HistoricalChristian.Faith

Was the severe “second marriage is adultery” reading a mainstream position before Montanism?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: plausible — the claim splits cleanly in two, and only half of it holds. That the harsh equation of remarriage with adultery predates the New Prophecy, and issues from an impeccably catholic pen, is sound: Athenagoras of Athens, writing to the emperors about 177 and wholly outside Montanism, already calls a second marriage “a specious adultery.” So the severe reading is demonstrably not a Montanist coinage — a real and useful result. But the further claim, that it was therefore mainstream, overreaches: Athenagoras is a single, rhetorically-heightened voice, and his own second-century contemporaries — Hermas and Clement of Alexandria — keep remarriage plainly sinless, while his “specious adultery” is a hyperbole aimed at a concededly lawful act, not a denial of its lawfulness. The pedigree is genuine; the “mainstream” is not.

The claim

…a person should either remain as he was born, or be content with one marriage; for a second marriage is only a specious adultery. “For whosoever puts away his wife,” says He, “and marries another, commits adultery”… For he who deprives himself of his first wife, even though she be dead, is a cloaked adulterer.

— Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians 33, ANF vol. 2.¹ The interpretation weighed here is the historical thesis the deprecation-of-digamy timeline flags at Athenagoras: that the strict view — second marriage as a kind of adultery — was a mainstream Christian position before the rise of the New Prophecy, so that when Tertullian later brands remarriage “a species of fornication” he is voicing an old catholic severity, not inventing a Montanist novelty. The value of the thesis is defensive: if the harsh reading is pre-Montanist and catholic, then the case that Tertullian’s ban is a heresy grown from Phrygian soil loses one of its props.

Who advances it

The thesis belongs to the revisionist reading of Tertullian — the line running from T. D. Barnes and Douglas Powell — which treats his rigorism as an intramural severity continuous with a real second-century ascetic current rather than a heresy imported with the New Prophecy. Athenagoras is its exhibit: an unimpeachably catholic apologist, addressing Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, who applies adultery-language to the remarriage of the widowed a generation before Tertullian wrote a line and quite apart from Montanus. The wiki carries the point in service of the same case — on both the remarriage timeline and the remarriage-as-fornication argument, Athenagoras is the evidence that Tertullian’s framework was a live mainstream idea before the New Prophecy. This page tests how much of that framing the single witness will bear.²

The evidence for

The witness is catholic, datable, and untouched by Montanism. Athenagoras is exactly the kind of witness the thesis needs. He is no sectary but a philosopher-apologist pleading the Christian cause before the emperors; his Legatio is securely dated to about 177 by its address to Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodus; and nothing in it touches the New Prophecy, whose Phrygian enthusiasms were a world away from his measured Athenian defence. When such a man tells the emperors that among Christians “a second marriage is only a specious adultery” and that the widower who remarries is “a cloaked adulterer,” the adultery-trope is shown to be at home in the catholic apologetic mainstream well before Tertullian, and with no debt to Montanus. On the bare question — is the severe reading pre-Montanist and catholic? — the answer is plainly yes.³

The deprecation it belongs to is older still, and scriptural. Athenagoras does not stand alone in rating the single marriage higher; he stands at the sharp end of a preference that is older than any Father. Paul himself calls the widow “happier” if she remains unmarried, licenses remarriage only as a remedy against burning, and bars the twice-married from church office and the widows’ roll. The impulse Athenagoras pushes to its rhetorical edge — that the second marriage is the lesser, grudging state — is thus woven into the apostolic text, and the church would go on to institutionalize it, barring digamists from the clergy everywhere and penancing them in the East. To that extent Athenagoras is voicing, in heightened form, a judgment that really was the church’s own.⁴

Adversarial assessment

What holds: the pedigree is genuine. The core of the thesis is secure and worth having. The “adultery” language is not a Montanist coinage; a catholic apologist reached for it a generation before the New Prophecy shaped Tertullian; and the deprecation it dramatizes is older than Athenagoras and partly scriptural. Anyone who wants to file Tertullian’s severity as a Phrygian import has to reckon with the fact that its vocabulary was already in a catholic mouth in 177. That much of the claim is sound, and it does real work against the “heresy invented from nothing” reading of Tertullian.

But “mainstream” rests on a single, heightened voice. The overreach is the word “mainstream.” Athenagoras is not a cross-section of second-century opinion; he is its most severe recorded pole, and his own contemporaries pull the other way. The Shepherd of Hermas (c. 140), asked point-blank whether the remarrying widower sins, answers “there is no sin in marrying again”; Clement of Alexandria (c. 200) keeps the second marriage lawful as “the apostle allows… from sympathy” and treats the flat prohibition of marriage as an encratite error. Set beside these, Athenagoras is the outlier, not the mean — the earliest voice on the timeline to reach for “adultery,” against two nearer witnesses who will not call remarriage sin at all. A view held at the severe edge by one apologist, while the plainer witnesses keep remarriage sinless, is a current in the tradition, not its mainstream.⁵

And his “adultery” is rhetoric about a lawful act, not a verdict of unlawfulness. Even the one witness proves less than the strong thesis wants. Athenagoras is dissuading, not legislating: his aim, in a plea for the good name of Christians, is to exhibit their continence to pagan emperors, and “specious adultery” is an intensifier pressed on an act he never actually declares unlawful or subject to penalty. The gap shows precisely at Tertullian, who takes the flourish and converts it into a verdict — classing remarriage as stuprum and forbidding it — a step Athenagoras does not take. So the witness establishes that the language of adultery predates Montanism; it does not establish that the ruling — remarriage is genuinely a species of fornication and therefore barred — was ever the mainstream position. The distance between Athenagoras’s hyperbole and Tertullian’s prohibition is exactly the distance the strong claim needs to close and cannot.⁶

Assessment

plausible. The thesis is right in its defensive core and overstated in its reach. That the severe “second marriage is adultery” language predates the New Prophecy, and comes from an impeccably catholic apologist writing to the emperors about 177, is sound — the reading is no Montanist coinage, and the deprecation it heightens is older still and partly scriptural. But the claim that it was therefore mainstream outruns the evidence: Athenagoras is a single voice at the severe edge, his nearer contemporaries Hermas and Clement keep remarriage plainly sinless, and his “specious adultery” is a rhetorical intensifier applied to a concededly lawful act rather than a ruling that remarriage is unlawful. The point stands, and does real work against reading Tertullian’s ban as a heresy grown from nothing — but it proves the pre-Montanist pedigree of a current, not the pre-Montanist standing of the prohibition. Plausible as the thesis is usually framed; sound if narrowed to the pedigree of the language alone. (Whether Tertullian’s hardening of that language into a ban is a severe reading of Paul or a false doctrine is weighed on the remarriage-as-fornication argument.)

Sources