There are many myths about what Jesus said on divorce and adultery. In this post, you will learn the number one assumption people make (often without even realising it!), why that assumption is wrong, and how it causes issues when we interpret the Bible.
You might be reading this asking, “Why didn’t Jesus mention abuse as grounds for divorce?” “Is remarriage after divorce always adultery?” The simple answers are, “Everyone already knew that abuse was legitimate grounds for divorce” and “No.” But if you want to understand why those answers stack up, and I mean properly understand, then I’d encourage you to sit with this essay.
Because you are not alone in asking questions. Many people find these statements confusing, exacting, insensitive… or all the above! And a lot of that is down to this one mistaken assumption.
To clarify, I’ll be talking about the verses in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, which record seven statements where Jesus linked divorce and adultery. These are: Matthew 5:32a, Matthew 5:32b, Matthew 19:9, Mark 10:11, Mark 10:12, Luke 16:18a, and Luke 16:18b. (On a side note, the “a” and “b” refer to either the beginning or end of a Bible verse.)
So what’s the big mistake? When people read these seven verses, they assume that the sexual nature of adultery should tell us something about when divorce and/or remarriage are permitted. I’m going to show you how that what Jesus said actually goes the other way round. He wanted the sexless nature of certain types of divorce to tell his audience something new about adultery. In a nutshell, when Jesus taught about divorce and adultery, what he wanted people to learn was that adultery isn’t about sex, it’s about treachery.
Let’s dive in and unpack this! Grab a cuppa, this post is over 5,000 words, all in. (Though if that’s just too much, I have a shorter essay: Gregoire, Grudem and grounds for divorce: why didn’t Jesus mention abuse?)
How our brains search for relevance
When Jesus taught about the Old Testament and Moses, we can assume that he was both preserving old concepts and offering new ones. On the one hand, he said he didn’t come to abolish the law (Matt 5:17). On the other hand, he also sometimes said, “But I say to you…” because he had something new to tell his followers.
If we have seven statements that link divorce and adultery, it’s logical to assume that Jesus was drawing on Old Testament and first-century Jewish ideas about both divorce and adultery. The question becomes: what did he want to preserve and what did he want to change? Many scholars, theologians and Christian leaders have offered their own answers to this question. But I want to take a step back. Instead of looking at what their answers were, I want to look at the thought process that got them there.
You see, our brains offer answers to this question on the basis of what seems most relevant to us.
We know that divorce and adultery are two different things. And yet, Jesus seemed to say that any husband who divorces commits adultery (Matthew 5:32a), anyone who divorces and remarries commits adultery (Matthew 19:9; Mark 10:11–12; Luke 16:18a), and that any man who marries a divorced woman commits adultery (Matthew 5:32b; Luke 16:18b).
Clearly, we have some questions to answer. We know that divorce and adultery are not the same thing, so if Jesus is saying they are the same in some way, then how, and why? What was he saying? What did he really mean?
Our brains answer these questions by looking for relevance and connections between divorce and adultery. That way, we can understand one term in light of the other.
An example to clarify how our brains work
Let me give you an example to illustrate what I’m getting at here.
Our brains normally link poisoning with murder. But suppose someone says, “If a person poisons a well, then even if no one dies, that person still commits theft.”
Our brains then ask: how can poisoning be like theft? To unravel this, our brains apply some background knowledge and assumptions:
- Wells are meant to contain drinking water.
- If someone poisons a well, the well water becomes undrinkable.
- If a person deliberately makes well water undrinkable, they have deprived people from drinking from the well when they should be able to.
- The water doesn’t need to be removed from the well to become undrinkable.
With these points in mind, we might deduce the following:
- The concept of theft helps us understand that although poisoning is commonly associated with the crime of murder, poisoning can also be a form of deprivation. We know this because the people who could normally drink from the well, now cannot.
- The concept of poisoning shows that although theft is commonly associated with the thief getting unjust personal gain, theft can be a form of deprivation without this. We know this because the person who poisoned the well will not benefit from the water.
- The concept of poisoning also helps us understand that something can be stolen without being physically removed. We know this because the water is staying in the well.
This is how our brains work. We apply background knowledge and we look for relevance so that we can understand how two different concepts can inform each other.
In a similar way, when Jesus linked divorce and/or remarriage with adultery, commentators have asked how these two different concepts—divorce and adultery—should inform each other. In answering these questions, they’ve applied background knowledge and assumptions that seem relevant. Some of these are helpful, but some are not! That’s what this article is about.
So let’s look at the background of divorce, remarriage and adultery.
Background: what was first-century Judaism’s view on marriage, divorce, and adultery?
Marriage
In ancient Judaism, marriage was a legal contract expected to be lifelong but could be ended in divorce.[1]
Sometimes the contract said when a divorce would be permitted and what would happen in that event, over and above any general legal rights that each spouse had.[2]
And that’s it really.
Men and divorce
By the first-century AD, many Jews lived under Roman rule and the Romans were monogamous. So, unlike men in the Old Testament, most men in first-century Judaism only married one woman.
To be clear, that didn’t make it illegal for married men to have sex with certain classes of unmarried women (e.g. prostitutes). Rather, it meant that men could only be married to one woman at a time. So, if a husband wanted to have another woman as his wife, his only option was to divorce his first wife and remarry.
Remarriage after being widowed was allowed.
There don’t seem to have been many legal barriers for husbands to divorce their wives during that period. The classic reason a husband divorced his wife was because she was sexually unfaithful.[3] However, Deuteronomy 24:1–4 contains a law that assumes a husband can divorce his wife for any indecent thing he might find out about her. Some rabbis (including those in the school of Hillel) used this text to teach that a husband could effectively divorce his wife for any reason.
In other words, it was always legal and often easy for a husband to get a divorce.[4] (Well, assuming he could pay the divorce settlement and sometimes that was expensive!)
Women and divorce
A woman could only be married to one man at a time. Unlike a man, a woman was not permitted under Jewish laws to have sex with any man other than her husband.
As with men, remarriage after being widowed was allowed.
It was more difficult for women to divorce their husbands. Jewish women were not able to initiate a divorce in their own court—though those who were Roman citizens could get a divorce in a Roman court.[5]
However, even though many Jewish women couldn’t legally enact a divorce, they could get a Jewish court to force their husbands to write the necessary divorce certificate. Wives who did this generally did so on the grounds of material neglect or emotional neglect by their husbands.[6] This was because Exodus 21:10–11 states that a slave wife should receive the benefits of certain marital rights, and it was generally thought that if Moses wrote this minimum standard for slave wives, then it also applied to free wives.[7]
So, divorce was legal for wives but it could be difficult and couldn’t usually be done for any reason.
(And, in case you missed it, “material neglect and emotional neglect” was the Ancient Israelite way of describing what we would call abuse by a husband against his wife.)
So, that’s the background on marriage, divorce, and remarriage. Now we need to look at adultery.
The shocking background of adultery
In first-century Judaism, adultery had a very specific meaning. It had a much narrower definition than simply “all extramarital sex.” Instead, adultery occurred when a man had sex with a woman who was married or betrothed to another man (Leviticus 20:10; Deuteronomy 22:22–27).
So, adultery was not the same as premarital sex (though that was also considered immoral), and it was not the same as a man having sex with a prostitute (again, generally considered immoral). These types of sex were not considered adultery and back then they were not seen as treacherous in the way that we might consider “cheating” to be treacherous today.
Also, we must consider the issue of consent. If a man raped the wife of another man, that was adultery. The raped women wasn’t considered guilty of adultery, because she didn’t consent (Deuteronomy 22:25–27), but the crime of adultery had still taken place.
We may find this definition of adultery quite shocking. Leaving aside how it ignored consent, it implied that a husband could wrong his neighbour in an act of adultery, but a husband could never wrong his wife. So, if there was a sexually unfaithful spouse who sinned against their spouse within a marriage, it was always the wife sinning against the husband. Because if the husband did something wrong, he wasn’t sinning against his wife, but against his neighbour. I’m not here to defend this definition, but it’s important we understand it. Because this is the background knowledge that Jesus’ audience had and that he was addressing when he said what he said.
Now, let’s look at how we might use this information to understand Jesus’ statements.
How exactly did Jesus link divorce and adultery?
On the face of it, Jesus made three basic assertions. Let’s review them.
First, a husband may not divorce his wife, except on the grounds of her sexual immorality. (Matthew 5:32a).
Second, neither a husband nor a wife may divorce their spouse and remarry. (Matthew 19:9; Mark 10:11; Mark 10:12; Luke 16:18a).
Third, a man may not marry a divorced woman. (Matthew 5:32b; Luke 16:18b).
Many people interpret these restrictions as general in nature. They say Jesus’ statements apply to all cases of divorce and/or remarriage. Others point out that that interpretation is really harsh and difficult to reconcile with what Paul said in 1 Corinthians 7; they therefore argue that Jesus’ statements aren’t general and allow for exceptions.
Let’s leave that aside for now; the question we need to answer is around how our brains find relevance in what Jesus said.
So, if Jesus was saying that divorce and/or remarriage is equivalent to adultery, how can divorce and remarriage inform us about adultery, and how can adultery inform us about divorce and remarriage?
How adultery informs our understanding of divorce and remarriage
What does adultery tell us about divorce and remarriage? Let’s apply our background knowledge.
Adultery was a grievous crime and capital offence in the Old Testament. It was one of the worst offences an individual ordinary person could commit, and it was never lawful in the Old Testament.
So if Jesus said divorce and remarriage are adultery, in the context of passages where Jesus speaks against both divorce and adultery, then our brains deduce that divorce and remarriage must somehow be unlawful.
Every biblical commentator agrees on this point.
Jesus’ teaching was a change for women and a paradigm shift for men because (as we saw earlier), for men, divorce and remarriage were often easy and nearly always lawful. Jesus said that wasn’t right.
But does that mean Jesus was saying that all divorces and all remarriages are unlawful? Are we saying that the “no-exceptions” unlawful nature of adultery should be applied to divorce and/or remarriage?
This is where commentators start to hold different views.
Our brains want to know when adultery occurs because that will teach us when divorce and/or remarriage are unlawful, but it’s hard to come up with a satisfactory or conclusive answer! Some commentators say that marriages can only end legitimately in death, and they cannot be legitimately ended in divorce. People who hold this view say marriage is ‘indissoluble’.
Others say it’s more complicated; they look at a clause that Matthew throws in (“except on the grounds of sexual immorality”) and argue that Jesus allowed divorce on the grounds of sexual infidelity. But for many of us, our brains are not satisfied. What about divorce in cases of abuse? What about marrying someone who was unfairly divorced?
So, let’s put these points on hold and think about what else Jesus’ statements might tell us.
How divorce-and-remarriage informs our understanding of adultery
Our background knowledge tells us that remarriage can only happen once a first marriage has been legally dissolved. Therefore, if someone can commit adultery by marrying a divorcee, then adultery can transcend one’s legal marital status. That’s new. Before, people in Jesus’ audience might have thought that the new marriage makes sex with the new sexual partner all OK. Now they know, and we know, that Jesus doesn’t see it that way.
Again, every biblical commentator seems to agree on this point. But there’s more.
Our background knowledge also tells us that husbands can divorce wives, and wives can divorce husbands. Therefore, if Jesus is saying divorce can be unlawful, this means husbands can wrong their wives and wives can wrong their husbands. Once again, the nature of divorce and remarriage teaches us something new about adultery. Namely, adultery can be committed by a husband against his wife, not just by a wife against her husband. That was previously unheard of in ancient Jewish thought!
Again, I don’t know of a single biblical commentator who disagrees here. They all believe that Jesus was being counter-cultural and redefining a moral standard on adultery. To them, it generally makes sense that Jesus might say something gender-equalising that makes a husband’s adultery within a marital relationship just as bad as a wife’s.
So let’s recap where we’ve got to so far: (1) there is something about divorce that is unlawful; (2) adultery isn’t constrained by marital status; and, (3) there are cases where unfaithfulness can go both ways between the spouses.
So far, everyone is in agreement. Now we get to the real problem. Let’s jump right in!
The big assumption that’s a big mistake!
Many commentators, when their brains look for connections between divorce and/or remarriage and adultery, make a big assumption, often without realising it. They assume that the sexual nature of adultery informs us about the illegality of divorce and/or remarriage.
And on the flip side of this, they also assume that the non-sexual nature of divorce has nothing to teach us about the nature of adultery.
These assumptions are, in my opinion, the cause of the biggest interpretive problem with Jesus’ statements. If they don’t seem problematic on the surface, bear with me—this will make sense.
When we assume that adultery must be sexual and look at how this relates to divorce and/or remarriage, we don’t ask why divorce and/or remarriage constitute adultery, we ask how.
- How does a husband commit adultery against his wife when he divorces her and marries another woman?
- How does a wife commit adultery against her husband when she divorces him and marries another man?
- How does a man commit adultery when he marries a divorced woman?
When commentators say that marriage is indissoluble and remarriage is adultery, it’s because they believe that the sex inside the second marriage is adulterous. They argue that the logic underneath Jesus’ statements is the idea that marriages do not end in divorce (or they do not end validly).
They argue that the substance of the first marriage continues in some deeper, theological sense even if the marriage has ended in legal terms. So adultery happens when the husband remarries or when the wife remarries.
The problem is, this logic is wildly inconsistent with what we know about first-century Jewish thought. Marriage was a contract and divorce certificates explicitly said that divorced wives were free to remarry.[8] Also, if we say that marriages never truly end until one spouse dies, then that traps people inside marriages where, through no fault of their own, they would be better off divorced. It also blocks such people from rebuilding their lives with someone else. Why would Jesus teach something like that? Yes, Jesus was certainly capable of over-turning established Jewish thought, but why would he want to introduce a brand new teaching that gives awful results in people’s lives?
Also, if these assumptions and logic are right, then they should fit well with the entire New Testament text. But they don’t.
So let’s talk about that.
The critical point of failure for traditional interpretations
Matthew 5:32a is the only one of Jesus’ statements where remarriage isn’t mentioned explicitly or implicitly. It says this:
But I say to you that whoever divorces his wife for any reason except sexual immorality causes her to commit adultery (NKJV).
This statement is very confusing, but the NKJV is typical of how most English translations render this verse. I believe that the NIV (“causes her to become the victim of adultery”) is better and more accurate to the original Greek, but proving that is a topic for another post.
The point for now is that there is no mention of remarriage.[9]
If we assume, as many do, that Jesus wanted to use the sexual nature of adultery to tell us something new about divorce and/or remarriage, this leaves two questions:
1) How does the husband cause his wife to have unlawful sex when he divorces her?
2) If we set aside the wife and focus on the husband as the principal offender in this clause, how does he have unlawful sex if he doesn’t remarry?
Let’s look at how commentators have tried to answer these questions.
How does the husband cause his wife to commit adultery?
Many commentators argue that the husband or the wife goes on to remarry; they say that this fact just isn’t mentioned explicitly in the text. In other words, they assume that adultery has to come from a sexual act.
Let’s discuss the main problem with this argument from the wife’s side.
Historically, it is not true to say that all divorced women would have been compelled to remarry.
David Instone-Brewer explains this point further. First, women could be entitled to a substantial amount of money in the event of a divorce. Also, once divorced, a woman could control her own money, do business in her own name, own land, witness in court, and do other things that would be difficult if she was married. Therefore, if a woman was wrongly divorced, she may have chosen not to remarry.[10]
Of course, sadly, it didn’t always work out that way. As Craig Blomberg points out, some women returned to their fathers’ households in disgrace and never remarried.
Either way, Jesus’ statement cannot be universally true if the “adultery” in Matthew 5:32a refers to the divorced wife having sex in a second marriage.[11]
In other words, the wife’s involvement in adultery in Matthew 5:32a cannot be about the wife committing adultery. It’s about her being made the victim of adultery – like how the NIV translates it.
So how does the husband commit adultery in Matthew 5:32a?
Now, let’s move to the second question: how does the husband commit adultery?
Most commentators don’t bother with this question because they think Matt 5:32a should be translated the way it is in the NKJV translation. In other words, they think that the husband doesn’t commit adultery directly but instead causes his wife to commit adultery when she remarries—and it’s the wife’s adultery that’s the problem.
Some commentators are clear about how absurd that is. John Nolland, for example, recognises the injustice of saying that the wife commits adultery in Matthew 5:32a, when it’s clear that the offender is the husband.
However, Nolland also argues that what Jesus originally said included a reference to the husband remarrying (just like we see in Matthew 19:9, Mark 10:11, and Luke 16:18a). Nolland says that that is how the husband commits adultery and he suggests that this was omitted from Matthew 5:32a.[12]
Again, there are several problems.
Firstly, none of the manuscripts for Matthew 5:32a mention remarriage. If Nolland is right, this would mean that Matthew dropped the ball when he wrote Matthew 5:32a, and none of the manuscript copyists even attempted to correct the error. This seems unlikely.[13]
Actually, it’s pretty implausible to suggest that Matthew dropped the ball at all in Matthew 5:32a. If remarriage was an essential part of how divorce and/or remarriage was the same as adultery, why would Matthew make this mistake when Mark and Luke don’t? Matthew was a more sophisticated scholar than Mark. Also, Matthew, as a Jew, knew a lot more about Jewish law than Luke did as a Gentile. It doesn’t make sense for Matthew to drop the ball.
On top of that, Matthew 5:32a has a wild piece of Greek grammar that unmistakably echoes the rare Hebrew grammar of Deuteronomy 24:4. It doesn’t make sense for Matthew to construct something so carefully, so skillfully, and so deliberately, and drop the ball on a fundamental necessity at the same time. Therefore, if Matthew didn’t mention remarriage, it seems much more likely that this was intentional.
Now, again, this is why some commentators argue that marriage is indissoluble and that all divorce is equivalent to adultery. These commentators obviously don’t assume that adultery must involve sex, but it is a very harsh and difficult view to follow. You would have to upend passages like Exodus 21:10–11 and Jeremiah 3:1. You would have to say that even though Jesus mentioned an exception for sexual infidelity, this exception isn’t valid or only refers to sexual sins that make the marriage invalid before it even began. You would have to say that Jesus overturned centuries of established Jewish thought and also expected to be fully understood in just a few pithy statements. And you would have to argue that an abused person in a marriage may never obtain a divorce. It’s hard, really hard, to justify this view, even if it doesn’t fall into the big mistaken assumption that most people make.
So now let’s look at an alternative explanation for how adultery happens in Matthew 5:32a.
Unpicking the (wrong) assumption that adultery must involve sex
As we’ve just seen, the traditional interpretation of what Jesus said fails when it comes to Matthew 5:32a. Commentators might say adultery can be sexless and marriage is indissoluble, but that is highly problematic. Or, commentators say that remarriage after divorce is adultery, and they assume that adultery involves sex. But, again, the idea that Jesus wanted to use the sexual nature of adultery to tell us something new about how divorce and/or remarriage was wrong simply doesn’t work. And it doesn’t work because there is no sex in Matt 5:32a.
Our brains can derive reverse-logic explanations with sex-based assumptions for what Jesus meant in his statements in Mark and Luke, and even elsewhere in Matthew’s Gospel, but these all fail for Matthew 5:32a, and they fail completely. I think Matthew said something more specific, nuanced and complex than what either Mark or Luke offersus. And he didn’t mention remarriage because he didn’t need to.
Let’s go back to our “how” questions, that ask how a husband or a wife commits adultery when the divorce and/or remarry. If there are no good answers to these “how” questions, then there must be something wrong with the questions themselves. And there is. Because we shouldn’t be asking how these actions of divorce and/or remarriage constitute adultery; we should be asking why.
When we ask why, we have the possibility that instead of using the sexual nature of adultery to tell us something new about divorce, Jesus wanted to use something about the sexless nature of divorce to tell us something new about adultery.
Of course, it can’t be sexlessness on its own. That would be too general. Our brains don’t find enough relevance there. However, if we were first-century Jews, we would immediately know what word the Old Testament associates with divorce when it’s described as a bad thing.
Unlocking the puzzle: divorce is adultery when divorce is treachery
When the prophet Malachi took aim at divorce in the Old Testament, he called it treachery. The text of Malachi is difficult to translate, and difficult to interpret more generally, so again we’ve got questions about whether he’s taking aim at all divorce or just groundless spousal abandonment.[14]
But whatever the answer to that question is, there’s no doubt that Malachi believes that God hates treachery in the form of divorce. And if that’s true, then it makes sense that God also hates treachery in the form of adultery.
Bear in mind, if there is ONE THING that describes God, it’s that he makes good promises and is faithful to them. That’s what he does. That’s what he cares about. That’s how he shows his values. Treachery is the exact opposite of that. No wonder God doesn’t like it.
So now let’s consider: what if Jesus linked divorce with adultery so that the sexless treacherous nature of certain types of divorce, like how Malachi understood it, could tell us something new about adultery?
If that’s the case, then the key lesson in Jesus’ teachings is that adultery isn’t defined by sexual intercourse, but by spousal treachery.
Now that idea makes sense!
It helps us answer our questions about whether Jesus was saying all divorce is unlawful, or just some types of divorce. Let’s remember, divorce was universally accepted in Judaism on the grounds of sexual infidelity and spousal neglect. And that makes sense intuitively because getting a divorce in these circumstances isn’t treacherous. It might be lamentable, but it’s not treacherous because the other spouse has already broken the marriage covenant. Or to put this another way, if adultery always involves treachery, and this type of divorce isn’t treacherous, then getting this type of divorce isn’t adultery.[15]
Also, if adultery is characterised by treachery, that would explain why adultery can transcend legal marital status. Because if adultery was about sex and marital status, then it would be OK to marry your paramour after they get a divorce, so long as you and your paramour don’t have sex before you marry each other. And that’s probably what Jesus’ audience thought before he taught them. But if adultery is about treachery, then who cares if you manage to marry your neighbour’s spouse before the pair of you have sex? You’re still helping your paramour commit spousal treachery and therefore you’re still committing adultery too!
This interpretation of Jesus’ teaching would also explain why adultery is a crime that can be committed by husbands against wives, not just by wives against husbands. Because both husbands and wives can commit spousal treachery, whether that’s via treacherous divorce or something else.
And you know what? If this is what Jesus meant, that adultery is about treachery, then spousal abuse inside a marriage would also qualify as adultery. And marital rape would be, well, both rape and adultery.
Isn’t that interesting?
Concluding thoughts
The gospel writers wrote highly abbreviated accounts of the life of Jesus[16], because every word they wrote was expensive and time-consuming. There was no room for fluff, so sometimes what would have been helpful context was left out because the writers assumed it was obvious.
Jesus could have just said that divorce and/or remarriage was unlawful, but Matthew, Mark and Luke all went out of their way to mention adultery. That means adultery was important to what they had to say. It also means that Jesus might have wanted to change how his listeners understood adultery more than anything else.
Yes, Jesus had things to say about divorce in its own right. However, it seems that the times when Jesus actually taught about marriage and divorce are in Matthew 19:4–6 and Mark 10:5–9. In those verses, he doesn’t mention adultery; he quotes Genesis.
And let’s not forget that when Paul wrote about divorce and remarriage in 1 Corinthians 7, he didn’t mention adultery at all. So, either Paul dropped the ball, or it wasn’t necessary to mention adultery. And if it wasn’t necessary for Paul to mention adultery, then either the gospel writers wasted their words, or… they weren’t telling us much that was new about divorce and/or remarriage—they actually were telling us something new about adultery!
So here you go – this is the big mistake people make when they read Jesus’ statements on divorce and adultery. The problem is not our answers, but how our brains process the information we have to get to an answer. Our brains find relevance in the wrong place because we don’t come with quite the same background knowledge or assumptions that Jesus’ audience had.
Yes, we’ve still got questions. What do so many translations say in Matthew 5:32a that a husband causes his wife “to commit adultery”? What about divorces where there isn’t a clear guilty or innocent party? These are important questions to look at.
But the key point for now is this: when we look at what Jesus said, we should not let our brains use the sexual nature of adultery to inform our understanding of how divorce and/or remarriage constitute adultery. Instead, we should use the sexless, treacherous nature of some types of divorce to inform our understanding of adultery.
TLDR: Jesus taught that adultery is about treachery, not sex. Hence, divorce is adultery when divorce is treachery.
If you found this post helpful, you might also appreciate this one: Does the Bible speak against marital rape? Yes… I think it’s hidden in Jesus’s teachings on divorce.
Or this one: Gregoire, Grudem and grounds for divorce: why didn’t Jesus mention abuse?
Footnotes:
[1] See David Instone-Brewer Divorce and Remarriage in the Bible: The Social and Literary Context, (Chicago: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2002), Chapter 1.
[2] Instone-Brewer, Divorce and Remarriage, 79.
[3] Instone-Brewer describes God as “suffering” divorce because “although he is the one who carried it out, he was forced into it.” See Instone-Brewer, Divorce and Remarriage, 34–58. Similarly, William Luck describes divorce in these passages as an act of discipline and thus quite distinct from examples in Mal 2:14–16. See William Luck, Divorce & Remarriage: Recovering the Biblical View, 3rd ed., (Fulton, MS: 2016), Kindle, “Chapter 4: Divorce in the Prophets: Discipline or Adultery?”
[4] See, for example, m. Gittin 9:10.
[5] Deborah Greniman, “The Origins of the Ketubah: Deferred Payment or Cash up Front?” Nashim: a journal of Jewish women’s studies & gender issues 4 (2001): 110.
[6] Instone-Brewer, Divorce and Remarriage, 85–90. Instone-Brewer adds that a wife still could be kept trapped in a marriage she wanted to leave, especially if the husband deserted her. Also, there is evidence of a Jewish divorce certificate that addresses the husband, not the wife.
[7] See Instone-Brewer, Divorce and Remarriage, 99–103.
[8] There were exceptions; an adulteress could not marry her paramour (m. Sotah 5:1). However, the right to remarry was in the wording of the divorce certificate (m. Gittin 9:3).
[9] Let’s be very clear, Matt 5:32a and Matt 5:32b are not one continuous statement, but two independent clauses. We do not need to look at Matt 5:32b to understand how the adultery in Matt 5:32a takes place. This is because of two compelling reasons: (1) Luke 16:18 closely mirrors Matt 5:32 and clearly comprises two independent clauses, with a verb for adultery at the end of Luke 16:18a that needs no explanation; (2) Matt 5:32b and Luke 16:18b both refer to “a” divorced woman; if they were referring to the woman unjustly divorced in Matt 5:32a / Luke 16:18a, they would have referred to “the” divorced woman.
[10] David Instone-Brewer, Divorce and Remarriage, “Remarriage of Widows and Divorcées” in Chapter 5.
[11] Craig Blomberg, “Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage and Celibacy: An Exegesis of Matthew 19:3–12,” Trinity Journal, 11, no. 2 (1990), 174.
[12] See John Nolland, “The Gospel Prohibition of Divorce: Tradition History and Meaning,” Journal for the study of the New Testament 17, no. 58 (1995), 33.
[13] I appreciate that many scholars have argued against the authenticity of the exception sub-clause, even though it is also attested in all manuscripts. I don’t think that debate undermines my rebuttal of Nolland’s proposal. This is because the exception sub-clause is actually in the text and remarriage is absent from it. Also, as Blomberg highlights, the argument against the authenticity of the exception sub-clause creates anomalies in how Matthew’s Gospel was formed. See Blomberg, “Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage and Celibacy,” 174–5.
[14] For a discussion of the passage and its translation difficulties, and the meaning of בגד, see Instone-Brewer, Divorce and Remarriage, 54–58.
[15] For the avoidance of doubt, calling time on a marriage where your spouse is abusive or constantly breaking the marriage commitment is not treachery. Paul essentially makes this point in 1 Corinthians 7, when he says that a believing spouse is not bound to an unbelieving spouse, assuming the unbelieving spouse refuses to believe and refuses to live with their believing spouse. Paul basically says, “How do you know if staying with your unbelieving spouse will ever mean that they believe? You don’t, so you’re not bound.”
We should be clear that if a spouse has abusive habits or addictions or other difficult behaviours that are destructive towards their family members, the other spouse is not being treacherous if they eventually walk away. They may choose to stay in an unmerited act of selflessness that goes beyond the call of duty, and some do. But, like Paul said, there is simply no guarantee that if the other spouse stays, then the abusive spouse will change their ways. It’s not treachery to leave.
[16] Instone-Brewer makes this point in detail. Instone-Brewer, Divorce and Remarriage, 166.