Jesus on marriage (and divorce)

- Jesus dancing the night away at the Cana wedding, from the movie Jesus

I saw this article today from Candida Moss, NT scholar at Notre Dame ... Jesus Christ Wasn’t Down With Marriage: Laws aimed at reinforcing “traditional” Christian marriage get Christ’s and early Christians’ views on matrimony exactly backwards. Here's just a bit of it ...

[...] While Jesus is adamantly opposed to divorce, he never once speaks in favor of marriage. He never celebrates a wedding (from a historian’s perspective, facilitating drunkenness at the Wedding at Cana is less evidence of Jesus’s support of marriage than of his desire to keep the party going) and describes heaven as a place where marriage no longer exists. It’s called heaven for a reason. In Mark 10:29-30, and with no mention of child support, Jesus promises the disciples that anyone who leaves “brother or sister or father or mother or children” for his sake would be rewarded in the age to come. And he’s not just a home wrecker in theory; tradition maintains that some of Jesus’s disciples were married, but their wives are not mentioned in the Gospels. Apparently the apostles left their families to go on a three-year fishing trip ..... In the first two centuries of the Common Era the real advocates for “traditional marriage” were the pagan Romans. The Christian tendency to reject marriage was one point of contention between the imperial authorities and the fledgling religion ...

For those who are interested, here's my past post in which Keith Ward, former Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, writes on what Jesus thought about marriage and divorce ... Jesus on marriage & divorce