One of the most famous moral teachings involving Jesus and an adulterous woman didn’t become part of the Bible until at least a hundred years after the Gospel of John was written.
One of the most famous moral teachings of the New Testament is “Judge not lest ye be judged.” It’s a favorite with pastors and politicians alike, and no individual story so exemplifies this maxim as Jesus’ encounter with the woman caught in adultery in the Gospel of John. A woman "caught in the act" is brought to Jesus by the scribes and Pharisees. They ask him if she should be stoned to death in accordance with the law given by Moses. At first Jesus ignores them and writes on the ground. When the accusers continue to challenge Jesus, he does not take the bait. Instead he asks that the person who is “without sin” cast the first stone. Nobody condemns the woman and Jesus tells the woman that he does not condemn her either and that she should go and sin no more.
The problem is that this story wasn’t originally in the Gospel of John. It didn’t become part of the Bible until at least a hundred years after the Gospel of John was written.
The earliest manuscripts of the Gospel of John show no trace of the story. It’s simply not included in the text. The two earliest manuscripts of John (known as P66 and P75), which were written in the second and early third centuries, do not include it. Nor do the mid-fourth century books Codex Sinaiaticus and Codex Vaticanus, the earliest complete collections of the New Testament. So where did the story come from and how did it make it into our Bibles?
In the new book To Cast the First Stone: The Transmission of a Gospel Story (Princeton, 2018), scholars Jennifer Knust and Tommy Wassermanexplore the tangled and complicated history of this beloved story. In it they argue, as others do, that the story was introduced into the Gospel of John by a later interpolator sometime in the third century. Some other ancient authors refer to the story as part of different literary tradition, a lost ‘gospel’ known as the Gospel of the Hebrews. That interpolator presumably believed that the story was important and authentic and added it into the text of the Gospel of John. Looking at the manuscripts themselves it’s possible to watch that happen. One manuscript, Codex Sangallensis 48, leaves a blank space in John 7:53-8:11, the place where the story is usually found.
Though they are careful to point out that we don’t know for sure where the story came from or why it was added to the Gospel of John, Knust, an associate professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Boston University, and Wassermann, a professor of Biblical Studies at Ansgar Teologiske Høgskole in Norway, told The Daily Beast that the interpolation took place “in a context where Greek was used but Latin was also spoken, and probably because the interpolator thought it fit best into that Gospel.” They added that “we can only speculate about why John and not some other Gospel,” but mentioned several theories, including the prominence of stories about women in the Fourth Gospel. They also note the intriguing theory of New Testament scholar Chris Keith that, in addition to portraying Jesus as forgiving, the story also presents Jesus as able to write. Perhaps it was added, then, to combat the scandalous accusation that Jesus wasn’t fully literate.
“Once it was added,” they said “it made sense to many Christians to read it there.”
The story proved enormously popular. In part, Knust and Wassermann told me, because “[it] fits well within a number of stories and sayings that also highlight the forgiveness or rescue of women who either engage in sexual misconduct or are falsely accused of doing so.” But also because it is intrinsically interesting to people and can be read in a variety of ways.
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