Debate with Joel Garner on Divorce and Remarriage part 2

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). Joel critiqued my view, I reacted his his critique.  He then reacted to my video.  In this episode, I am responding to his last video.  This back and forth gives us the opportunity to identify the premises that underly our disagreement so that you have more information and can decide who is right. Let us know in the comments!

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

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Email: DivorceYourRemarriage@gmail.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Welcome back to the Divorce Your Remarriage Podcast. I'm Chris Iverson, and I'm continuing my conversation with Joel Garner. Joel Garner has studied the divorce and remarriage issue from the scriptures for a long time. He's a YouTuber. He's got a bunch of videos on his channel. I encourage you to go subscribe and check out his content. I'll try to remember to put a link in the description below. But Joel, smart guy, humble guy, has done a lot of research and he has a particular view about divorce and remarriage, and I have a slightly different view. And so we've been discussing this. What happened was I said, Hey, Joel, what do you think about my view? And then Joel said, Oh, yes, I know about your view. And then he did a video saying what he thought about my particular view. And then I did a reaction video to him. And then he did a reaction video to me. And now I am doing a reaction video to his reaction video. So that's what we're doing here today. And it's a friendly debate, uh discussion with Joe Garner. So let me set this whole thing up, bring you up to speed. So in the New Testament, Jesus calls divorce and remarriage adultery. He does that seven times. Also, in two of those situations, Jesus says that there's an exception for fornication. And so the question is, what does he mean by fornication? So Joel and I disagree on that, and that's what we're discussing. And one of the reasons why it's important is because when people who are checking out what Jesus has to say on divorce and remarriage and they go to the average evangelical church, they're going to hear a rather permissive view on divorce and remarriage. And then they're going to maybe look at the scriptures and they're going to go, that doesn't seem to match the emphasis from Jesus and Paul in the New Testament. And then they might find us, people who believe in marriage permanence. And they might say, well, what do these people have to say? And when they come talk to us and they hear our view, we want to give them the most persuasive view possible so that they can evaluate it for themselves. And that's what's good about Joel and I discussing this is that the idea is that you can decide which view you think is the stronger one. So on the exception clause where Jesus says, except for fornication twice, Joel holds what's called the betrothal view. So here's how that works the idea there is a man and a woman are betrothed. They're not married, they're betrothed. That so they're like, which is like roughly the equivalent of our engagement, a little more serious. So anyway, they're betrothed. Now let's suppose she goes and has sex with some other guy. Well, this is a problem. He finds out and he goes, no, no, I'm calling off, I'm calling off the betrothal. It's over, right? Okay, so that's what he thinks. I don't think that view works for a number of reasons. We'll talk about it. Um, I and I actually have a whole video where I explain all my thoughts on the betrothal view, and so you can see that. But I'll talk about it some here. All right. Also now I hold a different view. I think what Jesus means is he's talking about sex in an invalid marriage. Let me explain how that would work. So let's say a man marries a divorced woman, for example. Jesus, by saying pornea, he's saying that the sex they have in that marriage is sexual sin. It's sexual sin because they're not actually married. They're in an invalid marriage. Why are they in an invalid marriage? Because she's actually still married to her first husband. She's not available to be married. It'd be the same thing if a woman married a divorced guy. Same situation, it's an invalid marriage. So the sex in that marriage is it is sexual sin, and that's why Jesus calls it pornea. Now you might think, well, Chris, doesn't Jesus call that sexual sin adultery? If he calls it adultery, how could he also call it pornea? And that's a very simple question to answer. The reason is it's called adultery seven times to emphasize the fact that she's still married to her first husband, right? So she was married to her first husband. They got a divorce, and her remarriage being adultery, what that tells you is that her divorce didn't end her first marriage, right? Because she's still married. That's why her remarriage is adultery, because she's still married. She's cheating on somebody, she's cheating on her first husband. We see that in Mark chapter 10, verse 11 really makes it very clear there. So then why does Jesus also use the word pornea then for the sex in that invalid marriage? Because that's to emphasize the fact that they're not married to each other, that this remarriage is a fake marriage. And why is it a fake marriage? Because people who are married, when they have sex, they don't commit sexual sin. They don't commit pornea. They're not married to each other, therefore it's pornea. And so that's why Jesus uses that word. So the reason why you would use why you would use pornea or you would use adultery is to emphasize different facts in the background. And so the pornea is used to emphasize the fact that they're not actually married, and adultery is to emphasize the fact that she is actually still married to her first husband. So they're emphasizing different aspects. But now I need to bring up the speed on one other thing, and that is a lot of this video is going to have to do with what are the what's the semantic range, what's the interpretive range for the word pornea? And the word pornea is what Jesus says, or you know, is written down in the original in Greek. It says except for pornea. That's the Greek word. Normally that would be translated fornication in English, it would be translated zanute in Hebrew, it would be translated uh fornicatio in Latin. Now, in my view, those four words, pornea, zenute, fornicatio, and fornication, those four words are interlingal synonyms. That means that is they mean the same thing. Whatever pornea can mean, fornication can mean. When they're using the exact same time and culture. When they're not using the same time and culture, they can fluctuate some because language changes over time. But nevertheless, if you're going to translate a word like pornea from Greek, corne Greek, over to English, the closest word you're going to use is fornication. But the meaning of that word, English word fornication is supposed to, is intended to include the whole semantic range for pornea. It's not supposed to mean just what fornication might mean, you know, in the year 1700 or whatever. It's supposed to include what the entire semantic range of pornea. And they're just choosing the word fornication because that is the closest analog that we have or the closest synonym we have for pornea. Okay, now the next question is when you come across a word in the Bible or really in any text, and you're trying to figure out what did the original speaker, what did the original author mean by that word? What you do is you say, well, this word could have five different meanings. And then you look at the context and you try to figure out from the context which of those meanings the author intended. And if you can't tell from the context, then you don't know. But oftentimes there's something in the context to give you a hint as to what the which one of those meanings the author intended. So that's what I would do. But that is not what Joel does. Joel does something different. What Joel says is that pornea has three different possible meanings: prostitution, fornication, or sexual immorality. Prostitution is sex for money. Fornication is sex between unmarried people. And I think that's too narrow of a definition of fornication, but that's the word, that's what he uses. It's something like that. He doesn't give me the exact definition here, but I think he means something like that. And the third possibility is sexual immorality. So he's got three buckets, right? Prostitution, fornication, sexual immorality. And then the idea is which one of those meanings is intended by the speaker. Well, Joel has a rule that he uses, and the rule goes like this you should presume the author intended fornication, that is something like sex between two unmarried people. You should presume they meant that unless you have something in the context that forces you to choose a different meaning. So if you don't have something in the context that forces you to have a different meaning, then you gotta say it means fornication, sex between two unmarried people. Now, my question is, where does this rule come from that you have to presume? Because what with what Joel does and what other people I have done, I've seen from the in the betrothal camp, is they'll say there's this presumptive rule, and they'll say it in different ways, but that's basically what they're saying. There's a presumptive rule that you have to understand it to mean this thing, which is fornication between two unmarried people, something like that. And then they put the burden on you to overcome the presumption that they just gave you. And my question is, where does this presumption come from? I don't see such a presumption in the text. So a lot of the conversation here is about is there a presumption or not? And a lot of times there's like a lot of begging the question of like there is a presumption. And so, you know, to Joe will say things later on in the video like, I don't know why we would use a different meaning than the ordinary meaning. Well, we would use a different meaning of the ordinary meaning if the ordinary meaning doesn't work in the text, but also like, why is the presumption that it would always be the ordinary or most frequently used meaning? I don't understand why that's the presumption. We don't know that that's what meant, what's meant there. But that's the kind of argument that's used. Well, you should use you should just use the ordinary meaning, by which he means the most frequently used meaning, but the but the most frequently, but the word ordinary implies like that's the norm. And so that's like a presumption that you should use that particular meaning of the word. And I just disagree with the whole presumption concept. I just think you have a word, it has five different meanings or whatever, you try to figure out from the context which of those meanings it has. I don't like stack the deck in favor of a particular meaning until I read the context and I figure out what the context points to. So additionally, what Joel's going to say then is when it's translated fornication in English Bibles, what he's saying is that the translators chose his view by using the word fornication. The reason he does that is because he thinks fornication just means sex between two unmarried people. He does not think fornication is an interlingual synonym for pornea, right? So I think if you take the whole semantic range of pornea and then you take the whole semantic range of fornication, they're basically the same. Basically the same. So when the translators choose fornication, they're just saying the English version of pornea. That's all they're trying to say there when they use the word fornication. But Joel doesn't think that. Joel thinks the translators know that this is talking about sex between two unmarried people and they're using a word to signal that. So Joel then uses, based on his presumption of this, what this word fornication means, of what he thinks the translators are doing, he uses all the translations that use fornicatio, uh, for like from like Jerome or fornication in English to say that he has all of this evidence that all these people agree with his view, but that is not what they're doing. I don't think Jerome is doing that. Anyway, we'll talk more about that in a minute. This is kind of the you know elaborate, kind of complicated thing that Joel does with language. And the Joel theory on language is what he uses to support his conclusion. And the and what he doesn't do is then give evidence for his whole complex theory. So so at the end of the day, what Joel is doing is he's just assuming the premise, and he's making a conclusion off of the assumptive premise, which is effectively begging the question. So that's kind of Joel's uh argument here that he's going to present. Now, I do want to say this not everybody who has the patrothal view does it this way. Like, like John Piper doesn't do all of this, he doesn't have this whole theory. He has a different way that he gets to the patrol view. But this is the way that Joel does it, and this is the way a lot of people who have the betrothal view do it. And in my experience, they don't like tell you up front that this is what they're doing, they just do it and they I think they think other people know this or something, and that we just know that's the rules they're operating on, but we don't know. It actually takes a while to figure out that they're using a totally different set of rules than than than we are, or that anybody else, frankly, is is using that I'm aware of. All right, so now let's hear from Joel what he has to say, and we'll go ahead and react to it.

SPEAKER_00 10:57

So I made four points in my previous video. I tried to stick to just scripture. I didn't want to deal with extra biblical sources, it's not my passion to debate on this particular point. I think it's far more important to debate on the point of um, you know, that divorce is wrong and remarriages are wrong, rather than um what I view as a more minor issue. And so I intentionally did not add uh information from sources outside of the Bible in my previous video.

SPEAKER_02 11:35

Okay, I wholeheartedly agree with Joel that this is of secondary importance. The most the main important thing is if somebody enters a remarriage that Jesus calls adultery, that remarriage is a continual state of adultery as long as the prior valid spouse is alive. Joel and I totally 100% agree on that. That is the most important issue. That is the urgent thing. And Joel and I totally agree on that.

SPEAKER_00 11:57

And I have his uh his book here. It's divorce your remarriage. Looks like it shows up backwards here, but um, at any rate, I I mean, if you're interested in the subject of divorce and remarriage, you know, to the point where you're reading books about it, I would recommend getting his book here. He has it available.

SPEAKER_02 12:18

That was really nice, Joel. I really appreciate that. I'll try to remember to put a link in the description below so you guys can get that book off of Amazon.com. That was very kind, Joel. I appreciate that. You can tell Joel did a lot of work for this video because he's pulling out quotes from my book and he's looking up stuff, and you can tell he put a lot of work into it. So I appreciate that. It's good for good content for for you guys. So that's really great.

SPEAKER_00 12:38

And my first point was that pornea means an invalid marriage nowhere else in the New Testament or Old Testament subtugent. In Chris's rebuttal video, he acknowledged that this is correct, that there's no passage that is explicitly or very clearly referring to an invalid marriage anywhere else in the Bible, with the possible exception of Matthew 5, 32 and Matthew 19.9. And that's assuming you interpret those to mean an invalid marriage.

SPEAKER_02 13:09

Okay, so it is true that as far as I know, fornication is not used elsewhere in the Bible to unmistakably refer to sex in an invalid marriage, except for I would say Matthew 5, 32 and Matthew 19.9. Um, but it may be that invalid marriages were in mind when fornication was used in the New Testament and in other places, but we don't see anything in the text that unmistakably requires the word fornication to mean that. Now, later in this video, Joel will agree that pornea can refer to sex in an invalid marriage. So now I don't think this particular objection has any really relevance because the whole point is, you know, can sex in an invalid marriage fall within the semantic range of the word pornea? If it can, then it's a candidate for our interpretation of Matthew 5.32 and Matthew 19.9. And we have to look at a bunch of other factors to figure out if that is a likely meaning of the word pornea there in Matthew 5.32 and Matthew 19. But the point is, first you have to ask the question does sex in invalid marriage, is that within the semantic range? And if it is, now it is a candidate for a possible meaning in that passage. So I don't think the fact that it's not used in other places, you know, that that means that it can't be what it means in Matthew 5.32 and Matthew 19. Joel agrees that pornea can refer to sex in an invalid marriage. And you'll see that later on in this video. Additionally, Joel's going to address a number of the sources I bring up that shows that uh the words for fornication were used to talk about sex in an invalid marriage by Jews before and after the time of Jesus and by early and by early church writers. So we know the word fornication was used by people around this time, shortly after this time as well, to refer to sex in an invalid marriage when they were discussing the topic of divorce and remarriage. And so then Jesus talks about fornication in a discussion about divorce and remarriage. Maybe that's what he meant as well. So I think that's useful evidence. But we'll and and we'll address all of that evidence uh as we go forward.

SPEAKER_00 15:22

He then said that meanings of the of words outside the Bible and Greek and Hebrew help us to understand what Greek and Hebrew words mean in the Bible. That is true to an extent. Um, often the meaning of words in Greek and Hebrew are understood in extra-biblical writings because of what they mean in the Bible, and there's a history of understanding what various words in the Bible mean, uh, largely due to translating. So you have the Masoretic text, and that's in Hebrew, and that's the Old Testament, that's what uh Orthodox Jews would read, and in that they have kept a history of understanding what the words in there mean all the way from the time it is written till now. However, there's also a Septuagint, which is a Greek translation of the Old Testament, and that helps people to understand what Hebrew words were meant by seeing what they were translated to into Greek by the translators of the Septuagint. You have a similar situation with the New Testament. In the New Testament, it was translated into Latin, which I will address more later on in this video as well. And that enables us to see what the Latin translator, Jerome, thought those Greek words meant by what he translated them into Latin. So you have this history of translating and a history of just understanding what the word means being passed on and on generation after generation. And that's the core of what biblical words mean. So if you're studying extra-biblical Greek writings or extra-biblical Hebrew writings, it can help you understand what words are meant in the Bible, but only to a fairly limited extent. Most of that information is already there just from usage and from translating the Bible.

SPEAKER_02 17:30

Okay, so what's happening here is Joel wants to constrain the possible ways we could read the word pornea. He wants to constrain it and constrain it with lots of different rules and historical accounts and interpretive rules, so that the only possible thing it could possibly mean is his view. That's not how I approach the text. How I approach the text is a word has a range of semantic meanings. I read the context to figure out which of the meanings the author intended intended in that case. Now, Joel talks a lot about what the biblical words meant and how those how those meanings were preserved over the centuries. Okay, now I want you to imagine the Sermon on the Mount. Here's Jesus. He goes out, a lot of common people, these are not super well-educated people, and in many cases, Jesus is speaking to them using Koine Greek. What's Koine Greek? It's it's literally common, the common Greek, the common language, and the common people heard Jesus gladly. So he's talking to them and they understand him, and he's just talking in regular language. He's not talking in a highly specialized kind of biblical language, he's speaking in like regular Greek to them, or perhaps Aramaic, and then Matthew wrote it in Greek. But the point is, and he may have actually written it in Hebrew, that's another subject. But the point is, Jesus is just speaking words, right? Like we take John the Baptist. John the Baptist is called before Herod and he tells Herod it's unlawful for him to have Herodias. We read that in Mark chapter six. He can understand John the Baptist because John the Baptist is just using language, how everybody always just uses language. So there isn't like some specialized like code that you need to know in order to figure out what the words meant. Herod didn't have to like look up John the Baptist's words and some like special code thing. He's just using language. So the language at the time, how words were used at the time in extra biblical writings can help us to understand what was meant by the people who spoke at that time. And let me just bring this up again. Joel is going to agree later on that within the meanings of pornea can be sex in an invalid marriage. So he already agrees that is a particular meaning. So here's the way to think about this. Suppose you have a stoic writer, first century, and you have a historian, first century, and they're both writing in Koine Greek. And the historian uses a word, and you wonder, I don't know what this word means. And then you read the Stoic writer and you see him use that same word, and it's very clear what it were, what that word means because of the context around it. And you take the meaning from the Stoic writer and you put it in the historian's writing, and you go, oh, okay, now it makes a ton more sense. Now I understand what the historian was saying. This is what we do all the time with ancient languages. And this is and this is what I'm talking about when we use extra-biblical languages to understand what the Bible says. We take extra biblical texts and we see what people are writing about stuff, and then we take that and then we look at what was said in the Bible, and then we can understand what was meant at the time. And this is a two-way street. So you can use the biblical text to understand extra-biblical text and vice versa. It's a two-way street. It's not a one-way street. Joel tries to make it like it's a one-way street, kind of. It's like it's three lanes going from the Bible to other texts and maybe like a like a little bike lane going the other way. But no, this is just a two-way street. If you have, if you have the two different writings, there, you know, you can read the one and you can read the other and you can understand what words mean in one, and that'll help you understand what words mean in the other. Now, is there a limit to this? And there is a limit, and it's really the same limit for all writings. It's not like a different limit from the Bible. The limit is this if the stoic writer has a word and uh that in his particular ideology has a very specialized meaning, then you can't really use that then for the historian, because the historian is just a historian and say he's not a stoic. So you can't assume the historian is using the word in that same way. So I agree, you know, the gospel means good news, but in the New Testament, it has a specific specific meaning. But you know, really outside of these specialized meanings, you can use two different texts, doesn't matter if one of them is biblical or not, to understand what words mean in the other one. All right, so knowing that, first, by the time of Jesus, the words that we translate fornication were definitely used to refer to sex in an invalid marriage. Second, in the Old Testament, uh, if a man divorced a woman and then she had sex with some other guy, that would have been fornication, right? So she's a divorced woman, has sex with a single guy, that's fornication. Now everybody would have agreed that you'd use the word zanute for that, or if they were using cornet Greek by that point in time, it says before Jesus, they're using cornet Greek, they would call it pornea. That's what they would call that. Divorced woman with a single guy, right? So even if there was some highly technical meaning in the Old Testament that we're supposed to like bring into the New Testament, uh, it would still be within the range of that meaning to say that if a man Divorces a woman and then she invalidly marries another man, that the sex between that divorced woman and her invalid husband would still be pornae because it's just sex between a divorced woman and a single guy. And that's what I think Jesus is talking about in the exception clause. He's talking about sex between a single guy, for example, and a divorced woman. I understand that from the culture's viewpoint, it's a divorced woman who's single and unmarried and a single guy. And so from the culture's viewpoint, that would be sex between two unmarried people. And I understand that from Jesus' viewpoint, it's not sex between two unmarried people because she's still married to her first husband, right? She's divorced, but the divorce doesn't make her not married. So that's why Jesus can also call that adultery. But my point is that Jesus is speaking to an audience who would use pornea to refer to sex between a divorced woman and a single guy. So from the audience's viewpoint, pornea, even if it had the specialized meaning that Jill is talking about, would still qualify as the word to talk about between a divorced woman and a single man. So, you know, so I don't I don't agree with Joel's whole concept of this complicated, linguistic, elaborate thing that he does in order to narrow the words of the meanings of words down to something that kind of fits his end view. So I don't agree with all of that. But even if you were to use that, that still doesn't rule out the the use of pornea to refer to sex in an invalid marriage.

SPEAKER_00 23:20

This uh word uh pornea that this is the whole debate is about. Uh one of the problems with in English, 50 years, the first 350 years of English translations, this word was translated fornication almost every single time. And then modern translators decided that it really means sexual immorality most of the time, and they then made translations. Most of the recent ones use sexual immorality for pornea very very heavily. They used this based on that assumption. Well, where did they get that assumption from? They got that assumption from extra-biblical writings. Of course, the problem is that in the Septuagint, pornea never means sexual immorality, and that's what people who were who were writing the New Testament as well as the first few hundred years of Christianity, they were all reading the Septuagint from the Old Testament. So they're reading pornea over and over and over again, and it never meant it never meant uh an invalid marriage during any of that time.

SPEAKER_02 24:29

So okay, so Joel and I agree that translators should translate pornea in the exception clause to be fornication. So this is another area where Joel and I agree, and we actually agree on a lot of stuff, which is nice. Um, and he's right that modern translations translate pornea to sexual immorality, and it would be better if they use the word fornication. I don't think it's a huge deal, but I do think it would be better. Now, other modern translations translate pornea to unlawful marriage or invalid marriage, illicit marriage, things like that. And it would be, and it would be better if they kept to fornication uh as well. So I agree with you on how they ought to translate it. But the reason why fornication is a better option is because that's the closest English word for pornea is fornication. And so therefore, choosing fornication is a more literal translation, so which is good because it kind of reduces the bias of the translator. You know, I want translations to be what Jesus said, not the interpret, not the translator's interpretation. If they want to give me their interpretation, that's fine. Write a commentary. But for the Bible, I'd rather be closer to literal. Now I understand I live in the real world. I know not all bias can be removed. They have to make interpretive choices when they do translations. I understand that. But but we that we should limit that. And the way you limit that is with a more literal translation. You want to maximize objectivity. And I understand, let me just say this. Some people want paraphrased Bibles and things because people who are not, their literacy isn't as good. Uh, it's easier for them to read that. So I understand that. I sympathize with that, but I prefer literal translations. Even though Joel and I prefer that translations use the word fornication, Joel has a different reason for why he wants it to say fornication. Joel wants it to say fornication because he thinks fornication does not equal pornea. Joel thinks pornea can mean prostitution, fornication, sexual immorality. And he wants the translators to make an interpretive choice he agrees with. He wants, he thinks it means fornication. He says, I want the translators to agree with me that it says fornication. So in Joel's view, the problem was that the translators looked at the extra biblical writings and made a different interpretive choice other than the one Joel prefers. Joel prefers it because he thinks there's a presumptive rule, right? The presumptive rule is pornea means sex between unmarried people, unless there's a substantial evidence in the context that it means something else. So, so from my perspective, Joel doesn't want translators to leave their interpretation out of their translation. He just wants them to choose a particular interpretation when they translate it. He wants them to pick his interpretation based on his presumptive rule. And he doesn't like it that they've gone to extra-biblical writings and they've used a different interpretation based on a different interpretive rule.

SPEAKER_00 27:13

Chris also uses the Talmud and the Damascus document to support his view that the exception clause is for an invalid marriage. He points out that these translated into English have a word that translates into English as fornication, and he believes that's referring to an invalid marriage. Same as the exception clause. However, this is not terribly relevant because the um the Talmud is written in Aramaic and the Damascus document is written in Hebrew. So what a Greek word pornea means is not relevant with what those writings are being translated into English as.

SPEAKER_02 29:14

But if they have sex in the invalid marriage, that's fornication. And the words you could use for that are, you know, pornea, you could use zenut, you could use fornicatio, you could use fornication. All four of those words would apply for sex in an invalid marriage. And all four of those words are interlingual synonyms if they're used at the same like time and culture. So next, I agree that the Damascus document and the Talmud were not written in Greek. I understand that. And that Matthew is written in Greek. I get that, but I don't think that this has any relevance here. So take the Damascus document. Let me let me walk you through that. It says a man who remarries commits fornication by doing so. It doesn't use the word for adultery, it uses the word for fornication, Zanute. Now, according to Joel's own interpretive method, he would translate Zanut to fornication because he thinks it means fornication, sex between unmarried people. He would not translate Zanute to prostitution or sexual immorality without the context telling him to do so. He would translate it to fornication. He would also translate pornea in the exception clause to fornication for the same reason. So Joel thinks Zanut in the Damascus document and pornea in the exception clause are both fornication. So Joel wants to maintain that these words mean the same thing definitionally, fornication, but they don't mean the same thing when they're in two different languages. And I just think he's gonna have to pick one or the other. Either they mean fornication or they don't mean fornication. But Jesus in the Damascus document make the same kind of argument here. And this is what I think is more compelling than getting into interlingual this and all that. It's really the same argument here, it's the same concept they're bringing forward. And that shows you the power of comparing what Jesus says to the Damascus document. So they start with Genesis, both of them. And you know, God created Adam and Eve. Uh that's a paradigmatic example, and that's how it's supposed to be one man and one woman. Very, they both start there. Therefore, they end up concluding that if a man marries another woman, it's sexual sin. So they start with Genesis and they end up with it's sexual sin to marry a second woman. So of all the studying that I have done, I know of nobody else making this argument at the time of Jesus, except Jesus and the Damascus document. And the argument is this you start with Genesis and you end up with saying a subsequent marriage is sexual sin. Nobody else is doing that other than the Damascus document and uh Jesus. Now, even the permissive scholars, I've read 30 books on this subject, even the permissive scholars notice how striking it is that Jesus and the Damascus document are the are similar in this regard, right? So in the Damascus document, the sexual sin is called Zenut, which means fornication. So here's my points twofold. First, a meaning of fornication is sex in an invalid marriage. Second, it would be odd for Jesus to make the same argument as the Damascus document and then mean something different by fornication. And now just to make things a little bit more complicated, there is some historic evidence to suggest that Matthew was originally written in Hebrew. And if it was written in Hebrew, certainly in the exception clause, it was originally written except for Zenut, the same Hebrew word in the Damascus document. Okay, now take the Talmud. So it speaks of it, it speaks of a man who married a woman who thought her first husband was dead. Man and woman are married, he goes off somewhere, she thinks he's dead. So she thinks she's a widow. Then she marries another man, right? Because she's a widow. That's fine, right? But then her first husband comes back. And then there's this question in the Talmud, what did they do? It says that her marriage to the second man is fornication in the Talmud. Now, Jesus is talking about divorce and remarriage to the Pharisees. The Pharisees' religious descendants wrote the Talmud. The word they used for sex in an invalid marriage was fornication. Jesus is talking about divorce and remarriage, and he uses fornication in that context. What do we think the Pharisees are thinking that word means? Now, Jesus is speaking to the Pharisees in Matthew 19, 9, but Jesus is also speaking to crowds. And these crowds are going to synagogues. Many of the people in these crowds are likely influenced by Pharisaic thought throughout these synagogues. And Pharisaic thought, we know in the Talmud says that fornication in the divorce remarriage context, a meaning for that is sex in an invalid marriage. So if Jesus is using the word fornication in the context of divorce and remarriage, it's very possible that they think he means sex in an invalid marriage. He would know they thought that. And so that's what he meant in the exception clause. So that's the argument from the Talmud and the Damascus document. Now, once we say, okay, it's possible that fornication in the exception clause means sex in an invalid marriage, the next step is then to test that as a meaning in the exception clause against the other possible meanings. And in my experience, it performs much better than the other meanings. The other meanings, the other ideas of what fornication could mean there, they're just like full of internal logic problems that things that don't make any sense. They contradict other verses, it just doesn't work. And they have to like twist themselves into a human pretzel to try to make the whole thing work. You don't have to do any of that with this view. This is very simple. Jesus is just saying, listen, if you divorce and you remarry, it's adultery, except if your marriage was invalid. If your marriage was invalid, well, then if you divorce that and you remarry, it's not adultery. Why wouldn't it be adultery? Because there's nobody to cheat on. You were never married to begin with. So it's very, it's a very simple view. But all these other views, they've got internal logic problems all over the place. And I have all of that uh on my YouTube channel. You can see all of the different arguments I make about all those other views. But let's continue and hear what Joel has to say.

SPEAKER_00 34:38

Chris also uh makes a big issue out of the Damascus document. He brings this up in a lot of his videos to support the the idea that the exception clause means an invalid marriage, and he brings this up in his book. So in his book, I'm going to read the relevant part of the Damascus document that he is citing. And it says, They shall surely spout, shall be caught in fornication twice by taking a second wife while the first is alive. Whereas the principle of creation is male and female, created he them. Also, those who entered the ark went in two by two, and concerning the prince it is written, He shall not multiply wives to himself. But David had not read the sealed book of the law, which was in the Ark of the Covenant, for it was not opened in Israel from the death of Eleazar, and Joshua and the elders who worshipped Ashtareth. It was hidden and was not revealed until the coming of Zadok. And the deeds of David rose up except for the murder of Uriah, and God left them to him. Okay, so he's saying, Chris, in his book and in his videos, that this is essentially condemning um an adulterous remarriage, and it's using the word fornication, even though it doesn't really have a connection to hornia, anyways. Problem with that is that there's no mention in there of an adulterous remarriage, and when it talks about being caught in fornication twice by marrying a second wife while the first is alive, it then proceeds to talk about monogamy versus polygamy. So, far more likely than not, it's just simply talking about polygamy there, and it's not actually referring to uh a remarriage after a divorce. There's no mention of divorce, and there's no mention of a remarriage there. There's just a mention of a second marriage, which is exactly what happens if you're a polygamous and then you go marry a second wife.

SPEAKER_02 36:56

So Joel says in this passage in the Damascus document only refers to polygamy and therefore is unable to assist us to understand what fornication means in the Jewish divorce and remarriage debate context. And that is the standard response to my view. Uh, and I'm so I'm glad Joel brought it up because it gives me an opportunity to uh respond to it. Uh, I have really four reasons why I think this objection uh is just unpersuasive for me. So the first one is this the Damascus document requires two conditions to be met before a man commits fornication. And the two conditions are this one, the man marries two women, two, the first woman is not dead, still alive. So if a man divorces and remarries, he meets both conditions. He married two women, the first woman is still alive. It does not give an exception for divorce. Joel thinks there is an exception for divorce, but it doesn't have an exception for divorce. It says these are the two conditions. That's it. So Joel then mentioned a little later in the Damascus document, here in the same same little passage, that it talks about polygamy and it does not talk about divorce and remarriage. Here's the problem. The reason that they continue talking later on is they're responding to potential objections in that section, right? And and here's the thing after Moses gives the law on divorce, I don't think there are any examples of divorce and remarriage in the Old Testament. So there's nothing for the Essenes would need to defend their view on regarding texts in the Old Testament. So they want to defend it on David, right? Because David's a good guy and he's a polygamist. So, Essenes, how does your view square with, you know, David's polygamy? That's an objection, so they're responding to a potential objection. And there's, you know, some other things that they mention in there. So I guess I don't know why we would expect them to try to reconcile their view with a non-existent account of divorce and remarriage in the Old Testament. There's no objection for them to respond to. So what Joel is doing is he's taking their responses to potential objections and using that to say, well, they're only talking about polygamy, as opposed to they're just responding to potential objections. And if you want to know what their rule is, you should see what they wrote. And what they wrote was they got two conditions. Condition number one is a guy married two women. Condition number two is the first wife is still alive. There's no exception then for divorce. And if a man divorces and remarries, he meets both conditions as long as the first wife is still alive. So that's my first reason why I find this unpersuasive, uh, that it's only narrowed to polygamy. Here's the second, here's the second reason why I find it unpersuasive. All right, consider Leviticus 18, 16. You shall not uncover the nakedness of your brother's wife. So there's two brothers, brother one and brother two. Brother two has a wife. Brother, brother one wants to have sex with the wife. Can't do that, Leviticus 18, 16. Okay. Now let's say brother two gets a divorce from the wife. Oh, now can brother one have sex with the wife? Let's say now brother one wants to marry the wife. Can he do that? No, he cannot. How do we know he cannot? Because of Herod and Herodias. Now, I I think everybody already kind of knows this, but in case you didn't know it, Herod and Herodias is a case in point. So there in uh John the Baptist, like Mark chapter six, he's uh John the Baptist is alluding to uh Leviticus 18, 16 when he tells Herod, it's not lawful for you to have Herodias because Herodias was married to Herod's brother. This is the exact situation. There's two brothers. Brother two is married to Herodias, and now Herodias, you know, is divorced from him and wants to marry Herod. And John the Baptist is like, you can't do that, Leviticus 18, 16. What are you doing? This is unlawful. And Herod understood him, and Herod killed him. So what that tells us is that divorce doesn't permit one brother from marrying his brother's wife. So that's divorce. Now, what about death? Well, if the if the brother died, then you could go ahead and marry the wife. And in fact, we have something called the leave right marriage. We have that in Deuteronomy chapter 25. Let's say you have two brothers, and one of them dies, and she's childless, and the other brother was expected to kind of go ahead and marry her. He didn't have to, but it was kind of expected. That's Deuteronomy chapter 25. And the Sadducees bring that up in Matthew 22. If you remember, there's the seven brothers, and you bring up this complicated thing to Jesus, and the one brother dies, and the second brother marries her, and the second brother dies. Anyway, and it's just kind of a nonsense hypothetical, but they bring it up to Jesus and he responds to it there. So that's the that's the Leverite marriage in Deuteronomy 25. So death ends that kind of family connection, but divorce does not end the family connection, right? I just want to point that out. Now, let's go two verses later. Leviticus 18, 18 says, and you shall not take a woman as a rival wife to her sister, uncovering her nakedness while her sister is alive, while her sister is alive. So here a man violates this verse if he marries two sisters while they are alive. In the Damascus document, they commit fornication if he marries two women while they are alive. So here's my point in all this. Leviticus 18, 18 uses this phrase while her sister is still alive. And the Damascus document says, while she is still alive. So so they're using they're using a concept already known. And so divorce would not be an exception to that. We already know divorce is not an exception to these Leviticus 18 prohibitions. So I think alive means alive. When the Damascus document says while she's alive, it means while she's alive. Divorce doesn't matter. While she's alive is all that matters. Okay, so here's my third point. The difference between polygamy and divorce remarriage is an illusion. So in Mark chapter 10, verse 11, Jesus says if a man divorces and remarries, he commits adultery against his first wife. Mark 10, 11. The remarriage is adultery because that man is still married to his first wife. Joel and I agree on this. This is very this is like basic divorce remarriage stuff. Okay. All right. Now now imagine this. A man divorces and he remarries. He is married to his first wife in reality and he's cheating on her with his second wife, right? Now imagine a man marries a woman, doesn't divorce her, marries a second woman. What's the reality going on? He's married to the first, cheating on her with the second. So in that sense, divorce and remarriage and bigamy are the same thing. It's the same thing in that sense. So now Joel is making a distinction between divorce and remarriage versus polygamy. And we know in the New Testament, the New Testament is not making that distinction. So the question is, did the Damascus document writers make that distinction? And in order to say that the Damascus document prohibition on a second wife didn't include divorce and remarriage, you have to assume they made a remarriage polygamy distinction. And we can't assume that they did. In fact, they're using the same argument that Jesus uses, and Jesus doesn't make uh that distinction. Okay, and here is my fourth reason, and I think this is the strongest reason. Even if the Damascus document is referring to sex in a polygamous marriage, Marriage, that still means sex in an invalid marriage is fornication. So even if we grant the Damascus document as referring to polygamy, that document shows that one meaning of the word fornication is sex in an invalid marriage. So three points on this. First, we know polygamy and divorce and remarriage is basically the same thing in Jesus' teaching. Two, therefore, even if the Damascus document is talking about polygamy, the fornication it calls sexual sin is the fornication that Jesus is calling out in his teaching. So when Jesus uses the word fornication in that context, it would be odd if Jesus didn't mean the same thing as the Damascus document meant by that word. So the semantic range of the word zanute and pornea includes the idea of sex in an invalid marriage. But more importantly, there are only two people, only two people or two groups or whatever making an argument from Genesis, the Essenes and Jesus, both use fornication in their assertions. In the Damascus document, sex in an invalid marriage would be fornication. And it would be odd then, it'd be a strange break in the pattern then, if to say the other, all the only other person that we're aware of making the same kind of argument when he uses fornication, that would be Jesus, meant something different by that same exact word.

SPEAKER_00 45:18

I think saying that this means anything more than that is a stretch. I don't know anyone else who's arguing that point except for Chris. And I think that's because you can't really make this clearly say that. I think you have to accept that either it's referring to polygamy, I think very high probability that's all it is, or if it's referring to divorce and remarriage, it just lacks the clear wording to indicate that. So I don't think that is useful at all for supporting this concept of the exception clause being an invalid marriage.

SPEAKER_02 45:56

So I think it's good. I'm I'm sharing my view on divorce and remarriage, and I think it's good for me to get pushback. People can kind of challenge it and everything. It's good for you all to see what the different views are. So Joel made appeals that there's nobody else who thinks this. Now I want to challenge that assertion on a few grounds. First, there is a Pentecostal denomination. I'm not Pentecostal, I'm not part of them, but they have had my view for about a hundred years. So I'm not the only person. I don't bring them up very often, but there is a there is a group 100 years had has had my view. Second, there's a scholar named Dr. Joseph Fitzmeier who shares significant overlap with my view. Now he's passed away, but he he's he had a master's in Greek. He taught at university, he taught, you know, Aramaic, Hebrew, New Testament. At one point, he was the president of the Society of Biblical Literature, and he's footnoted by evangelical scholars on divorce remarriage books that I've got. Um he worked on a concordance for the Dead Sea Scrolls. You know, he's a smart and well-informed guy, uh, and a lot of credibility. In fact, three Bibles have translated Pornea in the exception clause to something like invalid marriage. And I'm pretty sure they were influenced by uh Dr. Fitzmeier. All right, now there are two catches to me claiming uh Fitzmeier and friends. Uh, the first catch is that he's Catholic. And you might say, oh, well, he's gonna be biased and all that. I'll address that. The second one is that they agreed with me in part. So they would agree that Jesus and the Damascus document were teaching essentially the same thing. So that's that's the critical part where we agree. And they would agree that the exception clause is referring to an invalid marriage. However, my understanding is that he taught that the Damascus document was referring to incest as opposed as opposed to sex and invalid marriage. So in that sense, it'd be a little bit different. But the point is there are scholars who are doing this thing. By this thing, what I mean is looking at the Damascus document and saying, oh, look how striking that is to what Jesus says. Now, first of all, let me just say, like pretty much everybody does that. Everybody says it's striking how much the Damascus document lines up with what Jesus says. The difference is in the evangelical world, they have a bunch of reasons why they just say, well, yeah, it's it's interesting, but we we're not going to do that because it's just in the milieu of uh apocalyptic people or whatever. They just have a way of saying, of just kind of dismissing it. Okay. Uh or they'll do like this polygamy thing, which I don't think holds up, frankly. Okay, so they'll they'll do they have ways of just kind of dismissing it. But there are other scholars like Fitzmeier and others who would say, no, this is the same thing that Jesus taught, and it so much so that we're gonna have commentaries on it and and we are gonna teach that the Bible says something different than maybe what we thought it taught before. Now, there is another Catholic Bible that was, you know, ecclesiastically approved uh over in the Philippines. They have an English translation. I've ordered a copy of that as well, and it is drawing off of the same kind of scholarly work and that kind of same line of thought from Fitzmeier. It's called the Catholic Community Bible. And my understanding is, and I ordered it and I'll confirm this when I get it, that in Matthew 19, 9, it translates the exception clause to be except for concubinage, you know, like concubines, like polygamy, which is basically my view. And again, there might be some nuanced differences there, but well, but we're very close on what we're talking about here, using the Damascus document and then coming up with sex in an invalid marriage. So Joel framed this as like, you know, Chris against the world. But I think what's really going on here is it's scholars influenced by Martin Luther on the evangelical side versus scholars influenced by Rome on the Catholic side. When I address a person's arguments, if it's an evangelical person or a Catholic person or whatever, I try to address their evidence and their arguments, and I don't try to say, well, they're biased, and so I write them off. I don't do that. I think that's uh intellectually a bad idea. But Joel is talking about, well, there's no scholars that agree. Well, now if we're going to talk about which scholars agree with who, first of all, this is it's an argument from authority and ad populum and bandwagon. These are all like logical fallacies anyway. So it's kind of neither here nor there. But if we're going to do that, then we need to try to figure out, well, yeah, well, how biased are the scholars that we're talking about? We got the Martin Luther scholars and we got the Rome scholars, and the Martin Luther scholars, they disagree with me, and the Rome scholars don't. And here's the deal: here's why, here's why that's important. You know, if you're Joel and you have the betrothal view, you could get some permissive evangelicals to agree with you. For example, uh, Pastor John Piper agrees with Joel on the betrothal view. The reason Piper can do that is because when it gets to the question about adulterous remarriages, John Piper can say, well, yeah, I have the betrothal view for the exception, but if somebody's in an adulterous remarriage, they they should continue that adulterous remarriage. That's John Piper's view on that. And he can hold both those two things at the same time. And the reason he does the adulterous remarriage view is he used like this Gibeonite thing, which is not a very good argument, but that's for another video. But the point is you can hold the betrothal view and you can hold a view where adulterous remarriages can continue. You cannot hold my view and say adulterous remarriages continue. That will not square, it will not work. The whole point of my view is when Jesus called remarriage, sex and remarriages pornea, he was calling those remarriages invalid. And so just good luck trying to say your marriage is invalid, but you should continue it. I don't I don't think uh evangelicals can figure out a way to do that. So, to the extent that you think evangelical scholars are committed to allowing people to continue their adulterous remarriages, to that extent, they're not even gonna be open to considering my view because they have a commitment, and that commitment prevents them from truly considering my view. If you think that. Now, again, when I talk with people, I just assume they're open-minded. But if we're gonna talk about credibility and who agrees with who and everything, we have to understand the bias here. And the bias against my view is stronger than the bias against the betrothal view, because you can have the betrothal view and have a bunch of divorced remarried people in your church. You cannot have my view and have a bunch of divorced remarried people in your church. That's not gonna work.

SPEAKER_00 51:41

Also, if the Damascus document was so popular, Chris implies that it was well read uh by the time of uh Jesus and his disciples, then why when Jesus uh states the exception clause and what he says about divorce and remarriage, the disciples immediately respond to that by saying, Well, if this is the case with the man and his wife, it's better not to marry. In other words, they were shocked by what Jesus said. So if they're well acquainted with the Damascus document, and the Damascus document is saying the same thing that Jesus is saying, that uh you know remarriages are wrong, and it's calling them fornication, which he of course thinks means is interchangeable with Pornea, even though it's not, even if that's what it means, why would they express that shock? If they're well acquainted with it, why are they shocked? They're shocked because Jesus is saying something that they had not heard before, they did not know, they did not believe it. And whatever Jesus means by that exception clause, it can't mean that you can divorce your wife for some specific reason, especially if it's adultery, because they all already believe that. There'd be no reason for them to be shocked. So I don't think that works either to uh use the Damascus document and then say it's basically agreeing with Jesus. I don't think those dots really connect. Um, I think they're just talking about two different things.

SPEAKER_02 53:17

All right. So I like this objection because this is the first time I have heard it before. And so Joe came up with one I had not heard before. So yeah, I mean, I would just say that the concern of the disciples was that Jesus' teaching means the moral law makes marriage risky. If it's too risky to get married, people aren't gonna get married. We have to like limit the rule to be more pragmatic. That's what they were trying to say. And Jesus just rejects that pragmatism, he just rejects it. If you look at the whole Matthew 19 discussion there, so the Pharisees come up to Jesus and they're making a textual argument at one point from Deuteronomy 24, and they're using pressure because the crowds aren't gonna like Jesus' teaching. And they're also using pressure, perhaps because Herod just killed somebody, John the Baptist, over a marriage question. Jesus is gonna say this thing that's gonna implicate Herod's marriage. And so that could put Jesus in trouble with Herod. So they're using a textual argument and they're using these two kinds of uh pressure there, probably. And then the disciples give them a different kind of argument, which is a pragmatism argument. Well, you the risk reward, people aren't gonna get married if we all are following your rules on this, and Jesus just says, Well, go be a eunuch if you have to be. I mean, not exactly, but he did he doubles down. He does not cave to their uh appeal to uh pragmatism. The question, though, is how widespread was the Damascus document? And here's the evidence that we have, and you can decide for yourself how widely spread you think it was. The Essenes likely believed the Damascus document because it was found in the Dead Sea by the Qumran community over there by the Dead Sea in these caves that they had there. It's like right next door to their whole like community where they had probably about 120 guys who lived there. They were, it was very like monastery-ish. Now that's a little anachronistic because that was before monasteries were a thing, but it's very monastery-ish. And they had a room where they did a lot of writing and stuff, and then this is why we have all these manuscripts that were found in the caves there in uh in the 1940s. So it's you know, it's very much like that. And I guess there's about 10 of these, uh, roughly, is what I've read, uh, that were found in the caves, the Damascus document. 10. And now there aren't 10 of a lot of documents. This is like unusual to have 10 of a document in the caves. And then also we found one in Egypt. My understanding is that we're not finding a lot of these kind of documents from Qumran over in like other places. There are some, but there's not a lot of those. And you know, this is a long time ago, and you know, a lot of these documents have been exposed to the air. So the fact that we can find any of them is amazing. So the theory is that from what I've read from all the scholars is comparing this to other kinds of manuscripts, it was widely known in the Essene community. The Essenes believed it. That's like the popular scholarly kind of uh deduction that they make based on the evidence. Now, also, the Essenes were the third largest group, according to, I believe it was Josephus who wrote that. He wrote they were popular enough or large enough that Josephus wrote, you know, quite a bit about them, frankly. And uh there was an something called an Essene Gate in Jerusalem. So, you know, these people were around a little bit and they had this document floating around. Those are all the arguments for why the Damascus document got around, at least in the Essene community. And so the question is if it was widely known, and then Jesus is using a very similar kind of argument, you begin to put the pieces together, and this is why Fitzmeier and others have noticed this, and people have noticed how striking the Damascus document text is to what Jesus says, because you know the Pharisees aren't starting with Genesis, nobody's starting with Genesis that I'm aware of other than Jesus and the Essenes. And let's just be honest, if you go and read Genesis 1.27 and Genesis 2, 23, 24, nothing jumps out at you about divorce and remarriage from those two texts. You only know that they relate to divorce and remarriage because of the New Testament. The fact that the Essenes are saying that and Jesus is saying that is just very striking evidence that they're probably using the same kind of argument. And so then when one uses fornication and the other one uses fornication, you would think, ah, I wonder if they mean the same thing.

SPEAKER_00 57:01

He uses, and I'm gonna I'm gonna read his quotes out of his book because I don't see any problem with them. Clement of Alexandria. Clement of Alexandria says, Now that scripture counsels marriage and allows no release from the union is expressly contained in the law. Thou shalt not put away thy wife except for the cause of fornication. He's writing in Greek, that's pornea, and it regards as fornication, which is pornea when he wrote it, the marriage of those separated while the other is alive. This is Clement around 200 AD. So he's a fairly early, early church father. And I think that what he says here very clearly agrees with what Chris says. You know, if Clement of Alexandria is correct, Chris is correct because I think he clearly thinks that the exception clause is referring to a second marriage here, which of course Chris is calling an invalid marriage. He doesn't say the word invalid marriage there, but I think it's very clear that's what he means. Now, also just to be precise about this matter, pornea does not mean an invalid marriage. I mean, if your claim is that pornea means an invalid marriage, that's 100% completely false. It does not mean that. So if you're calling the exception clause an invalid marriage, what you're really saying is that the exception clause means sexual immorality, but is referring to an invalid marriage. The word pornea itself does not literally mean an invalid marriage.

SPEAKER_02 58:58

Okay, so three things here. So um I'm glad that Joel brought up the Clemente of Alexandria quote. I think it's a great quote. Uh, some people have questioned the translation of it or whatever. Now, I think if you read it in context, I think the translators got it right there in the Clement of Alexandria quote, but I just want to mention that. Um, second, I agree with Joel that if a man and a woman enter an invalid marriage and they never have sex, they do not commit fornication or pornea or whatever, because there's no sex. Okay, but sex within an invalid marriage is fornication. Now, I probably have not always made that crystal clear, but that is that is what uh I think that's what I'm thinking of when I say that, even if I doesn't occur to me to say those words as precisely as I should. Third, Joel said that pornea means prostitution, fornication, or sexual immorality. Now, I think Joel thinks fornication means sex between two like unmarried people. Uh, and Joel thinks sex is an in an invalid marriage falls under sexual immorality, right? So now I'm a little confused by his distinction here because suppose it's like 50 BC, and so it's before Jesus, right? And uh a man divorces his wife and then she has sex with some other guy, but she doesn't marry him, right? Just sex, divorced woman and a single guy, that would be called pornea, right? So it would be thought of as sex between two unmarried people, and that sex would fall under Joel's definition of fornication. So now if we fast forward to the New Testament, since Jesus thinks if she remarried, that would not be a valid marriage, her sex with her fake husband would also be pornea, according to the existing understanding by the people at that time. So I understand in Jesus' system of thinking, she's married to her first husband. And so then Joel would say that wouldn't be fornication according to Jesus' system of thinking. I understand that's what he what he would say there. Jesus is speaking to an audience, and that would be their system of thinking. So I don't think we can rule out fornication, uh, if even if even if we're using the definition of sex between two unmarried people to refer to an unmarried woman or a divorced woman and a single man.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:57

Uh, other sources here, Ireneus. Ireneus says our Lord compassionating that Aryan Samaritan woman who did not remain with one husband but committed fornication, that's pornea, by contracting many marriages. He's talking about the woman at the well, and he's saying that her getting married repeatedly is pornea. Okay, that's correct usage. If what you mean is sexual immorality, yes, absolutely, adulterous remarriages are sexual immorality.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:34

Okay, so Joel said adulterous remarriages are sexual immorality. So we agree on something important the sex uh with a remarriage that Jesus calls adultery, that sex is adultery, but it's also pornea. So the only question is is that what Jesus referred to in the exception clause when he used the word pornea?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:54

Is specifically sexual immorality referring to an invalid marriage. Problem is we don't know that. Ireneus uh simply doesn't comment on that in his writings. So it could be he thinks that, but there's nothing that he wrote that supports that viewpoint, it doesn't exist, and it would be speculation or conjecture to assume that that's what he's talking about. Chris even acknowledges that in his book, that that's not 100%, you know, solid support that he believes the exception clause meant an invalid marriage.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:32

Okay, so I agree with Joel that Irenaeus, in this quote, called sex and a remarriage pornea, the equivalent of pornea. And Irenaeus doesn't explicitly say that's what Jesus meant by pornea in the exception clause. I agree with Joel on that. But I think it's important for me to outline how I'm using these sources. The sources are the Damascus document, the Talmud, and four early church writings. So I'm using those sources, that's six sources, to make four distinct points. Point number one a meaning of pornea is sex in an impermissible marriage, invalid marriage. Okay. Two, pornea and zenute often had this meaning when it was used in a discussion about invalid remarriages. Three, the only other people making a Genesis-based argument about remarriages use Zanute the same way. That would be the Damascus document. Four, Jesus' audience of Pharisees used fornication this way when later when they wrote the Talmud, suggesting they would have thought Jesus meant sex in an invalid remarriage, and the crowds would have thought sex in an invalid remarriage, since they were influenced mostly through Pharisaic synagogues. All right, so so far of these four points, Joel agrees that Pornia can refer to sex in an invalid marriage, and Joel agrees Pornia sometimes was used to refer to sex in a remarriage. Okay, but Joel is not persuaded by the other points.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:13

No other than a species of pornia, or in other words, a type of pornia. That sounds kind of like he's saying that the exception clause is an invalid marriage, but the problem is it's not. You see, Tertullian writes elsewhere about divorce or remarriage. In fact, he probably has more written about divorcing remarriage than all these other early church fathers, you know, especially if you're only going up to the mid-fourth century combined. I mean, he has tons of stuff written about it, and he very clearly believes that the exception clause is referring to adultery and says so multiple times elsewhere in his writings. So you can't say he thinks the exception clause is an invalid marriage when he very clearly states elsewhere he thinks it's referring to adultery. Now, just to be clear for people who think the adultery view is true, he's not saying you can get divorced for the cause of pornea referring to adultery because you can then go get married again. He's just saying you can divorce for that, but you can't marry again, which he also says elsewhere in his writings. So he's still solidly in the marriage permanence camp. There are no early church fathers prior to the late fourth century who believed anything else other than marriage permanence. They all believed that. There's quite a few of them, too.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:38

All right, so I agree that Tertullian doesn't think pornea in the exception clause meant sex in an invalid marriage. That wasn't my point in quoting him. My point in quoting Tertullian is to show that the semantic range of the word pornea includes this idea of sex in an impermissible marriage. Now, Joel and I agree that sex in an invalid marriage qualifies. As pornea. So the fact that Tertullian doesn't say that's what it means in the exception clause is just not really relevant for the point I'm trying to make. So here's the thing there's like different points I'm trying to make. There's different premises I have in my argument. And I'll use evidence to support one of my points. And then Joel says, well, yeah, but that evidence doesn't support this point over here. That wasn't my reason for bringing the evidence. I was trying to support this point over here, not some other point over there. So the fact that the fact that Tertullian had a different view on the exception clause in no way uh reduces the fact that he thought fornication or pornea included sex in an invalid marriage.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:34

You can't use Ireneus to support the invalid marriage view, and you can't use Tertullian. They're just not saying something that you could say that's definitely referring to an invalid marriage.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:46

Okay, so Jill here said that you can't use Irenaeus or Tertullian to support the invalid marriage view. And I disagree with that. So you can support this view of mine in two ways. First, the invalid marriage view requires that sex in an invalid marriage is a type of pornea. And their writings show that sex in an invalid marriage is a type of pornea. So I I need that premise, the sex and invalid marriage type of pornea. Their evidence, their writings are evidence that yes, that is within the semantic range of the word. So therefore it is useful to help make the case. Second, Irenaeus' quote shows that when the word fornication is used in the divorce and remarriage context, it was used to refer to sex in an invalid marriage there. So that contributes to the case that fornication in the context of a remarriage discussion meant sex and invalid marriage, at least in these in these cases. So for example, if you use the word pornea in the context of a pagan temple, good chance they're talking about prostitution. If they're saying, if they're talking about pornea just among like young people, there's a good chance they're talking about plain old sex between unmarried people, premarital sex. What I am saying is when they're talking about pornea in the context of remarriages, there is this trend that there's good evidence that it could mean sex in an invalid marriage, because we see that in multiple places. So for example, for example, suppose we found uh some new early church writing, everybody's very excited, it's making headlines across the world, and it says he divorced his wife and married another while his first looked on. He's a liar, he's a thief, he's a fornicator. Well, now, before you saw these writings from Tertullian and Irenaeus and Clement and all these people, now before you saw all of that, you might think he's a fornicator means, oh, he must also be going to prostitutes, or maybe he had sex with somebody between his two marriages. But now, after you see these other quotes, now you go, he's a fornicator. Maybe it's possible, it's it's within the semantic range that the this early church writer, this fictional early church writer, is talking about sex in the remarriage, not just sex outside of the remarriage. And why would you think that now? Now you would think that now because you have these quotes that show unmistakably that this word is used for sex in a remarriage. In the same way, now when you go to what Jesus says, and he has this word fornication he's using while talking about remarriages, you go, oh, maybe he's talking about sex in an invalid marriage. And so that's why these early church writings are helpful.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:17

Yeah, but you can use Clement of Alexandria. And also the Damascus document, that's not good evidence for that. I I know Chris makes a really big deal about it in his videos and in his book, but I just don't think that's how most other people would read that writing. I don't think it would pop into their mind, oh my gosh, it's talking about adulterous remarriages, because there's just nothing there that says that. I think Chris makes that conclusion, and he's the only one doing that. Except maybe perhaps some other people that he's um convinced you know to agree with him. Maybe some of them do as well. But as far as someone else studying this matter very diligently and thoroughly and coming to the same conclusion, I don't know anyone else who has that viewpoint other than him.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:04

Okay, so it's interesting that Joel says no one else reading the Damascus document would make the connection with Jesus' teaching in the way that I do. But nearly every scholar I have read on this topic makes that connection and feels compelled to explain what is this connection. The similarities jump out from the manuscript. And so now what the evangelical ones do is they'll say, yes, there's similarities, they're remarkable, but it's just like apocalyptic people talking in a particular milieu or it's polygamy, so just don't worry about it, even though that's really not a reason to write it off. Now, I understand that Joel isn't aware of others who think that Jesus and the Damascus document are saying the same thing. But as I mentioned earlier, there definitely are serious scholars who think that. And again, though, no one's view rises or falls based on like the opinions of experts. And you know, Joel and I agree on a lot. We agree that Pornia can refer to sex in an invalid marriage. We agree that the Damascus document used Zenut to refer to sex in a second marriage. And I think the three things we disagree on here are this. I think the Damascus document's second marriage can include a divorce and remarriage scenario. Bill does not think that. I think that Jesus used the same argument as the Damascus document. And so therefore, he likely used the same meaning of fornication the Damascus document uses. And the third thing is I think that the language differences between the New Testament, the Damascus document, and the Talmud doesn't matter when you're trying to understand the meaning of fornication as it was used in those three texts in the different languages, because what you're talking about is like the Jewish debate about divorce and remarriage, and you're talking about the concepts that were just expressed in different languages, but they're the same concepts. So, from my vantage point, even if we grant that Joel is right on his point of disagreement, I still think where we agree is sufficient to say the exception clause is referring to sex in a remarriage. Now, and the reason for that is once sex in an invalid marriage is a possible meaning of pornea, when you test that meaning in the exception clause, it works perfectly. There's a textual basis for it, Matthew 532b. There are no internal logic problems with it, and it's consistent with how pornea is used in these extra-biblical literature on divorce and remarriage. However, when you test the other options, and I have tested them, there's problems like all over the place, and they're glaring problems.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:26

The other thing that Chris does in his book is he cites three Catholic English translations of the Bible. And the first one is New American Bible, which was published in 1970. And for the exception clause in Matthew 5, 32 and 199, it says, unless the marriage is unlawful. So that's referring to an invalid marriage, right? And that supports his viewpoint. Well, we we will see upon further examining if that's the case. He also cites the New Jerusalem Bible, which was published in 1985, and for the exception clause, it says, I am not speaking of an illicit marriage. That sounds like invalid marriage wording, and then he quotes the new Catholic Bible published in 2019, and for the exception clause, it says if the marriage was unlawful. On the surface, this seems like pretty good support for his viewpoint that the invalid marriage view is correct. But Chris thinks that the exception clause is only referring to invalid marriages that are adulterous remarriages. He makes this conclusion because he thinks that the next statement after it is strongly connected and overlapping with it in some sort of rhetorical manner, which I will address later on in this podcast. Problem with this though is that the Catholic Church doesn't mean the same thing Chris does. What they mean in these translations, and I pointed out their published dates, because I want everybody to understand that these English Catholic Bible translations are very recent. Okay, the Catholic Church historically uses the Latin Vulgate, translated by Jerome, in I believe it's the very late fourth century, and that's what they use. Okay, the Catholic Vulgate doesn't say invalid marriage or unlawful marriage or illicit marriage, it says in the exception clause fornicatio. That's the Latin word, and what Jerome did when he made the Latin Vulgate is he translated the Greek word cornea into the Latin word fornicatio. Okay, so what does fornicatio in Latin mean? Fornicatio in Latin means prostitution or fornication. Now I can find some things where people say it means a little more than that, perhaps sexual immorality. But the problem is that there doesn't appear to be a lot of significant usage of the word in that manner. Apparently, the overwhelming majority of the time that the word fornicatio was used in Latin, at least by the time of Jerome, is to mean either prostitution or fornication. So when Jerome read the exception clause in Greek and then translated it into Latin, he didn't call it an invalid marriage. He called it fornicatia, which means prostitution or fornication. And that strongly suggests that Jerome thinks that the word pornea in Greek, ordinarily in the New Testament, meant prostitution or fornication.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:06

I agree the Catholic translations are newer. Of course, we only found the Damascus document in 1897 in Egypt and the 1940s by the Dead Sea. Anyway, and so then they had to examine them and analyze them. So to the extent that the Damascus document influenced those translations, that accounts for the reasons why they're translated that way now and they weren't before. We had new information, so we adjusted, so they adjusted the translation. I also agree that uh Jerome translated it as fornicatio, and that is the best translation. I don't think the Catholic translation should be invalid. I don't think it should say that. I think it should say fornication in English. So I like literal translation, not to not a here's my opinion translation. So my point is only that these translators of these newer Catholic translations are smart people, like most translators, most translators are, and adds credibility to the idea that pornae and the exception clause can refer to sex in an invalid marriage. Now, what I mean by credibility is this a moment ago, Joel said, nobody thinks the way Chris thinks on this. Now, I don't think that objection like matters a whole lot, but there are people who think those kinds of objections matter. And for those people who think that, I'm saying, well, here, this is relevant. Take a look at this. Now, I get that this comes from the from Fitzmeier and his colleagues who think that it's invalid for incest. And I think it's invalid for adulterous remarriage. And I'm not sure if they think adulterous remarriage is also a possible meaning, because uh one of the translations that I mentioned earlier that I'm gonna get uh translates it except for concubinage. And I'll look at their notes if I if they have it in there. Um, but here's what this means my what this means is my view, even if they think it only means for incest, my view is only one step removed from them. They're doing everything that I am doing, except they do this one thing where they they take a left turn and they go on the incest translation or incest uh interpretation of the Damascus document. And I think it means adulterous uh remarriage. But to the extent that someone cares what the experts say, these experts are very close to my view as far as looking at the Damascus document and coming over to understand what Jesus has to say. And again, I don't depend on the Damascus document, it just happens to be a great piece of evidence for my view. I think I can get it just frankly, just from the New Testament, as I talk about later on.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:26

This is ironic because Jerome himself writes about divorce and remarriage, and in his commentaries on Matthew, when he gets to chapter 19, he indicates very clearly that he thinks the exception clause is for adultery, just like Tertullian. He thinks you can divorce for the cause of adultery, and that's what Cornelia is referring to there, but you just can't remarry again because he's also part of the marriage permanence camp. And there's not a whole lot of early church fathers, even when you first hear about it in the late fourth century, who have a different view than marriage permanence. So his belief that that means adultery does not mean he thinks you can go get married again, he thinks that you can't, even though he believes that he didn't translate the word as adultery, he certainly didn't translate it as an invalid marriage, he translated it as fornicatio, which shows that he thought that word ordinarily meant prostitution or fornication. And since prostitution doesn't work in the exception clause, because then you're basically saying if your wife commits adultery for pay, you can divorce her, but if she doesn't do it for pay, you can't divorce her, which doesn't make a lot of sense. Why would you only be able to divorce her if she was paid for her adultery? So you have to rule out prostitution, and that leaves you with fornication. So Jerome knew that it meant fornication. That's what he believed. He believed it meant fornication, even though he thought it was referring to sexual immorality. So I think what this shows is that Jerome was a man of integrity, and he translated the Bible accurately and didn't put his interpretation in there like a lot of modern translators do, especially when it comes to this word pornea, and they interpret it as sexual immorality, even though in English translations it was always translated as fornication for 350 years. Well, sexual immorality totally changes the meaning.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:29

All right, so I agree with Jerome's choice of fornicatio doesn't imply anything about Jerome's interpretation. Uh, I would choose fornicatio if I was going to translate that into Latin, even though I think it's referring to sex in an invalid marriage. It's just a literal translation choice. So for Jerome, he thought adultery was included in the meaning of fornicatio. So Jerome didn't translate a word in a way that he thought contradicted his own view. So for me and Jerome, pornea and fornicatio are interlingual synonyms. They mean the same thing, they're semantic equivalents. So I would love to know from you in the comments do you think Jerome translated pornea in the exception clause into a word that contradicted his own interpretation? I don't think he did. So here's the other thing. Joel said fornicatio would mean prostitution or fornication. So Joel says prostitution is like an incoherent interpretation, therefore it must be sex between two unmarried people. So what this means is Joel has another rule for how he interprets these words. If one of the meanings of the word makes the concept incoherent, then it cannot mean that. Right. So earlier we said Joel's got the these three buckets for pornea. It can mean prostitution, fornication, sexual immorality. That's step one. Step two is there's a presumption that it means fornication, unless the context forces it into some other meaning. We had two rules. So it has those three meanings, and then you choose fornication unless you have to choose something else. But now Joel has another rule that we're learning here. And this other rule is if you have one of these meanings and it makes the whole concept like in logically incoherent, then it can't be that meaning. It must be something else because we can't have an incoherent conclusion here. So now consider Matthew chapter 19, verse 9. It says, Whoever divorces his wife except for Pornea and marries another commits adultery. Now let's look at that word wife. If wife means betrothed woman, then there's no divorce and remarriage in this text, right? No, there's no divorce of a marriage here because there's no marriage. Because he's who is he divorcing? He's divorcing a betrothed woman. He's not divorcing a married wife. So if wife means betrothed woman, there is this is not about divorce and remarriage. Now that's impossible. This is definitely about divorce and remarriage. So then wife cannot mean betrothed woman. All right, so maybe wife means married woman. Well, if wife means married woman, then the person who committed pornea is already married. Whoever divorces his wife, except for pornea and marries another commits adultery. Well, who's committing pornea? The pornea is being committed by the woman. We know that because the man is divorcing her. So if the if the pornea is being committed by the woman and the woman is married, then the pornea is being committed by a married woman. So the only way to rescue the betrothal view from this problem is to say that the word wife means betrothed woman and married woman at the same time. And that is not how Greek works. That is an impossibility. Jesus' audience wouldn't know when to flip back and forth between the two meanings because they're first learning what Jesus thinks about this. And so therefore, it means that pornea cannot be referring to sex between two unmarried people in the way Joel thinks it uh it means, because it makes the sentence to not make any sense. Joel just said here, like fornicatio from Jerome, one of the meanings is prostitution. It can't mean prostitution because it doesn't make any sense. So he rules out a possible meaning of a word based on the fact that it's incoherent in the sentence. Well, this makes the word wife incoherent in the sentence when you make pornea to mean fornication in Joel's definition of the word. Therefore, it cannot mean fornication in Joel's definition of the word, which means it must mean, under Joel's viewpoint, prostitution or sexual immorality. And now that definitely opens up the door, even from Joel's own interpretive framework, that opens up the door to the pornea being sex in an invalid marriage. Now, here's a second problem. So if you don't buy the the wife problem is a problem, here's a second, which I think it definitely is, but here's a second problem with uh with viewing pornea as fornication in the way Joel views it. Imagine a man ends his betrothal for a non-pornea reason. Okay, so he say he just gets cold feet. I can't do this, I'm scared to death. Okay, cold feet. He ends the betrothal, not for pornea. Then that man marries somebody else. That would be adultery if pornea means what Joel says, right? But Paul in 1 Corinthians chapter 7, verses 25 through 28, says a person doesn't sin if they end the betrothal and they marry somebody else. So that would make Jesus to argue with Paul as it incoherent, and so therefore pornea cannot mean what Joel thinks it means uh under his fornication perspective. So so using Jill's own rules for ruling out per uh possible interpretations of this word pornea, uh it means that pornea cannot mean sex between two unmarried people.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:35

Adultery. It's even technically possible it could be referring to an invalid marriage, but the problem is that that involves interpretation. And what a lot of modern translations do is they interpret the text that you're reading. You think you're just reading what it originally said in Greek and Hebrew, and in fact, in an awful lot of a lot of them, that's not the case. They're literally interpreting it, they're taking their theological biases and they're interpreting the text instead of just leaving it alone and translating it as what it ordinarily means, and letting a modern reader deduce for themselves if maybe it means something a little different in that passage. Jerome did not do this, he exercised integrity on the exception clause and translated it as fornicatio, even though he thought it was actually referring to adultery. And this is what modern translators should do, they're not translating with integrity.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:35

Okay, so I think fornication in English is just a literal translation of pornea, so that whatever is possible for pornea to mean in Greek, it is possible for for fornication to mean in English. But let's suppose you have Joel's view that uh pornea can mean prostitution, fornication, sexual immorality. So you have a word in Greek that could mean A or B or C, and assume we have no English word that covers A and B and C. So translators are forced to choose between A or B or C. And for 350 years, they have chosen B. Does that require an interpretive choice to choose B? I think it would have to include an interpretive choice there because you're not choosing A or C, you're choosing B. So if Joel is opposed to translators putting their interpret interpretation into the translation, and he thinks pornea can mean one of those three things, he should oppose the choice of any of those words because all of them require an interpretive choice. Now, obviously, I get sometimes you have to make an interpretive choice if you're doing a translation. I understand that. But Joel is saying the old translators did not make a choice and the new ones did make a choice. But I don't see how that's possible from Joel's viewpoint of what prone means. What Joel wants is them to choose his preferred interpretation. That's how it was always done. Let's keep doing it that way. And he does. In addition to that, have a rationale for it, which is that he has this presumptive rule that it's most frequently used this way, therefore, we should presume it means that way. And I don't think uh a frequency, an identification of frequency means a presumption. Like I don't go to an English dictionary that's frequency ordered with the meanings, go to the first meaning. And then every time somebody uses that word, I go, well, it means the first thing in the dictionary. It must mean that. And if you don't mean that, you better make it crystal clear because it because the dictionary told me. I don't, I don't do that. I don't think anybody does that. I think we just hear words from people and we understand them in the context that they say. Words can have a bunch of different meanings. We figure out which of the meanings the person meant in the context by what they said.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:40

Inspired in English. It's inspired in Greek and Hebrew. So when you're dealing with theological concepts, trying to nail them down, what words mean in Greek and Hebrew is of immense importance. And it's not what it says in your even your King James version.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:55

Yeah, so I I agree with him. The original text is inspired. That's why you translate from the original text. You don't translate from some other translation that wouldn't make any sense. You translate from the original text.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:17

I mean, they really messed the situation up and they translated it incorrectly. Sorry if I'm offending any of my brothers and sisters in the Lord who have this idolatrous view about the King James Version of the Bible that it's 100% infallible. No, it's not. Jesus didn't talk in old English, He spoke in either Greek or Aramaic, and it was originally written down as inspired Word of God in Greek. So what he said in Greek is what matters. And if pornea in Greek normally means prostitution or fornication, but can't mean prostitution in the exception clause. Extremely high probability as a starting point, you have to assume he probably just means what the word ordinarily means.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:59

So Joel said pornea probably just means what the word ordinarily means. Well, in the context of a pagan temple, fornication probably means prostitution. So if we're just using what Joel thinks the word ordinarily means, premarital sex, we would get that wrong. Similarly, in the Jewish debate on divorce and remarriage, we have multiple examples of fornication meaning sex in an impermissible remarriage. So when we have a word like porne, and you want to figure out the ordinary meaning, do you want to figure that out devoid of context? Do you want to forget, oh, we're talking about uh a pagan temple? Or do you want to look at it in the context and use the context to help you think, oh, maybe it means this thing over here because of the context? Now, in a moment, he's going to call this kind of thing being, you know, elaborate and everything. I don't think it's elaborate. I think context is a standard part of interpretation.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:50

Elaborate explanations as to what he meant by the exception clause. If the use of pornea meaning fornication makes sense, and in fact it does. I point that out in a number of my older videos, and I don't want to say that here because this video is going to be long enough already. So back to the three Catholic versions of the Bible that make a statement that would appear to agree with Chris Iverson's theological viewpoint on the exception clause meaning an invalid marriage. Those are all very recent translations, and what the Catholic Church used since around the presumably the early 5th century up until what would probably be the late 20th century is they used the Latin Bulgate. That's their official version. All those monks and priests all throughout medieval Europe and the Renaissance time, and even before that, the Dark Ages, they're using the Latin Bulgate. So what they're doing is they're reading Matthew 19:9, and they're reading Matthew 5.32, and they're reading fornicatio as the exception clause word, which they understood perfectly well, normally meant fornication or prostitution. And this concept of Catholic Christians saying that the exception clause means an invalid marriage is not really uh there for a large chunk of their history. I mean, clearly Clement of Alexandria thinks it means that. All of which do not have any exception clause and very clearly seem to be saying no divorce and no remarriage, or more specifically, don't divorce and remarriage is adultery, which of course implies you shouldn't do that. So that's what they implemented. Now, what they thought fornicatio really meant, I think a lot of them didn't know. I think that just was unimportant to them and they ignored it. And this concept that that exception clause there really is referring to an invalid marriage as recent. So why is this relevant for Catholics?

SPEAKER_02 1:33:49

Okay, so I agree the change in translation of the exception clause is a recent development. And my understanding is this is because of the Damascus document, so that's what triggered this change. I will say there was an English Catholic translation in 1610. It was kind of a big deal. I don't know if it was the official one that all the people were using or whatever, uh, if they were still using the Vulgate. I don't think it's really either here nor there. Again, I think pornea and fornicatio are basically synonyms, so I don't think that they were choosing one type of pornea over another type when they use fornicatio, but Joel thinks that they were choosing one concept over the other. The root of this dilemma is that Joel's assumption that pornea is a new, fornicatio and fornication don't mean basically the same thing. Now, in my experience of the different positions on divorce and remarriage, this kind of specialized definition thing is only done by people who are in the betrothal view because without it, they feel like their view uh uh with regards to the exception clause kind of falls apart.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:44

This is because the Catholic Church historically is opposed to divorce. You know, divorcing what they view as a valid marriage is not allowed and has not been allowed for a very long time in the Catholic Church. And so what they do is they have this annulment process where they'll say that uh marriage was invalid to begin with, and therefore you can annul it. That might include having a civil divorce.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:11

Okay, so just a couple of things here. So Joel said that Catholics don't have divorce. Technically, they have the Pauline and Petrine privilege, which would dissolve a natural marriage. And I have videos about all the Catholic stuff. Uh, but I agree with Joel, they're pretty anti-divorce in the Catholic world. And so the Catholics have a doctrinal commitment to that predates the discovery and analysis of the Damascus document, and that does make translating the exception clause as an invalid marriage to be more attractive for them. And so I and I also agree that they've expanded annulments beyond, way beyond anything reasonable. And I have a video where I react to a Catholic annulment judge, his explanation of all their annulment things, and I uh you can you can watch that if you're interested in that topic. Okay, but this highlights kind of the expert problem I was talking about earlier. So Jill says, oh, nobody agrees with Chris. Okay, well, we just discovered and pieced together the Damascus document like late late last century. So the reformers didn't have it, the early church probably didn't have it. We just got it. Okay. The Eastern Orthodox, they have the Council of Trulo, they're not changing anything. Okay. The the evangelical Protestants, if you think they have a commitment to continuing adulterous remarriages, they're not gonna be changing their view on this. So all that's left are possibly are the Catholics. And I do have some Pentecostal people who have had my view for a hundred years, but basically all you got as far as large groups are going to be the Catholics. And yeah, and then you're gonna say, oh, the Catholics are biased because they're have a doctrinal commitment against uh divorce. Most people who are marriage permanents think all the camps are biased. If you're a scholar in an evangelical school and you come out with adulterous remarriages need to be divorced, you know, it might not help your career that much. But if you're Catholic and you come out and you say, hey, look, more evidence that we were right all along, they say, Oh, kudos, good for you. And that might help your career along a little bit. So there are incentives that people have. And I mean, when you look at John Piper's Gibeonite thing, John Piper is like too smart to pull out the Gibeonite thing. And I don't want to get into all of that, but I I think I think a lot of people know what I'm talking about here. It just really looks like there is just a commitment to continue adulterous remarriages. So, yes, all the groups are biased. I would say three things. There are scholars, serious scholars who have a view similar to mine. Yes, they're biased, but which experts would Jill say are unbiased? And lastly, this is just ultimately an appeal to authority or bandwagon effect or whatever, and just a logical fallacy doesn't really matter. So, but we will continue.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:34

View it as a divorce, they view it as an annulment, and they have this list of criteria for annulments. For example, if it turns out you're closer related, like brother and sister, that you can get an annulment. The marriage is fraudulent, you can get an annulment. The marriage was done under duress, you can get an annulment, and they have way more reasons than this. And this process of annulment existed in medieval Europe as well. However, what people were getting annulments for back then was much more narrow. It was, it was most often being a close relative, and it could be a second or third cousin, and it was almost entirely just being done by rich nobility, not the common man. The common man was just not able to divorce, period. The rich nobility could get annulments if they wanted to separate from their wife, and their wife happened to be distantly related to them. Well, these wealthy families intermarry all the time, so a high percentage of the time they're distantly related to the woman they're married to, and they could then get an annulment based on Catholic teaching at the time. Now, these annulments were not mandatory, in other words, it was optional. So these annulments have been expanded in modern times. Why? Because we have no fault divorce, divorce is rampant. You know, in the United States, our divorce rate is the highest in the entire world, and it's it's every bit as high among Christians, which is an embarrassment, because really that means that Christians in the United States have a higher divorce rate than non-Christians in the rest of the world. I mean, it's a total disgrace and shame that this is how our church is at the moment. But the Catholic Church has to deal with this, all these people getting divorced and all these people getting remarried. So they basically make up a bunch of new rules about it that didn't really exist in medieval Europe, where they say, Well, marriage is a sacrament, and by sacrament they mean it's you know it's an official function of the church. And when the church marries you, which means a priest marrying you, then you're in a valid marriage.

SPEAKER_02 1:39:48

When the priest doesn't marry you, you're not in a valid marriage, it's it's called a natural marriage instead, and you can res so I just want to mention my understanding of how the Catholic system works is a little bit different than than uh Joel's representation here. And but I don't want to get into every difference there. If you want to see how I understand the Catholic system, I have videos on that. Uh, and I'll and you can take a look at those. But I just want to mention that also. But I do agree in general, Catholic annulment system way too permissive. Joel and I totally agree on like that bottom line view.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:18

If you want to, you can get an annulment for it. Can't get an annulment if you were married by a priest, but if you weren't married by the priest and it wasn't with the approval of the priest, you can get an annulment for that. That sure sounds a lot like divorcing remarriage. So if you're a Catholic and you want to have the option of divorcing and remarrying, don't get married by a priest. Because the Catholic Church will recognize your marriage is marriage until you object to it, and then they'll grant you an annulment, which you then go get a civil divorce at the same time that you get that, and functionally you're getting divorced and remarried, even though the Catholic Church's official doctrine opposes that. You see, the Catholic Church is like this, it does things, it keeps to what the scripture means in theory, but in practice makes a total farce of it. And that's what they did here with with this business of divorce and remarriage. So the Catholic Church is not historically, when you go deep into its history, interpreting cornea to mean an invalid marriage.

SPEAKER_02 1:41:28

So I'm not Catholic, I have no plans to become Catholic, but I just want to say I don't know that the Catholic Church has a monopoly on making a farce out of things in the Bible. There's a lot of traditions that I think uh have have some channels.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:39

Started translating this into English, and their whole enormo annulment process was enormously expanded to cover all kinds of junk that never would have been covered in the past. And then they made these translations saying this, which is just another case of modern-day translators reading their theological bias into what a passage says in the Bible, instead of plainly and honestly just translating the word with what it ordinarily meant in its original language.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:11

Okay, so they had the Du Reims um Bible in 1610, it's Catholic version. It was English, and it translated the exception clause as uh fornication. So, you know, Joel said once they started translating it to English, they changed the exception clause. Uh that's not the case because of the 1610 version, but yes, in general, it is true that the recent translations are using a different word and they're calling it invalid. And they did that after they found and analyzed the Damascus document. Now, I have not heard a Catholic person, scholar, apologist say that Jesus had in mind the whole Catholic annulment complex they have today when he said, except for Pornea. Um, so I think what happened was we found the Damascus document, the scholars analyzed it and all this stuff, and they and that drove them to make this change to uh their translation. Now, if they wanted to say an invalid marriage can be ended and a remarriage is permissible, they wouldn't need to do a translation change to accomplish that objective because nobody thinks an invalid marriage is binding. So I I think all that happened here, this is not a complicated story. Catholic scholarly world moved after they found the Damascus document evidence, and the translation followed the Catholic scholarly world. And again, now I think they should stick with fornication. Uh, and if they have an interpretation, that's great. Put it in a commentary. Don't put it in your translation. When I show these translations, I'm just showing that well, there are actually scholars who have a similar train of thought regarding the Damascus document that I do. And so I don't think I don't think what the experts think matters uh here, but Joel seems to, and other people seem to, so that's why I bring it up.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:57

Now, what they mean by exception clause is not what Chris Iverson means. Chris Iverson means the exception clause is for an invalid marriage if that and that invalid marriage is referring to an adulterous remarriage. That's not what they have in mind. They have in mind their whole apparatus of their annulment process, and they recognize that in many cases you could get an annulment, but you don't have to, you can continue in your marriage instead.

SPEAKER_02 1:44:25

Okay, so again, whenever I have heard Catholic scholars or apologists discuss the exception clause, I have not heard them say Jesus was just justifying all of their annulments because, you know, when you said your vows, you know, in in reality, in your heart of hearts, you, you know, you didn't have the good of your spouse as your intention. You know, I have not heard them say, well, Jesus said, if your marriage is invalid, you can, you can, you know, end it. And so that means what Jesus meant there was if you had a shotgun wedding, you can end it. I'd have not heard any Catholic apologist say anything close to that. So what I th what what I've heard them say is that Jesus was calling the marriage invalid for a sexual reason, like incest, or maybe they're already married. So in other words, I don't think they're relying on their translation to justify an annulment because it was a shotgun wedding. I don't I just I don't hear anybody doing that. So if Joel can find some like official Catholic scholarly source approved by the Vatican or approved by a big shot or a bishop or somebody where they say shotgun wedding, oh, Jesus covered that in the exception clause, I would like to see that, but I just am not aware of anybody saying shotgun wedding, okay. Let's look at Jesus' exception clause. I don't think they're talking about that.

SPEAKER_00 1:45:35

It's optional, they don't have a problem there by using by interpreting it as an invalid marriage, which Chris Iverson later on, as I will point out, does he objects to the um exception clause being optional, which is not how Catholics would have interpreted this. They don't have in mind specifically an adulterous remarriage, they do have in mind many other scenarios as well, and they do have in mind that divorce uh or the annulment for an invalid marriage is optional. So when they say invalid marriage, there they don't mean the same thing that Chris Iverson means as an invalid marriage, they mean something very different, and therefore these three translations translating the exception clause as an unlawful marriage or an illicit marriage is of no help.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:31

Okay, so earlier Jill's like it's Chris versus the world, nobody agrees with him. And I go, actually, there's a bunch of people who agree with me. And then uh, and now he's saying, well, the translation choice doesn't tell you what like was originally meant. Well, yeah, I agree, it doesn't tell you what it was originally meant. This is all about people who want to make an appeal to authority or a bandwagon argument. This tells you, no, there actually are smart people who have a very similar line of thought to what I'm talking about. All right, let's talk about the reason why Catholics do not require an annulment for an invalid marriage. Now, it has nothing to do with the exception clause, it has to do with their internal process for declaring a marriage null. In their process, what they do is they presume that a marriage is valid until they find it to be invalid. So it's not that they think invalid marriages should be continued, it's that they think a marriage should be presumed valid until an official determination is made. And Joel and I would do like the same kind of thing. So if we knew two people were married, and we and that's all the evidence that we have, we would just, you know, okay, I'm sure it's a valid marriage. It seems like a valid marriage. Okay, fine. But then if we learn something that made me think, oh, that's an invalid marriage, then we would say, oh, now it's an invalid marriage, and we would make a determination based on the evidence. And the Catholics are doing the same thing. They're not calling it invalid before they know it. But the difference with the Catholics is they got a whole complicated system before they do all of that. And so that's why it can take months. And what would take uh, you know, Joel and I, with our views on the situations under which a marriage would be invalid, it would probably take us a very short period of time to make a determination. With the with the Catholics, it takes a long time because they have a lot of subjective elements. It's complicated. Okay, so here's my question Do the Catholic canons imagine it is morally permissible for two people in an invalid, adulterous remarriage to have sex? No, they do not. No, they do not. They don't want people in invalid marriages having sex. Now, but even if they did, even if they did, the whole point is there are scholars who see Jesus teaching the same thing as the Damascus document. And the result is that fornication, uh pornea in the exception clause refers to sex between invalidly married people. Same view that I have in that respect. So so, and that's just really to respond to people who make an appeal to uh authority.

SPEAKER_00 1:48:51

All of the other ones, upon careful examination, do not support his viewpoint. Go on to my second point here. My second point, which he rebutted, I said that if Jesus means an invalid marriage with the exception clause, then why doesn't he also point out that the invalid marriage is adultery in the same passage? And my point there was that this is awkward. I don't view this as a 100% problem that means there's no way the invalid marriage view could be correct, but it's awkward, it's not helpful to it. Chris's response to this was that he believes Jesus in Matthew 5:30 and 9 5 32 and 199 was speaking in doublets, and that the second statement in both verses is therefore connected to the first statement, and thus Mokiah in the second statement is really speaking about the same thing that Ponya in the first statement is. So I'm gonna go to Matthew 532 and 199, just so you can see what I'm referring to here. Here's Matthew 532. But I say to you that whoever divorces his wife for any reason except sexual immorality causes her to commit adultery. And whoever marries a woman who is divorced commits adultery. So what he's saying here at sexual immorality, by the way, is the Greek word pornea. He's saying that it's referring to the same act because it's a doublet. So there's some overlap in what they're saying in both statements. Okay. And he says the same thing here in Matthew 19, 9, which I will read here. And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, that's pornia, and marries another, commits adultery, and whoever marries her who is divorced commits adultery. He's saying that both statements are referring to the same act: an invalid marriage, and that it's adultery. Okay. So I don't know anyone else who has this viewpoint, this concept that Jesus is speaking in a doublet. There, I looked for this elsewhere online, I could find nothing like that. No one else seems to believe that. I don't see any reason why we have to assume that Jesus is speaking in a doublet and that he means these two statements are overlapping and connected and really talking about the same thing. Respectfully, I think Chris is just reading that into the text. I don't think it's really there. And I don't know of anyone else who preaches about this subject who's making the same point. So, you know, unfortunately, sometimes dots don't really connect, they're just coincidences, and I don't think that he's really speaking in this doublet. I even looked up this concept of doublets, and it very often doesn't even refer to the same concept that he's talking about here. You know, they people will talk about a doublet being Jesus making the same statement, two different passages. Like they would say, you know, um, except for the cause of pornea, well, that's a doublet because it's in Matthew 5:32 and Matthew 19 9. So they use this term doublet to mean all kinds of stuff. It's not even just what Chris Iverson is saying.

SPEAKER_02 1:52:24

Okay, so Joel is mentioning something from my prior reaction video. And in this portion that he's talking about of that video, I said two things. First, I explained the idea of a doublet. Second, I walk through where I think Matthew 5.32 explains the exception clause. Now it sounds like Joel meshed those two things together, and he thought the whole thing fell under the banner doublet, but it doesn't. It shouldn't be meshed together. One thing is a doublet, and then something else is Matthew 5.32 explains the exception clause. So all doublets mean is that Matthew often writes the same essential concept in two different places. That's all it means. So Matthew expects his readers to read the two ideas together. So you would read Matthew 5.32 and Matthew 19.9 together to understand the concept that's being conveyed. Now, most readers who research this topic do that instinctively. Jill does that. I do that. Almost everybody expects the phrase, except for fornication, to mean the same thing in Matthew 5.32 and Matthew 19.9. So that's all I mean by doublet. So so that's it. We can close the chapter on doublet. I'm done with doublets. That's all it is. Just that. Very simple. And the doublet thing is correct, whether or not you agree with my view on divorce and remarriage. That's the one has nothing to do with the other in that respect. Like my view on divorce and remarriage can be totally wrong, and the doublet thing is still totally correct. Okay, that's it. Now, second, here's the other thing I was talking about. I was explaining how when I read Matthew 5.32, I find that it is explaining the exception clause. And now Joel doesn't respond to anything I say there. Now, this is kind of an important part of my video because I'm going through the biblical stuff, right? So Joel's been talking about a lot of the extra biblical stuff, Damascus document, Talmud for early church writers. He's talking about a lot of that stuff. Well, I also do a whole thing where I talk about, okay, here's how I read the Bible, here's why I think the Bible explains the exception clause. So what I'm going to do is near the end of this video, I'm going to just play that portion of my video because Joel didn't respond to any part of that. And he doesn't, he's not obligated to or anything. But if you want to know what my case is, you you can see it there for yourself.

SPEAKER_00 1:54:47

Pornea meaning fornication makes sense already. Why do you have to even interpret it that way? There's nothing that compels us to do that. I can just read it and assume it means fornication because that's what pornea usually means. My third point that I made was why would Jesus use the Greek word mokiah to refer to adulterous remarriages, but then in the two Matthew and exception clauses, use the word pornea to refer to the same thing. Chris thinks that Mokaia and Pornea are being used to refer to the same thing, and different words are being used because different aspects are being stressed. But elsewhere in the Bible, we see the same pattern of remarriage being called adultery, not pornea. We're going to go to Romans 7, 2 to 3. And it says, For the woman who has a husband is bound to the law to her husband as long as he lives. But if the husband dies, she is released from the law of her husband. So then, if while her husband lives, she marries another man, she will be called an adulteress. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, so that she is no adulteress, though she has married another man. Okay, so this would be a perfect opportunity for Paul to call the adulterous woman a pornay, which means fornicator or prostitute, or call what she's doing pornea, which would mean uh fornication or sexual immorality, could even be sexual immorality, referring to an invalid marriage, and yet he does none of that. Instead, he calls her an adulteress, which is a form of the word mokaya. He calls her someone who commits mokaia, just like Jesus calls the second marriage mokaia. Nothing in there about Jesus uh calling it Portia or Paul calling it Portia, it's not there, and yet that would be a perfect opportunity for that to happen if Chris's viewpoint is correct.

SPEAKER_02 1:57:03

Okay, so one of my principles for interpretation of texts is that I typically, typically interpret what's there and not what's not there. So the fact that they didn't say fornication in Romans 7 is not really evidence. I don't think that's a really good argument. Now, second, what Joel would have to show is that if moi is used, it rules out pornea. So that when G when Paul uses Moicaia, he is ruling out pornea. That's what he would have to show. But what we see is the exact opposite. We see that sex in invalid marriages are called Moicaia and Pornea by early church writers. And Joel agrees that sex in an invalid marriage is pornea already. This would be like if I said, Well, I've got these old writings here, uh, you know, same way in the future, and I have some old writings from our period. And I said, Well, you know, we have some writings where they use the word cooking uh for heating up food to eat. And then we have this word smoking for people smoking meats. And well, in this writing, they describe someone smoking some brisket, but they didn't call it cooking. Therefore, smoking brisket must not be a form of cooking. Of course, it is a form of cooking. Uh, and just because cooking is not used every time smoking is used doesn't mean that smoking is not a form of cooking. And so similar, just because pornea isn't used every time m is used to refer to sex in an adulterous remarriage, that doesn't mean that sex isn't also pornea. And I shouldn't have brought up brisket because now I'm getting hungry. Okay. Third, if two people commit pornea, those two people are not married to each other. So the reason someone would use pornea is to refer to sex in a so-called marriage is to stress or emphasize the invalidity of that marriage. That's why that's why you would do that. So my view is that in the exception clause, Matthew was emphasizing that the remarriage is invalid. So, and that's what we see in the Damascus document second marriage is fornication, invalid. Talmud, woman's second marriage is fornication, invalid. And Clement and Irenaeus do the same thing. So if you're trying to stress the invalidity of the second marriage, you say pornea. If you're trying to stress the violation of the first marriage, you say adultery. So, and and those other passages that Jill referenced where only adultery is used, the authors are focused on the fact that the remarriage is a violation of the first marriage, hence they use adultery, not fornication. And we see this happening in the Bible. So when you think about words that are used for atonement, for example, there's like uh redemption. Well, redemption implies there was a debt that had to be paid. What you do is use the word redemption and you let people figure out there's a debt. Or you have the word propitiation that implies there was some wrath that had to be satisfied. Or reconciliation, that means there was a separation that had to be fixed there, right? Well, you use pornea, that means there's a marriage that ain't a marriage. That's what I think they're doing uh with that. It's an invalid marriage. Or you use adultery, that means the divorce didn't divorce, you're still married to your previous spouse. It has all of these concepts behind it that are behind that word. There are these antecedent concepts behind the word. And that's why you'd use a word and you would change which words you're using depending on which antecedent concept you're trying to relay to somebody. And so that's why if you want to focus on there's a debt that was paid, you would use one word, or if you want to talk about how there was wrath that was satisfied, you have to use a different word if you want to talk about that. And again, if you're trying to focus on the invalidity of the marriage, just you use pornea. If you're talking about the uh inability of divorce to end your previous marriage, then you would use the word uh adultery for the remarriage.

SPEAKER_00 2:00:38

Fourth point I have is the exception clause is not a command. There's no command to divorce for the cause of pornea, it just says that if you can divorce for the cause of pornea without causing your wife to commit adultery, that implies that you do not have to divorce for pornea, but can divorce, or in other words, divorcing for pornea is optional. Chris thinks that if the exception clause is referring to an invalid marriage, then divorce or an invalid marriage would inherently be required. But is this true? We're going to examine that. So if we go to first Samuel 25, 44. Samuel 25, 44 says, But Saul had given Mikal his daughter, David's wife, to Palti, the son of Laesh, who was from Gallum. Okay, that's basically a de facto divorce. It doesn't specifically say it's he's divorced from her, but obviously if she's no longer David's wife and she's now Palti or Paltiel's wife, then that's a second marriage. Okay, the next passage here is 2 Samuel 3, 13 to 16. So 2 Samuel 3. And it says, and David said he's talking to Abner, who wanted to make peace with him. This is when David was fighting against Israel. Judah was fighting against Israel, David against Isbosheth. Abner was Isbosheth's general for Israel, and it says, and David said, Good, I will make a covenant with you, but one thing I require of you, you shall not see my face unless you first bring Mikal, Saul's daughter, when you come to see my face. So David sent messengers to Ishbosheth, Saul's son, saying, Give me my wife Mikal, who I'm betrothed to myself for a hundred foreskins of the Philistines. And Ishbosheth sent and took her from her husband. This is Paltial. He's called her husband from Paltiel, the son of Laish. Same person as the Palti. I don't know why there's a discrepancy with one letter there, but it's clearly the same person. Then her husband, that's referring to Paltiel, went along with her to Bahiram, weeping behind her. So Abner said to him, Go, return. And he returned. Okay, in other words, Abner told him, Go home. So that's a second marriage, it's an adulterous remarriage, and she is going back to her first husband, David. And there's no mention of any divorce taking place there. So if it's understood that an invalid marriage would require you to divorce, how come they're not divorcing there? Instead of a divorce, it's just told go home. Go home, Palti L. No one's gonna recognize you as married to Nikle anymore, and no divorce is taking place.

SPEAKER_02 2:04:10

Okay, so Jill started this portion talking about the exception clause in Matthew 5.32 and Matthew 19.9. If you look at the exception clauses, they don't say to divorce or not to divorce in the exceptional situation. They only say if you divorce under X circumstance, then you're not guilty for like a remarriage. So the analogy I use is this. Suppose you're in an interrogation room. The district attorney walks in and says, if you take this plea deal, if you if you say you're guilty and you confess, we'll give you a slap on the wrist, a probation. Now the district attorney there is not saying technically by that statement you should confess. The district attorney is saying if you confess, this is the result. Now the district attorney attorney thinks you should confess. The district attorney thinks you're guilty, but they're not saying that when they're making the offer. They're saying if this, then this. And Jesus with the exception clause, all he's saying is if you divorce in the exceptional scenario, then you're not guilty for a remarriage. That's all he's saying there. He's not saying you should divorce or you should not divorce in the exceptional scenario. So the exceptional scenario does not explicitly or implicitly say on its own, just just if you just read it and you don't have an interpretation of fornication in the exception clause, if you just read it and you don't know what the exception clause is, you don't know if you if you think Jesus is saying you should or shouldn't divorce in the exceptional scenario. Is it just what the outcome would be? So to determine what if you should or not, you have to determine what fornication means. And so depending on your your your view of what fornication means, that would then tell you if you should or should not divorce in the exceptional situation. I think the exceptional situation is talking about there as an invalid marriage, and so I think that people should divorce in the invalid marriage situation. And we'll talk more about that in a minute. Now, regarding the Old Testament passages, so there's a few things to think about here. Morseon was tolerated in the Old Testament, it's tolerated in the New Testament. So in the Old Testament, you had Abraham and Jacob committed incest. Sarah was his wife, uh, and it was and it was his half-sister, and then Jacob married two sisters. So they committed incest. That's before Leviticus 18. That was tolerated. After Leviticus 18, that would not be tolerated if somebody did that. In the same way, in the Old Testament, they had polygamy and all kinds of divorce and remarriage, all this stuff. So it was tolerated in the Old Testament, not tolerated now in the New Testament. So that's that's the first thing to note. Now, with Michael, it doesn't look like there was a divorce from David. Whether there was or wasn't, though, her so-called remarriage was adultery. Uh, morally, it was an invalid marriage. So, and if there is no divorce from David, it was also an invalid marriage under the Mosaic law. So she goes back to David. But none of that really matters because Morrison was tolerated regarding marriage uh in the Old Testament. The next thing is that Joel focuses on the fact that Michael is called this guy's wife and deduces from that the marriage to David must have been divorced in God's eyes. But that's not how this works. So the words marry, divorce, husband and wife were used colloquially, like legally was it a marriage? Was it socially recognized as a marriage? It doesn't mean the person was actually validly married in God's eyes. If it did, let's let's suppose for a moment that every time it used wife or husband or married or divorced, that was validly what actually happened. If that was the case, and when when Herod married Herodias in Mark chapter six, it says that they married, that would mean their incestuous marriage was valid. And there's no way that's the case. It would also mean that an adulterous remarriage is a valid marriage because Jesus says, and marries another. But that's not the case. And Joel and I agree that that's not a real marriage. So we can't always interpret, you know, husband and wife, married, divorced to mean a valid marriage, a valid, a real husband, a real wife, and a divorce that actually dissolves the marriage. So that's not how the words were used. They were used colloquially. All right, third, a description of what they did is not the same as a prescription of what we're supposed to do. So so the fact that they did this and they did that, that means we can do this and we can do that. That that's not how that, that's not how that works. They're just telling you like what occurred in that situation. So, and more to the point, what I'm saying is if someone is in a fake marriage, they have to end that. Okay. Now, my guess is Joel probably agrees with me. Uh, you know, if a brother or sister are married, they should end that. At the time of Jesus, uh, they would do a divorce certificate to end an invalid marriage. And also in the Roman Empire, people are auto-divorced when they move out. So that wasn't all that complicated. So there's no paperwork in that, in that case. If people are in a fake marriage, they should not continue as though they are married. Now, I recognize that legal regimes are different in different periods, but generally speaking, invalidly married people uh need to end that marriage. Now, I'll grant Joel a concession. Suppose a man and a woman get married while he is drunk, I would say that he did not consent, because he was drunk, can't consent when you're drunk, and therefore their marriage is invalid. That's my that's what I would say. Now, upon sobering up and realizing what happened, if that man decides he wants to stay married, he can continue that marriage. And and the reason for that is now that he's sober, he is able to consent and he's consenting to continue the marriage. So I would, because I would say that that that meets that necessary requirement for a valid marriage, and so now they're validly married. If that was the only thing that was missing, then now they're validly married. So it can convert their marriage from invalid to valid, and then it wouldn't need to be divorced. Uh, but if they can convert it, they pretty much need to divorce it.

SPEAKER_00 2:09:51

If you're in an adulterous remarriage, the second marriage is invalid because you're still really married to the first person. You don't have to divorce the second person to somehow truly be married to the first person. You always are married to the first person until they die.

SPEAKER_02 2:10:07

Okay, I agree that divorce of a remarriage isn't necessary to stay married to the first person in God's eyes, because you're married to the first person in God's eyes, uh, regardless of whatever the civil law says. But if somebody is going to reconcile with their first spouse, I think they need to they need to get remarried to them under the law because um their legal divorce that they had was a step of separation that needed to be reversed. Um, but I agree with what Joel saying that people need to be married for life. Now, this part when I first heard it was kind of confusing to me because of what Joel previously said.

SPEAKER_00 2:10:42

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.

SPEAKER_02 2:11:06

Okay, and Joel said that same thing later on in that same video around 19 minutes and 30 seconds and some other places, I think, as well. But I was a little surprised by that. But I do think if somebody is invalidly married, they should divorce, and I'll talk about that more in a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 2:11:19

Chris says that Jesus doesn't say that divorce is optional in the exception clause because it would inherently be understood that you have to divorce an invalid marriage. But he can only arrive at this conclusion if he assumes that pornea means an invalid marriage. When this is discussed by Clement and Irenaeus and Tertullian, they have to give an explanation as to what they mean by pornea in order for you to understand they're referring to an invalid marriage. But Jesus does not give this explanation in Matthew 19 9 and Matthew 5 32. Chris would say that he does because he views the two statements there as being connected and over. Overlapping, but this is just speculation on his part. I don't know anyone else who has that opinion of those passages. I don't think you need to perceive them that way to make sense out of them. You know, it's simply not necessary to read an invalid marriage into that passage. And as we have seen so far, there's only one thing you can use to support that. Nothing in the Bible and nothing from any outside biblical sources except for Clement of Alexandria.

SPEAKER_02 2:12:29

Okay, so here we do have kind of the crux of the issue in the text. Joel thinks my connection of fornication in the exception clause and Matthew 5.32b is speculation. Now I don't agree with that characterization of it as speculation. And Joel's saying this, but he doesn't address the argument that I made about my view from the text, which I'll show later on in this video. I think what Joel is highlighting is that the text doesn't say, by fornication, I mean ex. But here's the thing that's a problem for everybody interpreting this passage. What I am showing is the text does definitely doesn't say by fornication, I mean ex, right? And so that there are a number of options. And one of those options is sex and an invalid marriage, right? The extra biblical evidence shows that in the divorce and remarriage context, fornication was used to refer to sex and invalid marriage, or pornea was used, whatever word. Matthew 532b doesn't fit the pattern of flipping the genders and serves no educational purpose unless it's there to explain the exception clause. And it's the only one of the moral formulations that could fit as an explanation of the exception clause. And Jesus often explained or expounded on his meaning without saying, now let me explain X. And you and he expects you to notice the proximity of something he's something he's going to explain. And then his explanation, you're supposed to realize, oh, he's explaining his earlier statement with this other statement. You see that throughout the Sermon on the Mountain and other places. So, so again, the text doesn't say fornication uh means X. Uh, there are a number of options. One of those options is sex and invalid marriage. My view has no internal logic problems, but all the other options have internal logic problems. And my view makes Jesus' use uh use of the word fornication to match the meaning of fornication in the only other extra biblical writing we have that makes this same kind of argument that Jesus is making from Genesis to a prohibition on uh being married to two people or whatever. That would be the Damascus document.

SPEAKER_00 2:14:32

I studied this matter trying to find anyone who believes that you have to divorce for an invalid marriage. In other words, the assumption that that would be known by everyone in Jesus' time, but I could not find anything that said anything close to that, except for a couple passages in the Mishnah where Rabbi Mare states that if the second marriage is invalid due to incorrect divorce procedure, then you have to divorce. And if any children are from that second marriage, they are all considered to be illegitimate at that point, which to them is a big deal, means so much to us, but to them it it that was a big deal. Uh, Chris alludes in his book to uh things in the Mishnah, also supporting that you have to divorce for an invalid marriage. Pretty sure he's talking about the same two passages in the Mishnah that I found, where Rabbi Mare is citing the sameness. Problem is that Rabbi Mare uh lived in the second century. He didn't live in Jesus' time, he was about a hundred years later. So in Rabbi Mare's time, at least Rabbi Mare and whoever else agrees with them thought that you were if you were in an invalid marriage, you had to divorce that invalid marriage, kind of like what Chris is implying. But there's no evidence that there was anything like that in Jesus' time. Now, maybe there was, but there's no evidence of it.

SPEAKER_02 2:16:01

The claim that's being made is that Okay, so the Talmud says in actually a bunch of different places that invalid marriages would need to be divorced. And I actually don't think this is all that controversial of a view that I have that invalid marriages were presumptively supposed to be divorced in Jesus' time, everybody knew that. John the Baptist tells Herod it's not lawful for him to marry Herodias. I think it's pretty obvious that after Herod and Herodias married, that they should divorce. Um, Romans chapter seven is written to those who know the law, so it'd be Jewish people, right? And Paul says the woman who marries a second man is an adulteress, ongoing adultery. I don't think the idea was there that she should continue in the remarriage. Paul's saying it's got to be divorced. When Jesus, people, when Jesus tells people that their remarriages are adultery, I just think it's very obvious. He's telling them they need to divorce those adulterous remarriages and not continue in it. Now, maybe what Joel is saying is if someone is in an invalid marriage, perhaps they could stay married and just not have sexual relations. And Catholics call this arrangement Josephite marriages. It's a whole long story how they get to that title. But I would say I agree that that takes care of the main problem, which is the sexual sin. That's the main problem. I'm I guess I'm less concerned about the lesser problem, but I don't think basically that invalidly married people should live together and create sexual temptations by being in the same house. Like a boyfriend and girlfriend shouldn't live together. I don't know why invalidly married people we should think they would be able to live together. Um, now could one live in New York and the other one in Los Angeles and stay married for the health insurance benefits or something like that? I don't think that's a good idea. It seems like a little shady, it's kind of misleading. Um, but I mean I agree, it's a lot better than than committing adultery. But no, I don't think technically they should do that.

SPEAKER_00 2:17:50

That it would be understood, you have to divorce the set the invalid marriage. Okay. Now, in our culture, that makes a lot of sense. I'll give you a scenario of what I'm talking about. Let's say a man is in a in a gay marriage, not saved, and then he becomes a Christian, he realizes that lifestyle is not okay with God, and he literally takes all his things and moves out, goes to church. Some years later, he meets a young lady at the church, and uh they decide I think we'd like to get married, and they have a meeting with the pastor, and he says, Well, technically, I'm legally married to this other guy, I haven't done anything with him for years, I've not spoken to him, I don't even know if he's still alive. But legally, I'm married to him. Okay, what's the pastor gonna say? The pastor's gonna say, You need to separate, you need to divorce your gay marriage partner so that you can be legally married to this woman here. That's what he's gonna say. So, in our culture, that makes a lot of sense, but in Jewish culture, that didn't necessarily make sense because the Roman government wasn't keeping track of those kind of things. You didn't have to be officially married with the Roman government, like you have to be officially married with the state you live in here in the U.S.

SPEAKER_02 2:19:12

All right. So we're getting a little far afield, but I am curious with Joel's hypothetical. Suppose the country the man lived in allowed somebody to be married to multiple people of male or female or whatever, they didn't care. Um, and let's say there's no financial inheritance or practical problems that would come as a result of him just staying married to the guy and then marrying the woman in addition. So my question would be: would it be wrong for the man to be legally married to the man and the woman at the same time? And if so, why? And whatever that reason is, would that mean the man should have divorced the his husband, quote unquote, even if he had never met the woman? And I mean, I just think fundamentally there's a problem with having a government record that says you're married to someone who you're not married to. And I'm not gonna go so far as to say it's a lie, because that creates a problem with 1 Corinthians chapter 7, verse 15, letting someone go and divorcing for like a safety reason or whatever. And if somebody else wants to divorce you and you got to sign the divorce paperwork, and okay, so uh you got to be able to sign the divorce paperwork. But I would just say this if it's like an unjustified, like an unnecessary, unjustified, incorrect representation, then I just think you should fix the records when it comes to the government, or now in Jesus' time, it would be with like contract records. I understand that they didn't have that all registered with the government, but when there's a court case, guess what they're gonna do? They're gonna pull out all these documents to try to figure out where you're at. And so in that, at that point in time, then the government records would be updated and would be based on the existing kind of uh contract. So I do, you know, I just do think you should have the records kind of updated and not be unjustified, incorrect representation uh there. Basically, you should update the records and make them correct unless there's like a really compelling reason for a mismatch. And there are some compelling reasons why a mismatch would be permissible, you know, and this is really getting kind of far afield. But yes, there are some edge cases. I grant there are some edge cases, but the rule is you should divorce an invalid marriage. Um, now in Israel, under Roman occupation, they had marriage contracts and then divorce certificates in Israel. So if somebody was invalidly married and in that system, I would say they should divorce, generally speaking. And now under Roman law outside of Israel, you would just auto-divorce when you moved out. Um, and separation and divorce were basically the same thing. So if a court case came up under the Roman government and the marriage situation was at issue, they would just determine at the time whether people married, were they living together or had somebody moved out? So my understanding is they didn't have to register with the government, and there are times uh when it would matter legally uh in court. So, you know, here's some other edge cases. Um, suppose you're in a country that never allows a woman to divorce, and you have a woman who marries a divorced man. Well, she can't divorce. She can ask for a divorce, he won't give it to her, she should move out, and the marriage records are wrong, but there's nothing she can do about that. Or suppose a man, uh, suppose a woman has been divorced for 30 years, her first husband is still alive, and she marries a man who's never been married before, and they claim no romantic feelings. She married him for financial reasons, um, and you know, so they could live in the same house or whatever, whatever financial thing there is, and to care for him as his health is declining. This is really a caretaker kind of role thing. And their wedding was not elaborate. It was basically just signing paperwork and saying vows like at a desk somewhere in an office. You know, I still think they should divorce, uh, but I agree it's not adultery. So it's it's like less bad than you know, uh siblings being married to each other and committing incest. That's way worse, right? So so I agree there's degrees and there are edge cases here where I can understand somebody's moral intuition kind of going this way and that way. The main thing I want people to do is quit committing the adultery. That's the main thing I want them to do. But as far as like what their government records should be, I do think generally speaking, unless you have a compelling reason, you should probably keep your records correct and your contracts and all that stuff should be accurate. Suppose a man has been divorced for 30 years, his first wife might be dead, he doesn't know, he remarried. The validity of his remarriage is unknown. Maybe it's valid, maybe it's not married. Now, I think he should probably stay in the remarriage, but abstain from sex until they know whether his first wife is alive. That's a very unusual, strange case, but you have to pick a solution there. And I don't want him to divorce. Also, don't want him to maybe be cheating on his wife. So this is the best I can come up with. Maybe Joel has a better answer than that. I'm open to other solutions. I don't think there's a great answer because we don't have all the information. Uh, he shouldn't have married the second woman, but now that he has married the second woman, I'm I'm hesitant to have him divorce her uh when he might actually be married to her. So, but yeah, so yes, there are some edge cases, I agree. But generally speaking, invalid marriages should be divorced. Um, and I would I would go with gay marriages, incestuous marriages, polygamous marriages, and adultery remarriages.

SPEAKER_00 2:24:01

What's to stop someone from just simply realizing that their second marriage is adulterous and going right back to their first marriage partner because they view the divorce as invalid. They view themselves as still married to them, which is exactly what Jesus' view was.

SPEAKER_02 2:24:17

Okay, so suppose someone is divorced and remarried, then they get saved. I think they should divorce the second spouse and be single or remarried to the first. It's a it's a little unclear, but one way to interpret what Joel said is this when the person gets saved, why divorce the second and remarry the first? Why not? You know, they get saved on Monday, uh, and then on Tuesday, you know, they just leave the house and they go down the street to where the first spouse is and then they have sex with them. And now the reason why you can't do that is because of 1 Corinthians chapter 7, verse 15, the phrase not enslaved. Let me explain that. Okay, so you have to imagine a different hypothetical. So we got to clear our minds of the previous one and start over. Okay. Suppose an unbelieving husband and a believing wife are married. He, the unbeliever, divorces her, the believer, right? Irreconcilable differences. Two years later, the husband, her former husband, comes by and wants to have sex. Is she obligated to have sex with him? No. Is it permissible for her to have sex with him? Also, no. Why? Because 1 Corinthians 7 15 says she is not enslaved. That means she is not encumbered by that marriage. The practical stuff with the marriage, that is over now. Now, the practical stuff with the marriage would come back if they reconcile. But as far as they're not reconciled, they're not enslaved. She has this not enslaved status, so they can't be doing marriage stuff when you're not, you don't have the practical stuff with the marriage and you're not reconciled. So they would have to reconcile first. And part of that reconciliation would be to remarry each other because the re because the divorce was a step of a significant step of separation. So if you want to reconcile, you gotta undo that. You have to remarry each other. So as long as somebody's kind of in that not enslaved status, they can't go and have sex with their uh with their valid spouse.

SPEAKER_00 2:26:11

Now it could be that Chris is correct. It could be that in Jesus' time when Jesus made the statement, and if he meant an invalid marriage, that that meant he was inherently understood you have to divorce that. Okay, it could be, but the problem is that's just his conjecture. There's just no evidence to support that anywhere, it's just speculation. I mean, I like to see evidence for everything I believe in the Bible, and you can use extra biblical sources. Chris seems to be very keen on doing that, but I view them as worth far less than what the Bible says. But I want to see evidence of my beliefs, I don't want to just read into passages things that might be there, but I can't prove it. I don't think that's a good way to examine scripture. I think you have to let scripture just explain itself.

SPEAKER_02 2:27:07

So Joel doesn't really address the argument I made from scripture, and he says, I don't have an argument from scripture, I'm just using extra biblical, but he didn't address my argument from scripture. He said it's a doublet and then kind of wrote it off. But there is an argument there. Now, I think that Joel and I agree that sexual relations in an invalid marriage has to stop. And that's the most important part. We I think we agree on that. Most of the time, if one spouse thinks their marriage is invalid, and to avoid temptation, they're going to move out. The marriage is on a road to divorce. So, and in Joel's prior video, he agreed invalid marriages should be divorced, uh, because it's kind of obvious that people should divorce their remarriages, for example.

SPEAKER_00 2:27:46

Not suppose, have all these suppositions about doublets, and that everybody would know you're supposed to get divorced for an invalid marriage. I just don't feel comfortable with this way of thinking. I think you have to look at the Bible like I think Jesus is speaking to the common man. I don't think what he's saying is that complicated, and and you know, that there's this little pattern inside that gives you all these clues as to what's really being said. I think it's just plain statements in either Aramaic or Greek when he spoke it, and they were plainly understood by the people. And when Jesus said accept for the cause of pornea, I think they understood exactly what he meant. I don't think there was any necessity to explain anything because Jesus meant the standard ordinary meaning of that word, which is fornication.

SPEAKER_02 2:28:41

So I agree they're plain statements. I think it was simple with what Jesus was saying. I don't think it was a riddle with clues and you have to find some ornate elaborate process. I think it was plainly understood at the time. I agree with all of that. I think Zanut Purnea in the divorce and remarriage Jewish debate was understood to mean sex in an invalid marriage. And Matthew makes sure to say it clearly in the second half of Matthew 532. So basically Joel and I are appealing to the idea that the audience was primed to think pornea meant something. Joel is saying they were primed to think of betrothal. I am saying they were primed to think of sex in an invalid marriage. Okay, now here's the differences though. One, there's nothing in the context to point to betrothal. But there is something in the context to point to sex in an invalid marriage. Two, there are internal logic problems with the betrothal view, but there aren't internal logic problems with the already married view, my view. Three, there isn't any extra biblical document saying marriage works like this. Genesis example, therefore, second spouse, that's bad. Uh, and by the way, fornication means sex during betrothal. That there's no document that does that. There is a document, there is people saying Genesis is example, therefore, second spouse bad. By the way, fornication is sex during an invalid second marriage. And that is my view of what Jesus was saying. Genesis, second marriage bad, and then fornication is sex in an invalid marriage.

SPEAKER_00 2:30:22

They understood that to mean he's talking about premarital sex. And premarital sex would in our culture you don't divorce for that because you're not married yet. But in Jewish culture, you are. You're married under their betrothal custom, the equivalent of our engagement, except they viewed that as your husband and wife, even though you're really betrothed or engaged.

SPEAKER_02 2:30:46

And Joel said that they're married, kind of there. And I understand that they use the word divorce for ending a betrothal, and they use their word husband and wife for the two betrothed people. I understand all that. But I don't think that they were married. I think that is an overstatement. I think betrothal is one stage and marriage is another stage. And I think, for example, Joel would agree that if they end the betrothal and they go marry somebody else, that is not adultery. But if you end a marriage or try to end a marriage and you go marry somebody else, that is adultery. So betrothal is not marriage. I just want to kind of highlight that.

SPEAKER_00 2:31:24

And they have to break that off if they're going to break it off with the divorce certificate. So if Jesus said the word pornea, they would all instantly understand. He's talking about fornication. This is prior to the uh consummation and the wedding feasts and the bridal chamber. They would understand that. It wouldn't need any explanation. It would click and register right away. Now, if Jesus really meant an invalid marriage, he would need to explain that. Just like Clemente of Alexandria did, just like Tertullian did, and just like Irenaeus did. And Jesus doesn't do that. There's no explanation for that. So why would they not just assume he means fornication like you normally would when you say pornium? Why would they assume he means an invalid marriage without any explanation for that? That doesn't make any sense.

SPEAKER_02 2:32:17

Okay, so first, they wouldn't actually need an explanation if Jesus was saying what I was what I think he's saying, because it was commonly understood. And we see that in the Talmud and the Damascus document of fornication, in the divorce remarriage context, refer to sex in an invalid marriage. In that context, just like fornication in a pagan temple uh context meant prostitution. So in the remarriage context, we see a lot of examples of it talking about sex in an invalid marriage. So they would have understood that. Second, they wouldn't need to interpret Jesus to refer to sex between unmarried people because that makes the text logically incoherent. Again, the word wife in Matthew 19, 9, either word you use, betrothed woman or married woman, you run into a problem. Also, this would mean that if some if a man uh ended his betrothal for a non-pornaire reason, and then he married another woman, he'd be committing adultery, which contradicts Paul in 1 Corinthians 7, 25 through 28. So they wouldn't have interpreted Jesus the way Joel does there, because it wouldn't be coherent. And the third thing is Joel says uh that Jesus would have to explain it, but Joel is assuming Jesus didn't explain it in Matthew 5.32b, and I'll show you uh how all that works uh here in a minute when we show you the clip from the video from the other day.

SPEAKER_00 2:33:31

So there is no internal biblical support for the invalid marriage view, and upon careful examination, there is only one case of true support for this viewpoint outside of the Bible, which is Clement of Alexandria. So if Clement of Alexandria is correct, even though no one else seems to have his viewpoint, or at least there's Not good and clear evidence that anyone else has that viewpoint. If he's correct, then Chris is correct. If Clemente of Alexandria is incorrect, then Chris is incorrect. You know, I don't think it's a good idea to have a viewpoint, and you only have one truly supporting external document, even though there's a myriad of other things outside of the Bible that would shed light on this issue, and yet none of them indicate that his invalid marriage view would be correct.

SPEAKER_02 2:34:36

So I don't think Joel agrees with his criticism here because he holds the betrothal view, and the early church people aren't giving that view of the exception clause. So I don't think he thinks we have to do like a vote of the early church to figure out who's right. And the problem is the early church said Pornea was adultery, but doesn't allow for remarriage. And that just doesn't work with Matthew 19. So the early church just had to be wrong about that. And so Joel is looking for others to hold my view, but that that but the only game in town for a very long time was adultery. And adultery just does not work as a meaning for the exception clause. Also, a moment ago, Joel said that he has to find it in the Bible or he doesn't believe it. But now he's saying he also has to find it outside the Bible among experts. So he he discounts extra-biblical stuff. And then later on he's like, oh, but you don't have any, you don't have enough extra biblical, you know, early church people or whatever. And so, you know, I I'm generally, I'm, you know, I'm pro-reading great theologians, and they're nearly always right. But on this subject, this subject is just not like most subjects. I don't see any evidence for Joel's position that pronea must presumptive presumptively mean sex between two unmarried people unless something in the context forces it to mean something else, uh, or or unless the meaning is incoherent. Like the early church and the reformers don't agree with that, or else they wouldn't think the exception clause is for adultery. So the the early church and the reformers and the great theologians, I don't think any of them are doing what Joel's doing with this presumption thing. I I mean, I does Joel have anybody who says what he says that you have to presumptively say a word has its own its frequent, most frequent meaning, unless the context forces another meaning. I just, that's just that's that's Joel's complex, elaborate linguistic rule that he has. And I don't see anybody talking about that. Let me let me give you an example. This might be a little bit more concrete. An example where this is a problem, this presumptive rule is a problem. So 1 Corinthians chapter 5 and verse 1, it says this it is actually reported that there is fornication among you, and such fornication as is not even among the Gentiles, that one of you has his father's wife. Okay, now when you first read this, it sure looks like it's talking about incest. A man has his father's wife, but it uses the word fornication, and fornication must mean, according to this strict presumptive rule, it must mean sex between unmarried people, unless the context requires a different interpretation. So you might think, oh, well, the the presumption would be overcome here because obviously the context is so strong that it's incest. So you might think, oh, the context kind of overcomes this presumptive rule, but it does not. Joel does not think that. Joel thinks this is not incest. He thinks it's not incest because of the word fornication. His presumptive rule requires him to assume the father's dead. The idea is if a man has sex with his father's wife, that's incest unless the father died. Because once the father dies, now like the family connection is broken. So if the man has sex with his father's wife and it's called fornication, it must be the case that the father is dead under Joel's view because it must be two unmarried people, can't be incest. So when I say the presumptive rule is the context has to force that meaning of the word pernicate, I mean force because the context can't just like strongly signal that. That's not good enough because the text very strongly signals that. And so here's what I'm saying. Okay, is it possible the father is dead? I suppose it's possible the father is dead. But can you use the word fornication and say the father must be dead? There is no way you can do that. But that's what Joel does. Why does he do it? Not from the text. He does it because of his presumptive rule that fornication must mean sex between two unmarried people. And you'll find this with other people who have the betrothal view. They'll interpret this, 1 Corinthians chapter 5 and verse 1, to not be incest. And that's a really good way to figure out if they have this presumptive rule, like Joel has, because this is a great test. What do they think is going on in 1 Corinthians chapter 5 and verse 1? Do they think the father must be dead? That tells you they have this unreasonably presumptive rule. And then my question is, okay, you have a presumptive rule. Got it. Give me your mountains of evidence for that because you're going to need a lot of evidence to show that there ought to be this presumptive rule. And there just isn't, I haven't heard them give me any evidence. All they say is this is how it's ordinarily used. Okay, that that is not evidence that frequency means that there's a linguistic rule of presumption. And we don't, I don't, I just don't do this anywhere else. I never go to a dictionary and look at the most, you know, frequency ordered dictionary, use the top definition, and then assume every time somebody uses that word, it must mean that unless it's absolutely, absolutely forced to mean something else. I don't do that. Instead, what I do is I look at the word, it says fornication in 1 Corinthians chapter 5 and verse 1. It says it's, you know, sex it's worse than what the Gentiles do. A man has his father's wife, and I think, well, it's incest, probably. And you know, the father might be dead, sure, that's possible, but I'm not going to say the father must be dead because I use the frequency order dictionary definition. There's no way I would do that. And so that's the difference here. And if I was going to do that with the frequency order thing, I would need like a mountain of evidence to show that is that presumption is the way you must interpret language. And so far, I haven't seen Joel give any evidence. I think you need a mountain of evidence, and I haven't seen any evidence.

SPEAKER_00 2:40:05

Jerome translating the word pornea into fornicatio is good evidence. It's good supporting evidence that the word pornea means fornication, and that he even understood that, even though he didn't believe that's what it actually meant there. You know, it's okay.

SPEAKER_02 2:40:38

Okay, here's what I think is going on with Jerome. It's very simple. Pornea is the word in Greek. The closest Latin word is fornicatio. He uses fornicatio. He's doing a literal translation, it's not any more complicated than that. Joel thinks when Jerome finds this word pornea, that Jerome has to make a translation choice. It either means sexual immorality or prostitution or means fornication. And so he's using fornicatio because it means fornication. Now, there's no evidence for this from Joel that that's what Jerome is thinking when he chooses fornicatio. Joel just imposes that on Jerome, that that's what he's doing. And so here's the deal somebody who has my view that fornicatio and uh pornea mean basically the same thing, I would also translate it that way. And I don't have Joel's complex linguistic framework. And I I don't think Jerome had Joel's complex complex, elaborate, speculative linguistic framework. I don't see evidence that anybody even thought of this linguistic framework. Not only do I not see evidence of them using it, I don't think anybody was even thinking about this. I don't think it entered into their brain that we needed to do this. So to infer that Jerome, in like whatever it was, 400 AD or whatever it was, was using Joel's linguistic framework is like total speculation and conjecture and totally unsupported.

SPEAKER_00 2:42:01

Unfortunate that our modern day translations are the way they are. But there's a history of the exception clause being understood to mean fornication for a long time, and there's very limited history to interpret it to mean an invalid marriage view. And I see no reason why you have to throw out the standard way of viewing the matter that already makes sense.

SPEAKER_02 2:42:34

Okay, so just to be clear, I am not throwing out the word fornication. I think it means fornication. Joel is assuming the premise that my view is incompatible with the word fornication. Also, he says uh that the betrothal view is the standard way. The betrothal view is not the standard way. The standard way is that pronea and the exception clause meant adultery. Now, I don't agree with the standard interpretation, but the betrothal view is not the standard interpretation. You're right. And so, but the idea that Joel's complex linguistic framework was in every translator's mind for like 1900 years, and therefore they were just saying the betrothal view merely because they translate it as fornication. I mean, that's just not true.

SPEAKER_00 2:43:11

And then pick the viewpoint of basically one person and assume that it's referring to an invalid marriage in the form of an adulterous remarriage.

SPEAKER_02 2:43:23

Okay, so the process, just so you understand, was not that I like picked one guy. Oh, here's a guy. I just picked him. That wasn't the process. The process was this I read a ton of books, I evaluated many theories, it was like seemingly endless. Uh, I kept running into significant problems with the different theories that I had. And so a lot of people, what they do is they just pick one, but I just couldn't do that. So then I looked at this theory and I noticed sex with an invalid marriage, there's no problems. It makes great sense of Matthew 532b, which has no reason to be there if it's not an explanation of the exception clause. So it matches how fornication was used in the Damascus document. The only other writing that we see giving a Jesus type argument on the subject starting from Genesis, it uses fornication in the way the Pharisees used it in the Talmud to refer to sex in an invalid marriage. All the pieces fit together and the difficult problems of the other views vanished. So we're going to pause Joel's video here for a moment. I want to show you where I previously made the case for my view from Matthew 5.32. And so that way you can see the case that I make from the Bible. 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 let me 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, he goes 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 in a remarriage. I'm saying those two statements mean basically the same thing. So now, if I'm right about that, and 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. And here's why it's the outlier: it's the only text in Matthew, Mark, or Luke that's 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 532B 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 532b. Here's my third point. Matthew 532b 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 for 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 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 set and 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, they're explaining each other, explaining the whole concept Jesus is 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, believe your gift there, go to your brother, reconcile, and then come back and offer your gift. So 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, has nothing 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 has 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 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 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. All right. So there are a number of individual claims that I made there, and I think they're correct, and they make a compelling case for my view of the exception clause. Okay, so let's have Jill finish his video.

SPEAKER_00 2:57:21

I would like to say a few more things about Chris Iverson. I don't think that his being incorrect on this particular point is a massive problem because his overall theology is mostly correct. And when you're dealing with false doctrine, and it's false doctrine of such a nature that if people accept what you what you're teaching, they can actually wind up in hell, which is the case with this adultery and remarriage issue, where people are saying you can get divorced and then you can get remarried. No, no, Jesus said don't divorce, and he said remarriage is adultery. And I don't think their little theories about this matter somehow nullify what Jesus said. I think when you die and stand before God's throne, Jesus is going to say, I commanded do not separate what God has joined together, and I called remarriages adultery, and you did both these things and never repented for it. And the normal consequence of that for eternity is that you're going to be cast into the lake of fire. So it's very, very serious. And Chris Iverson is not teaching a false doctrine that would lead people to hell, it is a minor issue. He's still basically preaching the true message of the gospel. I mean, I probably have some things and what I've said in my 19 videos on this subject that aren't correct so far, too, and I just don't, I'm not aware of that yet. I mean, a couple of them I do know about, and I've even pointed it out, but there may be something there. You know, when you when you write a whole book like this, you write a whole book, uh, that's a lot of words. I mean, even if you think you're 100% correct on everything, good chance you're gonna write something that's not, even though you meant well. And I don't think that God is just enraged at Chris Iverson for doing this. I think I think the Holy Spirit views him as he's still basically preaching the correct message of the gospel on divorce and remarriage, even if he's wrong on some minor points. And I do not mean for this video to somehow discredit him. You know, I I I view him as he's like my brother in the Lord, and he's fighting the good fight just like I am, and we're on the same team. Kind of like a uh football game, you know, where the offense is on the sideline because defense is playing, and you get two players on offense, and they're having a little debate over what they should do when they get back out on the field, when the offense is out there again, and they don't just they don't agree with each other. But as soon as the offense gets control of the ball and they go back on the field, what do they do? They do exactly the play that the coach orders them to do, and they're not having an argument anymore. And I think that this issue is very much like that, and it would it would be a mistake to view the two of us, either by each ourselves or by other people, as some sort of huge rivals that are duking it out in some big boxing match or something like that. You know, this is a minor issue. That the bigger issue is that divorce is wrong and that remarriage is wrong, and you should not be doing either one of those. For anyone, including potentially Chris, uh, who heard what I said here, and you still believe that that exception clause is referring to an invalid marriage and specifically an adulterous remarriage type of invalid marriage, and you're not persuaded by what I'm saying, you don't want to be persuaded. My advice would be to pray and ask the Holy Spirit to show you the truth about the matter. You know, there has to be a willingness to accept the possibility that you're wrong, but I think if that's a sincere request and you're really willing to accept whatever the Holy Spirit shows you, then I think that would be the likely outcome. And I want to pray, ask the Holy Spirit to show Chris Iverson the truth on this issue, that you that you will open his mind and allow him to see it. And if he's correct and I'm incorrect, then I pray that you show him that as well, that you make it clear to him, and that you give him the knowledge and the wisdom and how to respond to what I say here. And uh, if I'm incorrect on this matter, then Lord, I pray that you show me that. But to the best of my understanding and good faith, I don't think that that exception clause can mean an invalid marriage, and I would expect that the Holy Spirit speaking to anyone on that matter is probably going to show them that. But I pray that God do this in Jesus' name.

SPEAKER_02 3:02:54

So that was really nice uh by Joel here at the end. I totally agree with him. Um, we want the truth, and I believe Joel is discussing this in good faith. Uh, he's totally right. The exception clause is relatively minor in the grand scheme of this whole issue. The uh real problem is people dying in the state of continual adultery. That is a problem. So I think it was great that he kept everything in perspective here. And I echo his sentiments um uh about all those things. And Joel's a good guy, he's humble. Um, I think this conversation is good for our audiences, and people can hear the different perspectives and kind of decide for themselves what they think Jesus teaches. So kudos to Joel. I appreciate his reaction video, all the work he put into it. I could tell you put a lot of work into it, and I appreciate that. And uh I'll I'll uh try to remember to link to him in the description below so you can go ahead and subscribe to him. So thank you everybody for watching all this. Give me your comments. I'd love to know your feedback. Hit like, hit subscribe, get a copy of my book, Divorce or Remarriage. Go check out Joe's channel, and I'll see you guys next time.