In the New Testament the Apostle Paul, reflecting an ascetic dualism of body and spirit found in Greco-Roman philosophy, associates flesh (Greek sarkos) with animalistic urges or sinfulness. "To be carnally minded is death," says Paul, whereas "to be spiritually minded is life and peace" (Rom. 7:14; 8:6). Topping Paul's list of manifest "works of the flesh" are adultery and fornication (Gal. 5:19). "If ye live after the flesh, ye shall die," Paul writes to the Romans (8:13), "but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live." Thus Paul tells them to "make not provision for the flesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof" (13:14). Similarly the First Letter of Peter urges the faithful to "abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul" (1 Pet. 2:11), and the Second Letter condemns false teachers, who as "natural brute beasts," with "eyes full of adultery," allure "unstable souls" by "the lusts of the flesh, through much wantonness" (2 Pet. 2.12-18).
Lust (Latin luxuria) is listed among the seven deadly sins, gleaned from various biblical passages (e.g. 1 Tim. 6:10, 1 John 2:16) by early Christian theologians, and treated in St. Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica.
Pieter Coecke van Aelst, The Triumph of Lust / Palacio Real de Madrid
There is more fornication in Ezekiel 23, a lurid allegory of Hebrew apostasy, than in any other chapter in the Bible. Coming in a close second is Ezekiel 16, an allegory of adulterous Jerusalem. Indeed Ezekiel on illicit sex is almost in a class by himself (see EZEKIEL: TALKING LEWD WOMEN), though certainly the other Old Testament prophets as a group have plenty to say (and in the case of Hosea, to do) on the subject (virtually always as a metaphor of Israel's unfaithfulness to Yahweh; see HARLOTRY: "A-WHORING AFTER OTHER GODS"; JEREMIAH: "THY LOVERS WILL DESPISE THEE"; and HOSEA: "UPON EVERY CORNFLOOR").
In the New Testament's book of Revelation, John of Patmos portrays imperial Rome (called "Babylon") as "the great whore" and "mother of harlots," with whom "the kings of the earth have commited fornication" (17:1-5). John also complains in Rev. 2:20-23 about an individual in Thyatira, a "Jezebel" and self-styled prophetess who seduces the faithful "to commit fornication." For her lack of repentance, John quotes the "Son of God" as saying he "will cast her into a (sick) bed" and "kill her children with death."
The Apostle Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians, tells the faithful to "flee fornication" (6:18), to "let every man have his own wife" and "every woman have her own husband" (if one is compelled to by desire, it being the ascetic Paul's preference, in view of the impending end of the world, that Christians stay single and celibate, focused on the glory to come [7:1-8,32-33]). Paul reminds them that fornicators are not among those who will "inherit the kingdom of God" (6:9-10).
The Letter of Jude is more direct about punishment: like the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, those guilty of fornication will suffer "the vengeance of eternal fire" (1:7). The Apocalypse of Peter, a noncanonical work dating probably from the early second century (see Barnstone's The Other Bible), describes how fornicators are hung over a burning pit in hell, the women by their necks and plaited hair and the men by their genitals. The men complain among themselves that they didn't know this was coming.
William Blake
The Harlot Babylon
1809
