Jesus Only Condemned One Kind of Marriage: It Wasn’t Gay Marriage

In Jesus’ day, Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel represented two major “houses” of thought on Jewish law, both rendering near opposite interpretations of Moses’ divorce commandment. Recorded in Mishnah – the earliest written collection of Jewish oral traditions – Hillel taught that a man could divorce his wife under any circumstance, including “burning his dinner,” while Shammai taught that divorce was only permissible in cases of “sexual immorality.”

This bit of history clarifies an episode in Matthew’s gospel where a group of Pharisees – experts on Jewish law – tested Jesus on the matter, hoping to expose him as a fraud and dampen his growing popularity. Jesus’ take on Jewish law in general was characteristically deranged, often leaving his audience in dismay. “If you are angry with your brother or sister,” he jabbed in his Sermon on the Mount, “you are guilty of murder,” and, “If you look lustfully at a woman, you’re guilty of adultery.” Murder and adultery were two of the biggest sins a first-century Jewish person could fathom, “abominations” as the Old Testament categorizes them.

Matthew’s Jesus seemed to condemn everyone.

Or was he simply trying to level the playing field? If everyone’s guilty, nobody is more or less righteous than anyone else, all in need of the unconditional mercy and forgiveness that lay at the core of Jesus’ teaching. That would have deeply assaulted the spiritual caste system so prevalent in ancient Judaism, as well as the one that infests just about every expression of Christianity since.

With regards to divorce and remarriage, it’s no surprise that Jesus condemned the perspectives of Hillel, Shamai, and Moses himself.

Recorded in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and referenced in Paul’s writings, Jesus taught that marriage was a permanent bond, indissoluble by humans. “Therefore,” he jabbed again, “whoever divorces his wife and marries another is guilty of adultery.”

That left even his closest followers scratching their heads.

But Jesus didn’t share his perspective because he wanted everyone to run around condemning the divorced/remarried crowd. That’s certainly not why I bring it up.

Not only was he aware of how lethal divorce could be for a woman in his world, he knew that the Pharisees were intimately familiar – many of them would have been on their 2nd+ marriage, in ardent support of Hillel’s “any reason” interpretation. But instead of attaching himself to one perspective or the other, or anywhere in between, Jesus condemned the most influential sect in ancient Israel of adultery on multiple counts.

This was simply one of many swipes that Jesus took at people of influence who believed that they were cleaner, holier, and more acceptable than everyone else.

It’s a similar swipe at today’s self-righteousness, but the early church in America didn’t see it that way. Up until the sexual revolution, bible-believers condemned divorce with great passion, rejecting anyone who sought to remarry. In the late 60’s, however, we began to realize that divorce was becoming a way of life for many: if we continued our campaign there wouldn’t be much left of the church. And who wants to harass people who’ve been through the hell of divorce, now seeking a fresh start?

Ultimately, we adopted a concession that put the church on a more human trajectory, welcoming remarried folk with open arms and treating them with the equality and dignity that they deserve.

But we’ve still got some work to do.

Today, gay marriage sits in our crosshairs and the queer community in the place once occupied by divorced folk.

According to mainstream interpretations of the bible, same-sex relationships are considered “abominations;” sins of the highest order, detestable to God, etc. This of course has driven many Christians to embark on the now infamous anti-gay campaigns that characterize much of the global church. If the bible is the “Word of God,” we say, and it slaps such a harsh label on something, shouldn’t bible-believing Christians oppose it?

But if we use the same interpretive utensils for 2nd + marriage that we use for Gay marriage, we run into the kind of problem that we always run into when we use the bible to fight culture. In this case, the Old Testament considers adultery to be the same kind of “abomination” as same sex relationships, and Jesus equated remarriage with adultery.

In other words, if Gay AND 2nd+ marriages are abominations, and we’re charged with the oppostion of all things abominable, why do we oppose one and make concessions for the other?

According to the majority of contemporary New Testament scholars, that’s easy: Matthew’s Jesus threw in a loophole (in bold type below):

Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, not upon sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery. ~ Matthew 19:8-9

It has been said, ‘Anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce.’ But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, makes her the victim of adultery, and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery. ~ Matthew 5:31-32

Few will mention the mountain of interpretive issues involved with these passages. For example, the key words/phrases in their loopholes were rarely used in the ancient world, and they only appear once in the gospel of Matthew. Limiting them to one interpretation is problematic. Furthermore, a great many early Christian writers and thinkers (commonly referred to as the “Church Fathers”), as well as the earliest church councils didn’t read any loopholes into Jesus’ divorce perspective. That stands in sharp contrast to the majority of contemporary New Testament scholars who do. Why is there such a big interpretive gap? It certainly isn’t because we know more about Koine Greek and its parent culture than the people who knew it better than we do.

And why were Jesus’ closest followers so aghast at his teaching? They were familiar with Hillel’s “anything goes” perspective as well as Shammai’s much more narrow “sexual immorality” view – these were hotly debated in their time. How is it that Jesus could elicit such a response?

The disciples said to him, ‘If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry.’ ~ Matthew 19:10

Jesus’ words went so far outside the boundaries of popular thought that they seemed to condemn marriage itself.

The most glaring problem comes when we consider Moses’ teaching on divorce, the passage referenced by Jesus and the Pharisees in their debate. I’ll admit that I only recently read it; in my 20 years of studying scripture, including 4 years of Master’s-level theological study, I didn’t know this passage existed. It was never mentioned in class, nor in the hundreds of Sunday morning sermons that I’ve sat through over the years. I always assumed that, when the Pharisees questioned Jesus, they referenced some unwritten oral tradition, not a Mosaic commandment clearly outlined in Torah:

If a man marries a woman who becomes displeasing to him because he finds in her a matter of sexual immorality, he can write her a certificate of divorce, give it to her, and send her from his house ~ Deuteronomy 24:1

Jesus can’t possibly be saying anything akin to, “Moses said that you can divorce your wives in cases of sexual immorality, but I tell you that Moses had it wrong; you can only divorce your wives in cases of sexual immorality.”

Reading a loophole into Jesus’ teaching simply doesn’t work.

Whatever Matthew’s Jesus meant by παρεκτὸς λόγου πορνείας and μὴ ἐπὶ πορνείᾳ, he was offering no outs. No conditions. Perhaps that’s why there is no mention of a loophole in the Gospels of Mark and Luke. Paul references Jesus’ divorce perspective in his letter to the ancient Church in Corinth, but no “sexual immorality” concession is mentioned there, either.

Therefore, I’ll reiterate that, according to the way that many Christians read the Old Testament as an anti-gay magna carta, the New Testament condemns remarriage with the same language. So, to anti-Gay Christianity – to my theological alma mater that won’t consider queer applicants, or my former church that once kicked a woman off of the music team because she likes girls, or to the many donors of a Christian school who recently pulled their funding because of that school’s newly-adopted inclusion policy, or my pastor friend who wants to tell his two gay congregants that they can stay married but sex between them is forbidden – I ask: why give such concession to one “biblical” sin but so vehemently oppose the other?

Why is remarriage OK and Gay marriage one of the biggest sins on the list?

To this Evangelical, bible-believing Christian of many years, it seems that the anti-Gay church is engaged in a very old brand of hypocrisy, one that has long been part of our ethos as “people of the book.” Our history is full of bible-believing God followers who set their face against a large group of humans, only to be exposed thereafter as people who got it wrong, to put it mildly.

Christians who fueled the Antebellum South, Nazi Germany, and the Crusader campaigns will forever serve as clear examples, as will the Pharisees of Jesus’ day.

Don’t get suckered into this ~ Matthew 16:6 (my paraphrase)

Twenty years from now – whether we find a pro-gay loophole in our holy writ, or put a massive rethink on the bible’s alleged anti-queer passages, and/or accept the tension between scripture, faith, praxis, and culture – the majority of us will come to embrace the queer community, ordain them as ministers, officiate their weddings, bake their cakes, call them “us,” and consider them just as holy as we believe ourselves to be. The rest of us will calve away, as we always do in these moments, convinced that we’re fighting for God while becoming ever more irrelevant – if you can imagine such a thing.

Between now and then, as in our anti-remarriage era, many will be turned away, all in the name of a Jewish carpenter whose perspective on who is holy and who is not still leaves us scratching our heads.