In this clip, Cy Kellett welcomes a caller questioning the Catholic view on divorce and the exceptions mentioned in Matthew 5. The apologist dives into the nuances of the exceptive clauses and their implications for Jewish Christians, providing clarity on a complex topic.
Transcript:
Caller: The Catholic view, as I understand it, is there’s no divorce under any. Under any circumstance, except for, like, an illicit union. But in Matthew 5, Jesus says that adultery is the exception. And the Greek word that it was translated into at the time meant. It meant just adultery in general, not any specific kind. Is that contradiction?
Jimmy Akin: No, it’s not. You’re referring here to what are known by biblical scholars, both Protestant and Catholic, as the exceptive clauses in Matthew. And you’re right, they’re there in Matthew’s discussion in Matthew 5 and also in Matthew 19. They are not in the parallel passages in Mark and Luke. In Mark and Luke and also in Romans, when the subject of divorce comes up, the. There are no exceptive clauses. The prohibitions in all of those passages are absolute. Where Jesus indicates or Paul indicates, if you get married after being divorced and your spouse is still alive, you’re committing adultery. And so this leads to an insight about the exceptive clauses in Matthew. Because if adultery allowed you to get married, well, that would apply to tons and tons and tons and tons of people, because adultery was very common, including in the Roman world. And so it would make no sense in multiple different New Testament sources like Mark and Luke and Romans, if Christian teaching was you can’t get remarried after divorce in. Unless the person committed adultery, if adultery was a genuine exception, because loads of marriages end after adultery. And that was as true, maybe even more true, in the Roman world as it is today. So it would be pastorally irresponsible of authors like Mark and Luke and Paul to not mention a huge obvious exception that’s going to apply to tons of the audience and to present this otherwise very strict standard. So that suggests that whatever the exceptive clauses are doing in Matthew, they’re not meant for a broad audience. They’re meant for something more restrictive, something that’s unique to Matthew’s Gospel, that would not apply to the audiences of Mark’s Gospel or Luke’s Gospel or the Book of Romans. And so what might that be? Well, there are a few possibilities. One possibility is that Matthew is written for Jewish Christians rather than for non Jewish Christians. And so some people have said, well, maybe the acceptive clauses have to do with the provisions of Jewish law that would not apply to a gentile audience. And this has led to a proposal in some quarters that what the exceptive clauses are referring to are those kinds of marriages that were forbidden in Jewish law. Like, you know, you can’t. I won’t go into the details, but basically there are certain relatives that are close enough to you, you’re not allowed to marry them or it’s considered incest in Jewish law. But that wouldn’t be the case in Gentile law. And so may maybe Matthew includes the acceptive clauses as a way of heading off an objection that his Jewish Christian audience might have. Another thing I wanted to point out. You said that the word that’s used means adultery, and actually it’s not. The word used in the acceptive clauses is porneia. And porneia is clearly some kind of sexual immorality. There is an argument that has been made that it was used in the 1st century in Jewish circles to refer to the forbidden union types. That’s at least something scholars have argued. But it’s not the ordinary word for adultery. The ordinary word for adultery in Greek is. So what Jesus says is if you divorce, except for porneia and get remarried, then you are committing moyeah. And so there’s a distinction between these two things. And so it would be a mistake exegetically to simply read porneia as adultery, because that’s not what the term normally means and it is actually distinguished from adultery in these various texts. Now, all of that deals with one proposal that has been made. There is another proposal that has been made. There’s actually like four of them. I’ll give you at least three here. Another proposal is that Matthew is simply fleshing out an implication that is already present in Mark and Luke and Romans. He’s just making it clearer. And this position that I’m about to articulate is actually the one that was dominant among the early church fathers. This is the way the earliest Christians read the text, Edgar, in Mark and Luke it says that if someone like a woman remarries after a divorce, that’s adultery. Right? And specifically what Jesus says in Mark 10 and in the parallel in Luke is if you divorce your wife and it’s implied, then she’s going to marry someone else. You’re making her an adulteress, you’re making her commit adultery, right? What if you divorced her for adultery? Are you making her an adulteress in that case?
Caller: I’m not. I don’t know if I understand.
Jimmy Akin: Well, let’s try it. Okay, so you’re married to this woman, she commits adultery, you get mad and you divorce her. She then marries somebody else. Did you make her become an adulteress or was she already an adulteress?
Caller: She’s already an adulteress.
Jimmy Akin: She was already an adulteress, so you weren’t making her one. And that’s the second proposal, which was dominant among the early church fathers that, yeah, there is a reference to adultery here or sexual immorality in general, but that doesn’t give permission to marry somebody else. What Jesus is saying is if you divorce, unless they’re already sexually immoral, then you’re making them sexually immoral because they’re going to marry someone else. But on this scenario, you’re not making them that way. So you’re not putting another person in the proximate occasion of sin. They’ve already committed the sin on their own. And so if they continue on that path by marrying someone else, you didn’t do anything to them. They’d already chosen that path. So that’s the second interpretation. There’s also a third interpretation, and there’s actually a fourth, which I won’t go into. But a third interpretation of the acceptive clauses also has to do with what’s unique, unique about Matthew’s Gospel. It’s not only written for Jewish Christians, it also contains some other information. Edgar, can you think of any other point in Matthew’s gospel besides these teachings of Jesus where the subject of divorce is mentioned in Matthew in Matthew? Like, maybe someone was thinking about doing a divorce. Maybe someone righteous was thinking about having a divorce. Maybe someone early in Matthew’s gospel who was righteous was thinking about a divorce.
Caller: St. Joseph.
Jimmy Akin: What was that? Yeah, St. Joseph, right up front, Matthew says that Joseph thought Mary had been unfaithful and so he was going to divorce her privately. Not so as not to put her to public shame, but he was going to divorce her. And if you’ve got right up at the front of your gospel a statement that this righteous guy was planning a divorce, and how do you then present Jesus’s teaching about no divorce? Do you do it in the unqualified way that Mark and Luke did, or do you want to maybe adjust it a little bit so that you make it clear that you’re not implying just Joseph was an immoral man for doing this. So this proposal that Matthew’s including the acceptive clauses to explain why it was okay for Joseph to do this because he thought now he was wrong and an angel corrected him, but he thought that Mary had already committed adultery, so he wouldn’t be forcing Mary to become an adulteress if he divorced her. And that’s why Matthew includes the exceptive clauses to make that clear to the audience. So this third proposal is actually an extension of the second. So, Owen, there’s three different proposals for you. None of them involve a contradiction here between Catholic teaching on divorce. And remarriage and any of these texts.
Caller: Oh, and I’m going to leave that right there. When we come back, we’re going to take a quick break. And we come back, we’ll take more questions with Jimmy Akin.