Re: 3 cheers for polygamy

"If you want to be a bishop, you could only have one wife."

Not necessarily. I am told that the original Greek reads that an elder must be a "man of (a/one) wife", which is somewhat vague because in the Greek the word for "a" and "one" are the same. Therefore, it is possible that this is simply a requirement that all elders in the church (which would include the later offices of bishops and priests) must be married, without specifying the number of wives.

This is supported by the context in 1 Timothy 3:2-5:
"Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, a man of (a) wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. He must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive, for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for Gods church?"

The intent is quite clear in verse 5 - if a man can't manage his own house, how can he care for the church? This makes it very obvious that the intent has nothing to do with restricting an elder or priest to one wife, but to make experience as a married man and the head of a household a requirement for these offices.

Of course, we must use our sense in interpreting some of these passages, as I am told by linguists that the Greek of the New Testament is actually pretty wretched stuff, more of a pidgin or creole than classical Greek. In fact, I have also been told by a student of languages that the Arabic in the Koran is much the same - with many cases of words being used whose only recorded use from the period are in the Koran - which naturally makes interpreting them sometimes difficult, with nothing to compare them to.

You might ask how the Roman Catholic Church reversed the intent of the above passage entirely, and ended up restricting most higher offices only to men who did not have the minimum required experience - and frankly I don't know. It flies against all reason and all Biblical authority - but at some point this happened and it became tradition to read this passage in a novel way that would support the Roman tradition of monogamy. It should be noted that virtually every other culture on earth considered polygamy to simply be one type of marriage - not just places like Africa, India, China, and America before Columbus, but also places like pagan Sweden. It was nearly universal. In many times and places, where warfare and hunting accidents killed far more men than women, polygamy was a necessity to maintain the population and the strength of a country. In Roman culture this imbalance was addressed a different way - wealthy men simply took mistresses, which allowed the accumulated wealth of patrician families to stay concentrated within those families rather than be shared among all the man's children.