It is one of the best-known scenes in the gospels. The scribes and Pharisees bring a woman caught in adultery, stand her in the middle of the Temple court and ask Jesus whether she should be stoned. He writes on the ground with his finger. Then he says: “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her” (John 8:7). They leave one by one, the eldest first.
Most printed Bibles still carry it. Most of them also put it in brackets, or add a footnote, because the oldest copies of John do not have it.
What the manuscripts show
Scholarly consensus
The passage runs from John 7:53 to 8:11. It is absent from the two earliest papyri of John, P66 and P75, both usually dated to around 200 CE. It is absent from Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, the two great Greek Bibles of the fourth century. The first Greek manuscript to carry it is Codex Bezae, copied around 400 CE.1
And when it does turn up, it does not always turn up in the same place. Some manuscripts put it after John 7:36. Others put it after John 21:25, at the very end of the gospel. A group of manuscripts known as family 13 puts it in Luke, after Luke 21:38.2
A story that wanders between two gospels and three positions is a story that copyists were trying to find a home for. Bruce Metzger, who edited the Greek text most translations are made from, put it bluntly: “The evidence for the non-Johannine origin of the pericope of the adulteress is overwhelming.”3
Where it came from
So where did it come from? The honest answer is that the evidence runs out, and I would rather say so than pretend.
There are hints of an older story. Eusebius, writing in the early fourth century, says Papias told “a story about a woman accused of many sins before the Lord, which is contained in the Gospel according to the Hebrews.”4 A third-century church order, the Didascalia Apostolorum, tells a version of it to bishops as a lesson in mercy. So the story circulated before it entered John. Whether it is a memory of something Jesus did is a separate question, and the evidence does not settle it either way.
Minority view
Augustine had his own theory. He suggested that some men had cut the passage out of their copies because they feared it would give their wives licence to sin.5 Metzger did not accept it, and the pattern of the evidence runs the other way: a passage added, in different places, by different hands.
Why it matters on this site
The passage is a clean case of what the Qur’an means when it treats the scripture of the People of the Book as something that carries the revelation alongside other things. Here is a text that a reader of John in the year 300 would never have seen, now read aloud in churches as the Word of God.
I am careful here, because the Qur’an passes no verdict on this story, and I will not invent one for it. The site sorts gospel material by the measure, and on that measure this passage is unclear: nothing in it conflicts with the Qur’an, and nothing in the Qur’an confirms it. What the manuscripts show is that it was added to John, and that is a fact about the book, which is open to anyone to check.
Islamic position
There is a curious echo in the hadith. Al-Bukhārī records that a group of Jews in Medina brought a man and a woman accused of adultery to the Prophet, hoping for a lighter judgement than their own law gave. He asked what the Torah said. One of them covered a verse with his hand. ʿAbd Allāh ibn Salām told him to lift it, and the verse of stoning was underneath.6 The Qur’an comments on the same kind of case: “But why do they come to you for judgement when they have the Torah, in which is God’s judgement?” (5:43).
Both stories have the same shape. An accused woman, a crowd that wants an answer, and a prophet asked to rule on the law of Moses. In the Medina report the Prophet holds them to what their own book says. In the John story Jesus turns the question back on the accusers. I find it striking that each tradition kept a story in which a prophet is set a legal trap and refuses to be used by it.
What a reader should take from it
Read the passage. It is a good story, and its last line, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more” (John 8:11), says something true about repentance that the Qur’an also says many times (for example 39:53).
But read it knowing what it is: an early story that found its way into John long after the gospel was written. The rest of John deserves the same question, as the page on John and the Jesus who speaks of himself asks it. The Islamic Dilemma assumes that the four gospels are one fixed text the Qur’an either affirms or denies. John 7:53-8:11 shows that the text itself moved.
For how this compares with the way the Qur’an was handed on, the Abrahamic Religions journal has a piece on the transmission of scripture in all three traditions.
Allāhu aʿlam.
Sources
- Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd edition (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994)
- Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, book 3
- Al-Bukhārī, al-Ṣaḥīḥ
Notes
- Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd edition (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994), pages 187-189. ↩
- Metzger, Textual Commentary, page 189. ↩
- Metzger, Textual Commentary, page 187. ↩
- Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.39.17. ↩
- Augustine, De adulterinis coniugiis 2.7.6. ↩
- Al-Bukhārī, al-Ṣaḥīḥ, Kitāb al-manāqib, 3635. ↩