In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus gives a teaching on divorce. No exceptions. In Matthew, the same teaching shows up, but now there's an exception. And Paul adds one of his own.
So which is it? Is the Bible breaking its own rules?
I don't think so. I think it's showing us how to read it. But in a lot of religious spaces, we've regressed. We've fallen into the same trap Jesus kept confronting: reading Scripture for the rules and missing the wisdom.
So let me tell you where I've landed. The Bible isn't an answer book for today's issues. It's a wisdom book that trains us how to approach them. And I didn't get there by lowering my view of Scripture. I got there by watching how Jesus read it.
Most of us were trained to read the Bible in black and white. Find the verse, follow the verse, and if your life doesn't fit the verse, that's on you. But I don't think that's what the biblical text offers us, and I don't think it's what Jesus offered us. When we stop treating the Bible as a rulebook and start reading it as wisdom, it opens up. It forms us. It actually brings life instead of the weight it's so often been handed down with.
So let's look at three moments. First, where Jesus says, "You have heard it said, but I say." Second, where his disciples break the Sabbath and Jesus defends them. And third, the divorce question we started with. By the time we get there, I think you'll see why the Bible handles it the way it does.
Fulfill, not abolish
We'll start in Matthew 5, the opening of what most Bibles label the Sermon on the Mount. A lot of us picture this as one afternoon on a hillside, with Matthew somehow transcribing every word. I don't think that's what's happening. More likely, Matthew has gathered the teachings he heard from Jesus over time and preserved them in this form.
That doesn't mean Jesus never taught on a hillside. But notice the difference between the Gospels. Luke places similar teaching on a level place (Luke 6:17). Matthew puts Jesus up on a mountain. That's a theological move. Matthew is drawing a line between Jesus and Moses, the one who received the law on a mountain, and making a claim about Jesus's authority to teach it.
Before we go further, a word about the word "law." English translations use it, but it isn't very faithful to how the Torah was understood. When we hear "law," we think of a legal code, like the rules of the road: here's the speed limit, don't break it. But Torah means teaching or instruction. It was instruction for how to live. Keep that in mind, because it changes how everything else reads.
Here's what Jesus says:
"Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish these things but to fulfill them." (Matthew 5:17)
The Law and the Prophets were two of the three collections that later made up the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh. The third was the Writings. The Torah, the five books attributed to Moses, held first place. So Jesus is saying: I'm not here to set aside the texts that define who you are. I'm here to fulfill them.
Jesus was a rabbi, and a rabbi's disciples learned his way of reading and living the Torah so they could carry it into the world. That's the frame here. Jesus is saying, I'll show you how these teachings actually work in real time and in real places. Then Matthew leaves us a trail of what that looks like.
Reading the Torah was always an argument
Here's something we need to understand: reading the Torah was always a conversation about how to apply it rightly. Parts of Leviticus read like a legal code, but they were never handled like one.
In the generation just before Jesus, roughly 30 BCE to 10 CE, two rabbis led the most influential schools of interpretation in Judaism: Hillel and Shammai. Shammai's school tended to read the text strictly. Hillel's school tended to be more flexible. Their disciples were still debating when Jesus began teaching.
One of their famous disagreements was about divorce. Deuteronomy 24:1 allows a man to divorce his wife if he finds "some indecency" in her. But what counts as indecency? Shammai's school said only sexual unfaithfulness. Hillel's school said a man could divorce his wife for almost any reason. That debate is later recorded in the Mishnah (Gittin 9:10), compiled around 200 CE.
So when Jesus steps into the divorce question in Mark 10 and Matthew 19, he isn't raising something new. He's walking straight into a live argument of his day.
Here's my point. Wrestling with what the text means for us today isn't rebellion. It happened with Hillel. It happened with Shammai. It happened with Jesus. It's the tradition Jesus was born into. Hold on to that divorce debate, because we're coming back to it.
"You have heard it said, but I say"
Through the rest of Matthew 5, Jesus repeats a pattern: you have heard it said this, but I say this. Again and again. He's saying, you know the Torah, but you've misapplied it.
Take murder (Matthew 5:21 to 22). The command is clear: do not murder. But Jesus goes deeper, to the root of anger and contempt. He isn't adding a rule. He's showing what the command was protecting all along.
Or take love for enemies:
"You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor' and 'hate your enemy.' But I say to you, love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you." (Matthew 5:43 to 44)
Here's what's interesting. "Love your neighbor" is in the Torah. It's Leviticus 19:18. But "hate your enemy" isn't there. It was an addition that had attached itself to the command in popular teaching. Jesus strips off that cultural addition and gets back to the heart of the command, then stretches it further than anyone expected.
Then there's how he says it. I did debate in high school, and one of the first rules I learned was that nobody cares what you think. Always cite your source. That's why you'll hear me say "N.T. Wright says" or "Michael Bird says." It builds credibility. Rabbis in Jesus's day did the same thing, pointing to other teachers and other texts to support their arguments.
Jesus doesn't. He just says, "But I say to you." He sources his own authority. And Matthew tells us the crowds noticed: when Jesus finished, they were amazed, because he taught like someone with authority, not like their experts in the law (Matthew 7:28 to 29).
The one with the most authority over the text uses it to get to the heart of it, not to tighten control. "You have heard it said" names the wooden way people were approaching the text. "But I say" shows that the real issue is bigger, deeper, and more profound than they realized.
Too many of us have fallen back into reading the Bible as a rulebook, an answer book for every question. The Bible just doesn't function that way. When we force it to, like the authorities Jesus was addressing, we risk losing what makes it meaningful for us today.
The Sabbath was made for people
Now let's go to Mark 2.
"Jesus was going through the grain fields on a Sabbath, and his disciples began to pick some heads of wheat as they made their way. So the Pharisees said to him, 'Look, why are they doing what is against the law on the Sabbath?'" (Mark 2:23 to 24)
This wasn't a small thing. The Sabbath was the day of rest, one of the most important practices in Jewish life. Picking a few heads of grain from a field was allowed (Deuteronomy 23:25). The problem was doing it on the Sabbath, when harvesting counted as work.
Over time, the question "How do we honor the Sabbath?" had turned into lists of what you could and couldn't do. Maybe you grew up in a tradition where you didn't shop or work on Sundays because God rested on the seventh day. It sounds a lot like religion today. We want to love God, so we build systems and rules to make sure we do it right.
Jesus answers with Scripture. He asks if they've ever read what David did when he and his men were hungry. In 1 Samuel 21, David went into the house of God, the tabernacle at Nob, since the temple wouldn't be built until Solomon, and ate the consecrated bread that only priests were allowed to eat. Jesus uses the text itself to answer his critics. Then he says this:
"The Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath." (Mark 2:27)
That's the reframe. The Sabbath was given so people could rest and have shalom, peace with God and each other. But it had been systematized so severely that it no longer did what it was made for. If your rules keep you from the rest the Sabbath was meant to give, are you actually keeping the Sabbath?
Jesus wasn't asking what the rule says. He was asking what the rule is for. He isn't saying the rule doesn't matter. He's saying you've misunderstood why it's there. We do the same thing in Christianity all the time. We're so focused on the rule that we miss its heart, and then we misapply it.
Back to divorce
Now let's return to the question we started with. And first, a word of care: if you've lived through divorce, this isn't an article about how to apply these texts to your situation. It's about something bigger: how Jesus read Scripture, and how his earliest followers read his words.
Start with Deuteronomy 24:1 to 4. The law allowed a man to give his wife a certificate of divorce, legal proof that she was free to remarry. That sounds harsh to us, but in its world it was a protection. Women in the ancient world had very little standing. They often had no property or income of their own. Without that certificate, a divorced woman could be left with no way to remarry, no way to provide for herself, and nowhere to go. For its time, this was a remarkable provision.
By Jesus's day, as we saw, Hillel's and Shammai's schools were arguing over how to read that text. So in Mark 10, the Pharisees bring the question to Jesus:
"Then some Pharisees came, and to test him they asked, 'Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?' He answered them, 'What did Moses command you?' They said, 'Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.' But Jesus said to them, 'He wrote this commandment for you because of your hard hearts.'" (Mark 10:2 to 5)
Pause there. For centuries, people had tried to understand and apply this command. And Jesus says it was given because of hard hearts. It wasn't God's ideal. It was a concession, because God knew people would abuse the power they had over others. Men had been using that power against women for a long time, and God put a protection in place.
Then Jesus goes back behind Moses, to creation itself. From the beginning, God made them male and female, and the two become one flesh. What God has joined, let no one separate. And he concludes:
"Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery." (Mark 10:11 to 12)
In Mark, there's no exception. But look at how Matthew tells the same story:
"Now I say to you that whoever divorces his wife, except for immorality, and marries another commits adultery." (Matthew 19:9)
Matthew includes an exception that Mark doesn't. Why?
It gets more interesting in 1 Corinthians 7. First, Paul passes on Jesus's teaching directly. He says this command comes not from him but from the Lord: a wife should not divorce her husband, and a husband should not divorce his wife (1 Corinthians 7:10 to 11). But then Paul faces a situation Jesus never addressed: a believer married to someone who isn't a believer. Paul marks the next part clearly as his own ruling, "I, not the Lord" (1 Corinthians 7:12), and says:
"But if the unbeliever wants a divorce, let it take place. In these circumstances the brother or sister is not bound. God has called you in peace." (1 Corinthians 7:15)
So Mark has no exception. Matthew has one. And Paul applies Jesus's teaching to a new situation and adds another.
Now here's what a lot of people don't realize. The New Testament isn't arranged chronologically. Paul's letters were mostly written before the Gospels. Scholars' dates vary, but roughly:
1 Corinthians: around 53 to 55 CE
Mark: around 65 to 70 CE
Matthew: around 80 to 90 CE
That means Paul's letter is the earliest written record we have of Jesus's teaching on divorce. And from that very first written record, it's already being applied with wisdom, for a specific audience in a specific situation.
The Bible isn't breaking its own rules. The earliest followers of Jesus read his words the way Jesus read Moses: for their purpose, in new situations. Jesus says, in effect, I know that's the law, but it was given because of hard hearts. He rereads Moses for his moment. Paul does the same with Jesus. Matthew adds a clarification for his audience. Mark doesn't.
If you read this as a rulebook, you'll get frustrated. You'll try to harmonize every detail and jump through hoops you don't need to jump through. If you read it for wisdom, you can see what's happening. The application of the text can depend on the situation, and the Bible itself shows people growing in their cultural context and applying its wisdom to their own circumstances. My more conservative friends may push back on that, and that's fine. We can have that conversation. But Jesus does it, Matthew and Mark do it, and Paul does it.
If the New Testament does this with Jesus's own words, we're allowed to wrestle with the text too.
From "What's the rule?" to "What is this for?"
So where do we go from here? I think the question shifts. We usually come to the Bible asking, "What's the rule I have to follow?" Jesus invites us to ask, "What is this here for? What wisdom is it offering?"
Some people will say that's a loophole, a way of not taking Scripture seriously. I disagree. I think this is how Jesus read his Scriptures. I think it's how Paul and the earliest followers of Jesus read theirs. And I think it's an invitation for us to read ours the same way. It doesn't make the Bible less authoritative. It makes it more alive, more real, and more applicable to where we are and what Jesus is inviting us into.
The people who used the Bible as a weapon were reading it the way Jesus corrected, not the way he read it. The religious leaders who used Scripture to control people were the ones Jesus redirected.
So here's where I land. The Bible isn't an answer book for today's issues. It's a wisdom book that forms people who can face them. Not through black and white, binary thinking, but through the color, depth, and nuance of real life, as we're formed by the wisdom of God to apply the text in healthy ways.
What verses were handed to you as rules that never made sense for your life? If the Bible has been used to beat you up, control you, or manipulate you, I want to invite you to revisit those verses through a different lens. Ask: What wisdom is being offered here? What formation am I being invited into? And how can I apply it to my situation today?
You don't have to choose between taking the Bible seriously and taking your life seriously. Jesus never asked you to.
