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Document Details : Title: Jésus et l'adultère d'une nouvelle union après divorce Subtitle: Pour une nouvelle traduction de Mathieu 5,32 et Luc 16,18 Author(s): THIRY, Christian Journal: Marriage, Families & Spirituality Volume: 31 Issue: 2 Date: 2025 Pages: 219-233 DOI: 10.2143/INT.31.2.3295218 Abstract : In 2015, during the debates that took place at the two synods on the family which preceded the publication of Amoris laetitia, the Paris publisher Éditions du Cerf published John-Paul Meier’s synthesis on Jesus and Divorce. In this work, the American historian and exegete laid out the scriptural data that could shed light on the historical Jesus’s position on this matter. Meier’s extremely confident position was that Jesus, the Palestinian rabbi, had based the prohibition of divorce on the divine principle of monogyny for which a man can only marry one woman during that woman’s life. This is because the marriage bond is indissoluble in the eyes of God such that its rupture is adultery. This article critically analyzes these arguments with a different methodology: rather than analyzing the texts in their chronological order, it focuses on their target audiences, a Jewish milieu for the repudiation of the spouse and a Greek communitarian milieu for divorce. A different conclusion is argued for: it is not remarriage but the common tendency of men to be unfaithful – and not women – which is manifest in particular, but not exclusively, by the exploitation of the mosaic law on repudiation that the Jesus of history denounced in principle because it is opposed to the divine project of the wellbeing of the couple and oppresses the vulnerable, the wife and children. The argument calls into question the traditional translations of Mt 5,32 and Lk 16,18, drawn from the Vulgate. |
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