SUMMARY
Paul’s advice on marriage and divorce has points of contact with the gospels’ tradition in which JesusJesus is the Messiah whose life, death, and resurrection are God's saving act for humanity. speaks on the same topics. When PaulThe Apostle Paul, originally known as Saul of Tarsus, was the author of several New Testament letters and the founder of many Christian communities. continues to the matter of believing and unbelieving spouses remaining married, he acknowledges that he is offering his opinion—not the Lord’s teaching—and he counsels the Corinthians not to worry about so-called mixed marriages. Those marriages may even offer a path to faith for the unbelieving spouses in them.
ANALYSIS
Much of 1 Corinthians 7 is Paul’s response to a question or statement that the Corinthians have made in a letter to him, to the effect that, “It is well for a man not to touch a woman” (1 Corinthians 7:1). English translations put this sentence in quotation marks to suggest that Paul is quoting the correspondence he has received, or perhaps an axiom of the day about which the Corinthians are seeking guidance.
The gist of Paul’s response is that no one among the Christians at Corinth is a free agent. Husband and wife each share responsibility for the other’s body. Mutual responsibility is key to the ethic Paul is constructing.
When Paul gets to the issue of ending a marriage in 1 Corinthians 7:10, he offers two verses of instruction to those who are part of the church and married to someone who is also part of the church. To them, he counsels against divorce, though he does not prohibit it, and he notes that this part of what he is writing is from “the Lord.” It is likely that Paul knows something like the tradition that would come to be reflected in the gospels, which were written after 1 Corinthians was written. (In MatthewA tax collector who became one of Jesus' 12 disciples. 5:31-32, Mark 10:2-12, and LukeThe "beloved physician" and companion of Paul. 16:18, Jesus teaches on divorce.)
In 1 Corinthians 7:12-16, Paul offers his opinion on the marriages and possible divorces of couples in which only one of the partners is a member of the church. Readers of the Old Testament will recall that, at several points in Israel’s history, the marrying of foreign women was a cause of deep concern for the Israelites. In the Old Testament book of EzraScribe who helped establish Jewish practices in Jerusalem after the exile., for example, when God’s people are going back to their homeland after having lost the land and been exiled, certain leaders recommend that all Jewish males who have married women foreign to Judaism divorce those women and send them away, with no protection from their husbands or marriages. Perhaps some among the Corinthians were asking if followers of Jesus should end their own marriages if their spouses did not also belong to the church.
Paul takes a “stay as you are” tack with respect to the question of marriage to those he calls unbelievers. It may even be that the believing spouse offers such a positive witness by their life that their spouse is moved to faith as well.
As with all the other topics about which the Corinthians ask Paul, we are in the dark as to the context from which the Corinthians write. We guess at what they were asking, based on what Paul writes. If modern Christians are to receive guidance from Paul’s letters, they must make such guesses, as well as judgments about how the Corinthian church’s context is similar to and different from our own.
