COUNCIL OF NICAEA (Nicea) / NICE
Canon 3, 325 AD
(This is a popular council of the surviving church (Catholics [therefore Protestants] and Eastern Orthodox)
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11044a.htm (Catholic Encyclopedia), The First Council of Nicaea:
Canon 3: All members of the clergy are forbidden to dwell with any woman, except a mother, sister, or aunt.
http://faculty.cua.edu/pennington/Canon%20Law/Nicea/Nicea1-4.html, Nicaea Canons 1-4:
Concerning women who have been brought in to live with the clergy
3. This great synod absolutely forbids a bishop, presbyter, deacon or any of the clergy to keep a woman who has been brought in to live with him, with the exception of course of his mother or sister or aunt, or of any person who is above suspicion.
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf214.vii.vi.iv.html, The First Ecumenical Council: The Canons of the 318 Holy Fathers Assembled in the City of Nice, in Bithynia:
Canon III.
THE great Synod has stringently forbidden any bishop, presbyter, deacon, or any one of the clergy whatever, to have a subintroducta dwelling with him, except only a mother, or sister, or aunt, or such persons only as are beyond all suspicion.
Notes.
ANCIENT EPITOME OF CANON III.
No one shall have a woman in his house except his mother, and sister, and persons altogether beyond suspicion.
JUSTELLUS.
Who these mulieres subintroductæ were does not sufficiently appear…but they were neither wives nor concubines, but women of some third kind, which the clergy kept with them, not for the sake of offspring or lust, but from the desire, or certainly under the pretence, of piety.
JOHNSON.
For want of a proper English word to render it by, I translate “to retain any woman in their houses under pretence of her being a disciple to them.”
VAN ESPEN.
Translates: And his sisters and aunts cannot remain unless they be free from all suspicion.
Fuchs in his Bibliothek der kirchenver sammlungen confesses that this canon shews that the practice of clerical celibacy had already spread widely. In connexion with this whole subject of the subintroductæ the text of St. Paul should be carefully considered. 1 Cor. ix. 5.
HEFELE.
It is very certain that the canon of Nice forbids such spiritual unions, but the context shows moreover that the Fathers had not these particular cases in view alone; and the expression συνείσακτος should be understood of every woman who is introduced (συνείσακτος) into the house of a clergyman for the purpose of living there. If by the word συνείσακτος was only intended the wife in this spiritual marriage, the Council would not have said, any συνείσακτος, except his mother, etc.; for neither his mother nor his sister could have formed this spiritual union with the cleric. The injunction, then, does net merely forbid the συνείσακτος in the specific sense, but orders that “no woman must live in the house of a cleric, unless she be his mother,” etc.
This canon is found in the Corpus Juris Canonici, Gratian’s Decretum, Pars I., Distinc. XXXII., C. xvj.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Catholic_Encyclopedia_(1913)/Agapetae, Catholic Encyclopedia (1913)/Agapetae:
The Agapetae are sometimes confounded with the subintroductae, or woman who lived with clerics without marriage, a class against which the third canon of the Council of Nice (325) was directed. The word Agapetae was also the name of a branch of the Gnostics in 395, whose tenet was that the relations of the sexes were purified of impropriety if the mind was pure. They taught that one should perjure himself rather than reveal the secrets of his sect.