Chapter Nineteen - Quick Notes and Facts

• In the Mosaic law, divorce is permitted. In ancient Judaism, only the husband could initiate a divorce. Women had no way to contest a divorce. Unless her family of birth took her back, she would have no support. Husbands controlled the children; a divorced woman had no access to them.


• The ‘Matthean exception’ is unique to this account of Jesus’ teaching on divorce. The Greek word is porneia, from which we get the word pornography. But scholars don’t know from the context exactly what the word means here.
  
  It means "uncleanness", but is the meaning "unlawful degrees of relationship", or "adultery" or some other sort of perverse behavior? Much ink has been spilled, but we don't know what the original author of the gospel intended in using this word. (Remember that porneia is a Greek word, while Jesus spoke in Aramaic. So, the specific meaning could easily have been lost in translation.)


• The inclusion of a teaching on celibacy here is very much outside the mainstream of Jewish thought. (The first command in the Scriptures is to “be fruitful and multiply” so the expectation was that everyone would eventually marry.) However, there were Jewish sects, like the Essenes, who practiced sexual continence. Also, in the ancient world, castration was a common practice, especially of slaves. Jews found this completely abhorrent, but Jesus’ contemporaries would have undoubtedly have met or seen eunuchs.