Jane,
I agree with your general premise that later Christianity gets the 'divorce thing' wrong whereas N.T. Christianity actually admonishes men to honor their wives and not feel free to discard them like a used piece of tissue-paper. But, I can't say that I agree that the N.T. Scripture, taken as a whole in context and with the application of educated hermeneutical acumen (as it should be), is of little help. Likely, the truth of the matter is that Jesus didn't think He needed to spell it all out; in fact, the implication in saying "...such and such law was given because of your hardness of heart" seems to tell us that men could generally have figured this out with their God given brains if they weren't so stubborn and heard hearted toward women.
If we take what
Gerda Lerner, PhD has to say in her book,
The Creation of Partriarchy, and maybe at some points despite what she says, I don't think we can actually accuse the O.T. men of treating women in any 'worse' ways than what the numerous pagan nations of old were already doing and had been doing for quite some time, ways that extended into even more ancient eras, as far as we can tell. No, as far as we can tell, if one was a wife of purity in Old Israel-- as she had learned to be so from the time of being a little girl-- that women had a good place in society (assuming also that the entire nation was actually 'doing' what it was supposed to do in Gods' eyes, i.e. not being sinful, something they apparently found it difficult to do).
And if we take what
Orlando Patterson, PhD has to say in his book,
Freedom: Volume 1, about how the initial motifs of "freedom from sin" in the N.T. played out in history over the last 2,000, we can't really knock the teachings of Jesus, Paul, and Peter off the table; their teachings were at least likely helpful in some ways to the initial development and causes of freedom in Western society.
I mean, how dense does one have to be to not understand the implications and social outworking of the following verses from Matthew 20:20-25?:
20 Then the mother of Zebedee’s sons came to Jesus with her sons and, kneeling down, asked a favor of him.
21 “What is it you want?” he asked.
She said, “Grant that one of these two sons of mine may sit at your right and the other at your left in your kingdom.”
22 “You don’t know what you are asking,” Jesus said to them. “Can you drink the cup I am going to drink?”
“We can,” they answered.
23 Jesus said to them, “You will indeed drink from my cup, but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared by my Father.”
24 When the ten heard about this, they were indignant with the two brothers.
25 Jesus called them together and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. 26 Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, 27 and whoever wants to be first must be your slave— 28 just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
To me, this is one of those "well, duh?" passages which people seem to very easily ignore, and they (even "the Church") have done so quite profusely over the past 2,000 years since these words were delivered.
One doesn't have to have a PhD to understand this:
be a servant to other people; don't oppress them or make slaves of them. Obviously, in its fullest manifestation, this would apply to all social contexts, even those between men and women, and husbands and wives.
So, I think we can see that if people could apply the specifics of Jesus' admonishment where He says, "Not so with you," the world would be, could be, and could have been, a better place. In this regard, His words, even His simple words, are helpful.
Peace,
2PhiloVoid
