Yes. Read in context, the Bible treats sex outside marriage as sin. The reason matters as much as the verdict. Scripture does not locate sexual morality in consent alone. It locates it in covenant: the lifelong, exclusive promise of one man and one woman that Genesis calls becoming one flesh. Without that reasoning, the conviction feels like an arbitrary rule. With it, the conviction makes sense.
The question usually comes sharpened by a specific argument. When the Bible condemns sexual sin, the argument goes, it really condemns exploitation: the powerful using the vulnerable. Two consenting adults of equal standing are a different matter, and the old word fornication has been stretched past what the text meant. Part of that argument is true, so it deserves a careful hearing. The way to test it is to read the passages themselves, in their settings, and only then draw a conclusion.
Why Does Jesus Seem to Talk Mostly About Adultery?
Readers often notice that Jesus says a great deal about adultery and divorce and comparatively little about unmarried people. Some conclude that he cared less about sexual ethics than Paul did. Dr. Esau McCaulley, who teaches New Testament at Wheaton College, reads the silence differently. Jesus ministered almost entirely to a Jewish audience inside Israel, so he could start from the shared ethic of Israel’s Scriptures and press it further. Paul wrote largely to Gentiles. He could assume nothing and had to build the ethic from the ground up.
McCaulley adds a historical claim of his own. In his account, nearly all Jewish girls of that period married in their teens, so an adult woman a man noticed was very likely someone’s wife. If he is right, that explains the shape of Jesus’s teaching here:
“Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: 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 5:27–28)
Whatever the exact marriage customs were, the text plainly raises the standard. The command now reaches desire as well as action.
The Gospels also show that Jesus recognized a category beyond adultery. In Matthew 15:19, he lists what comes from the heart: “For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies.” Adulteries and fornications appear as separate items. The Greek word behind “fornications” is porneia, the general term for sexual immorality, and here it stands beside adultery as something distinct. The plain implication is that two unmarried people could sin sexually without either one betraying a spouse. McCaulley says it directly: “Jesus actually knows about that category.”
Matthew 5:32 points the same way. Jesus allows divorce only “for the cause of fornication,” which assumes that sexual life belongs inside the commitment between husband and wife. McCaulley summarizes the pattern: “to do something outside of that commitment is how the Bible defines sin.”
Is the Bible’s Concern Only Exploitation?
Here the popular argument has real support. McCaulley grants that in the Greco-Roman world, men with money and status had sexual access to slaves, poor women and boys, and Paul confronted that directly. He goes further than many traditional readers would. Telling wealthy men they could not take whomever they wanted restrained the strong for the sake of the weak. “Paul’s sexual ethic was actually counter imperial. He was limiting the power of the most powerful people.” McCaulley points out that the pattern persists today, in workplace harassment and in professors who prey on vulnerable students.
So the exploitation reading is right about what the Bible opposes. The open question is whether exploitation is the only thing it opposes, and three passages suggest otherwise:
- 1 Corinthians 5:1. Paul rebukes a church for tolerating a man who “should have his father’s wife.” McCaulley proposes that, because men often remarried much younger women, the stepmother and son in this case may have been close in age and equal in standing. That reconstruction is his, and the passage does not state it. The plain point of the text stands without it: Paul condemns a sexual relationship and accuses no one of coercion.
- Ephesians 5:3. “But fornication, and all uncleanness, or covetousness, let it not be once named among you, as becometh saints.” The verse follows a call to walk in love as Christ loved us, and it addresses the whole church, most of whom held no wealth or power over anyone. McCaulley reads porneia here as a broad category of sexual sin, which matches how the standard Greek lexicons define the word.
- Acts 15:29. The Jerusalem council asks Gentile believers to abstain “from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication.” The council placed only a few requirements on Gentile converts, and avoiding sexual immorality is one of them. McCaulley reads the term here, too, as the same broad category.
Taken together, the texts condemn exploitation and also treat sexual relationships outside marriage as sin, coercion or no coercion. McCaulley puts it bluntly: “the idea that consent in a Christian context outlaws the possibility of sin is a sub biblical idea.”
What Does 1 Corinthians 7 Add?
This chapter is often quoted for one line and misread as a grudging concession. Read whole, it supplies the positive picture that the prohibitions assume.
Paul opens with a reply: “Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote unto me: It is good for a man not to touch a woman” (1 Corinthians 7:1). Many interpreters, McCaulley among them, take that second sentence as a slogan the Corinthians sent Paul, not his own view. On McCaulley’s reading, some converts were abstaining even from their wives and drifting back into old habits. Paul answers in verse 2: “Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband.”
Verse 4 is the one McCaulley calls important:
“The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband: and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife.” (1 Corinthians 7:4)
The first half would have surprised no one in a world that assumed male authority. The second half would have. Paul tells a husband, often much older than his wife in that culture, that his body belongs to her. McCaulley reads this as requiring mutual regard in the marriage bed: “He’s actually empowering the woman to have dignity within the context of the sexual relationship.”
That corrects a common misreading. Paul does not treat the wedding as a license for anything. Sex inside marriage can also be sinful when it treats a spouse with contempt, so covenant is both the setting for sexual life and a standard for how spouses treat each other within it.
Only then does Paul turn to the unmarried and widowed. Staying single is good, he says, “But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn” (1 Corinthians 7:9). Contain means exercise self-control, and burnmeans burn with desire. The verse assumes something important. Paul’s counsel to someone overwhelmed by desire is marriage. He does not suggest a consensual relationship between equals as another option. Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, raised exactly this point in her conversation with McCaulley, and the text supports her.
Why Covenant and Not Consent?
This is the center of the argument. McCaulley states it directly: “the Bible does not place the morality or the immorality of something at the place of consent. It places in the context of covenant.”
He insists that sexual assault is always wrong and that consent is real and required. His claim is that consent sets a floor and leaves the biblical question unanswered, because two people can agree to a relationship that harms both of them. He gives ordinary examples. Someone lies about intending to marry, or about having money, and the other person wakes up having agreed and still feels used. Or someone waits years for a proposal that never comes, and the partner leaves and marries someone else months later. Each of these arrangements was consensual, and each left someone exploited.
So what makes giving oneself to another person safe? Genesis answers with a sequence:
“Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.” (Genesis 2:24)
A man leaves, cleaves and becomes one flesh. Union follows commitment. McCaulley draws out the logic: because I have committed my life to you, you can give yourself to me without being exploited. In his words, “sexual expression is meant to be a manifestation of or flow out of a lifelong covenant.”
The prophets reinforce this from another direction. They repeatedly picture God’s faithfulness to Israel as a husband’s faithfulness to a wife, and Israel’s idolatry as unfaithfulness. McCaulley notes that marital fidelity carried so much weight in Jewish and Christian thought that it became a picture of God’s own loyalty. The marriage covenant is meant to reflect the kind of promise God keeps.
McCaulley also offers a thought experiment. List every way a person can be exploited inside a consensual sexual relationship: deception, unequal commitment, abandonment, using someone’s loneliness. Then imagine removing each one. “And by the time you remove all of those things, you basically have gotten yourself into a marriage contract.” The protections a person needs to give themselves safely turn out to be what a lifelong promise provides.
Weren’t These Texts Written for a Different World?
This is the strongest objection, and McCaulley grants part of it. Two financially independent adults of the same age, freely choosing a sexual relationship with no plans to marry, was not the typical first-century case. By his estimate, most sexual sin in Paul’s day involved exploitation, and the scenario modern readers ask about was a small minority.
A small category is still a category, though, and the texts name it. Jesus distinguishes fornication from adultery. Paul condemns a relationship with no coercion in view. The broad word porneia reaches sexual relationships outside marriage. Scripture did not have to anticipate every modern arrangement, because it grounds sexual ethics in what marriage is. McCaulley also questions how different our world really is. Much of what people now call casual and equal still involves unequal power and unequal commitment.
The texts answer the question with a clear yes, and they also set limits on what follows from it. They do not rank sexual sin above other sins, and they give no grounds for treating anyone’s past as unforgivable. McCaulley says both plainly, noting that faithfulness is just as hard in matters of money and honesty.
How Should This Be Taught?
The Jude 3 Project holds the historic Christian ethic that sexual intimacy belongs within marriage, and it teaches that ethic by leading with grace rather than condemnation. The way the church has taught it in the past makes this necessary. Fields names the harm: some people’s first sexual experience was abuse they never chose, and sermons treating virginity as a badge of superiority loaded shame onto them. She refuses the opposite error as well: “you don’t combat the misuse of scripture by misusing it.” McCaulley warns that preaching aimed at applause can forget the survivor or the person trapped in an abusive marriage who is listening, and nothing in the covenant ethic asks anyone to stay in danger. McCaulley describes his own aim this way: “I’m trying to be compassionately passionate about the truth.”
If you are in an abusive relationship: National Domestic Violence Hotline, 1-800-799-7233.
For those who have failed, sometimes for years, his word is that “a long sin is not a permanent sin.” He does not promise quick victory. He describes the continued effort itself as part of the story God is still writing.
The ethic also carries a real cost for people who may never marry. Fields says plainly that “God doesn’t promise you a husband or wife,” and she denies that obedience shuts anyone out of the abundant life. McCaulley argues that Scripture places the deepest joy in life with God in the resurrection, where marriage as we know it ends. If joy required sex, that hope would be a lesser one, and lifelong celibacy, chosen or not, would be a sentence. He reads the apostolic writings as holding out joy to the single, the widowed and the wounded alike.
That brings the question back to wisdom. McCaulley describes every sin as a moment when God’s wisdom seems impractical. The covenant reading gives a reason to trust that wisdom here. Scripture ties sex to a lifelong promise because the promise is what makes such complete self-giving safe for the person who gives it.
