Yoked together
Andrew Proud
Date posted: 1 Oct 2019
Dear Editor,
Mark Gilbart-Smith
in his article
‘Can
Christians marry
non-Christians’
(en
August) asserts
that 2 Corinthians 6:14
is not
‘explicitly about marriage’. Strictly
speaking, he is right, but our English trans-lations obscure a very strong implication to
the contrary. There is a wide consensus in
translating the Greek word, very literally, as
‘unequally yoked’. Matthew 19:6 and Mark
10:9 are explicitly about marriage, but the
translators are in widespread agreement in
not translating so
literally. A more
literal
translation would be ‘What God has yoked
together’ instead of the familiar ‘joined.’