A bill of divorce
McKenzie, John L.
LOOKING AT WHAT JESUS SAID A bill of divorce JOHN L. McKENZIE WHAT THE NEW TESTAMENT says about divorce is found in a few texts, almost all of which are attributed to Jesus—I Corinthians...
...I do not intend to propose the ethics of the just war as a principle for the solution of this question...
...Yet the rigorous Roman Catholic position has come under question...
...If it is a temporary sexual encounter it cannot be an element in a stable society...
...One must regard the Roman law as a social and moral advance...
...I merely point out a certain lack of consistency...
...The prohibition is supported by an appeal to Genesis 2:24...
...But I have suggested that the prohibition of divorce may be rooted in a culture in which women, from birth to death, were secure only as long as they were the property of some man—father, husband, and in their old age a son...
...One finds it difficult to believe that the refusal of compassion reflects the image of Jesus...
...Luke 16:18...
...Documents discovered at Qumran indicate that there were Jewish sectarians who denied the legitimacy of divorce, at least for their sect...
...Thus the constant teaching of the Roman Catholic church on the indissolubility of marriage seems to be well supported not only by traditional interpretation but by the interpretation of modern scholarship...
...But since they thought their sect alone represented authentic Judaism, this limitation does not mean much...
...It is a divorce executed by private authority...
...or the finding of legal loopholes which make one wonder whether any marriage, so scrutinized, could survive as valid and legitimate...
...Effectively, that is, he permitted a man to divorce his wife if he wished to divorce her...
...This law was the object of a celebrated controversy between the rabbinical schools of Shammai and Hillel, a controversy which antedated Jesus himself...
...It does seem that unless the church adheres to its traditional rigidity, it will be compelled to drift into the moral morass of divorce on demand...
...This is true...
...One does not know how the established position was established, but it was not by exegesis...
...Apparently we see an "intrinsic evil" in sexual intercourse which we do not see in killing...
...until quite recently it was universally thought that the question as Mark has it (10:2) made no sense in a Jewish context...
...21:25, in the sense of marriage within the prohibited degrees of kinship...
...This was a reasonable rabbinical question...
...The traditional law of the Greek Church has permitted divorce for adultery alone...
...It is generally believed that the formulae of Mark and Luke 23 May 1980: 301 are more primitive than the formulae of Matthew...
...there can be no divorce where there is no marriage...
...This was one of the practices of the Law which was imposed upon Gentile Christians...
...This last text is the only Old Testament text which authorizes divorce...
...a proselyte was legally dead and had no relatives from his previous life...
...but the law is not really well founded in the texts of Matthew...
...the prohibition of divorce placed some restraint on what is called male chauvinism...
...It is almost in passing that the requirement of a document of divorce issued by the man is stated...
...They have been therefore more or less compelled to say that the exception was added by Matthew to the saying in its original form...
...This does not imply that the other sources omit it because they thought it would confuse Gentiles (as it certainly has...
...This kind of work, one thinks, was done better by the scribes and Pharisees than by the disciples of Jesus...
...One sees a certain consistency in the saying of Jesus, if one believes that the thrust of his sayings was, as I said above, opposed to human cruelty...
...It is not a question of affirming or denying inevitable cruelty in the human situation, but of supporting systems which create cruel situations...
...they are more remarkable for their ingenuity than for anything else, and ingenuity is not a vice in an interpreter...
...The prohibition of divorce imposes cruelty...
...Paul correctly Commonweal: 302 says that it was not accepted among the pagans...
...But there is really no record of annulments being for sale, although, papal courts being what they often were, it must have happened on occasion...
...I think Jesus did too...
...The disciples respond to the prohibition of divorce with the obvious remark that it is better not to marry...
...Again we meet an ambiguous phrase...
...but sacramental marriage is not beyond the candid hypocrisy of which I spoke above, nor does it protect people from the cruelty inevitable in a rigorous prohibition of divorce...
...If the church has defined its rigidity in these terms, by the same power by which the church has defined its position it can redefine it...
...Many Catholics, both clergy and laity, have long been distressed by the candid hypocrisy of many of these procedures...
...Space is not available, nor would it be useful for my purpose, to detail the various explanations which have been offered...
...But the Gospel of Matthew exhibits other instances of the same approach...
...The interpretation which seems to be winning acceptance was suggested by the late Joseph Bonsirven nearly thirty years ago...
...It seems to put things before people...
...There are irreparable sins and errors, like murder, one hopes that these can be kept to a minimum without encouraging them...
...The same evidence which enables us to read the gospel of Matthew gives us the exceptions...
...Shammai, a famous rigorist, understood this to mean adultery and nothing less...
...Paul apparently thought it could...
...Does the community of the people of God...
...The text of Matthew, so interpreted, simply removes illicit unions from the prohibition of divorce...
...Both of these have been questioned, but not by Roman Catholics...
...Oddly enough, the rabbis did not unanimously reject it for proselytes...
...Jewish listeners would not need this, as we have seen, and it is not said except by Mark...
...it prohibits divorce whether it be the act of the husband or the act of the wife...
...Jesus taught this...
...If a secure biblical basis were all that was necessary, no questions would be possible...
...did he also teach that there is no recovery from mistakes, especially if they be the mistakes of others or the mistakes of adolescence...
...This word was applied in rabbinical Hebrew not only to prostitution and to fornication, but also to marriage contracted within the forbidden degrees of kindred (Leviticus 18:6-18...
...Mark 10:1-12...
...only in contemporary interpretation is a consensus emerging...
...I can only suggest, indiscreet as it may be, that those readers find another harpist...
...Nothing is gained by viewing marriage as anything else...
...Greek has nouns and a verb which mean adultery, and Matthew uses these words both in 5:32 and 19:9...
...Neither have interpreters found it tenable to suppose that Matthew made an exception to the saying of Jesus...
...I expect some readers to say I harp on this...
...It was such an incestuous marriage of a man to his stepmother at Corinth which so outraged Paul (I Corinthians 5:1-5...
...Does the contemporary church believe that it possesses the apostolic power by which Paul modified a saying of Jesus...
...This is clearly divorce, although the Roman Catholic church, with its dislike for the word, has called it the Pauline "privilege...
...The Roman Catholic church has already extended the principle in its own practice to cover the marriage of a baptized Protestant who becomes a Roman Catholic...
...It has long been recognized that the decree was not intended to place abstention from non-kosher food on the same moral level with abstention from frequenting houses of ill fame...
...Yet if there is any definite thrust to Jesus's words, it is a thrust against the cruelty of man to man—in this case, of man to woman, and woman to man...
...and it is possible that the phrase in Matthew 5:32 is an echo of the ambiguous phrase in Deuteronomy 24:1...
...It seems clear that one does not face this problem by asserting that there ought to be a law...
...It is exactly the same principle on which Roman Catholic canon law for centuries has permitted total separation and remarriage without calling it divorce...
...One feels that if he did the right thing, he did it for the wrong reason...
...Jesus spoke, as I have said, to a Jewish question spoken in a Jewish context...
...The Jerusalem bible accordingly uses the term "fornication...
...Paul has no saying from the Lord to cover this case, and he delivers a saying which is expressly his own: If the unbeliever "separates" (this seems to have been a technical term for divorce) the believer is free to marry again...
...certainly it thinks it needs it...
...If one wished to be-a rigid adherent of the biblical words, one might look at Matthew 19:10-12...
...Except for these questions, the sayings of Jesus go beyond even Shammai and forbid divorce for any cause...
...LOOKING AT WHAT JESUS SAID A bill of divorce JOHN L. McKENZIE WHAT THE NEW TESTAMENT says about divorce is found in a few texts, almost all of which are attributed to Jesus—I Corinthians 7:10-16...
...It is a fact that the position of women in modern society is much altered from the position of women in ancient Jewish society...
...We have found ways to evade the teaching of Jesus on violence, which is as clear as his teaching on divorce...
...Turning his words into an imperishable absolute may be impossible unless one also turns the context in which they were spoken into an imperishable absolute...
...The explanation is based on the meaning of the Hebrew word in rabbinical usage (zenut) which lies behind the Greek word which we translated "harlotry" (porneia...
...It means rather that the exception answers a question which would occur only to a rabbi, and not even to a rabbi (Paul, for instance) when he was talking to a Christian audience...
...In practice the prohibition of divorce has meant that Catholics who wished to free themselves from a marriage had to find a canon lawyer and an ecclesiastical court which would find a legal defect in their marriage...
...We meet again something which we have met earlier...
...There is also a certain amount of inevitable cruelty involved in the total rejection of divorce...
...The translators are quite correct in rejecting the word "adultery...
...WE MAY take this conclusion for granted...
...See texts on next page...
...He did not originate the explanation, but as he presented it the explanation won attention which it had not received previously...
...Paul seemed to think the call to live in peace made more serious demands than an existing marriage makes...
...Here Paul thought himself empowered to apply the principle of the saying of Jesus to a case which the saying did not cover, employing a principle something like that which I enunciated above...
...and it does not so much authorize divorce as presuppose it...
...The exception could not be formulated outside a context of rabbinical discourse...
...No one with any experience in the Roman Catholic legal system will deny that he sometimes feels like an executioner, and often an executioner of a doubtfully guilty party, granted that in most matrimonial problems there is never a totally innocent party...
...Marriage within other prohibited degrees of kinship, however, was not so offensive to Hellenistic morals...
...This question illustrates perhaps better than anything else the difficulty in defining the teachings of Jesus as laws...
...It has long been recognized that the same word (porneia) is used in Acts 15:20, 29...
...Can this saying be extended without qualification to situations in a far different context...
...Can kindness in one situation become cruelty in a different situation...
...the Greek word does not mean "adultery" but harlotry, although it is true that the Greek and the Hebrew words which are translated harlot and harlotry are loosely used of illicit sexual union where no professionalism is implied...
...I do not believe that either follows what I called the thrust of the teaching of Jesus...
...One needs clearer evidence than has been adduced that this is really the teaching of Jesus...
...Commonweal: 304 The Christian should be able to find a position between inhumane rigidity and amoral relaxation...
...The teaching of Jesus, as reported by Paul (the earliest witness), Mark and Luke, is brief and lacks nothing in clarity...
...Mark's formula cannot be the earliest form of the saying...
...If the problem of divorce had been treated by the kind of reasoning which gave us the morality of legitimate self-defense and the just war, we should long ago have found the legitimate and the just divorce...
...THE INTERPRETATION is further recommended by the Jewish character of the Gospel of Matthew...
...he permitted divorce because the husband did not like his wife's cooking, or because he found another woman who pleased him better...
...Civil society may need this...
...Hillel, famed for his humanity, in this question approached the trivial...
...one should not in the name of the teaching of Jesus impose cruelty...
...The form in which the question of the Pharisees is set in Matthew 19:3 is thought to reflect this controversy...
...Jewish law had no provision for a wife to divorce her husband...
...Jesus certainly stated without qualification the principle that marriage is a stable and total commitment...
...The church has never expressly treated the moral teaching of Jesus as a set of impossible or impractical ideals which simply fail to give practical directions for life in the real world...
...The controversy dealt with the meaning of the ambiguous phrase in Deuteronomy 24:1 defining the cause of divorce, translated in the New American Bible as "something indecent...
...One may say that there is a certain amount of inevitable cruelty involved in living in human society, and this must be conceded...
...The situation of women is certainly different in the modern western world from the situation of Jewish women in Palestine in the Hellenistic-Roman period...
...In fact, it is hard to explain the stubbornness of a pope so nearly totally devoid of moral fiber as Clement VII...
...I have deliberately avoided the question of women's liberation, because I believe this problem can be addressed without introducing that problem area...
...I should notice that neither now nor in the past have interpreters believed that the exception was an addition to the original text of Matthew...
...We deal with the same problem in principle when we treat the words addressed to Peter by Jesus in Matthew 16:18-19, about being the foundation of the church and possessing the keys of the Kingdom...
...I am not hinting at corruption in the usual political sense...
...They found ways to draw the line at the marriage of a son with his mother...
...Jesus was asked to state whether he stood with Hillel or with Shammai...
...The teachings of Jesus, whatever we think they were, never relieve us of the necessity of further thought about the world and the human situation, of moral responsibility, of making decisions which he did not prefabricate for us...
...The total prohibition of divorce often makes it impossible to show compassion...
...some have already said it...
...This principle is what I called it, an evasion of the clear teaching of Jesus...
...But it is a certain hypocrisy intrinsic to the process itself and not corruption that causes questions—the process of granting what is effectively a divorce and refusing to call it 23 May 1980: 303 that...
...But the church has recognized the difference between what is recommended as a better thing and what is obliged as a minimum of moral integrity...
...and it is difficult to say this clearly...
...The application of his words to any other situation means some degree of bending...
...Let us suggest that if we are, we are bending them no more than those Christians did who adapted the teaching of Jesus on violence to a cultural change in which the government, the courts and the police became Christian...
...in both 5:32 and 19:9 the New American bible translates "lewd conduct is a separate case," thus removing most of the ambiguity by translating something which really is not in the Greek...
...Paul invokes no legal authority, civil or ecclesiastical...
...N THE SAME LINE of discussion, the Jewish practice of I divorce, especially when it was interpreted in the school of Hillel, seems to have involved inevitable cruelty to women...
...The prohibition of divorce has a much sounder biblical foundation, for instance, than the primacy of the Roman Pontiff or the sacrament of orders...
...It was a reflection of the privileged position of the male and the depressed condition of the female in Israelite and Jewish society...
...some very powerful and wealthy people were unable to procure an annulment...
...Matthew's two texts raise questions which we shall discuss shortly...
...A colleague has remarked that in these texts the more diligently form criticism has investigated the sayings, the more clearly it appears that the sayings are rigorous without qualification and that they represent a saying of Jesus himself...
...I do not intend, as I have said, to suggest a solution of the problems by a theory of the just and legitimate divorce...
...It has long been known that these practices led to contrived interpretation both of the law of marriage and of the particular marriage contract which reached distortion...
...Matthew 5:32 and 19:1-12...
...One may say that these cases do not include the marriage of two baptized persons, which is the point at which the church becomes rigid...
...These methods do not permit those who practice them to affirm that the most primitive form of the saying comes from Jesus himself...
...Nor do the words of Jesus in the relevant texts refer implicitly or explicitly to sacramental marriage...
...It was a rabbinical principle that an earlier text in the Torah outweighed a later text...
...the just war permits cruelty...
...This law actually prohibits the remarriage of a man and a woman who have been previously divorced...
...He delivered to the Corinthians the prohibition of divorce not as his own commandment but as the commandment of the Lord (I Corinthians 7:10-11...
...Jesus answers by saying that the renunciation of sex is not for everyone, thus clearly introducing the difference between commandment and counsel...
...The divorced woman had no security except her own family, if she had a family...
...it was prohibited by Roman law...
...The divorce is permitted because God calls us to live in peace (I Corinthians 7:15...
...One may ask whether we are not bending the words of Jesus to fit the contemporary culture...
...it has been turned into a counsel of celibacy for clergy and religious, with no basis in the text itself...
...All these texts presuppose Deuteronomy 24:1-4, quoted in Mark 10:4, Matthew 5:31 and 19:7...
...Can this community ever deal with persons not as persons but as cases and remain faithful to what it believes to be the Christian life as taught and lived by Jesus...
...The lines of Matthew, so interpreted, contain no relaxation of the prohibition of divorce which is clear in the other texts...
...23 May 1980: 305...
...I have noticed that even the most recent methods of form criticism and what is called "redaction criticism" support the view that the most rigorous form of the saying is the most primitive...
...What Matthew really meant has long been uncertain...
...There is sufficient experience of divorce followed by successful marriage to another partner to permit the assertion that divorce sometimes heals a failed human situation...
...The church has rarely done this with any of his sayings...
...Law means that there are no individual cases...
...they do show no good reason for attributing the saying to anyone else...
...In the context, this can be nothing but a counsel of celibacy for the divorced...
...and if we do, wemust deal with Matthew's exceptions...
...his statement was formulated for those who lived under Roman law...
...Henry Tudor of England, for instance, could not procure one from a court where nearly everything was for sale...
...He seems to have been tolerant of errors of benevolence, but not of errors rising from rigid legalism...
...The law as we know it makes little or no provision for the treatment of each individual case as individual...
...Certainly modern women, and most modern men, have rejected that social system...
...Mark certainly relaxes nothing by his modification...
...But what happens if a believer is married to an unbeliever...
...Both the phrase and its syntactical relation to the context are ambiguous...
...Nor have interpreters leaned to the view that the exception was a part of the original saying of Jesus which was omitted by Paul, Mark and Luke...
...How far may one take the principle implicit in his permission of divorce in this case...
...why is it done to this saying...
Vol. 107 • May 1980 • No. 10
