“And whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery.” — Matthew 19:9
Matthew 19:9 carries several small shifts in the exception clause, but the largest dispute comes at the end. The Textus Receptus says that the man who marries a divorced woman commits adultery. Many critical witnesses omit that final clause.
The same warning appears at Matthew 5:32. That parallel gives both sides their simplest explanation: scribes may have copied it here, or they may have dropped it because they thought Matthew had already said it.
The sentence Christ gives
The received form has two parts. A man who puts away his wife, except for fornication, and marries another commits adultery. Then Christ names the second man: whoever marries the woman put away also commits adultery.
The second clause prevents the whole moral burden from resting on the first husband. A wrongful civil release does not turn an unlawful union into a lawful one. Marriage is not dissolved by desire, paperwork, or a teacher’s loophole.
Modern editors point to early omission and the exact thought in 5:32. They also note that the clause occurs in varied forms and positions. Those facts make harmonization a serious possibility.
Yet the end of the first clause and the end of the second both use the same verb, “commits adultery.” An eye can pass from one occurrence to the next and leave the intervening words behind. The shorter sentence remains grammatical. This is a classic setting for accidental loss.
The exception is not a permission slip
The phrase “except it be for fornication” has also moved within the manuscript tradition. Whatever its position, it must be read with Christ’s appeal to creation: God made male and female, joined the pair, and forbids man to tear apart his work. The exception addresses sexual covenant-breaking; it does not turn divorce into a casual remedy for unhappiness.
Nor should the final clause be used without pastoral care. Scripture distinguishes the treachery of the guilty party, the suffering of the abandoned spouse, repentance, discipline, and the legal complications of broken homes. A textual defense is not a complete marriage manual.
The full received saying has broad support, an obvious omission route, and agreement with Christ’s earlier teaching. Parallel agreement may be repetition by the Lord or Evangelist, not a copyist’s trespass. Matthew’s final warning belongs: the next marriage does not wash the first covenant clean.
The final clause also makes the put-away woman grammatically passive without making her morally identical in every case. She has been divorced; the circumstances and guilt must be judged from the whole passage and the facts. Christ’s warning is aimed at the system that treated dismissal and remarriage as an easy sequence.
The repeated verb “commits adultery” gives the eye-skip account real force. In continuous text, a scribe who moves from the first occurrence to the second lands at a complete ending. Homoeoteleuton—the loss caused by similar endings—is a technical name for an ordinary visual event, not a magical defense of every long reading.
Pastoral application must keep truth and mercy together. The verse protects covenant faithfulness and the spouse harmed by betrayal. It should not be wielded to place every tangled case beyond repentance, counsel, or careful ecclesiastical judgment.
Sources and further reading
- Genesis 2:18–24; Matthew 5:31–32; 19:3–12; Mark 10:2–12.
- Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, note on Matthew 19:9.
- Westminster Confession of Faith 24; Second London Baptist Confession 25.