there is evidence that the qualification for an Elder to have one wife is actually a phrase meaning still married to his first wife, but even if it is a limit on Elders, does that make it a limit on all men?;
I find it helpful to not automatically accept the presupposition that it is a
limitation or a target, as there is nothing I have found in the text to support that. An elder having more than 1 wife has
never been in scripture a matter of reproach as far as I can find. So when I discuss those passages I will ask people to consider that even if we accept "husband of one wife" as what it sounds like, that it is just as easily (and supported by prior scripture) a pragmatic
exemption for men with multiple wives, rather than a
reproach of men with multiple wives and a limitation or a new standard. While I haven't landed on defending this as the case definitively, it's a step 1 type of argument to get them thinking differently on the matter.
In the same way that a man who is recently married is exempted from going to war or
any other duty for a year. Deut 24:5
Either way you slice it, given I have found no solid agreement on the translations of those verses or what they really honestly mean, it forces the opposition to at least think of it in a different manner without forcing them to accept a new translation or understanding that they may not want to budge on initially. Limitation vs Exemption, one makes men with 2+ a matter of reproach, the other does not. What aligns better with Torah?
Another note is that if having more than 1 wife
is now a matter of reproach, it makes far more sense to word it with the other matters of reproach the elders were
not to be ... so it would be "
not a husband with more than one wife, not addicted to wine... etc" rather than to all of a sudden start speaking of men with only 1 wife as "above reproach" merely because they only have 1, where we don't see that elsewhere in scripture.
And finally, given Paul's audience of mostly gentiles who legally could only have one wife anyway, it's always just been weird to me to accept that he would write that as a qualification that made them above reproach, as there was nothing special about a roman man with 1 legal wife, while he slept around on the side at will with prostitutes and such or is on his 5th legal only wife because of how easy it was to divorce/remarry. No more than having one wife makes a modern day Pastor above reproach or anything special, because he can only have 1 anyway legally just like who Paul was writing to. But if he's still married to the wife of his youth, that's certainly something, he's faithful, a covenant keeper.