Jesus And The Woman Taken In Adultery

Jesus and the woman taken in adultery (or the ) is a passage (pericope) found in John 7:53– 8:11 of the New Testament. It has been the subject of much scholarly discussion.

In the passage, Jesus was teaching in the Second Temple after coming from the Mount of Olives. A group of scribes and Pharisees confronts Jesus, interrupting his teaching. They bring in a woman, accusing her of committing adultery, claiming she was caught in the very act. They tell Jesus that the punishment for someone like her should be stoning, as prescribed by Mosaic Law. Jesus begins to write something on the ground using his finger; when the woman's accusers continue their challenge, he states that the one who is without sin is the one who should cast the first stone at her. The accusers and congregants depart, realizing not one of them is without sin either, leaving Jesus alone with the woman. Jesus asks the woman if anyone has condemned her and she answers no. Jesus says that he, too, does not condemn her, and tells her to go and sin no more.

There is now a broad academic consensus that the passage is a later interpolation added after the earliest known manuscripts of the Gospel of John. Although it is included in most modern translations (one notable exception being the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures) it is typically noted as a later interpolation, as it is by Novum Testamentum Graece NA28. This has been the view of "most NT scholars, including most ''evangelical'' NT scholars, for well over a century" (written in 2009). The passage appears to have been included in some texts by the 4th century, and became generally accepted by the 5th century.

The passage

John 7:53–8:11 in the New Revised Standard Version, which is paleographically dated to the early 300s, does contain a mark at the end of John chapter 7 with an umlaut in the margin alongside a distinctive blank space following the end of the Gospel of John, which would convey that the manuscript copyist was aware of additional text following the end of John 21 – which is where the pericope adulterae is found in the ''f''-1 group of manuscripts.

The Latin Vulgate Gospel of John, produced by Jerome in 383, was based on the Greek manuscripts which Jerome considered ancient exemplars at that time and which contained the passage. Jerome reports that the pericope adulterae was found in its usual place in "many Greek and Latin manuscripts" in Rome and the Latin West. This is also confirmed by other Latin Fathers of the 300s and 400s, including both Ambrose of Milan, and Augustine.

Pope Leo I (Pope from 440 to 461) cited the passage in his 62nd sermon, mentioning that Jesus said "to the adulteress who was brought to him, 'Neither will I condemn you; go and sin no more.'" In the early 400s, Augustine of Hippo used the passage extensively, and from his writings, it is also clear that his contemporary Faustus of Mileve also used it. Augustine claimed that the passage was specifically targeted and improperly excluded from some manuscripts:

"Certain persons of little faith, or rather enemies of the true faith, fearing, I suppose, lest their wives should be given impunity in sinning, removed from their manuscripts the Lord's act of forgiveness toward the adulteress, as if he who had said, Sin no more, had granted permission to sin." – Augustine, De Adulterinis Conjugiis 2:6–7.

The pericope does not occur in the Greek Gospel manuscripts from Egypt. The Pericope Adulterae is not in 𝔓⁶⁶ or in 𝔓⁷⁵, both of which have been assigned to the late 100s or early 200s, nor in two important manuscripts produced in the early or mid 300s, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. The first surviving Greek manuscript to contain the pericope is the Latin-Greek diglot Codex Bezae, produced in the 400s or 500s (but displaying a form of text which has affinities with "Western" readings used in the 100s and 200s). Codex Bezae is also the earliest surviving Latin manuscript to contain it. Out of 23 Old Latin manuscripts of John 7–8, seventeen contain at least part of the pericope, and represent at least three transmission-streams in which it was included.

Many modern textual critics have speculated that it was "certainly not part of the original text of St. John's Gospel."'Pericope adulterae', in FL Cross (ed.), ''The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church'', (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). The Jerusalem Bible claims "the author of this passage is not John". Some have also claimed that no Greek Church Father had taken note of the passage before the 1100s.

However, in 1941 a large collection of the Greek writings of Didymus the Blind (313–398 AD) was discovered in Egypt, in which Didymus states that "We find in certain gospels" an episode in which a woman was accused of a sin, and was about to be stoned, but Jesus intervened "and said to those who were about to cast stones, 'He who has not sinned, let him take a stone and throw it. If anyone is conscious in himself not to have sinned, let him take a stone and smite her.' And no one dared," and so forth. As Didymus was referring to the Gospels typically used in the churches in his time, this reference appears to establish that the passage was accepted as authentic and commonly present in many Greek manuscripts known in Alexandria and elsewhere from the 300s onwards.

The subject of Jesus' writing on the ground was fairly common in art, especially from the Renaissance onwards, with examples by artists including those a painting by Pieter Bruegel and a drawing by Rembrandt. There was a medieval tradition, originating in a comment attributed to Ambrose, that the words written were ("earth accuses earth"; a reference to the end of verse Genesis 3:19: " for dust you are and to dust you will return"), which is shown in some depictions in art, for example, the ''Codex Egberti''. This is very probably a matter of guesswork based on Jeremiah 17:13. There have been other theories about what Jesus would have written.

Interpretation

This episode, and its message of mercy and forgiveness balanced with a call to holy living, have endured in Christian thought. Both "let him who is without sin, cast the first stone" and "go, and sin no more" have found their way into common usage. The English idiomatic phrase to " cast the first stone" is derived from this passage.

The passage has been taken as confirmation of Jesus' ability to write, otherwise only suggested by implication in the Gospels, but the word in John 8:8 could mean "draw" as well as "write".

Mosaic Law

Deuteronomy 22:22–25 states:

In this passage and also in Leviticus 20:10, "death is fixed as the penalty of adultery", applicable to both the man and the woman concerned. However, "''stoning'' as the form of death is only specified when a betrothed virgin is violated".

Textual history

According to Eusebius of Caesarea (in his ''Ecclesiastical History'', composed in the early 300s), Papias () refers to a story of Jesus and a woman "accused of many sins" as being found in the Gospel of the Hebrews, which might refer to this passage or to one like it. In the Syriac , composed in the mid-200s, the author, in the course of instructing bishops to exercise a measure of clemency, states that a bishop who does not receive a repentant person would be doing wrong – "for you do not obey our Savior and our God, to do as He also did with her that had sinned, whom the elders set before Him, and leaving the judgment in His hands, departed. But He, the searcher of hearts, asked her and said to her, 'Have the elders condemned thee, my daughter?' She said to Him, 'No, Lord.' And He said unto her, 'Go your way; neither do I condemn thee.' In Him therefore, our Savior and King and God, be your pattern, O bishops."

The '' Constitutions of the Holy Apostles'' Book II.24, composed , echoes the , alongside a utilization of Luke 7:47. Further, Didymus the Blind (c. 313–398) states that "We find in certain gospels" an episode in which a woman was accused of a sin, and was about to be stoned, but Jesus intervened "and said to those who were about to cast stones, 'He who has not sinned, let him take a stone and throw it. If anyone is conscious in himself not to have sinned, let him take a stone and smite her.' And no one dared," and so forth. Codex Fuldensis, which was produced in AD 546, and which, in the Gospels, features an unusual arrangement of the text that was found in an earlier document, contains the adulterae pericope, in the form in which it was written in the Vulgate. More significantly, Codex Fuldensis also preserves the chapter-headings of its earlier source-document (thought by some researchers to echo the Diatessaron produced by Tatian in the 170's), and the title of chapter 120 refers specifically to the woman taken in adultery.

The important codices L and Delta do not contain the , but between John 7:52 and 8:12, each contains a distinct blank space, as a sort of memorial left by the scribe to signify remembrance of the absent passage.

Pacian of Barcelona (bishop from 365 to 391), in the course of making a rhetorical challenge, opposes cruelty as he sarcastically endorses it: "O Novatians, why do you delay to ask an eye for an eye? ..Kill the thief. Stone the petulant. Choose not to read in the Gospel that the Lord spared even the adulteress who confessed, when none had condemned her." Pacian was a contemporary of the scribes who made Codex Sinaiticus.

The writer known as Ambrosiaster, , mentioned the occasion when Jesus "spared her who had been apprehended in adultery." The unknown author of the composition "Apologia David" (thought by some analysts to be Ambrose, but more probably not) mentioned that people could be initially taken aback by the passage in which "we see an adulteress presented to Christ and sent away without condemnation." Later in the same composition he referred to this episode as a "lection" in the Gospels, indicating that it was part of the annual cycle of readings used in the church-services.

Peter Chrysologus, writing in Ravenna , clearly cited the in his Sermon 115. Sedulius and Gelasius also clearly used the passage. Prosper of Aquitaine, and Quodvultdeus of Carthage, in the mid-400s, utilized the passage.

A text called the Second Epistle of Pope Callistus, section 6, contains a quote that may be from John 8:11 – "Let him see to it that he sin no more, that the sentence of the Gospel may abide in him: "Go, and sin no more."" However this text also appears to quote from eighth-century writings and therefore is most likely spurious.

In the Codex Vaticanus, which was produced in the early 300s, perhaps in Egypt (or in Caesarea, by copyists using exemplars from Egypt), the text is marked at the end of John chapter 7 with an umlaut in the margin, indicating that an alternative reading was known at this point. This codex also has an umlaut alongside blank space following the end of the Gospel of John, which may convey that whoever added the umlaut was aware of additional text following the end of John 21 – which is where the is found in the f-1 group of manuscripts.

Jerome, writing around 417, reports that the was found in its usual place in "many Greek and Latin manuscripts" in Rome and the Latin West. This is confirmed by some Latin Fathers of the 300s and 400s, including Ambrose of Milan, and Augustine. The latter claimed that the passage may have been improperly excluded from some manuscripts in order to avoid the impression that Christ had sanctioned adultery:

History of textual criticism

The first to systematically apply the critical marks of the Alexandrian critics was Origen:

Early textual critics familiar with the use and meaning of these marks in classical Greek works like Homer, interpreted the signs to mean that the section (John 7:53–8:11) was an interpolation and not an original part of the Gospel.

During the 16th century, Western European scholars – both Catholic and Protestant – sought to recover the most correct Greek text of the New Testament, rather than relying on the Vulgate Latin translation. At this time, it was noticed that a number of early manuscripts containing the Gospel of John lacked John 7:53–8:11 inclusive; and also that some manuscripts containing the verses marked them with critical signs, usually a lemniscus or asterisk. It was also noted that, in the lectionary of the Greek church, the Gospel-reading for Pentecost runs from John 7:37 to 8:12, but skips over the twelve verses of this pericope.

Beginning with Karl Lachmann (in Germany, 1840), reservations about the became more strongly argued in the modern period, and these opinions were carried into the English world by Samuel Davidson (1848–51), Samuel Prideaux Tregelles (1862), and others; the argument against the verses being given body and final expression in F. J. A. Hort (1886). Those opposing the authenticity of the verses as part of John are represented in the 20th century by men like Henry Cadbury (1917), Ernest Cadman Colwell (1935), and Bruce M. Metzger (1971).

According to 19th-century text critics Henry Alford and F. H. A. Scrivener the passage was added by John in a second edition of the Gospel along with 5:3.4 and the 21st chapter.

On the other hand, a number of scholars have strongly defended the Johannine authorship of these verses. This group of critics is typified by such scholars as Frederick Nolan (1865), and John Burgon (1886), and Herman C. Hoskier (1920). More recently it has been defended by David Otis Fuller (1975), and is included in the Greek New Testaments compiled by Wilbur Pickering (1980/2014), Hodges & Farstad (1982/1985), and Robinson & Pierpont (2005). Rather than endorsing Augustine's theory that some men had removed the passage due to a concern that it would be used by their wives as a pretext to commit adultery, Burgon proposed (but did not develop in detail) a theory that the passage had been lost due to a misunderstanding of a feature in the lection-system of the early church.

Almost all modern critical translations that include the pericope adulterae do so at John 7:53–8:11. Exceptions include the New English Bible and Revised English Bible, which relocate the pericope after the end of the Gospel. Most others enclose the pericope in brackets, or add a footnote mentioning the absence of the passage in the oldest witnesses (e.g., NRSV

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