Gospels · The divorce dispute
Text 06 / 08 · Jesus and Paul
The question Jesus was asked
Codex Amiatinusc. 700 CEVulgate
Illustrative artifact · does not contain this passage
The Pharisees ask whether a man may divorce his wife for any cause. Jesus takes them back to creation and gives a demanding answer. The question is whether his answer also establishes a marriage limit they did not ask about.
ὃ οὖν ὁ θεὸς συνέζευξεν ἄνθρωπος μὴ χωριζέτω.
transliteration
ho oun ho theos synezeuxen, anthrōpos mē chōrizetō.
What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.
Matthew 19:6b, a close literal rendering.
We can agree on the main point of Jesus’s answer: marriage is a bond people are not free to tear apart for convenience. I accept the full force of that teaching. The dispute is whether Jesus is also establishing an exclusive number of spouses or answering the divorce question put to Him.
The setting is a first-century dispute about the grounds for divorce. The Pharisees ask whether a man may divorce his wife “for any cause,” language often connected with the schools of Hillel and Shammai. Jesus answers from creation: what God joins, a person must not separate. Whatever else follows from His answer, it closes the easy exit the question is trying to preserve.
A closer look at the important words
Open any term to see its range and where else Scripture uses it.
- to divorce · To release, send away, divorce: the question's operative verb, and the answer's subject.
What question is Jesus answering?
The Gospels show Jesus speaking plainly about particular unions. Herod is condemned for taking his brother’s wife. The woman at the well is confronted with the truth about her husbands. A man who divorces and remarries is named an adulterer. What the Gospels do not record is Jesus directly discussing a man who remains married to one wife while marrying another. That silence proves nothing either way. It tells us to be careful about making the passage answer a case it never names.1
Later Christian writers explained the Old Testament households as a temporary concession or as symbols that did not establish a continuing practice for Christians. Justin Martyr and Tertullian are early examples. Their reasoning has names, dates, and documents, and the Drift walks through them.
Why you may reach a different conclusion
Here is the clearest reason to read the passage more broadly:
Jesus answers a divorce question by reaching behind Moses to creation, where God makes a man and a woman and “the two” become one flesh. He answers from the beginning of marriage, not only from the divorce law in front of Him. On the traditional reading, that appeal gives the pair exclusive force and ends any earlier accommodation involving either divorce or additional wives.
Mark sharpens that case when Jesus says a man who divorces his wife and marries another “commits adultery against her” (Mark 10:11). The wording gives the first wife an ongoing personal claim and is stronger than a generic appeal to creation by itself.
Why I reach a different conclusion
My answer is that Jesus explicitly identifies divorce as a concession to hardness of heart and repeatedly names separation, dismissal, and remarriage after dismissal as the wrongs under discussion. The laws about plural households do not receive that characterization in this exchange (see Exodus 21:10). On this reading, Jesus restores the permanence of an existing bond. Extending His answer to an exclusive number may be a strong canonical inference, but it is not the case the passage directly describes.
Exodus offers a check, not a shortcut. Torah condemns adultery while recognizing another woman in Exodus 21 within a marriage law and preserving the first wife’s marital rights. That distinction is why I do not assume every simultaneous second union is adultery. Whether Jesus later changes that status is the point still being tested.
“Against her” deserves its full weight. I read it as naming the betrayal created by dismissing the first wife in order to form the next union. A traditional reader may extend it to every subsequent union while the first wife lives. That is a serious canonical inference, but the case Mark narrates still includes divorce and dismissal.
What I think this passage establishes
Matthew 19 gives an uncompromising answer about divorce and the permanence of marriage. I do not find an explicit numerical ruling in that answer. The traditional reading sees exclusivity in Jesus’s return to the two at creation. The decision turns on whether that wider inference best explains the law and the rest of the canon, not on denying the force of Jesus’s words.
1note
Mark says the husband commits adultery “against her” and extends the teaching symmetrically to the wife who divorces. Qumran also preserves a pre-Christian, creation-based restrictive reading of marriage. See the Qumran source record.
Open the sources
- Bible Hub interlinear · Matthew 19 ↗ · The Greek, parsed word by word. archived copy
- Codex Sinaiticus · Matthew ↗ · The oldest complete New Testament, in the scribes' own hand. archived copy
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The next passage is 1 Corinthians 7:1–5. “Let each man have his own wife” sounds like a numerical rule when it stands alone. In the conversation Paul is answering, some married believers appear to be asking whether they should stop sleeping together.