- 64 - He had received no authority from Christ to preach such a doctrine. Paul himself was well aware of this, as you will see if you will read that chapter carefully. If you do, you will notice something that occurs nowhere else in any of his epistles, namely, Paul’s repeated insistence that he is voicing his personal views only as regards celibacy, and that in this respect he is speaking under no mandate from the Lord. Hence the constant reiteration of the words: ‘I say’. ‘But I say to the unmarried men and especially to the widows....’ ‘Not I, but the Lord commands the married....’ ‘But to the rest say I, not the Lord....’ ‘As for the unmarried young women I have no explicit commandment from the Lord, but give only my opinion….’ At the end of the chapter, he again emphasizes: ‘That is my opinion!’ His opinion was mistaken, even if his last sentence closes with the remark that he believes that he also possesses a spirit of God’. Paul himself was not married, a state which he justified by the fact that his calling as a preacher required him to make long and frequent journeys over an extended area. Had he had a family, these travels would have been impossible, for he could neither have taken his wife and children with him nor have abandoned them for months and years at a time. Paul’s own unmarried state made him narrow-minded and fanatical about this subject. All people have their human faults. This is a fact for which allowance must be made even in the case of the Apostles. Paul was subsequently enlightened by Christ as to his misconception about celibacy and was directed to correct his viewpoint in a letter addressed to all the congregations. This is the letter I told you about on the evening of our first meeting, and in which a number of other passages in his earlier letters that had led to misunderstandings were also corrected. On that occasion I told you that this letter had later been destroyed because a number of the explanations and corrections that it contained were not acceptable to the Church of the later age and its teachings. How radically Paul changed his views on celibacy in consequence of the enlightenment he received from his Master can be seen from his writings to Timothy and to Titus. He, who had written to the Corinthians that he wished they all were unmarried, as he was, now no longer tolerates the appointment of an unmarried man or woman to any office in the congregation. Judging from his Epistle to the Corinthians one might have expected that he would have preferred unmarried individuals for the posts in question, but no – all had to be married. I Timothy 3: 2- 12: ‘So must the bishop be the husband of one wife….. He must govern his own household in exemplary fashion, and with the utmost dignity teach his children obedience; for if a man cannot govern his own family, how shall he be able to take care of God’s congregation?’ ‘The deacons, too, must be husbands; they must do a good job of governing their children and their own households.’ A similar injunction is addressed to Titus, that he should choose no unmarried men as elders, but only married men whose children were of the faith. (Titus 1: 6) Whereas he had written to the Corinthians that he wishes widows to remain unmarried, he writes to Timothy:
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