. . . that the wife being dismissed can only be properly dismissed if the man expects to permanently remain unmarried. It is made clear in both 5:32 and 19:9 that any man who dismisses a wife for anything other prostitution is "committing adultery" if he "should be marrying another."
OK, first of all, in my haste yesterday, I failed to double-check on Matthew 5:32, so the above post should have only read:
. . . that the wife being dismissed can only be properly dismissed if the man expects to permanently remain unmarried. It is made clear in 19:9 that any man who dismisses a wife for anything other than prostitution is "committing adultery" if he "should be marrying another."
Again, no, very much no. But I won't repeat the analysis. Yahushua was not 'adding to' what He had already Written.
I don't see how what He had said at some point prior, as long as it doesn't subtract from what He's already said, is, ipso facto, an issue of adding to what He'd already said. What is said in 19:9 does not negate what is said in 5:32. Both can be true and worthy of mention. It is also the case that the two instances were entirely different contexts. In 5:32, Yeshua was preaching to throngs of Jews and the passage is just one in a plethora of topics; in 19:3-9, He was responding to very loaded questions from the Pharisees, and :9 was an answer to a follow-up question posed because the Pharisees were unsatisfied with His answer to the first one, the kind of situation well known in human discourse to beg for a more in-depth answer -- or perhaps in the kind in place during the then-current very contentious debate among Jewish sects about when or whether divorce was justified. Rather than being able to label 19:9 as an instance of adding to what Yeshua had already said -- especially given that I'm taking this from the CLNT, which is translated directly and literally from the Greek (and the Peshitta version of 19:9a, translated from the earliest manuscripts in Aramaic [which, sometimes, though used Aramaic manuscripts that had been translated from earlier Greek ones], the language Yeshua spoke, reads, "But I say to you, Whoever leaves his wife without a charge of adultery and marries another commits adultery") -- I think you're risking
subtracting from Scripture, which surely is more dangerous than even your assertion that He was adding to His Own Words. Nothing prohibits either Yah or Yeshua from making additional statements that either clarify or augment something Either has said in the past.
If Matthew 19:9a isn't a prohibition against marrying another woman if one has put away a previous wife for anything other than prostitution (or perhaps even adultery),
@Mark C, how else do you explain the inclusion of the phrase "
and should be marrying an
other" or "and marries another?" (Keep in mind as I ask this that I am being critical of myself, because I myself married both my 3rd and my 4th wife after divorcing my 2nd wife, so the point of my question is not to cast aspersions; I'm truly on the hunt for the ultimate truth here.)
The only significant argument explaining this away in my awareness is made by those who twist Matthew 19:9 into a proof that entirely depends on a monogamy-only mindset; this includes the Roman Catholics, whose
New American Bible translates it instead as, "I say to you, whoever divorces his wife (unless the marriage is unlawful) and marries another commits adultery," but they only left :19a with this wording because of the Latin Vulgate's then-new-found assumption that Scripture consistently denounces polygamy. I don't trust anything that relies on the Latin Vulgate, which was the template for corruption later followed by the KJV project, which also heavily relied on the Vulgate. They have to get around what is literally translated as 'for' (as in, for the reason of) to come up with their meaning attached to the word 'porneia' as being associated with anything unlawful.
It is also this use of 'porneia' instead of 'moicheia,' that, by the way, further convinces me that 'prostitution' is a superior translation than 'adultery,' which is the standard translation of 'moicheia.' 'Porneia' indicated unlawful sexual relations, which at the time was most commonly exemplified by being a party to cult prostitution. This also aligns it with Sha'ul's admonition in I Corinthians 6:16 about being one flesh with a prostitute (and directly implies that a sexual relationship with a prostitute would be both marriage and unlawful). The Messiah may have almost exclusively preached to Jewish audiences, but that wouldn't have kept Him in a state of total ignorance about the surrounding Greco-Roman culture -- or prevented Him from considering the possibility that what He said in one context would or could be spread through the grapevine to other contexts, communities and cultures.
A useful commentary about this can be found at:
https://www.anabaptists.org/books/mdr/porneia.html
I do not, by the way, find any
contradiction in what Yeshua said about marriage.
A man who can handle (in every way) an additional wife may take her.
Wouldn't divorcing a wife be an excellent indication that a man can't handle one wife, much less two or more? (Again, I consider myself required to take this into consideration as I myself contemplate having a plural family. In fact, that's why the first thing I did when I determined that I would seek plural marriage again a decade or so ago was to contract my previous wives to encourage them to return to me.)