The Jewish Jesus on Jewish Divorce

you welcome everyone to this year's Shaffer lecture on February 6th 1930 Yale University you should have press release so they knew how to do that even then and it said John C Shaffer a publisher of the Chicago Evening Post has established a foundation we would now call it an endowment in the Yale Divinity School in memory of his son Kent a graduate of Yale University who died in 1925 the income of the foundation is to be used for a course of lectures upon the life character and teachings of Jesus the Schaeffer lecturers occur every other year alternating with the Nathaniel Taylor lectures which are on some aspect of theology past Shaiful lecturers include bart airmen susan garrett Lou Martin Abe malar B NT Wright Martin Hengel and EP Sanders this year's lecturer is John P Meyer father Maya was educated at st. Joseph's Seminary in College in New York at the Gregorian University in Rome and at the Pontifical biblical Institute also in Rome his scholarly interests are in the area of New Testament specifically in the historical Jesus and the Gospel of Matthew as well as Palestinian Judaism in the 1st century CE II having published the first three volumes of his Magisterial work on the historical Jesus entitled a marginal Jew in 1991 94 and 2001 he's now working on the fourth volume in that series and I understand there may even be a fifth he's also written six other books as well as over 65 articles for journals and collected essays at various times he's been the editor of the or associated editor of the Catholic biblical quarterly and New Testament studies in the spring of 2002 ba the Maya was appointed to the William K Warren Foundation chair of theology at the University of Notre Dame the topic of his Schaeffer lectures this year will be on the danger of making jesus a Christian the test case of law and morality and today's subject will be the Jewish Jesus on divorce the other lectures in this series will take place at 10:30 tomorrow and Thursday and we'll treat the Jewish Jesus in the Sabbath and the Jewish Jesus and purity laws please join me in welcoming John Myers of the shape Alexis thank you thank you and thank you Harry very much for that gracious introduction indeed I had not planned on a fifth volume of a marginal Jew but if the Pentateuch was good enough for Moses is good enough for me give me that old-time five scroll approach actually after I publish vol 3 of my series of marginal Jew in 2001 I proceeded to what I thought would be a fairly quick and easy survey of Jesus the Mosaic law and morality it would be quick and easy I thought because after all are there so many books and essays already out there on Jesus and the law you could drown in them I would simply cherry-pick the best of them put my own Bill O'Reilly spin on it and be done with the topic alas as I slouch slowly toward the completion of my treatment of Jesus in the law in the academic year 2006 and 7 I have come to the sad conclusion that every book ever written on Jesus and the law is hopelessly wrong now I'm not yet sure what's right but I know everything else is wrong why wrong among other reasons because authors usually to fail to make some vital distinctions about the historical Jesus and is teaching on Torah although the mistakes proceeded from these primordial mistakes hence what I would like to do in these three Schaffer lectures is first explore with you these pivotal distinctions and then apply them to three major test cases three key areas of Jesus's teaching on Torah law divorce Sabbath and purity rules today we'll look at Jesus and Jewish divorce but as a prelude let us first draw those vital distinctions that hopefully will keep us from simply repeating the mistakes of the past a fond hope we always have that we do not always achieve if you look therefore for instance on your outline first of all the introduction three important preliminary distinctions the first important distinction to grasp is the difference between Christology and the quest for the historical Jesus both are valid academic endeavors as are the theology in history departments of a university that housed both areas of study obviously the two endeavors are related but I always begin a course on either Christology or the historical Jesus by insisting on a clear distinction between the two fields Christology is a subdivision of the academic discipline called theology in Anselm's famous phrase Peters cuarón's intellect 'm faith seeking understanding Christology is a subdivision is therefore faith seeking understanding of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior the very object of Christian faith by definition then Christology operates within the sphere of Christian faith however much it may probe aspects of this faith or question traditional understandings of the faith by contrast the quest for the historical Jesus is by definition a strictly empirical historical endeavor if historical Jesus means anything it means that a historical endeavor open to any competent historian of any faith or no faith whatever of its nature then it crease ins from or brackets Christian faith this does not mean that it denies rejects or attacks such faith the quest simply pre sins from Christian faith the way a world-class astronomer who happens to be a devout Christian would prescind from a theology of God the creator or the Trinity when she is exploring the outer reaches of a galaxy she may be unable to explain these three co-equal brilliant sources of light at the far end of the universe but she may not invoke the Trinity as a literal deus ex machina all this is simply a matter of functional specialization a term beloved of Burnet Lonnegan to be sure there is always the possibility of a critical correlation among various disciplines after each has done its own work according to its own proper method but not before to attempt such a cross fertilization prematurely would be to short-circuit the whole process and violate the integrity and autonomy of each discipline now greater this distinction between Christology and the quest for the historical Jesus what do I mean then by the historical Jesus the historical Jesus is that Jesus whom we can recover or reconstruct by using the scientific tools of modern historical research as applied to ancient sources of its nature the historical Jesus is a modern abstraction and construct he is not coterminous with the full reality of Jesus of Nazareth which would include everything Jesus ever said or did during some 30 something years of his life that's the full reality of Jesus totally unachievable by us today it really happened because we don't know it doesn't mean it really didn't happen but it just reminds us historical Jesus real Jesus not the same thing in other words the historical Jesus is not to be equated with the real Jesus no more than the historical Caligula is to be equated with the real Caligula if I may use a younger contemporary of Jesus with a somewhat different temperament Oh though was he all that much sad bad or mad what the real Caligula was is by no means what Suetonius and Tacitus in their terribly biased presentations representative remember the history is written by the people who assassinated Caligula what would have been pilots form of a gospel we had a real gospel of Pilate some are sent for the first distinction the second distinction this first distinction between the quest for the historical Jesus and Christology naturally leads to indeed really embraces within itself a second important distinction namely the distinction between our empirical historical knowledge of a certain Palestinian Jew of the first century named Yeshua of Nazareth and our faith knowledge of Jesus Christ whom Christians proclaim to be their crucified Lord and Savior to be sure believing Christians insists that these two figures are one and the same person considered at different stages of his existence or considered from different vantage points and as a Christian I certainly affirmed that identity in faith but academic historians be they Catholic Protestant Jew necessarily prescind from faith for the sake of the method in the historical quest such historians must insist that the precise object of their investigation the historical Jesus is always solely and entirely a first century Jew with no Christian Pontifical vestments hiding under his Jewish cloak all a historian precisely as a historian qua historian can know is a particular circumcised Jewish male from Galilee who in the first decades of the 1st century CE II regularly went up to Jerusalem to observe the main and even some minor Jewish feast in the temple think of Hanukkah in John 10 despite the United States today Hanukkah was a nothing and feast Jesus even goes to that what kind of Jew he was where he fit on the variegated map of first century Judaism how much he may have diverged from what can be very vaguely called mainstream Judaism of the time are all valid questions for debate but if there is any enduring gain from the so-called third quest for the historical Jesus it is the one hammered home by scholars like Gazipur mission EP Sanders Jesus first last and only a Jew this distinction leads in turn to a third more specific distinction which brings me to the subject of today's lecture I refer to this fiction between Christian theology or ethics on the one hand and the teaching of the Jewish Jesus about the Jewish law on the other perhaps in no other area of the quest is the tendency to ignore the obvious fact that the Jewish Jesus is addressing his fellow Jews so subtle yet all pervasive be it the question of divorce of the Sabbath surety rules of the prohibition of taking of an oath the unspoken thrust of most articles in books on Jesus and the law is to place Jesus's teaching on law and ethics primarily in the context of Christian theology rather than in the context of first century Jewish debates about legal observance here the peril of ignoring the Jewishness of Jesus mutates into the peril of guaranteeing that the teaching of this Jew will always be immediately and directly relevant to Christians with no hermeneutical reflection with no sense of distance and difference necessary many modern Christians unconsciously desire a Thomas Jefferson enlightenment Jesus or a Buddha like New Age Jesus who is either a great moral philosopher inculcating eternal truth or a psychobabble counselor suggesting warm fuzzy maybes in contrast as I can well attest from past lectures Christian eyes glaze over instantly as soon as a scholar insist on envisioning Jesus as a Jew immersed in the legal holic debates of his fellow first century Jews who cares a secret unspoken feeling therefore in my opinion the best way of preventing any erasing of Jesus's Jewishness is to insist on understanding this first century Jew as addressing his fellow Palestinian Jews within the confines of Jewish legal debates without the slightest concern about whether any of this is of interest to Christians in other words to understand the ethical teaching of the historical Jesus you must place him firmly and solely within the context of the Jewish law the historical Jesus is the holic Jesus the Jesus Seminar notwithstanding I must stress this point from the start because just as most quest for the historical Jesus have been Christology in historical disguise so to most treatments of Jesus and the law are simply works on Christian morality or ethics wearing a yarmulke indeed it could be argued that the obliteration of Jesus's Jewishness reaches its high point in the question of Jesus and the law where the Jewish Jesus regularly morphs into the Christian Paul Augustine Luther or Bart not to mention those anonymous Christian theologians of the law whom we call Matthew Mark Luke and John hence I must emphasize that the question I am asking today is what one first century Palestinian Jew somewhere around 28 to 30 C II taught other first century Palestinian Jews about Jewish divorce in other words we are not asking primarily about what first or second generation Christians made of Jesus's teaching to be sure the latter focus is a constant temptation first because Christian documents provide us with our only access to the historical Jesus is teaching on divorce and second because questions of Christian pastoral practice today usually drive the scholarly inquiry no matter how much we talk about the historical Jesus hence I must prove myself a cold hard-hearted academic by banishing all Christian concerns from this lecture let all catechumens depart close the doors most books and articles on the question are consciously or unconsciously structured so as to attain in the end the Holy Grail not of The Da Vinci Code but of the proper solution through the present-day problem of frequent divorce among Christians now I certainly understand and sympathize with that aim within the larger project of Christian moral theology in church law yes but when it comes to the quest for the historical Jesus and divorce we face a glaring example of an unpalatable truth relevance is the enemy of history by which I mean of course a facile rush to relevance is the enemy of sober history needless to say I would not object to Christian theologians and canonists using the results of a sober quest for the historical Jesus in their own reflections but first the quest for a Jew teaching Jewish law to other Jews must be pursued on its own terms for its own sake to do otherwise is to fall into the original sin of confusing historical quest with Christology the original sin of turning Jesus into a Christian the original sin of Christianizing Jesus any serious historical investigation challenges us to face the past as past that is estranged different even off-putting with no guarantee that what we learn will prove relevant to our agendas so it must be with a quest for the teaching of one particular first century Jew about Jewish divorce that said it is high time we focused upon today's topic Jewish divorce insisting on Jewish divorce naturally brings us to the context of Jesus's teaching within the practice of the ancient Near East the Jewish Scriptures and the Jewish writers of Jesus's day now it is vital to remember that what Christians call the Old Testament contains no notable body of divorce law what is the corpus of divor at divorce law in the Old Testament nothing divorce was simply the given throughout the ancient Near East a traditional institution divorce was a matter of private not public law it was handled within the family and the clan and the state or larger society had no business intervening there were no divorce courts at the time for the most part no certificate of divorce granted you by the nation state with some intriguing exceptions the power to divorce lay with the husband this understanding of divorce is taken over by the Old Testament which presupposes the institution rather than creating or regulating it with great detail the few scattered divorce laws that exist in the five books of Moses deal mostly with the unusual cases in which the virtually unlimited power of the husband in matters of the voice divorce was limited it was that unusual situation which called for the only law of the pentateuch that actually mentions the procedure for divorce and then only in passing is Deuteronomy 24 or 1/2 for which you have on your handout sheet of text there upper right-hand corner without any exact parallel in the ancient Near Eastern law Deuteronomy 24:1 - for treats the special case of a wife who is divorced by her first husband and then by her second husband this poor woman can't win after the second husband divorces her or dies she may not be married again to her first husband that's the point of the law the prohibition of going back to the first husband this curious piece of legislation unparalleled really in the rest of the ancient Near Eastern corpus of law became pivotal in later legal developments because it alone among the laws that the Pentateuch mentions in passing the mechanism of the certificate of divorce safe accurate through which a husband must give the wife he divorces likewise in passing the law mentions that the first husband divorces his wife because he finds in her something shameful in Worcester bar the phrase is vague and perhaps purposely so it's very vagueness may be calculated to give almost unlimited discretion to the husband in an honor shame society something shameful whatever the male group thinks is shameful that's sufficient but the certificate and the shameful thing will themselves become major objects of legislation later on originally however the so direct object of the law in Deuteronomy 24:1 to 4 was the prohibition of the return to the first husband by the twice divorced wife not the certificate knocked the grounds of divorce it is especially after the Babylonian exile in the sixth three BCE that the question of divorce begins to heat up among those Israelites returning to Judea the book of Ezra and chapters 9 and 10 seem to reflect some sort of attempt to force Jewish husbands in Jerusalem to divorce their foreign wives though the exact problem is not entirely clear this problem in turn may be reflected in a very obscure texts in Malachi 2 10 to 16 verse 16 is usually translated in our Bibles as I hate divorce says the Lord well whatever the real meaning of the Hebrew in the Masoretic text may be and the text actually may be quite corrupt in its present form the text does not mean I hate divorce but not sure what it means really interestingly this puzzling text of Malachi had already become a bone of contention in the two centuries prior to Jesus one strand of the Greek so-called Septuagint translation of Malachi makes the text condemn divorce when done out of hatred while the other strand recommends divorce when hatred has arisen talk about having it both ways intriguingly a Hebrew fragment of Malachi from cave 4 at Qumran follows the latter tradition and so we are left with the Prophet Malachi recommending divorce at Qumran boy they actually it is this more permissive tradition that is witness for the most part in the intertestamental period and continued later on in the rabbinic literature more to the point it is the tradition Jesus addresses in the first century CE II both the philosopher Philo and the historian Josephus stated boldly that divorce may take place for any reason and Josephus motive lis divorced heirs and such reasons often arise in human affairs the only Stern reservations about divorce are found in the sceen literature though the precise meaning of a key passage in the Damascus document remains debatable in my view the main object of the text polemic is polygyny that is the case of one man having more than one wife marriage after divorce may likewise be prohibited by this text but not divorced as such indeed at least one passage in the Damascus document may indicate that divorce was allowed in another sceen document the temple scroll one passage seems to forbid polygyny and divorce with remarriage but the prohibition apparently applies only to the king in some ideal future other passages in the temple scroll as they rework the laws of the Pentateuch seem to presuppose divorce in brief it is an exaggeration to say the least to claim that Qumran for bad divorce period what is primarily prohibited is polygyny divorce with remarriage seems to be forbidden at least to some people at sometimes though divorce in itself does not seem to be prohibited outright if we may complete this quick survey by glancing forward to the Mishnah the first part of the talmud the mission of being composed around 200 CE II the tract 818 contains something truly new on the Jewish scene debating the meaning of the obscure phrase something shameful in Deuteronomy 24:1 the school of Shammai so we are told claims that the phrase indicates that a man may divorce his wife only if she is guilty of some shameful conduct the school hello carrying on the tradition found in the Old Testament Philo and Josephus insist that any reason whatever however frivolous burnt food at a meal a more beautiful woman you found whatever is sufficient grounds for divorce the truly significant point here is that the Mishnah is the first text of Palestinian reason to witness to a debate over what constitutes sufficient grounds for divorce thus one sees immediately the problem of invoking this Shamai hello debate as background for the teaching of Jesus background which happens to be about 150 years later than the thing is supposed to be background of back to the future at the Othman problem in abusing later rabbinic text as background for the historical Jesus now against this briefly sketch backdrop let us look at the relevant New Testament text and you have those likewise thanks to our lovely staff here at the Divinity School on your handout pages of text restricting ourselves for the moment to the three key parallel text and placing them in roughly chronological order we will review Paul's treatment of voice in first Corinthians 7 10 to 11 the Q tradition lying behind Matthew 5:32 and Luke 16:18 and finally mark 10 11 to 12 by the way I should note that for the purpose of this lecture I am presupposing the priority of mark and the existence of some sort of Q tradition available to both Matthew and Luke to begin then with first Corinthians 7 Paul spends chapter 7 of first Corinthians dealing with the various states of life for social statuses of the Corinthian Christians through most of the chapter Paul boldly issues all sorts of advice and directives with the serene assurance of his apostolic authority phrases like I say I wish my opinion is along with of course direct commands pepper the chapter Paul did not suffer from low self esteem he was a great apostle with a big heart and a bigger ego all the more striking then is the way Paul broaches the question of divorce verse 10 with an abrupt self-correction containing an important distinction now to the married I give the command not i but the lord one gets the impression that paul realizing that a prohibition of divorce ran against the common sense and practice of the whole ancient world not to mention the modern world felt he had to appeal on this point to higher authority hence as in a few other passages in first corinthians we have the very rare case of paul appealing to a teaching of Jesus that is paralleled in the synoptic Gospels as in almost all such cases the tradition of the Lord's Supper being an exception Paul paraphrases rather than quotes Jesus's words therefore the parallel of first Corinthians with qu and Mark will of its nature be a vague one of substance rather than a word-for-word correspondence still a basic two part division which is also discernible in all the gospel sayings on divorce shines through Paul's version in verses 10 to 11 especially if you understand a typical four line parenthesis in the middle quote a wife is not to separate from her husband parenthesis but as she does she is to remain unmarried or be reconciled with her husband close parenthesis and a husband is not to divorced his wife you see the two-part prohibition there if I may anticipate for a moment what we shall see in the gospel text this laconic and absolute prohibition shows pause pastoral adaptation of the Jesus tradition to a Roman legal context if as I will argue later the original Jesus saying envision divorce only by the husband Paul writing to Christians in the rebuilt city of Corinth which had become a Roman colony with Roman law expands the prohibition to cover wives since in Roman law by the first century not too much before but by the first century a fully free woman had the right to divorce a husband not all when you often reading textbook well in Roman law women could divorce the hut no a fully free room a woman Sooey URIs could for instance an ex-slave woman was still on the Patronus could not without the patronesses permission etc etc always be aware of the general sweeping statement a fully free woman in Roman law could divorce her husband but equal rights mean equal obligations and equal prohibitions for Paul if the Christian wife does go ahead with a divorce that is legal in the eyes of Roman society her only options says Paul commenting on the court prohibition are to remain unmarried or to be reconciled with her husband underlying the command to remain unmarried and hence the prohibition of entering a second marriage seems to be the presumption that the Christian marriage bond remains true a divorce has taken place empirically but it is a divorce that is recognized by civil pagan society not by God or the Christian community interestingly Paul never states what he thinks the status of a second marriage would be if it were attempted by a Christian in other words he does not articulate what lies at the heart of the synoptic prohibition they made that a second marriage constitutes adultery the underlying presuppositions of first Corinthians 7 10 to 11 may point in that direction but the conclusion is not stated a further difference from the Gospels is that Paul then proceeds in verses 12 to 16 to permit a Christian spouse to leave a marriage with the pagan partner if the pagan refuses to live in peace with the Christian spouse quite understandably Paul does not try to invoke any teaching of Jesus to solve this problem which is proper to a Christian community Paul explicitly states that in this case I not the Lord say we're back to our usual argument Paul's authorities enough still more intriguing is pause perhaps embarrassed silence on whether the Christian having divorced the pagan spouse may remarry unlike some other cases in 1st Corinthians 7 Paul is not eager here to offer his opinion however distinct from Jesus's don't-ask don't-tell in this case apparently enough then for Paul let's turn to the cue tradition the synoptic prohibition divorce takes a somewhat different form from Paul's at the heart of the Synoptics saying common to mark Matthew and Luke stands the branding of divorce and remarriage as adultery something Paul never explicitly says in both Matthew and Luke we find this brief saying Matthew 5:32 and Luke 16:18 placed in a larger redaction akan text Matthew quite typically of him in cases the saying in the architectonic structure of a Sermon on the Mount specifically in the third of his six antitheses it was said to the men of old but I say to you Luke also typically of him presents a looser structure the prohibition stands in a small bundle of sayings 16 14 to 18 in one of those many discourses Jesus delivers during Luke's great journey narrative of Jerusalem which takes up chapters 9 to 19 about half of the gospel and the theological topics of the great journey narrative seem to meander just as much as the geography does in some both forms of the prohibition are easily detached from their larger artificial context of rejection still even devout believers and the cue document must ask are the methine and Luo conforms in fact taken from cue or are they different forms of a stray saying that came to both evangelists via the oral tradition in my view a close comparison of the two forms in make the hypothesis of a single written source more likely in a nutshell both Matthew and Luke present a two-part saying each part reflecting more or less a casuist ik form of law in each part the man is the lead agent he alone divorces and so he alone is ultimately responsible for the ensuing adultery the woman is always the object of the male's action as we shall see this is a notable difference between the cue and the mark and forms all in all then there are sufficient reasons for assigning the same to cue granted though that both Matthew and Luke have left they redact no fingerprints on the same can we reconstruct a hypothetical cue form a dicey operation but on the other hand an international team of scholars has produced a whole huge volume that claims to reconstruct chu word-for-word which would require the omniscience of God himself so why shouldn't we try with a single saying we're only imitating a little bit of God's omniscience on that you side only Matthew has the so-called accepted clause para tosse logo corneas except in the case of cornea whatever pornea maybe this acceptive clause overloads the first line of the prohibition and is present only in Matthew Paul Mark and Luke all like this proviso indeed if the acceptive clause stood in the original form of the saying how do we explain why Paul Mark and Luke all agree on its omission without the benefit of a conference call Paul certainly had no problem with the idea of an exception since he makes one for mixed marriages hence however intriguing Matthew's obscure exceptive Clause maybe for exegetes it should be dropped from the primitive form we are therefore thankfully excused from having to wrestle with the intractable problem of what exactly cornea means and q 532 well should we apply Occam's razor to the first part of Luke's prohibition since the phrase and marrying another woman does not occur in Matthew 5:32 here I would be more cautious since the equivalent clause does occur in the marking form of the same in mark 10 11 moreover there is the question of the inner logic of the prohibition and of the metaphor used the reprobated action of the man initiating the divorce is branded adultery this accusation however provocative makes much more sense if the man not only divorces his first wife but marries a second wife without the new sexual relationship it is difficult to see why the mere act of divorce should have conjured up the precise label of adultery the second marriage makes the rationale of the accusation perfectly clear hence tentatively I would retain the phrase and marrying another for cue the conclusion of the first half of Matthew's prohibition is likewise unique to Matthew 5:32 the divorcing husband causes his wife to be involved in adultery or translated over literally he causes her to be adulterated some exegetes claim that the highly Jewish Palestinian male perspective of this version argues for its originality in other words by divorcing his wife the husband forces her to seek the only protection available a second marriage which all the forms of the synoptic prohibition brand as adultery he forces her to be involved in an adulterous relationship since all power and divorce lies with the husband he is the one responsible for the adulterous relationship that arises from his initiative while I find this suggestion attractive it does suffer from the fact that no other form of the prohibition even Matthews own version in matthew 19:9 has this formulation hence again tentatively I would favor the wording of the conclusion of the first half that is found in all other synoptic forms namely he commits adultery the special formulation in Matthew 5:32 may be an example of Matthew's adaptation of the earlier tradition to a strongly Jewish Christian Church thankfully the second half of the prohibition is basically the same in both Matthew and Luke however the specification in Luke's form that the woman has been was divorced by her husband may be Luke's way of emphasizing that the first marriage bond remains that is to say the man is still her husband despite his action I'm all the more suspicious because the word man or male on air in the Greek is a favorite one of Luke's and so I would drop the phrase by her husband from the second half of the saying as a later clarifying addition the upshot of this all too rapid analysis is that the primitive Q form the prohibition probably ran something like everyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery and the man marrying a divorced woman commits adultery there's always when the viewpoint of the man we wind up with a balanced succinct rhetorical bombshell that would certainly be worthy of the provocative word Smith named Jesus of Nazareth but let's not get ahead of ourselves have we at last or at least attained the earliest available or most primitive form of the saying well before we make that statement let's take a look at mark specifically mark 10 11 to 12 when exegetes treat the mark inform the tradition they often take up immediately the whole dispute story or strike to straight in mark 10 to 212 I prefer not to do that since the dispute story as a whole does not enjoy multiple attestation taken as a whole it is a mark in composition that Matthew repeats with reduction of changes and Luke omits it what does enjoy multiple attestation is the double saying at the end of the story namely mark 10 11 to 12 what we notice immediately in the mark inversion of the saying is that the simple two-part formulation reflected in cue has somehow mutated into a double equal-opportunity form in mark the statement about the man divorcing his wife is paralleled by the corresponding statement about the woman divorcing of her husband the underlying idea that is present in all the synoptic forms of the prohibition is that any combination of divorce and remarriage no matter who is the lead agent and no matter who gets remarried constitutes adultery this idea may also be implied by Paul's version though it is not stated as such one explicit element that does unite Paul and mark is that they are the two who balanced the action of the husband divorcing his wife with the equal prospect of the wife divorcing her husband since Paul's paraphrase may be influenced by the Roman legal situation at Corinth it may well be that marks double version may likewise reflect Roman law this would make perfect sense if as many hold mark wrote his gospel in and for the Christian community at Rome if this be the case then probably even in the mark in tradition the most primitive version of the prohibition envisioned only the husband as having the power to divorce and indeed the second part of that saying referring to the woman is a slightly shortened rated form of the saying referring to the husband this would cohere with the fact that for all the differences in matthew and luke the prohibition in both is formulated exclusively from the male point of view this I would argue fits well with the scenario of one Palestinian Jew named Jesus preaching to his fellow Palestinian Jews most of them poor peasants or urban laborers as far as we can tell among ordinary Palestinian Jews of the early 1st century CE II only the husband had the power to divorce to be sure and I must Restless circumstances were different in other times and places and in other social strata for instance the Papa Raya the Jewish military colony at elephantine II in Egypt dating from the 5th century BCE attest to the ability of either man or wife to divorce one's partner simply on one's own volition and simply by a declaration in a public assembly but not only is this military colony far removed in time and space from 1st century Palestine it also seems to have been a syncretistic perhaps polytheistic group of Diaspora Jews with their own temple in addition the key biblical requirement for divorce an element emphasized by Jesus as well namely the certificate of divorce seems not to have been used by Jews at elephantine thus equating first century elephantine II in Egypt with 1st century Palestine is highly questionable certainly even in 1st century Palestine the rules were different for the rich and the powerful when need not be surprised that the Herodian princesses played by their own rules as do European princesses and Hollywood starlets today for example Herodias did indeed divorce her first husband to marry Herod Antipas but not only was she a member of a highly Hellenized royal family she may well have initiated the dissolution of a marriage while still dwelling in Rome where her first husband lived and where her action in the eyes of the Romans would have been perfectly legitimate not so in the eyes of pious Palestinian Jews as a Jewish historian duly notes wagging his finger although he's really the last person to wake a moral finger at anybody other supposed examples of Jewish women divorcing their husbands either date from a later time lie outside Jewish Palestine proper or rest upon very fragmentary and disputed data all in all I would maintain against recent objections that in the first century CE II the ordinary Palestinian woman neither rich nor powerful nor of independent means nor of royal status could not divorce her husband the legal world inculcated by the Jewish Scriptures the intertestamental literature and later by the rabbi's seems to have been the reality on the ground for the peasant women of Palestine it was that Jewish Palestinian reality that the most primitive form of the divorce saying addresses the power line with the male but does the most primitive form available to us or something like it actually go back to the historical Jesus here inevitably we must apply the criteria of historicity or authenticity to the data we have analyzed today is always the various criteria usually employed in the quest for the historical Jesus are under attack from a number of critics for a number of different reasons let me simply say by way of preface that I readily acknowledge that the criteria are rough instruments giving us rough results they yield various degrees of probability people looking for gold and certitudes are hereby directed to other academic fields as a matter of fact a good deal of Journal a held conclusions about the ancient world secular and religious enjoys only varying degrees of probability I often find an amusing when reading books on ancient or medieval history in the sexual affair to see how often authors will in fact use the equivalent of the criteria of historicity to establish their positions without openly acknowledging what they are doing it is much better I think to be critically aware of how we arrived at our conclusions with a sober sense of availability there of a foul Adobe common to most statements about ancient history that said one should also note that the degree of probability one can claim for a position often rises when one's conclusions is supported not just by one but by a number of the criteria this seems to be the case with Jesus's prohibition of divorce let us look at the first criterion that applies the criterion of Multipla attestation of sources and forms as we've seen at length we have multiple attestation of Jesus's prohibition and divorce in three independent sources Paul Q and mark all from the first or the very beginning of the second Christian generation in addition the multiple attestation occurs in various literary forms moral expectation and letters extended gospel discourses and a dispute story relatively few sayings of Jesus enjoy such broad attestation this brings us to the second and third criteria discontinuity and embarrassment these two criteria often overlap or blend into each other and that seems to be the case here on the one hand this continuity applies more to Jesus's Jewish background and contemporary milieu as we have seen at length in the Old Testament divorce is taken for granted and the few laws dealing with divorce generally hem in the otherwise on limit power the husband to divorce his wife this unlimited power is reaffirmed by Philo and Josephus with debates about the proper grounds for divorce appearing only later on in the Mishnah with the Damascus document a temple scroll there is indeed a much more negative viewer divorce yet even these stringent sectarian documents apparently presupposed the reality of divorce within the sceen community put simply the sweeping claim that Qumran or the Essenes for bad all divorce can mark not be demonstrated from the evidence at hand hence with his clear and total prohibition of divorce and remarriage mitigated by no exceptions and no distinctions about grounds Jesus stands alone in the Judaism of his day and certainly alone in mainstream Judaism before and after him the startling singularity I think and here I'm getting into murky waters this startling singularity cannot be dismissed by objections from scholars like EP Sanders that after all the Old Testament never commands divorce and that therefore Jesus like the Essenes or the Pharisees is simply going beyond the law without rescinding it a common view today well this does not get around the fact that Jesus is prohibiting an important pivotal social institution that the law accepts and regulates by forbidding divorce Jesus is abrogating not only this institution but also the laws governing it in the Torah indeed to press the point even further to a point that often is not considered by his prohibition Jesus is stating that a highest observant Jewish male who carefully fulfills all the requirements of the law in divorcing his first wife to marry a second is if so facto breaking one of the commandments of the Decalogue thou shalt not commit adultery he who divorces and remarriage it's adultery by obeying Deuteronomy 24:1 2:4 to the letter you're breaking the Decalogue thus jesus' prohibition is more than simply going beyond the Torah or inculcating a not only but this also radicalism Allah EP Sanders the claim that using the institution of divorce according to all the stipulations of the Torah is in effect breaking a commandment of the Decalogue places Jesus in a singular position visa the mainstream Judaism of any time or any place on the other hand the criterion of embarrassment highlights the unlikelihood that the prohibition of divorce is a creation of the early church a creation that was later attributed to Jesus from the very start and for the whole history of the church ever afterward when it comes to divorce we find people questing not for this toric of Jesus but for wiggle room Paul is prophetic of what is to come alone among his various directives in 1st Corinthians 7 in the case of divorce he feels the need to appeal over the head of his own apostolic authority to Jesus and he immediately proceeds to create the first Christian wiggle room in the case of mixed marriages the grand example of wiggle room in the second Christian generation is Matthew's except applause whatever precisely the exception is the criterion of embarrassment argues cogently that the early church would not have gone out of its way to create a stringent rule that from the start it found so difficult to observe like hitting your head against a stone wall because it feels so good when you stop no doubt many a harried pastor from Paul onwards has secretly wished that Jesus had been more stringent about Sabbath observance and less stringent about divorce bonia done it the other way the upshot of this negative Alliance of discontinuity and embarrassment is that neither mainstream Judaism nor the early church created a total prohibition that is so alien to the ancient and modern mind Jewish and Gentile alike thus the criteria of multiple attestation discontinuity and embarrassment provide the major arguments for tracing the prohibition of divorce back to Jesus once these arguments are weighed it is appropriate to add the seconding voice of the criterion of coherence in other words the prohibition divorce fits the overall contours of the message and ministry of the historical Jesus as best we can reconstruct it for instance most Questers describe jesus' approach to the law and human conduct whether we call this Holika morality or ethics as radical much more popular in 60s than today most would agree that in the light of the kingdom of God both eminent yet somehow present in Jesus's ministry Jesus called his disciples to a radical doing of God's will that was complete and costly whether we think of specific commands aimed at certain individuals follow me and let the dead bury their dead so you have give to the poor and then come follow me or whether we think of general commands issued to all of his followers love your enemies there is in Jesus's directives to his followers a bold challenge to be heroic to go beyond what most moral people would think is required of them to be good although hardly emphasized by most Questers today this radicalism seems to have extended to Jesus's rather stringent views on sexuality William lauder great New Zealand Australian writer has done some marvelous work on this topic not to I recognized I think because he's saying some things that would not be very popular today indeed in this regard I am reminded of an intriguing argument from coherence suggested by the wife of a university professor who had invited me to lecture at the University of California San Diego after discussion during the question period and it always comes up on a question period whether Jesus was married or not the professor's wife suggested that the best argument for Jesus's celibacy was that he totally forbid divorced something no married man would ever do and if you think that's just a joke correlate the positions of the Roman Catholic Church the Greek Orthodox Church most part engine church is on divorce with the marriage status of their clergy there is an intriguing homology there moreover even the act of rescinding certain institutions and regulations in the written Mosaic law is not unheard of in Jesus's teaching in my opinion multiple attestation discontinuity and embarrassment also argue that the total prohibition of taking an oath goes back to Jesus may or messiah's do not swear at all either by have no vigor by anything yes yes no no that's it no swearing no taking of an oath whatever but we should note that in some cases the Mosaic law does command a person to take an oath in certain situations apparently Jesus is radical ethic at times dare to break with the Mosaic law in specific instances but at the same time of course he presumes and inculcates the Mosaic law in general how do you explain this perhaps because of Jesus's overall sense that in the end time God would restore not only Israel but also the whole and wholesome creation he had willed at the beginning when there was no divorce and no need to swear oath in other words or site owned in sight as it was in the beginning so it shall be in the end only better in some then I think the criteria of multiple attestation of sources and forms discontinuity embarrassment and coherence unite to argue a weighty case in favor of the prohibition of divorce going back to Jesus after this extensive argument at least the burden of proof definitely lies on the side of those would deny authenticity well now that the historicity of the basic prohibition divorce has been established we can make the strategic move of returning to the whole dispute story of mark 10 to 212 while the Corporal Bishan contained in verse 11 can now be affirmed as historical for the reasons I've just given the rest of the dispute story is often dismissed as a secondary Christian creation there are serious reasons for holding this view including the signs of heavy mark and redaction that pervade the substance and style of the Parata P other critics would add that the scriptural quotations of Jesus in dispute stories are usually secondary additions to the tradition though I think this is a more questionable argument that a public and provocative Jewish religious figure who presented himself as the prophet and teacher of Israel in the last days would never have cited scripture in his arguments strains credulity still the moulding hand of mark the redactor is clear throughout the periculum for example the initial question of the Pharisees in verse 2 is it legal for a man to divorce his wife this question receives a full answer with the same vocabulary not in Jesus's initial public response to the Pharisees who asked it rather to them he says out of the blue what God has yoke together a human being must not separate rather it's later on in the private response to his disciples in verse 11 that really the initial question is answered in the same sort of language perfect inclusio if indeed mark is molding the whole story nevertheless there are some indications that behind the present mark in composition may lie an argument that goes back to Jesus as I've just noted it would be remarkable if the historical Jesus never argued through Scripture and as a matter of fact Jesus's argument against divorce created by welding together Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 is echo to a degree in the Damascus document not unlike mark 10:6 2:8 the Damascus document argues against certain types of marriage by stringing together two citations from Genesis the first being the same one Jesus cites in mark 10:6 male and female he created them hence this particular argument is perfectly at home among Palestinians and need not be attributed to the scribal activity of a Hellenistic Christian Church then to the Mishnah remembers that one of the characteristics of the Pharisees was their concern about divorce and the certificate of divorce in particular thus that the question is put to Jesus precisely by the Pharisees may not be simply a matter of marks use of stock figures in as a dispute story to be sure the climactic aphorism of Jesus in mark 10 9 what God has joked together a human being must not separate lacks independent mortal attestation still various considerations might incline one to accept its origin in Jesus's own teaching on the one hand as far as style is concerned the saying is a striking subversive aphorism formulated in concise antithetical parallelism a type of speech characteristic of Jesus and on the other hand as far as substance is concerned there is an intriguing aspect of the New Testament teaching on divorce that is often overlooked that argues for the same coming from Jesus outside of citing Jesus's own teaching Christian authors in the New Testament are strangely silent on the problem of divorce when one considers the broad range of topics that New Testament moral excitation treats think of the house tough l often repeatedly going over the same issues the New Testaments almost total silence on the topic of divorce outside of the explicit appeal to Jesus prohibition is curious apparently either one treated the difficult subject divorced by appealing to Jesus a teaching however glossed or one did not treat the subject at all in other words there seems to be no great rush among New Testament authors to mint their own pronouncements about divorce to put this point in another way once the historicity of the basic prohibition is seen in for qyn mark 1011 has been accepted one can extend the argument from coherence to include the differently phrased prohibition of mark 10 9 after all it makes sense that once Jesus's prohibition divorce became known among his fellow Jews experts on the law would argue with him at length about his teaching it was the teaching that didn't affect some sectarian group alone it affected everybody it also makes sense that during these arguments Jesus would have formulated his teaching in various ways at various times mark 10:9 preserves a formulation that focuses upon the act of divorcing itself and for visit with a nap addicted command by contrast the multiply attested saying in Q & mark combines the boss with remarriage and in a more casual SiC formulation forbids the combined action by branding it adultery neither formulation mark 10 nine or mark 10 11 need be seen as cancelling out or contradicting the other rather the two formulations prohibit the same social reality from two different points of view in the end then I would be inclined to accept the authority command in mark 10 9 as likewise coming from Jesus though I admit it does not enjoy the same weighty arguments as does the multiple-- attested saying now you may have noticed by this time that despite all my reconstructions of the tradition history of Jesus's prohibition I have not taken a stand on which formulation is du1 Jesus himself spoke actually I don't think you can make or should make such a choice granted an itinerant Jesus who spent over two years preaching to various groups it may well be that more than one synoptic formulation however pared-down may go back to him for example though I inclined to the view that the formulation in Matthew 5:32 the husband causes his wife to be involved in adultery reflects Matthews redaction I cannot entirely exclude the possibility that this wording as well as that of the primitive hue saying goes back to Jesus himself as is usually the case with the historical Jesus we may feel fairly sure about the substance of his teaching the exact wording much more dicey matter our conclusion that the historical Jesus totally for bad divorce admittedly leaves us with a larger problem about Jesus and the Jewish law to be sure the Jewish law was a complex and fluid reality around the time of Jesus competing texts and competing interpretations abounded yet apart from the extreme allegorist mentioned by Philo in the Diaspora and the radical Helenus reformers who precipitated the Maccabean revolt in the first part of the second century BCE no prominent Jewish teacher certainly not in first century Palestine ever proposed a total or partial abrogation of the written Mosaic law and certainly neither does Jesus the Jew yet we have found a historical Jesus who does apparently abolish the institution of divorce the institution of swearing that regulates these institutions now am I in effect sneaking in by the back door the old and largely discredited Christian view that Jesus and his teaching abrogated the law certainly not Paul's made annoyed but how these individual abrogation --zz fit into jesus's overall approach to an affirmation of the law is a riddle that i am still struggling with even as i continue to write a volume for on jesus and the law in particular does Jesus approach to divorce set a pattern that holds true in his other teachings on the law there is no way to know that except to continue with our prose and so next time we will explore Jesus's approach to the Sabbath and then finally his approach to purity in other words stay tuned thanks very much you

Channel: Yale Divinity School

Views: 9,580

Rating: 4.304348 out of 5

Keywords: Jesus, Jewish, Historic, Biblical, Ancient, research, Judaism (Religion)

Id: tSDZRomO1rU

Length: 69min 40sec (4180 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 14 2013