Divorce in the Gospels

Remarriage in Early Christianity
by a. andrew das
eerdmans, 384 pages, $49.99

The translation of Biblical texts requires both philological competence and interpretive skill. Hard passages of scripture put these traits to the test. Consider the oft scrutinized words of Matthew 19:9. The New American Bible (1970, revised 1986) has:

I say to you, whoever divorces his wife (unless the marriage is unlawful) and marries another commits adultery.

Whatever the New American Bible’s merits may be, its rendering of the crucial “exception clause” (“unless . . .”) has utterly nothing to do with the original Greek. The Douay–Rheims, an English text mediated by the Latin Vulgate, is far closer to the Greek here: “except it be for fornication.” But even the Vulgate (followed by the Douay–Rheims) proceeds to import language from Matthew 5:32 about marrying a divorced woman. And it might be added that the Latin fornicatio is already an act of creative translation (of the Greek porneia)—so creative that the Latin word seems not to have existed until Western Christians coined it in order to translate the New Testament.

In Remarriage in Early Christianity, A. Andrew Das wades into these choppy waters. His guiding question is: Do the texts of the New Testament ever permit remarriage? The focus of his study is remarriage rather than divorce (though the issues are inextricable and the book serves as an equally rich treatment of the latter). Das is aware of the present social and scholarly context of any study that seeks to understand the early Christian approach to these questions. Broadly, the liberalization of attitudes toward divorce and remarriage in Western law and culture cuts against Christian tradition, making the subject “intensely personal” and pastorally sensitive.

The aftermath of the twentieth-century sexual revolution increased the number of divorces everywhere, but the stakes were always high. The issues were complicated, even in first-century Palestine. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus seems to have reserved the full exposition of his view until he and the disciples were back in a private house, out of earshot of the crowd and Jewish authorities.

There is a striking lack of consensus among modern scholars about the meaning of the relevant New Testament passages. Das summarizes some of the major contributions of the last generation, mostly from scholars working in Protestant traditions. He invokes as a point of departure William Heth and Gordon Wenham’s 1984 book, Jesus and Divorce: The Problem with the Evangelical Consensus, which challenged the legitimacy of remarrying while a previous spouse was alive. Their book provoked rebuttals on various hermeneutic and practical grounds, and the back-and-forth that ensued in the pages of technical journals and semi-scholarly books strains the neck muscles.

Das presents his own work as part of this conversation. He is aware that with such a “bewildering array of perspectives” in the field, there is a powerful temptation to reach the conclusions one prefers. Nonetheless, he presents and defends an argument that “goes against the headwinds” of most recent scholarship. Whereas the tendency of the last generation has been to find room for laxity, or at least variety, in the views of the early Christian tradition, Das maintains that the New Testament and its early interpreters not only held to strict views but did so consistently. Though he is sensitive to the fact that his position has implications for dogma and pastoral care, those issues are secondary here: He follows the search for understanding wherever it leads.

When it comes to witness on divorce and remarriage, Scripture provides an embarrassment of riches. No fewer than five passages—one each in Mark and Luke, Paul in 1 Corinthians, and the Matthean doublet—speak directly to the question. In Mark, Jesus teaches that divorce contradicts God’s intention for creation; a divorced man who remarries commits adultery against his wife, and a divorced woman who remarries likewise commits adultery. In Matthew, these prohibitions are repeated, with an exception made in the case of porneia. Luke also reports that remarriage after divorce is adulterous, and that the marriage of a divorced woman is adultery. Paul explicitly emphasizes that he is working with a command of the Lord prohibiting divorce.

The abundance itself is unusual and revealing. The rigorous teaching of Jesus on marriage was arresting even in its own time. It was vividly remembered and immediately grappled with. The new model of marriage was distinctive and defining for early Christian communities.

Understanding any ancient text requires reading it in its context. The phrase Keine Geschichte ohne Philologie—“no history without philology”—is attributed to the great classicist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. Its inverse—no philology without history—is equally true. Interpreters of the New Testament passages on divorce and remarriage have tried to squeeze any and all help from the context, reading the words of Jesus in light of various Jewish and Greco-Roman social practices and mores. But in this case, as Das observes, what is striking is that the context helps by providing a contrast with the deliberately counter-cultural teaching of the Gospels. In Roman law and culture, divorce was easy and remarriage commonplace. In a world of early mortality, high fertility was imperative, and to the Romans that meant keeping women of childbearing years married. There was little room to fuss over divorce or remarriage, and Roman property law (which, broadly speaking, kept the property ownership of husband and wife segregated) made separation simple enough.

On the Jewish side, it was only natural for the Pharisees to confront Jesus with the fact that Moses allowed divorce and remarriage. The Torah is unambiguous in permitting divorce and remarriage (not to mention polygyny). Jesus replies that it was not intended to be so from the creation, and only “hardness of heart” required the allowance of divorce. All in all, to the extent that historical context sheds light on the meaning of the Gospel teachings, it only underscores how revolutionary they were.

Das is convincing in his treatment of these contextual matters, but he is even more compelling in his philology. Interpreters must try to understand the language of these weighty texts, and the challenge of doing so has often been a stumbling block. Sometimes it is a matter of translators imposing meanings on the text, but at other times the problem is innocent ineptitude (language training not always being the strongest suit of seminary education). Das’s readings are reliable and rooted in a command of Koine Greek. For instance, his methodical correction of various modern mistranslations of the Greek verbs for “to commit adultery” (in which the middle and passive voices carry active meaning, hence tocommit) is refreshing.

He is equally authoritative in his treatment of the word porneia, the source of much mischief and misunderstanding. I have a vested scholarly interest in this part of his study. In a paper published about a decade ago, I tried to clarify what this central term meant for the early Christians. The word is stranger than is usually thought: The very fact that the first Latin translators had to coin fornicatio for it is a clue that there is something profound and unintuitive about the term.

Effectively an invention of the Judeo-Christian tradition, porneia connotes a completely antithetical sexual culture, in which rules about sex, marriage, and reproduction were governed by a social logic rooted in status and power. Roman men had easy access to slaves, prostitutes, and other women whose bodies were unprotected by the norms of sexual honor. Respectable women were expected to enter marriage pure, but no such concept was applied to men. Tellingly, the Romans did not even have a word for “male virgin.” Within marriage, fidelity was a one-way street—a restriction on the wife—and adultery a crime against the husband whose wife was violated, not the betrayal of a marital covenant. The language of the New Testament was written against the backdrop of this culture—or, more precisely, in protest against it.

Porneia might be translated as “unchastity” or “sexual immorality”: Any translation is likely to flatten out the realities of the vastly different social world of the first century, but these terms express something of the New Testament’s counter-cultural stance. Porneia signified illicit sexual practice, but with the implication of the illicit sexual practice widely accepted by the idolatrous surrounding culture.

Far from engendering consensus, my contribution has provoked divergent responses. Some have maintained that Paul’s prohibition of porneia would not restrict a male slaveowner’s sexual use of his own property. Others have gone in the opposite direction and claimed that porneia was meant to condemn any feeling of sexual desire as sinful, even within marriage! It’s hard to be impartial, but Das has given an evenhanded review of this issue, and he has thoroughly relieved me of any duty to respond to my critics.

The meaning of porneia bears centrally on the all-important exception clauses in the Gospel of Matthew. Both Matthew 5:32 and 19:9 have Jesus describing an exception to his interdiction on divorce, in the case of porneia. Das leaves no doubt that here the clause means something like “except on account of shameful sexual immorality.”

The Gospel of Matthew envisions a scenario, then, in which some form of legal divorce is not necessarily sinful. But the genuinely hard question remains: Does the exception clause legitimate subsequent remarriage? If, for instance, a husband dismisses an unfaithful wife, may he remarry? In other words, does the exception modify the prohibition in the first part of the sentence only (divorce) or in the entire sequence (divorce and remarriage)?

The text is ambiguous. Das gives an exhaustive syntactical analysis. He also reviews the matter in light of other New Testament interpretations and the reception of the early church. He makes the case that the exception clause modifies only the prohibition on divorce. He thus maintains that even the Gospel of Matthew disapproves of remarriage and that this was the consistent position of the early Church. Although his conclusion is restrictive, he approaches the question with humility and balance. The case he makes from the text itself does not slam the door shut, but it will need to be taken seriously by anyone who is interested in honest appraisal of the issue.

Remarriage in Early Christianity should be regarded as the most authoritative, up-to-date scholarly review of the New Testament passages bearing on divorce and remarriage. That said, its strengths—sound philology, command of the relevant hermeneutical issues—are also something of a limitation. There is very little consideration of why the early Christians staked out a model of marriage that was so at odds with both the immediate Jewish and larger Roman context.

The New Testament passages on divorce and remarriage, especially in Mark and Matthew, make it clear that the rigor of the new teaching did not emerge in legalistic isolation. For instance, the prohibition on divorce arises in the Sermon on the Mount because it was inseparable from the radical message of agape love. The hard teachings, then, were the corollary of a new ideal of marriage, a sacramental union summed up in the words “the two shall become one flesh”: an ideal deeply connected to the new covenant and its theology of grace. The rigid prohibitions on divorce, we might say, were the implication, not the motivation.

Kyle Harper is the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty and professor of classics and letters at the University of Oklahoma.

Image by Cosimo Rosselli, public domain. Image cropped.