Unconvincing: Betrothal Interpretation of Jesus's Divorce Exception Clause

Jesus rejects remarriage, but he makes an exception for fornication (Mat 5:32, 19:9). I respond to those who interpret the exception to permit ending a relationship if a partner is unfaithful during betrothal.

Betrothal View Proponent's Resources:
John Piper: https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/divorce-and-remarriage-a-position-paper
David Pawson: https://www.amazon.com/Remarriage-Adultery-Unless-David-Pawson/dp/0956937691/
Daniel Jennings: https://www.danielrjennings.org/except_for_fornication_version_1.pdf
Sharon Fitzhenry: https://lifelongunion.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/1/6/10162923/jewish_marriage_biblical_divorce_and_remarriage_draft.pdf

Book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FH9YRS7N/
Insta: https://www.instagram.com/divorceyourremarriage/
YouTube: Chris Iverson - YouTube
Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/c-7751594
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61578367894327
Email: DivorceYourRemarriage@gmail.com

Transcript

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Welcome back to the Divorce Your Remarriage podcast. I'm Chris Iverson. And I recently put up a poll on YouTube asking folks who uh follow my content which view they have of the exception clause. I'll explain what the exception clause is in a minute. Which view they have of the exception clause. And 43% of you got it right. We just don't know which 43%. 43% of you agreed with me that the exception clause refers to an adulteress remarriage. That marriage is invalid. So the sex in that marriage would be pornea, would be fornication. That's my view. 43% of you agreed with me. 43% of you disagreed with me. You said it was infidelity during betrothal. So in this video, I'm going to talk about the reasons why I'm not persuaded by the betrothal view. Now, I want to say this folks who have the betrothal view, we're in the same kind of group, and that's important. We don't think that there's this out for adultery, which then kind of begins to open up the door to other scenarios where maybe there's uh an out for other things. So that's important. Like, like it's good that we're on the same team, we're on the same kind of cul-de-sac there. But, you know, when new people come and they're trying to research what the exception clause means and they listen to the mainstream evangelical view that it means infidelity in a marriage, those folks who are open-minded might then come take a look at us because they might look at the New Testament and say, I don't know, it seems like Jesus thinks marriage is permanent. Let me look at what these marriage permanents people have to say. So they're going to come to us and then they're going to hear what we have to say. But if our uh explanation for the exception clause is not as persuasive as possible, they might say, well, the permanence people, yeah, they have some strengths, but the mainstream evangelical side, they have some strengths too. And they may not really come over to our side. A percentage of them will go over to the kind of the mainstream evangelical view. So we want to be as persuasive as possible. So it is kind of important that we figure out what the exception clause means so that we can be persuasive to folks. Okay, so we're just going to do three things. We're going to review the exception clause, we're going to define the betrothal view, and then we're going to analyze the arguments for and against. What is the exception clause? So Jesus famously calls remarriage adultery seven times. He does that in four different places. Twice in the Matthew passages, Jesus includes an exception for the Greek word pornea, which is typically translated in English fornication. And so in Matthew 5.32, this exception permits a man to divorce a woman when pornea is present. In Matthew 19, 9, this exception permits a man to divorce a woman when pornea is present, and probably also to remarry. I would say also to remarry, but that's disputed. So next we're going to talk about interpretations of the exception clause. So the main interpretations of the exception clause I have here, there's the betrothal view, that's sex before marriage, premarital sex. That's the betrothal view that we're going to be discussing here. There's the remarriage view, that's my view. That's sex in an invalid marriage. The idea there is a man married, for example, a divorced woman. She is still married in God's eyes to her first husband. So his marriage to the divorced woman is an invalid marriage. And the sex they have would be porneed, beforenication, between the two of them because they're not married. It's also adultery against her first husband. And I have a whole video where I go through, there's a ton of evidence actually for this view. And I have a whole video on that. It's my most popular view, uh video on uh YouTube. And there's the incest view, which is similar, but the idea is that, like a man married his sister, for example, that'd be in the incest. And so then so the sex that they have would be a type of pornea, would be a type of sexual immorality. And this is a view that's popular in uh Catholic apologetic circles. Then there is the adultery view. Idea is two people are married. Let's say the wife cheats, she commits adultery against him, and then so he's the victim now, and so he's able to divorce and or remarry. There's a disagreement about whether or not he can remarry, and that has to do with how you read Matthew 19. I think you would have to read Matthew 19.9 to be able to say that whatever the exception clause allows you to divorce for, it also allows you to remarry for. But people dispute that. And the early church didn't view it that way. The early church thought you could divorce for adultery, but you couldn't remarry for adultery. Uh, but the mainstream evangelical view is that you can divorce and you can remarry because of adultery. And we inherited that from Luther and Calvin, and it was enshrined in the Westminster Confession of Faith. All right, and then there is the exclusion view, and I'm I'm kind of putting two views together under this, uh, under this one. So all these other ones say, well, it says accept for pornea. So we just got to figure out what pornea means. But the exclusion view says the real issue is the word accept. It doesn't really mean accept. And what it means is not even for adultery, for example. Or they would say, we're just saying we're just gonna set aside or ignore the question of what happens if somebody is unfaithful during a marriage. We're just gonna ignore that scenario for the purpose of the exception clause. So again, I don't think this view is very persuasive, and I have a video on that. Okay, so we're gonna further define betrothal next, uh, the betrothal view. But uh on here uh on your screen, I've got Matthew 5.32 and Matthew 199 there that you can take a look at, and I have the exception clause highlighted so you can see, you know, how the whole thing is put together. All right, the betrothal view defined. Now, first we're gonna talk about what uh what is not required for somebody to have the betrothal view. Technically, somebody who could have a betrothal view and they could believe that 1 Corinthians chapter 7 and verse 15, where Paul writes that a believer is not enslaved when an unbelieving spouse departs. Uh, technically, somebody who has a betrothal view could say that the uh believer is now free to be able to go marry somebody else from 1 Corinthians 7.15. I think that's a totally wrong interpretation. I don't think I've ever even seen somebody who holds the betrothal view who thinks who interprets 1 Corinthians 7.15 that way that allows a believer to remarry after being abandoned. But technically, there's nothing in the betrothal view that forces them to have a particular interpretation of 1 Corinthians 7.15. Also, the betrothal view does not require a particular uh perspective on what to do if somebody is in an adulterous remarriage. John Piper holds the betrothal view and does not think people need to divorce their adulterous remarriages. Now, I think this question is more important than the exception question. This is the most important question. What do you do if you're an adulterous remarriage? Because that's going to cost a person their soul if they die in a state of adultery. Um and what do you think of the exception clause is also important, but it's of secondary importance compared to this. Also, somebody could hold the betrothal view and they could say that a man who's a polygamist should stay with his extra wives. Now, I don't think that. I think that's like absurd. And usually whatever someone's view is on adulterous remarriages, if those need to be continued or not, usually that highly correlates with their view on polygamous marriages. The betrothal view does not require somebody to have a particular view on modern engagements. What we have is our engagements. People are dating, then they get engaged, and they get married. And at the time of Jesus, though, what they were doing is they would get betrothed and then they would get married. So the modern engagement, some people would say it is subject to the same rules as betrothal, other people would say it's not subject to the same rules as betrothal because it's like a different uh concept or whatever. Okay. So what is the betrothal view then? The betrothal view is there's kind of two kinds. One of them is if a man or woman cheats during betrothal, they can end the betrothal. That's the Westminster Confession of Faith. And then some people would say also they could end the marriage. So how this would work is a man and a woman are betrothed, and let's say that the uh woman cheats during the betrothal, and the man finds out that he could break off the betrothal, right? So that is one view. Another view is they are betrothed and then she cheats, then they get married, and then he finds out soon after they're married, oh, she cheated, and then he could divorce the marriage. But now a lot of people don't have that second one where they think you can divorce the marriage because it goes against the whole like marriage permanence, like whole concept. Okay, and then the second view, the second betrothal view is uh if a woman, not a man, only a woman, so it's a gendered rule, if a woman, not a man, has premarital sex at any time, at any time, so during the betrothal, before the betrothal, whatever, um, but she misleads the man to think she's a virgin. She claims she's a virgin, turns out not a virgin, right? And if it's only the woman, then he can end uh the betrothal andor the marriage. Usually, again, it they would try they're talking about ending the betrothal. That's how they that's how they would view it. So now let's we're gonna look at arguments for and against betrothal views. First, uh, often people who are making the betrothal argument, they're gonna try to limit the relevance of Matthew 5.32, and they're gonna say correctly that when the exception applies for Matthew 5.32, it all it does is it allows for divorce, not remarriage. So if you read Matthew 5.32, the conduct the man is is doing is just divorce. He is not remarrying in this moral formulation. It's it says, uh, everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery. So if that man never remarried, nevertheless he still, quote, makes her commit adultery. So the only conduct he's doing is divorcing here. And so the exception clause would only permit him to divorce in the exceptional scenario. So they just want to focus on limiting the relevance of Matthew 532. Again, that doesn't really tell you what the exception clause means. Again, if you look, if you look at the exception clause, it just says accept on the ground of sexual immorality. It doesn't tell you who is committing sexual immorality, it doesn't tell you what kind of sexual immorality, and it doesn't tell you when the sexual immorality occurred. Was it before the marriage? Was it during the marriage? Doesn't tell you that. All right, also, people who have the patrol of you are going to make some pro-permanence arguments. And I think a couple of them are stronger pro-permanence arguments, same ones that I use, and a few of them are weaker pro-permanence arguments. The first strong pro-permanence case is that in Matthew 19, 3 through 8, Jesus is making a no exceptions argument. He's building an argument, and then he comes to his final conclusion in verse 9, and then he's supposed to make an exception. So that would make the conclusion to not follow the premise, the argument. So that seems incorrect. It seems like we should interpret verse 9 where it has the exception clause to not be like a real exception. So that's the first strong pro-permanence argument. The second strong pro-permanence argument is that Jesus rejects the Deuteronomy chapter 24, verse 1, Mosaic permission for divorce. So now in Deuteronomy chapter 24 and verse 1, Moses was writing a law there. It goes from verse 1 through verse uh 4. And in verse 1, he talks about one of the conditions uh for the prohibition in verse 4. And one of the conditions is a man who divorces his wife, he gives her a certificate of divorce for a matter of uncleanness. And this was understood to mean that this is being tolerated, that it's it's tolerable during the old covenant period for a man to give his wife a certificate of divorce for a matter of uncleanness. That's how it was how it was understood. And so the Pharisees asked Jesus, well, what about this Mosaic? You're saying no exceptions. Okay, but Moses had a certificate of divorce. What do we do with the certificate of divorce? And then Jesus in Matthew 19, verse 8, he rejects the Mosaic permission for divorce. He says, Well, that was allowed for your hard-heartedness, but from the beginning it was not so. So the so the Pharisees are looking at the regulation, but Jesus is not looking at the regulation. Jesus is looking at in the beginning in Genesis. And so and so this is a real flaw in the mainstream evangelical view, because the mainstream evangelical view is Jesus had a similar view to a rabbi named Shemai. And Shemai, though, premised his whole view on Deuteronomy chapter 24. Jesus isn't premising anything on Deuteronomy chapter 24. If you read Matthew 19, Jesus is premising it on in the beginning. Jesus doesn't agree with Shemai. Jesus doesn't even agree with Shemai on where to start, let alone on what the conclusion is. So Jesus does not agree with Shemai. Jesus agrees with, I would say, the Damascus document, which is a third one. So it's not Rabbi Hillel or Rabbi Shemai that Jesus agreed with. It's not Pharisee one over Pharisee two. It's the Essenes in the Damascus document. Again, I have a whole video where I explain all of that. But here's the point here Jesus rejects the Deuteronomy chapter 24 in verse 1, allowance for divorce. And he does that actually in three places: Matthew 5, 31, 32, where he says, but I say to you, he says, you know, you've heard certificate of divorce, but I say to you, that's so that he's contradicting the certificate of divorce practice. And then Matthew 19, 7 and 8, as we just mentioned, and in Mark 10, verses 4 through 9, Jesus says something similar there. So I think those are strong arguments for a pro-permanence position, mainly because they're in the same context as the exception clause. So for Jesus to be making a no exception kind of argument in these two different ways, and then he has an exceptional statement, you have to understand the exceptional statement in the context of the whole argument that he's making. And that would make you come to the conclusion it's not a real exception, not like for adultery. Okay, then there are some weaker pro-permanence arguments. We have that we have two exceptions, we have a bunch of places where we don't have exceptions. And so they say, well, if you go to harmonize those two, when you harmonize them, it should be that there are no exceptions. Um, but I don't think that really works because you can't have a rule in one place and an exception in another place. So uh, you know, in five places, Jesus moral formulations they can on the subject may contain no exceptions. I agree with that. And Paul's paraphrase of Jesus' teaching in 1 Corinthians 7, 10 and 11, again, no exceptions. And then Paul, when he says a wife is bound to her husband as long as he lives, again, no exception. So you have a lot of no exceptions stuff. And then when you go to harmonize that with the exception passage, you know, it wouldn't be the case that like you can have an exception in one place and a general rule in another place. So for uh let me give you an example of this. So in Genesis chapter 9 and verse 6, the rule is stated there that you know people shouldn't kill other people, basically. But that so that would make it sound like you could never do capital punishment, that would make it sound like you could never have a just war. But of course, we know there is just war and we know there was capital punishment later on. So it would seem like there are exceptions, they just weren't included in Genesis 9.6. Now that now, here's where it gets a little bit different. This is why these pro-permanence arguments are a little bit stronger than maybe they might uh look at the surface. And that is Genesis 9, 6, for example. That's a rule that's contained in the first five books of Moses. And who wrote that? Moses and maybe some of his close uh friends there. Moses was there when he wrote that, so they knew what the exception was because Moses is telling them as you know, he writes this, and also it's in the first five books. So the people who are getting the first five books, they're getting all the books. They're not getting, you know, just one book over whatever. But when it comes to the these pro-permanence arguments, the Corinthians they didn't have Matthew. So if Paul is not giving an exception, the Corinthians don't have an exception. And Matthew was probably written after Corinthians, but that's another story. Okay, and then the Romans, again, they don't have Matthew, right? And people who have the Gospel of Mark, they probably don't have the Gospel of Matthew. So that's a little bit different than the Mosaic situation I'm talking about. So that's what makes these a little bit stronger. But again, I just think I would just focus on these first two pro-permanence arguments. I think those are stronger. But all this does, this doesn't actually prove anything with regards to the patrol view at all. These pro-permanence arguments argue against allowing for remarriage, but it doesn't tell you which of the permanence views on the exception clause are correct. All right, so now we're gonna get into you know some of the actual arguments that argue in favor of the actual patrol view. And one argument is that only Matthew has the exception clause, right? Matthew 5 and Matthew 19, and it has the Joseph and Mary kind of history there. And the Joseph and Mary history is in Matthew chapter one. So there what happens is Joseph and Mary are betrothed. Joseph finds out Mary is pregnant. He thinks, oh, she had sex with another guy. And so then he's going to divorce her. Now, wait a minute, wait a minute. Why are we using the word divorce if they're not married? They're betrothed, right? Well, that's how the words were used. When people were betrothed, they'd call them husband, they'd call them wife, they would get a divorce from the betrothal if they were going to end the betrothal. So that's how the words were used at that time. That's not how we use those words, but that's how they were the words were used at that at that time. So people would say, oh, look, Matthew chapter one, it's got this, it got this information in here. And so when Jesus is using the exception clause in Matthew 5 and Matthew 19, he's saying that Joseph was just. He was, it was permissible for him to want to divorce his betrothed wife, suspecting her of having committed fornication, which of course she did not commit fornication. The obvious problem with this is that's a nice, that's a nice theory, but not there's no connective tissue that connects the story with Joseph and Mary and Joseph thinking about divorcing Mary over to Matthew 5 or Matthew 19. There's nothing that connects those two. So that has to be imposed on the text from the outside, from the person who has the patrol of you, because there's nothing in the text that connects those two. And so this raises a whole question about hermeneutics, about interpreting the scripture. Under what situations can you do something like this? And I just think you need to have something in the context of Matthew 5 and Matthew 19 to tell you it references back to Matthew chapter one. It's not sufficient to say, well, this plausibly fits. That's not that's not like a good enough way to interpret. I think you need something in the context of Matthew 5 or Matthew 19 that joins together these concepts. And if you don't have that, then I don't think you can come to a betrothal conclusion, which you're really just making like an argument from silence there, because there is no connective tissue that connects like the you know, this fact over to the conclusion that therefore the exception clause is for betrothal. There's nothing that connects those two. So here's another argument for the betrothal view. They'll say, well, you know, only Matthew has the exception clause, as we mentioned, which is true, and it was written to a Jewish audience, and they'll say, you know, betrothal uh was treated similar to marriage. So here, what's the what the work that's being done here is it's saying, we know nothing in Matthew 5 or nothing in Matthew 19 says anything about betrothal specifically. But it uses the word pornea, and they're talking to a Jewish audience. And so now what we're going to do is instead of having a contextual clue in the text that tells you this is about sex during betrothal, instead of that, because we don't have that, instead, what we're gonna do is we're gonna substitute the Jewish mind, the way Jewish people thought at the time of Jesus. And then every time we you we hear somebody say, Well, there's no, there's nothing in the text that says that, they said, Oh, well, if you were Jewish, you would know at that time. And so they're trying to import in all of these thoughts into the Jewish mind. And so it becomes just a catch-all for like, well, if we lack evidence, that's okay. We'll just say the Jewish mind, this is what they would have automatically thought Jesus said. And that is insufficient to just kind of wish cast into the Jewish mind all of these different thoughts for the theory, which you need to show, you need to demonstrate that they actually had these thoughts, not just presume that they did. Because again, that's just an argument from silence. Now, I agree, yes, they had betrothal, but that does not mean when they hear the word fornication in a passage talking about divorce and remarriage, that would then trigger them to think about this whole network and complicated thing about betrothal and ending a betrothal. So you would have to show that that's what they would have thought. So again, it's an argument from silence. And so, and so let's let's point out some counterpoints to these here. So, first of all, Romans chapter seven is also written to a Jewish audience. It's to those who know the law, and yet it has no exceptions uh fornication there. First Corinthians chapter seven discusses betrothal starting in verse 25, and yet it has no exceptions when you go to verse 10 and 11, where Paul paraphrases what Jesus taught on divorce and remarriage. So the fact that it has betrothal starting in verse 25 tells us that they practice betrothal there. So you think, oh, well, if they have betrothal, we need to insert this kind of exceptional situation in verses 10 and 11, but Paul's not doing that. And the last one here is that betrothal and marriage, they use similar terms. That's true, but they were clearly distinct stages. So it's true they use husband and wife, and they use divorce, they use those terms, but they were clearly distinct stages. In 1 Corinthians chapter 7, verse 25 through 28, it says that after a betrothal has ended, a man or woman can marry somebody else. Well, that is definitely not the New Testament teaching on divorce and remarriage, but it is the New Testament teaching on ending in betrothal and then marrying somebody else. So they're different, the nature of these things is very different. So the idea that betrothal was treated similar to marriage, yeah, well, well, except when you get to the New Testament, you can end a betrothal and you can marry somebody else. But if you end a marriage and you marry somebody else, that's adultery. So these were definitely distinctly different in their nature. Betrothal wasn't like marriage light. All right, so here's another argument in favor of the betrothal view. So they'll look back to Deuteronomy chapter 22 and 13 through 21 contains a law. And this law executes a woman uh who claimed to be a virgin, but is determined not to be a virgin after she's married. So and so they say that Jesus applies that law in the exception clause. All right, so here's some problems with this situation. Nothing in Matthew 5 or Matthew 19 references the Deuteronomy 22 law, nothing at all. We just have to like impose that on the text. Even if Jesus was bringing Deuteronomy chapter 22 into the exception clause, nothing in Matthew 5 or Matthew 19 signals Jesus is changing Deuteronomy 22 from requiring death to requiring or permitting divorce. So, yes, now I understand the Jews at the time of Jesus, they did not have government control because they were occupied by the Romans and the Romans permitted the Jews to have some degree of political autonomy. But one thing they could not do was sentence somebody to death. That's of course why the Jews had to go to uh Pontius Pilate to get him to get him to execute Jesus, to crucify Jesus. They couldn't do it themselves. So I understand that if Jesus thought, well, they should continue this capital punishment policy from Deuteronomy 22, that he wouldn't be able to say that because they didn't have the political ability to do that. And so then uh the next thing over would be to divorce. So if you wanted to apply Deuteronomy 22, I understand he would have to switch it from death to divorce. I get that. But here's my point you would think there'd be something in the text to explain, explain that. And there's nothing in there. So so we we have nothing in there to say this is about Deuteronomy 22 at all. And we have nothing in there that kind of signal this switch over from capital punishment to divorce. And the third problem, of course, is that this was Deuteronomy 22 was a gendered law. It only applied if the woman was not a virgin, it did not apply if the man was not a virgin uh in the Old Testament. And so it's odd to think that we would have we would import this kind of gendered provision into the New Testament. Um, because that contradicts like the background reason that we see everywhere that the rules for divorce and remarriage are not gendered. So if you look at you know Matthew 5, 32A and Matthew 19, 9, the genders are flipped. If you look at Mark 10, 11, and 12, the genders are flipped. Luke 16, 18 again, flipped. And in 1 Corinthians 7, the whole chapter they're flipping it. And why is that? Because people were accustomed to thinking the moral law is gendered. For example, a man could hand his wife a certificate of divorce, but she couldn't hand him a certificate of divorce. So they understood the Old Testament law to be gendered, but now with now when you get into the New Testament, it's not gendered in these same ways. So it would be odd to consider that Jesus is bringing in this kind of government law from Deuteronomy 22 with a capital punishment and all that that's gendered into the moral law when that contradicts this kind of background concept that the moral law with when it with respect to divorce and remarriage is not gendered. All right, so here's another pro-betrothal argument. They'll say the marriage between God and his church is in the betrothal stage now and it isn't completed until like the marriage supper of the Lamb. And there is a rich analogy like this in the scripture, but that doesn't mean Jesus was talking about betrothal in the exception clause in Matthew chapter five and Matthew chapter 19. There's lots of different analogies and allegories going on in the scripture that are rich and beautiful, but that does not tell us what the exception clause specifically means in Matthew 5 or Matthew 19. Again, you need something in the context to tell you what it meant. So here's another argument in favor of the betrothal view. And this has to do with the Greek word uh pornea. And this is a pivotal part of the betrothal argument. So they'll say that they'll focus on the fact that pornea, not moikea, moikea was for adultery. Pornea, not moikea, is the term in the exception clause. That is true. It is the word for fornication, it is not the word for adultery. And therefore, they say it must be referring to premarital sex. So let's take a look at this claim. In addition to premarital sex, I believe that pornea can refer to adultery, incest, homosexual conduct, and sex in an invalid marriage. So I have a few questions for my friends who have the betrothal view. I'd love to get your thoughts in the comment section. Tell me what you think about these three questions. The first one is this if incest is excluded from the definition of pornea, then if a betrothed woman had sex with her brother, does the exception apply? That's my first question. Second question If homosexual conduct is excluded from the definition of pornea, if a betrothed woman committed a lesbian act, does the exception apply? If pornea cannot be adultery in any scenario, then if the betrothed woman has sex with a married man, does the exception apply? And I think the answer to two or probably all three of these questions is going to be yes, the exception applies. I think you're gonna have to say that uh incest could be a meaning of pornea and that adultery could be a meaning of pornea. All right, so next we're gonna look at evidence that fornication was used to refer to sex in an invalid marriage. All right, so one of the ways you figure out what a term meant at the time is by looking at how people use the term at the time. We have, and so we have the use of the word fornication in the Damascus document that says that a man shall be caught in fornication twice by taking a second wife while the first is alive. And so the Damascus document here premises its view on Genesis, the same passage that Jesus premises his view on. And the conclusion in the Damascus document was that a remarriage while the first spouse is alive is fornication. And this is written in Hebrew, so it's the Hebrew word for fornication, but it's the same concept going on. They're speaking more than one language, they're writing in more than one language during the time of Jesus. Additionally, we have the Pharisees, right? And the Pharisees, their religious descendants, wrote something called the Talmud. And uh the Talmud purports to include uh the views of the Pharisees. Some of these views were at the time of Jesus, some of them were a little bit later, some of them many of them were uh before the time of Jesus. And one of these uh passages in the Talmud uses the word fornication to refer to sex within an invalid remarriage. And I have that here. The scenario is a man and woman are married. The man leaves. She thinks he died, so she marries another man, but then her first husband comes back. What do we do? And so in the Talmud it says she needs to get two divorces, one from each of the husbands. Now, why the first husband? Well, the first husband she needs a divorce from because Hillel, which was the who's the big Pharisee guy, he was the big rabbi, he said that if a woman cheated on her husband, that he must divorce her. Now, I don't think that's true. Uh Hillel was wrong. Okay, but that was his view. So he must divorce her. So that's why she she married the second guy, so that constitutes adultery. So then the first husband must divorce her. Why does the second husband have to divorce her? He has to divorce her because she married him while she was already married to somebody else. So that's an invalid marriage. And so then somebody, of course, asks the question wait a minute, wait a minute. If it's an invalid marriage, why would you need to divorce? You can't divorce an invalid marriage. Why would you need to do that? And the answer in the Talmud is that they would get a divorce for the invalid marriage for good record keeping so that down the road somebody doesn't get a misimpression that she's still married or the second guy or something like that. Now, here's the part that's important for us it refers to the sex within the invalid marriage. I have it highlighted here. The English word that's translated in this particular translation of the Talmud is licentious, but I have the Hebrew word also highlighted there, and that's the word zanute. And if you look that up, you'll see that that word means fornication. It's the same word being used in the Damascus document. So the idea is a man uh who marries uh a woman who's already married, their marriage is a fake marriage, it's an invalid marriage, and the sex they have in that invalid marriage is fornication. Now it's fornication, even though she is married, she commits fornication with her second husband. She's not a prostitute. She's not a prostitute. She thinks genuinely that her first husband is dead. She thinks she's in a valid marriage. It's not being called fornication because it's prostitution. The word pornea uh has a lot of prostitution, kind of root meanings to it. But in this case, there's no prostitution going on at all. So she doesn't, she's not prostituting. He doesn't think she's a prostitute, she doesn't think she's a prostitute. It's adultery, definitely, because she's married and she's now having sex with a man with whom she has an invalid marriage with. But it uses the word fornication to refer to their sex. And the and the reason for that is it's highlighting the fact that the two of them are not married. That's the reason why I think it's using the word fornication there. I think it's also why the Damascus document is using the word fornication. And so this is part of my argument as to why I think uh fornication in Jesus' exception clause is referring to an invalid marriage. This is a way this term was used by the Essenes in the Damascus document. They're the third largest religious group at the time of Jesus. And the Pharisees here in the Talmud, they were the largest religious group. So the largest and the third largest both are using the word fornication to refer to sex in an invalid marriage. So my point is that is a meaning of the word fornication in the Jewish divorce and remarriage uh debate. The idea that pornea must only refer to premarital sex, and therefore it must be referring to sex within a uh during a betrothal period is just incorrect. Also, early church writers also use fornication to refer to invalid marriages. So here we have Clement of Alexandria, and he says, but to put to shame and to discourage those inclined to contract a second marriage, the apostle appropriately uses language and says at once, quote, every other sin is external to the body, but he who commits fornication sins against his own body. Irenaeus says something similar here. Now, people will say, well, the extant writings, the writings we have from Irenaeus were ones that were translated into Latin. We don't have the original ones. Yes, that's true, but they knew the difference between the word adultery and they knew the and fornication in both Latin and in the original language he wrote in, which was likely Greek. So when Irenaeus writes this here, and we have uh Latin, uh, the best evidence we have is that he uses the word fornication. And these are not the only two. There's other people who say the same thing who refer to a adulterous remarriage, the sex within that as fornication. So here's what Irenaeus says. He says, Our Lord compassionating that erring Samaritan woman, this is the woman at the well, who did not remain with one husband, but committed fornication by contracting many marriages. Then we have Sirach, chapter 23. And now this was written in the BC era, this is during the intertestamental period between Malachi and Matthew. And here's what it says Thus shall it go also with the wife that leaveth her husband and bringeth in an heir by another. For first she hath disobeyed the law of the most high, and secondly, she hath trespassed against her own husband, and thirdly, she hath played the whore in adultery and brought children by another man. This is a writing about a hundred and sixty-ish years before we have Jesus using the word fornication in Matthew 5 and Matthew 19. So it's about 132 BC, and this is a translation from Hebrew to Greek, and we can see just how the words were used by people at the time. And I have highlighted here a version of Moichea and Pornea there, and it's talking about the same conduct. So she has sex with a man other than her husband, and that sex is called fornication and adultery. So that means it is possible for a particular act to be both those at the same time. So people who say that pornea can never be adultery, I Syrac contradicts that uh perspective. So if a woman who was or is married goes to another man, it's pornea, and that's consistent with consistent with my view that adulterous remarriage view of the exception clause. Okay, so now I have a little diagram here to help us understand uh the different options here. So I have a little diagram here with yellow and blue, and yellow is fornication and blue is uh adultery here. So there's three options. The first option with these words is I think unlikely, and that is that adultery is a type of fornication. So fornication is the main category, and adultery is just a subset of that. And so that would mean that every time the word adultery is used, it's a type of fornication. It's not possible to do so for somebody to commit adultery, that's not fornication. So that's one view. Now I think this is unlikely because you would never need to say both words fornication and adultery. And yet we do see that in lists where it will talk about like the works of the flesh or these or whatever. And so it'll have fornication as one of the uh one of the sins, and it'll have adultery as a different sin in the same list. And so you would never need to do that if adultery was just a subset of fornication. So here's the second option. I think this is the most likely option, and that is that uh the same act can sometimes be fornication and adultery. For example, a single person with a married person, and they're both really committing adultery against the first spouse, but the sex between them is fornication. So I think the same act can be both. We just saw that with with Sirac. Now, here's what I think is not possible. I do not think it's possible that fornication and adultery can never be used to describe the same conduct. I don't think that's I don't think that's correct. I think there are some occasions, at least some occasions, where fornication and adultery can be used to describe the exact same conduct. Now, here's the other thing we need to understand. A lot of this adultery, fornication uh discussion, uh, you know, what exactly are the limits of those words, uh treats language as though it was like engineered in a lab and it's a mathematical formula, but it's not math. Language is not math. Language is it's flexible and it gets used in different ways. And so I'm just gonna give you an example from the English language. If I go to the store and I buy two apples, that's in the plural apples. If I buy one apple, that's in the singular apple. But if I buy zero apples, we're back to the plural. This doesn't make any sense. That's because language is not engineered, it's not, it's not a mathematical formula, right? So, you know, if if you know 2,000 years from now, somebody, you know, reads something that I wrote and I said zero apples, they're gonna say, oh, he must have meant 10 apples because it's in the plural. And so the zero can't, you know, doesn't match with the apples. And so we must have some manuscript problem. Well, no, that's just how language was used at the time. And people 2,000 years from now don't know that, and they're trying to apply like some kind of mathematical formula on something that is by its nature, language is not a mathematical formula. Again, it's not engineered. Now, this idea that language is not math is going to make some people, it's gonna make their blood pressure go up and give them a bunch of anxiety. Well, we can't read anything if it's not math and all that. No, no, you can definitely read stuff and understand things, but what you have to do is you have to reduce how much emphasis you put on like the Greek definition or the Hebrew definition of a word and like its tense and its mood and all that kind of stuff. That's not doing as much work as maybe you think it is. What's doing more work is the neighborhood in which that word is used. So there's there's a whole passage there. Here's a word that's being used, and you can understand that word by the words around it, that a lot of language is understood relationally to other words in the context. For example, in the Old Testament, when it talks about idolatry, sometimes it will use the word adultery. Well, it's not actually talking about sex, it's talking about idolatry. But how would you know that? You don't know it from the meaning of the Hebrew word. You know it from its relationship to other words in the context. And so context is going to matter a lot more than trying to apply some kind of mathematical rigid formula on the meanings of words that change over time and uh and don't always follow some kind of precise set of rules. All right, so here's another objection. People will say, well, translators use the word fornication, an exception clause, at least certainly in the older translations. In the newer translations, they use the word fornication less. But we should trust the translators since they're the experts, right? Well, the response I would give to that is Webster's 1828 dictionary, because it defines fornication this way: it says the incontinence or lewdness of unmarried persons, male or female, also the criminal conversion conversation of a married man with an unmarried woman. So here in fornication, Webster says a married man with an unmarried woman. Now, there is an author who writes on divorce and remarriage, uh, Sharon uh Fitzhenry, and she says, and I'll reference her later on uh here in this video also, but she says she tries to discredit the Webster 1828 dictionary, and he's like imposing that, and she uses a bunch of older dictionaries and stuff. Here's the challenge. A lot of older dictionaries, they had like the most common use for a word, or they had like the way this word is used in the law, and the law has like very technical meanings to it or whatever. And um what and so what we want to do is we want to figure out what do people who write dictionaries, when they do it well, what do they do to figure out what the meaning of the word is? And the thing they do is they go back and look at how that word was used in the past, which is the stuff that we already previously looked at. So going to the dictionary to try to going to some old dictionaries to try to overcome the way the word was actually used in the Damascus document, in the Talmud by the early church writers is not a good way to argue this because the place where the dictionary writers would go to are these writings like the Damascus document, the Talmud, et cetera. All right, so this is another dictionary. This is Garner's Modern English Usage. And ignore the word modern here. I mean, it is it is a more recent dictionary, but uh this Garner, he's really smart. This is put out by Oxford. He was actually a friend of Justice Antonin Scalia, Supreme Court, late Supreme Court Justice. Uh, and that's where I learned about the Garner's uh dictionary here. And uh Scalia, as you may know, really cared a lot about what the text say, what did the what were the words used? And he's really zeroed in on the exact, precise words that were used in legal texts. And so he needed a good dictionary. And so, and so he he found Garner and he liked Garner a lot. And under the adultery section for this particular uh dictionary, this is and this dictionary, by the way, what what's in what's good about it is it doesn't just give you like the normal definitions, it gives, it goes through a lot more explanation of the word. This is why people really like his dictionary. And so under adultery, he says uh fornication often implies that neither party is married, but it may also refer to the act of an unmarried person who has sex with a married person. And so we see that in Garner's modern English. Okay, so now I'm not the only person who thinks that pornea can also be used to refer to adultery. So, for example, uh Daniel R. Jennings wrote a book called Except for Fornication. And in there on page 53, he says that pornea can be used to describe prostitution, even in the case of a married woman. Pornia can be used for a married woman. So it's adultery and fornication at the same time. Uh Jennings says that in page 53. And uh David Pawson, he had the Patrol of View, and he wrote in his book uh that he recommends Jennings' book as an excellent piece of research. That doesn't mean that Pawson necessarily agreed with this particular statement, but uh Pawson did uh endorse Jennings' book in that in that sense. All right, now compare this with a quote out of uh Sharon FitzHenry's uh book. She has a book and you can find it online for free. She said in there, it was the maral status of the woman that determined whether the sin was fornication or adultery. Okay, so in other words, if the woman was single, it was fornication, not adultery. If the woman was married, then the sex was adultery, right? So it was the maral status of the woman that mattered. She says that in page 50 22 and then something similar in page 52. Though if you look at pages 38 and 39, she argues that both the man and the woman need to be single. So there's a question here: does it just the woman needs to be single or the woman and the man that need to be single in order for sex to be pornea? However, however she defines it, her essential premise is this a sin is never fornication and adultery. That's her that's her essential premise. So here are my questions for people who have the patrol of view, and I want and just think of think through these scenarios. Are these sins fornication, adultery, or both? A single woman has sex with a married man, single prostitute has sex with a married man. Pornea was originally used or focused on uh the sex of like temple prostitute people. So it'd be these women who are near like temples of worship or whatever for uh idols, and then there'd be sex and whatever, and they'd pay her. And so, anyways, it was had to do with a lot of prostitute type stuff. So then if it had to do with a lot of prostitute type stuff, what are you gonna do when you have a prostitute and a married man? Which word are we gonna use, or we or would we say that both words would apply? A married prostitute, this is this is Jennings' situation, has sex with uh a man, say he's a single man or say he's a married man, which word would you say applies? I think both words apply. A betrothed woman who has sex with a married man. So again, we had single woman, we had a single prostitute, and now we have a betrothed woman uh has sex with a married man. A man divorces and then he marries a single woman. So we know that if a man divorces and remarries, he commits adultery. Jesus says it seven times in the New Testament. Well, if a man divorces and he marries a single woman, that's an invalid marriage, right? So she is not married and she's having sex with a married man. So Jesus calls that adultery seven times. But if it's the marital status of the woman that matters, then you'd think you'd think that's also fornication, which it is, which is my view. I think their sex is both fornication and adultery. That's why Jesus can refer to the remarriage as adultery seven times in the New Testament. And then in the exception clause, he's referring to the same sexual act as fornication. So here are a couple more quotes from FitzHenry. And the reason I bring this up again is uh Sharon's great. Uh, we're on the same team here, we're against adulterous remarriages and all that. But I just want to bring this up because her book is popular in the permanent circles, and we need to like look at arguments for and against all the different views so we can be as persuasive as possible to people who are open-minded and are looking into the permanence position. So she writes that occasionally an abandoned woman may refer to the adulteress living with her husband as his harlot. Now, let me just pause here. When she says harlot, what she's what she means is that the woman is committing adultery and committing fornication. That's what Sharon means here in her book. And we'll talk about that here more in a moment. So she says, occasionally, an abandoned wife may refer to her, the adulteress living with her husband as his harlot, to emphasize the shame and dishonor of his betrayal. And you may find overlapping usages of whore for an adulteress to emphasize the disgrace of her deeds. God often employed terms such as harlot and adulteress to shame Israel for her idolatry. The two words, harlot and adulteress, are different in their literal meanings. A husband may call his unfaithful wife a harlot, but the words clearly mean prostitute, not adulteress. These two words keep their meanings, no matter if for impact they are hurled out as insults. Okay, additionally, she has another quote that says, Pornea, an unmarried man joins with a harlot, a married man joins with a harlot. And so that's on page 57 of her book, Jewish Marriage, Biblical Divorce, and Remarriage. You can find that online. Now, so Fitz Henry uses some texts, basically, to craft a literal meaning. And then when that meaning doesn't fit in other texts, she dismisses those texts as not being literal. And so we have a question of how do we investigate language? And I don't think this is the right way to do it. I think what we should do is look at all of the uses of the words fornication and the word adultery during the time of Jesus and around there, and then look at all those and then figure out what are all the different meanings that are used for these different words. And once we understand those different meanings, then when we come to a particular text like the exception clause, we can say, well, at around the time of Jesus, people use this word to mean this and they use it to mean this and they use it to mean this. So these are the different possibilities for what Jesus meant when he used that word in the exception clause. I don't think what you can do is you can look at all of the different ways porne and adultery were used and then say, well, uh, these over here, we're gonna use these to figure out what the definition of the word is. And then these ones over here, we're gonna say we're gonna kind of dismiss those as though those aren't that's not the real definition because we haven't included those in our bucket of text that we use to determine the real definition. So I don't think you can do that. I think you have to look at all the text to figure out from the time what the meaning of those words were. All right. So so that's what the Greek word, but now we're To talk about problems with the betrothal view. So the argument made in favor of the betrothal view fails to make the case. And I have tried to explain that here up to this point in the episode. But in addition, there are some textual issues. Jesus is discussing marriage, he's not discussing betrothal. That's the first problem. The second problem is the word wife would have to have two meanings, and Jesus' audience wouldn't know when he was flipping back and forth between the two meanings. So let's look at Matthew 19, 9 using different ideas for what the word wife might mean. So in the here's the first one whoever divorces his betrothed, except for Pornea and marries another, commits adultery. So if wife means betrothed, we have a problem. Because this is not then about divorcing a marriage. There's no marriage being divorced here at all. Right? Because it's betrothed, not a not a marriage marriage. So we have to understand Matthew 99 about not being about a marriage. That seems very unlikely. Is it adultery to marry after ending a betrothal for non-pornea? So think about this scenario. Man and woman are betrothed. He breaks it off because they can't agree on what color the bridesmaid dresses are going to be. Is it going to be chartreuse or sea foam green? They can't agree. So he he can't take it anymore. And so he ends the betrothal and he goes and marries somebody else. Well, if you think the word wife means betrothed, when he goes to marry somebody else, that marriage is adultery, right? Because he divorced his betrothed, his reason was not pornea, and then he married another, and so he committed adultery. But there's no way that's what this means. Jesus is not saying if you end a betrothal and you marry somebody else, uh, and uh that it's adultery in any in any particular case. And in fact, in 1 Corinthians chapter 7, verses 25 through 28, Paul talks about a case where somebody's betrothed, they end the betrothal, and then they go marry somebody else, and Paul says that you don't sin in doing so. So that would uh contradict 1 Corinthians chapter 7 and verses 25 through 28. So I don't think we can say the word wife means betrothed woman. Well, what if it means married woman? This is the second meaning. Whoever divorces his married wife, except for pornea and marries another, commits adultery. So then pornea cannot be about sex during betrothal, since the word wife means married wife. There is no betrothed person here. It's a married wife that he's divorcing there, if the if that's what the word wife means. Uh, and and also it means divorce of a marriage, not an ending of a betrothal. So so we have this, we have a real problem with the word wife here, with the betrothal view. So let's zero in on this internal logic problem with the betrothal view. So if a man ends his betrothal for a non-pornea reason, Matthew 19, 9 implies his marriage to another would be adultery. We just talked about that, and that contradicts 1 Corinthians 7, 25 through 28. In addition, though, it creates a gendered rule so that a woman is not permitted to divorce if the betrothed man committed pornea. If you look at the exception clauses in Matthew 5 and Matthew 19, who's doing the divorcing? In both those texts, the man's doing the divorcing, which means that if it says except for pornea, it would have to be the woman who's committing the pornea. So it would have to result in a gendered rule. And as we mentioned earlier, the New Testament appears to be getting getting rid of this idea that the moral law is gendered when it comes to these issues of divorce and remarriage. So that seems to contradict this overall background principle that's in context with these divorce and remarriage passages. I've got a chart here uh that has four different possibilities. Uh, and you see the numbers one, two, three, four there for these different possibilities. And so the first one is that a man divorces and uh he's divorcing his betrothed partner for pornea, right? And then the idea there is that marriage to another is not adultery. So that's what the betrothal view says, the exception clause is referring to. But let's look at the other three possibilities. Say a man divorces his betrothed partner for non-pornea reasons, as we just mentioned. So that would mean that ending the betrothal causes her to commit adultery, right? So in Matthew 5.32, it says a man who divorces his wife, except for Pornea, uh, causes her to commit adultery, right? The idea is she's likely to go ahead and marry somebody else. And so he's culpable for her adultery that she's likely to do. Well, if he divorces her, but it's not for Pornea, then he would be, again, causing her to commit adultery. And so he'd be culpable for her second marriage. But we already know if she uh they break off the betrothal and she marries somebody else, there's no sin there. So that seems to contradict 1 Corinthians chapter 7 and verses 25 through 28. And of course, then the his marriage to another would also then be adultery, which also doesn't make sense. Now, what about if the woman divorces the man for having sex during betrothal? So that would be ending the betrothal would cause him to commit adultery, and her marriage to another would be adultery, which of course doesn't work. Now, um, you might think, well, nobody holds that the woman can divorce uh the betrothal, but that's not true. If you read the Westminster Confession of Faith carefully, it is not gendered. So if a man and woman were uh engaged or betrothed and he had sex with somebody else, she could end the contract in the language of the Westminster Confession of Faith and uh go ahead and go marry somebody else, according to the Westminster Confession of Faith interpretation uh of this. Now, the Westminster Confession of Faith, just so you understand, it does have like this version of the betrothal view in it, but it also has uh the uh innocent party to adultery view in there, uh which is the traditional kind of Protestant view uh that Luther popularized that says that the exception clause is referring to a husband and wife who are married, and then one of them commits adultery, and then the one who did not commit adultery, the innocent one, can divorce and they can go ahead and marry somebody else. So they have that view in there, but they also have kind of added in there in the Westminster Confession of Faith, this betrothal thing uh as well. And it's not it's not a gendered provision in the Westminster Confession of Faith. Okay, and so the the fourth square there, if you go through that, it's it would have the same problems as the third one. So these are some internal logic problems with the betrothal view. And the reason why we zero in on this is because we should understand that the doctrine that Jesus was explaining in Matthew 5 and Matthew 19 is coherent and doesn't have all these kinds of weird internal logic problems uh to them. So if we find a particular view and it has all these internal logic problems, that should take us to disfavor that particular interpretation. So for Fitz Henry, she is saying the exception clause is really important because Jesus is trying to prevent a misunderstanding here that Jesus wants to preserve the allowance to end a betrothal for fornication. So what this shows is that for Fitz Henry, the word wife in Matthew 19, 9 means both married woman and betrothed woman, and that the exception clause is added to show that it's not adultery to remarry after ending a betrothal. But on Fitz Henry's own terms, the exception clause only addresses breaking betrothal for fornication. So if a man ends a betrothal for non-fornication and marries another, he commits adultery. So Fitz Henry does address this on page 53, where she says that he cannot end the betrothal covenant except for the cause of fornication. But there's a couple problems with that. The first of all, 1 Corinthians 7, 25 through 28 shows a man can end a betrothal for any reason and then go marry somebody else. But the other challenge with this is she says that he cannot end the betrothal. I don't know what she means by she can he cannot. It's they're under Roman law, for example, in Corinth, and he can just break the betrothal. He doesn't have to have a justification. The Romans don't care what your reason is. She can just break the betrothal and he can go marry somebody else. And so the question is if he breaks it for a non-fornication reason, non-fornier reason, he marries somebody else, is that adultery? Isn't that how the Jews would understand Jesus what Jesus uh to mean if they thought he was talking about sex during betrothal? So what's going on here is the word fornication is being focused on in order to uh bring in the betrothal view. But then when you say, well, doesn't that mean in a non-fornication situation that a marriage after ending a betrothal would be adultery? They say, no, no, fornication isn't isn't that important. It's only important to get us to the betrothal view, but it's not really important when you go to then actually apply the exception. And I and I I don't think that's a I don't think that's a way that we're allowed to kind of interpret the passage there. All right, so we have also some process problems. So some believe that the exception clause points to a gendered rule that gives the man the right to divorce, but when the situation is reversed, it does not give the woman that same right. And so here's here's that view. The betrothed man and woman have sex for the first time. Uh, if she was a virgin, then they are married. If she was not a virgin, then they do not get married. Okay. Now the problem here is that it imagines that the first time that they have sex is it's premarital sex. And so therefore, it requires sin to get married, right? And so uh, and the Bible is clear that marriage occurs at the give and take stage, and then sex occurs after they're married. It's not that people have sex and the sex makes them married, otherwise, sin would be required to get married. Rather, they get married first and then intimacy comes later. So that's called BMI. That's betrothal, marriage, intimacy. And you see it very clearly in Matthew chapter one in verse 18, they're betrothed, Mary and Joseph. In verse 24, Joseph takes Mary, that's the word for marriage. In verse 25, they have sex later. I have a whole video uh explaining how why consummation is not required, sex is not required to make a marriage. That a marriage comes first and then sex intimacy comes afterward. That's the normal biblical pattern here. But the reason why the betrothal view uh has has to do all of this is because one of the reasons a man can determine whether or not the woman he married uh is a virgin or not is the first time that they have sex, he can determine that. And so then you have a yeah, then you have a problem, right? Because they're having sex, but then if she's not a virgin, is he divorcing a marriage? And they have to say, well, no, he's not divorcing a marriage. So I guess we'd have to say that's premarital sex, but he's not, he's not guilty for the fornication because he didn't know that she was lying about uh not being a virgin. But they do all this kind of stuff, but that just doesn't work. It's premarital sex, it's fornication, it's sin uh for people to have sex in an invalid marriage, even if they thought it was a valid marriage. If a man marries a divorced woman, but he doesn't know she's divorced, their marriage is still invalid, they're still committing fornication. Now, does he have guilt for that? No, because he's he's uh ignorant of a fact. So I agree he doesn't have guilt, but that doesn't, but their sex is still the sin of fornication. So I have 11 questions for my friends who held the betrothal view. And the reason why I have to ask all these questions is because there's different variations of the betrothal view. So some of these questions will apply to your view and some of these questions will not apply, but let's go through them and let's see. And I'd love to get your your responses in the comments below. So the first question is Does the exception clause give the woman the same moral justification to end the relationship as the man? What text in Matthew 5 and Matthew 19 indicates pornea must be sex during betrothal or premarital sex by a betrothed woman who claimed virginity? Now, I think everyone's gonna have to say that no text really indicates that that's what Jesus means by pornea. And so what they're gonna say is that the word pornea itself tells you that it's sex during betrothal. I think that's what your answer is going to be. And I think we have shown in this episode that that uh the word pornea itself is not sufficient to indicate that it could only be talking about premarital sex. Does the word wife in Matthew 19, 9, does that word wife mean betrothed woman, married woman, or both? And now, if it means betrothed, we have a another set of questions, uh, so then it's not about marital divorce? Uh if married, then pornea was by a married woman? And if both, how could Jesus' audience know which one he meant in different scenarios? Next question: if a man ends his betrothal for non-pornea and marries another, does he commit adultery? If she purported to be a virgin and the man finds out when he first has sex with her that she isn't, was that sex premarital sex or was it marital sex? If it's premarital, was it sin? Now I understand he may not have guilt for that sin. You could it's possible for somebody to sin and not have guilt. But my question is, was it sin or not? And this my other question is, if it was marital sex, can he divorce her and remarry? And if he can divorce her and remarry, how does that square with the no exception argument Jesus makes in Matthew 19, verses three through six? If you agree that adulterous remarriages must be divorced, then whether you think the exception clause is for sex during betrothal, or if you think the exception clause is referring to sex during an invalid marriage, either way, we're on the same team. But what we're trying to figure out here is which view is going to be the most persuasive to open-minded people who hear the mainstream evangelical view with all of their exceptions and their permissive view, and then they look at the New Testament and they go, you know, that doesn't really feel right. Let me see what these permanents people say. And they stumble onto us. We want to be as persuasive as we possibly can be for them. And so let me recommend you get my book, Divorce Your Remarriage. It's on Amazon.com. I have a link to that in the description below. Please put in your comments. Let's have this discussion and figure out which view is the right one of the exception clause. And I'll see you guys next time.