Even before its publication, word of Boswell’s work in progress sparked spirited speculation within academia. And beyond. A publicity campaign kicked into full gear last week. Garry Trudeau, another Yale man, built a week’s worth of “Doonesbury” strips around Boswell’s book. (At the Vatican, scholars read the “Doonesbury” sequence and wondered what was up.) An interview Boswell gave last fall to ABC was obtained by NEWSWEEK (box). He is gravely ill now and unavailable for comment.

Much of Boswell’s book is devoted to a history of marriage from ancient Greece and Rome to the late Middle Ages. One of his aims-and part of his argument is to show how terms like “brother and sister” were used for siblings, heterosexual spouses and homosexual couples as well as for converts to early Christianity. Another is to establish that for premodern Europeans, marriage was an arrangement between families that had little to do with sexual attraction and even less with love. At best, love developed “after the fact.”

Boswell’s subtle implication is this: only same-sex lovers were likely to be romantic in the modem sense. Unlike heterosexuals, who entered marriage for property, dynastic advantage or progeny (with the men free to take concubines or prostitutes for pleasure), homosexuals loved each other without these extraneous considerations. Only they, he implies, were apt to develop a purer and more passionate attachment as “soul mates.” And nowhere, he argues, was this more evident than in stories of various Christian saints.

In the most controversial sections of the book, Boswell claims that the Christian veneration of certain same-sex pairs of saints indicates a ritual acceptance of homosexual attraction-if not of gay sex. His chief example is the fourth-century Greek martyrs Saints Serge and Bacchus. These two soldiers, according to Boswell’s interpretation of their legend, were “brothers”-homosexual partners. He also includes such “paired saints” as the female Roman martyrs Perpetua and Felicitas, and the Apostles Peter and Paul. Even Jesus and his “beloved disciple,” John, he writes, obviously had “a special relationship.” That these same-sex pairs were invoked in rituals, he concludes, is further proof of their homosexual intent.

Boswell’s main problem is his tendentious interpretations of the evidence. The ceremonial prayers he cites exist in various liturgical collections dating back to the eighth century. All are taken from the Byzantine tradition (mainly Greek and Slavic); although Boswell argues that there were Latin translations, he has been unable to locate any. The liturgies resemble rituals the early church used for heterosexual marriages, including the joining of right hands while a priest reads a prayer of blessing. But the texts make no explicit mention of sex. How, then, are these rituals to be understood?

Boswell’s critics believe that what he’s stumbled onto are well-known liturgical books that Catholic and Orthodox scholars have commented on for centuries. What Boswell chooses to translate from the Greek as “same-sex unions” are, in the original, celebrations of “brotherhood” or “fraternity” used for reconciling warring siblings, for adoptions and for establishing other fictive relationships-but not homosexual unions. “Boswell has discovered nothing,” says Jesuit scholar Robert F. Taft, of the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome, which specializes in early Byzantine Christianity. “What is new-and I think false-is his interpretation of this ritual. In light of the Byzantine attitudes toward homosexuality, which was punishable in church law by two or three years of penance, and in civil law by torture, castration and even execution, it is ridiculous to claim that the Orthodox church had an official rite sanctioning homosexual unions.”

Other scholars question Boswell’s further claim that the Roman church also used these rituals. Historian James A. Brundage of the University of Kansas, a specialist in medieval law, admires Boswell but finds his arguments “extremely dubious.” Although he hasn’t studied the rituals Boswell cites, Brundage says, “It’s pretty clear to me from the legal texts that the chaps who wrote them did not accept same-sex relationships.” And federal Judge John T. Noonan Jr., author of several scholarly books on medieval marriage and sex, dismisses Boswell’s book as a “curious attempt to create for himself a past in a church whose Scriptures and teachings never accepted the relationships he defends.”

That the “brotherhood” ritual may have served at times as a cover for homosexual relationships is a real possibility. That it was created for that purpose remains unsubstantiated. That its existence could lead to church-sanctioned gay marriages appears to be an empty hope.

IN AN INTERVIEW LAST fall with John Hockenberry, of ABC’s “Day One,” John Boswell talked about his book.

BOSWELL: For a while I would wake in the middle of the night and think, “No, this is too amazing’ You can’t have this right,” and I’d get up and go look at photocopies I had of the manuscripts and I’d satisfy myself that it was right. It’s unmistakable …

The reasons Christians object to homosexual behavior, and marriage in particular, is that they claim it’s always been prohibited … and these ceremonies [are] evidence that that’s not true.

HOCKENBERRY: In fact the other argument is even more true: that the ceremony has been endorsed.

BOSWELL: Right. It’s been endorsed and there are people who believe in same-sex love, and would like to incorporate it into a Christian lifestyle, and this would afford them the opportunity.

HOCKENBERRY: Of course the church could squash you like a bug …

BOSWELL: Well, they can deny it but I’d be very surprised if they could disprove it.