Review date: 2002
Reviewed in: Anvil
Reviewed by: Christopher Ash, Great Shelford
By Spring 2002 David Instone-Brewer will have published a significant contribution to the debate about the divorce and remarriage teachings of Jesus and Paul. This is already available to read on his website. His Grove booklet is a clear and very concise version of his thesis, which is strongly dependent on the rabbinic and Greco-Roman backgrounds to the 1st century debates. Brewer argues that Jesus' divorce sayings were his rulings in the contemporary debates about the validity or otherwise of divorces. Clearly if a divorce is invalid, then any subsequent 'remarriage' by either party will in law be adultery. The legality of remarriage is dependent on the validity of the divorce. At the time of Jesus the school of the rabbi Hillel had introduced easy 'any matter' divorces for men (Mt. 19:3 NIV 'for any and every reason'); these promoted a culture of quick and religiously respectable divorce. Jesus (shockingly) says these are invalid, unless there was 'indecency' (porneia) involved (by which Brewer, along with many scholars, understands a broad range of sexual infidelities). More controverially, Brewer argues that Jesus also implicitly accepted that persistent and deliberate emotional and material neglect of a spouse was grounds for valid divorce. He bases this on the rabbinic use of Ex.21:10f, which argued that if even a slave-wife must be given 'food, clothing and marital rights' then a fortiori this obligation rests on all husbands (and, with certain modifications, on wives). Brewer admits that to say that Jesus would have accepted these grounds is an argument from silence, but argues that since this was a common assumption of all his contemporaries, Jesus would have had very deliberately to contradict it had he wished to do so. He suggests also that in 1 Cor. 7:3-5, 32-35 Paul implicitly teaches the obligations to provide emotional and material support of a spouse, and thus also (Brewer suggests) accepts that the deliberate and persistent failure to do so are grounds for valid divorce. Brewer's thesis is clear, well-argued, and in some important respects novel. Some parts are more persuasive than others, but all serious students of the debate will need to engage with his work. The Grove booklet is an accessible place to start.