Biblical Foundation
Western matrimonial law rests on several foundational biblical texts. Genesis 2:24 — 'Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh' — defines marriage as a permanent union between two persons creating a new social unit. The 'one flesh' formulation implies an ontological merger that the parties cannot unilaterally dissolve. Jesus quotes this text in Matthew 19:5 and adds a theological commentary that shaped centuries of marital jurisprudence: 'So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate' (Matthew 19:6). The permanence of marriage — its character as a divine institution rather than a merely human contract — became the canonical prohibition on divorce.
Malachi 2:16 — 'The man who hates and divorces his wife... does violence to the one he should protect' — reinforces the biblical commitment to marital permanence, presenting divorce as a betrayal of covenant obligation. The Pauline letters extend the framework: 1 Corinthians 7:10-11 cites Jesus's teaching prohibiting divorce, and Ephesians 5:22-33 develops the analogy between marriage and the relationship between Christ and the Church, giving marriage a sacramental dimension that became central to Catholic canon law's treatment of matrimony as one of the seven sacraments.
The biblical model shaped marital law in several specific ways. First, consent: both Old and New Testament texts assume that marriage is entered freely. Second, exclusivity: the Genesis 2:24 'one flesh' principle and Paul's body-ethics (1 Corinthians 6:15-16) established monogamy as the normative form, despite the polygamy of the patriarchs. Third, prohibited degrees: Leviticus 18 established an elaborate framework of incest prohibitions that became the basis of canon law's tables of consanguinity. Fourth, the purposes of marriage were understood to include procreation (Genesis 1:28) and companionship (Genesis 2:18: 'It is not good for man to be alone').
Historical Transmission
The Church's assumption of jurisdiction over marriage in the early medieval period transformed biblical principles into enforceable law. By the ninth century, the Church claimed exclusive jurisdiction over matrimonial matters throughout Latin Christendom. Gratian's Decretum (c. 1140) gave this jurisdiction systematic legal expression, drawing extensively on Genesis 2:24 and Matthew 19:5-6 to define marriage as a permanent, consensual, sacramental union.
The canon lawyers developed an elaborate jurisprudence of matrimonial impediments — circumstances that invalidated a purported marriage: prior marriage, consanguinity (mapped against Leviticus 18), affinity, impotence, and lack of proper consent. Pope Alexander III (1159-1181) settled a major controversy by ruling that free consent of the parties was sufficient to create a valid marriage, regardless of whether it had been consummated or publicly celebrated. This principle of consensual marriage had roots in the biblical presentation of Eve being 'brought to' Adam in Genesis 2:22, understood as presenting her for consent.
The Protestant Reformers challenged Catholic sacramental theology of marriage but retained its canonical structure. Luther argued that marriage was a civil matter, and that civil authorities should govern it — but he retained monogamy, consent requirements, prohibited degrees, and the moral weight of marital permanence, all derived from the biblical texts. Reformed states created civil marriage courts but applied essentially canonical rules, ensuring that the biblical framework survived the secularisation of marriage jurisdiction.
Modern Application
Modern Western matrimonial law retains most of the structural features that canon law derived from the biblical texts. Monogamy remains the universal legal norm in Western legal systems, reflecting the Genesis 2:24 'one flesh' principle as transmitted through canon law. Prohibited degrees of consanguinity are encoded in every Western civil code, descending from Leviticus 18 through canon law. Consent requirements are universal: a marriage lacking genuine free consent is void or voidable in every Western jurisdiction.
The secularisation of marriage law, accelerating through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has progressively detached matrimonial law from its biblical foundations in areas such as divorce and the legal definition of marriage. Yet even contemporary debates about marriage invoke the biblical framework as the primary reference point. John Witte Jr.'s From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage, Religion, and Law in the Western Tradition (1997) traces in scholarly detail how the biblical model, mediated through canon law, shaped not only the substantive rules of Western matrimonial law but its conceptual categories — the idea of marriage as covenant, its grounding in mutual consent, and its aspiration to permanence and exclusivity.
The Reformation and Secularisation
The Protestant Reformation's reconceptualisation of marriage as a civil rather than a sacramental institution created the template for the modern secular marriage law that now prevails throughout the Western world. Luther's marriage theology -- developed in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520) and On the Estate of Marriage (1522) -- argued from the same biblical texts (Genesis 2:24, Matthew 19:5) that canon law had used, but drew opposite institutional conclusions: marriage is a God-ordained estate, but it is a worldly rather than a sacramental one, and therefore falls under civil rather than ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Reformed states across northern Europe established secular marriage courts in the sixteenth century that retained canonical substantive rules -- monogamy, consent, prohibited degrees -- while subjecting them to civil administration.
This Reformation-era secularisation established the pattern that every Western legal system has followed: marriage law retains the biblical structural features (consent, monogamy, prohibited degrees, the aspiration to permanence) that canon law derived from the biblical texts, while progressively detaching them from their explicit theological grounding. The biblical inheritance is thus preserved in secularised form, visible in the structural features of marriage law across the Western world even as the theological convictions that generated those features have receded from legal consciousness.
The contemporary worldwide influence of the biblical-canonical marriage tradition extends far beyond the West. In Africa, Asia, and Latin America, Christian communities shaped by missionary contact with Western canon law have developed their own syntheses of biblical marital norms and indigenous legal traditions. The result is a global diversity of Christian marriage law that nonetheless reflects the common biblical foundation: the one flesh principle of Genesis 2:24, the consent requirement, the aspiration to permanence and exclusivity. The universality of these features across very different cultural contexts testifies to the formative power of the biblical marriage texts that Gratian and the canon lawyers first systematised in twelfth-century Bologna.