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Japanese Yes. No passage of Scripture forbids dating or marrying someone who has had sex before, and Catholic canon law does not count a sexual past among the impediments to marriage. The law of Moses asked for a virgin bride only of the high priest. Scripture and the churches care about the couple’s faith and how they live from now on.
Scripture knows people with pasts, and it does not leave them there. Rahab, whom the Book of Joshua calls “a prostitute” (Joshua 2:1), is named in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus and remembered in Hebrews for her faith. Paul says it plainly: “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17). That is true of the person we love, and it is true of us.
What does it mean to not be a virgin?
A virgin is a person who has never had sexual intercourse, so a person who is not a virgin has had it at least once. Scripture uses the word in the same sense. Genesis describes Rebekah as “a maiden whom no man had known” (Genesis 24:16), and “known” is the verb it uses for intercourse: “Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived” (Genesis 4:1). When Mary asks the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” (Luke 1:34), the Greek reads literally “since I do not know a man.”
People do not agree on which acts count. In a 1991 survey of 599 students at a state university in the Midwest, published in JAMA in 1999 by researchers at the Kinsey Institute, 59 percent said that oral-genital contact did not amount to having “had sex,” and 19 percent said the same of anal intercourse.
No medical examination can settle the question. In 2018 the World Health Organization, UN Human Rights and UN Women called for an end to “virginity testing,” the inspection of the hymen or the “two-finger” test. The WHO states that there is “no evidence that either method can prove whether a woman or girl has had vaginal intercourse or not.”
Does the Bible say to marry a virgin?
Only for Israel’s high priest. The law of Moses told the priests of Israel: “They shall not marry a prostitute or a woman who has been defiled, neither shall they marry a woman divorced from her husband” (Leviticus 21:7). The high priest, “the priest who is chief among his brothers” (Leviticus 21:10), was held to a stricter rule. He could not marry a widow either, “but he shall take as his wife a virgin of his own people” (Leviticus 21:13–14).
Other Israelites had no such rule. The same law provides for a divorced woman who “goes and becomes another man’s wife” (Deuteronomy 24:2), and Boaz married Ruth, “the widow of Mahlon” (Ruth 4:10). The law did deal harshly with one case. Deuteronomy 22:13–21 set out a hearing for a husband who charged that his new wife had not been a virgin: if the charge was false, he was flogged and fined a hundred shekels of silver; if it was true, she was to be stoned.
Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus names “Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab” (Matthew 1:5). She is traditionally identified with Rahab of Jericho, whom the Book of Joshua calls “a prostitute” (Joshua 2:1). The Letter to the Hebrews names her among the examples of faith: “By faith Rahab the prostitute did not perish with those who were disobedient” (Hebrews 11:31). God also told the prophet Hosea to “take to yourself a wife of whoredom,” as a sign of Israel’s unfaithfulness to God (Hosea 1:2). No passage in the New Testament requires a Christian to marry a virgin.
Does God forgive a sexual past?
Scripture says that God forgives the sins people confess: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). Paul wrote that “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17).
In John’s Gospel, Jesus names a Samaritan woman’s history to her face at a well: “you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband” (John 4:18). She left her water jar, went into the town and told the people, “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did” (John 4:28–29). “Many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony” (John 4:39).
What do churches ask of the couple?
Catholic, Orthodox and many Protestant churches teach that sex belongs within marriage, and the teaching applies to both people in a relationship, whatever either has done before. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says that “all the baptized are called to chastity” (2348). It also expects growth: “Chastity has laws of growth which progress through stages marked by imperfection and too often by sin” (2343). Paul grounded the standard in the body of every believer: “You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body” (1 Corinthians 6:19–20).
Paul’s instruction on partnership concerns faith: “Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness?” (2 Corinthians 6:14). Catholic canon law draws a related line. It lists twelve impediments that make a marriage invalid, among them age, an existing marriage and close kinship (canons 1083–1094). A sexual past is not one of them. A difference of religion is: a marriage between a Catholic and a person who is not baptized is invalid unless a dispensation is granted (canon 1086).
Should a couple talk about past partners?
Scripture gives no rule on how much of a sexual past one partner must tell the other. It does forbid deceit: “Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self” (Colossians 3:9–10). Under Catholic canon law, a person “contracts invalidly who enters into a marriage deceived by malice, perpetrated to obtain consent, concerning some quality of the other partner which by its very nature can gravely disturb the partnership of conjugal life” (canon 1098).
A past sexual relationship also raises a medical question. The NHS, Britain’s National Health Service, notes that “many STIs have no symptoms,” that a person can carry an infection without knowing it, and that “the only way to know for sure is to get tested.” Being tested, and telling each other the truth, is part of caring for the person we hope to marry. Then the past can be named and laid down, because in Christ “the old has passed away; behold, the new has come.”
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