Read the document
“Either therefore polygamy is a true marriage, or all children born in it are spurious; which would include the whole race of Jacob, the twelve holy tribes chosen by God.”
John Milton, De Doctrina Christiana · Book I, chapter 10 (Sumner translation, 1825)
From the treatise's chapter on marriage.
Put it in context
Milton's systematic theology stayed in manuscript for a century and a half; it was found in a state archive and published in 1825. He applied his own Protestant method to this question, and the result stayed unpublished while he lived.
His argument turns on the status of Israel's children: if the patriarchal unions were not true marriages, he reasons, the twelve tribes would be illegitimate. It is one learned Protestant's attempt to make the household stories and later doctrine fit together.
What is disputed
De Doctrina Christiana is a private theological manuscript published long after Milton's death, and the attribution has itself been contested in modern scholarship. It is evidence of one learned Protestant's reasoning, not of mainstream Protestant doctrine.
How I read this record
This is my conclusion from the source, not part of the quotation.
Milton independently reached a permissive reading while working through a private Protestant theology. The unpublished manuscript shows that the question remained thinkable after the confessional rule had been established.
Open the sources
- De Doctrina Christiana (Sumner translation) at archive.org ↗ · Book I, chapter 10, on marriage.