On one occasion Jesus was teaching in the temple and a group of scribes and Pharisees brought in a woman who had been caught in adulty. They pointed out that the adulteress ought to be stoned according to the Law of Moses, and asked Jesus to give an opinion on the matter. The Lord stooped down, writes something with his finger in the dirt, and then said, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her” (Jn. 8:7).[1] He then resumed writing on the ground. One by one from oldest to youngest the accusers departed. Only the woman and Jesus were left. The Lord asked the woman whether or not the accusers were around to condemn her. The woman indicated none remained. Jesus then said, “Neither do I condemn you; go and from now on sin no more” (Jn. 8:11).
What a beautiful extension of mercy towards the woman caught in the sin of her own doing. Interestingly, the pericope[2] of the adulteress in John 7:53-8:11 is absent in the earliest New Testament manuscripts and among the manuscripts the passage is included, it is never found in the same location. Some manuscripts place the pericope after John 7:52, others after John 7:36, still others after John 21:25, and even others after Luke 21:38.[3]
Bart Ehrman, the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, finds the textual variants associated with the pericope of the adulteress to be an “enormous problem.”[4] He finds this to be just one out of over four-hundred-thousand other New Testament textual variants, which equates to more variants in the manuscripts than words in the New Testament![5] He points out the variants come as result of unintentional and intentional mistakes made by copyists and our extant ancient manuscripts are just copies of copies full of copyist errors, which were compounded every generation the text was reproduced.[6] “It is an enormous problem” writes Ehrman, “it is such an enormous problem that a number of textual critics have started to claim that we may as well suspend any discussion of the ‘original’ text, because it is inaccessible to us.”[7]
Ehrman is even perplexed about the pericope of the adulteress communicates:
To a careful reader, the story raises numerous questions. If this woman was caught in the act of adultery, for example, where is the man she was caught with? Both of them are to be stoned, according to the Law of Moses (see Lev. 20:10). Moreover, when Jesus wrote on the ground, what exactly was he writing? (According to one ancient tradition, he was writing the sins of the accusers, who seeing that their own transgressions were known, left in embarrassment!) And even if Jesus did teach a message of love, did he really think that the Law of God given by Moses was no longer in force and should not be obeyed? Did he think sins should not be punished at all?[8]
Lots of implied loose ends — missing adulterer, mystery about what Jesus wrote, miscarriage of justice. But here is the bottom line: “The favorite Bible story of Jesus’s forgiving the woman caught in adultery…doesn’t belong in the Bible,” concludes Ehrman.[9] Is all this true?
The issues related to the manuscripts and meaning of the pericope of the adulteress are hardly a “major problem” as Ehrman suggests.
The New Testament manuscripts. It is best to note that the “estimate of four hundred thousand variants among the New Testament manuscripts may be numerically correct, but what Ehrman doesn’t clearly communicate to his readers is the insignificance of the vast majority of these variants.”[10] Copyist used alternate spellings of words, alternated word orders (major problem in English but hardly so in Koine Greek), or definite articles (generally equivalent to the word “the”) comprise most of the known variants, but “such variants are readily recognizable and , in most cases, utterly noticeable in translations.”[11]
Textual critics can even get an idea of how the autograph read. It can be point out that “since changes creep into manuscripts at different times and in different places, it is possible to compare several manuscripts to discover when and where the error occurred,” and “the textual critic can then, in most cases, figure out the original wording of the text.”[12]
No vital information is lost copying process of the manuscripts. With the extant manuscript evidence, we can get the general idea of what was contained in the autograph, i.e., the original manuscript. The manuscript evidence weighs in favor of the pericope of the adulteress being a later addition to the New Testament; however, its inclusion is hardly an “enormous problem.” Nothing about John 7:53-8:11 distorts or alters in anyway the portrait of Jesus Christ painted in the panoply of the Scriptures.
A Living Memory.
John 7:53-8:11 very likely preserves an actual happening in the life of Christ. Neither a part of the original Gospel of John or even the Gospel of Luke, but still a memory of Christ kept alive in the Christian community until being written down and added into ancient copies of the New Testament.
Dr. Bruce Metzger, a renown textual critic, rejects Johannine authorship of the pericope of the adulteress, but still finds “the account has all the earmarks of historical veracity” and that “it is obviously a piece of oral tradition which circulated in certain parts of the Western church and which was subsequently incorporated into various manuscripts at various places.”[13] Merrill C. Tenney in The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, writes, “To say that it does not belong in the Gospel is not identical with rejecting it as unhistorical. Its coherence and spirit show that it was preserved from a very early time, and it accords well with the known character of Jesus.”[14] Likewise, New Testament scholar Dr. Craig Blomberg, states, “whereas this story of the ‘woman caught in adultery’ is again not at all likely to have been in the original Gospel of John, a good case can be made that it preserves an account of something Jesus actually did. It fits Jesus’ nature, teaching, and ministry, and may well have been handed down by word of mouth until some scribe copying the gospel decided it was too good to leave out.”[15]
What we have in the pericope of the adulteress is a living memory of an episode in the life of Christ preserved orally amongst early Christians which eventually got appended to the New Testament.[16] Neither penned by John nor Luke, it is still a cherished memory from the Lord’s earthly ministry worth keeping alive. The author of the Fourth Gospel even reminds t us: “Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (Jn. 21:25).
Jesus and the Mosaic Law. Nothing in the pericope of the adulteress suggests that Jesus thought the Mosaic Law ceased being in effect, neither did the Lord think it could be disobeyed, nor did he imagine sins could go unpunished. What we have in this account is Christ displaying justice and mercy, truth and grace, righteousness and compassion.
The scribes and Pharisees were putting Jesus to the “test” (Jn. 8:5). They were pushing for the execution of adulteress based on the letter of the law, as put forth in Leviticus 20:10 and Deuteronomy 22:22-24, but especially the line: “You shall bring them both out to the gate of that city, and you shall stone them to death with stones” (Deut. 22:24). Yet all first century Jews would have even been privy to the fact that “Rome had removed capital jurisdiction from Jewish courts, except for temple violations” and the test set by the scribes and Pharisees was to see “whether Jesus will reject the law, compromising his patriotic Jewish following, or reject Roman rule, which will allow them to accuse him to the Romans.”[17]
The absence of all parties involved in the scandal is noticeably peculiar. This clues us into the fact that something is less than forthright with the case which the scribes and Pharisees brought to the Lord. New Testament scholar Gray Burge explains:
The falsehood of the scribes and Pharisees is indicated in two ways. First, the Old Testament law on which they base their charges (8:5) required the punishment of both parties (Lev. 20:10; Deut. 22:22). The woman’s partner is absent. Was she set up? Second, Jewish law carefully stipulated what evidence needed to be in hand. No execution was possible without a solid case. Hence Sanhedrin records indicate judges who would even demand to know the color of the sheets on the bed. The law even distinguished intercourse from preliminary sexual contact. This extensive demand for evidence made adultery charges rare in Judaism since couples would naturally take precautionary measures to conceal themselves. However, the law was aware of men who, rather than divorce their wives for an illicit affair, chose to have them “set up” with witnesses for execution. (If a man thus executed his wife, he became heir to her property; but not if he divorced her.) But this self-interest was deemed morally wrong. If witnesses viewed preliminary coition, they were obliged to interrupt the act and prevent the greater crime. If, as we suspect, a man has discharged his wife thus and engineered testimony (“caught in the act,” 8:4) to execute her without warning her, the entire affair may appear legal but reeks of injustice. In Jesus’s eyes the entire situation would have been reprehensible.[18]
Still faced with the dilemma of whether or not to stone the woman, Jesus stoops down and begins writing with his finger in the dirt. What was written is never answered.[19] This is left a mystery. But it is uncanny that the divine finger that etched the Ten Commandments upon tablets of stone (Exod. 14:12-14; 31:18; Deut. 9:10-11) is now the finger of the incarnate Son of God scribbling on the ground during a confrontation about the Mosaic Law.
Jesus gets pass this dilemma in offering a third way. He says, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her” (Jn. 8:7). This way the law is neither abrogated nor ignored but upheld. Witnesses were to cast the first stone in an execution according Mosaic Law (Deut. 17:6-7; 19:15-21). Stones were never picked up by the witnesses, if there were any witnesses present on the occasion, but the accusers one by one from oldest to youngest walk away.
The Lord is Merciful: What the scribes and Pharisees missed is all that the Lord had taught us about being merciful. God gave the Ten Commandments etched upon tablets of stone with His own finger. He even spoke through Moses concerning the punishments for those who transgressed the law. This much is true. However, the Lord also taught us about mercy and how to be merciful.
Even within the Mosaic Law provisions were set for Israel’s tribunal to extend leniency towards the guilty. A ransom could be set for those guilty of capital offenses with the only exception being premeditated murder (Num. 35:30-34). [20] The court could rule that an adulterer and adulteress should pay a ransom instead of being executed. Yahweh moreover extended mercy towards those who committed premeditated murder as in the cases of Moses (Ex. 2:11-15) and David (2 Sam. 11-12; cf. Ps. 51). David says, “Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven | whose sin is covered” (Psa. 32:1).
Even if the woman was truly “caught in the act,” it was well within the prerogative of the Lord to extend mercy. He is really the one to pay the ransom on behalf of the woman so that she could go and sin no more. Jesus taught that “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mk. 10:45). Law is neither abrogated nor ignored. But Christ suffers on the sinner’s behalf. Paul writes, “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Rom. 5:6-8). Likewise, John tells use: “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 Jn. 2:1-2).
I believe the pericope of the adulteress is the living memory of an exceptional extension of divine mercy which happened during Jesus’ earthly ministry. It continued to be shared in the first century Christian community until bring appended to the New Testament. We are really blessed to have it in our English Bibles inserted between John 7:52 and 8:12. It is unlikely that the account was put to papyrus and parchment by the hand and quill of a writer under the inspiration of the Spirit, say John or Luke, but it is one of many real-life stories that encourage us to be better people through extending mercy. It is to the merciful that God is merciful (2 Sam. 22:6; Psa. 18:25; Matt. 5:7).
— WGN
Notes:
[1] All Scriptures cited from The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), unless noted.
[2] A pericope is “a paragraph or otherwise discrete section of writing, frequently the focus of exegesis. The term is often restricted to the literary units in the Gospels” (Matthew S. DeMoss, Pocket Dictionary for the Study of New Testament Greek [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001], 96).
[3] Cf. footnote for 7:53-8:11 in the English Standard Version.
[4] Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (New York: HarperSanfrancisco, 2005), 64.
[5] Ibid., 89-90.
[6] Ibid., 57-58.
[7] Ibid.,58.
[8] Ibid., 64.
[9] Ibid., back cover.
[10] Timothy Paul Jones, Conspiracies and the Cross: How to Intelligently Counter the Ten Most Popular Theories that Attack the Gospel of Jesus (Lake Mary, FL: Frontline, 2008), 74
[11] Ibid. 74
[12] Ibid., 79.
[13] Bruce Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (Germany: United Bible Socieities, 1971), 221.
[14] Merrill C. Tenney, The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, vol. 9, ed. Frank E. Gaebelein (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1981), 89.
[15] Craig Blomberg, Jesus and the Gospels: An Introduction and Survey, 2nd ed (Nashville, TN: B&H, 2009), 84.
[16] For further discussion on the reliability of the biblical manuscripts and the science of textual criticism, cf. Hank Hanegraaff, Has God Spoken? Proof of the Bible’s Divine Inspiration (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2011), 48-56.
[17] Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993), Jn 8:4–5.
[18] Gary M. Burge, The Baker Illustrated Bible Commentary, ed. Gary M. Burge and Andrew E. Hill (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2012), 1131.
[19] Early church fathers had various interpretations of Jesus stooping down to write upon the ground. Jerome (c. 347-420) speculated that Jesus was listing the sins of the woman’s accusers (Against the Pelagians 2.17). Bede the Venerable (c. 672/673-735) indicated that the one about to pardon the woman just happens to be the one who inscribed the Ten Commandments with His finger upon stone by the action of the Holy Spirit (Homilies on the Gospels 1.25)
[20] Old Testament scholar Walt Kaiser explains: “There are sixteen crimes that called for the death penalty in the Old Testament: kidnapping, adultery, homosexuality, incest, bestiality, incorrigible delinquency in a child, striking or cursing parents, offering a human sacrifice, false prophecy, blasphemy, profaning the sabbath, sacrificing to false gods, magic and divination, unchastity, the rape of a betrothed virgin, and premeditated murder. In each case, where the evidence was clear and beyond a reasonable doubt, the death penalty was demanded.
One major distinction was drawn, however, between the penalty for premeditated murder and penalties for the other fifteen crimes on this list. Only in the case where someone had lain in wait to kill with malice and forethought does Scripture specify that the officials were forbidden to take a ransom.
The word ransom comes from a root meaning “substitute.” The only fair inference from Numbers 35:31, then, is that perpetrators of any of the other fifteen capital crimes could escape death by offering a proper ransom or substitute. In those fifteen cases, the death penalty served to mark the seriousness of the crime. It is important, however, to note that only God could say which crimes might have their sanctions lessened” (Walter C. Kaiser Jr. et al., Hard Sayings of the Bible [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1996], 170).
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