My Journey to Understanding the “Exception Clause” in Matthew
Someone asked me recently about my understanding of the exception clauses for divorce and remarriage found in Matthew.
A. The Way that Seemed Right...
My journey to understanding Matthew 19:9 began a couple years ago as I was reading a bible translation which falsely quoted Jesus as saying “except for ADULTERY”. Or another translation which renders it “except for marital unfaithfulness”. But God even used these blatantly wrong translations to help me begin to consider the possibility that Jesus might not actually be talking about a circumstance where the couple COULD remarry after divorce. Jesus is talking about and to Jews under the Law of Moses. What is the penalty UNDER THAT LAW (and Roman law at that time, I have heard but not studied myself) for a Lawfully wedded woman who commits adultery? DEATH. Don’t have time to go into the OT and search that up? Just turn to John 8 and listen to what the teachers of the Law told Jesus should be done with that woman. So based on that false translation of Matthew 19:9 my thinking about the question of why would Jesus say that you don’t commit adultery by remarrying about divorcing your first wife for adultery? Because your first wife is DEAD and therefore “divorce expect for adultery” actually means you’re obviously not getting a divorce for adultery since you’re a good Jewish boy who knows that the Law says the adulterous woman must be stoned to death. Therefore death, not divorce, breaks the covenant and you, in that circumstance of death, not divorce, are free to remarry. If that were actually the word “adultery” as translated, this verse could logically be understood as Jesus pointing the Jews AWAY from the current practice of divorcing adulteresses instead of executing them. Jesus was actually making the heinousness of adultery even more pointed in light of what he said about lusting in our hearts making us guilty of adultery, aka ACTUAL DEATH. Such a statement could then also be why the Jews later brought him an adulteress and said “okay smartiepants if you’re so pious here’s a sinner, should we kill her?”
B. Enter the Greek-English Dictionary...
I was happy with this understanding but then I got an app that makes the Strong’s Concordance numbers for the original Greek words easily readable with definitions in English. Guess what I found? My bible translation had LIED to me. The Greek word used in “except for adultery” did not actually mean “adultery” (the illegal sexual activity of a married person) at all! It meant “fornication” the illegal sexual activity of a SINGLE person. 😳😳
So then I found some translations that read “except for sexual immorality” and I thought, as so many others I’ve read or heard about, that maybe this fornication word was like an umbrella category, like “fruit”, and adultery was placed under that category like “apple” (although even then I had to admit that Strong’s did NOT list adultery in the definition so such an inclusion might be more like “tomato” and only occasionally or very technically would that kind of fruit be grouped together with other kinds of fruit).
This was great to explain away why those other bible versions had (inadvertently?) lied to me but then it turned my original explanation about Jesus marriage permanence stance on its head. 😕 Plus, we now live in a country without capital punishment so where does that leave such a couple?? “If you can’t kill ‘em, divorce ‘em”? I could clearly see the rationale behind the divorce-remarriage epidemic we are currently faced with if a general umbrella all-encompassing kind of “sexual immorality” catch-all is really what “fornication” means. I could have sadly accepted that and just moved on except for a couple things that now stood opposed to this supposed teaching of the Messiah:
1- if that’s true then why didn’t Mark & Luke mention this kind of except for “sexual immorality” exception clause? I could understand why if it was actually the word “adultery” since the Jews had a different Law than the Gentiles (to whom it’s likely that Mark was writing and to the Greek man to which Luke was writing). But now if it meant literally any immoral sexual activity (including lusting in our hearts!) and not something only the Jews judged with capital punishment, why not tell the Gentiles???
2- if adultery and fornication really were interchangeable in the same way that “apples” and “fruit” can sometimes be used interchangeably why did the NT writers list them separately on their later lists of the kinds of sinners we used to be but aren’t now if we’ve undergone New Birth, or the kinds of sinners who, if we still are, aren’t actually going to inherent the Kingdom of God? And furthermore why were two other kinds of sexual sin, homosexuality and male prostitution, included on those lists though NOT included in the Greek definition of “fornication”? Like if someone’s husband has an affair with a man he is somehow not guilty of adultery against his wife OR of sexual immorality/fornication and thus she would have no grounds to divorce him? That just didn’t jive with me or make sense to what I understood the Law to be saying. And yet there’s that list of sinful practices with those four things clearly separate. It’s unnecessarily redundant and contradictory and that doesn’t seem like something a God-breathed Word would do.
3- the Holy Spirit was revealing who Jesus is and what He is really like in deeper and clearer ways to me as I drew closer hungry to KNOW Him. He began showing me that Jesus is perfect theology, the only true role model after whom to pattern my life. And both my previous understandings of the exception clause did not, in any way, look like this amazing Man I was being shown. Jesus didn’t kill the adulteress in John 8, he used that circumstance to focus their eyes on their own sinfulness indeed to the degree that they each deserved execution in a similar matter! And Jesus is the most humble, unoffendable, nonretaliatory, lovingly holy, selfless in other words FORGIVING man there has ever been nor ever will be. This same man did not say “come and believe I exist and am who I say I am”. No. This man says “Come and follow Me all the way to your very own cross, the instrument of your unjust suffering and the tool used by God to bring about the death of your self and the working out of God’s new life and nature in its place”. So regardless of dictionary definitions and religious and cultural traditions and whether the things that Jesus said mean what some girl thinks or what some other guy thinks, when it comes to patterning my life about deciding what I do or don’t do the FIRST PLACE I must look is at the LIFE of JESUS. I already mentioned how his lack of action executing the adulteress shows my initial understanding of his supposed teaching of death for adultery, even if it wasn’t already shown to be a fabrication, is false. So to support Jesus’ supposed doctrine that AS HIS DISCIPLE I can divorce my husband for sexual immorality including adultery (and maybe even if I stretch the definition even further to include like general sexual uncleanness and decide that encompasses all the other sex acts someone might commit and bring hurt or shame against their spouse) then all I have to do is find one instance where Jesus is sinned against in a comparably heinous way and he then severs any past relationship with them and withholds forgiveness and mercy. ...
I looked for awhile. There isn’t one. If Jesus is my model and my life follows his actions then if ever I’m in similar circumstances to his I’m called to live like:
- Best friends abandon me during hardest hour of my life? Still bring them with me as I go meet my fate.
- Best friend attacks enemy and cuts off his ear? Heal the enemy.
- Best friend lies about me not once but repeatedly? Return and reestablish loving relationship with him.
- Someone I chose to mentor and bring close becomes a frenemy? Continue the relationship and still teach them, don’t even mention that I know they’re dirty even when I know that person is the one who is going to set me up to be murdered.
- False accusations brought against me by enemies trying to literally kill me? Stay silent and don’t even mention how they are blatantly lying.
- Tortured in accordance with my Father’s plan? Endure without defending myself EVEN THOUGH I HAVE THE POWER AND THE RIGHT TO.
- Hung on a cross like a criminal, mocked, humiliated and violated to such a degree that I don’t even look like a recognizable human anymore and now I’m left to die? “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”
- Handed a punishment for a crime I didn’t even commit such that I experience the very separation from the presence of God that feels like “My God why have you forsaken me”? “It is finished. Father, into Your hands I commit my Spirit.”
- Yet suddenly: Spouse cheats on me? Maybe more than once? Maybe without seeing a need to repent? “That’s it, I can never forgive you! I would kill you if I could, get out of my life forever you are nothingggggg to me!!!!!!” Ummm... one of these things is not like the others.
Jesus shows me the Father. He only says what he hears the Father saying AND he only does what he sees the Father doing. The Spirit and the Word always agree. So if I’m hearing something he says but NOT SEEING that thing in the spirit of what he DOES then I have missed it somehow in my interpretation and I need to seek him for more light on the subject.
I couldn’t explain why the sexual immorality exception schtick was wrong but I knew in my heart it was. Maybe it was just wrong for me because my conscience showed me something more clearly than it showed others?
C. Revelation: To God, Divorce isn’t Actually a Thing?!
During this season, the Master was also showing me things I had never seen before through the divorce texts that were bringing light to my struggle to understand polygamy from a biblical perspective. EVEN IF there truly was a biblical exception wherein God dissolved the “one” He’d made from two BACK into two once more, that was the exception not the rule. Setting those cases aside (and this was very easy because all you have to do is read any of the other gospel accounts where he addresses divorce with no exceptions), Jesus reveals that for unlawful divorce the remarriage of either gender, whether innocent or guilty in the procuring of the divorce, is ADULTERY. Now THIS TIME (I knew enough to check) the Greek word used actually does mean literal adultery. The illegal sexual conduct of married persons. Adultery is a moral crime that can ONLY be committed BY THE MARRIED. Widows can’t commit adultery against their deceased spouse, they are no longer married. Commonlaw fornicators can’t commit moral adultery against their BF/GF, they are not married. Single people can’t commit adultery against their spouse because they don’t have one, they are not yet married. Here’s the revelation for me - Divorced people CAN commit adultery against their former spouse because according to Jesus they don’t actually have a “former/ex” spouse at all, they have a current spouse because God says they are STILL MARRIED.
What does this mean for whether polygamy gets the all-clear from Jesus? Everything. Jesus is teaching that divorce is not recognized by God as dissolving a one-flesh union which He created. The ability of the divorce paper to sever that tie was as effective and valid as the ability of a napkin to cut through the mortar cementing two bricks together. Living with someone as if you are lawfully married by God whether you are civilly “divorced” and civilly “single” or whether you are civilly “divorced” and civilly “remarried” actually means you are bound to your first wife and bound to your second wife. You literally have two spouses at the same time whether you’re still sleeping with them both or not. That’s polygamy. Remarriage is adultery BECAUSE the person is still married when they begin to live as married with a second person. Remarriage is actually polygamy. The first lawful marriage is a covenant. The second marriage is a sham, it may be “lawful” according to the laws of the land as a legal civil contract with even a religious ceremony and it may have all the love and commitment of a the union that truly deserves the title “marriage” but according to the Creator, it is actually no different in his eyes than going to Utah or Iran and “marrying” a second wife or living with someone without legal papers and telling everyone you’re husband and wife while you’re still married to someone else. You’re lying. And you’re sinning against that spouse by committing open adultery with a nicer title and sometimes even paying for a license and changing how you file your taxes.
D. McFall Introduces Erasmus
At this time I came across an article by linguist Dr. Leslie McFall. In it he proposed something astonishing. That the 15th Century Greek manuscript upon which the KJV and almost every other English translation upon which both Protestant and Catholic bibles are based had evidence of scribal error (which they all do but that’s why we have lots of copies and people who can compare and read Greek and Latin, right?). Most of these “typos” change nothing of doctrinal significance for the reader, but this error though very small was of a deliberate nature and DID change things for English readers. So small that it was the addition of one little word which completely changed the meaning of Matthew 19:9 from “divorce not EVEN for fornication” to “divorce not EXCEPTING for fornication”. Wait what??? This man had literally studied the Greek manuscripts in question and there were photographs in the article/book of these documents which clearly showed what he was talking about. This is the chapter I read:
academia.edu/10729554/Erasmus_and_Divorce_in_Matthew_19_9
McFall was suggesting that Jesus had been the victim of misrepresentation! That he had actually been saying “no divorce not even for....” but Erasmus, a priest who was also a humanist, felt that was too harsh a stance to take, to expect a person to stay married to a sexual betrayer or never get married again, so he inserted the little Greek word which changes the meaning in the hugest of ways. Whoa.
So again I was back to Jesus as an absolutist. No divorce for any reason, the exception was false. Like the divorce papers itself in Jesus’ non-exception view, McFall brought evidence that the exception did not actually exist in the heart and mind of the Father in the way that humanity had assumed. I published some blog posts around this time explaining what I’d learned and sharing links to the book and other articles that shared this interpretation.
The only thing I wondered about this view was a small question about the description of Joseph, the husband of Mary, being “a just man” who (it seemed to infer BECAUSE) he resolved to “put Mary away privately.” This man was divorcing his wife and his character was described as “just” BEFORE the angel came and stopped him from putting Mary away. Why didn’t I see God talking about any other divorce in these terms? Malachi in particular seems to explicitly spell out God’s exact opposite opinion of those who divorce their first wife. Hmmm.
The most compelling thing I learned from reading McFall’s article was not whether he is right or wrong about Erasmus’s well-intentioned corruption of the biblical manuscripts, but that my unsettled feeling about the incompatibility of a disciple of Jesus (who is commanded to adopt His very nature) and the choice to divorce an adulterous spouse was indeed incompatible and not just only my idea.
Jesus lived a life of radical love and forgiveness towards even his enemies who did not ask for forgiveness. He told “those who would come after him to follow pick up our cross and FOLLOW HIM”. True, he also taught that to receive forgiveness FROM THE FATHER one MUST repent, turning away from their sin. Yet Jesus walked as a man submitted to God and filled with the Holy Spirit to show those the Father was about to redeem from mere humanity how they would soon be able to behave, live, and feel TOWARDS EACH OTHER. He instructed us to pray to our Father to forgive us our trespasses in the same way that we forgive those who trespass against us. We are required to forgive not only those who ask forgiveness but those who do not because in truth they cannot — we see like Jesus that while they remain in their self-focused state they cannot comprehend the things of the Spirit and do not truly know God therefore “they do not know what they’re doing”.
McFall’s own words are well worth the reflection: “Both Jesus and Stephen unilaterally forgave their murderers...[So] The issue is not whether Jesus was for or against divorce. The issue is whether divorce is compatible with being a Christian, and compatible with the Spirit of Christ living in the body of each believer. If His presence within the believer does not make divorce obsolete as a concept, and totally irrelevant, then something is seriously wrong with the claim that CHRIST is residing in that person. You cannot hold to divorce and hold to forgiveness at the same time. They are opposed one to the other in the new nature.
...Because Jesus went back [in his reply to the Pharisees] to the pre Fall state of marriage where God united Adam and Eve in a ‘one flesh’ union, while they were in their unfallen state, to form a permanent, lifelong union, that is the position that Jesus places all His followers in. Consequently, just as Adam and Eve, in their unfallen state, were in a permanent, lifelong union, incapable of a breakdown, because they were sinless at this stage, so the Christian is in an identical position if they remain in Christ...Every aspect of Jesus’ teaching on marriage can be explained if we go back with Him and stand alongside Him in the Garden of Eden as the guests of the first married couple. Deuteronomy 24 could play no part in Jesus’ thinking because divorce belonged to an age that He has superseded. It is obsolete.
Any attempt to bring back divorce into the life of Jesus’ followers would be to turn the clock back and totally ignore the coming of the Lord Jesus, and the new way that He brought with Him by which all men must come to God...The Law was not designed or written for Adam in his sinless state. It was designed for the state he fell into and into which he brought all men. Therefore, the Law was not written for the Lord Jesus, or for His descendants [who are new creatures created after His image in true righteousness and holiness (Eph.4:24)]...God was, throughout the Old Testament, modifying the behaviour of unregenerate sinners, who constituted His [family] through NATURAL birth. Hence such laws are inappropriate [unnecessary] to apply to Jesus or to His followers [who constitute His family by SPIRITUAL birth].”
E. The Jewish Betrothal Period
After this I came across a remarkable teaching by David Pawson on divorce and remarriage. https://youtu.be/Noqlkx4mUFQ
He didn’t appear to follow McFall’s theory of dealing with the words before the clause but he approached Jesus as a proponent of marriage permanence from another angle — that of the an alternative definition of that word “fornication”. He introduced me to the knowledge that Jewish marriages were not like western marriages in several important ways. The most significant to this topic is that Jewish weddings followed the eastern tradition of a betrothal period of at least a ear WHICH WAS LEGALLY BINDING and to the degree that it was appropriate and common to reference the couple as husband and wife even though they had not yet consummated, celebrated or moved in together.
Pawson proposed that the reason the fornication exception only appeared in the Gospels written for the Jews was because the exception only APPLIED to the Jews, specifically to one particular marriage circumstance - the same one in which Joseph heart-breakingly thought he had found Mary.
There were dissenters to this view, McFall among them, although he seemed to continue to come at marriage from the “after the wedding” western traditions and ignore the point Pawson was making about a uniquely Jewish “after the engagement” marriage tradition. They were actually both saying the same thing. Some disputed Pawson’s view and stick with the umbrella “sexual immorality” translation or the erroneous “adultery” translation which made me wonder why. It seemed like people were deliberately sticking their fingers in their ears, perhaps because of the grave implications such a truth would have on many of the “marriages” in the church (perhaps even their own)?
F. A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words
I wasn’t certain how academically solid Pawson’s view was until I came across a remarkable compilation of teachings from many people, McFall among them,
which succinctly laid out the arguments, in graphical form to support the understanding that the Greek word porneia which is the word translated fornication in English was specifically referring to the illicit sexual activity of a single woman “playing the harlot” (though not necessarily being one literally with the reception of money). Further they showed that when this was a charge leveled against a betrothed woman the law called either for execution by stoning, or for divorce, the putting away of the woman breaking the ketubah, the Jewish betrothal contract before the taking of the wife into the place prepared for her. In other words, Jesus, speaking to the Jews, reaffirmed that the only time a husband could divorce his wife was if she had been found to be unfaithful during the engagement or had misrepresented herself as a virgin before the wedding night. Jewish virgins were married on the fourth day of the week so that the husband had one night’s grace to discover whether she had lost her virtue to another and if so was required to bring charges against her when the court convened on the morning of the fifth day. After that, Jesus was teaching, unless for that same charge of not being a virgin when married and the father of the bride being unable to produce the blood covenant linens which were kept, there could be NO divorce. He overturned the law of Moses and every other exception once the two had been unified as one, put together by God, from then on man had no authority and no ability to put asunder by putting away his wife.
G. What Does This Mean for Gentile Believers Like Me?
In our day as Gentiles, where engagements are not legally binding, this breaking off of the engagement before the wedding night or before the legal documents signed at the wedding have been filed, would not require a legal divorce because we do not enter into legally binding engagements. We see now how God can hate divorce while simultaneously describing Joseph as a just man because he chose to divorce Mary privately rather than execute her publicly. This was a betrothal divorce in the Oriental wedding tradition not a post one-flesh divorce at all!
And we see Jesus’ teachings as properly understood in this manner are totally consistent with the radical forgiveness and love that he models and commands his disciples to follow. The ability to follow him in this as in all things requires the supernatural activity of the Holy Spirit and thus only becomes possible for those who are not like those Jews following the Law of Moses as humans born of Adam but as people who are being saved because we have been born again and no longer have hard hearts as unregenerate sinners. This teaching was so radical that when the disciples understood it they privately exclaimed how it would be better for a man not to marry and Jesus agreed that for those who had the grace of living a single life without falling into sexual sin, that would be easier. This radical, permanent, unselfish love [which he calls agape] is expressed through a one-flesh union which remains even in the face of greatest betrayal. If we are disciples of Jesus and enter a covenant marriage before God we have entered a union which goes back to the preFall marriage and which also looks forward, prophesying the perfected marriage relationship between God and Israel and Christ and his Church and as such it is only attainable for those who have Holy Spirit’s new creation nature because of born again.
Therefore, to the Gentiles to whom Jesus’ teachings were transmitted in Mark and Luke, disciples were instructed that there was no cause for divorce where remarriage would not result in adultery. And for the Jews there was no cause for divorce after the one-flesh union had truly and fully and officially been joined where remarriage would not result in adultery. Jesus IS an absolutist, he DOES teach marriage permanence AFTER the wedding not including the engagement.
I finally felt I had reached a conclusion that was solid Truth. I was saddened that the English-speaking world was reading translations that didn’t make this clear. Very few would take the time to search it out, I suspected, and would end up teaching heresy and even living in adultery while tragically thinking they were on their way to Heaven. Were there really NO bible versions that made this clear? In the course of my readings related to this I discovered that there were, indeed, Greek bibles which made this clear. In fact, the majority of existing bible manuscripts of Matthew make this clear but our English bibles are translated from the much smaller collections of manuscripts which are older, the assumption being older copies trumps number of copies for discerning the truest meaning of the original Word. There are good arguments to explain why the majority texts would not have older copies however and these arguments, taken with the truth I’ve finally come to regarding Jesus’ exception clause lead me to suspect that the majority text is a sounder translation of the Word of the God than the received text used for KJV or the critical texts used in most other English translations. Thanks to be internet I was able to search for English new testaments that were translated from the Majority Greek texts (some claim to be but are actually still pulling from the KJV) and I found one available online that I wish to promote by looking at the very verses that started this whole journey.
The BBE (Bible in Basic English) takes the Majority Text’s as its basis for translation from Greek and recognizes the true meaning of “porniea” as it would be understood by the Jews.
Matthew 5:31 Again, it was said, Whoever puts away his wife has to give her a statement in writing for this purpose: 32 But I say to you that everyone who puts away his wife for any other cause but the loss of her virtue, makes her false to her husband; and whoever takes her as his wife after she is put away, is no true husband to her.
Matthew 19:3 And certain Pharisees came to him, testing him, and saying, Is it right for a man to put away his wife for every cause? 4 And he said in answer, Have you not seen in the Writings, that he who made them at the first made them male and female, and said, 5 For this cause will a man go away from his father and mother, and be joined to his wife; and the two will become one flesh? 6 So that they are no longer two, but one flesh. Then let not that which has been joined by God be parted by man. 7 They say to him, Why then did Moses give orders that a husband might give her a statement in writing and be free from her? 8 He says to them, Moses, because of your hard hearts, let you put away your wives: but it has not been so from the first. 9 And I say to you, Whoever puts away his wife for any other cause than the loss of her virtue [greek porniea], and takes another, is [greek mochaio: adulterer] a false husband: and he who takes her as his wife when she is put away, is [mochaio: adulterer] no true husband to her. 10 The disciples say to him, If this is the position of a man in relation to his wife, it is better not to be married. 11 But he said to them, Not all men are able to take in this saying, but only those to whom it is given.
(Emphasis added).
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