The Bible and Its Divorce Contradiction

Accord­ing to the Bible, can a per­son get divorced and remar­ry with­out com­mit­ting adul­tery ? Remar­riage after divorce is pro­hib­it­ed because it is adul­tery. Jesus clear­ly says so.

    Mark 10:2 – 5, 9 – 12 : And the Phar­isees came to him, and asked him, Is it law­ful for a man to put away his wife ? tempt­ing him. And he answered and said unto them, What did Moses com­mand you ? And they said, Moses suf­fered to write a bill of divorce­ment, and to put her away. And Jesus answered and said unto them, For the hard­ness of your heart he wrote you this precept…What there­fore God hath joined togeth­er, let not man put asun­der. And in the house his dis­ci­ples asked him again of the same mat­ter. And he saith unto them, Whoso­ev­er shall put away his wife, and mar­ry anoth­er, com­mit­teth adul­tery against her. And if a woman shall put away her hus­band, and be mar­ried to anoth­er, she com­mit­teth adul­tery.“cf. Luke 16:1 – 18 

Hence the log­i­cal nota­tion or form of the pro­hi­bi­tion on remar­riage based on the above verse is :

    (x)(Dx & Rx => Ax)

where D is for divorced,” R is for remar­ried,” and A is for com­mits adul­tery.” It is read, For any­thing x, if x is divorced and x is remar­ried, then x com­mits adul­tery.” This is uni­ver­sal and applies with­out excep­tion to any x, accord­ing to the above quo­ta­tions from Jesus. Whoso­ev­er” means any­one”. Jesus also says this applies for any divorced man and any divorced woman :

Whoso­ev­er shall put away his wife, and mar­ry anoth­er, com­mit­teth adul­tery against her. And if a woman shall put away her hus­band, and be mar­ried to anoth­er, she com­mit­teth adul­tery.” Mark 10:11

Oth­er parts of the Bible also state that if some­one divorces, the per­son is not to remar­ry.See Matthew 5:31 – 32 ; 1 Corinthi­ans 7:10 – 11 and Romans 7:2 – 3

So no one who divorces can remar­ry with­out com­mit­ting adul­tery. But, on the oth­er hand, the Bible also says that not every­one who divorces a spouse and remar­ries is com­mit­ting adultery :

When a man hath tak­en a wife, and mar­ried her, and it come to pass that she find no favour in his eyes, because he hath found some unclean­ness in her : then let him write her a bill of divorce­ment, and give it in her hand, and send her out of his house. And when she is depart­ed out of his house, she may go and be anoth­er man’s wife.“Deuteron­o­my 24:1 – 2

Jesus agrees that you can get divorced and remar­ry as long as you divorce because of fornication :

And I say unto you, Whoso­ev­er shall put away his wife, except it be for for­ni­ca­tion, and shall mar­ry anoth­er, com­mit­teth adul­tery ; and whoso mar­ri­eth her which is put away doth com­mit adul­tery.“Mt. 19:9

But if you can divorce and remar­ry with­out com­mit­ting adul­tery (in case of for­ni­ca­tion), then this implies the following :

    ~[(x)(Dx & Rx => Ax)]

If there is an excep­tion, then the con­di­tion­al can­not apply to any and all things x and it is not the case that who­ev­er divorces and remar­ries com­mits adul­tery. This is a for­mal con­tra­dic­tion, since the Bible, and even just the New Tes­ta­ment, endors­es both sides of the issue :

    (x)(Dx & Rx => Ax) & ~[(x)(Dx & Rx => Ax)]

So the Bible con­tra­dicts itself on whether one can get a divorce and remar­ry with­out com­mit­ting adul­tery. This is a for­mal con­tra­dic­tion sup­port­ed by the Bib­li­cal text. It should be not­ed that New Tes­ta­ment schol­ars are not even sure what Jesus(P) orig­i­nal­ly said on the top­ic of divorce and remar­riage. What we find in the Gospels are a vari­ety of forms of say­ings which were devel­oped at dif­fer­ent times among dif­fer­ent Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ties. D. C. Park­er concludes :

The main result of this sur­vey is to show that a recov­ery of a sin­gle orig­i­nal say­ing of Jesus is impos­si­ble. We have been able to show that some forms of text were devel­op­ments. But it does not fol­low that one of those with which we are left is more orig­i­nal than the oth­ers. The dif­fer­ences between the four pas­sages in Matthew (twice), Mark and Luke are already great. But the devel­op­ment of the tra­di­tion goes beyond that, both in time and in extent. We can see the tra­di­tion being devel­oped right through to the for­ma­tion of the Byzan­tine text.

The quest for a Law in the teach­ing of Jesus can­not be pur­sued in the face of the evi­dence that, for those ear­ly Chris­tians who passed the tra­di­tions to us, there was no law, but a tra­di­tion whose mean­ing had to be kept alive by reflec­tion and rein­ter­pre­ta­tion. What we have is a col­lec­tion of inter­pre­ta­tive rewrit­ings of a tra­di­tion.” D. C. Park­er, The liv­ing text of the Gospels, Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 1997 pp. 92 – 93

And only Allah knows best !Endmark


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10 responses to “The Bible and Its Divorce Contradiction”

  1. Alex Avatar
    Alex

    If we can not trust the New Tes­ta­ment, how can we trust any thing that we don’t have the Oring­i­nal to ?
    Argu­ing over what Jesus orig­i­nal­ly said or not, and not argu­ing over what it is dueteron­amy, is being very biased don’t you think ? Maybe Matthew is right and Deuteron­o­my is wrong. I mean, we don’t have the oring­i­nal books of Moses any­more than we do the books of Matthew, Mark or Luke.

  2. ProfessorManque Avatar
    ProfessorManque

    John there are about 5000 extant ver­sions of the NT, and ALL of them are DIFFERENT, and far from hav­ing any orig­i­nals of the 27 books we copies of copies of copies etc so this is not evi­dence that increas­es our con­fi­dence that we know what the orig­i­nal authors intended.

    Your Pla­to anal­o­gy is man­i­fest­ly inane except to brain­washed doofuses

  3. Roger Avatar
    Roger

    Just some­thing that needs to be con­sid­ered regard­ing Deuteron­o­my 24:1, most Eng­lish trans­la­tions that I am aware of don’t trans­late it then let him write a bill of divorce­ment” but rather and he writes her a cer­tifi­cate of divorce and puts it in her hand”. If the pas­sage reads and he writes her a cer­tifi­cate of divorce” as most Eng­lish trans­la­tions put it, then there is no con­tra­dic­tion at all. Because it does not say the man SHOULD do it.…it’s appar­ent­ly sim­ply talk­ing about what to do in a sit­u­a­tion where the man HAS done that.
    When I study the mat­ter, it real­ly looks like and he writes a cer­tifi­cate of divorce” is the best trans­la­tion. And I should add that it is impor­tant to remem­ber that the King James Ver­sion and oth­er ver­sions are only trans­la­tions of the Hebrew text. When I look at the Hebrew text, it appears that there is no con­tra­dic­tion at all and that the word­ing of then let him write a bill” is not the most lit­er­al, word-for-word translation.

  4. John Avatar
    John

    By the way admin…

    I real­ize that some peo­ple might take pathet­ic” the wrong way…I’m used to using words in some of their old­er and less-pop­u­lar­ized sens­es because they’re more pre­cise. For instance absurd” means irra­tional­ly unlike­ly accord­ing to sta­tis­tics”, for instance, 1/​x while x – >infin­i­ty is called absurd”, prop­er­ly : but absurd”, today, is loaded : so if you will please change pathet­ic” so that I don’t offend peo­ple. Here’s the mod­ern sense : limp’. A lit­tle weird, sure…but it’s like lame” means useless/​hindered, but today it’s used as an insult.

  5. John Avatar
    John

    this argu­ment is pathetic…please think through things…and quote the whole con­texts ; you also need to remem­ber the with­out a cause”…which you don’t cite. Also, Chris­tians aren’t igno­rant that pow­er-strug­gles result­ed in peo­ple try­ing to change the scrip­tures : some doc­u­ments expunge with­out a cause”, some­thing not supris­ing since peo­ple like Augus­tine assert­ed that mar­riage can nev­er be annulled (Con­tra­dict­ing Deuteron­o­my and Jesus Him­self who said except for the cause of adultery”.

    If you want to make an argu­ment you real­ly ought to know what you’re about to say : oth­er­wise you lose all respect in the eyes of those who know what’s going on when they find a demon­stra­tion of noth­ing more than ignorance.

    And mind you, igno­rance isn’t an insult : we’re all igno­rant of something…we just have to put time in and learn about it.

    The whole we don’t real­ly know the orig­i­nal text” argu­ment is one that’s laughable…since there are more man­u­scripts of the NT than any oth­er ancient doc­u­ment, with more con­stant­ly being dis­cov­ered, and demon­strat­ing pre­dictable dif­fer­ences in what are usu­al­ly (by non-believ­ing crit­i­cal schol­ars, even) termed minor” details such as spelling, word-order (which does­n’t mat­ter in Greek most of the time because it uses case end­ings called declen­sions”), and insertions/​deletions which are read­i­ly identified.

    Peo­ple read Pla­to with con­fi­dence : when there are only 4 or so ancient man­u­scripts of it. The NT has thou­sands upon thou­sands, not only of man­u­scripts (min­isu­cles, uncials, etc.) but then papyri, lecionar­ies, ancient quotes, etc… so we’re not alto­geth­er too wor­ried about assailants who try to take such a pre­pon­der­ance of evi­dence and twist it.

    Thanks for the try, though.

  6. jennie Avatar
    jennie

    adul­tery is a crime ! ^_​^

  7. Doug Krueger Avatar

    I am the author of the piece on the divorce con­tra­dic­tion. Some of the for­mat­ting may be a lit­tle off in the for­mal log­ic state­ments. In between the Rx” and the Ax” there should be an arrow indi­cat­ing impli­ca­tion. In some com­put­ers, unfor­tu­nate­ly, this may appear as a ques­tion mark.

    This is a sol­id con­tra­dic­tion in the Bib­li­cal view of divorce and remarriage.

    _​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​
    Doug Krueger
    Fayet­teville, Arkansas

  8. katie Avatar
    katie

    what the hell are you peo­ple on about ?

  9. danny Avatar
    danny

    In fact, New Tes­ta­ment schol­ars aren’t sure what Jesus (P) orig­i­nal­ly said on the top­ic of divorce and remar­riage. What we find in the Gospels are a vari­ety of forms of say­ings which were devel­oped at dif­fer­ent times among dif­fer­ent Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ties. D. C. Park­er concludes :

    The main result of this sur­vey is to show that a recov­ery of a sin­gle orig­i­nal say­ing of Jesus is impos­si­ble. We have been able to show that some forms of text were devel­op­ments. But it does not fol­low that one of those with which we are left is more orig­i­nal than the oth­ers. The dif­fer­ences between the four pas­sages in Matthew (twice), Mark and Luke are already great. But the devel­op­ment of the tra­di­tion goes beyond that, both in time and in extent. We can see the tra­di­tion being devel­oped right through to the for­ma­tion of the Byzan­tine text ?

    The quest for a Law in the teach­ing of Jesus can­not be pur­sued in the face of the evi­dence that, for those ear­ly Chris­tians who passed the tra­di­tions to us, there was — no law, but a tra­di­tion whose mean­ing had to be kept alive by reflec­tion and rein­ter­pre­ta­tion. What we have is a col­lec­tion of inter­pre­ta­tive rewrit­ings of a tradition.”

    [D. C. Park­er, The liv­ing text of the Gospels, Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 1997 pp. 92 – 93]

    There­fore, there is lit­tle point talk­ing about what Jesus (P) said or did not said since we do not even have the orig­i­nal form of the words and there­fore do not know what Jesus (P) orig­i­nal­ly said on this topic.

  10. iwishtobe Avatar
    iwishtobe

    sor­ry. but may i cor­rect u ?

    deuteron­o­my 24:1 – 4
    1 ?When a man takes a wife and mar­ries her, and it hap­pens that she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some unclean­ness in her, and he writes her a cer­tifi­cate of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her out of his house, 2 when she has depart­ed from his house, and goes and becomes anoth­er man?s wife, 3 if the lat­ter hus­band detests her and writes her a cer­tifi­cate of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her out of his house, or if the lat­ter hus­band dies who took her as his wife, 4 then her for­mer hus­band who divorced her must not take her back to be his wife after she has been defiled ; for that is an abom­i­na­tion before the LORD, and you shall not bring sin on the land which the LORD your God is giv­ing you as an inheritance.

    Read the whole thing ! Don’t just stop mid­sen­tence ! The Bible did­n’t say that she may go out and be anoth­er man’s wife. It says that if her sec­ond hus­band dies, he (the first hus­band) can’t mar­ry her again. And if he does, he com­mits aldultery !

    Jesus DID NOT agree that we are allowed to com­mit adul­tery in this :
    ?And I say unto you, Whoso­ev­er shall put away his wife, except it be for for­ni­ca­tion, and shall mar­ry anoth­er, com­mit­teth adul­tery ; and whoso mar­ri­eth her which is put away doth com­mit adul­tery.? (Matt. 19:9)

    WHich sen­tence over there says that we are allowed to com­mit adul­tery?! It just states that if we do the above, we com­mit adul­tery. It does­n’t give us the PERMISSION to do it.

    Hope you do your research (if you did any) before post­ing a blog like this =)

    God bless.

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