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The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early ChristianityKathy L. Gaca (Author), 2003&#160;This provocative work provides a radical reassessment of the emergence and nature of Christian sexual morality, the dominant moral paradigm in Western society since late antiquity. While many scholars, including Michel Foucault, have found the basis of early Christian sexual restrictions in Greek ethics and political philosophy, Kathy L. Gaca demonstrates on compelling new grounds that it is misguided to regard Greek ethics and political theory—with their proposed reforms of eroticism, the family, and civic order—as the foundation of Christian sexual austerity. Rather, in this thoroughly informed and wide-ranging study, Gaca shows that early Christian goals to eradicate fornication were derived from the sexual rules and poetic norms of the Septuagint, or Greek Bible, and that early Christian writers adapted these rules and norms in ways that reveal fascinating insights into the distinctive and largely non-philosophical character of Christian sexual morality.Writing with an authoritative command of both Greek philosophy and early Christian writings, Gaca investigates Plato, the Stoics, the Pythagoreans, Philo of Alexandria, the apostle Paul, and the patristic Christians Clement of Alexandria, Tatian, and Epiphanes, freshly elucidating their ideas on sexual reform with precision, depth, and originality. Early Christian writers, she demonstrates, transformed all that they borrowed from Greek ethics and political philosophy to launch innovative programs against fornication that were inimical to Greek cultural mores, popular and philosophical alike. The Septuagint's mandate to worship the Lord alone among all gods led to a Christian program to revolutionize Gentile sexual practices, only for early Christians to find this virtually impossible to carry out without going to extremes of sexual renunciation.Knowledgeable and wide-ranging, this work of intellectual history and ethics cogently demonstrates why early Christian sexual restrictions took such repressive ascetic forms and cast a sobering light on what Christian sexual morality has meant for religious pluralism in Western culture, especially among women as its bearers.(Text by the author)&#160;Contents:AcknowledgmentsAbbreviations1. Introduction: Ancient Greek Sexual Blueprints for Social OrderPart I. Greek Philosophical Sexual Reforms2. Desire’s Hunger and Plato the Regulator3. Crafting Eros through the Stoic Logos of Nature4. The Reproductive Technology of the PythagoreansPart II. Greek Biblical Sexual Rules and Their Reworking by Paul and Philo5. Rival Plans for God’s Sexual Program in the Pentateuch and Paul6. From the Prophets to Paul: Converting Whore Culture into the Lord’s Veiled Bride7. Philo’s Reproductive City of GodPart III. Patristic Transformations of the Philosophical, Pauline, and Philonic Rules8. Driving Aphrodite from the World: Tatian and His Encratite Argument9. Prophylactic Grace in Clement’s Emergent Church Sexual Ethic10. The Fornicating Justice of Epiphanes11. Conclusion: The Demise of Greek Eros and ReproductionBibliographyIndex