If the inspiration for the Da Vinci Code's Robert Langdon were drawn from a single living person, John Boswell would hav | dG1fQUtkLWs2djlaWE0
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00:00Pope Francis said earlier this week that he doesn't care if someone is gay or straight as long as he has faith.
00:07And as it turns out, that was exactly the same stance the early Christian church took as well.
00:13A 1994 book, Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe, which comes out as an e-book for the first time next month,
00:20says that there were gay marriages as far back as the year 100 AD.
00:24Now, author John Boswell, a deceased Catholic historian and scholar at Yale, studied dozens of records of church ceremonies
00:31where two men were joined in unions that followed the same rituals as hetero-couples.
00:36A fairly obscure ceremony in Greek lectionary called brother-making, Adelpho Poia, and that was the kernel of the book.
00:50Because many of these manuscripts, they're obviously one-of-a-kind,
00:57and he was fairly concerned that when word got out that he was looking at these ceremonies
01:06that librarians, the church itself, might make them inaccessible.
01:12In particular, at one monastery on Mount Athos, and because the monks there knew about John's work
01:22in the history of homosexuality, John was not welcomed.
01:25And so the story we heard as his graduate students was that John had actually sent one or two graduate students
01:32in his place in order to access somewhat covertly those manuscripts that he needed for that project.
01:40So I offered to go to the monastery and film the missing pages, which I did.
01:47We got to the monastery and he explained to the head monk who I was, he knew that I was coming.
01:55And so I went in, no flash of course, took these giant books off the dusty bookshelves and photographed the pages.
02:02And John was very happy to see them when I got back.
02:06It was a very brave book. It was an extremely scholarly and rich and impressive book.
02:13And there's no doubt that it started an avalanche ship. It was completely transformative.
02:19If there's anything that he needs to be remembered, his love of the church,
02:22and what a beautiful academic that he was, and then how he changed the world.
02:27for the rest of the church.
02:32I was scared to help them to get out and continue to return to the Ancient geoculta.
02:35So let's talk about his difficulty.
02:36And why is he changed the light of the church.
02:38So all you know about his life now is a really well,
02:40and I was like, one of my emotions, and I was just worried,
02:42and I was scared of the church, and I was scared of the church.
02:47I was scared of the church.
02:48So that he had a great public.
02:50I was scared of him.
02:51So why was the only reason why is a religious man in the country for a why?