THE BIBLICAL TEACHING ON DIVORCE AND REMARRIAGE
Leslie McFall
15 October, 2008
http://morechristlike.com/documents/DivorceMcFallview.pdf
The Church of God received the teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ directly from Him in oral form, and the Apostles and Jesus’ followers had time, during His earthly ministry, to becertain what He meant and to work out the practical implications of His teaching on divorce and remarriage before the Gospels were written down.Out of their personal interaction with the Lord Jesus came a clear, unambiguous application that was never seriously challenged for the first 450 years by any authoritative Christian
teacher/leader.1 As a result, a definite pattern of behaviour characterised the whole Christian Church whereby divorce was not permitted for any reason, not even adultery. The so-called‘Pauline Privilege’ (1 Cor 7:15-16) was interpreted to mean that if an unbelieving partner took
the initiative to separate (or get a civil divorce) from a Christian partner, then the Christian partner must stay single in the hope that the unbelieving partner would come back again(even if the unbeliever remarried). After the coming of Jesus Christ and the institution of a
new priesthood of which He is its undying, great High Priest, offering a better Covenant between God and Man,2 and replacing the external Mosaic Law (Heb 6:12; 10:16) with an internal law written in the minds and upon the hearts of all those born again of the Spirit of God, divorce was abolished by God completely, there being now no grounds whatsoever for
divorce, for either Christian or non-Christian because of the one-flesh nature of the union,and this was understood firmly by the entire Church up until the Protestant Reformation,which then branched off and introduced divorce for adultery for the first time as a teaching of the Lord Jesus (which is reflected in the Westminster Confession of Faith [1648]).
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the Universal (Byzantine) Text used by the Early Church, and which had been transmitted faithfully from their day up to the time of the Reformation, then the application of their core doctrine of “sola Scriptura” (“Scripture Alone”) would become a trap, because they would
latch on to a faulty copy and attribute to it the inspiration and infallibility that only belongs to the original text and its faithful copies. And that is exactly what happened in the case of Matthew 19:9, where a scribe in the 15th century added to his copy of the Greek text the small Greek word EI (‘if’) before the negative MH (‘not’) to change the text to read ‘except’ (because in Greek EI placed before MH becomes ‘except’).
Who was the first to add EI to the inspired Word of God? We do not know who did it, but the earliest Greek manuscript to contain the addition does not date earlier than a thousand years after Christ.
How did it get into the Reformers’ Bibles? This we do know. It was through Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), the Dutch humanist3. He was not a Reformed Christian. He was brought up in the Catholic Church but, like the Reformers, he became disillusioned with the Catholic Church’s teaching on a number of issues, one of which was their insistence that Jesus did not permit divorce or remarriage. Erasmus was extremely angry at the dogmatic
stance of the Church over this teaching. He believed that divorce was justified in the case of adultery, so when he came to produce the first published edition of the Greek New Testament, he deliberately added EI before MH in Matthew 19:9 to allow divorce for adultery despite the fact that the three manuscripts which he used did not contain it. Not content with changing the Greek text, Erasmus also changed the Latin Vulgate, which was the Bible of the Roman Catholic Church. The Vulgate read: “And I say to you that whosoever shall put away
[Latin: dimiserit] his wife, such as [nisi4 ] for fornication [Latin: fornicationem], and shall marry another, committeth adultery”. Erasmus altered this to read: “And I say to you that whosoever shall repudiate [Latin: repudiauerit] his wife, except [nisi] it be for disgrace [Latin:
stuprum], and shall marry another, committeth adultery”. By changing ‘fornicationem’ to ‘stuprum’, Erasmus widened his exceptive clause from the specific sin of fornication, to the general, catch-all phrase of anything that gives ground for “dishonour, disgrace, defilement,
unchastity, debauchery, lewdness, and violation,”5 all of which are the meanings given to stuprum in the Oxford Latin Dictionary. Suddenly, Erasmus offered divorce not just on sexual grounds (for fornication), but for any cause that gave rise to dishonour or disgrace, which may
not necessarily be sexual, such as abuse or neglect or anything that a partner feels angry about.
The Reformers did not spot the addition made by Erasmus, because handwritten copies of the Greek New Testament were very rare in those days. Everyone took on trust that Erasmus had been faithful to the handwritten Greek copies that he used to produce the first published
edition of the Greek New Testament in 1516. He produced five editions of his text (the last being in 1536, the year he died). In none of them did he correct his mistake, even though by 1536 he had become aware of, and had consulted, many more manuscripts, including the Complutensian Polyglot, which was produced by the Roman Catholic Church in 1522.
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From these texts it is clear that Jesus has abolished divorce per se. There are now no grounds for divorce. Divorce was the creation of man. Marriage was the creation of God. It follows that if the man-made creation of divorce has been abolished for all time to come then remarriage is out of the question. All remarriages are adulterous relationships while
both spouses are still alive. Both fornicators and adulterers are excluded from heaven.
“Have you not known that the unrighteous the reign of God shall not inherit? Be not led astray; neither whoremongers, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor sodomites (homosexuals), northieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, the reign of God shall inherit. And certain of you were these! But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were declared righteous, in the name of the Lord Jesus, and in the Spirit of our God” (1Cor 6:9).
When Erasmus added eij (EI) before mh;, this introduced a completely new idea. Where Jesus had said, “not for fornication,” meaning, a man may not divorce for fornication, Erasmus changed it to read, he may not divorce “except for fornication,” which he then translated it to 12
read, “except for indecency,” thereby permitting divorce for fornicationa and virtually ‘every cause’ that a man can squeeze into “indecency”. Jesus, in fact, specifically ruled out fornication (or adultery) as a grounds for divorce, but Erasmus turned the text into a grounds
for divorce. You could not get a more blatant contradiction that this.
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