NO one reading this passage in the twenty-first century can fully realize how great it is. Throughout the years, the Christian view of marriage has come to be widely accepted. It is still recognized by the majority as the ideal, even in these permissive days. Even where practice has fallen short of that ideal, it has always been in the minds and hearts of those who live in a Christian situation. Marriage is regarded as the perfect union of body, mind and spirit between a man and a woman. But things were very different when Paul wrote. In this passage, Paul is setting down an ideal which shone with a radiant purity in an immoral world.

Let us look briefly at the situation against which Paul wrote this passage.

The Jews had a low view of women. In his morning prayer, there was a sentence in which a Jewish man gave thanks that God had not made him ‘a Gentile, a slave or a woman’. In Jewish law, a woman was not a person but a thing. She had no legal rights whatsoever; she was absolutely her husband’s possession to do with as he willed.

In theory, the Jews had the highest ideal of marriage. The Rabbis had their sayings. ‘Every Jew must surrender his life rather than commit idolatry, murder or adultery.’ ‘The very altar sheds tears when a man divorces the wife of his youth.’ But the fact was that, by Paul’s day, divorce had become tragically easy.

The law of divorce is summarized in Deuteronomy 24:1. ‘Suppose a man enters into marriage with a woman, but she does not please him because he finds something objectionable about her, and so he writes her a certificate of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her out of his house.’ Obviously, everything turns on the interpretation of something objectionable. The stricter Rabbis, headed by the famous Shammai, held that the phrase meant adultery and only adultery, and declared that even if a wife was as mischievous as Queen Jezebel, a husband might not divorce her except for adultery. The more liberal Rabbis, headed by the equally famous Hillel, interpreted the phrase in the widest possible way. They said that it meant that a man might divorce his wife if she spoiled his dinner by putting too much salt in his food, if she walked in public with her head uncovered, if she talked with men in the streets, if she spoke disrespectfully of her husband’s parents in her husband’s hearing, if she was an argumentative woman, if she was troublesome or quarrelsome. A certain Rabbi Akiba interpreted the phrase but she does not please him to mean that a husband might divorce his wife if he found a woman whom he considered more attractive. It is easy to see which school of thought would predominate.

Two facts in Jewish law made the matter worse. First, the wife had no rights of divorce at all, unless her husband became a leper or rejected the faith or engaged in a disgusting trade such as that of a tanner. Broadly speaking, a husband, under Jewish law, could divorce his wife on any grounds, whereas there were no grounds on which a wife could divorce her husband. Second, the process of divorce was disastrously easy. The Mosaic law said that a man who wanted a divorce had to hand his wife a bill of divorce which said: ‘Let this be from me your writ of divorce and letter of dismissal and deed of liberation, that you may marry whatsoever man you will.’ All a man had to do was to hand that bill of divorce, correctly written out by a Rabbi, to his wife in the presence of two witnesses and the divorce was complete. The only other condition was that the woman’s dowry must be returned.

At the time of Christ’s coming, the marriage bond was in grave danger even among the Jews, since Jewish girls were refusing to marry because their position as a wife was so uncertain.

THE situation was worse in the Greek world. Prostitution was an essential part of Greek life. The Athenian orator and statesman Demosthenes had laid it down as the accepted rule of life: ‘We have courtesans for the sake of pleasure; we have concubines for the sake of daily cohabitation; we have wives for the purpose of having children legitimately and of having a faithful guardian for all our household affairs.’ The women of the respectable classes in Greece led completely secluded lives. They took no part in public life; they never appeared on the streets alone; they never even appeared at meals or at social occasions; they had their own apartments where none but their husbands might enter. It was the aim that, as the historian Xenophon had it, they ‘might see as little as possible, hear as little as possible and ask as little as possible’.

The respectable woman of Greek society was brought up in such a way that companionship and fellowship in marriage was impossible. Socrates said: ‘Is there anyone to whom you entrust more serious matters than to your wife—and is there anyone to whom you talk less?’ Verus was the imperial colleague of the great emperor Marcus Aurelius. He was blamed by his wife for associating with other women, and his answer was that she must remember that the name of wife was a title of dignity but not of pleasure. The Greeks expected their wives to run the home and to care for their legitimate children; but they found their pleasure and their companionship elsewhere.

To make matters worse, there was no legal procedure of divorce in Greece. As someone has put it, divorce was by nothing else than caprice, the result of a whim. The one security that a wife had was that her dowry must be returned. Home and family life were near to being extinct, and faithfulness was completely non-existent.

IN Rome, the matter was still worse; its degeneracy was tragic. For the first 500 years of the Roman Republic, there had not been one single case of divorce. The first recorded divorce was that of Spurius Carvilius Ruga in 234 BC. But, at the time of Paul, Roman family life was in ruins. The philosopher Seneca writes that women were married to be divorced and divorced to be married. In Rome, the Romans did not commonly date their years by numbers; they called them by the names of the consuls. Seneca says that women dated the years by the names of their husbands. The poet Martial tells of a woman who had had ten husbands; Juvenal, who was a lawyer, tells of one who had had eight husbands in five years. The biblical scholar Jerome declares it to be true that in Rome there was a woman who was married to her twenty-third husband and she herself was his twenty-first wife. We find a Roman emperor, Augustus, demanding that the husband of the Lady Livia should divorce her when she was pregnant so that he might marry her himself. We find even Cicero, in his old age, putting away his wife Terentia so that he might marry a young heiress, whose trustee he was, and thereby acquire her estate in order to pay his debts.

That is not to say that there was no such thing as faithfulness. The historian Suetonius tells of a Roman lady called Mallonia who committed suicide rather than submit to the favours of the emperor Tiberius. But it is not too much to say that the whole atmosphere was adulterous. The marriage bond was on the way to complete breakdown.

It is against this background that Paul writes. When he wrote this lovely passage, he was not stating a view that everyone held. He was calling men and women to a new purity and a new fellowship in the married life. It is impossible to exaggerate the cleansing effect that Christianity had on home life in the ancient world and the benefits it brought to women.