HistoricalChristian.Faith

Does Mark 10:12 (“if she divorces her husband”) reflect Roman, not Jewish, law?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: plausible — Mark’s second clause, “if a woman shall put away her husband, and be married to another, she committeth adultery” (Mark 10:12), makes the wife the active divorcing party, a case mainstream Jewish law of the period did not envisage but Roman and Greek law did — so the widely-held inference that Mark adapted Jesus’ saying for a Greco-Roman readership is coherent and well-supported. But the exclusive “Roman, not Jewish” form overreaches: elite Jewish women did initiate divorce (Josephus’ Herodian examples), the fifth-century Elephantine contracts gave wives that right, and the clause may even be dominical — aimed at the live Herodian scandal — rather than a Gentile-audience redaction · bears on the source question weighed under why Matthew alone carries the exception

See also: why does Matthew alone carry the exception clause? · is Jesus siding with Shammai against Hillel’s “any cause” divorce?

The claim

And he saith unto them, Whosoever shall put away his wife, and marry another, committeth adultery against her. And if a woman shall put away her husband, and be married to another, she committeth adultery.

— Mark 10:11–12. Alone among the four New Testament forms of the divorce saying, Mark gives a second, mirror clause in which the wife “puts away” (apolysasa) her husband. The advocated thesis is a claim about Mark’s composition and audience: because a wife initiating divorce was a live legal reality under Roman and Greek law but not under the Jewish law of Jesus’ setting, Mark has extended the saying to fit a Greco-Roman readership — evidence that his Gospel is aimed at Gentiles and part of why his form differs from Matthew’s Jewish-framed one. It is a thesis about the audience of Mark, kept distinct from the separate question of whether Matthew’s exception clause is original or redactional (weighed under why Matthew alone carries the exception).

Who advances it

The reading is close to standard in Markan commentary. R. T. France, in the New International Greek Testament Commentary, judges that the second, balancing clause — the wife who divorces her husband — may reflect an origin for Mark’s Gospel (or at least for this tradition) in Rome, where the law recognized a wife’s right of divorce that the Jewish world did not, and treats the notorious Herodias affair as the exception that proves the rule.¹ Joseph Fitzmyer draws the same conclusion for the source question: “V. 12 is a further Marcan extension of the first logion, introduced to suit the contingencies of Gentile Christian communities in areas where Roman and Greek law prevailed and where a woman was permitted to divorce her husband,” and Donahue and Harrington report it as the general critical verdict that the clause “is generally regarded as an addition to Jesus’ teaching that was made to address situations related to the Roman legal practice whereby a woman could initiate divorce proceedings.”² Adela Yarbro Collins, in the Hermeneia commentary, and a broad range of critical exegetes read v. 12 the same way. The observation is old: the ancient catenist Victor of Antioch already noticed that the wife-initiated case was unusual — the Lord here “forbids this, which was neither plain, nor known to all, though it was contrary to nature” — and Bede knew of wives who dismissed their husbands (“as many are read to have done for the sake of religion”), so the atypicality of a woman putting away her husband was felt by readers long before it was made an argument about Mark’s audience.³

The evidence for

The Jewish law of divorce was, as a rule, the husband’s prerogative. Under the ordinary halakhah descended from Deuteronomy 24:1, it is the man who “writes her a bill of divorcement”; the Mishnah’s tractate on divorce (Gittin) is framed throughout around a husband delivering the get, and a wife dissatisfied with her marriage could at most petition a court to compel her husband to divorce her — she could not simply divorce him herself. Josephus states the principle in his own voice, and treats a woman who breaks it as acting lawlessly: “with us it is lawful for a husband to do so; but a wife, if she departs from her husband, cannot of herself be married to another, unless her former husband put her away.”⁴ So the plain sense of Mark 10:12 — a wife who “puts away her husband” and remarries — describes an action that the standard Jewish law did not provide for.

Roman and Greek law did provide for it. In the classical Roman law of the late Republic and Principate, divorce was available to either spouse: a wife (or, where she was still under her father’s power, her paterfamilias) could dissolve the marriage by unilateral notice, exactly as a husband could. Wife-initiated divorce was commonplace in the Greco-Roman world Mark’s Gentile readers inhabited. A saying that pronounced only on a husband dismissing his wife would leave that everyday case untouched; Mark’s added clause closes the gap, applying Jesus’ principle symmetrically to the situation his readers actually met.⁵

Mark is on independent grounds a Gospel that explains Jewish things to Gentiles. The adaptation reading does not stand alone: Mark translates Aramaic phrases (talitha cumi, ephphatha, 7:34), glosses Jewish customs for outsiders (“the Pharisees… except they wash… holding the tradition of the elders,” 7:3–4), and renders the “two mites” into a Roman quadrans (12:42). A saying re-tooled to reach a reader who could herself initiate a divorce fits that whole editorial habit — which is why the clause is standardly cited as one small datum in the case that Mark writes for a Roman/Gentile audience.⁶

Adversarial assessment

What holds. The core observation is secure and not seriously disputed: Mark 10:12 puts the wife in the active role of divorcer, a role the ordinary Jewish law of the get did not grant her but Roman and Greek law did, and Mark elsewhere plainly shapes his material for readers outside the Jewish law. So the inference that this clause reflects, and was framed for, a Greco-Roman setting is well-grounded — the strongest single textual sign that the divorce tradition was already being adapted to its hearers, and a real support for the abbreviation reading of the Synoptic difference (that Mark and Luke render for Gentiles what Matthew states in Jewish terms).

What is overstated or imprecise. Three cautions keep the thesis honest, and together they pull it back from the exclusive “Roman, not Jewish” form to a milder one. (1) Jewish women were not wholly barred from initiating divorce, so the clause does not require a non-Jewish setting. Josephus’ own narrative supplies elite counter-examples: Salome sent her husband Costobarus “a bill of divorce” on her own initiative, and Herodias “took upon her to confound the laws of our country, and divorced herself from her husband, while he was alive” — the very scandal for which Mark 6:17–18 has John the Baptist rebuke Antipas. Josephus brands both as lawless, so they confirm the rule even while showing the practice; but they show that wife-initiated divorce was a known Jewish reality, not a purely foreign one. Earlier still, the fifth-century-BC Jewish marriage contracts from Elephantine gave the wife an explicit, symmetrical right to declare divorce (the reciprocal “I hated…” clause, on payment of the same “silver of hatred” whether husband or wife initiated), and the reading of the second-century Judaean-desert papyrus P.Se’elim (XHev/Se) 13 as a woman’s bill of divorce — argued by Tal Ilan, contested by others — keeps the question genuinely open. Wife-initiated divorce among Jews was exceptional and often reckoned illegitimate, but it was not unknown.⁷ (2) The clause may be dominical, not a Gentile-audience redaction. Wife-initiated divorce in the Herodian house was headline news in Jesus’ own Galilee and Perea — Antipas married Herodias after she left her first husband, and the Baptist died over it (Mark 6:17–18) — so Jesus could himself have pronounced on a wife putting away her husband, addressing the notorious local case rather than a distant Roman one; and since Mark sets this whole dialogue in Perea, Antipas’ own tetrarchy “beyond Jordan” (Mark 10:1), the Herodian scandal is the near context. On that reading v. 12 is not evidence of Mark’s Gentile provenance at all, but a genuine word of Jesus condemning Herod and Herodias.⁸ (3) “Roman law” is a loose shorthand. What the clause presupposes is a legal culture in which a wife could initiate divorce; that was true of Roman and of Greek/Hellenistic law generally, and (in the Herodian orbit) of Romanized Jewish elites — so the sharp “Roman versus Jewish” antithesis is really “a milieu where wives divorce versus the ordinary halakhah,” a softer and more defensible contrast.

Assessment

Plausible. That Mark 10:12 reflects a legal world in which a wife could initiate divorce — and that Mark, who elsewhere explains Jewish things to Gentiles, framed the clause for such readers — is a coherent, mainstream, and well-supported reading, and the best single textual sign that the divorce saying was adapted to its audience. What it does not sustain is the exclusive form, “Roman, not Jewish”: elite Jewish women (Salome, Herodias) demonstrably did initiate divorce, the Elephantine contracts granted the right outright, and the Se’elim papyrus keeps the documentary question live — so the clause reflects a milieu where wife-initiated divorce occurred rather than one that only Roman law could supply. And because that milieu reached into Jesus’ own Herodian setting, the clause need not be a Gentile-audience redaction at all: it may be a dominical word aimed at the Herodias affair. The narrow observation (a wife as active divorcer, at home in Greco-Roman law) is essentially certain; the advocated inference (proof that Mark redacted the saying for Gentiles) is probable but short of established, which is why it rates plausible rather than sound. It supports, but does not by itself prove, the abbreviation reading of why the Synoptic forms differ (weighed under why Matthew alone carries the exception).

Sources