REACT: Exception Clause Debate Part 3 (Joel Garner and Chris Iverson)

Joel Garner ( @joelgarner539 https://youtube.com/@joelgarner539?si=sQgbrm_k56PBVeBq ) interprets the New Testament to teach marriage permanence, but he disagrees with my view of the exception clause (Mat 5:32, 19:9). In this episode, I am responding to his last video in our ongoing friendly debate.  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!

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to the Divorce Your Remarriage Podcast. I'm Chris Iverson, and we are continuing our series, our debate, with Joel Garner. Joe Garner is a YouTuber who has been expressing his view on what Jesus meant in the exception clause on divorce and remarriage. And I have a different view than he does. And so we've been debating back and forth with YouTube videos. And uh Joel dropped a video on June 14th. I was excited to see that. And so I'm going to go ahead and respond to that last video of his. He said he invested 15 hours preparing for that video, which is really good because it gives you all some good content to consider. So we're getting to the stage in our debate where we're starting to repeat ourselves some. So I'm going to try to reduce how much I repeat myself from the prior episodes where I engaged in this debate with Joel. And hopefully that'll make this episode a little bit more concise. Just to recap, Joel and I agree on a lot. So Jesus calls divorce and remarriage adultery. When a remarriage is adultery, the remarried couple should not keep having sex because the sex is the adultery with the remarried couple. And they also should divorce their adulterous remarriage. Joel and I agree on that. Now, Joel does have a nuanced view about what they should have done in biblical times, but today the application would be people should divorce their remarriage. So Joel and I agree on a lot. We agree on the main things that matter about this subject, but we do have a difference in our interpretation, which is what the debate is all about. Of the seven times Jesus calls divorce and remarriage adultery, two of those times he includes an exception clause. The exception clause says, except for pornea. And the question is, what did Jesus mean by that exception clause? Now, why does this matter? The reason why this is important is that in evangelicalism, there's a very permissive view, a very permissive interpretation of what Jesus teaches. And so every now and again, you're going to find an evangelical who's going to come over and going to hear what do we, what do we say? People who are like Joel and I, people in the permanence camp. And we want to give them the most compelling uh interpretation possible and give good answers to their important questions. And so if I think I think if you take Joel's view, you're going to have more problems persuading somebody. If you take my view, I think it is more persuasive and there's less, there's fewer issues. So I think that's a better view for us to proceed from when we're sharing the permanence view with folks. Okay, so on the exception clause. The exception clause is in Matthew 5.32, Matthew 19.9, Jesus says, except for fornication there. And the Greek word there is pornea. And so Jesus is saying divorce and remarriage is adultery, uh, except for one scenario. That's the fornication scenario, right? So the question is, what exactly is that scenario? And Joel and I agree that the exceptional scenario cannot be talking about infidelity in a marriage. I know that is the popular evangelical interpretation, but there is just a laundry list of problems, internal contradictions, just problems you have all over the place with that interpretation. There's just no way Pornea and the exception clause could mean adultery. It's way too many problems with that. Um, it makes it just makes it, you know, those problems are just insurmountable. Um, so Joel says the exception clause refers to sex during betrothal. For example, a man and woman are betrothed, and let's say she has sex with some other guy, and then he finds out he ends the betrothal, and now he can go marry somebody else. If he married somebody else, he wouldn't be cheating on his ex-betrothed, you know, engaged fiance person because he was never married to her. So that's Joel's view of what Jesus is referring to in the exception clause. I don't think that works. Uh, and I have a whole episode where I go through the reasons why I think that that is not what Jesus meant there. But just the highlight reel is it imagines the word wife, for example, in Matthew 19, 9 to have two different meanings at the same time. Uh, that's really impossible. It means only a betrothed woman in the exceptional scenario, and it means only a married woman in the kind of typical scenario, and it can't mean both those things at the same time. Now, the word wife can refer to a betrothed woman, but it can't refer to a betrothed woman and a married woman at the same time in the same verse. And not only is it betrothed woman and married woman, it's only betrothed woman and only married woman in the same word. That wouldn't work. Uh, the second issue with the betrothal view is it implies that if a man ends a betrothal for a reason other than fornication and he marries somebody else, he commits adultery. Uh, and that contradicts Paul in 1 Corinthians 7, 25 through 28. The third problem is that nothing in the context of Matthew 5 or Matthew 19 indicates that Jesus is talking about betrothal. So betrothal is just kind of out of the blue. It's in there, and you have to infer all of that from the word pornea, and I don't think you can do that. And number four, uh, it's completely reliant on the word pornea to refer to sex between two unmarried people. But even if a person uses that definition for the word for pornea, the exception clause can be interpreted the way I interpret it in the already married view. So let me explain what the already married view is. Um, this is this is my view. So we just had Joel's view, betrothal. Here's the already married view. And I have a whole explainer video where I go through my view, and there's a surprising amount of evidence for my view. But the the idea is that the sex being referred to in the exception clause is pornea because they're not married to each other. So the idea is a man married a woman, for example, let's say, and she's divorced. But Jesus, his whole teaching is that divorce doesn't end your marriage. So he's marrying somebody who's already married, right? And Jesus says that in Matthew 5, 32b. I think he's explaining the exception clause. So the sex they have in their remarriage, it's it's adultery, right, against her first husband because the divorce doesn't dissolve the marriage. But it is also uh fornication between the woman and her second husband, because the sex between them is fornication because they're not married to each other. Um, and so the word adultery is used to emphasize the fact that her first marriage is still intact. And the word fornication is used to indicate that the marriage between the woman and her second husband is not a fake marriage, it's an invalid marriage. So the words fornication and adultery are conveying antecedent facts. The antecedent fact for the adultery is her first marriage is still there. The antecedent fact for the fornication is the marriage to the woman and her second husband. That's a fake marriage. They're not really married. Married people, they don't commit fornication, they have marital relations, it's not fornication, it's not sin. But a woman and the second husband would be sin, uh, and it's because they're not married. So Jesus explains this in Matthew 5:32b. The second half there says a man who marries a divorced woman commits adultery. And that I think that's Jesus explaining pornea in the exception clause. And one thing I want to mention here is that Joel thinks that I can't really reach my view without extra biblical evidence. Um, and we'll talk about the extra biblical evidence in this video, but that's not true. I can reach it just from the scriptural text itself. Clemente of Alexandria reached it apparently just from the text itself. He had the same view that I have, as far as I can tell. And so the extra biblical evidence is helpful, it backs it up, but it's not necessary to reach my conclusion. So Joel thinks the exception clause imagines ending a betrothal after somebody cheated, and I think the exception clause imagines an invalid marriage, a marriage to somebody who is already married. So let's hear Joel, and then I'll respond to what he has to say.

SPEAKER_01 7:30

He said early in the video. Um he's stated this in a video of a couple videos ago on his uh um channel where he was addressing another YouTuber that he didn't believe that Deuteronomy uh 24, 1 to 4 is what Matthew 5.32 was talking about. However, when I went through this video of his near the end of it, he made a comment uh indicating that he believed that when he said Matthew 5.32, his audience had Deuteronomy 24, 1 to 4 in mind. That kind of seems like a contradiction to me. Not quite sure what his uh how he's going to reconcile all that, but I'm sure he'll he'll probably make a response to this video doing that.

SPEAKER_00 8:34

Okay, so let's talk about Matthew 5.32 and about Deuteronomy 24. So Joel and I agree on a couple things. First, and uh Matthew 5.31, 32, this is the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus is discussing Deuteronomy 24. Uh Matthew 5.31, he says, you have heard that it was written, it was said, uh, if you're going to divorce, give a certificate of divorce. He's talking about Deuteronomy 24. It's pretty plain. And then uh and then Jesus says, but I say to you. So in verse 32. So Jesus' rule in Matthew 5.32 isn't the same as Deuteronomy 24. And Joel and I both agree on that. So here's what this means. This means is Jesus doesn't think Deuteronomy 24, that Mosaic law on divorce, is the highest moral law in the Old Testament that touches on divorce and remarriage. Jesus' teaching is more restrictive than Deuteronomy 24. And you can see that in Matthew 5, 32. Jesus says, But I say to you, which means Jesus is going further. He's going to be more restrictive than Deuteronomy 24. Now, when Jesus gets more restrictive, where does he find a warrant for that? And he finds it in Deuteronomy 24, 1 through 4, where it says that the woman is defiled in reference to her first husband if she remarries. So Jesus says he makes her commit adultery by divorcing her, right? So Matthew 5.32, Jesus says, but I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for fornication, makes her commit adultery. And that tracks with Deuteronomy 24, when Moses says that if a man divorces his wife for a matter of uncleanness, and then she goes and she marries somebody else, uh, he can't return back to her. And the reason is because after that she has been defiled, is how Moses puts it. And after that she has been defiled means in her second marriage, that was sin for her to remarry. And Jesus says uh that the first husband makes her commit adultery. So Jesus saying makes her commit adultery maps on to uh Moses saying after that she has been defiled in Deuteronomy 24 in her second marriage. So now you might think, Chris, if Jesus is tracking with Moses on Deuteronomy 24 writing, then doesn't that mean that the matter of uncleanness in Deuteronomy 24, 1 is the same as except for Pornea in Matthew 5, 32? And the answer is no. That's a mistake people make. So Moses wrote, if you look, if you look at it carefully, he wrote, if a man divorces for a matter of uncleanness and she remarries, she is defiled. So he divorced for a matter of uncleanness there. So Jesus says, if a man divorces except for pornea and she remarries, that it's adultery. So Moses is not using matter of uncleanness as an exception. He's saying even if you divorce for a matter of uncleanness, still if she marries somebody else, she's defiled. But so Jesus is using pornea as an exception, except for pornea. So if you look at Matthew chapter 19 and verse 8, Jesus said that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives because you have hard hearts. So the allowance for divorce in Deuteronomy 24 wasn't moral permission, it was tolerance of an immoral act in Deuteronomy 24. So the exception clause in Matthew 5.32 and Matthew 19. So in Matthew 5.32, I don't think Jesus was paraphrasing Deuteronomy 24. I don't think he was teaching everybody, hey, follow my paraphrase of Deuteronomy 24. I don't think that's what's going on. I think Jesus was identifying where the true moral law was on divorce and remarriage. And it was mentioned in Deuteronomy 24. It's mentioned in there. In Deuteronomy 24, it's mentioned almost like in passing when it says she is defiled if she remarries. And Jesus prioritizes the true moral law that he finds in that part of Deuteronomy 24 and teaches that rule, the rule that logically flows from that concept in Deuteronomy 24. And so what this means is there's a sense in which Deuteronomy 24 allowed divorce and the sense in which it threw shade at divorce and remarriage. And the sense in which it allowed divorce and remarriage is the tolerance Jesus speaks of in Matthew 19, 8, and the sense in which it casts shade on divorce and remarriage was the defilement of that woman when she remarried. And Jesus says that's adultery in the New Testament. So Jill doesn't say it quite the way I just said it, but I think we're pretty close on our view of this. Uh, there might be some differences that are more than just terminology, but I don't think that it really has any bearing on our interpretations of the exception clause. So I'm gonna go ahead and skip forward to the part where we disagree, though, uh, and this does bear on the exception clause.

SPEAKER_01 13:16

And when it goes here to 532b, which Chris says is an explanation of 532A. 532B says and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery. Okay. He's talking about the second husband in Deuteronomy 24, 2 and 3. 3 it says, if the latter husband detests her and writes her a certificate of divorce, he puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, or if the latter husband dies, who took her as his wife. Okay, the second husband mentioned in 2 and 3. Jesus is saying he married a divorced woman, he committed adultery. So when Jesus said this.

SPEAKER_00 14:07

Okay, so now I disagree with how Joel does this. So I agree, Matthew 5, 32, 31, and 32 uh are referencing back to Deuteronomy 24, and Jesus is saying, here's what Deuteronomy 24 says, but that's not really the moral law the way you guys are reading it. So what what Jesus is doing though in Matthew 5.32a is he's saying, here's the moral law. You divorce, you make her commit adultery. Um, and and we can see that in Deuteronomy 24 because the the remarriage there says she's been defiled. So we see that in Deuteronomy 24. That's kind of hinted. The real moral law is kind of hinted at in Deuteronomy 24. Matthew 5.32 B, though, is does not map on to Deuteronomy 24, the text there. So Matthew 5.32b, it says, uh uh a man who marries a divorced woman commits adultery, right? I don't think that that's what that maps on to Deuteronomy 24, where it says that the second husband dies. That's not that's not the same thing. It is true that it says that after that she has been defiled in Deuteronomy 24 in reference to the that second marriage. But Jesus already mentions that in Matthew 5.32A. In Matthew 5.32a, it says a man divorces her and he makes her commit adultery. Makes her commit adultery maps onto she has been defiled. Right? The person who has been defiled is the woman in Deuteronomy 24, and the person who is made to commit adultery is the woman. So that maps that maps onto that. There isn't then another statement in Deuteronomy 24 where Moses says, Oh, and by the way, the man committed adultery. Now we know the man committed adultery because it takes two to tango. So you already know that from the word defiled. But the point is the mapping from Deuteronomy 24, Matthew 5.33, the mapping that happens is already done by the end of Matthew 5.32A. There is no mapping after that. So because the only other thing that happens in Deuteronomy 24 is that the second husband dies or divorces in that particular scenario Moses is talking about. And there is no dying or divorcing going on, being talked about in Matthew 5.32B. Matthew 5.32 B says something different. Matthew 5.32 B says a man who marries a divorced woman commits adultery. And I think that's Jesus explaining what he means by the exception clause, not continuing to map on to Deuteronomy 24. So if you look at Matthew 5.32A, man divorces, woman remarries, that remarriage is adultery, right? Now who is incurring guilt for that remarriage? The first husband is culpable because he made her commit adultery, right? She is culpable because she committed adultery. That's that's culpable, right? And what out now, what about her second husband? He also commits adultery. It takes two to tango. So you already know all three of them have guilt from Matthew 5.32A. You don't need Matthew 5.32 B to tell you the second husband is guilty of adultery. You knew that already from Matthew 5.32A. So why is Matthew 5.32 B there? Now you might think Jesus often talks about this remarriage stuff in pairs. Well, but he has a reason for that. So let's look at that. So in Luke 16, 18 and Mark 10, 11 and 12, both of those have two moral formulations there, and they have it for a reason. Jesus is flipping the genders. If you look at it carefully, he's flipping the genders. The same rules apply for men as apply for women. What about in Matthew? Well, Matthew 5.32A and Matthew 19 9, Jesus flips the genders. So you think if Jesus does this thing in pairs, but then you realize the pairs have a reason, the purpose is to flip the genders, then you notice 532b isn't needed to flip the genders. Why is it there? In other words, of the seven times Jesus calls remarriage adultery, Matthew 532B is an outlier. And I think it's there to explain the exception clause. Otherwise, it has no educational purpose. And I don't think Jesus said Matthew 532B for no reason.

SPEAKER_01 18:04

So there's no way it can mean that. But they're gonna quibble about this word. And I think the only way that Chris can arrive at his invalid marriage view is to go the route of interpreting pornea to really be referring to sexual immorality. I haven't seen him concede that yet, but I don't think there's any way you can just say, well, fornication in English means an invalid marriage. It doesn't. No one thinks that. He's just saying that because that's how he's forming his argument.

SPEAKER_00 18:39

Okay, so let me just be clear on one thing. So I think the word fornication does not mean invalid marriage exactly. I think fornication is the sex within an invalid marriage, just to keep that kind of clear. Um, so Joel and I differ on how we understand the meaning of a word in the text of scripture. So I think most words have a semantic range of meaning. And to determine what a speaker means by a particular word, you look at the context to figure out what which of those meanings was intended in that particular passage. So it's like if somebody uses a word you've never heard before, you look it up in the dictionary, you see it has whatever three meanings, and you determine which one was meant by the context of the speaker's message. You don't automatically assume that the speaker intended the oldest meaning or the most frequently used meaning or the newest meaning or whatever. The meaning of the speaker's use of that word is determined by the context of what the speaker's message was, not the age or the frequency or the use of the word. So now Joel thinks that I can't arrive at my conclusion unless I select a specific meaning of pornea in the exception clause. And Joel thinks pornea could have three possible meanings within the semantic range at the time of Jesus, and those three meanings would be prostitution, fornication, or sexual immorality. And then he says, my view requires pornea to mean sexual immorality. Um, but I don't actually think that's the case. Uh, so if Jesus meant sex in an invalid, adulterous remarriage, there's a sense in which it is adultery, which would fall under sexual immorality. That's true. Um, but there's a sense in which it's sex between two unmarried people, so then it would be fornication. And here's what I mean by that. In Matthew 5, Jesus is speaking to an audience, they don't know him. This is this is the first time they're hearing him, right? And Jesus' audience was accustomed to thinking uh a particular way with regards to divorce and remarriage and all of that. So, for example, if a man who is single had sex with a divorced woman, they would think of that as fornication because they think a divorced woman is unmarried. In fact, Paul calls a divorced woman unmarried in 1 Corinthians chapter 7, verses 10 and 11, even though Paul knows she is still bound to her husband. So, in the same way, Paul can call a divorced woman unmarried, even though she is married, so Jesus can call the sex between a man and a divorced woman fornication and adultery. And to understand this, Joel thinks words are used because of the nature of the act that occurs. And that's the only thing to consider. But I disagree. I think words oftentimes are used to highlight an antecedent fact. So fornication tells you the two of them are not married to each other. Adultery tells you that she's still married to her prior valid husband. And so in the same way, unmarried in 1 Corinthians 7, 10, and 11 tells you she is legally divorced, but the word husband in that same passage tells you she's actually married. So they're both referring back to antecedent facts, and that's why Paul uses unmarried and husband, referring to the woman's same relationship to her husband. So Joel differs, at least when it comes to pornea. Joel thinks that words often have a biblical meaning that differs from the common meaning of the word. And the biblical meaning must be used if they are at odds and it's an inspired text. So at other times he's made a different argument that the more frequently used meaning must be used unless the context forces you. Into a different meaning. So Joel seems to imagine that Jesus didn't speak in Koinea Greek exactly. He hasn't said this exactly that I've I've heard, but it seems that Joel imagines Jesus spoke in a biblical Koine Greek or maybe a biblical Aramaic. And so you might wonder then where would Jesus get biblical Greek or biblical Aramaic from? And Joel, I believe, thinks he got it from the Septuagint. And so, and that's not only where Jesus got it from, but also his like audience, who the people to whom Jesus is speaking, that they are understand that he's speaking to them in a biblical Greek, not just the regular Greek. And so a Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures was the Septuagint. It had been around for about 280 years by the time Jesus had his ministry. So now I don't know where Joel Joel thinks Jesus would have gotten biblical Aramaic from. So I would need Joel to kind of shed some light on that because if Jesus spoke in Aramaic, is he speaking in the Aramaic of the time, or is he speaking of Aramaic like locked in stone from, I don't know, 200 years before or 300 years before, which Aramaic is he using? I'm not sure. So here's why this is important. Joel doesn't look to see what the meanings of the words were at the time Jesus spoke. He doesn't want to know what the common usage of the word was at the time Jesus spoke. Because, you know, words change over time. I mean, that's just the nature of language. So ordinarily, if you found an old manuscript and it used a word, you would want to know not just what that word meant at some point in time, you would want to know what that word meant at that time in that culture. And Joel doesn't do that with biblical words. Joel thinks the meaning of biblical words Greek, for example, is locked for all time at the time when the Septuagint was translated 280 years before Jesus. The result is that Joel uses that to narrow the meaning of words in the New Testament to what the Septuagint would have said that they meant.

SPEAKER_01 24:17

I actually believe pornea means prostitution in the Bible more often than fornication. This is based on not only the context of the New Testament passages that use pornea, but also the context of all the passages in the Old Testament Septuagint that use the word pornea translated from Semat. The Septuagint is a version of the Old Testament that was used by New Testament authors as well as by early Christian readers of the Bible. This is the rule I'm following. Not because I made it up, but because that is the semantic range of how God in both the New Testament and Old Testament uses the words Zanat and Punea. And I do not want my understanding of the Bible to be corrupted by a broader semantic range of pornea used by authors who were not inspired outside of the Bible. I only want to key in on God's semantic range.

SPEAKER_00 25:10

Okay, so Joel says he uses the context to determine which meaning of the word pornea was intended by the author. So it sounds like, well, I guess Joel and Chris should agree then, because that sounds like what I would say. But we don't agree. And a great way to show an example of the difference between what we're saying here is by looking at 1 Corinthians chapter 5 and verse 1. So Paul writes there, it is actually reported that there is pornea among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans, for a man has his father's wife. Now that sounds like incest. As a man who's having sex with his father's wife, sounds like incest. It's the kind of sex you don't even see among the pagans. That's how out of bounds this is, this pornea is. Now, Joel says that the word pornea means sex between two unmarried people. Therefore, the father must be dead. So he uses the word pornea to infer that the father is dead. But the text doesn't say the father is dead if you look at it. Let's say this is the man, this is the man and his stepmom. If the father is dead, then the family connection between the man and the stepmom is dissolved. It's not there anymore because he is dead. That was the only family connection there. And so it would make it not to be incest. Gross, but not not violating Leviticus 18. So Joel says, well, because pornea means sex between two unmarried people, the father must be dead. And that's that's why Paul uses the word pornea there instead of just the common idea that the father's probably still alive. This is a good chance this is incest. But so let's hear how Joel responds to that argument.

SPEAKER_01 26:47

Now, modern-day Bible translators will insist that it means incest in that passage, which is logical. And uh they'll even have their English Greek dictionaries literally say pornea means incest. In reality, this is the only passage they're referring to, and they make that statement, just like when they say, Oh, pornea means adultery in the same Greek English dictionaries. Well, where did they get that from? It's because they believe in the adultery view, they believe that the adultery is a reason that you can both get divorced and remarried, and therefore they're gonna put that definition in the Greek English dictionary. But problems with this, the the word pornea doesn't literally mean incest. Now it could mean sexual immorality, and it could be referring to, and and some people may think this is one of the strongest cases in the New Testament where you can argue that pornea has got to mean something other than prostitution or premarital sex, and they'll also point out that uh another thing that's pointed out is that the people in Corinth were uh extremely morally debauched when it came to uh sexual morals, and uh therefore they were tolerating a man sleeping with his father's wife, and uh, you know, and perhaps this would not have been tolerated elsewhere because the Corinthians are even more morally debauched than everyone else. I don't really buy that argument. I think the Corinthians very likely were more morally debauched than everyone else, but that doesn't mean that the Corinthian Christians at the church in Corinth were as well. After all, if you read the rest of 1 Corinthians, there it becomes rather apparent that they're asking Paul about the possibility of just being celibate. So apparently they think in terms of the way to deal with pornea is just be celibate. What do you have to say about that, Paul? And Paul addresses that. Why would they be thinking in terms of celibacy if they were just all these morally depraved people, every bit as debauched as the rest of the Corinthians? I think that's unlikely. So I think when it says that uh, you know, this is not even named among the Gentiles in that passage, it's not referring to the Gentiles of Corinth, but the Gentiles in general. After all, the entire Gentile population in the Roman Empire was overall pretty morally debauched when it came to sexual matters as well, not just the Corinthians. The Corinthians may have been worse, maybe, but I don't think that's the point of what Paul's saying, and I think pointing that out to try to say, look, they're so bad, they tolerated a man having an affair with his father's wife. I think it's unrealistic. I think it's unrealistic to assume that this man was literally having relations with his live father's wife. I think it's far more likely that he was having relations with his dead father's wife, and if he's having relations with his dead father's wife, absolutely that would be called fornication because she's not married, she's a widow. I think they would possibly view that as not being anywhere near as bad as actually having an affair with his live father's wife. The other problem here, too, is the use of the word pornea. Okay, well, normally, if you can use the word Mokaiah, why are you going to use the word pornea? If the man is having relations with his live father's wife, that's Mokaiah. And Paul is saying this is not even named among the Gentiles, he's trying to stress how bad of a sin this is the man's committing. And if it's adultery, he wants to use the word pornea instead of the Greek word adultery for adultery, which is Mokaiah. I don't think that makes a lot of sense. I think if that man was having relations with his live father's wife, Paul, being consistent with the way he speaks in the rest of the passage, would have used the worst sin title for it possible, which would have been Mokaiah. And the fact that he did not do that strongly suggests that the sin he's referring to would not fall under the category of Mokaiah. So if that's the case, then Paul saying pornea absolutely could mean fornication, it does not have to mean incest. I mean, whether you interpret a man having relations with his dead father's wife as incest or not, I mean, that's read into the passage. It says pornea. How do we know Paul just didn't mean fornication there? He wasn't even thinking about incest. How do you know that? So it's just another example of modern-day translators coming to these conclusions and literally inserting it right into the Bible and changing what it actually says. I see no reason to change it for what the KJV says. It says fornication in the KJV, fornication makes perfect sense. Why alter it? Why suppose it can't possibly mean that? I don't see any need to do any of that.

SPEAKER_00 32:21

Okay, so that was five minutes of Joel trying to explain why the father in this passage must be dead. So now, if you take my approach, Paul could be talking about incest. Sure, it's possible that the father is dead. And Paul is saying this is just gross, but not necessarily incestuous. That's that's possible under my view. But here's what's not possible under my view. You can't know the father is dead from the word pornea. Joel is trying to say the father is dead because it says pornea. So Joel uses a bunch of different arguments uh to say the father is likely dead, or we can't know that the father is alive. Okay, even if you grant that, that is not the problem. The problem is not he's likely dead or we don't know he's alive. The problem is saying you know the father is dead because the word pornea is used. That's the issue. And so Joel can't say the father might be alive because his rationale for the betrothal view falls apart. And the reason why is because pornea is now being used in the way that the common people are using the word pornea, which means that the word pornea in the exception clause could refer to other kinds of sexual sin, and then it wouldn't just be necessarily between two unmarried people, and then he can't find a way to get to the betrothal view. So so therefore, pornea and exception clause can definitely mean sex in an invalid marriage. All right, so let's do a thought experiment here. If you took this sentence from Paul in 1 Corinthians chapter 5, 1, where it says a man has sex with his uh his father's wife, if you take that and you found somebody else who wrote a manuscript, another a Christian, similar values, all that stuff, and he wrote something very similar to what Paul writes about a man who has pornea with his father's wife. Um, and it was a different family, different place, and everything, but some the same core words were used that are at issue here. The difference, of course, is Paul is an inspired text, and this other writer is not an inspired text. Uh, I think Joel would think that extra biblical writer could be referring to incest, but that Paul is not referring to incest, even though they're using the exact same words and they're writing at the exact same year and they're using the exact same Greek language. And the difference between the two is that Paul is writing in Koine Greek that's inspired, and the extra biblical writer is writing in Koine Greek that's not inspired. The same words written by two different Christians at the same time period in the same culture can mean two different things, according to Joel's view, because one is inspired and the other one is not. And that's because Joel really imagines that they're writing in two different languages. So one is writing in biblical Koine Greek, that would be Paul, and the other one is writing in the common Greek language at the time. And so the the what Paul is writing in was set in stone at the time of the Septuagint, 280 years earlier. And this other common Greek is just what people are using at the time. And so the rule that Joel is using is just presumed by him. There's no text that says the Greek that's being used in the New Testament has the semantic range of the Greek words used in the Septuagint. Nothing says that. Joel just presumes that and poses it on the text. So now imagine Jesus hears or Paul's original readers, they don't know that they're communicating in a biblical Koine Greek rather than a regular Koine Greek. For all they know, they're communicating in regular Greek as they've heard it. And so we have to imagine that they receive what Jesus says, and in their mind they're thinking, okay, if Jesus is speaking in biblical Koine Greek, he means A. But if he's speaking in just Koine Greek, he means you know, normal Koine Greek, then he means B. And so we don't know what he means because we don't know which language to be using. And this whole thing just seems very kind of far-fetched. You have to understand when they first heard Jesus, they didn't know he's the Messiah. They hear, they see somebody, there's a big crowd. People have said compelling things about him or maybe negative things about him. And so they want to go out and hear what does he have to say. They don't know he's talking about, he's talking in biblical Koine Greek. Here's the other thing: do they know that there's a difference between biblical Koine Greek and Koine Greek? The Septuagint was written 280 years before Jesus' ministry. Like 130 years at least before Jesus' ministry, we have the Damascus document, which uses the word uh Zanute, uh, which is fornication in Hebrew, uh, to refer to sex in a remarriage. We'll talk about that in later on in this video. But here's my point. They're they're using Koine Greek. I don't know that they know that the meaning of this word pornea has changed over the last 280 years. How would they know that? How would they know that? They're not going to school. A lot of these people are not super well educated. I don't know how literate they are. They can hear the word and understand that, but uh, can they read it? So it's just unclear to me that they would know the language changed over the last 280 years. Here's probably what happened. They grew up hearing various words in Greek and they learn words just like the rest of us do, and they have heard the word pornea used to refer to all kinds of different sexual immorality and various things, right? And then when they go to synagogue and they hear the scriptures being read out in the Septuagint and they hear pornea, and what they're hearing is a particular kind of uh immoral sexual conduct, and that one happens to be sex between two unmarried people. But that doesn't mean that they have internalized this idea that it had a different meaning at that time and the meaning has expanded. It just means that when when they come across a text, it happens to have this particular meaning of pornea. But I don't know that they knew the semantic range changed from 280 years before. And so Joel has to imagine that they that they all know this. And I I don't I don't even think we have evidence that they knew that. And so I don't know how they could be interpreting Jesus and Paul according to uh an understanding that language changed over time and the septuagent meaning is different than the common meaning today. And so, therefore, you have to be using the Septuagint meaning. This is all just a lot of speculation about what's going on in the mind of the hearers that I just don't think we have any evidence for, any warrant for at all. We have no text that tells us we need to do this. This is all unsubstantiated speculation.

SPEAKER_01 38:26

Here was Chris thinks that I am making assumptions about interpreting pornea without evidence. This is not true. The evidence is not some method I made up. The evidence is how does God use the word pornea elsewhere in the Bible? That's the only evidence that should matter.

SPEAKER_00 38:45

Okay, so my claim is that Joel is presuming a word must mean what it meant elsewhere in the Bible rather than what it meant at the time it was written. And so Joel says the evidence is that what uh is is when God used a particular word in the Bible, it had a particular meaning at that time. But that's not evidence for his rule, though. That's just evidence for how the word was used at a particular time. It's not evidence that for hundreds of years after the end of the Old Testament, these words had the same semantic range. Uh so for example, the Septuagint was translated from Hebrew around 250 BC, and words change over that much time. So anyone who has read the King James knows this, right? So the word suffer in the King James often means to permit, not to have a bunch of pain. The word conversation in the King James uh often meant behavior, not like a dialogue. Uh, meet or M-E-E-T uh often meant something that was appropriate or fitting, not getting together. So words change over time, and the idea that Hebrew words or the Koine Greek words that they were translated into 280 years before Jesus' ministry all had the same meaning is just unlikely. 280 years is kind of a long time. Joel imagines that Jesus spoke in a 280-year-old version of Koine Greek. And that would be like someone today uh speaking the way English was spoken in 1750, which is about 280 years earlier, which is around, you know, the time when America became a country, a little bit after that. So we were an English colony in 1750. So, for example, the pursuit of happiness, which we have in the Declaration of Independence. Uh, that phrase today sounds like pursuing bliss. So a young person who's just out there in the world, if they say, hey, pursuit of happiness, what does that mean to you? And they say, That means I'm going to a rave tonight, right? So that's how they might think of pursuit of happiness. That is not what was meant by the found by the founding fathers in the Declaration of Independence. They meant freedom to flourish by living according to natural law and all this, not going to a rave and getting high. So the meaning of meanings of words changed over time. And also, Jesus sometimes spoke in Aramaic, which means he couldn't be speaking in a biblical version of the language, I don't think, because I there wasn't a translation that I'm aware of of the Hebrew scriptures to Aramaic. Maybe Joel can enlighten me about where Jesus would get biblical Aramaic from. But in Mark 5:41, 7.34, and 1436, Jesus speaks in Aramaic. Also, sometimes Jesus spoke to people who didn't grow up going to synagogue. And so Joel's idea that Jesus is Jesus spoke in a biblical version of Greek, and then Jesus' audience knew what he meant because they all had grown up going to the synagogue. That doesn't work because they didn't all grow up going to synagogue. So the Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7, 26, Pontius Pilate, for example, the centurion. These are people who likely did not grow up going to synagogue. And I'm sure there's more examples as well. The implication of all of this is Jesus just spoke to common people in the language that they used. He didn't like switch over to biblical Koine Greek. And now the reason why all this semantic range stuff matters is when you're trying to figure out the meaning of a word that was used in the New Testament, you have to ask yourself the question: do we use what that word meant in the Old Testament, or do we also look at how that word was used in Koine Greek at the time Jesus used that word? And I think we should look at both, both how the Old Testament used it, but also how that word was used at the time because Jesus was just speaking the common language of the people. And so Joel thinks we should only look at the Old Testament. So that's why I can use the Damascus document, the Talmud, and four early church writers to show that they use pornea and interlingual synonyms in Hebrew and Latin to refer to sex in an invalid marriage, which is my view that Jesus in the exception clause is referring to sex in an invalid marriage. It's an invalid marriage because, for example, a man married a divorced woman, she is already married. The divorce doesn't dissolve the marriage. So it's so her divorce is fake, the remarriage is fake, the whole thing's fake. She's just living with her boyfriend. They're calling it a marriage. So the sex they have in that marriage is fornication, and it's also adultery against her first husband. But the point is, Jesus uses the word pornea there to indicate that their marriage is a fake marriage. And that's how this language was used in the Damascus document, in the four early church writers and in the Talmud. Now, again, I don't need the extra biblical writings to arrive at my conclusion. I can get there from just the Bible, but I think that they should be admitted as evidence and they shouldn't be dismissed because of an unproven rule that the New Testament Greek used words that were in the semantic range of the Greek 280 years earlier. And listen, I'm just not aware of any evidence that Koine Greek that's used in the New Testament was auto-limited to the Septuagint meanings 280 years earlier.

SPEAKER_01 43:37

And the evidence we have shows that the semantic Chris says that a divorced woman in the Bible having sex with a single man would be considered fornication pornea. But there is no biblical passage that says this. From Jesus' perspective, he views the divorced woman as still being married, and therefore anyone having sex with her would be committing adultery. This basically The same as divorce and remarriage, what Jesus consistently called Micaiah adultery, not 40. Just in other words. So, in other words, if he thinks that people would call that in the Bible single man and a and a divorced woman, that's fornication, 20. But it's actually Makai because she's still married to her first husband. It's adultery. It's not correct about it. And there's no passage that says what he says either. Chris thinks that Zanat and Pornea are interchangeable words in two different languages and points out that I said there's no overlap between them. Zanat and pornea can mean prostitution, fornication, and sexual immorality, but not in the Old Testament Hebrew or the Septuagint. They always mean only prostitution or fornication there. But in writings outside of the Bible written after the Old Testament, they can occasionally be used to mean sexual immorality as well. What I mean by there being no overlap is that the Damascus document is translated from Hebrew to English, and the Talmud was translated from Aramaic to English. No Greek was involved in these words being translated. Zanut clearly originally meant only prostitution and fornication. This is how God uses the word. All New Testament passages using the word pornea make sense if they mean prostitution or fornication. None of them require a sexual immorality usage to make sense. There's no evidence that God in the Bible ever used pornea in its broader usage of sexual immorality.

SPEAKER_00 45:55

Okay, so one of my arguments was even if you take pornea and you say it's locked in stone from the Septuagint, and it can only mean sex between two unmarried persons, then it could still, with that meaning, support my view of the exception clause. And here's here's how that would work. Suppose it's 20 A.D. before Jesus has his ministry, a divorced woman has sex with a single man. What is the word they would use at that time, 20 AD, 10 years roughly before Jesus does his ministry? I don't think anybody's calling that adultery in 20 AD. They think she is unmarried. So in 20 AD, everyone, I think, is calling that pornea. Now Joel says the Bible doesn't talk about that scenario in the Old Testament. Okay, that's because the Bible doesn't talk about divorce very much in the Old Testament. But there has to be a word for this. And what word were people steeped in the Septuagint language? What would they use? Obviously, it's pornea. So when Jesus uses the exception clause, he's speaking to people who think pornea can refer to sex between a man and a divorced woman that is within the semantic range of people who grew up using the Septuagint. So I recognize Jesus calls it adultery because the idea that divorce ends a marriage is just a fiction. Obviously, I understand that. But at the time Jesus speaks, the word pornea for sex in an invalid marriage because a man married a divorced woman is within the semantic range, even under Joel's theory. It says that if a man marries a second woman, he commits fornication twice, if it's within the life, their lifetime. So the idea is there's a man and he marries two women and he commits fornication. If all three of them are still alive, he commits fornication, or you could say that means sexual immorality, whichever, whichever translation you want to use for a Zanut, there. So but here's the point the man marries two women, everyone's still alive, equals fornication. There's no exception for divorce. So if a man marries a woman, divorces her, and marries another woman, just on the plain text of what that says, that would be zenut. So this is relevant because it's using the word zenut. And then the word zanut, if you were to translate it into Greek, is the word pornea, which is the word that Jesus uses in the exception clause. So that's relevant then because when Jesus uses the word pornea, which is the interlingual synonym for zenut, it would seem like he's talking about the same thing the Damascus document's talking about, which has been around for 130 years. This is not like a new concept that just came out last week. It's not like Gen Z just came out with the word cap or no cap or business or ris, all the things, right? It's not like that. It's not like it just came out last week. It's been around for 130 years. It's it's like it's like the equivalent of a word or a thought or an idea that came out in the year like 1900. It's not new. It's been around for a long time. So Jesus using the word pornea, which in Hebrew would be zenut, and he's talking about divorce and remarriage there. And there, and in the Damascus document, when it uses it in kind of this, this, this blanket all situations kind of way, it's talking about the second marriage being the sexual sin there and using the word Zanut for that. So when Jesus uses the word pornea, and this idea has been out there for 130 years, seems like he's talking about the same concept we already have in the Damascus document. So that's why the Damascus document is an interesting extra-biblical piece of evidence that Joel and I debate about. So now Joel suspects that Zanut there means sexual immorality. And if you were to translate the Damascus document to Greek, you would translate Zanut to pornea. Let's say Joel's correct that the word Zanut uh 280 years before Jesus' ministry could only mean prostitution or fornication, sex between two unmarried people. Well, then 130 years before Jesus' ministry is the Damascus document. Here, the word Zanut is being used in a different way. It's talking about sex in a second marriage. So we have to imagine that Jesus' hearers are thinking that the word pornea is limited to what its meaning was 280 years ago and not what its meaning was 130 years ago. And like they are supposed to know that there's a difference between how it was used 280 years ago and 130 years ago? How would they, how are they going to know this? And we should imagine that Jesus was intending to use words that the way they were used 280 years ago rather than the way they were used 130 years ago, for example, in the Damascus document. Why would we assume that? Where is that written? That there's this time limit. You have to go back 280 years. Now I understand Joel is saying it's not the years, it's the Septuagint. I get that. But my point is there's just nothing that tells us that we have to go back to the Septuagint to figure out the semantic range of a word rather than just the way the words were used at the time Jesus spoke.

SPEAKER_01 51:00

However, the Damascus document says that a man commits Zanna twice by marrying a second woman in the lifetime of either himself or his first wife's life or both his wives' lives. It's not a very clear statement. What does committing Zenut twice mean? What is it in reference to? Is the lifetime statement referring to the man, his first wife, or both his wives? I don't know. And I'm not sure anyone else does either. But definitely there is no clear wording that is referring to divorce and remarriage. Why can't it just be referring to polygamy as is indicated in the next few sentences of the passage? Why does it have to be referring to both polygamy and divorce and remarriage?

SPEAKER_00 51:44

Okay, so there's two conditions in the Damascus document that have to be met before a man is guilty of fornication. The first condition is he marries two women. And the second condition is everyone's alive. So if a man marries two women and none of them, none of the three of them have died, he committed fornication. There isn't an exception for divorce in the Damascus document. So if a man marries a woman, divorces her, and marries another, he commits fornication based on the literal text of this passage in the Damascus document. So here's the point. The only other writing we have that uses a similar argument as Jesus regarding remarriage calls the remarriage fornication or zenut. So when Jesus uses the word fornication, pornea, in the exception clause, we should imagine he means sex in a remarriage. And that's my view. Now, Joel is going to make daylight between, he's going to try to make daylight between Jesus and the Damascus document on what they're saying here. But there's no contradiction contradiction between what Jesus said and what the Damascus document says. And what there is, though, is striking and unique similarity. They both root their argument in Genesis, not just Genesis, Genesis chapter one, verse 27. No one else is doing this that we have that we know of. They're both categorically calling remarriage sexual sin. Neither of them make an exception for divorce, which is the mainstream view of the culture at the time. It's the same argument. Now let's take a let's take a step back here. If you look at the religious groups at the time of Jesus and you ask which one is closest to Jesus, John the Baptist is clearly the closest. Well, who's after John the Baptist? Who's the next closest over? It's the Essenes and like the stuff in the Damascus document. Now, imagine it's the 1990s and you have Bill Clinton as president and you have like Newt Gingrich in Congress, and there's a new politician who arrives on the scene and you ask him what his view on taxes is. And he says stuff like, a rising tide, you know, raises all boats, and the laughter curve is a very important academic idea. And you know where he's going. He wants to lower taxes. Those are the arguments you give if you want to lower taxes. If you talk to somebody else today, uh different politician, and you ask them about taxes, and they say, you know, these billionaires, they have a lot of money, and you know, we have a lot of poor people who need a lot of services and all that. You're, you know, they're talking about they want to raise taxes. That's the direction they're going. You know that. You don't even have to hear the rest of the argument. You already know that's that's their viewpoint. So here's my point Jesus is giving the same essential argument as the Essenes. The Damascus document had been going on for 130 years by the time of Jesus' ministry. And Jesus premises his teaching on Genesis, and so does the Damascus document. And Jesus is giving a blanket statement calling remarriages sin, so does the Damascus document. The logic totally tracks. Jesus also gives a lot of other views that are a scene adjacent. They both talked about, you know, entering they were entering a new covenant. They're both, you know, both disfavor oaths. They talk, they both talk about their community as like a living temple. So when the Essenes feature a word like Zenut, fornication, uh, and give a specific meaning to it when giving this argument about remarriage, it's good evidence that their meaning of fornication, Zanut, is the same meaning Jesus has when he's giving the same argument as the Essenes does. Uh, and it means sex in a remarriage is the fornication. That's what the Essenes meant. That's what Jesus meant as well, I think. Now, regarding polygamy, so imagine for a moment that marriage is unable to be divorced. I think this is Jesus' teaching. Divorces are totally fake, right? So if a man marries a woman, divorces her legally, and marries another woman, he's a polygamist. Why is he a polygamist? Because divorce is a legal fiction here. So does Jesus think divorce ends a marriage? No, he does not. He does not. We know he doesn't think it ends a marriage because remarriages are adultery. That's why it's adultery. They're still married. Okay. So now I want to say this. Nothing in the Damascus document limits their meaning to polygamy. A man marries two women, you know, there could have been a divorce in between there, right? So nothing limits the Damascus document their demeanor polygamy and not divorce and remarriage. And their use of the phrase within their lifetime seems to borrow from, I would argue, Leviticus 18, 18, which means it incest to marry two sisters within their lifetime. And the meaning of that is even if you divorced the first sister, if you marry the second sister, that's still not okay. According to Leviticus 18, 18, it reinforces that the Damascus document didn't imagine divorce ended in marriage because of the terminology they use there in the Damascus document. But even if, even if Joel's right, and the Damascus document was only talking about polygamy, let's imagine that was the situation, it uses the word fornication about sex in a polygamous marriage. And Jesus makes no distinction between polygamy and divorce and remarriage. So if the Damascus document is talking about polygamy and talking about that sex being fornication, and Jesus is basically saying divorce and remarriage is polygamy and therefore it's sexual sin, then when he uses the word fornication in that context, he's also talking about the sex in the second marriage.

SPEAKER_01 56:45

Chris is incorrect about the Talmud using Zanet. The Talmud was written in Aramaic, not Hebrew, but it is possible that Jesus spoke to the Pharisees in Aramaic and used the Aramaic word Zanaya in the exception clause. So his point would still be the same. We don't know for certain if they conversed in Aramaic or Greek. This does not mean that Zanaya. Zanaya is the Aramaic word that's the uh more or less the equivalent of Zanat in Hebrew. You have to keep in mind they're related languages, kind of like Spanish and Portuguese. This does not mean that Zanaya was clearly meant to mean an invalid marriage. Zanaya means prostitution, fornication, or sexual immorality. I think the Pharisees in the Talmud meant sexual immorality, referring to an invalid marriage, but this doesn't matter because the Mishnah, the older part of the Talmud, was written after Jesus' time. The vast majority of the statements in the Mishnah about divorce were not during Jesus' time. Certainly the passage that Chris cites has nothing to do with the incident in Matthew 19, 9.

SPEAKER_00 57:51

Okay, so first, if Jesus spoke in Aramaic, to my knowledge, there isn't a bunch of uses of Aramaic for the word fornication in the Old Testament that Joel could point to that limits its meaning the way he thinks the Septuagint limits its meaning. So I don't agree with Joel's idea of limiting the meaning of the words to the Septuagint. But if you're going to do that, you'll need a body of biblical text that uses that word for Aramaic to limit Jesus' meaning when he's spoken Aramaic, if you think that's possible. So if Jesus spoke in Aramaic, that's all the more reason to not limit the meaning of fornication. So that should open the door to more meanings of the word uh pornea in the exception clause because Jesus' audience would have in mind the common semantic range of the Aramaic word, not the supposedly Old Testament limited range. Second, my understanding is the Talmud was written in Hebrew and Aramaic. The word in the Talmud here that I referred to is in Hebrew, but you know, I don't want to quibble about that because the point is it's it's an interlingal synonym that means the same thing as Purnea, and in the Talmud it meant sex in an invalid marriage. Now I agree it was written long after Jesus' ministry. I agree with that. But the relevance of the Talmud is that this is the word the religious descendants of the Pharisees used. And the Pharisees were the people to whom Jesus was specifically speaking in Matthew 19, 9. And so if they understood in the divorce remarriage debate, uh the word fornication, whatever language you're going to use, that that with the meaning of that word, pornea, zenute, zeniah, whatever, whatever language you're using, that concept of fornication, in the divorce remarriage debate, if they thought that marriage that word meant in sex in an invalid marriage, when they wrote the Talmud, that's good evidence that they thought they thought when Jesus was speaking. And it builds an argument that in the Jewish debate on remarriages, fornication had this meaning. In the Jewish debate on divorce and remarriage, it had this meaning, sex in an invalid marriage. You've got it in the Damascus document talking about sex in a second marriage. You've got it in the Talmud talking about sex in an invalid marriage, and you have four early church writers using it talking about sex in an invalid marriage.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:20

Chris, speaking about the Damascus document, says that I think the condemnation of taking two wives gives an exception for divorce, which he then points out is not there. But this assumes that the Jews reading the Damascus document would assume a divorced wife is still your wife. Why should we assume this? There's no evidence anywhere outside of the Bible that Jews ever believed this.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:44

Okay, so Joel said that I have to assume the writers of the Damascus document thought a divorced wife is still a wife. Right? That is an argument the scholars try to use who have a different view than I do. But that's just incorrect if you read the text of the Damascus document here. All I have to do is read the text. The Damascus document says it's fornication if a man marries two women in their lifetimes. He's got to marry two. If he marries two, and everybody's still alive, he meets the conditions for fornication for Zanud. It doesn't say they are still the man's wives while he is married to them. It says he married two. It doesn't say what the Damascus document writers think about the nature of those marriages, if those are valid marriages or not. It does not tell you what they think. What a lot of scholars are doing is they are importing the most popular views of the Jewish culture into the writers of the Damascus document. And what they're saying is, well, they would have agreed essentially with the Pharisees, basically in the Sadducees, that divorce ends a marriage. And so then they're using that to try to interpret the Damascus document. But you can't do that with the writers of the Damascus document. These are not like the Pharisees. These are a totally different subgroup. You have to let them speak for themselves and not impose Pharisaic views on the writers of the Damascus document. So to imagine that the Damascus document writers had an exception for divorce would require imposing an exception on the text that is not there. The writers did not say that. We should let them say what they said and not impose an outside view on their text. So and as I already have addressed, even if they were only thinking of polygamy and they had an unstated exception for divorce, since Jesus teaches that divorce is invalid, Jesus viewed polygamy and divorce remarriage as the same thing. And so in that respect, you know, that's an argument that that's what Jesus meant in the exception clause. And again, this idea had been around before Jesus for 130 years. So now it might be new to some of us, but it wasn't new at the time of Jesus. It was as old to his generation as like the Wright brothers airplane thing was to our generation. That was like a long time ago, black and white, you know, grainy television thing they're taking off in the airplane. We can all like kind of picture it in our head. That was a long time ago for us, in the same way the Damascus document was a long time ago before Jesus. Nobody at the time of Jesus was even alive at the time the Damascus document was written. That's how far, that's how long ago it was written. So to them, this is just an idea that's been around for a while. And so Jesus using the word fornication and exception clause to refer to the same thing the Damascus document writers are writing about, which is sex with the second woman, would not have been some novel concept to them.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:23

Chris points out in Matthew 19, 9 that if the exception clause is for a betrothed wife, then the next statement about marrying another would have to mean the same thing, and that is not logical. Next statement, of course, is uh in any man who marries a divorced woman. But this is just his conjecture. In Greek, both betrothed wives and fully married wives use the same Greek word. Jesus' listeners hearing him say pornea would have grasped that he was referring to a betrothed wife, since pornea in this passage means fornication.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:05

Okay, so let's explain what we're talking about here. In Matthew 19, 9, Jesus says a man who divorces his wife, except for pornea, and marries another commits adultery. The betrothal view says in the exceptional scenario, the wife is a betrothed wife, but in the typical adultery scenario, the wife was a married wife. And I agree the word wife can mean betrothed woman or it can mean married woman. For example, in Matthew chapter one, verses 18 through 25, it talks about how Joseph and Mary were betrothed to each other and uses husband for uh for Joseph, for example, there. So I agree the word wife can mean a betrothed woman, but that's not the question. The question is can the same can the word wife mean both of them at the same time? And I don't think it can mean both only betrothed woman for the exception clause and only married woman for the adultery conclusion at the same time. So as far as I'm aware, if that's what the word wife means in Matthew 19, 9, this is the only text that does that in in the Bible where it switches meanings from only betrothed to only married at the same time. Nobody else is doing that. That's just not how the Greek language works.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:27

Chris may think this double usage of the word in Greek could not happen, but that's just his opinion. As someone who believes in the betrothal view, I don't think it is threatened at all by his assumptions. Does Chris really know 100% this double usage of the same word for two different things really would not be possible? I get that Chris's view that it may be confusing to use the same word two different ways in the same passage is logical. But that does not mean that using the same word two different ways in the same passage is therefore. Or illogical. Sometimes two different possibilities are both logical, even though they can't both be correct. Thus, his assumption about the non-possible double usage of the Greek word wife need have no effect on anyone who believes in the betrothal view. It's not a real threat to the validity of the betrothal view.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:23

Okay, so we'll let it sit there. Joel and I disagree. He thinks wife can flip the meanings there in the same passage. And I just don't think that's that's right. The other problem with this is suppose you have a situation where um a man is betrothed and he got he has cold feet. He doesn't want to be married to her. She doesn't cheat on him. Nobody cheats on anybody. He's just, I can't do this, I'm scared to death. And so he backs out. And then he goes and he marries somebody else a month later. Well, is that adultery? Right? Because if you look at the passage, it says a man who divorces his wife, except for Pornea and marries another commits adultery. Well, if he divorces his betrothed wife and marries another, and it's not for Pornea, is that adultery? And it would seem like the answer would be yes. But that's weird because they were never married. How can he cheat on somebody to whom he was never married? And if you look at 1 Corinthians chapter 7, verses 25 through 28, there Paul is speaking of people who are betrothed. And he says, listen, if you end your betrothal, if you're free from a wife, which there refers to being free from a betrothal, there, if you're free from uh the betrothal, and then you go and you marry somebody else, you don't sin. So Paul says you don't sin, but then Jesus says you commit adultery? I don't think so, which means betrothed woman cannot be a meaning of the word wife in Matthew 19 or Matthew 5.32.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:45

Chris says that in my view, if the exception clause means fornication during the betrothal period, then divorcing during the betrothal period for a different non-pornea reason would constitute adultery. Because Jesus says that if a man divorces his wife for any other reason and marries another, he commits adultery. That is logical, but so is Jesus saying wife in meaning already married wife in the exception clauses, unless she is only a betrothed wife who also commits fornication. Jesus has to communicate in some logical way, even if it can be logically interpreted in different ways.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:28

Okay, so Joel agrees that if fornication is referring to cheating during the betrothal, it could logically be interpreted to mean if a man ends a betrothal for non-pornea and marries another, it's adultery. So I think it's stronger than logical. I think it's what Jesus said if he was talking about sex during betrothal in the exception clause. Now, Joel agreeing it's logical, though, is helpful because it shows that the word adultery doesn't necessarily modify the word wife, which is what you need if you're going to uphold the betrothal view. You have to say the word pornea modifies the word wife, and the word adultery modifies the word wife. But if you think pornea refers to sex between unmarried people, and therefore the word wife must mean betrothed woman, in the exceptional scenario, for all you know, Jesus isn't talking about marriage at all, right? Maybe it's only about divorcing a betrothal and marrying another person. Maybe there is no marriage at all in the verse. Now, contextually, that's absurd because what they're talking about is marriage. But that's my whole point here. The context tells you adultery refers to a divorce of a marriage and then a remarriage. The context also tells you the exception clause isn't referring to a betrothal situation. Betrothal just isn't in mind in this passage at all.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:55

I would argue that he does sin if he ends a betrothal, because he dealt with his betrothed wife in bad faith and did not keep his word. His yes was not yes, but he does not commit the sin of adultery if he then fully marries another woman. I don't think Paul is saying in First Corinthians 7 25 to 28 that a man can end a betrothal without sinning. I think Paul is just talking about single, never married women.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:33

Okay, so 1 Corinthians 7 25 makes it clear Paul is not talking about married people in the verses that follow. So in verses 27 and 28, he says, Are you free from a wife? Do not seek a wife. But if you do marry, you have not sinned. So free from a wife, there is referring from being free from a betrothal. And so my point is marrying someone else after a betrothal ends is not sin. So when Jesus said a man who ends a marriage for non-pornea and remarries commits adultery, he couldn't be referring to a betrothal that ended for non-pornea because remarrying in that case isn't sin. If somebody divorced a betrothal and then married somebody else, that's not that's not sin.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:15

Chris thinks that if someone is in an invalid second marriage, they should divorce before going back to their first spouse, assuming reconciliation is possible, and they should not have sex with their first spouse again until they are legally remarried. I do not agree with this. I think this logic just means you are still viewing marriage like the world does. In God's eyes, you are and always were, since you were married, married to your first spouse. So obligations for sexual relations mentioned in First Corinthians chapter 7 would still hold. Now, I do think, at least in our culture as well as many others, you should divorce the second marriage and remarry the first spouse, ASAP. This may result in no sexual relations taking place before you are legally remarried, but I don't believe it has to. I think recognizing you are and always were still married to your first spouse is the key issue. It's not our government or culture that marries people, aka joins them together in one flesh. The Bible is very clear that God is the one who does this. Chris uses 1 Corinthians 7.15's not enslaved statement to support his argument, but I don't think 1 Corinthians 7.15 can somehow cancel out clear teaching elsewhere in the Bible. You should divorce marriage number two, ASAP, and legally remarry spouse one ASAP to avoid an appearance of evil and have legal arrangements that are fundamentally and avoid uh having legal arrangements that are fundamentally lies. I do not think you have to have a second wedding ceremony for the second marriage.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:22

Okay, so this is a little far afield from our exception clause debate, uh, but let's talk about it. Um, if one spouse abandons another, the abandoned spouse is not enslaved, according to 1 Corinthians chapter 7 and verse 15. Joel and I agree that the abandoned spouse is not permitted to remarry. And Joel and I agree that the two are still married despite the divorce and abandonment. So we we also agree that they can reconcile. The odd question, though, is this is it permissible for this separated couple to have sex while they are legally divorced? And I think the answer is no. Joel thinks the answer is yes. I would say it's no because they're not enslaved. And Joel would say it's yes because they're still married. And so here's the problem not enslaved means that for the time being, the abandoned spouse is not encumbered by ordinary married life. That's Paul's meaning there. A wife doesn't need to follow her husband, for example, after he abandons her. And imagining that they can have sex effectively creates a different kind of marriage where they're married, but they can pick and choose which parts of married life they want. And what Paul meant in 1 Corinthians 7, 15 was, hey, you Corinthians who are married, and you want to be celibate and to serve God, here's one way you could do that. If your spouse abandons you, then you can be celibate and you can serve God. Paul didn't have in mind people who would be abandoned and have like optional sex with their ex. So to be divorced or or they can be divorced or they can be reconciled, but they can't be half married. That that's not okay. We can't do that. There's no half marriage. Paul wasn't inventing like a different kind of marriage there. So now I agree a second marriage ceremony isn't needed. I don't think a ceremony is needed for the first marriage anyway, but it's good to have, it's nice, it's fine, but I don't think it's necessary for the first or the second marriage. And you know, I think Joel agrees. We don't want to have people who are half married. They're having sex, but they're not really reconciled to their spouse. But you do have a problem where you do have some people who are divorced, they got remarried, let's say they divorced their remarriage, and so now they're the first spouse and themselves, they're both like not reconciled, but every now and again they get together. And that's not okay. You can either be non-slaved or married, but you can't do this kind of middle ground kind of thing. And I think Joel, I think Joel agrees with that. Like you need to reconcile. He said an ASAP. You get to reconcile here. Let's say they agree they're gonna go ahead and get remarried. Let's say they agree on that on Monday, and then they have sex on Monday, and then they get married together on Tuesday. Joel would say the sex they had on Monday is fine and they got married on Tuesday. Now, I'm not gonna make a huge deal of the sex on Monday. Okay, I understand that. But here's the thing I don't like. I don't like, um, yeah, we're still married to each other in God's eyes. And so that means we can go have sex, you know, a couple of times a month or whatever. We're never actually gonna get remarried. We're never actually gonna get back together, we're not gonna share common life together, we're just gonna get together every now and again. That kind of like we're gonna invent another kind of marriage. That's the problem I don't want to have happen. And that's what it would mean if somebody, somebody thought that technically you can be not enslaved and still have sex with your first spouse and everything's fine. Also, we have this other weird problem where people are gonna be, you know, divorced and remarried. And then like the person who's remarried can go back to the first spouse and say, hey, let's have sex. And so they're having sex with both, both the remarried spouse and the first. Listen, you got to pick somebody. You can't be doing this having sex with both things. And Joel agrees they need to quit having sex with their remarried spouse. But the point is, the idea that it's permissible for them to have sex with their first spouse while they're having sex with the second spouse, I just I just don't think that's that's true. They need to divorce the second marriage, go back to the first one, and then after they're reconciled, then they can go ahead and have normal marital relations. I think that is uh, I think that's like the concept that Paul had in mind. The whole idea of not enslaved is here's a way in which you cannot have to follow the other person around and you can be kind of free from the encumbrances of moral life. The idea wasn't that you can be free from the encumbrances of moral life, except the ones you want, and then you can pick and choose which ones you want. I don't think that's the idea Paul had in mind there in 1 Corinthians 7, 15. The people he's speaking to want to be celibate. These are not people that Paul is imagining are going to go have, you know, have sex like, you know, once every three months with their ex-spouse. So I don't think that's what Paul had in mind there from not enslaved. And so I think people should divorce the remarriage, go back to the first spouse. Uh, and then once we know that they're now reconciled, not that it's not just that they talked about reconciling, but they are actually go ahead and reconciled, then marital relations uh would be able to continue.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:08

Chris says that the early church fathers did not believe in the betrothal view. This is not exactly correct. Justin Martyr clearly did believe that you could divorce your spouse during betrothal for the cause of pornea. He did not explicitly connect that to the exception clause in Matthew 5.32 and Matthew 19. However, it would not make a lot of sense that he would understand that and not realize that the exact same word used in the exception clause was referring to the exact same thing. So we have to assume he probably did view the matter this way. There are also other early church fathers who very clearly believe the exception clause is referring to fornication, aka premarital sex, and not to something else. So even though they may not have connected the dots, being unfamiliar with the Jewish betrothal customs, they still understood that the exception clause meant fornication, aka premarital sex, and therefore it would only be possible that that's actually referring to the betrothal view, even if they did not realize this. Clement of Alexandria clearly has the same view that Chris does. He doesn't say anything about his moral formulation, of course, but the belief that the exception clause is referring to an invalid marriage is the viewpoint he also has. Pretty much all the rest of the early church fathers who express a viewpoint on the exception clause believed that it was referring to adultery. Perhaps a slight majority of them believed that. They, of course, did not believe in our modern adultery view and believed that you could only divorce for adultery but not remarry, as well as that you were really, of course, still married to the person you divorced.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:03

Okay, so by the phrase moral formulation, what I mean by that is not that complicated. Just when Jesus says if you divorce and you remarry, it's adultery. Just that text, I'm calling that a moral formulation. It's just if this, then this. That's all it has no special meaning beyond that. Okay. Joel agrees that Justin Martyr did not say the exception clause was for betrothal. And that's that's my point. Joel is making a connection that isn't in Justin Martyr's writing. And that would be like me saying that since Irenaeus refers to fornication as sex in an invalid marriage, Irenaeus thought that's what Jesus meant in the exception clause. Now, I don't say that. I don't say that just because Irenaeus believed a meaning of fornication is sex in an invalid marriage, therefore that's what Irenaeus thought Jesus meant in the exception clause when he used pornea, because I'm sure Irenaeus thought there were other meanings of the word fornication, and he might have selected one of the other ones. And in the same way, just because Justin Martyr understood about betrothals and he understood what pornea, uh sex between unmarried people, that doesn't mean he's connecting all of that in the exception clause. So when I look at Irenaeus and the other three early church writers that see that fornication refers to sex in an invalid marriage in the debate about divorce and remarriage, I just say that for a couple of reasons. One, it means that sex in an invalid marriage is within the semantic range of the word fornication. And two, fornication, when used in the context of a conversation about divorce and remarriage, repeatedly means sex in an invalid marriage. It means that in the Essenes, it means that in the Talmud, it means that in the early church writers. So yes, Joel can say, and it is true that sex during betrothal is within the semantic range of fornication. But that by itself doesn't mean that's what Jesus said in the exception clause. For example, we know that Jerome also translated the exception clause as fornicatio in Latin, and we know he didn't have the betrothal view, despite the fact that Joel thinks Jerome must have known fornicatio means sex between unmarried persons. And nearly all of the early church thinks fornication in the exception clause refers to adultery. None of them say it means the betrothal view. So that shows that the native speakers of Koine Greek did not agree with Joel's presumption that pornea means sex between unmarried persons only, or prostitution in the New Testament. This has been a fantastic debate with Joel and I. And Joel's smart and he's sincere and he's been honorable and he's been a great debate partner. And I'm really hopeful this helps uh all of you who are interested in all these kind of nuances and back and forth. Now, at some point we're gonna have to close the debate. I'm fine to continue it. It's up to Joel if he wants to do another reaction video. But what I want to say is this that, you know, neither of us should feel like, you know, oh, if I don't respond to everything in the last video, you know, it'll be seen like I conceded a point or whatever. And and and there's there's an impulse people have for that. And I don't think that's what we should do. I think we should view it like there's a natural point at which people who enter a debate with different views also leave that debate with the same views they came up, they came in with. That that's that happens a lot. That's normal. Um, so if Joel wants to respond to some or all the points here, that's great. I look forward to your response there, Joel. But if not, we should assume that Joel and I continue to respect each other and we continue to have pretty much the same views that we uh started with. But the beneficiary is all of you, and you get to see our conversations. And I hope that is helpful. And I know Joel wants it to be helpful for all of you as well. So you can see all these different nuances and perspectives. So go ahead and get my book, Divorce Your Remarriage, where I have all my views in here, or you can just watch all my episodes. You probably get most of the views that way anyway. And uh subscribe, like, comment, let me know what you think, and we'll see you guys next time.