He Described Divorce With Moses, Not God
When asked about divorce, Jesus shifted the blame for the law to Moses — and the origin of marriage to a different speaker entirely.
In Matthew 19 and Mark 10, Jesus is directly questioned about the legality of divorce. His reply performs a subtle rhetorical separation: he attributes the divorce permission explicitly to Moses ('Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives'), while attributing the creation ordinance that prohibits it to 'he which made them at the beginning.' He does not say 'God permitted divorce' — he says Moses did. The permissive law gets a human name attached; the prohibitive principle gets attached to the Creator. This split attribution is entirely visible only in Jesus's own words. He further reinforces the divide by the phrase 'but from the beginning it was not so' — positioning Moses's ruling as a later, bounded concession rather than original divine intent. Notably, Jesus volunteers this distinction; he was not asked who authored the divorce permission. The questioners asked only whether it was lawful. He answered by restructuring the question around two authorities — Moses and the Creator — and assigning different rulings to each. The pattern does not appear when narrators describe the exchange: it only emerges from reading what Jesus actually said.
Red Letter Sources
Matthew 19:4Matthew 19:5Matthew 19:8Matthew 19:9Mark 10:3Mark 10:5Mark 10:6Mark 10:9
And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female,
And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh?
He saith unto them, Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so.
And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery.
And he answered and said unto them, What did Moses command you?
And Jesus answered and said unto them, For the hardness of your heart he wrote you this precept.
But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female.
What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.
Evidence Notes
In both Matthew 19:8 and Mark 10:5, Jesus uses Moses's name explicitly as the agent of the divorce permission ('Moses...suffered' / 'Moses wrote this precept'). In Matthew 19:4 and Mark 10:6, he attributes the male-and-female creation to 'he which made them' or 'from the beginning of the creation.' The two attributions — Moses for permission, Creator for prohibition — appear only in Jesus's direct speech, not in the narrator's framing of the encounter.
Greek Note
In Mark 10:5, Jesus uses 'Μωϋσῆς ἔγραψεν' (Moses wrote) — a named human agent. In Matthew 19:4, the creator is referenced impersonally as 'ὁ ποιήσας' (the one who made). The asymmetry between a named lawgiver and an anonymous Creator is present in the Greek structure itself.