Was the Greek of 1 Corinthians 7:39 corrupted to widen the remarriage license?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: unsupported — Tertullian’s charge that the received text of 1 Cor. 7:39 was tampered with — that “the alteration of two syllables” turned a narrow permission into an open-ended one — has no basis in the manuscript record. No Greek witness carries the restrictive reading he wants; the critical apparatus records no variant touching the tense or scope of the clause; and the one thing his own words concede is that the difference he is chasing lies in a Latin translation, not in the Greek. The charge is best read not as text-critical evidence but as a rigorist’s attempt to escape Paul’s plain permission by impugning the very text that grants it — advanced by Tertullian alone, in his openly Montanist period, and endorsed by no editor of the Greek New Testament since.

The claim

— Tertullian, On Monogamy 11, ANF vol. 4.¹ The verse as the church received it reads: “The wife is bound by the law as long as her husband liveth; but if her husband be dead, she is at liberty to be married to whom she will; only in the Lord” (1 Cor. 7:39). Tertullian, needing that permission gone, argues that it was never so broad: the “authentic Greek” (Graeco authentico), he says, had been altered by two syllables so that a clause once limited to the woman whose husband died before her conversion — to whom a first Christian marriage would then be no “second” marriage at all — was made to read as a future-tense license covering the woman widowed at any time, and so to sanction remarriage “as often as one had been lost.” The claim adjudicated here is the narrow, text-critical one: that the standard text of 1 Cor. 7:39 is a corruption of a stricter original.

Who advances it

The charge is Tertullian’s own, and essentially his alone. He raises it in On Monogamy (c. 208–212), one of his openly New-Prophecy works, at exactly the point where Paul’s permission stands in the way of the ban on remarriage he is defending — and nowhere else in the tradition is the reading he wants attested or the corruption he alleges repeated. Modern text-critics who notice the passage cite it not as evidence for a variant but as a specimen of a Father alleging tampering: H. A. G. Houghton, treating it in The Latin New Testament, reads Tertullian’s Graeco authentico as an appeal to the correct or “authentic” reading against a defective Latin rendering then in circulation — not a claim to have inspected an autograph, and not a witness to any Greek manuscript carrying his restriction.² The interpretation therefore has one proponent with a motive and no manuscript behind him.

The evidence for

Tertullian’s exegetical instinct is not baseless. The strongest thing to be said for the charge is that its reading of the chapter, apart from the textual claim, is not absurd. Much of 1 Cor. 7 is addressed to the newly converted and their existing circumstances — “let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called,” “art thou bound unto a wife? seek not to be loosed” — and Tertullian ties 7:39 to that thread, reading it as one more instruction about the state a believer was “found in.” If the verse really addressed only the woman already widowed at conversion, his ban would gain a foothold. So the charge is not a random emendation; it is driven by a genuine feature of the chapter, and that is what makes it worth weighing rather than merely dismissing.³

Adversarial assessment

No manuscript carries the reading he needs. The decisive fact is textual, and it runs flatly against him. The Greek of 1 Cor. 7:39 is stable: ean de koimēthē ho anēr, “but if the husband should fall asleep” — an aorist-subjunctive conditional with no restriction to any prior time, read the same way by every Greek witness. The critical apparatus of the passage records only one minor variant in the whole verse (the presence or absence of nomōi, “by the law,” in the opening clause), and it touches neither the tense nor the scope of the permission. There is, in short, no textual trace whatever of the stricter original Tertullian posits: the “two-syllable alteration” has left no fingerprint in the one place it would have to appear.⁴

His own words locate the difference in the Latin, not the Greek. The complaint is aimed at a form “gone out into common use” — the Old Latin si autem dormierit vir eius, whose future-perfect “shall have fallen asleep” he thinks misleading — and he corrects it by appeal to the Graeco authentico. But on the best reading of that phrase he is not reporting two rival Greek copies; he is using the authentic Greek as the standard against which he judges a wobble in the Latin. That is an argument about translation and its tense, not evidence of a corrupted Greek archetype — and even the Latin difference he points to will not carry the restrictive sense he wants, since a conditional about a husband who “shall have died” applies just as naturally to one who dies after his wife’s conversion as before. The charge dissolves on inspection into a quarrel with a rendering, dressed up as the unmasking of a forgery.⁵

The motive is transparent, and the method is special pleading. Tertullian does not arrive at the corruption charge from the manuscripts and then apply it; he arrives at the ban and then needs the verse gone. In the same chapters he abrogates Paul’s permission by the authority of the Paraclete (“why may not the Paraclete… have abrogated an indulgence which Paul granted?”), and where that will not serve he impugns the text — two routes to the same end, neither of them exegesis. To allege, without a single witness, that the apostle’s words were secretly altered precisely where they contradict one’s own thesis is the textbook shape of special pleading: the evidence is declared corrupt because it is inconvenient. This is the mirror image of a charge the church did sometimes press honestly — that the Hebrew text was tampered with by later hands — but here it is turned by a Christian rigorist against an apostle’s own Greek, and it fails for the reason such charges must be tested and not merely asserted: there is no manuscript to show for it.⁶

Assessment

unsupported. As a claim about the text, the charge has nothing behind it. The Greek of 1 Cor. 7:39 is uniform across the witnesses; the apparatus records no variant bearing on the tense or the scope of the permission; and Tertullian’s own appeal to the Graeco authentico is best read as correcting a Latin rendering, not as reporting a corrupted Greek exemplar — a reading confirmed by the fact that no editor of the Greek New Testament, ancient or modern, has ever adopted his restriction. His underlying exegetical hunch — that parts of 1 Cor. 7 address the newly converted in their existing state — is a real feature of the chapter and keeps the charge from being merely frivolous; but that hunch does not license the textual accusation built on it. The corruption charge is what it looks like: a rigorist impugning the apostle’s text at the one point it thwarts him, with no manuscript to show for the tampering he alleges. Unsupported. (The larger question the charge serves — whether the ban it defends is a severe reading of Paul or a false doctrine — is weighed on the remarriage-as-fornication argument; the authority-move that replaces this failed textual route, the Paraclete’s abrogation of an apostolic concession, is treated there.)

Sources

Tertullian, On Monogamy (De monogamia), ch. 11 (ANF vol. 4) — the passage as quoted, arguing that the received form of 1 Cor. 7:39 restricts the widow’s freedom to remarry to one “found (by the faith) loosed from a husband,” the “loosing” having taken place through the husband’s death before her conversion, so that her subsequent Christian marriage is “not counted a second” one; the alleged corruption is the alteration “of two syllables” making the clause read as a future-tense license. The Latin (Sciamus plane non sic esse in Graeco authentico, quomodo in usum exiit per duarum syllabarum aut callidam aut simplicem eversionem: Si autem dormierit vir eius…) is at The Latin Library, Liber de Monogamia. ↩
H. A. G. Houghton, The Latin New Testament: A Guide to its Early History, Texts, and Manuscripts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) — on Tertullian’s De monogamia, where he contrasts the Latin form then “in common use” with the reading “in the authentic Greek” (Graeco authentico); Houghton reads the phrase as an appeal to the genuine/correct reading of the Greek against a defective Latin translation, not as a claim to have consulted the autograph of 1 Corinthians nor as a witness to a Greek manuscript carrying Tertullian’s restriction. The same conclusion is drawn by R. Pearse, who notes there is “no reason to suppose a reference to the original manuscript… but instead to the correct reading… rather than the somewhat dodgy Old Latin translation then in circulation.” ↩
The chapter’s address to the newly converted: 1 Cor. 7:20 (“Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called”) and 7:27 (“Art thou bound unto a wife? seek not to be loosed. Art thou loosed from a wife? seek not a wife”). Tertullian threads 7:39 onto this sequence at On Monogamy 11, reading the widow’s liberty as one more instruction about the condition a convert was “found in” — the exegetical move that gives the textual charge its foothold. ↩
The Greek of 1 Cor. 7:39 — …eàn dè koimēthēi ho anēr, eleutherá estin hōi thelei gamēthēnai (“but if the husband should fall asleep, she is free to be married to whom she will”) — is an aorist-subjunctive conditional with no restriction to any prior time; it is read uniformly across the Greek witnesses. The critical apparatus (Nestle–Aland / UBS) records for the verse only the variant addition of tōi nomōi (“by the law”) in the opening clause — a point of no bearing on the tense or scope of the remarriage permission; see the survey of variants for the epistle at “Textual variants in the First Epistle to the Corinthians”, which lists no variant at 7:39 touching the clause Tertullian disputes. ↩
The form Tertullian objects to — the Old Latin si autem dormierit vir eius (“but if her husband shall have fallen asleep”) — and his correction by the Graeco authentico are at On Monogamy 11; that the quarrel is with a Latin rendering rather than a Greek exemplar follows Houghton and Pearse (n. 2). Tertullian himself concedes the future-tense reading will not do his work even if granted — “even if it had been so… the future would just as much pertain to her whose husband shall die before she believed” — so the tense he disputes does not in fact secure his restriction. ↩
The parallel authority-move — abrogating Paul’s permission by the Paraclete rather than emending it — is at On Monogamy 14 (“why may not the Paraclete, too, have abrogated an indulgence which Paul granted…?”), weighed on the remarriage-as-fornication argument. The honest form of a scriptural-corruption charge — the church’s claim that the Hebrew Old Testament was altered by later hands — is traced, and itself weighed, on the rabbinic-corruption timeline; the contrast is that such charges stand or fall on textual evidence, of which Tertullian’s has none. ↩