[source: Age of Consent]

AGE OF CONSENT WITH ONSET OF PUBERTY FOR MOST OF HUMAN HISTORY
Age of Consent throughout history has usually coincided with the age of puberty 
although at sometimes it has been as early as seven. Early on age of consent was 
a familial or tribal matter and only became a legal one in the Greco-Roman 
period. The Roman tradition served as the base for Christian Europe as well as 
the Christian Church itself which generally, essentially based upon biological 
development, set it at 12 or 14 but continued to set the absolute minimum at 
seven. In the past century there has been a tendency to raise the age of consent 
but the reasons for the change have not always been clear and the issue has been 
further complicated by the reluctance of many contemporary historians to 
recognize what the actual age of consent in the past has been. This failure has 
distorted the importance of biology on age of consent in the past.
[source: Age of Consent]

CHRISTIAN AGE OF CONSENT BETWEEN 7 AND 12
“... The Roman tradition served as the base for Christian Europe as well as the 
Christian Church itself which generally, essentially based upon biological 
development, set it at 12 or 14 but continued to set the absolute minimum at 
seven.”
[source: Age of Consent]


“when secular law replaced religious law, there was rather little change in 
content...in England and the United States there was no such rift with the past. 
In the latter country, as each new state joined the union, its sex laws simply 
duplicated, to a great extent, those of pre-existing states;”
[source: Age of Consent]