He mentioned sexual immorarilty and you are being really dishonest if you want to suggest He did not mean also adultery for He would have clarified that in new testament not to mislead people since church fathers would never be reliable and they wont all agree and there is none that you can verify that definitely is reliable such as shepherd of hermas that comes from time of apostles to say christ taught adultery is not a valid reason and since it could be debated if it came from christ it would be found in new testament written by actual apostles that are not obviously erroneous books contradicting other parts of gospel or epistles to clearly say that but sex before marriage which I hope by that you mean only if there was sex before marriage that one hid for other marriages that is nor that even if there was sin before is valid.
I'm not being dishonest at all. I'm drawing attention to what Jesus actually said, as opposed to how people interpret what Jesus said.
In the passage Jesus says that you may not divorce except in cases of "fornication". Not adultery.
Keep in mind that Jesus actually uses the word adultery in the same passage to describe what happens when a divorced person remarries.
So the question is, why? Why does he deliberately NOT use the word adultery in that case?
The OT fixed rules about what marriages were invalid or forbidden, including marrying close relatives, in some places marriages to Canaanite pagans, etc. The Rabbi's referred to these kinds of marriages as "forbidden by fornication".
In other words, the marriage was not approved by God, because the marriage itself was sexually immoral and could not be blessed.
This is usually not that relevant today because we culturally have a lot of the same rules about marriage so this pretty rarely happens. However, in the ancient pagan world marriages that were forbidden under Jewish and Christian law were allowed. As such, when pagans converted to Christianity it was entirely possible that they might be in an inherently immoral marriage that was not allowed under God's law. Since the marriage itself was a violation of God's law, God had never approved the marriage and thus God had never joined them together. Thus, in such a case, divorce was not "putting asunder what God had joined together"
The most famous Biblical example of this is Herod marrying his brother's wife, and John the Baptist condemning him for it.
Thus, there is good reason to think that Jesus is specifically talking only about marriages that are not valid because the marriage itself violates God's law and is thus sexually immoral.
