Divorce in First Wise Reaction（离婚在第一个明智的反应）.pdf

Divorce in First-Century Judaism and the New Testament First let me say what a pleasure it is to be here. It was here in Belfast that I started my interest in this topic. The C of I was debating remarriage of divorcees in church without much insight into the biblical material, so I decided one summer vacation to write a submission for their committee. This fundamentally altered my view and I have subsequently written a number of articles and contributed to books on the topic. More recently I have had several enquiries about David Instone-Brewer’s books and articles, at least two from N Ireland. So I thought it might be apt revisiting Belfast to revisit the subject. Brewer argues that Jesus did not take a very original line on divorce. That he moreorless agreed with the stricter party of the Pharisees, the Shammaites, who held that divorce with the right of remarriage was possible in the case of adultery, or failure to provide one’s wife with food, clothing and marital intercourse. Jesus was only condemning the liberals of his day, the Hillelite Pharisees, who had recently declared that one could have a divorce for any cause. Such divorces, were according to Jesus, invalid and if one went on to remarry one committed adultery. In this paper I want to review this proposal, and ask whether it stands up. It is extremely difficult to write a history of this issue, because though there are plenty of marriage contracts from the ancient world the number of texts that actually spell out the philosophy and practice of marriage is quite limited. So we shall need to start in the OT era and work forward to the NT. To understand the OT texts we need to supplement the biblical texts with evidence from the legal collections from surrounding cultures. To understand the NT texts we need to utilise texts from subsequent centuries, both Jewish, eg. Mishnah and Talmud, and Christian, the commentaries of the earl