Journal of Religious History

Vol. 43, No. 2, June 2019

doi: 10.1111/1467-9809.12584

ALAN H. CADWALLADER

“What’s a Single Man Blathering about? Jesus on

Marriage.”

The church throughout its history has laid claim to Jesus’ teaching about marriage. It
has dubbed the declared distillations to be the “dominical words on marriage.” The
only problem is that historical criticism has left contemporary readers with no cer-
tainty about what Jesus actually said; literary critics have destabilised whether Jesus’
words on marriage were ever intended to be transtemporal; textual critics have demon-
strated the impossibility of nailing down any fixed teaching and ideological critics
have shown the vested interests of scribes in shaping the meaning of the text from the
very beginning. Marriage, it seems, is a Rorschach test completely subject to the
needs and interests of those who venture into looking at it. Consequently Jesus can
relegate marriage to a practice not even worthy of the resurrection, prize it open to
multiple spouses whether contemporaneous or sequential, enforce asymmetrical
pairings based on gender, and generally fall in with whatever state or church decisions
might be. “Dominical words on marriage” proves to be a house built on sand.

The substance of this article seeks to demonstrate that the grounds upon
which much biblical interpretation, ecclesiastical dogma, and historical
assumption about marriage are established are not the rock of immovable
surety but the sand of shifting understandings. Consequently, the formation
of a Christian understanding and practice of marriage lies in the hands of
competing interests that have been operational from the origin of the Christ-
movement(s) and throughout the complex life of Christianity. Christian mar-
riage, therefore, is an ongoing experiment and contest, precisely because that
is the lifeblood of its conception. The assumption in contemporary scholar-
ship that the Gospel(s) delivers a dominical word about marriage and divorce
is fundamentally flawed. The suspicion that there were fissures in this domin-
ical word arises because the Christian church throughout its history has not
been able either to live to that dominical word or to agree about its parame-
ters and its realisation. Nonetheless, the effort to discipline and absolutise
shows little sign of being exhausted, even if the extent and mode of applica-
tion continues to invite experimentation.

Alan H. Cadwallader is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Public and Contextual Theology,
Charles Sturt University, Canberra, Australia.

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 JESUS ON MARRIAGE 149
A recent collection of essays on marriage in Europe from the Renaissance
to the early modern period provides us with a launching pad for the investi-
gation. The volume was striking for the range of expressions of marriage that
a scouring of both canonical and legal regulation and judicial decisions rev-
ealed.1 The editor, Silvana Menchi, was at pains to insist that the expression
“Christian marriage,” misdirects analysis. Rather, the evidence underscores
the variegated expressions of marriage. The value of harvesting judicial
records rather than concentrating on legislative and dogmatic pronounce-
ments (as a number of the essays showed) is that “singular cases” come to
the fore that demonstrate that canonical generalities were frequently removed
from, even at loggerheads with, the actual practice of couples and families.
Multifaceted contests betray the interests of wider groups — states, churches,
and families — all vying to discipline coupling. The Protestant–Catholic
divide is the mega-screen of cinematic battles, but this should not obscure
the skirmishes within ecclesiastical traditions and political demarcations (not
least in France’s refusal to adopt the marriage decrees of the Council of
Trent). The effort to make marriage uniform in this period achieved the
opposite result, returning us to the proposition that marriage is rather about
marriages.2 Marriage is an agonistic arena, where the rules are morphing
constantly, indeed experimenting, in response to a variety of interests and
forces.
My particular concern lies less in the historical analyses of this period
(1400 to 1800), valuable and enlightening as they are. Rather, I was
intrigued by the uncritical appeal to a more distant Christian tradition by
intellectual players of the time and by contemporary historians. It would be
misleading to suggest that there was general agreement on the meaning and
application of New Testament material on marriage; however, there was
general, albeit tacit agreement that such New Testament material was avail-
able as a solid base on which to build one’s particular teaching on marriage.
The citations of New Testament references are surprisingly thin in the col-
lection, almost as if they can be assumed as an immovable starting point.
When they are cited, the presumptions behind their use become clear. So,
for example, Charles Donahue makes three assertions that reveal a founda-
tion that has not been interrogated: firstly, that monogamy was the Jewish
practice at the time of Jesus; secondly, that Greek and Roman practice and
law were similar; thirdly, that the indissolubility of Christian marriage was
derived from the teaching of Jesus found in the New Testament, even if
later Protestant teaching did permit a heavily circumscribed access to
divorce, also reliant upon an undifferentiated New Testament foundation
(Mt 5:32, 19:9; 1 Cor 7).3

1. S. S. Menchi, ed., Marriage in Europe 1400–1800 (Toronto: University of Toronto

Press, 2016).
2. See generally, S. S. Menchi, “Introduction,” in Menchi, Marriage in Europe, 3–30.
3. C. Donahue Jr, “The Legal Background: European Marriage Law from the Sixteenth to the
Nineteenth Century,” in Menchi, Marriage in Europe, 33, 34, 38.

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The complication to this streamlined summation came elsewhere in the

collection, firstly in the (Luther-informed) admission that Jesus had not insti-
tuted marriage (which meant that marriage was not a sacrament),4 and sec-
ondly, that there was a “marginal role assumed by the family” in the New
Testament, allowing the breaking of bonds of family affection and the renun-
ciation of the married state.5 There was also an occasional acknowledgement
that Roman juridical sources significantly shaped ecclesiastical teaching, as
in the requirement of parental (read: paternal) consent and the male authority
symbolised in deductio in domum, the woman’s departure to the groom’s
house. At best, biblical examples rather than injunctions support these.6
Hence, whatever the teaching on marriage, it was, in each instance, an amal-
gam of different sources.7
Historians might perhaps be forgiven for portraying such New Testa-
ment material in monolithic terms.8 Biblical commentators have encour-
aged them to do so. The term “dominical” hovers over the interpretation
of key gospel passages that mention marriage.9 Paul supposedly cites a
saying of Jesus, namely, “that a wife should not separate from a husband
… and that a husband should not separate from a wife” (1 Cor
7:10–11). Though Paul writes before the Gospel of Mark, the proximity
of his wording to that of Mk 10:11–12 fosters the category “dominical
saying.” Unfortunately, Paul immediately qualifies the words (v.11a). For
him at least, “dominical saying” did not mean an uncompromising disci-
pline on all couplings within the early Christ-groups in Corinth. This
exposes the contemporary desire for a/the discipline of uniformity as a
decision rather than a consequence. Systematic theologians readily sup-
ply the requisite term, dominical.10 This forced conjunction of biblical
and theological interpretation finds its extreme proposition in the follow-
ing view:

I do not engage source-critical or form-critical problems but take the textus recep-
tus to be the governing word — in part because the sayings that the teaching
Church has historically taken as dominical belong to this text (as opposed to a sub-
set of ipsissima verba distinguished on scholarly grounds from spuria) and in part

4. H. Wunder, “Marriage in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation from the Fifteenth
to the Eighteenth Century: Moral, Legal and Political Order,” in Menchi, Marriage in
Europe, 71.
5. S. S. Menchi, “Conclusion,” in Menchi, Marriage in Europe, 335.
6. Donahue, “Legal Background,” 49.
7. Donahue, “Legal Background,” 42.
8. Compare, however, M. Porter, Sex, Marriage and the Church: Patterns of Change (North
Blackburn: Dove, 1996) 16–17.
9. So, for example, J. Gibson, The Temptations of Jesus in Early Christianity (London: T & T
Clark, 2004), 284; E. E. Ellis, Pauline Theology: Ministry and Society (Eugene, OR: Wipf and
Stock, 1997), 81. Compare the language of “codification” in D. B. Capes, “Paul, Jesus Tradition
in,” in Encyclopedia of the Historical Jesus, ed. C. A. Evans (New York: Routledge, 2014), 448.
10. A. McCormack, The Term “Privilege”: A Textual Study of its Meaning and Use in the 1983
Code of Canon Law (Rome: Editrice Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 1997), 160; D. Farrow,
Desiring a Better Country: Forays in Political Theology (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 2015), 135; G. Wainwright, Doxology: A Systematic Theology (London: Epworth,
1980), 78.

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 JESUS ON MARRIAGE 151
because I fail to understand how the Church, or one claiming to speak in her name
can call others to sacrifice and hardship on the basis of divine pronouncements that
are intrinsically subject to deletion or change.11

Here an edited Greek New Testament from 1527 (oddly, not the Vulgate)
is combined with the fiction of an unchanged interpretation by the church
from the time when everything related to teaching about marriage came from
the Lord (Dominus) Jesus. His pronouncements are unchanging, indeed must
be, in order to preserve his divinity and the rightness of the divine call —
curiously making marriage an invitation to “sacrifice and hardship.” History
— involvement in time — has no formative standing. The biblical text
becomes as asomatic as the angels sometimes credited with its delivery (Acts
7:53; Gal 3:19). Not only is this theologically suspect even in terms of the
confessional background from which it emanates,12 but it flies in the face of
critical approaches that guide New Testament scholarship. The drive for dis-
cipline and unification of practice is manifest, but the rationale abrogates his-
torical and critical realities.
To illuminate this proposition that a single, dominical marriage precept is
a later fabrication, the sayings of Jesus in Mark’s Gospel dealing with mar-
riage (and divorce)13 will be examined in relation to their text, historical con-
text, literary structure and ideological function. Those sayings come in two
main blocks: Mk 10:1–12 and 12:18–27, though the Mark 10 passage,
dubbed the dominical teaching on marriage, will receive most attention.

The Textual Basis

There are two textual problems in assigning the label “dominical saying” to
Mk 10:1–12, especially verses 5–9 and 11–12. The first is that the text of
Mark is considerably unstable. The second is that the Gospel of Matthew,
supposedly dependent on the Gospel of Mark, fails to reproduce the “domini-
cal saying” in Mark’s form.
To provide an example of the textual instability, I draw on the work of
David Parker. He delineates and translates six main varieties of wording in
the manuscript tradition of Mk 10:8,14 each with significant manuscript
support:

11. P. Mankowski, “Dominical Teaching on Divorce and Remarriage: The Biblical Data,” in
Remaining in the Truth of Christ: Marriage and Communion in the Catholic Church,
ed. R. Dodaro (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2014), 57. From a Protestant position: S. B. Clark,
Man and Woman in Christ: An Examination of the Role of Men and Women in Light of Scripture
and the Social Sciences (Ann Arbor: Servant Books, 1980), 286.
12. See A. H. Cadwallader, “History as Bulwark, Bridge and Bulldozer: Dei Verbum and Ecu-
menical, Biblical Endeavor,” in God’s Word and the Church’s Council, ed. C. Monaghan and
M. O’Brien (Adelaide: ATF Press, 2014), 207–24.
13. The word sometimes translated as “separate” (χωρίζω as in 1 Cor 7:10–11 NRSV) is a stan-
dard expression (along with ἀπολύω and ἀποστάσιον of Mk 10:2, 4) for divorce: BGU 1.251,
4.1049, 1102, 1103; P. Ryl. 2.154; cf P. Ryl. 2.154 (the substantive). The term was still being
used in the sixth century in Christian divorces: P. Cair. Masp. 3.67311; P. Lond. 5.1713.
14. D. C. Parker, The Living Text of the Gospels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), 78–79. Strictly, Parker provides seven alternatives; I have combined his fifth and sixth
variations (being very little different) and made his seventh the sixth item here.

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1. If a woman divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery;
and if a man divorces his wife, he commits adultery.
2. If a woman divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery;
and if a man divorces his wife and marries another, he commits adultery.
3. Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her,
and if she, divorcing her husband, marries another, she commits adultery.
4. Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her;
and if a woman goes out from her husband and marries another, she commits
adultery.
5. Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her,
and if a woman divorces her husband and then marries another, she commits
adultery.
6. If a man divorces his wife and marries another, he commits adultery against
her; and if a woman separates from her husband and marries another, she com-
mits adultery against him; likewise also he who marries a woman divorced
from her husband commits adultery.

Clearly, there is no uniformity even if there be some family resemblance.

Parker’s list could be divided further. In a pre-printing press culture, precise
replication of texts is unknown, but the changes cannot simply be passed
off as mistakes of tired, ill-trained or distracted scribes.15 Specific commu-
nities within specific localities produced copies of the Gospels that to a
greater or lesser extent reflected local contexts and the influence of inter-
pretations of the text.16 It is often suggested that Mark’s text(s) accessed a
Roman juridical context rather than the Jewish setting of Jesus in the
allowance of a woman to initiate divorce.17 Certainly, the isolated saying in
Lk 16:18 and Mt 5:32 restricts the initiative of divorce to the man.18 This
impulse for adjustment to contemporary conditions seems therefore to have
infiltrated the history of transmission from the beginning. This complicates
the search for a Grundform of the text. Even if we follow the most recent,
scholarly, edited Greek text, it cannot be concluded that these are the
dominical words. The most that can be asserted is that such an edition

15. A scribal mistake (parablepsis from the καί opening the phrase in verse 7b to the καί begin-
ning verse 8) is sometimes credited for the loss in some manuscripts of καὶ προσκολληθήσεται
πρὸς τὴν γυνα~ικα αὐτο~ υ. See W. Loader, The Septuagint, Sexuality and the New Testament:
Case Studies on the Impact of the LXX in Philo and the New Testament (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2004), 79–80.
16. J. K. Elliott, “Manuscripts, the Codex and the Canon,” Journal for the Study of the New Tes-
tament 63 (1996): 113; compare S. E. Porter, “What Do We Know and How Do We Know It?
Reconstructing Early Christianity from its Manuscripts,” in Early Christian Origins and Greco-
Roman Culture: Social and Literary Contexts for the New Testament, ed. S. E. Porter and A. W.
Pitts (TENT 9; Leiden: Brill, 2013), 41–70.
17. Parker, The Living Text of the Gospels, 79; R. H. Gundry, Mark: A Commentary on His
Apology for the Cross (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 370; D. B. Peabody, “Reading Mark
from the Perspective of Different Synoptic Source Hypotheses: Historical, Redactional and
Theological Implications,” in New Studies in the Synoptic Problem, Oxford Conference, April
2008, ed. P. Foster, A. Gregory, J. S. Kloppenborg, and J. Verheyden (Leuven: Peeters, 2011),
180 n49. More on this historical issue below.
18. Robert Derrenbacker suggests that Matthew combined the Q-saying with the recalled word-
ing of Mark; see “The ‘External and Psychological Conditions under which the Synoptic Gos-
pels Were Written’: Ancient Compositional Practices and the Synoptic Problem,” in Foster et al.,
New Studies in the Synoptic Problem, 451.

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 JESUS ON MARRIAGE 153
provides a better (not the original) text of the Gospel of Mark and certainly
no ipsissima verba.19
The complexities are multiplied further when the synoptic relationships of
the Gospels are explored. The key verses in Mark 10 are generally thought
to have been replicated in the Gospel of Matthew (19:9), even if both texts,
in the words of Eugene Boring are “moving targets.”20 Luke omits them alto-
gether, which has been taken by Stevan Davies as Luke’s encouragement of
divorce, given that wives are added to the list of household members which
followers of Jesus are encouraged to leave (Lk 18:29, cf. Mk 10:29, no men-
tion of wives).21 Matthew’s wording elides the woman’s initiative in divorce
and adds an escape clause to the prohibition of divorce said to be the domini-
cal saying in Mark’s Gospel: “And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife,
except for unchastity, and marries another commits adultery.”22 Even all-
owing that Matthew was working with an already revised copy of Mark’s
Gospel, these are significant adjustments in “the dominical saying.”23 So, in
addition to the six previously listed alternatives, another option is introduced,
and this before we notice the number of variations in the manuscripts of Mt
19:9.24 Two conclusions arise from this brief survey of the textual evidence.
Firstly, in David Parker’s words, “the recovery of a single original saying of
Jesus is impossible.”25 Secondly, the scribes of the Jesus’ tradition readily
and confidently adjusted the traditions they had access to according to the
context and interests of their own time, including the scribes that we dub
“Mark,” “Matthew” (and “Luke”).

The Historical Basis

There are three matters that I wish to raise in this section: the question of
whether monogamy was the Jewish norm in the time of Jesus; the question
of who might initiate divorce in the time of Jesus; the question of institu-
tional control of marriage. The evidence demonstrates that the saying of
Jesus and its incorporation into the Gospels not only have a history but that
these historical contexts do not warrant an uncontested transference into later
times. They certainly do not provide the justification that contemporary
Christian dogma about marriage assumes or demands.

19. E. J. Epp, “Text-Critical, Exegetical, and Socio-Cultural Factors Affecting the Junia/Junias
Variation in Romans 16,7,” in New Testament Textual Criticism and Exegesis, Festchrift for
J. Delobel, ed. A. Denoux (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2002), 228.
20. M. E. Boring, “The ‘Minor Agreements’ and their Bearing on the Synoptic Problem,” in
Foster et al., New Studies in the Synoptic Problem, 246.
21. S. Davies, “Women in the Third Gospel and New Testament Apocrypha,” in “Women Like
This”: New Perspectives on Jewish Women in the Greco-Roman World, ed. A-J. Levine (Atlanta,
GA: Scholars, 1991), 187.
22. λἐγω δὲ ὑμ~ιν ὅτι ὃς ἄν ἀπολύσῃ τὴν γυνα~ικα αὐτο~ υ μὴ ἐπὶ πορνείᾳ καὶ γαμήσῃ ἄλλην
μοιχᾶται (Nestle-Aland28).
23. For a comparison of all the Gospel sayings about divorce, see D. W. Jorgensen, Treasure
Hidden in a Field: Early Christian Reception of the Gospel of Matthew (Berlin: de Gruyter,
2016), 208–15.
24. Parker gives eight variants: The Living Text of the Gospels, 85–86.
25. Parker, The Living Text of the Gospels, 92.

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154 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS HISTORY

Monogamy
The default interpretation of Mark 10 is that Jesus was a creature of his Jew-
ish environment and therefore required monogamy.26 It is probably assumed
that death delivered release either from marriage or into a serial monogamy
such as in Mk 12:20–22 (cf. 1 Cor 7:39).27 Rabbinical teachings certainly
came to promote monogamous marriage, but the period of these teachings is
the end of the second / beginning of the third centuries and later. It is only
with great care that we can trace some sayings back to the time of Jesus.28
The sayings did arise in the context of debates about marriage, that is, in a
context where the push towards uniformity was in process. Rabbinical Juda-
ism inherited this push from earlier Jewish groups and carried it to comple-
tion. Polygamy, at least for members of the Qumran community of the first
century, was rejected even though the practice is acknowledged in its writ-
ings.29 The commitment of the community to differentiate itself likely
prompted such self-definition. A number of leading Jerusalem priests seem
to have been polygamists or at least bigamists, as also some in the Herodian
dynasty.30 Indeed, in the life of early Christ groups, polygamy appears to
have been an accepted if handicapping factor for Christians.31 One cannot
assume that Roman legal requirements of monogamy (but not at the expense
of polygyny)32 were adopted throughout the empire. Roman law, especially
in the early imperial period, tolerated multiple legal systems.33 Nevertheless,
even when dressed in arguments citing Scripture, the Roman legal promotion
of monogamy was a considerable inducement to conformity for rabbis.34
Enough survives in the rabbinical writings to show that, even if sometimes
disapproved, polygamy was a lively, if eventually terminated, option.35

26. See, for example, P. J. Tomson, “Divorce Halakah in Paul and the Jesus Tradition,” in The
New Testament and Rabbinic Literature, ed. R. Bieringer, F. G. Garcia, D. Pollefeyt, and P. J.
Tomson (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 322.
27. Compare m. Qidd. 1.1.
28. See J. Neusner, The Rabbinic Traditions about the Pharisees before 70, Part I: The Masters
(Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2005 [1971]); A. I. Baumgarten, “Rabbinic Literature as a Source
for the History of Jewish Sectarianism in the Second Temple Period,” Dead Sea Discoveries
2 (1995): 14–57; P. Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the
Emergence of Christianity (New York: Knopf, 1999), 18–41.
29. Damascus Document (Zadokite Fragments) 4.20–5.2. See W. Loader, The Dead Sea Scrolls
and Sexuality (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 113–19.
30. tYebam 1.10; bYebam 15b; yYebam 1.5, 3a; cf Josephus Vita 75. For the Herodians, Jose-
phus gives quite specific lists: BJ 1.24.2, Ant 17.1.2.
31. David Daube, The New Testament and Rabbinic Judaism (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1956),
76 — see 1 Tm 3:2, Ti 1:6. Other commentators read the texts as a directive that blocked the
divorced or serial monogamists from church leadership; see C. S. Keener, … And Marries
Another: Divorce and Remarriage in the Teaching of the New Testament (Peabody: Hendrickson,
1991), 81–103.
32. W. Scheidel, “Monogamy and Polygyny,” in A Companion to Families in the Greek and
Roman Worlds, ed. B. Rawson (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 108–15.
33. See C. Ando, “Roman Pluralism in Practice,” in The Oxford Handbook of Roman Law and
Society, ed. C. Ando et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 283–93.
34. So D. Instone-Brewer, “Jesus’ Old Testament Basis for Monogamy,” in The Old Testament
in the New Testament: Essays in Honour of J. L. North, ed. S. Moyise (JSNTs 189; Sheffield:
Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 79, 101. Polygamy was explicitly outlawed in 393 CE (Justinian
Code 1.9.7).
35. See, for example, mKet 10.5, bYom 18b, bYeb 21b, 44a; compare also Josephus Ant
17.1.2, BJ 1.24.2; JustinM Dial 141. Criticism of polygamy is clear in bAb 2.5, bYeb44a.

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Silvana Menchi accents how important the individual case is for challeng-
ing the disciplining literati, exposing how straitening their activity strives to
be.36 There is a danger of reading rhetorical texts as transparent history and
failing to look beyond them to documents and artefacts that gained no “trans-
mission history.”37 One such “single case” emerged from a bundle of
35 domestic papers bound together and hidden in a cave at the outbreak of
the second Jewish war of independence in 132–135 CE. The owner, a woman
named Babatha, either left and never returned or is to be counted among the
skeletons found in the same cave. Babatha was an illiterate woman of moder-
ate substance who entered her second marriage to a certain Judah son of
Eleazar Khthusion, following the death of her first husband. Judah also died
(in 130 CE). His first wife, Miriam, was still alive and not divorced from him;
disputes over property ensued — hence the importance of the documents
related to property matters. Whilst some have wanted to argue for serial
monogamy on Judah’s part,38 there is no reference to his divorce from
Miriam; indeed one of the documents recording part of the dispute refers to
the deceased husband as “my and your husband,”39 with no mention of an
intervening divorce. John Collins’ summation is that “the practice
[of polygamy] was evidently not so restricted as had been supposed.”40 Strik-
ing in Babatha’s Aramaic marriage contract with Judah is the declaration for-
mula that it is performed “according to the law of Moses and the Jews.”41
Such polygamy was no barrier to seeking an adjudication over property in a
Roman court.42
Accordingly, the evidence for polygamy in first-century Israel at least
places before us whether the Markan passage is addressing it as an issue.
This must await treatment in the next section. Suffice to indicate here that
the deployment of Gn 1:27 in Mk 10:6, even from the Greek translation
(LXX), delivers no specific reference to a creational foundation of monog-
amy. By contrast, the use of the same passage in the Damascus Document
(copies found at Qumran and elsewhere) is quite targeted; the writing
denounces the “fornication [of those who] take two wives in their life-

36. Menchi, “Introduction,” 7–8.

37. See A. H. Cadwallader, “How Wide is the Horizon: History, Hermeneutics and Listening to
what the Spirit is saying to the Church,” in Kaleidoscope of Pieces: Anglican Studies on Sexual-
ity, ed. A. H. Cadwallader (Adelaide: ATF, 2016), 17–27.
38. R. Katzoff, “Polygamy in P. Yadin?,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik
109 (1995): 128–32.
39. P. Yadin 26 cf P. Yadin 34.
40. J. J. Collins, “Marriage, Divorce and Family in the Second Temple Period,” in Families in
Ancient Israel, ed. L. Perdue, J. Blenkinsopp, and C. Meyer (Louisville, KY: WJKP, 1997), 122.
There appears a resistance to allowing distance between the literary discipline about marriage
and the actual practice, even if undisciplined marriage is admitted; see, for example, S. Lowy,
“The Extent of Jewish Polygamy in Tannaitic Times,” Journal of Jewish Studies 9 (1958):
115–38, in addition to Katzoff, “Polygamy in P. Yadin?”
41. P. Yadin 10.
42. J. G. Oudshoorn, The Relationship between Roman and Local Law in the Babatha and
Salome Komaise Archives (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 77–92.

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156 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS HISTORY

time.”43 It is clear, therefore, that monogamy is an additive not a constitu-

tive of the Genesis passage. Even Loader, who argues for dominically pre-
scribed monogamy in Mark 10, admits that there is nothing in the Genesis
references that precludes polygamy.44 Polygamy has too long a history in
the Jewish Scriptures to see any patent contradiction with the Genesis
passage(s). Josephus, in the last quarter of the first century, wrote that the
continued practice of polygamy had ancestral warrant.45 As I have argued
elsewhere, Mark’s passage with proof-text can be read as reinforcing the
strength of a union rather than delimiting its membership,46 as in 1 Cor
6:16.47

Agency in Divorce
Another document from the time of the second Jewish revolt has forced a
reconsideration of the divorce proscriptions in Mk 10:11–12. As noted
above, Mark is said to extend Jesus’ saying so that it reflected Roman juridi-
cal permission for a wife’s initiation of proceedings.48 After all, Josephus
claimed this would contravene Jewish law.49 But a papyrus from a cave
located above Naḥal Ḥever, a wadi south of En Gedi that feeds into the Dead
Sea, seems to indicate the initiative of the wife, Shelmazion, in securing a
divorce, not simply establishing permission to ask for a divorce which the
husband might then initiate.50 The papyrus has also been interpreted in this
latter sense.51 It is significant, however, that the Aramaic Targum (Jonathan)
to Jeremiah, probably a second or third century CE compilation, made a tell-
ing addition to the reference to God’s bill of divorce to Israel in Jer 3:8, com-
paring God’s action to that of “men [who] give a letter of divorce and put

43. See C. Wassen, Women in the Damascus Document (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Litera-
ture, 2005), 116. Significantly, the Damascus Document testimonia combine Gn 1:27, 7:9 (the
pairs of animals) and Dt 17:17 (restriction on the number of king’s wives). The combination in
Mk 10:6–8 (Gn 1:27, 2:24) is different. Any slick transfer of the Qumran protest against polyg-
amy to Mark’s Gospel is problematic.
44. Loader, The Septuagint, Sexuality and the New Testament, 80–81; W. Loader, The New Tes-
tament on Sexuality (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 278.
45. Josephus Ant 17.1.2, BJ 1.24.2. Josephus calls it “ancestral custom” (πάτριον) not law; else-
where, he describes intermarriage as against “ancestral laws” (πάτρια νόμιμα, Ant 20.7.2).
46. A. H. Cadwallader, “The Markan / Marxist Struggle for the Household: Juliet Mitchell and
the challenge to patriarchal/familial ideology,” in Marxist Feminist Criticism of the Bible,
ed. R. Boer and J. kland (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2008), 157.
47. D. Martin, The Corinthian Body (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 176, followed
by A. C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NIGTC; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
2000), 468. Compare Loader, The New Testament on Sexuality, 192, who avoids the logical
conundrum that if consorting with a prostitute “creates oneness with someone other than Christ”
then so also must Christian marriage. Elsewhere, he fudges the distinction between unity in
Christ and unity in marriage: W. Loader, Making Sense of Sex: Attitudes towards Sexuality in
Early Jewish and Christian Literature (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 17.
48. Daube, The New Testament and Rabbinic Judaism, 362–69; B. Incigneri, The Gospel to the
Romans (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 98–99, 270; Jorgensen, Treasure Hidden in a Field, 209–10.
49. Josephus Ant 15.7.10. Tal Ilan argues that Josephus is eyeing his Roman audience: “Notes
and Observations on a Newly Published Divorce Bill from the Judean Desert,” Harvard Theolog-
ical Review 89 (1996): 202.
50. P. Ṣe’elim 13; see Ilan, “Notes and Observations”; Collins, “Marriage, Divorce and Family,”
120–21.
51. A. Schremer, “Divorce in Papyrus Ṣe’elim 13 Once Again: A Reply to Tal Ilan,” Harvard
Theological Review 91 (1998): 193–202; Loader, The New Testament on Sexuality, 56–57.

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[a woman] away.”52 One interpretation of such an addition is that it confronts
existing doubt that divorce was restricted to male agency (under divine tem-
plate?), implying that previously the law was equivocal.53 Nevertheless, a
lack of certainty hangs over a Jewish woman’s agency in divorce proceedings
— in Judaea.
There are examples of Jewish women outside of Judaea initiating divorce.
The practice seems to have been long-standing for Jewish women in Egypt,
as evidence in fifth century BCE documents from Elephantine indicates.54 If
an avenue was available through a different legal system, then some Jewish
women may have shifted jurisdictions for a favourable outcome. The clearest
examples of women initiating divorce are two members of the Herodian
dynasty, namely Salome, sister of Herod “the Great” and Herodias, wife
sequentially of two of Herod’s sons.55 These instances are usually dismissed
as further aberrant behaviour of the Herodians. But this merely reiterates
Josephus’ judgement — “not in accordance with Jewish law.” He uses the
word γραμματε~ιον for Salome’s divorce document rather than the Septuagin-
tal phrase (τὸ) βιβλίον (το~υ) ἀποστασίου (Dt 24:3; Is 50:1; Jer 3:8). Jose-
phus does not restrict γραμματε~ιον to divorce documents but his usage is
infrequent.56 The term is not found in the LXX, but it appears frequently for
an official document (whether divorce or not) in Hellenistic and later usage.57
Josephus is probably suggesting that Salome and Herodias relied on a juris-
diction other than Jewish law to achieve their desired result.58 Hence, in the
first century there were multiple jurisdictions regulating divorce alongside
debates within cultural groups as to agency and control of marriage and
divorce. Given the diversity of first-century regulating of divorce, it cannot
be decided on that basis what context is being addressed either by Jesus or
by the evangelist (although we shall have cause to return to the Herodian
women). To assert otherwise, is to reveal a predisposition for a certain result.
Josephus assesses Salome’s divorce of Costobarus as prompted by her loy-
alty to her brother Herod (the Great). She alleged that her husband and others

52. Translation from R. Hayward, The Targum of Jeremiah (Aramaic Bible 12; Edinburgh: T &
T Clark, 1987), 55.
53. The divorce by a Christian of her husband mentioned by Justin Martyr (2 Apol 2.6) is com-
plicated by whether she was Jewish and the jurisdiction she was relying upon: see B. S. Jackson,
“The Divorce of the Herodian Princesses: Jewish Law, Roman Law, or Palace Law?” in Josephus
and Jewish History in Flavian Rome and Beyond, ed. J. Sievers and G. Lembi (JSJs 104; Lei-
den: Brill, 2005), 349–54. Compare the expulsion (divorce?) of Justa by a similarly reprobate
husband; thereafter she lived as a “widow” (ClemHom 2.20).
54. TAD B3.3 (where the “silver of hatred,” that is, payment for divorce, is within the agency of
each party); see Instone-Brewer, Divorce and Remarriage in the Bible, 79–80; B. Porten, et al.,
The Elephantine Papyri in English: Three Millennia of Cross-Cultural Continuity and Change
(Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011), 209–11.
55. Josephus Ant 15.7.10 (Salome divorced Costobarus); Ant 18.5.4 (Herodias divorced one son
of Herod “the Great,” Philip, to marry another, Antipas). A third example — of Berenice from
King Polemo of Cilicia — is ambiguous in Josephus’ report (Ant 20.7.3). Berenice is simply
described as “deserting” (καταλείπω) him.
56. Only Josephus Ant 16.10.4 of a (forged?) letter.
57. See, for example, IG 2.1415, 1421; SEG 30.93; P.Corn. 1; P.Col. 7.170; P.Genova 2.62,
which cover a variety of official documents. The word can be used for a private letter (P.Petr.
2.15; P.Mert. 2.90).
58. Compare Jackson, “The Divorce of the Herodian Princesses.”

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were planning an insurrection.59 Salome’s initiation of divorce is presented as

preserving the core rationale of marriage — the cohesiveness of state power
and control. Her divorce may have been a privilege of her class to claim what
lay outside of most women’s socio-economic capacity; it may have been
irregular in its choice of regulatory machinery. But it became warranted and
justified, at least as Josephus delivered the rhetoric, by the display of loyalty
(εὔνοια) to Herod. Josephus’ presentation of the interlocking of Herodian
marriages and divorces anticipated Suetonius’ treatment of the sequence of
marriages and divorces of Augustus, the founder of imperial Rome, as well
as his organisation of marital arrangements.60 Suetonius is more dispassion-
ate than Josephus and certainly is more approving of Augustus than Josephus
is of the Herodian dynasty. But both clearly tie political stability to the regu-
lation of family life — whether of marriage or divorce or, indeed, the bearing
of children.

The Literary Basis

There are two further elements that many commentators appropriate for
rebuilding “the historical Jesus.” Even though the object is claimed as his-
tory, the approach fundamentally relies on an analysis of literature that seeks
to isolate the traditions and forms from the compositional surrounds of, in
this case, Mark’s Gospel. These pruned skeletons are then privileged over
against the context that the evangelist provides, even if the interpreter sup-
plies some (alternate) flesh. Thereby, it becomes easier to claim the status of
a dominical saying precisely because it is asserted that the tradition and form,
removed from the evangelist’s narrative, is closer to the historical Jesus —
who, oddly, now appears as a narrative-less figure “of history.” So the history
of Jesus becomes little more than an analysis of literary forms and the con-
tent residing therein — a “history of ideas.” This facilitates the transtemporal
(yet atemporal) claims for a “dominical saying.” It “treats scripture and its
interpretation as the reflection of an evolving, but essentially monolithic, nor-
mative religious world-view.”61
This is why, for example, the usual delimitation given to the passage in
Mark’s Gospel is verses 2 to12.62 Verse 1 is dismissed as nothing more than
a repetitive hinge linking isolated pericopae.63 Mk 10:1 is also isolated by
modern editorial paragraphing and sub-titling.64 The irony is that the very
writing from which the material is extracted stands against a rootless saying.
Mark’s Gospel is committed to providing context for these sayings: “the site

59. Josephus Ant 15.7.10.

60. Suetonius Aug 62–64.
61. J. N. Livingstone, Society, the Sacred and Scripture in Ancient Judaism: A Sociology of
Knowledge (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1988), 2.
62. See, for example, Y. K. Zhekov, Defining the NT Logia on Divorce and Remarriage in a
Pluralistic Context (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2009), 84.
63. Some call it a “seam”; see D. Reid, “Miracle Stories and the Synoptic Problem,” in Foster
et al., New Studies in the Synoptic Problem, 304.
64. J. S. Kloppenborg, “Synopses and the Synoptic Problem,” in Foster et al., New Studies in
the Synoptic Problem, 70.

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 JESUS ON MARRIAGE 159
of a reading … is decisive in Mark.”65 The point is not that Mark is pre-
senting history; rather he refuses to divorce the sayings of Jesus from a narra-
tive. Ironically, those commentators who put the words of Jesus into a
supposed historical context of first-century conflicts over monogamy are in
fact claiming that Mark’s setting is a poor narrative setting compared to the
one they offer.
There are three elements to examine in this section, two of which are the
stock of New Testament exegesis, given to the isolation of traditions and
forms. The third takes up the previous arguments that sayings need to be
heard within the narrative context that an author provides (which can then be
tested for historical information) rather than yanked out of context for a liter-
ary analysis masquerading as history (of competing ideas).66

Traditions from the Septuagint

The Septuagint translation of Gn 2:24 adds “the two” to the Hebrew: “they
[the two] become one flesh”;67 other versions have it, including a slightly
convoluted Samaritan version: “And there became one flesh out of the two of
them.”68 This supposedly facilitated the link with Gn 1:27 in the response of
Jesus as well as prompted the summative comment of Jesus in verses 8b–9.
The problem here is that God is made the author of marriage (in spite of
marriage not surviving into heaven in Mk 12:25) and marriage appears as a
return to the original creation of man. Significantly, the generic word
ἄνθρωπος “human” is used in Gn 2:24, rather than ἀνήρ “man/husband” of
Gn 2:23, even though it is then connected with γυνή “woman/wife.” This
links back to the ἄνθρωπος of Gn 1:27 which is defined there as ἄρσην
“male” and θῆλυς “female.” If the wording “and be joined to his wife” is to
be omitted in accordance with a number of manuscripts,69 then Wever’s sug-
gestion, that the LXX adopts ἄνθρωπος over ἀνήρ to indicate marriage as a
“general rule for mankind,”70 has even stronger claim. ἄνθρωπος would then
be taken as a collective, given the plural of Mk 10:8. The use of ὅ (“what”)
in Jesus’ comment in verse 9 strengthens the notion of unity (androgyny?)
without specific elements.71
Given that it is fairly certain that the LXX of Genesis has nothing to say
about monogamy but a great deal about the diversity-in-unity of God’s crea-
tion, it is difficult to decide whether Jesus has been influenced by the ideas
in the LXX or is extending them. Simple reliance on the LXX alone cannot
yield a result.

65. F. Belo, A Materialist Reading of the Gospel of Mark (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1981), 4–5,
his emphasis.
66. Livingstone, Society, the Sacred and Scripture, 60.
67. Loader, The Septuagint, Sexuality and the New Testament, 80–81.
68. J. W. Wevers, Notes on the Greek Text of Genesis (SCS 35; Atlanta: Scholars Press,
1993), 34–35.
69. Omitted in ‫ א‬B Ψ 892* 2427 l48. Gundry favours this shorter text: Mark, 530.
70. Wevers, Notes on the Greek Text of Genesis, 35.
71. Daube notes the interplay of singular and plural: The New Testament and Rabbinic Juda-
ism, 72–73.

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A Controversy Story
The form of the story in verses 2–12 is usually categorised as a controversy
story.72 Sometimes, the Pharisees are interpreted as part of the controversy,
sometimes not.73 When they are included, Jesus turns into one of the sectar-
ian voices of first-century Jewish ideas, albeit the best according to Christian
reproduction. The form in which the “debate” (as it becomes in such inter-
pretation) is cast is also sometimes structured according to a traditional Phar-
isaical scheme.74 When the structure omits verse 1 from consideration and
does not evaluate their test/temptation (πειράζοντες, v. 2), then all we have
here is a “history of exegesis” evolving through debates.

The Narrative Context

The testing of Jesus in verse 2 raises two important questions for our effort
to restore the saying of Jesus to its narrative context. Firstly, what is the test
involved? If it is nothing more than a battle of minds, then it is difficult to
see the double-edge involved. Jesus could easily have agreed with the Phari-
sees (v. 4) and the contest evaporate (cf. Mk 12:28–34) — in that case the
disciples would hardly have felt prompted to ask for further explanation.
Robert Gundry frankly admits, “Mark does not specify the difficulty that
makes the question testing.”75 Secondly, how does the evangelist use the lan-
guage of “testing?”
This second issue provides the ground for solving the first. Mark has
established the tone of testing at the beginning of “his” Gospel. The devil is
the tester/tempter par excellence, and the general reference to Jesus’ desert
trials is presented as the harbinger of Jesus’ ministry (Mk 1:12–15). Unlike
Matthew (4:1–11) and Luke (4:1–13) who provide details of three tempta-
tions, Mark is curt. Yet Mark does have three temptations. These are inter-
spersed through human narrative (Mk 8:11, 10:2, 12:15), not restricted to
mythical battles. The arena for evil is nothing but mundane in Mark.
Accordingly this test involves some evil; it is not merely a debate, or a
mere reply to a harmless question from the Pharisees.76 The clue is offered in
the opening verse, for it provides a location charged with threat. The narra-
tive has already factored the Transjordan into the geographical mindset of
the dynamics driving the story (Mk 1:5, 9, 14, 6:17–29). The Transjordan
resonates as the space wherein John the Baptist ministered and wherein, as a
result of that ministry, he was executed. The Transjordan was controlled by

72. See D. Burkett, An Introduction to the New Testament and the Origins of Christianity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 164.
73. See Loader, The New Testament on Sexuality, 273.
74. Daube, The New Testament and Rabbinic Judaism, 141–50. Sometimes his unhindered
application of later rabbinic materials to first-century Christian controversy stories is challenged.
Nonetheless, his interpretation has been influential: see B. Witherington, The Gospel of Mark: A
Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 275.
75. Gundry, Mark, 529; C. Focant, The Gospel According to Mark: A Commentary (Eugene,
OR: Pickwick, 2012), 398.
76. H. Rhee, Early Christian Literature: Christ and Culture in the Second and Third Centuries
(London: Routledge, 2005), 114.

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 JESUS ON MARRIAGE 161
the tetrarch Herod Antipas. There, a palace-fortress was located (Machaerus)
wherein John was paraded, possibly as a traitorous agitator, before the jilted
Nabataeans to the south-east.77 There, he was executed before those whom
Antipas sought to cultivate into providing resources for the looming battle
with the Nabataeans. Antipas’ plans and actions backfired. Roman troops
had to be assigned to restore the peace. The memory of this last example of
Herodian excess lingered on. Mark made full use of it in his story of John’s
beheading; it substantiated the condemnation of Herod as corrupting leaven
in Mk 8:15.
This is where two of the variants previously noted become critical, divert-
ing attention from Herod to the stock culpability of the woman, Herodias.78
The transmitters of the text have sensed the significance of the opening verse
of chapter 10 and have switched the verses detailing agency in divorce, so
that the woman’s divorce is named first (see variants 1 and 2 above). Anyone
who sought divorce in order to marry another curried infamy;79 the epitome
lies in this episode. The inversion of verse 11 and verse 12 subtly swings
attention to her connivance in political manipulation of divorce and marriage
(not to mention the pimping of children).80
Some commentators do recognise the connection with the death of John
the Baptist in this episode, and that the test holds the same sword as des-
patched the Baptist hanging over Jesus’ head or the sword of public scorn
should Jesus fail to live up to the reputation of his forerunner.81 But then, the
interpretation declines to see Jesus’ answer as directed precisely to that
entrapment. His response over the payment of the tribute tax to Caesar is no
longer seen as a dominical word justifying subservience to the state but
rather a critique of state oppression and of those who have become collabora-
tors.82 The same principle needs to be applied here. Rather than being a
transtemporal dominical word in regard to marriage, the narrative of Mark
delivers a temporally focused strategic word into a specifically fraught
contest.
This is where the second passage in Mark becomes crucial
(Mk 12:18–27). The destabilisation that is resurrection spotlights the ques-
tion of the multiple conveyance of a woman for reproductive purposes
(Levirate marriage). Even though Mark lacks a proper resurrection story, the
language of resurrection pervades the entire Gospel. Just as evil has been

77. The daughter of King Aratus IV of the Nabataeans was the first wife of Herod Antipas. She
barely escaped with her life once Antipas’ eyes were lured to Herodias; see Josephus Ant
18.5.1–3.
78. R. S. Kraemer, “Implicating Herodias and Her Daughter in the Death of John the Baptizer:
A (Christian) Theological Strategy,” Journal of Biblical Literature 125, no. 2 (2006): 321–49.
79. A. D. Jacobson, “Divided Families and Christian Origins,” in The Gospel Behind the Gos-
pels, ed. R. A. Piper (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 370–71.
80. See J. Birdsall, “The Western Text in the Second Century,” in Gospel Traditions in the Sec-
ond Century, ed. W. Peterson (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 3–17.
81. Gundry, Mark, 536–57; J. G. Crossley, The Date of Mark’s Gospel: Insight from the Law in
Earliest Christianity (London: T & T Clark, 2004), 176.
82. See A. H. Cadwallader, “‘In Go(l)d We Trust’: Literary and Economic Currency Exchange
in the Debate over Caesar’s Coin (Mark 12:13–17),” Biblical Interpretation 14 (2006): 486–507.

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162 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS HISTORY

removed from the mythic realm in Mark’s Gospel so also has resurrection.
Resurrection is directed towards this world, not the next. Accordingly, it is
not merely that creation edicts have no absolute hold (the Mark 10 passage)
but also, neither does a distant future; rather the resurrection means that
everything has changed in the present.83
The narrative arrangement of the death of John the Baptist shapes our
reconsideration. The execution is prefaced by word reaching Antipas about
the mission of Jesus’ disciples (Mk 6:14–16). His response is to see John
resurrected — manifest in the present power of word and deed. Accordingly,
the resurrection destabilises marriage. Luke’s reworking of Mark’s material
makes blatant the subtlety. He has Jesus say, “those who are credited as wor-
thy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead, neither marry
nor are given in marriage.” (Lk 20:35). Here is the foundation for privileging
celibate life over marriage84 and encouragement to separate from spouse in
order to pursue that life.

Conclusion
What has been argued here is that the foundation on which ecclesiastical dis-
cipline and theological absolutes dispensed about marriage have been built is
a foundation of sand. From the beginning, in text and context, the sayings
attributed to Jesus have been subject to ecclesial construction from ideologi-
cal motives. The analysis of the sayings on marriage and divorce has shown
that at the levels of text, historical setting, and literary structure, the sayings
of Jesus are highly contingent and temporally focused. The search for endur-
ing Christian values must look elsewhere. Accordingly, responsibility is
thrown back upon those who would venture into marriage and divorce —
whether for its enforcement or its practice — to acknowledge that an admis-
sion and ownership of contemporary concerns is likely to create a more
transparent and accountable approach to marriage and divorce, than a solip-
sistic appeal to a dominical saying made natural by constant repetition.

83. See S. Bachelard, “Marriage and the Sacred: Fragments Straight and Gay,” in Cadwallader,
Kaleidoscope of Pieces, 43–58.
84. T. K. Seim, “Children of the Resurrection: Perspectives on Angelic Asceticism in Luke-
Acts,” in Asceticism and the New Testament, ed. L. E. Vaage and V. L. Wimbush (New York:
Routledge, 1999), 115–26.

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