Posted on 11/18/2021 8:41:53 AM PST by SeekAndFind
The account of the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53-8:11) has a textual history that makes heads spin. Michaels in her commentary on John [146] offers the details: It is not in the earliest manuscripts (with one exception); in those manuscripts where we do find it, it is not found in one place. Some have it at the end of John. Some put it after our John 7:36; one puts it after 7:44. Some have it in Luke, after Luke 21:38.
So what's happening here? Do we maybe have a bit of an otherwise rejected gospel, or an inauthentic story of Jesus, in our canon?
The answer to both questions is, probably not -- and it is important to see these, indeed, as two separate questions, despite a certain tendency to treat them as one. The story could easily have been authentic, yet made its way at first only into heretical gospels; heretics should certainly have wanted it to add a pretension of authenticity to their works. (Although, note well, we have no copy of a heretical or alternate gospel with the story.)
In this short essay, we'll discuss three questions. First, does the evidence point to this being an authentic account from the ministry of Jesus? Second, who wrote up this account? And finally, why wasn't it put in one of our canonical gospels to start with?
(This has been a source for endless speculation: That Jesus was writing the charge out as though for a Roman trial; that he was inscribing some passage from the OT, or even listing the sins of the accusers!)
Also slightly favoring authenticity is the fact that this story seems to be alluded to by some patristic texts. Eusebius indicates that Papias told a similar story of a woman accused before Jesus of many sins. The story also seems to be alluded to in the Apostolic Constitutions, and in the Syrian Didascalia of the third century, which tells bishops to deal with repentant sinners "as he also did with her who had sinned, when the elders set before him, and leaving the judgment in his hands, departed." (See Morris' commentary on John, 883, and Beasley-Murray's commentary on John, 143.)
In the process of composing his Gospel, Luke, following standard literary practice for the time, would have compiled notes which he later collected and collated into a full text. The pericope would be well designated as one of Luke's original "loose leaf" notes that didn't make the cut to the final gospel. Why? The pericope fits quite well in the context where it is sometimes placed in Luke (after 21:38). But it is also immediately before the Passion narrative.
Luke's Gospel is just about the right size for a typical ancient scroll, so the omission of this pericope from his Gospel may have been for a no less practical reason than that Luke saw that he was running out of writing room.
this article also assumes an even earlier manuscript does not exist that might include it....
I think the last line is almost spot on—
I think it was originally included, but ran the scroll to about 102% of capacity and some of the scribes asked to make copies demanded that something be cut, resulting in two manuscript traditions.
John is only at about 80% of scroll capacity (very rough estimate) so tacking the cut part onto the end of it made sense in terms of room, but not placement. One or two scribes tried their hands at finding a better home for it in John, and now it is where it is.
There are also many other passages regarding Jesus not condemning, saying all have sinned, but at the same time calling us to repent. So even if we were to learn this story was added it doesn’t change any of the teachings.
Typically the simplest explanation is the correct one.
Well that's inane.
Who is claiming access to all of "the earliest manuscripts"?
The lesson is we’re all sinners and that we should repent and sin no more. It’s in perfect keeping with the gospel message.
“It is not in the earliest manuscripts (with one exception)”
Well, then “It is not in the earliest manuscripts” is not true.
I thought the whole article was a little confusing.
My understanding is that Papias heard it directly from the Apostle John, passed it on, and later scribes included it.
Here’s a comment from this article (https://danielbwallace.com/2013/06/26/where-is-the-story-of-the-woman-caught-in-adultery-really-from/):
“Eusebius cited Papias (early second century, possibly a disciple of John) as referring to a story about a woman accused before Jesus — this might have been a reference to the Pericope Adulterae.”
Could this article be more poorly written and confusing?
I look at it this way: Could it have been ADDED from any non-apostolic source without having caused any controversy? If not, those who knew it was “added” affirmed that it was added for a valid reason, such as having existed in a well-attested, but now-lost folio.
??
Sometimes the ‘earliest’ manuscripts exist because they were considered wrong, with error, or bogus. Thus they were not used, and survived.
The most used ones got tattered and worn and did not survive as well.
I’ll just throw that in for consideration.
Oh I’m sure there’s a valid and interesting verbose explanation.
I’m just put off by the lead premise that “X doesn’t exist ... except where it does.”
Singularly unhelpful not to indicate which manuscripts. ALEPH? BET? p76? Your article sounds like the “oldest and best” no sense of Wescott and Hort.
Could this article be more poorly written and confusing?
Yes—did you see the story about the cop and the wild boars?
It’s sad that we miss the central theme of this event in the “pericope de adultera”—the “cut-out of the adulteress.” As her accusers said, she was taken in the very act.
But another person was engaged in that very act, too, wasn’t he? Not a word is spoken of him!
That person wasn’t “taken” in the very act, indeed was never alluded to, except very circumspectly in the words of Jesus.
This is highly suspicious. We focus on the woman’s sin. But the man who enticed her isn’t even searched for. We all judge her, even as the Pharisees attempted to get Jesus to judge her.
Yes, a big crew of the Pharisaic leadership dragged her before Jesus, having “caught” HER... in the very act!
How did they know she’d be where they came upon her en masse?
Adultery was a death penalty offense in those days. Wouldn’t she or anyone else have been more circumspect than to be found where a crowd of the authorities was likely to go?
Reason tells us the place would have felt quite secret and safe. Yet the scibes and Pharisees burst in on the two adulterers, knowing where and how it was going to happen. Shazam!
This shows the intense evil in the hearts of these privileged religious elites, an evil enflamed by things Jesus did, said and taught. He trashed “their” temple’s money-changing tables, and the handy sales pens of doves and lambs for sacrifice. He did this multiple times, if the scripture order is followed.
To this day Jewish writings of those days speak of “Miriam the daughter of Heli” (Jesus’ mom) as being tortured by perpetual hanging over hot flames, by fishhooks embedded into her breasts, and Jesus condemned to be perpetually boiled there, in heated excrement.
Today, about half of Jews are not religious, the rest either are strong believers in Tanach or only semi-religious, but holding fast their tradition. But the vast majority of these disparate Jewish people agree on one thing: They will not acknowledge Jesus as Messiah.
From Jesus’ ministry days, he was hated. This is why they preferred Barabbas to be released—a murderer, robber and insurrectionist—instead of Jesus, when Pilate gave them that “out” to save face while putting a scare into his pitiably brutalized prisoner.
The man who committed adultery with the woman brought to Jesus was very likely SENT to her, knowing her marital situation was unhappy, in hopes of luring her to sin, just as they later paid Judas, who’d grown weary of a Messiah who kept saying he would be killed by unholy hands and would raise himself from the dead.
Judas and all the disciples really, looked for hints of when Jesus would announce “his time had come,” and would lead men and angels against the foreign oppressors, establishing Jewish rule over the earth and a new era of prosperity and righteous living.
That fallen wife was used by them, endangered, and then simply thrown away, for the very purpose of silencing Jesus through a legal trap.
The woman’s accusers were all shocked when Jesus’ answer made clear he knew all the details of everyone who had a hand in that crime. They would have to assume he also knew the names of those who’d hatched the plan: The very top leaders among the “righteous elders.”
The gospel account mentions the elders were the first to file out of the crowd, not wanting more to be said about them. It was indeed highly embarrassing that Jesus showed them the mercy of not naming them, man by man.
But they feared in their hearts that he knew. Broken texts of this account sometimes leave out the all-important factor of their “hearts’ conviction” in the matter. They knew the jig was up. This was all the more reason to wait and take Jesus quietly in the dark, instead, when relatively few people would be privy to the capture.
The religious leadership sent agents to grab him on several occasions after this woman was so abased. But those arrests proved impossible for them.
Now we need to ask, why would Jesus, of all men, have been so ready to let this woman’s sin go? Didn’t Jesus warn approvingly of severe and just punishment until the guilty party should pay the “utmost farthing” of legal penalties?! (Matt. 5:26).
Not only was this woman enticed, entrapped and endangered for her life before a guy the learned doctors of the law described as an unlettered hayseed Galilean who presumed to be a judge of the socialite and credentialed “betters” among their company. But they were shown he knew their acts and thoughts.
It’s amusing to conjecture their likely assumption that he must’ve been being informed of their plans by a “mole” in their midst.
And still their hatred of him consumed them, and did so all the more as the rest of that chapter in John’s gospel clearly shows. Some Pharisees not involved in the “pericope de adultera,” kept themselves amid the people gathered to be taught by Jesus.
They began to heckle him from out of the crowd. When he spoke of his father who had sent him to the world (God), they asked “Where IS your father?” They later asked, “Who are YOU?!” and slyly said, “WE’RE not the ones born of fornication,” and “Say we not well you’re a Samaritan (thereby accusing his mother of being a miscegenating slattern) and that you harbor a demon?”
John’s gospel and his first epistle were likely the very first Christian texts tampered with by early enemies of the faith. We know this because in the first epistle, John, the writer, dwells at length on the topic of people who abandoned the Christian faith, and some who set up shop in a spirit of sophistication in religion, while denying John’s eye-witness accounts, and even banishing him from their churches, as was plainly discussed in perhaps the shortest Bible book, John’s 3rd Epistle.
Jerome, who was tapped by the Catholic Church to assemble an early, trustworthy collection of all the New Testament documents considered sacred, writing in A.D. 415 that he’d seen the pericope de adultera “in the Gospel of John and in many manuscripts, both Greek and Latin.” He included it into the Latin Vulgate.
But the “pericope” was argued about much earlier. In fact, in the 1920’s, when it became popular to attribute this Bible story to the spurious “Gospel of the Hebrews” many seminarians agreed the learned Eusebius in the early 300s A.D., cited the “Gospel of Hebrews” account in connection with accusations of nasty topics, leading those scholars to think that false gospel was the source of this story.
It was a classic “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” fallacy: “Because it occurred after the fact, it must have been caused by the fact.” Not so fast.
At the other end of the Mediterranean, Pacian was citing the Pericope as teaching about mercy.
In all of the history of this passage, has there been no one who looked at and wrote about its importance as an intended example of the hard injustice applied by some of the Pharisees when they thought it would achieve their evil goals?
Where was the missing other adulterer in this particular instance? Jesus wasn’t upholding some nebulous sort of mercy for a common crime of passion: He nailed his adversaries in a spectacular revelation of their evil hearts, and only he and they knew what he was talking about!
John included this story due to its importance in setting up the “hate-fest” that continued on through the rest of the passage, with Jesus being accused of being a bastard, because they didn’t have any Galilean record of his birth.
The early Christian writer Cyprian (circa mid-200s A.D.) said some of his own predecessor African bishops brooked no forgiveness via repentance over conjugal infidelity; zero tolerance, as it were.
You see, Christ went too easy on her!
Therefore, this story itself must be spurious.
But didn’t Christ go too easy on forgiving a heinous murderer as well? The thief that hung beside him on a cross, who could never make penance on earth for ANY crimes he committed. Shouldn’t that story have been left out of the Gospel too? And for the same reason: Too easy forgiveness!!
Especially so, since only one in four of the gospel writers even mention’s that criminal’s repentance, quite a minority! And Luke—the writer who mentioned it—wasn’t even an eyewitness like John and Matthew, and possibly Mark. Shouldn’t Luke’s account therefore be thrown out too?
Let’s not be so quick to take superficial evidence, presented without much alternative background material, as if it were truth.
Jesus is recorded in three separate places as saying, “My words shall not pass away.”
Every early text that excluded the “pericope in adultera” PASSED AWAY into disuse, and the faithful custodians of this portion of Scripture wore out thousands of manuscripts in its heavy use, and only texts that saw the very widest employment through all the literate world were KEPT in use, in three different regions: Africa, Europe and Asia.
The pericope persisted in all three, not sporadically reappearing “from the dead” from time to time, as many corrupted Greek and Coptic texts have done in recent centuries, but as the main texts of the faith. They never passed away.
Jesus gave us this sign for a reason. And the reason is getting clearer in our time. Think on it friends.
The account in Scripture was well known by the early Church, who cited it often and handed it down to us.
Check out http://www.tektonics.org/copycathub.php
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