[bearbear]

Originally Posted by PeterG

Again:
μὴ ἐπὶ πορνείᾳ = "except porneia" and the same as: εἰ μὴ ἐπὶ πορνείᾳ
"even for porneia" would be: ἐάν τε ἕνεκα πορνείας

I think McFall's argument is that μὴ ἐπὶ would mean that the exclusion clause only applies to divorce and not remarriage whereas εἰ μὴ ἐπὶ would broaden the exclusion clause to both divorce and remarriage.

If we take the most literal translation another meaning comes to light. The translation reads: “Now I say to you that who, for example, may have divorced his wife—not over fornication which was punished by death—and may have married another woman, he becomes adulterous by marrying her. And the man having married a divorced wife, he becomes adulterous by marrying her.”

Jesus and the lawyers knew that for capital offences, such as fornication, divorce was out of the question. So why did Jesus mention ‘fornication’? He was asked if it was lawful to divorce ‘for every cause.’ So it was a case of what did the law say, not what did tradition say, or what did expediency demand under Roman rule. Now, the language of law is very precise. Jesus appeared to lay down one limitation on a universal provision for divorce, and that was that a man could not divorce his wife for fornication (‘not over fornication’), but we know this cannot be the case. The solution is simple. By using the negative Jesus was positively identifying everything else as grounds for divorce. We can amplify what Jesus meant in the following paraphrase: “Now I say to you that who, for example, may have divorced his wife—not over fornication which was punished by death, but over a non-‐‑fornication cause—and may have married another woman, he becomes adulterous by marrying her.” We can then reduce this paraphrase to read: “Now I say to you that who, for example, may have divorced his wife—not over fornication, but over a non-‐‑fornication cause—and may have married another woman, he becomes adulterous by marrying her.” This is exactly what Jesus said in the parallel teaching accounts in Mark 10 and Luke 16.

https://timothysparks.com/wp-content...appendix-b.pdf