Jesus and the woman taken in adultery (or the ) is a passage (pericope) found in John 7:53–8:11 of the New Testament.
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 depart, realizing not one of them is without sin either, leaving Jesus alone with the woman. Jesus asks the woman whether 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. Nevertheless, many scholars "conclude that the story does record an actual event in the life of [Jesus]." Most scholars believe it was a well-known story circulating in the oral tradition about Jesus, which at some point was added in the margin of a manuscript. 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). However, its originality has been defended by a minority of scholars who believe in the Byzantine priority hypothesis. The passage appears to have been included in some texts by the 4th century and became generally accepted by the 5th century. It is likewise considered by many to be pseudepigraphical.
The passage John 7:53–8:11 in the New Revised Standard Version reads as follows:
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"E.g., Britni Danielle, "Cast the First Stone: Why Are We So Judgmental? ", Clutch, 21 February 2011 and "go, and sin no more"E.g., Mudiga Affe, Gbenga Adeniji, and Etim Ekpimah, "Go and sin no more, priest tells Bode George ", The Punch, 27 February 2011. 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's ability to write, otherwise only suggested by implication in the Gospels, but the word (egraphen) in John 8:8 could mean "draw" as well as "write".An uncommon usage, evidently not found in the LXX, but supported in Liddell & Scott's Greek-English Lexicon (8th ed., NY, 1897) s.v. γραμμα, page 317 col. 2, citing (among others) Herodotus (repeatedly) including 2:73 ("I have not seen one except in an illustration") & 4:36 ("drawing a map"). See also, Chris Keith, The Pericope Adulterae, the Gospel of John, and the Literacy of Jesus (2009, Leiden, Neth., Brill) page 19.
According to the Hebrew Bible (also known as The Old Testament), the punishment for adultery was the death penalty by stoning. However in this time period (1st century CE), only the Roman Government was lawfully allowed to impose the death penalty; thus the Rabbi's punishment for an adulteress was divorce and the forfeit of her marriage contract (known as a ketubah), and not the death penalty.
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),S. P. Tregelles, An Introduction to the Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy Scripture (London 1856), pp. 465–468. 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).Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, Stuttgart 2001, pp. 187–189.
19th-century text critics Henry Alford and F. H. A. Scrivener suggested that the passage was added by John in a second edition of the Gospel along with 5:3.4 and the 21st chapter.
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 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, NJB, NIV, GNT, NASB, ESV). Since the passage is accepted as canonical by Catholics, however, some Catholic editions of these critical translations will remove the brackets while retaining the footnote explanation of their uncertainty (e.g. RSV-CE/2CE and ESV-CE); others, like the NRSV-CE, nevertheless retain the brackets.
Textual history 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.
Eastern Christianity 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. (3rd German edition, translated by George Ogg), at p. 121. (6th German edition, translated by George Ogg), at p. 138. However, according to the later writer Agapius of Hierapolis, Papias wrote a treatise on the Gospel of John, where he included the story within the Gospel itself. Possibly the earliest evidence for the existence of the pericope adulterae within the Gospel of John is from the 2nd century Protoevangelium of James, which contains the words "οὐδὲ ἐγὼ [κατα]κρίνω ὑμᾶς" (neither do I condemn you) in Greek, which are identical to the text of John 8:11. Other parallels between this story within Protoevangelium and the Johannine pericope adulterae include: (1) a woman is accused of adultery, (2) the accusation is made by the Jews, (3) the woman is brought by a crowd to stand before a religious figure, (4) the accused woman is presented to the judge for a ruling and (5) both accounts are a part of a "confrontation story". However, it is not certain if the author borrowed directly from the Gospel of John or from a now-unknown document such as the Gospel according to the Hebrews.
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.The Early Church Fathers Volume 7 by Philip Schaff (public domain) pp. 388–390, 408 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. It is also shortly mentioned by the 6th century author of the Greek treatise "Synopsis Scripturae Sacrae". Among the early Greek attestations of the pericope adulterae are the 6th century canon tables found in the Monastery of Epiphanus in Egypt. Although fragmentary, the manuscript likely contained the story of the adulteress and contained its own section number. Evidence of its existence within some Egyptian manuscripts additionally comes from two ivory pyxides dated to around the 5th or 6th century, which depict the story of the adulteress.
Within the Syriac tradition, the anonymous author of the 6th century Syriac Chronicle, called Pseudo-Zacharias Rhetor mentioned the translation of the pericope Adulterae into Aramaic from a Greek manuscript from Alexandria. The story of the adulteress is also found in manuscripts of the Palestinian Syriac Lectionary, including MS "A" (1030ad), MS "C" (1118ad) and MS "B" (1104ad).