HistoricalChristian.Faith

Does “makes her an adulteress” (Matthew 5:32a) presuppose the wife’s remarriage?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: sound — the first half of the Sermon-on-the-Mount saying, “whosoever shall put away his wife… causeth her to commit adultery” (poiei autēn moicheuthēnai, Matthew 5:32a), makes the dismissed wife an adulteress by way of a second union it takes for granted she will enter — the plain and near-consensus reading, patristic and modern. The passive “be made adulterous” and the husband’s sole culpability are a rider on that mechanism (the woman is its victim), not a rival to it; the “merely stigmatized as adulterous” reading is a minority that does not displace it. Sound as a presupposition of her remarriage; overreaching if pressed as a freestanding proof of universal indissolubility · bears directly on the dissolution question

See also: is the marriage bond indissoluble while both spouses live? · does the exception permit remarriage, or only separation? · does porneia mean a wife’s marital unfaithfulness?

The claim

…he who puts away his wife when she is not a fornicator, makes her an adulteress, so far as it lies with him, for if, “when the husband is living she shall be called an adulteress if she be joined to another man;” and when by putting her away, he gives to her the excuse of a second marriage, very plainly in this way he makes her an adulteress.

— Origen, Commentary on Matthew XIV.24, ANF vol. 10 (quoting Romans 7:3). The claim being weighed is the mechanism Origen names: the dismissal “makes her an adulteress” because it drives her into a second marriage while the first bond survives — so the clause does not brand her adulterous by the mere act of divorce, but presupposes the remarriage the second half of the verse goes on to name (“whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery”). Read this way, 5:32a is itself a small proof that divorce does not dissolve the bond.

Who advances it

The reading is the unanimous gloss of the early exegetes who touched the clause and the majority verdict of modern critical commentary. Clement of Alexandria paraphrases “he makes her an adulteress” as “that is, compels her to commit adultery,” and locates the adultery in a second union: the man who marries her is guilty too, “for did he not take her, she would return to her husband.” Origen ties it explicitly to Romans 7:3 — the wife “joined to another man” while her husband lives “shall be called an adulteress” — so the dismissal makes her one by handing her “the excuse of a second marriage.” Chrysostom reads the husband as culpable “though he take not another wife… having made the first an adulteress,” and Theophylact and Theodore of Mopsuestia say the same — the divorced woman may not remarry, and “the man she lives with must pay the penalties of an adulterer.”¹ Modern commentary supplies the social mechanism the fathers assumed: Donald Hagner, Robert Gundry, R. T. France, and the standard translators’ handbooks all take the clause to presuppose that a dismissed woman would remarry — in that society, of near-necessity — and so be “made” an adulteress by a union she did not initiate.²

The evidence for

The verse is a single thought, and its second half names the remarriage. “Whosoever shall put away his wife… causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery” (Matthew 5:32). The two clauses describe one situation from two sides: the dismissed woman is remarried (5:32b presupposes a man who takes her), and that union is the adultery. The parallel doublet at 19:9 is explicit — the man who “shall put away his wife… and shall marry another, committeth adultery” — so remarriage is the operative act throughout Matthew’s divorce material. If “makes her an adulteress” meant only that a dismissed woman is reputationally tainted, the second half of its own verse would be left describing a separate crime rather than completing the first.³

The grammar makes her the passive party of an act, not the bearer of a label. Matthew writes poiei autēn moicheuthēnai — “he makes her to be made adulterous,” with the husband as the causal agent (poiei) and the wife the passive object of a real act (the passive infinitive moicheuthēnai). The verb names an act of adultery with a sexual referent, not a reputation; what she passively undergoes is being drawn into a second union. The passive and the placement of all the blame on the husband are exactly what one expects if Jesus is indicting a system in which a woman had no independent standing and could be cast “upon the mercy of another man” — the emphasis falls on the husband’s responsibility for a plight he creates, which is why Gundry reads the passive as reflecting the male dominance of the culture rather than any fault in the woman.⁴

The first-century world supplies the remarriage the clause assumes. The presupposition is not read into the text; it is the social reality behind it. A divorced woman in first-century Jewish society, dependent for survival on a household, could scarcely subsist alone and was in most cases driven to a second marriage. Hagner puts the mechanism plainly: because “a single woman could hardly survive on her own, except through prostitution… she was therefore bound to take another husband and so be made into an adulteress.” The remarriage is not the woman’s wanton choice but the near-inevitable consequence the divorcing husband sets in motion — which is precisely why the guilt is laid on him.⁵

Adversarial assessment

What holds. That 5:32a presupposes the wife’s remarriage is the plain sense on four converging grounds — the verse’s own second half, which names the remarriage; the passive-plus-causal grammar, which makes her the object of an act rather than the bearer of a label; the first-century social reality, which made a dismissed woman’s second union all but certain; and the unbroken early reception, in which every father who glossed the clause read it as a compelled second marriage while the first bond survives. It is well-grounded and, as a reading of the mechanism, unrefuted: no serious commentator holds that a woman is “made an adulteress” by the bare fact of being divorced with no union in view.

What is overstated or imprecise. Three cautions keep the claim precise. (1) The clause presupposes remarriage as the expected outcome; it does not entail it in every case. Moicheuthēnai is what happens when she remarries; a dismissed woman who never enters a second union is not thereby made an adulteress. The clause frames the normal, near-inevitable result of dismissal in that world, not a metaphysical automatism — so “entails her remarriage” overshoots what “presupposes” secures. (2) The “merely stigmatized” rival is a real emphasis, not a competing reading. Some translators render the clause “causes her to be regarded as an adulteress” and some social-historical exegetes press the injustice done to the woman by the dismissal itself; a few even resist attributing any guilt to a victim of divorce. That instinct is right about the passive voice and the husband’s culpability — and the wiki keeps it — but it does not displace the remarriage mechanism: the verb names an act with a sexual referent, the verse’s own second half presupposes an actual union, and the whole ancient reception reads one. The stigma is real, but it is the stigma of the adulterous union she is driven into, folded into the majority reading rather than substituted for it. (3) Presupposing remarriage is not the same as proving universal indissolubility. That 5:32a assumes the dismissed woman’s remarriage is adultery shows the bond survives this divorce — but 5:32a concerns the man who puts his wife away without the exception (“saving for the cause of fornication”). On the exception-permits-remarriage reading, her second union is adulterous because that groundless dismissal never freed her, which leaves open the disputed case of the innocent party after a divorce for unfaithfulness. So the clause is strong evidence that a causeless divorce does not dissolve the bond, and it does not by itself settle whether any divorce can — the contested question weighed on the indissolubility and remarriage-or-separation pages.

Assessment

Sound. Read as a claim about how the dismissal “makes her an adulteress,” the interpretation holds: 5:32a presupposes the wife’s remarriage as the mechanism — the verse’s second half names it, the passive grammar makes her its victim, the first-century world made it near-inevitable, and the entire early reception from Clement and Origen to Theophylact reads it so, with modern commentary (Hagner, Gundry, France, the translators’ handbooks) in agreement. The one genuine rival — that she is merely branded adulterous by the divorce itself — captures a true feature (her passivity, the husband’s guilt) but does not displace the mechanism, so it is folded in rather than rated apart. Two qualifications are load-bearing and keep “sound” honest: the clause presupposes the expected remarriage rather than entailing it in every case, and its further use as a standalone proof of universal indissolubility inherits the contested status of that larger argument — 5:32a shows a causeless divorce leaves the bond intact, not that a for-cause divorce cannot dissolve it. The presupposition itself, though, is as secure as anything in the divorce material.

Sources