Tag Archives: Early Christian

Article on Divorce from the Encyclopedia of Early Christianity

Divorce: Dissolution of Marriage

(A short, but accurate 800-word article found in the Encyclopedia of Early Christianity[1]; all bolding is mine.)

The attitude of ecclesiastical authors of the first Christian centuries toward divorce is of great importance, for they were the closest heirs of the thought of the apostles and they lived in a period like our own, when the civil law accepted divorce and divorce was commonplace among the upper classes. Tertullian, at the end of the second century, contrasts the first 600 years of Roman history, when there was not a single divorce, with the morals of his own time, when women “long for divorce as though it were the natural consequence of marriage” (Apol. 6).

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