The Jewish attitude towards divorce formed the necessary background for appreciating both Jesus' and the apostles' teaching on divorce.
As a whole the Jewish attitude towards divorce was that it was permissible and that the manner by which it was accomplished was for the husband to write his wife a 'certificate of divorce.' This is clear from the record of their exchange with Jesus in Matt 19:8 and Mk 10:4; 'Why then did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?" The Scriptural text upon which this question was based is most probably Deut 24:1-4. There were, however, differences among the Jewish scholars of the day regarding how the text was to be understood and the grounds on which divorce may be permitted. These differences were distilled in the two main schools of thought, that of Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Shammai.
Rabbi Shammai is the stricter of the two, permitting divorce only on grounds of serious sexual offences such as adultery. Rabbi Hillel was more liberal allowing divorce for any misdemeanour that displeases the husband, including such triviality as spilling the food or speaking too loudly.
Furthermore, it was assumed by both schools that re-marriage after a divorce was permissible. The Mishnah, though written down only later but reflecting traditions that go back to before Jesus' time, makes plain that an essential part of the bill of divorce was the clause, "You are free to marry again." It is against this background that Joseph acted when he sought to quietly "divorce-send her away" Mary when he discovered she was with child (Matt 1:19).
It is also against this background that we must set Jesus' teaching about divorce, which are recorded as part of his so-called Sermon on the Mount at Matt 5:31-32, and as part of his response to the Pharisees' question in Matt 19:3-12 & Mk 10:2-12.
It is very probable that the Pharisees raised this question with Jesus, apart from other agenda, because the question was a matter of debate among the Pharisees themselves, divided as they were between the two schools of Hillel and Shammai.
However else we may interprete the specific words of Jesus' teaching on divorce here, his attitude towards the matter is un-mistakable:
Haven't you read that at the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female,' and said, 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh'? So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.
For Jesus divorce was never part of God's intention for marriage. This went head-on against the attitude of Jewish thinking of the day, and when the Pharisees then asked why Moses permitted divorce, Jesus' reply was that "Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning" (Matt 19:7).
We may note the following points here:
1. That Moses "permitted" divorce was taken as a given, both by the Pharisees and by Jesus. But where such permission is given is not stated, although it is usually assumed to be Deut 24:1-4. But, as we have seen, Deut 24:1-4 assumed divorce to be a fact of life and simply stipulated a particular situation where remarriage was prohibited. It actually had nothing to say about permissibility.
2. While the Pharisees would take as the basis of their decision the instructions of Moses, Jesus sought to go beyond Moses and shift the basis back to God's intention for marriage from the very beginning.
Having shifted the basis of the discussion from Moses' permission "because of your heart" to God's original intention for marriage, Jesus now clarifies the implications of living by that intention:
I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery. (Matt 19:9)
Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery (Mk 10:11-12).
Both evangelists reports essentially the same point, i.e., divorce and remarriage, from the point of God's original intention, constitutes adultery. Divorce is a sin. Matthew, however, records a caveat—"except for marital unfaithfulness [porneia]." According to Matthew's witness, Jesus permitted divorce only where porneia was involved. But what does this exception mean? Two main issues have occupied the attention of commentators with regards to this question.
1. Why does Mark not record the exception?
2. What exactly did Jesus permit in his teaching? Was it a case of "divorce only in case of marital unfaithfulness but no remarriage?" or did it involve "divorce only in case of marital unfaithfulness with remarriage a possibility?"
Some have suggested that Mark's was Jesus' original words and that Matthew added the "exception" clause to suit his community where the absolute prohibition of divorce was seen as too demanding and difficult to uphold.1 Not only is such a postulation unhelpful in understanding the text, it can neither be proved nor disproved. A more balanced view is that the exception was original to Jesus and Mark's omission was due simply to the fact that the exception was already understood. This may be likened to Jesus' saying at Matt 5:27-28: ""You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit adultery.' But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart." It is pointless to ask, "But what if the woman is my wife?" That is an exception that is already understood.
There may in fact be good reason why Matthew specifies the exception that neither Mark nor Luke (Lk 16:18) mention. He alone reports Joseph, Jesus' father, contemplating divorcing Mary when he found her pregnant with child. In doing so, Matthew describes Joseph as a "righteous man" (Matt 1:19). Matthew would obviously seem inconsistent if he were to report Jesus' teaching on divorce if he had left it in its more "absolute" sense as Mark and Luke had done. Without the exception clause, Matthew would seem to make Jesus contradict his father's action. There is, in other words, no need to make a clever molehill out of Mark's omission or of Matthew's clarification.
The second question is more important. When Jesus permitted divorce when adultery was involved, did Jesus also permit remarriage after such a divorce. Or did Jesus permit only divorce—separation—without the option of remarriage for the offended spouse.
The consistent practice and understanding of the early Church was that Jesus permitted divorce in the case of adultery (the early Church in practice actually required it) but not remarriage afterwards. The exception clause, in other words, applies only to the first act of divorce, but not the following act of remarriage.
One school of thought—sometimes referred to as the Erasmian view because it was first given concrete exposition by Erasmus in the 16th Cent—argues that the exception clause applies to both divorce and remarriage; therefore, the offended person who divorces his spouse because of adultery is free to remarry.2
The main argument offered by this view is that since Jesus was a Jew, he would have shared the common view with his audience that assumed that it was the divorcee's right to remarry. His audience would not have understood—it is argued—Jesus to have propounded such a revolutionary view of divorce in which that right was nullified; ". . . if Jesus had used the word 'divorce' in a sense that barred remarriage—without making it crystal clear that he was doing so—he would certainly have been misunderstood."3
The argument is reasonable but is not quite as persuasive as it seems at first. If Jesus clearly rejected Moses' instruction as the basis for divorce, the audience would just as plausibly had understood Jesus also not to accept Moses' purported permission for remarriage. It would have been difficult for anyone listening to what Jesus had taught not to notice how radical they were and how they undermined all that they had presumed about divorce. Not only had Jesus shifted the basis of the debate from Moses back to God's original intention but with his teaching he had also removed a vital privilege from the men with regards to divorce and changed the status of the wife in the equation.
Contemporary Jews viewed adultery as an offence against a husband, whether by his wife or her lover. By asserting that a man's intercourse with another woman also constituted adultery Jesus removed that privilege from the men (Matt 19:9; Mk 10:11). His disciples' expression of shock—"If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry" (Matt 19:12)—shows how radical and destructive of their conception of divorce Jesus' teaching must have been. As if this was not enough, Jesus goes on to assert that "anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery" (Mk 10:12). While Roman laws permitted either the husband or the wife to divorce his/her spouse, Jewish laws generally permited divorce only to the husband.4 By asserting then that "if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery" Jesus changed the status of women in the marriage relationship and practically nailed the last nail into the coffin of their conception of divorce. Even though the statement is not meant to "permit" women to divorce, it shows that—in Jesus' view—women are no longer subservient to men even in such things. Now, if, according to Jesus, God's intention was for a man to "leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh," that they will "no longer [be] two, but one," and "therefore what God has joined together" no man should separate" and that everything else they had assumed to be acceptable about divorce according to Moses' concessions were flawed, then it needs very little else for anyone to conclude, working out from there, that remarraige after divorce—even where the divorce was legitimate—was unlikely to have been acceptable to Jesus. Once Jesus had looped off the tree of Moses' concession on divorce at its root, the leafy branch of remarriage cannot long remain. This conclusion gathers more weight when we look at the phrasing of Jesus' teaching in Matt 5:31-32.
While Jesus' saying here appears to have been made earlier than that recorded in 19:3-12, our examination of it will add little that is new to what we have already discussed. Two points are significant, however:
1. Instead of recourse to God's original intention for marriage, here Jesus makes himself the authority for the new commandment on divorce—"But I tell you . . ." (v32).
2. As we have seen, the Jewish certificate of divorce explicitly states that a divorce woman was free to marry again. By asserting here that "anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery," Jesus is asserting in a most glaring way that the Jewish assumption that remarriage after a divorce is permitted is flawed, that such a remarriage constitutes adultery.
These observations, and especially the last point, raise serious questions about the soundness of the Erasmian view that, in the case of adultery, the offended party is freed to remarry again. There is no clear positive statement from Jesus' teachings that such remarriage is permitted and the arguments against it are, as we have seen above, rather more than weighty.
N.B. - Lk 16:18 records essentially the same saying of Jesus as Matt 5:32, so there is no need to give it independent treatment here.
Low Chai Hok
©Alberith, 2013