Hello, and welcome back to the Moral Vision of Jesus Christ. If this is your first time here, you ought to start over from the beginning of this study, which can be found here. To remind those of you who have been with us since the beginning of this endeavor, our purpose here is to uncover the morality of the historical Jesus as best we can by studying the gospels of Christ verse-by-verse in painstaking detail. My approach to this study, I hope, could be said to be rooted in grounded dispassionate scientific rationalism.
The impetus for this study is the impending nuclear war, not long off in the future, that will annihilate our species and keep us from enjoying the benefit of intergalactic space travel and the gift of the wonderful expanse of the universe. The impetus for this study is the end of my bloodline and yours, which is inevitable and imminent as long as the major world powers, lead by the United States of America (a so-called "Christian" nation), continue to maintain and upgrade nuclear arsenals large enough to single-handedly destroy life on Earth over and over again. The impetus for this study is the same impetus, I believe, as the impetus for Jesus Christ's Galilean Ministry, that is to say, to literally save the world.
This project has been years in the making, and will be many more years in its accomplishment. This writing is absolutely never-for-profit, and is by default in the "public realm." Anyone anywhere may use these words however they wish.
Last week, we finished up our study of Jesus' "Teaching About Anger" in the Gospel According to Matthew. Today, we will read the first two verses of what is called, in modern times, Jesus' "Teaching About Adultery." This teaching occurs in the context of Christ's famous "Sermon on the Mount," the most focused and detailed moral teaching Christ offers in any of the gospels. We will digest these verses by, as has become our habit, looking at some of the ancient Greek from which they were translated. We will continue by postulating at Jesus' meaning in these verses, and then by expanding our knowledge base on the topic by exploring ancient marital mores both within the Jewish community and in the world at large.
Let us delay no more. Happy reading.
------------------------------
Matthew 5:27 through 5:28
27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’
28 But I say to you, everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
------------------------------
Let's start with the Greek, as per usual.
The Greek Words
The first word of interest in our verses today is "moicheuó," which is a verb that literally and simply means "to commit adultery." Just shortly, we will learn exactly what "adultery" meant to the ancient Greeks, which will help inform our understanding of this word and these verses.
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."
The third critical word here is "epithumeó" which means "to set one's heart on a thing," "to desire," or "to covet." The word "covet" ought to call our minds back to the mitzvot of Moses, and the (depending on who is counting) ninth or tenth commandment: "thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife," which relates directly to Jesus' word's today.
---
Jesus' Meaning
It is next to impossible to miss Christ's meaning here in these verses. Just as he has already doubled-down, so to speak, on the commandment to not kill by saying it is extremely sinful even to be angry with another human, so too is Jesus doubling-down on the commandment to not commit adultery. Here, Jesus speaks to the evil inherent in lusting after another sexual partner when one is already married. He elevates such lust to the level of grave sin.
The parallel between this doubling-down and the doubling-down he did with the prohibition against killing is exact. We will see more of this in the future. This clear pattern will emerge: Jesus Christ believes that the old law is broken. Jesus Christ believes that the old law, which focuses usually on outward action, often allows room for a person to be rotten on the inside while still technically avoiding sinfulness or unlawfulness. Jesus wishes to show his followers the way to dig out the rot.
As we move forward and see Jesus debating with various ancient Jewish elites, we will see him again and again accusing them of attending to the outward trappings of a spiritual life without having their hearts and minds in good moral condition. The teachings he offers here in the Sermon on the Mount are precursors to those debates. He will accuse them of presenting a false front. He will rewrite the law such that one may no longer feel justified in such fakery.
This is one of the very few times that Jesus says anything about sexual morality during his ministry in any of the Gospels. The verses we are studying today are not multiply attested, so it is hard to say for certain, from a scholarly standpoint, that he even spoke these verses. If he did say them, however, the meaning of these verses should be very clear. Jesus wants married folks to focus their hearts and mind and eyes on their chosen partners, and, once married, to avoid considering others in a sexual way.
---
Context
Now for a whirlwind tour of ancient marital traditions. Here we will look at the sexual or marital traditions of the ancient Greeks, the ancient Mesopotamians, and the the ancient Jews in overview in order to better understand how these things would have been understood at Jesus' time.
Mesopotamian Marriage and Adultery
Let's start with some fast facts about ancient Mesopotamian culture as marriage and sexuality pertained to it. It may not surprise you to learn that, in the various ancient Mesopotamian civilizations, marriage was an arranged affair. The importance of marriage in Mesopotamia, from Sumeria down to Persia, was not romantic but rather economic. Whereas in our modern western world marriage is a contract or covenant between the wedded, in ancient Mesopotamia, marriage was usually a contract between the parents or the families of the wedded.
Let's get a taste for ancient Mesopotamian marriage by checking out what Herodotus* was able to glean about Babylonian marriage as it had existed even before his time. Herodotus wrote:
Once a year in each village the young women eligible to marry were collected all together in one place; while the men stood around them in a circle. Then a herald called up the young women one by one and offered them for sale. He began with the most beautiful. When she was sold for a high price, he offered for sale the one who ranked next in beauty. All of them were then sold to be wives. The richest of the Babylonians who wished to wed bid against each other for the loveliest young women, while the commoners, who were not concerned about beauty, received the uglier women along with monetary compensation…All who liked might come, even from distant villages, and bid for the women.Incredible. Can you imagine this? All the unmarried girls of marrying age being rounded up into a veritable meat market to be sold to the highest bidder?
I do not wish to over-impose my modern western values onto this scenario, but the girls must have found this uncomfortable. Especially the "uglier" ones. My mind struggles to imagine a more cruel way to arrange marriages.
Outside of this Babylonian tradition, Mesopotamian marriages were, as I said, generally arranged by the parents and family of the wedded. Often, neither bride nor groom would have had a lot of choice in their partner. According to the "Ancient History Encyclopedia," there is no evidence that ancient Mesopotamian women were ever granted free choice of a marriage partner. The ancient Sumerian word for "love" actually meant, in the literal sense, to "mark off a section of land," indicating the economic nature of the transaction. Marriage in ancient Mesopotamia, as you can see, was a deeply impersonal affair when compared to our modern standards.
As in many ancient cultures, a bride was expected to be a virgin on her wedding night when she first had sexual contact with her new husband. It would have been a great insult to the groom and to the groom's family if she was found to be otherwise, and various repercussions might have been expected.
The marriage itself, aside from unifying families in a socio-economic way, was primarily used to encourage the birth of children. Recall that, in ancient times, one quarter of infants died before the age of one, and perhaps close to half of all children died before reaching adulthood. In order for human populations to stay the same or grow, women had to have as many children as possible. Infant death rates didn't drop significantly anywhere in the world until around the eighteenth century, so, for the whole of human history up until that point, fertility was valued in most cultures above any other natural human trait. That said, in ancient Mesopotamia, if a wife was found to be infertile, a husband was permitted to take a second wife in order to guarantee the continuation of his family. Plural marriage would only have been allowed in Mesopotamia in the case of infertility in a first wife. Interestingly, inability to conceive a child would rarely, if ever, have been attributed to the physiology of the husband, even if he proved unable to father a child with multiple women.
Divorce was uncommon in the ancient Mesopotamian cultures, but it did occur. People tended to stay wedded even if they were unhappy with one another, again because the institution of marriage was simply not designed for the happiness of the bride or the groom. An emotionally unhappy marriage that produced many children and adequately unified two families would have been considered more successful than an emotionally happy marriage that did not produce children. Divorce, in ancient Mesopotamia, could be initiated by a husband or a wife, and was seen as legitimate in the case of infertility in the wife, or abuse and neglect on the part of the husband.
In the case of infidelity on the part of a wife, she might be put to death along with her extramarital lover, although, according to Hammurabi's famous law code, if the husband decided not to have his adulterous wife put to death, then her lover must also have been spared that fate. The use of capital punishment would have been at the behest of the offended husband, and was not necessarily required by law. Infidelity to a marriage would have been seen as generally immoral, whether it be on the part of the husband or the wife. Even the world's very oldest civilization found adultery morally repugnant.
Greek Marriage and Adultery
As in ancient Mesopotamia, marriage in ancient Greece was a matter of public interest. Because of the massive infant and child mortality rate, it was imperative for women to have as many children as possible as fast as possible in order for populations not to fall into decline. This need for constant births was compounded by the fact that the Greek city-states went to war every year, sometimes with a foreign enemy, but, more often, with one another. In Athens, Sparta, and most of the other Greek city-states, military conscription was universal for males. One who had not served in a military capacity could not have been considered a citizen. Every citizen (all of whom were male) would have been obligated to risk their lives at war perhaps several times over in their youth. With the city-states methodically killing one another's young men in bloody combat every year during the war season, the need for births was even more pronounced than it might have generally been in ancient Mesopotamia.
When we consider Greek family dynamics, we must recall the perhaps barbaric way that women were treated in Athens. Women in Athens, and some of the other city-states, were less than second-class citizens. An Athenian woman was not generally permitted to do much of anything except tend to the upkeep of the household and rear children. Athenian women were not allowed into the main common area of their own homes, and only went outside of their own accord if their husband was too poor to afford slaves who would go to the market and the well for him. Athenian women were expected to cover up with veils and long clothing, and were generally treated with disdain.
Spartan women had it much better. Their husbands were perpetually away at war or training for war, so the Spartan woman was left in charge of much more than simple household upkeep. They could move freely about, wear what they wanted, and speak to other people at will. Spartan women were also not forced into marriage nearly as early as Athenian women, allowing them an extended period of relative freedom at the beginning of their lives.
In Greece, a man would have had more choice in his bride than in Mesopotamia, and marriage could be seen as slightly more personal. The Greeks wanted to have children in order to continue their bloodlines and their names, and, importantly, so that they would have survivors to make sacrifices to the gods for them after their death. A childless person, having no one to appeal to the gods on their behalf after their death, might have expected to have a less than ideal afterlife. For this reason, it was not unheard of for ancient Greeks who couldn't have children to adopt orphaned children.
Plural marriage was frowned upon in Greece, but it was not unheard of for a wealthy married man to have concubines or mistresses. Given the wife's permission, the offspring of concubines or mistresses could even become full fledged heirs to their father.
Divorce was allowed in ancient Greece, and could have been initiated by the husband or the wife. The husband could easily divorce his wife by sending her back to her father and repaying the dowry he received at the time of the wedding. The wife, in order to divorce, would need to plead her case before the archon, or ruler, of the city-state.
In Athens, it was illegal for a citizen to stay with an adulterous wife. Because of this strict law, sometimes a husband would attempt to keep adultery on the part of his wife a secret, rather than be obligated to disrupt his household. If a man were to catch his wife in the act of adultery in Athens, it was legal for him to kill the man with whom she laid on the spot. Various forms of public humiliation as punishment for adulterers are recorded in ancient texts throughout Greece. While a wife's extra-marital affair would have always been considered adulterous, a husband could have relations with a prostitute or a slave without having been considered an adulterer.
Jewish Marriage and Adultery
Now let's address the specific context of marriage among Jesus' people.
As in ancient Greece, men in ancient Judah and Israel sometimes had a degree of choice in their marriage partner(s), and marriage could be seen as a contract between the groom and the father of the bride. As a formality, a woman might have been asked to consent to the marriage, but it is not likely that she had true veto power over the arrangement.
According to Genesis 1:28, the God of the Jews instructed his people to "be fertile and multiply," to "fill the earth and subdue it." Thus one might say that the primary purpose of marriage for the Jews, as in most ancient cultures, was to ensure a steady flow of new babies to keep populations from plateauing or declining. It must be noted, though, that the ancient Jews had a sense of romantic love, as is exemplified in the "Song of Songs," wherein the author writes of the romantic and sexual joys between two people who can only be considered to be very in love.
The virginity of a woman at the time of marriage was sacrosanct to the ancient Jews. Deuteronomy Chapter 22 states that if a man finds no evidence of his new wife's virginity on their wedding night, he is to return the wife to the doorstep of her father's house. There, "the men of her town shall stone her to death, because she committed a shameful crime in Israel by prostituting herself in her father's house." To be clear, "evidence of virginity," for the ancient Jews, was a bedsheet soaked in the virginal blood of a new bride on her wedding night. The celebration and display of a bloodied sheet the morning after a wedding is still common in some Muslim communities today.
Plural marriage was allowed for the ancient Jews, and there are over forty important figures in the Old Testament who have multiple wives, including Esau and King Solomon. Plural marriage seems to have declined during the intertestamental period, but there is still evidence of some plural marriage even up to the time of Jesus.
Divorce was permitted by the ancient mitzvot, but had to be initiated by the husband. However, if a husband was found to be in violation of his marital obligations, a woman might have her husband convinced by other men, by violent or monetary coercion, to initiate a divorce. In this way, a woman could get a divorce without being seen as initiating it, through the help of other men in the village.
In ancient Judaism, adultery is strictly defined as intercourse between a married woman and someone other than her husband. If a married man slept with an unmarried woman, this was not technically considered adulterous. In contrast to many ancient and modern societies in which an adulterous woman is seen as being more guilty than the man with whom she has committed the act, ancient Jews found both the man and the woman in an adulterous relationship equally guilty. We see this in Deuteronomy 22:22, as follows:
22 If a man is discovered lying with a woman who is married to another, they both shall die, the man who was lying with the woman as well as the woman. Thus shall you purge the evil from Israel.The prescribed punishment for adulterers in ancient Palestine is among the harshest we know of in the ancient world. By this fact alone, we know that adultery was one of the very worst moral transgressions that an ancient Jew could have committed, and all of the people present at Jesus' Sermon on the Mount would have understood the severity of such a situation.
---
Conclusions
As you can see, the sanctity of marriage was paramount in the ancient near east and Greece across many cultures. To say exactly why all of these ancient cultures valued dedicated, ideally permanent forms of marriage would require a long discussion about human evolution and the prehistoric nature of primate sexuality, as well as a deeper discussion about the economy of ancient life in general. For our purposes, it simply behooves us to understand that everyone listening to Jesus' Sermon on the Mount would have agreed, at least in theory, to the importance of fidelity in marriage. It would not have been a surprise that a spiritual teacher would offer his thoughts on adultery and the sanctity of marriage.
The fact that Jesus tells his followers that looking at a married woman with lust is sinful is an indication that, in his time, he had witnessed just such an act on more than one occasion, and that the people doing this did not think themselves to be in the wrong. When Jesus doubles-down on this portion of the law, he is insisting on a deeper purity for his followers. He wants his followers to live in the spirit of morality, and not just by the letter of morality. This will be a recurring theme, as we've mentioned before, in his debates with the Jewish elites of his time. Jesus, unlike the elites of his time (and ours), believed that morality ought to be internalized, so that right action comes from within, rather than being imposed from without.
As an aside, please note that Jesus says precious little about sexual morality through the course of his ministry. As we will soon learn, Jesus finds divorce to be immoral. As we will also come to know, Jesus sees sexuality as something of a distraction from God or from the spiritual life, and, as we have seen today, Jesus finds adultery abhorrent. Aside from these three concepts, however, Jesus never said anything about sexuality. He certainly never had word-one to say about homosexuality. Any Christian who believes that Jesus Christ spoke out against homosexual relations in humans is wrong. The prohibition against homosexuality found in the Old Testament is one of the many many prohibitions that Jesus chose not to continue when he tore down the old law and replaced it with his new law of love. If anyone anywhere tells you otherwise, send them to me and I will set them "straight," so-to-speak.**
Today's verses are instructional for me as I prepare to be wedded myself to the love of my life. Not only will I remain loyal to my wife, but I will make a constant effort to keep my eyes and heart on her. Jesus style.
Thank you so much for reading. Please share this writing. We'll see you next time for our one-year anniversary.
Love.
-------------------------
* Do I still have to introduce Herodotus? Hopefully not, because I'm going to stop doing it...
** Since Jesus never talks about this, I wasn't sure where we were going to say this. Today seemed like the right time.
* Do I still have to introduce Herodotus? Hopefully not, because I'm going to stop doing it...
** Since Jesus never talks about this, I wasn't sure where we were going to say this. Today seemed like the right time.
-------------------------
To read what's next, click here.
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.
