This article, "Paul and How He Radically Redefined Marriage", was written to discuss Paul's drastic view on marriage and how it affected the Roman sexual revolution as well as the emerging Christian movement. The writer, Roy Bowen Ward, analyzes the views on marriage and sexual pleasure between different groups such as the Roman Knights and the Stoics. At the beginning of Christianity, the Roman Empire was having a hard time controlling the rate of people that have chosen to stay single. The Roman tradition was that marriage was a duty, and was endured only for the sake of obtaining heirs. Prostitutes satiated sexual desire, since it was commonly believed that it could not be possible between husband and wife. This led many people to remain unmarried, in order to pursue a lifestyle of sexual pleasure free of responsibility. While other more conservative groups, such as the Stoics, supported marriage, but opposed sexual pleasure except for procreation. Against either backdrop, Paul's view on marriage can be considered extreme, since it states that sexual desire was to be quenched only in marriage. This is indeed odd because the need to quench sexual desire was the reason many Romans did not marry. Paul also apparently does not recommend marriage for the reason of procreation. This is because he sees the purpose of obtaining heirs irrelevant on the grounds that the world will soon come to an end. Another drastic view of Paul's is that the husband and wife are equal partners in marriage when it comes to receiving and obtaining sexual pleasure from each other. Since the Stoics, as well as other Roman philosophers believed that the wife was there only to serve the husband, Paul can be seen as the more liberal in his opinions. To summarize, Paul's preference was for unmarried people to remain unmarried, since this was a way to exercise self-control, a virtue given to some by God.
