REACT: Joel Garner Scruitinizes my "Already Married View" of the Exception Clause

Joel Garner ( @joelgarner539 ) interprets the New Testament to teach marriage permanence, but he disagrees with my view of the exception clause (Mat 5:32, 19:9). I react to Joel's good faith critique.  You decide who is right. Let us know in the comments!

I reference these episodes of mine in this video:
Explainer of Invalid Remarriage View: https://youtu.be/oFhua7rHUwM?si=iUkE3VzlEixP39Ib

Consummation Required?: https://youtu.be/v62dbDWqJzU?si=OtlaJpV5gNWQfww_

Joel isn't the only person to critique my view!  I previously had correspondence with a (really smart) evangelical college professor who disagrees with me. I cover that here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL46V5S-armss_fU3L4vDXl_-3xfEcuZ9Y&si=b5kW1THQRNb8utHX

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

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

I'm excited today because Joel Garner, a YouTuber, put out a video expressing his disagreement with my view of the exception clause. And that means I get to react to it. He gives four reasons, and we're going to go through those and we're going to react to what he has to say. So I think it's good that Joel uh made this video. I wish more people who disagree with my view on the exception clause or divorce and remarriage in general would make videos, and that way I can respond to what they have to say. I think that back and forth is healthy because it gives you the opportunity to see people who've thought about this a lot, and then you can decide what you think the scripture teaches. Now, regarding divorce and remarriage, uh, Joel and I are both in the marriage permanence camp. So we're we agree on way more than what than what we disagree on. We both believe that marriage is unable to be dissolved as long as both spouses are alive. So that's good. We just disagree on how we get there, how we interpret the scriptures in order to arrive at that conclusion. And so that's what we're gonna look at here.

SPEAKER_00 0:56

In my previous episode, I went over what pornea means. I spent an hour and 25 minutes on that subject. That's episode 17. You are interested in that. But in this episode, I'm gonna go over the possibility of whether pornea in those two Matthew and exception clauses could mean an invalid marriage.

SPEAKER_01 1:22

All right, so I should mention that Joel doesn't like mention me my name, that he's uh referring to my view, but he does make a lot of references to my view in this video. So that's what I'm gonna respond to. So let me just set this up. First of all, Joel's done a ton of research on this uh subject, and he's got a bunch of videos on his channel. I'll try to remember to link to it in the description below, and you can go over there and subscribe to him and check out his videos and his content there. He's got a lot of good things to say. Um now, Jesus calls divorce and remarriage adultery. He calls it seven, he calls it that seven times in the New Testament. And Paul echoes that in Romans chapter seven and first Corinthians seven. But in two of Jesus' teachings, there he includes an exception. And so the idea is divorce and remarriage is adultery, except if it was for fornication. And the difficult question that Joel and I disagree on is what did Jesus mean when he said, except for fornication? And so the Greek word for fornication is pornea. It's sometimes translated sexual immorality, and it's a different Greek word than the word used for adultery. So now Joel thinks fornication is referring to a scenario where a man and woman are betrothed, not married. Uh, it's kind of like our engagement today, and one of them cheats during the betrothal. And so Joel thinks Jesus is saying they can break off their betrothal and they can go marry other people without that marriage being adultery. So now I don't want to get into a critique about that. I actually have an episode coming up where I give the reasons why I'm not persuaded by the betrothal view, and that goes into a lot more detail. And so subscribe to my channel so you don't miss that episode coming up. But I think fornication is referring to a scenario where a man and a woman got get married, but one or both of them are already married. So, for example, if a man married a divorced woman, their marriage is invalid, and the sex in that marriage is fornication between them because the two of them are not married. So Jesus is teaching if you marry a divorced person whose prior valid spouse is alive, that's a fake marriage. And you can divorce them and then go marry somebody else because the marriage you were in was not a real marriage. So if you the whole reason why divorce and remarriage is prohibited by Jesus is the remarriage is adultery. Well, if your marriage was fake to begin with, then there's nobody to cheat on when you go to remarry. So that's why if you divorced an invalid marriage, you can go ahead and marry somebody else, and that's permissible. That's what Jesus is teaching in the exception clause. Now, there's actually a lot of evidence for that view. And I don't want to repeat all of it here, but if you've not seen my episode, it's an explainer on invalid the invalid remarriage view. Uh, you want to watch that before making a judgment about whether my view is correct or Joel's view or some other view is correct. You'd want to uh see the evidence there for yourself. So Joel is going to offer some criticisms of my view of the exception clause, and we're going to dive in where Joel starts defining the invalid marriage view.

SPEAKER_00 4:19

This video, we're going to go over the possibility of whether the invalid marriage view is correct or not. Another thing I think is useful to point out is that believers who believe in the betrothal view and the invalid marriage view are actually in agreement with each other. In other words, pretty much everyone who believes in a betrothal view also believes you should be divorcing for an invalid marriage. And likewise, uh, pretty much everyone who believes in the invalid marriage view would agree that you could divorce during the betrothal period because that's not full-blown marriage where you're actually joined together yet. So these two camps don't disagree with each other theologically. What they disagree with each other about is what is meant by Jesus' use of the word pornea in Matthew 5, 32 and in Matthew 19, 9.

SPEAKER_01 5:23

Jill's totally correct. I 100% endorse what he just said there. Totally agree. And the reason this matters, though, you might think, well, it doesn't matter if you guys end up agreeing on the kind of the bottom line, like, you know, the math of how you get there doesn't matter, you agree on the bottom line. Well, it matters for a couple of reasons. One, there's value in just finding the truth of what was what Jesus meant. Uh, but the second reason is we want to be as persuasive as possible. When open-minded people who are investigating Jesus' teaching on divorce and remarriage, when they come and uh see, well, what do the permanence people have to say? We want to be as persuasive as possible to give them the best chance to come to the over to the permanent side. And that way they can they can hear the steel manned versions of both the permanence view and like a more permissive view that's uh more common in evangelicalism. So there really is actually an important reason to figure out what did Jesus mean when he said, except for fornication.

SPEAKER_00 6:20

So I'm going to go over why I believe the Mafian exception clause, which is which is pornea in the Greek, cannot mean an invalid marriage. And I have four points to support that argument. And I believe my fourth point is pretty much in a game over type of point. So my first point is that pornea does not mean an invalid marriage anywhere else in the New Testament. The word pornea is used frequently. In my last video, I went over, I think it's 25 passages that actually have the word pornea in them and pointed out that each one of those most likely means either fornication or prostitution, but none of them mean an invalid marriage, with the possible exception of Matthew 5.32 and Matthew 19.9, if you believe that's what it's referring to. There's also an Old Testament translation called the Septuagint, it's a translation from Hebrew to Greek. This is undoubtedly the Bible, the Old Testament that was being used by first century uh Palestine Jews. Also, the early Christians who are mostly Greek speaking would also have used this version of the Old Testament, and that version, even though Greek is not the original language that the Old Testament was written in, it does have the word pornea. In other words, there's a Hebrew word called Zanat that translates into the word pornea. Okay, and on in no passages does the word pornea in the subtuagent mean an invalid marriage. None, it doesn't mean it in any of them.

SPEAKER_01 8:14

So where I agree with Joel in his assertion here is that if you ignore the exception clauses, there's no biblical text that uses the word fornication in such a way that it must be interpreted to refer to an invalid marriage. Now, it might be that when New Testament writers wrote fornication, that they were including invalid marriages there. But the text doesn't unmistakably require that. I agree with Joel on that. But here's the question we have to ask. How do we determine what the words in the Bible mean, right? So how do we determine like the limits of the semantic range of a word? Do the words in the Bible only have meanings that are unmistakably meant in other biblical passages? And I don't think so. The first challenge with this is I don't know how you would start to translate the Bible if you can't use existing knowledge of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. You would have nothing to treat the original text like it. You have to treat it like it's a completely foreign language that you know absolutely nothing about. And I don't know how you would even start to translate it. Like no translation does that. What they do is they look at existing Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek things, and then they understand what those things already already mean. And so then when they go to the biblical text, that helps them, it informs their understanding of what these terms meant. So the second problem would be uh how would Jesus' original hearers understand him if they needed the rest of the New Testament to understand what he meant by a Greek or Aramaic word? So it would be like if somebody was speaking English to you, but the meaning of the words had no relationship to the meaning of normal English. And that's clearly just not what's happening in the New Testament. For example, Herod didn't need the rest of the New Testament to know John the Baptist was criticizing his marriage to Herodias. They were just using language as it was used in common parlance. So what this means is the population of text we can go to when determining the semantic range of a word is not only the Bible, it includes other texts as well. So, and we have at least six other texts that refer to a remarriage as fornication. Again, I go through this in my explainer video, but we have the Damascus document, we have the Talmud, we have Clement of Alexandria, we have Irenaeus, we have Tertullian, we have Basil the Great, and they're all referring to remarriages using the word fornication. And the Damascus document already existed at the time of Jesus, and it was likely believed by the third largest religious group at the time called the Essenes. Now, the Talmud was written later, but it was written by the religious descendants of the Pharisees, and they were the largest religious group at the time of Jesus, and they were the ones with whom Jesus was arguing in Matthew chapter 19 and Matthew chapter 19, verse 9, Jesus uses the word fornication in the divorce remarriage context. And in the Talmud, in the divorce-remarriage context, it uses the word fornication to refer to an invalid remarriage. So again, I cover all of this in my explainer video, so I don't want to belabor the point. But in the Damascus document, it appears to make the same argument that Jesus makes from Genesis about remarriage. And in the Damascus document and Jesus both use the word fornication. And in the Damascus document, the fornication is referring to the sex in a remarriage. And so it would be odd, actually, if Jesus was agreeing with the Damascus document here, here, and here. And then finally, when he gets to the word fornication, he like takes a left turn and means something different than what the Damascus document means. Anybody who had read the Damascus document by the time of Jesus would have not thought that. They would have thought, oh, he means the same thing that the Damascus document means because he's using the same argument. I think the right answer is that the Damascus document view is what Jesus was expressing, which is that uh the remarriage is the fornication.

SPEAKER_00 11:55

Important thing to consider when you're trying to come up with what a word means is what does that word mean elsewhere in the same book? Okay, and in the same book of Matthew, there is another passage. It says, For out of the heart proceeds evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, that's Molkaiah in Greek, fornications, that's pornea in Greek, thefts, false witness, blasphemies. These are the things which defile a man, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile a man. Why is this significant? Because if pornea means sexual immorality there, then why is it listed as a separate sin from adultery, which is mokiah in the Greek, if sexual immorality includes adultery? There'd be no reason to say the word mochia unless for that word pornea there actually refers to either fornication or prostitution. In that case, it would not mean sexual immorality. So Matthew elsewhere is using pornea to mean either prostitution or fornication, most likely fornication, since it's right next to adultery.

SPEAKER_01 13:10

I agree with Joel that the inclusion of fornication and adultery in a list like this likely means that it's possible to commit a type of adultery that is not fornication. So if a married man cheats with a married woman, that's adultery. But there's really no reason to use the word fornication to describe that act. Uh, using fornication to describe that act would be like an odd choice because the reason you use adultery versus fornication is to emphasize something, and there would be nothing to emphasize using the word fornication in that scenario. So let me let me give you an example of what I mean by that. As you may have heard, a long time ago we landed on the moon, and uh one of the astronauts said, um, one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. Now, this is odd because the man took a step and it's a small step, but then he also calls it a giant leap. Well, which is it? Is it a leap or is it a step? We got to make a decision here. He must not know what he's talking about because it can't be a leap and a step, because those are two different things. Well, all the guy is saying is in one sense, this is a small thing. It's a it's a normal step that we take all the time. It's one step, small step, right? Also, he's walking on the moon. That's huge. We've never done this before done this before. This is a major advance forward for humanity in our technology. He called the same thing a step and a leap. He's looking at it from a different aspect. So the step, he's looking at it from one aspect, it's a step, and the other, and he's looking at it from like what this means in the history of humanity. That's a big deal. It's a giant leap for mankind. So, which word he's using is not just about the the death, the semantic range or the definition. It's also about what aspect the speaker is trying to emphasize. So when Jesus calls remarriages adultery, he's emphasizing the violation of the first marriage bond. So when Jesus calls remarriages fornication, he's emphasizing the fact that the remarriage is invalid because validly married people cannot commit uh fornication with one another. So the reason for the difference in selection of words has to do with the marriage bond or lack of marriage bond that Jesus is explaining. So adultery is used to emphasize the person's divorce, original divorce, didn't dissolve their first marriage. Fornication is used to emphasize the fact that the two legally married people in the remarriage are in fact not married at all. So that's how you can have the same step be a small step and a giant leap, and how the same the sexual act with invalidly remarried people can be both fornication and it can be adultery.

SPEAKER_00 15:37

So that's something that you consider. Then you want to consider how is the word used in the rest of the Bible. And since this is an issue with Greek, we're talking about the New Testament. There are no passages where pornea means an invalid marriage, other than the possible exception of Matthew 5, 32 and Matthew 19. So there is one passage that comes at least a little bit close to this. It's actually 1 Corinthians 5. That's where it says, It is actually reported to me that there is sexual immorality among you, such sexual immorality as is not even named among the Gentiles. I go over this in my last video. I think very high probability it means fornication there, even though it's referring to a man having relations with his father's wife. And that's because I believe it's a man having relations with his dead father's wife, which would not be adultery. But you could say that is a form of incest, and incest could fall under the category of invalid marriages. However, even if it means incest in that passage, it's not specifically referring to an invalid marriage. So again, there's just like all the other passages that clearly mean either fornication or prostitution, there's just nothing there that you could say, well, pornea means in that means an invalid marriage elsewhere. You don't have anything like that.

SPEAKER_01 17:06

All right. So in the 1 Corinthians chapter 5 passage, I think there Paul is highlighting the incest problem, which is why he emphasizes like how bad the conduct is. It's worse than what the Gentiles do. But I I agree with Joel that that it's it's not talking about remarriage there. Now, also, I want to be clear here the specific narrow case Jesus is referring to in the exception clause isn't all invalid marriages, in my view. It's not all invalid marriages. Rather, it's one kind of invalid marriage. He is referring to an adulterous remarriage. Two people entered into a legal marriage where one or both of them are already married. Jesus defined what he meant by pornea in the exception clause in the second half of Matthew 5.32. So I don't think Jesus is referring to all invalid marriages in the exception clause. Now, yes, if a man married his sister, that's an invalid marriage, and it must be divorced. Totally agree. And that's Leviticus 18. Everybody already knows that. So Jesus doesn't need to highlight that because it's common knowledge, everybody knows that. But people would be confused. This is why Jesus does the exception clause. People might be confused about whether they can uh remarry after divorcing an adulterous remarriage. And that's what Jesus is clarifying in the exception clause. What he's saying is, yes, if you married somebody who was already married, and then you divorce them, you can remarry. That's Jesus' point in the exception clause.

SPEAKER_00 18:33

The next point that I have is that if pornea is referring to an invalid marriage in the two Matthew exceptions, why does Jesus not point out that the invalid marriages, the people that are in it are committing Mokaiah adultery or pornea fornication already? Now, if it's an invalid marriage in the sense of being an adulterous remarriage, because Jesus calls remarriages after a divorce or to a divorcee, adultery is seven times in the Bible. He calls it adultery Mokaiah. So if he does that, then why does he not also mention that this invalid marriage constitutes mokiah or pornea on the part of both the husband and the wife that are in it? It seems rather peculiar that that would be left out if that's what he means. I'm not saying that's an impossibility, but it's certainly awkward and odd.

SPEAKER_01 19:40

All right, so to respond to Joel here, I've got to go through a few things. So, first, when you're reading the gospels, we should not imagine that we're that every quote that we have of Jesus or of other people is a full and complete transcript. There's just not enough room to write everything down that everybody said, all the back and forth. So what we have is a faithful summary of what was said. That's the first thing to note when reading the gospels. The second thing to note is only Matthew has the exception clauses, and Matthew writes in doublets. So what is a doublet? Doublet, there are pairs of similar teachings that appear in two places. And Matthew 532 and Matthew 19. So Matthew uh seems to intend for his readers to identify the doublets and then read them together. And the idea seems to be that by Matthew writing essentially the same concept in two different contexts and two slightly different ways, the reader is less likely to misunderstand what Jesus meant. So Jesus was an itinerant preacher. He's going around and he would have repeated the same points over and over in different places and would have modified them slightly for the different contexts he's in. So Matthew had plenty of stuff to draw on. And you can imagine Matthew hearing Jesus teaching something one week in one context. And Matthew thinks, oh, the way Jesus said that in this context, Jesus must have meant a. Then next week, we're in a different spot. And Jesus teaches essentially the same thing, but slightly differently. And he goes, Oh, he didn't mean a. That was slightly off. He actually meant B. And Matthew's able to figure that out because he hears the same teaching in two different places. So if that's correct, if that's what Matthew is doing, is bringing with bringing us with him on this enlightening experience where you hear Jesus the first time, you think, oh, he must have meant this. And you hear him the second time, you go, oh, he actually meant that, like the penny drops. And so Matthew's taking you along so you can see what his experience was like and you can be enlightened in the same kind of way. I'll give you an example of this. So Matthew chapter 10, verse 22, and Matthew chapter 24, 13, Jesus says that he who endures to the end shall be saved. And the question is endures what? What is the odd what is the thing that is being endured? So in one passage, Jesus focuses on persecution. So you might think, oh, Jesus means if you endure painful persecution to the end, you'll be saved. But then in another place, he talks about, you know, people's love growing cold and lots of discouragement. And then when you put those together, you go, oh, Jesus means this if you endure all kinds of hardship, not just persecution. That's not the main thing he's talking about. He's talking about all kinds of hardship. Then you endure to the end, you'll be saved. Matthew 5.32 and Matthew 19, those are doublets and they go together. So I mentioned that because all you need is either Matthew 5.32 or Matthew 19.9 to tell you what fornication means in the exception clause. And because of Matthew's style of writing, all you need is in one spot. And once you have it in one spot, we know that Matthew intends his readers to understand the exception clause in both places in light of the one spot that gives you the reason. And I say all that because it appears to me that Jesus uh taught what he meant by fornication in the exception clause in Matthew 5.32, and he didn't may have not included it in Matthew 19.9, depending on which manuscript you look at. So all that to say, Matthew 5.32, Jesus explains what he means by fornication in the exception clause. And we're gonna we're gonna walk through that. All right, so Matthew 5.32, it says, the first part says, He who divorces his wife, except for fornication, makes her commit adultery. That's the first moral formulation. And now there's a second moral formulation. The second moral formulation says he who marries a divorced woman commits adultery. So my view is that the second moral formulation is an explanation of fornication in the exception clause. All right, so let me let me walk through that. This is the first time you've heard that. I gotta walk through it for you. So now imagine Jesus said this He who divorces his wife, except for fornication, makes her commit adultery. That's what we have in the text. But then he continues on to say, let's just imagine for a moment. And by fornication, I mean sex in a remarriage. Well, by fornication, he's defining fornication earlier in the passage. I mean sex in a remarriage. That's my view, right? That's my view. So instead, what we have in Matthew 5.32, the second half, is he who marries a divorced woman commits adultery. Now, what I am saying is that what Jesus meant when he said, He who marries a divorced woman commits adultery is the same as if he had said by fornication I mean sex and a remarriage. I'm saying those two statements mean basically the same thing. So now if I'm right about that, and what we're going to address some objections to that view in a moment, but if I'm right about that, then in Matthew 5.32, Jesus does tell us that adulterous remarriage is both fornication and adultery. So Joel asks, why didn't Jesus say the invalid marriage is adultery? I think he did. That is my view that he said it explicitly in Matthew 5.32, the second half. He said it was both. Now, let's address some questions people might have. So the first question people are going to have is how can I say Matthew 5.32b explains the exception clause? There's no text that indicates the purpose of Matthew 5.32b is to explain the exception clause. Now, I explained that all in my video, but let me just go through like five points here. First, Matthew is the only one of the three Gospels that has an exception clause, and it's the only gospel that has three moral formulations rather than two. So it's Luke 16, 18, Mark 10, 11, and 12, and then Matthew, it's 5.32 and Matthew 19, 9. If you look at all of those, you'll see what I'm saying. Matthew is the only one with the exception, and the only one with three moral formulations rather than two. That's my first point. Second point, Matthew 5.32B is the outlier moral formulation. Here's why it's the outlier. It's the only text in Matthew, Mark, or Luke that is not necessary to flip the genders to show that the moral law for divorce and remarriage does not favor the man as Jesus' audience was accustomed to thinking. So Jesus' audience, you're talking to Jewish people, and Jesus' audience is thinking about Deuteronomy chapter 24 and verse 1. A man can give the wife a certificate of divorce, she can't give him a certificate of divorce. They're not like us today, where we just assume the moral law is like, you know, basically the same for men and women. That's not how they thought. They thought the moral law was very gendered and it preferred men over women. That was how they thought. So they had to emphasize no, no, it does not prefer men over women. The perfect moral law does not do that. In Mark chapter 10, verse verse 11 and 12, there, you've got Jesus flipping the genders. In Luke 16, 18, you have Jesus flipping the genders. In Matthew 5.32A, in Matthew 19, 9, you have Jesus flipping the genders. Regardless of which one gets remarried, it's adultery there. But Matthew 5.32B doesn't, you don't need that to flip the genders. Why is it there? Matthew 5.32B is an outlier and it's doing something different than all the other moral formulations. Again, Jesus called divorce, remarriage, adultery seven times, but one of those is different than the other six, and that's Matthew 5.32B. Here's my third point. Matthew 5.32B is the only moral formulation that Jesus gives that could logically fit as an explanation of the exception clause. If you go through the other moral formulations that are out there in Mark and in Luke and in Matthew, and you try to put them in as the exception clause, they're not going to work. This is the only one that actually works. Number four, Matthew 532B has no educational purpose unless it's an explanation of the exception clause, because you could deduce the principle in the text from Matthew 532A. Let me explain that. Matthew 532A says if a man uh divorces his wife, he makes her commit adultery. Now let's imagine the situation. She goes ahead and she remarries. She commits adultery. It's right there in the text. Well, also the man who she marries, also he commits adultery, right? There's no such thing as a one-sided adultery. Both people are committing adultery. So everybody already knew that. So then what would be the reason to say if a man marries a divorced woman, he commits adultery? You already knew that for Matthew 5.32A. It's an unnecessary additional thing to say. So Matthew 5.32B must be doing something other than educating people about divorce and remarriage because they already knew that. Number five, often Jesus states something and then he explains what he means by it without saying something like, what I mean by this is X. So he'll like say A and then he'll explain A, but when he goes to explain A, he doesn't say, What I mean by A is He doesn't, sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn't. He does not always like connective language. You're supposed to read it and infer that he's explaining something by the text, as opposed to looking for a Greek word that connects the two sentences. And so Jesus expects his audience to figure it out. So let's look at some examples of that. In Matthew 5, 14, Jesus says, You are the light of the world. Next sentence A city said on a hill cannot be hidden. Now, if you wanted to, you could say, Well, Jesus didn't connect those two. So one has nothing to do with the other. But of course, they have something to do with with each other. They're self-explaining each other, explaining the whole concept Jesus is teaching there. Matthew 5, verses 23 and following, Jesus says, you know, if if you're offering your gift at the altar and your brother has something against you, leave your gift there, go to your brother, reconcile. And then come back and offer your gift. Reconcile first. Then he says, Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you're going with him to court, etc. So you could say, well, these two passages have nothing to say about each other because Jesus doesn't say likewise or applying the same principle. There's no connective language between the first thing and the second thing, but they obviously he's talking about the same concept, and you would infer that by what he is saying. Matthew 5, 33 through 36, Jesus says, Don't take oaths. And then he says, Let what you say be simply yes or no. Anything more than this comes from evil. And you could say, well, it has nothing to do with oaths. That has a totally separate statement, Jesus doesn't connect the two, so we can't connect the two. You could do all of that if you wanted, but obviously nobody does that. Everybody just knows. Oh, yeah, he's explaining, you know, okay, so from this, you know, disfavoring of oaths principle that Jesus gives. Now, what do you do if you're not going to do oaths? Well, you just say yes or no. That's all you do, right? So we don't need to imagine that Jesus would have said or would need to say, by fornication, I mean X, in order for Matthew 532B to be an explanation of the exception clause. All right, so that's the first question people are going to bring up. How come there's no connective language where Jesus says, this is what I mean by fornication? He often doesn't give uh that kind of connective language. The second question I anticipate people would have with my view here is then why would Jesus say fornication in the exception clause and adultery in Matthew 5.32b, Jill's already brought this up, but let me let me get into this one more time. So if Jesus is referring, uh Jesus is referring to the same act, uh, and the idea is that the adultery in Matthew 532b is there to highlight the fact that the woman's divorce from her first marriage didn't end her first marriage. Let's camp out there for a moment. Men and woman are married, they get a divorce for irreconcilable differences. They can't agree on the color of the curtains. Okay, she goes and marries another guy. Jesus says that remarriage is adultery. It can only be adultery if she's still married to her first husband. People who are unmarried can't commit adultery. So if she marries another guy and Jesus calls that adultery, that's because Jesus is saying your divorce didn't divorce. Your divorce did not dissolve your first marriage. That's why the remarriage would be adultery. Very simple. So Jesus uses the word adultery because he is trying to emphasize or highlight or teach the fact that divorce does not dissolve a marriage. That's why he uses the word adultery. All right. Now, the reason then for uh for the word adultery is not necessarily to emphasize like the heinousness of the sin. Rather, it's to highlight that she's still married. Okay. Now, the word fornication then is in the exception clause. Why then would I say that Jesus is using the word fornication to refer to a remarriage when he just used adultery to refer to a remarriage? I don't understand. Why would you use fornication instead? And Jesus would use fornication to highlight a different fact. And the different fact is these two people who got legally married, they're not married. Two actual validly married people, if they have sex with each other, can't, that they can't commit fornication with each other. They're married. That's not how this works. So when Jesus uses the word adultery, what Jesus is really teaching about is the divorce, is not a real divorce. And when Jesus uses the word fornication, what he's really teaching about is your marriage is not really a marriage. So the words adultery and fornication are not actually about so much the act, the sexual act, as it is about the bond or the not or the non-existent bond in the case of the remarriage. So I think the assumption many of us carry around that we don't even notice, it's an unconscious assumption that we have, as we think that a word is chosen in Greek here in Matthew, because of the nature of the thing that is being mentioned, adultery or fornication. So people are thinking in terms of, well, the immoral sex is either fornication or it's adultery, depending on its nature of what, you know, who's married to who and all that. But that's not the only consideration in the selection of a word. The other consideration is what aspect of the thing is most relevant to the point we're making here. All right, so let me let me give you an example from a different text. Maybe it'll maybe it'll be easier to see. So take the Lord's Prayer in uh Matthew chapter six. Part of it says, forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. Moments later, Jesus says, if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. Now, in the Lord's Prayer, he references forgiving debts, and then he argues for forgiving debts by showing the necessity of forgiving trespasses. He uses two different words, one's for like financial debt, and the other one is for trespass for sin. Now, if you think the word selection is based only on the nature of the thing that's being talked about, then someone could say, well, if Jesus meant forgive us our trespasses in the Lord's Prayer, he would say trespasses. But he says financial debt. So he did not mean trespasses, because he didn't use the word trespasses, he used the word debt. He's talking about finances. Yet in Jesus' argument following the Lord's Prayer, he analogizes debt to trespasses. So instead of thinking that the only consideration when selecting a word is the nature of the thing being discussed, we should recognize a second consideration. What aspect of the concept does the author want to emphasize? And when we see this second consideration, this text makes a lot more sense. What Jesus is highlighting in the Lord's Prayer seems to be that sinning against God andor a person makes us owe a kind of moral debt. Okay, and then so we should forgive those who owe that moral debt to us because they sinned against us. Then in the next verse, when Jesus talks about trespasses, he is focusing not on the moral debt aspect of sin, but on the wrongness and punishability of sin. That's why he uses the word trespass. So when you take it all together, what Jesus means is if you want to avoid the punishment for your sin, you must forgive those who owe you a moral debt because of their sin. So word selection is based on the nature of the thing and the aspect of the thing that's relevant for the speaker and the particular point they're making in the passage. So if we go back to Matthew 5.32, then the reason why Jesus would use adultery and fornication to refer to a remarriage, sex and a remarriage is that in one instance he uses adultery uh to make sure his audience knows that the divorce doesn't end a marriage, and in the other instance, he uses fornication to make sure his audience knows that a marriage is to an already married person is an invalid marriage.

SPEAKER_00 35:54

Seven times. Adultery is Mokaia in Greek, but then use the same in the in the two Matthew and exception clauses, use the word pornea to actually be referring to the same thing. That doesn't make any sense. If pornea means fornication and mokayah means adultery, then they're normally the same physical act. But Mokaiah is considered a worse sin than pornea is, so why would Jesus call it Mokaiah and then call it pornea in the two Matthew and exception clauses? That doesn't make a lot of sense. I mean, if it's bad enough to be called Mokiah, why would you have the kind of downgraded statement for it of pornea instead? I think the fact that Jesus calls um remarriages Mokiah seven times shows that there's a pretty consistent pattern of that's what he calls it. So it's not likely that he's calling it in the two Matthew exceptions clauses pornea as well.

SPEAKER_01 36:58

All right, so this is the point I just addressed. Porney is used to highlight the invalidity of the marriage to a divorced person. Adultery is used to highlight the inability of a divorce to dissolve a valid marriage. So let me just say Joel's question is a really good question here because a lot of people are operating off the unconscious assumption that a word is chosen based solely on the nature of the act and not on the aspect that's relevant to the speaker's message at that point. So I think this is really helpful to recognize kind of the two-factor decision-making process that's going on when a word is selected. I think that in all likelihood, this like two-factor decision-making process where you're looking at the nature and the aspect of the thing that you're is going to be helpful for your teaching or the emphasis you're trying to make, that kind of two decision two-factor decision-making process, um, I think it was just basically second nature. They didn't even know they were doing it. I don't think there was a bunch of like analysis that was needed by native speakers of Koine Greek to do this. They were just like on autopilot. Uh, it's just that when we go back to look at it, we're not automatically thinking the way they're thinking. Uh, but once you see it, I think it will make us just better interpreters in general. So I appreciate Joel's question because it prompted us to kind of think through and walk through this uh question.

SPEAKER_00 38:09

Next view, next point I have, which I've never heard anybody give this point before. I've never read it, I've never listened to it on a podcast. I mean, as far as I know, I'm the first person pointing this out. At least I'm the first person pointing this out that I know of.

SPEAKER_01 38:30

And that point is this is a lot of buildup, Joel. So the suspense, here we go.

SPEAKER_00 38:38

Why would Jesus make a statement that if a man divorces his wife for any other reason than pornea, which if it's an invalid marriage, then it's referring to an invalid marriage, he causes his wife to commit adultery, which is what Matthew 5.32 says. It's also what the original Matthew 19. But then does not say you have to divorce.

SPEAKER_01 39:04

Okay, so first I I I've not been persuaded that the original Matthew 19. said what Matthew 5.32 says, but I don't want to get off on a whole manuscript uh tangent here. The second thing I want to mention is that Joel thinks Jesus makes divorce an option in the exceptional scenario. But I don't think Matthew 5.32 or Matthew 19.9 say divorce is optional in the exceptional scenario. All Matthew 5.32 and Matthew 19. The exception clause itself doesn't say if divorce is optional or required. So let me give you an example of how this would work. So suppose you're charged with a crime and the district attorney walks into the interrogation room and says, Listen, we've been interrogating you for a long time. If you'll just confess to the crime, we'll just give you probation and you can go home. Now, the the DA thinks you're guilty and the DA thinks you should confess. The DA isn't saying you should or shouldn't, right? All the DA is saying is if you confess, then we're just going to give you probation. But of course the DA thinks you're guilty, although they wouldn't be telling you to confess, they would just tell you to go home if they didn't think you were guilty. So all the DA is saying though is if this, then this. If you confess, then we'll give you a slap on the wrist. And so the DA isn't saying that confession is, you know, morally required or not morally required or whatever. The DA obviously believes it is required, but in the statement, in this if statement, the DA isn't saying that. So similarly, in the exceptional uh scenario, in the exception clause, Jesus is saying, here's what'll happen if you divorce in the exceptional scenario. That's all he's saying. He's not saying you should or shouldn't divorce. So whether Jesus requires divorce in the exceptional scenario depends on what you think the exceptional scenario is. So if you think it's infidelity during a marriage, then you would probably deduce that divorce isn't required, but it's permitted. If you think it's infidelity during betrothal, again, you would probably deduce that divorce isn't required, but it's permitted. If you think it's if you think it's an invalid marriage, then you would deduce that divorce is required. So since the question of whether divorce is required or not depends on what fornication means, then Jesus doesn't need to say that divorce is or isn't required in the exceptional scenario. He just needs to say what fornication means. And I think he did say that in Matthew 5.32 B.

SPEAKER_00 41:40

An invalid marriage would be primarily adulterous remarriages. It could also include things like incest. You know, a man finds out his wife is really his sister. Uh, it could involve uh fraudulent marriage where the man does everything except consummate the marriage and takes off, has nothing to do with the woman. All they had was a wedding ceremony and no marriage after that. You know, these types of things you would call an invalid marriage. But among invalid marriages, the overwhelming majority would be adulterous remarriages. So that's what we're gonna focus on here.

SPEAKER_01 42:21

So if okay, so a couple of things. First, I don't think sex is required to create a marriage. It sounds like Joel does, and I have a whole episode on that, but I don't want to get on that tangent. A second, in the exceptional scenario, Matthew 532, Matthew 19.9, I don't think Jesus is including incest or other things. Uh, I think he's only speaking about marriages that are invalid because one or both spouses are already married. The other scenarios would be understood to be invalid, and there's no reason to for Jesus to uh address them.

SPEAKER_00 42:50

Except for the cause of pornea means an adulterous marriage. How come there is no command by Jesus to divorce? There's not even a command to not divorce either. Go back to Matthew 5:32 and Matthew 19:9 and read what it says. It says, But I say to you, whoever divorces his wife for any reason except pornea causes her to commit adultery, and whoever marries a woman is divorced commits adultery. So if that means an invalid marriage, pornea there, okay, Jesus is not giving a command to divorce. How come he's not commanding to divorce an invalid marriage, a marriage that he calls adultery later on in this passage, as well as elsewhere in the Bible? See, that doesn't make any sense. It what's really happening here is Jesus is saying you can divorce for the cause of pornea, but you don't have to. Requirement to divorce for the cause of pornea. And if pornea means an invalid marriage, then how come Jesus is essentially saying you can remain in your invalid marriage if you want to? You have the option of divorcing without it causing your wife to commit adultery, but you don't have to. You see, there's no commandment in the Matthew and exception clauses to divorce. There's none.

SPEAKER_01 44:29

All right, so the reason there's no command to divorce in the exception clauses is that the requirement to divorce would be deduced from the meaning of the word fornication. So I would say that by calling it fornication, Jesus is saying it's a fake marriage. So, you know, if a boyfriend and a girlfriend, you know, go to their pastor and they say they've been having sex and the pastor says, well, that's fornication. Everybody knows the pastor means you got to knock, knock it off. Also, where does Jesus say in the exception clause, you know, in the exceptional scenario, you may or may not divorce? Or where does he say in the exceptional scenario, divorce is optional? He doesn't say it's optional. He doesn't say it's required, he doesn't say it's optional in the exception clause, because that's not his purpose in the exception clause, isn't to talk about that. All he's saying in the exception clause is if you divorce in the exceptional scenario, you're not guilty for a remarriage.

SPEAKER_00 45:22

Even proponents of the adultery view, which are in the opposite and opposing camp to the marriage permanence view, even they understand and will often regularly say there is no commandment from Jesus to divorce for the cause of pornea, which they interpret to mean adultery. They'll say, if your spouse commits adultery, you don't have to divorce them, you can work things out instead. In fact, they'll often say that, and then they'll say that usually that's what's best to do, even though they believe that you have this sacred, solemn, holy right to divorce for adultery once your spouse commits it. You see, even the camp that's in the in the in error on this, even they understand there's no commandment to divorce for the cause of pornea. So why would Jesus talk like that if it's an invalid marriage and you truly have to divorce an invalid marriage? His language in Matthew 5, 32, as well as Matthew 19, 9, would indicate that you don't have to divorce in that circumstance. And that makes no sense if it's referring to an invalid marriage.

SPEAKER_01 46:41

So it's true that those who believe that fornication refers to infidelity within a marriage believe divorce isn't required in the exceptional scenario. And that's the vast majority of evangelicals. But they deduce that from their wrong premise that fornication means infidelity. Nothing in the exception clause says divorce is optional in the exceptional scenario. So Joel says that even the wrong camp understands divorce isn't required in the exceptional scenario. And I think the wrong camp concludes the divorce isn't required in the exceptional scenario because of their wrong interpretation of fornication in the exception clause. It's a deduction. And so if you set aside the question of what fornication means, I don't see where Jesus says divorce is optional or required in the exceptional scenario from the text. So I really appreciate Joel's video. I watched the rest of his video. I think I've got all of the content that's related to the invalid marriage view that's relevant. He says the same thing uh a few more times here, but I think I got like the his main points here. I think I responded to them. I tried to do so in a faithful way, in an honest way here. And Joel's a Joel's a great guy. We disagree on the fornication question, but he'd be a great guy to take out the dinner if we lived near each other or whatever. So Joel's a good guy. So go ahead and subscribe to his content, check out his videos. He's got a bunch of them. He's done a lot of research on this. He's a smart guy. He's reasonable and he's humble as far as I can tell. And I really appreciate uh his kind of contribution on YouTube to sharing what he has found on this. So make sure you go ahead and get my book, Divorce Your Remarriage. Get that at Amazon.com. I'll have a link to that in the description below. Give me your comments. Let me know what you think here. And also make sure you subscribe because I'm gonna have a video that's gonna come out about the betrothal view. And for those of you who believe in the betrothal view, like like Joel does, you're gonna want to see that so you can understand why I'm not persuaded by the betrothal view of fornication in the exception clause. But again, Joel and I, we're on the same team. We both believe that adulterous remarriages must be divorced. So subscribe, like, comment, do all the things, and I'll see you guys next time.