On Matthew 5:31 through 5:32

Hello, all.

I'm very sorry for my relatively extended absence.  There's been some illness in the family.  My father has fallen sick again, and has been in the hospital for a couple of weeks.  It has been touch-and-go at times.  Your thoughts and prayers would be appreciated.  

Anecdotally, I want to tell you that I don't know how I would have personally made it through the last month without a mantric, near constant recitation of either the Lord's Prayer or the Jesus Prayer.  I don't understand the precise nature of prayer, and I suspect that it may ultimately be so many words against the wind, but it sure helps to ease my spinning mind.

Also anecdotally, I have noticed one thing in the interim since I last wrote about the gospel a few weeks ago: I do not feel as good about life when I don't have my head in the New American Bible on Saturday or Sunday morning.  Differing kinds of negativity, malaise, and apathy sneak in much easier on those days when my mind drifts from the words of Christ.  So, for whatever it's worth, understand that I write all of this not only for the grandiose benefit of the whole of humanity, but also for my own sake.

This is therapy, for me.  This is medicine.

Today we arrive at Jesus' "Teaching About Divorce."  Please note that the teaching we have before us today is multiply attested, so it is more likely to have actually been spoken by the historical Jesus than some of his other phrasings.

Without further ado, let's set it off.

(Actually, sorry, here's a little more ado: if this is your first time here, you can follow this link to the beginning of all of this.  Reading this from the beginning will help you understand what this study is really about, and give you a lot of the context you'll need for the proceeding years of study on which we now embark.)

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Matthew 5:31 through 5:32

31 “It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife must give her a bill of divorce.’

32 But I say to you, whoever divorces his wife (unless the marriage is unlawful) causes her to commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

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These verses require little interpretation.  Once again, Jesus is altering the Law of Moses because he sees it as inadequate or obsolete.  He tells his followers (again) that Moses' law was not strict enough.  Whereas Moses allowed divorce for a myriad of reasons, or perhaps no reason at all, Jesus says that divorce is almost never moral, and, as we will learn, can only be performed under the extreme circumstance of infidelity.

As per usual, we're going to get into some of the ancient Greek here first.  As you've seen occasionally, knowing the ancient Greek phrases from which the gospel is derived lends a powerful new dimensionality to our reading here in modern times.  On the occasions that the ancient Greek doesn't inform some altered interpretation, it still behooves us to learn some of the Greek as a matter of academic exercise.  In my humble opinion, a true gospel scholar can only describe herself or himself as such if they have developed at least a tertiary familiarity with Koine Greek.

After we learn some Greek, we're going to familiarize ourselves with the ancient Jewish divorce custom by checking out Moses' teaching on divorce as it appears in the Old Testament.

Finally, we'll look at divorce statistics in the modern United States of America, the most populous and powerful self-proclaimed "Christian" nation the world has ever seen.  This will give us reason to conclude by riffing on modern Christian hypocrisy, which is, after all, the focus of this entire study.

Here are your Greek words.

In Greek

The first word we'll look at today is "divorce."  Our modern Bibles come to this word "divorce" by way of the ancient Greek "apoluó" which could mean many different things.  Potential alternative translations for this word include, but are not limited to, the following:

- Dismiss (as a teacher might dismiss a class at the end of the day.) 

- Fire (as a totally incompetent executive might fire a highly competent Chief of Staff.)

- Unloose (as one might unloose a horse tied to a hitching post.) 

- Uncage (as one might uncage an innocent child held captive by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services.)

- Unhand (as one might unhand a person they had wrongly restrained.)

- Unbind (as one might unbind a person tied up in restraints.)

- Release (as one might be released from their wrongful imprisonment at the hands of the American prison-industrial-complex.) 

 - Send away (as the average American "Christian" might try to send me away if they heard me utter the truth about Jesus Christ.)

This terminology is a perfect example of why we like to look at the Greek.  Just look how much more is packed into this one Greek word than we could ever extrapolate from its English counterpart as it appears in our gospel today.  Many of these alternative translations would seem to indicate that a wife was, in ancient times, little more than a captive or a slave.  This fact would not be obvious to one who merely read this passage in English.

The second word we'll check out today is one we've already studied just a few weeks ago.  The word "wife," as it appears here, comes from the Greek "guné."  To review, this is what we discovered about this word before, when it was coincidentally also our "second word of interest": 

"The second word of interest today is "guné" which means "woman." This word is indeed very old, predating ancient Greek significantly, coming from a Proto-Indo-European word with a similar sound. This word relates to the English prefix "gyne" as in "gynecologist." This word is also directly related to the English word "queen." Another cognate of this word is the Sanskrit "jani."

Please note that "guné" appears in the gospels many many times, slightly more often denoting a "woman" or "women" in general than a "wife" specifically.

What can one ascertain about Greek and Jewish culture by the fact that a "wife" would have been referred to by the same noun as any generic "woman?"  To me, it speaks to the chattel-like condition of women generally in ancient times.  Greek women were particularly repressed, although the lot of an ancient Palestinian woman would not, by any means, be enviable by modern standards either.

My fiancée certainly would not prefer that I call her my "woman," and I could anticipate severe repercussions if I did.

The next phrasing we want to look at is "unless the marriage is unlawful."  This appears to be one of the only spots I've encountered so far where the New American Bible has strayed away from the original Greek by a considerable margin.  Other Bible translations are closer to the mark when they translate this clause as "except for sexual immorality."*

The phrase "sexual immorality" here comes from the Greek "porneia."  "Porneia" can mean several different things, including "whoring," "whoredom," "fornication," "prostitution," or "harlotry."  The word "pornography" shares a common root with this word.  Here, then, Jesus appears to make an exception to his strict rule on divorce: you may still get a divorce if your wife has been unfaithful in a sexual manner.  

It is difficult to say for certain at this point whether or not Jesus felt that this was a two-way street - whether or not a woman could ask for divorce in the case of her husband sleeping with another woman.  Since Jesus was a first-century Hellenized Palestinian Jew, we have to assume the worst here, but we can hope that he meant this rule as a two-way rule.

And that's enough Greek for today.  Let's move on.

Old Testament Teaching on Divorce

The primary teaching of Moses on divorce is found in Deuteronomy.  In Deuteronomy Chapter 24, we read the following:

1 When a man, after marrying a woman, is later displeased with her because he finds in her something indecent, and he writes out a bill of divorce and hands it to her, thus dismissing her from his house, 

2 if on leaving his house she goes and becomes the wife of another man, 

3 and the second husband, too, comes to dislike her and he writes out a bill of divorce and hands it to her, thus dismissing her from his house, or if this second man who has married her dies, 

4 then her former husband, who dismissed her, may not again take her as his wife after she has become defiled. That would be an abomination before the LORD, and you shall not bring such guilt upon the land the LORD, your God, is giving you as a heritage.

As you can see here, the ancient Jewish man may divorce his wife simply because he is "displeased" with her.  Divorce among the ancient Jews was not considered reprehensible.  This stands in stark contrast with Jesus' teaching, as we've just seen.

It is interesting to note that the common term in both ancient and modern Judaism for a "bill of divorce" is "get."**  If a man wants a divorce from his wife, he must give her a "get," which may say little more than something like "you are hereby permitted to all men."  The origin of the term "get" is not known for certain, but it is postulated that it comes from the ancient Sumerian word for "document."

In order for the divorce process to be complete, according to Jewish tradition, the get must be delivered to the wife, and she must physically accept it.  The get must be hand-written, and must be written in a way that the text cannot be cleanly erased.  A get may not be predated.

As we've discussed before, Jewish tradition says that only a man may initiate a divorce.  A woman cannot offer her husband a get.  An aggrieved Jewish wife living after the time of the Second Temple, however, can appeal to a Rabbinical Court, which has jurisdiction over marriages.  The Rabbinical Court has the power to force a husband to offer his wife a get.  If the husband refuses, the court may use monetary or corporal coercion of various kinds to convince the man to offer the get.  In this way, women are allowed to initiate divorce proceedings as well, although it is much more difficult for her than it would be for a man.

To Jesus, the concept of divorcing your wife simply because she was "displeasing" in some way was immoral.  Jesus expected that, if his followers married one another, they would stay the course of life together, through thick and through thin.  This is perhaps one of his more significant departures from Jewish tradition.

Divorce Traditions of Modern American "Christians"

In 2014, the Pew Research Center conducted their second "U.S. Religious Landscape Study."  This study was constituted by data gleaned from telephone interviews with 35,000 Americans from all 50 states.  In the 2014 study, it was found that 74% of divorced Americans considered themselves to be "Christian."  In that same study, it was found that 70.6% of Americans considered themselves "Christian."  The significant fact for us here is that the concentration of "Christians" is greater in the pool of "divorced Americans" than it is in the pool of "any Americans."  

Even when we consider Jesus' exception to the "no divorce" rule, American divorce statistics point to religious laxity or ignorance on the part of American "Christians."  In an article published in 2013 by Shelby B. Scott of the University of Denver Department of Psychology, regarding a study of divorced Americans, we read the following:

Overall, the results indicate that the most often cited reasons for divorce at the individual level were lack of commitment (75.0%), infidelity (59.6%), and too much conflict and arguing (57.7%), followed by marrying too young (45.1%), financial problems (36.7%), substance abuse (34.6%), and domestic violence (23.5%).

These percentages roughly match other American "reason for divorce" statistics widely available today.  So, if 74% of divorced Americans are Christians, and roughly 41% of divorced Americans divorced for some reason other than infidelity, than that means there are a whole lot of "Christian" Americans out there divorcing against the rules prescribed by their supposed Lord and Savior.

All of this speaks, I think, to the general laxity of American "Christianity."  It further informs my opinion that the word "Christian" is, more often than not, a fashionable emblem for the American to wear, rather than an actual belief system, morality structure, or mode of living.  It further informs my opinion that American "Christians" are, more often than not, total hypocrites.***

I'll leave you with a related quote from my second favorite text of all time (after the Synoptic Gospels, of course.)  Here's Leo:

"We talk of the hypocrisy of the Pharisees.  But the hypocrisy of our society far surpasses the comparatively innocent hypocrisy of the Pharisees.  They had at least an external religious law, the fulfillment of which hindered them from seeing their obligations to their neighbors.  Moreover, these obligations were not nearly so clearly defined in their day.  Nowadays we have no such religious law to exonerate us from our duties..." - From Tolstoy's "The Kingdom of God is Within You."

The hypocrisy of our society far surpasses that of the Pharisees.  Join me next time.  Please share this writing.

Love.
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* The New American Bible is, despite its relative fidelity to ancient manuscripts, a Catholic text.  The fact that the Catholic Church has particular and unique rules and regulations concerning marriage probably informs why this phrasing is slightly off here.

** I first became familiar with the term "get" from the outstanding HBO series "Curb Your Enthusiasm."  Curb Your Enthusiasm is a great way to learn about some aspects of modern Jewish culture.  And it is hilarious.

*** A hypocrite is one who claims to adhere to certain moral precepts, or preaches certain moral precepts, but in reality does not himself live by said moral precepts.

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To read what's next, click here.

To read what came prior to this, click here.

For the index of Christ's words, click here.

On Matthew 5:29 through 5:30

Hello, and welcome to the one-year anniversary edition of The Moral Vision of Jesus Christ, your comprehensive and exhaustive study of the Gospels of Jesus Christ.  If this is your first time here, please feel free to avail yourself of the Introduction, which can be found here.

For the uninitiated, this gospel study will easily be the most detailed and thorough gospel study you've ever read by the time of its completion.  Its size will dwarf the Bible itself, and its scope is already preposterously wide.  Today, not by design but by happy coincidence, this study will surpass the 100,000 word milestone, which means that this study is already significantly longer than all four gospels combined.

As I've mentioned before, this study is inspired, more than anything, by the late work of the late Leo Tolstoy, perhaps the most influential and well known Russian writer in history.  On our one-year anniversary, then, I am obligated to draw your attention to him once again.

Tolstoy was easily the best-selling novelist of his time.  After having become famous the world-over for tomes like "Anna Karenina" and "War and Peace," Tolstoy turned his attention and his writing efforts away from fiction and toward spiritual, philosophical, and political matters.  Over the course of a few significant texts, Tolstoy gave a revelation to the world.  That revelation was, to put it most simply, that Jesus Christ's life and teaching had been grossly misunderstood and misapplied by nearly all of his so-called followers throughout history since the time of Constantine or even earlier.

Tolstoy came to believe that a pure and lasting happiness could be found by anyone who correctly interpreted and applied the teachings of Jesus Christ.  Tolstoy also believed that, properly applied, the teachings of Jesus Christ would literally liberate the world from the bondage of war, iniquity, and statism.  Furthermore, Tolstoy pointed out (not believed, but pointed out) that Jesus Christ had been an anarchist.  That is to say that Jesus Christ unequivocally opposed any state apparatus whatsoever based on his moral understanding of the universe.

I'd like you to have a sense of what Tolstoy was saying.  In what I consider his most valuable work, The Kingdom of God is Within You, Tolstoy wrote as follows:

If the more or less good, and the more or less bad cannot be distinguished in the heathen world, the Christian conception of good and evil has so clearly defined the characteristics of the good and the wicked, that it is impossible to confound them.  According to Christ's teaching the good are those who are meek and long-suffering, do not resist evil by force, forgive injuries, and love their enemies; those are wicked who exalt themselves, oppress, strive, and use force.  Therefore by Christ's teaching there can be no doubt whether the good are to be found among the rulers or ruled, and whether the wicked are among the ruled or the rulers.  Indeed it is absurd even to speak of Christians ruling.

As you can see here, Tolstoy's thinking about Jesus was deep and atypical.  Had he not been the biggest celebrity in Russia at the time, Tolstoy might have easily been jailed or "disappeared" for writing such things.  This gospel study is designed to prove beyond any doubt to the world that Tolstoy's assessment of the morality of Jesus Christ was unquestionably correct.

That said, I would like to take this opportunity to remind you how I became interested in Tolstoy and, through him, in Jesus Christ.  Some years back, during the course of curious studying, I was brought to the realization that the human race has a deadline to meet.  Whether people in your life are talking about it or not, whether the news media is talking about it or not, whether our leaders and institutions are giving it creedence or not, our species has an important deadline to meet.  That deadline is the extinction of the human race by war.  

You see, there exist in this world enough nuclear weapons to destroy all life on the planet Earth over and over again in a short period of time.  The possibility of such an all-out nuclear war will not begin to diminish until we begin to dismantle the bombs en masse.  In fact, the possibility of all-out nuclear war increases daily as super-powers increase their stockpiles and smaller nations attempt to manufacture their first bombs.  So long as the world's governments, lead by the example of the first nuclear power, the United States of America, stay their course, the threat of a species ending nuclear-war is not a matter of "if," it is a matter of "when."  Consider the words of US president John F. Kennedy:

Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.

It is my belief that the only thing that can prevent the accident, miscalculation, or madness to which Mr. Kennedy referred is the voluntary abolition of nuclear weapons throughout the world.  Be it tomorrow, ten years from now, or one-hundred years down the road, the deadline we face for this task is the day that something or someone slips, the sword of Damocles falls, and the missiles begin to soar into the sky.  This deadline is inevitable, and certainly nearer than most would imagine.  It is my sincere belief that the only thing that will allow us, as a species, to do away with this mechanism of global suicide that we've created in our nuclear arsenals is the honest application of a Law of Universal Love.  Realizing all this years ago, I went looking for an applicable Law of Love.

When I went looking for a Law of Universal Love, I found Leo Tolstoy pointing straight to Jesus Christ.  When I read the gospels for the first time, it felt to me as if Jesus had looked forward through a couple of millenia and somehow seen our deadline, just the way JFK clearly saw it.  When I read the gospels for the first time, I wept as I realized that the true miracle of Christ's teaching lay directly in the hands my generation, and that the salvation that Jesus offered his first-century followers was equally offered as a real-world salvation attainable by myself and my generation.

Jesus Christ offers us a freedom from the risk of a species-ending nuclear annihilation.  Amazingly, Jesus Christ offers us, in the same breath, a freedom from the personal pain of everyday life.  I believe this with all of my heart and mind.  

Truly, Jesus Christ offers us an attainable, real-world Kingdom of God.  And truly, as Tolstoy said, that Kingdom is within you.

I am so very excited and blessed to celebrate one-year with you today.  To those of you who have read this steadily: thank you so so much for your time and interest.  To have your attention here means more to me than almost any other thing in the world.  The only thing that means more is Jesus Christ's Law of Love itself.

Now, as always and without further ado, please enjoy my brief thoughts about the following verses.

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Matthew 5:29 through 5:30

29 If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one of your members than to have your whole body thrown into Gehenna. 

30 And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one of your members than to have your whole body go into Gehenna.

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Did anyone do a double-take on these verses?

Did Jesus just recommend that his followers yank their own eyes out of their faces and cut their own hands off?

To put it simply: yes, yes he did.  And, woah.

Recall that these two verses are still part of what is called, in modern times, Jesus' "Teaching About Adultery," and that many Bible scholars would directly relate the previous two verses (Matthew 5:27-28) to these.  When taken apart from the previous two verses, however, these verses retain a very similar meaning, and remain consistent with other teachings of Jesus.

The first question that probably came to my mind when I initially read these verses is "does Jesus mean this literally, or is he being hyperbolic and metaphorical here?"  The answer to that question is a difficult one to find, and I think that it could probably be argued either way.

Jesus' recommendation that his followers avoid sin by cutting the parts of their bodies off that are leading them to sin will be reprised later, and fits within the mold of extreme asceticism which I think Jesus filled.  Recall that Jesus' ministry began after a grueling forty-day solo journey in the hot desert, during the course of which he fasted.  His ministry begins with a great act of asceticism.  Later in the gospel, we will see Jesus recommend various ascetic lifestyle modes to his followers, and he will go as far as telling his male followers that they would be best off castrating themselves in order to more easily focus all of their living energy on God.  Jesus deliberately structured his Galilean Ministry so that the state would execute him at the end of it, so some might argue that everything he said or did during his ministry was focused on a grand public death.  Jesus was undoubtedly a morbid character, then, and it seems clear through several multiply attested verses that ascetic mortification of the flesh was an ideal to him.  

Knowing all of that, what remains to the reader here is to determine to what literal extent Jesus advised this extreme mortification of the flesh to his followers.  Did he actually mean "if you are distracted by a lusty eye, you should poke your own eye out and be blind?"  Does he actually mean it later in Matthew 19:12 when he tells his followers that they will be closer to God if they castrate themselves?

For once, today, I am not going to postulate an answer.

Instead, in celebration of our one-year anniversary, and to enhance your consideration of these verses, I am going to offer you the very first visual aid for this study.  Below is a fifteenth-century depiction of one of the very first "Church Fathers," Origen of Alexandria, whom we've discussed before.  In this painting, Origen is shown taking Matthew 19:12 seriously to the highest possible degree.

Ouch!

That's right, brothers and sisters.  We will discuss this at greater length later, but there were many people in history who took Jesus' prescription to mortify their flesh extremely seriously.  Origen is not the only one we have record of castrating himself in order to refine his love for God.

Certainly, if Origen was willing to go to the extent he does in the above painting based on the gospel, he believed that Jesus was one-hundred percent serious in today's verses when he advised them to pluck out their eyes or cut off their hands.

Amazing.

I hope this didn't gross y'all out too much.  It shouldn't have.  After all, this is just Christian history.

For lack of time, we will leave it here today.

Thank you again for a wonderful year.  I look forward to many more with you.

Please share this writing.

Love.

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To read what's next, click here.

To read what came prior to this, click here.

For the index of Christ's words, click here.