“And whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery.” —
A small ancient stream omits this final warning. The Textus Receptus keeps it, and so do the standard modern critical editions. The chief dispute is therefore inside the apparatus, not between the Authorized Version and every modern Bible.
The first half of the verse ends with the woman being caused to commit adultery. The final clause then names the man who marries her. Remove it and the sentence still closes with correct grammar. A public reader would hear a severe teaching on divorce and might never know a line was missing.
The received clause also survives in more than one Greek form. Vaticanus uses a participial construction while keeping the same meaning. That kind of variation suggests that the substance was present early even where copyists adjusted its shape.
Critics who defend omission can point to the parallel teachings and to a desire for fuller moral symmetry. But the clause is no decorative balance. It assigns responsibility to the second man and matches Christ’s later teaching in .
Marriage is not private paperwork
Jesus rejects the notion that a certificate can make treachery righteous. Wrongful divorce exposes the put-away spouse to adultery, and a person who enters the resulting unlawful union shares the guilt.
The exception “saving for the cause of fornication” must be read with the creation bond and the rest of Scripture. This verse is not a complete treatment of abandonment, discipline, repentance, or every hard pastoral case. It is a direct blow against the casual dismissal of a wife.
No doctrine rests on the final clause alone. Mark, Luke, and Matthew 19 speak to remarriage. That stability lets us weigh the text without panic. The broad and early support for the clause, its meaningful place in the argument, and the ease of smooth omission justify the agreement of received and critical editions.
The words belong. Christ closes the loophole from both sides of the new union, and no copyist’s shortened ending should open it again.
The participial form in Vaticanus is important because it does not read like a simple late copy of the Textus Receptus. It preserves the same moral clause in a distinct grammatical dress. That makes an early common substance more likely than a single late expansion spreading in one fixed wording.
The omission’s limited spread also cautions against making brevity a rule. A shorter witness may be old and still preserve an accidental loss. Textual judgment asks whether the loss is mechanically plausible, whether the surviving longer forms are diverse, and whether the sentence performs real work in the author’s argument.
Here all three answers support inclusion. The clause can vanish cleanly; it survives through more than one construction; and it names the responsibility of the new husband. The agreement of current critical editions with the received text is therefore not reluctant traditionalism. It is a sound judgment upon the evidence.
Sources and further reading
- ; 19:3–12; ; .
- Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, note on .
- Westminster Confession of Faith 24.