Jesus' View on Divorce According to the Synoptic Gospels

One of the most hotly debated topics within the church today is the issue of divorce and remarriage. The Bible speaks of this issue in only a few passages, in the Old Testament to the people of Israel by the Law of Moses and in the prophets of Isaiah, Ezra, and Malachi regarding mainly the relationship of God to His people.  In the New Testament, we have four passages describing the words of Jesus and an instance of Paul instructing the Corinthian Church in this matter of divorce and remarriage.  Among the debate today is not only the morality of divorce and remarriage and how the Bible stands on the issue, but also whether or not a divorced man can lead a local church body.  The issue of divorce and church leadership is debated within the context of the qualifications of elders and deacons within Paul’s pastoral epistles to Timothy and Titus, unfortunately this will be beyond the scope of this paper.  Instead we will examine Jesus’ views on divorce according to the Synoptic Gospels where Jesus’ sayings on this matter are revealed.

The study of Jesus’ view on divorce presents us with two instances of teaching and both have their parallels.  The passage in the Sermon on the Mount has its parallel in Luke, while the passage of the testing of Jesus by the Pharisees in Matthew 19 has its parallel in Mark 10.  This presents us with a problem that has been an issue for debate for centuries; it is called the Synoptic Problem1.  Parallel passages found in Matthew, Mark, and Luke are often very similar; sometimes even the wording is exact.  Other times with the comparison of the evangelist’s sayings or narratives there will be much different details or a different organization or an including or excluding of different details.  The truth is that the difficulty is not the differences in the gospel accounts because this can be attributed as editorial differences or different perspectives and vantage points within a true account and biography.  The difficulty arises with the striking similarities and the exact wording of certain accounts and even the same ordering of events.  This tells us that the evangelists had similar sources of information or that they were interdependent on one another.  Many theories exist today, but the one that is popular among scholars today is Markan priority.  This argument believes that Mark was written first and Matthew and Luke borrowed from Mark and some other sources, one of these sources is termed, “Q.” Q is said to be a document of Jesus’ saying and explains how Matthew and Luke can have so many similarities of Jesus’ sayings.  Tradition and the Roman Catholic Church argue that Matthew was written first.  They believe that Matthew was written first in a Semitic language and then later translated into Greek.  The statements of Papias as recorded by Eusebius support this.  However, many other things discount Papias and argue against Matthew’s Greek as translation Greek.2

To avoid this issue altogether in the study of Jesus’ view on divorce would almost be impossible.  But we can minimize the effects of the problem by holding to these assumptions:

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Author: Christopher W. Myers

Keywords: Marriage, Divorce, Bill of divorcement, Certificate of divorce, Certificate of divorcement, Bill of divorce, School of Hillel, School of Shammai, Any cause, Every cause, Divorce for any cause, Divorce of every cause, Rabbinic debate, Commits adultery, Continues to commit adultery, Remarriage, Divorcement, Exception clause, Except for fornication, Except for adultery, Porneia, divorce and remarriage, divorce and marriage

Bible reference(s): Deuteronomy 24:1-3, Matthew 5:31-32, Matthew 12:39, Matthew 19:3-9, Mark 8:12, Mark 10:2, Mark 10:4, Mark 10:11-12, Luke 16:18, Romans 7:1-3

Source: Divorce Paper: Jesus’ View on Divorce According to the Synoptic Gospels (Lynchburg, Virginia: 2007), pp. 3-22.

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