African and South American brothers and sisters, capable of independent thought. He speaks for himself as well: “I actually believe it because I think it’s what the text says.”
What the evidence removes
The category of sexual sin outside marriage appears in the teaching of Jesus, in Paul’s letters and in the apostolic decree of Acts 15, all well before Constantine. The ethic restrained the powerful rather than serving them, and the biblical writers held holiness and justice together throughout.
Showing that an ethic is ancient does not compel anyone to live by it, and McCaulley grants that people can choose the life they want. Nor does a correct history excuse the ways the church has taught this badly. Those questions need their own honest answers.
What the evidence does remove is one escape route: the idea that a reader can keep the justice of Jesus and discard his holiness because the second was added later by an empire. Whatever someone decides about Christian sexual ethics, they are deciding about the teaching of Jesus and his first followers, not about a fourth-century political maneuver.