Read the document
Neminem, qui sub dicione sit Romani nominis, binas uxores habere posse vulgo patet.
“It is obvious to all that no one under the rule of the Roman name may have two wives.”
Codex Justinianus · 5.5.2 (rescript of Diocletian and Maximian, 285)
The rescript adds that such a man is marked with the praetor's infamy.
Put it in context
The emperor is not making theology. He is restating settled civil law, the same rule Gaius had stated a century earlier, now with the penalty named.
Christian teachers in the following centuries lived under a civil rule that already limited a man to one wife. The rescript matters because it shows that rule in force before the empire became Christian.
What is disputed
The rescript addresses a specific inquiry under Roman law. What it establishes about provincial practice generally, and how its legal terms map onto marriage as distinct from concubinage, requires the surrounding legal context rather than the sentence alone.
How I read this record
This is my conclusion from the source, not part of the quotation.
The document establishes that a one-wife civil rule was current under Roman law before the empire became Christian. It does not establish whether, or how strongly, that law shaped later Christian exegesis.
Open the sources
- Codex Justinianus book 5 at the Grenoble Roman law library ↗ · Find title 5, law 2, in the Latin.