Caught and Transformed: John 8

John 8:1-11 is a strange passage. Most scholars agree that it is not an original part of the Gospel of John.[1] While many scholars are unwilling to examine it in their commentaries,[2] some suggest it may have come from an early oral narrative about Jesus,[3] or may have been inserted as a preservation technique since some early texts insert it at the very end of John.[4] Christian churches generally consider it authoritative as scripture.[5] The relationship between Jesus and Moses, as it is brought up in by the scribes and Pharisees in the excerpt, fits well into the context of John’s gospel. In addition, the trial and transformation of the adulterous woman looks more like the extended healing or forgiveness stories in John than it does the brief exorcisms and healings of the synoptic gospels.

Little is known about the woman who is brought before Jesus. She is not given a name and the reader is not told where she is from. There are some things that can be deduced, however. First, it is likely she is a Jew, since the Pharisees would not otherwise be interested in her offence and punishment. Second, she is not a slave, since intercourse with a slave girl would result in monetary restitution, not stoning.[6] Third, she is guilty of the sin as charged and she does not argue her case in defense. Jesus acknowledges her sin at the end of the excerpt in 8:11 by adding “no more [μηκετι]”, that is, “again.”[7] Fourth, and aligned with this last assumption, she would have been either betrothed or married to a husband, in order to qualify for execution by stoning as the Pharisees claim.[8] To this end, the male adulterer is nowhere to be found.[9] Jesus must notice this but doesn’t mention it.

The fifth and most important deduction about the woman is that she feels guilty and repentant about her sin. This claim rests on one direct piece of textual evidence and one inference from the text. Though it is not given what inflection is in her only words in 8:11, nor is it explicit what facial expression or emotion she carries, if she had been anything but repentant, she would have escaped after the lowest ranked of the Pharisees and scribes. Even if she had proudly remained and arrogantly declared to Jesus and all the people in the temple, “No, sir”! she would have no reason to remain there awaiting Jesus’ response. Neither is Jesus a qualified accuser; Deut. 17:7 requires that the witnesses are the first to begin the execution and the context suggests Jesus was not a witness to the unlawful conduct.

Further supporting her sense of regret for her sin is what can be inferred from her psychological condition. She was literally “caught in the very act of adultery”[10] somewhere else and had to endure a walk to her death (she does not know about the ulterior function to test Jesus). She may not even be fully dressed,[11] and is in front of the entire community, πας ο λαος. She knows she is guilty. That she somehow miraculously escapes her allotted punishment when surrounded by authorities of the Law receiving Jesus’ green light to execute, must have been utterly transformative. She was not acquitted, but Jesus eventually dies on her behalf (as He did all of ours).

There is a tradition behind 8:9a that explains that Jesus’ statement is a direct conviction of the Pharisees and scribes and that they leave, “one by one, beginning with the elders” because they have a guilty conscience. There are several flaws with this tradition. Perhaps the source of this misinterpretation comes from scribes and copyists in the eighth and ninth centuries, who were unsatisfied with the visual account of the departure of the Pharisees and add to 8:9, “και υπο της συνειδησεως ελεγχομενοι [and by the conscience being convicted].”[12] Should this excerpt be able to stand alone, [13] that addition may lend itself well to the Christian idea that Jesus transforms everyone around Him, saving the woman from execution and converting the heartless Pharisees into repentance. Seated as it is in the Gospel of John, this interpretation leaves the problem that the Pharisees were not in fact transformed by their encounter with Jesus. They come back later and interrogate Jesus when He heals the blind man (9:13-34), attack Him at the festival of the Dedication (10:22-39), and eventually crucify Him (18-19). In 8:6, the only verse in this excerpt where the readers are allowed some inside information about character’s thoughts, it is obvious that the Pharisees are there to tempt, πειραζοντες, Jesus, “that they may be able to accuse [κατηγορειν] Him.” The scribes and Pharisees are consumed by their plot to kill Jesus that began in 5:16 and this plot continues intensifying throughout John.

The rhetoric of their question is formidable; the Pharisees are appealing to an earlier argument with Jesus. In 5:45b-47, Jesus tells the Jewish leaders, “your accuser [κατηγορησω] is Moses…if you do not believe what he wrote, how will you believe [my words]?”[14] Jesus is often forced to defend Himself to the Jews against the prominence of Moses,[15] but His goal is not to overthrow the Law of Moses. Instead, He is the both the fulfillment of Law of Moses and the curator of “grace and truth,” as John introduces it in 1:14.[16] Their question in 8:4-5 reverses Jesus’ own argument against Him by laying the interpretation of the law completely in the “teacher’s” [Διδασκαλε] hands. They do not give away any hint what they think or expect: He must choose either the Law or “grace and truth.” Michaels affirms that this trap is only on the basis of Jewish law and does not, as some scholars have postulated, attempt to trap on the basis that Roman law is at odds with Jewish law in regards to the power to execute.[17] That it is based on Jewish law alone in effect makes it all that much more sinister; this is not a case were devout Jews are seeking advice on how to carry out their Law given the political ruling group is at odds with them. It is a misuse of the very words God spoke to Moses by corrupt Jews, who further insult Jesus by appealing to His role as a “teacher.”

This writer expects that readers will not only recognize the heartless treatment of the woman [18] but also, by the sinister inquiry, will recall Deuteronomy 6:16, “Do not put the LORD your God to the test [ἐκπειράσεις][19] as you tested him at Massah.” It may even be possible that the writer hopes the readers have heard the temptation narrative given in the earlier Mark 1:12-13 where Jesus is “tempted [πειραζομενος]” by Satan, Matthew 4:1-11, where Jesus is “tested[πειραθηναι]” by the “Tempter [πειραζων],” or Luke 4:1-9 where Jesus is “tempted [πειραζομενος]” by the devil. In any case, the literary presentation of the Pharisees puts them in a light that is contra Jesus, to be seen by readers as directly offensive toward the Lord God in the flesh, dwelling among humans, a frame set up by the very opening of John.

The answer Jesus gives holds up the Law of Moses. He invites the execution as prescribed, with only one condition: the witness who is “without sin” is, in accordance with the Law, to begin the stoning. Michaels explains that this phrase, “without sin” refers only to the matter at hand and this condition is backed up by the Law in Deuteronomy 19:16-18.[20] It does not mean that the witness is without sin since birth, but that the witness is fair and honest in bringing the accusation of the current sin to trial. Jesus defends Himself (and the woman) by answering correctly according to the Law: execute in Lev. 20:10 and Deut. 22:22, by stoning in Deut. 22:23-24 and trustworthy witnesses are to begin the execution in Deut. 19:16-18. It is clear that Jesus has nothing more to say because he has returned to writing on the ground, having once again aligned His ministry with both the Law and “grace and truth” by assuming condemnation in her place at calvary.

The message of this excerpt is clear to readers. The woman was humbled by the judgment of her sin and was therefore able to be transformed. She walks away from the encounter with her sin forgiven and a valuable lesson learned while the Pharisees leave, one by one, just as tainted with evil as when they arrived. The Pharisees are so consumed by their contempt for Jesus that they are unable to accept Jesus’ confrontation of their sins here and elsewhere in John. The writer leaves the readers with the challenge to deflate their egos, as the woman did, in order to be capable of allowing their sins to be confronted.

[1] Bruce Malina and Richard Rohrbaugh, Socio-Science Commentary on the Gospel of John (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1998), 292.

[2] See, e.g., Raymond Brown, An Introduction to the Gospel of John, edited by Francis Moloney (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 40 n1: “I shall exclude from this discussion the Story of the Adulteress in 7:53-8:11”;D. Moody Smith, Jr., John,(Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999) only briefly notes the inauthenticity of the excerpt on 179 and notes its complex context on 217.

[3] David K. Rensberger, “The Gospel According to John,” in The Harper Collins Study Bible, edited by Harold Attridge (New York: Harper Collins 2006) 1830.

[4] Ramsey Michaels, The Gospel of John (New International Commentary on the New Testament), (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 2010), 494, n. 149.

[5] Malina and Rohrbaugh, Socio-Science Commentary on the Gospel of John, 292.

[6] Anthony Phillips,"Another look at adultery," Journal For The Study Of The Old Testament 20, (July 1981), 13; see Leviticus 19:20-22.

[7] Greek here and elsewhere from The Interlinear Bible: Hebrew-Greek-English, edited by Jay P. Green, Sr. (Peabody: Hendrickson 2014); One cannot rest any weight on Jesus’ answer to the Pharisees and scribes because in the rhetoric of his counterargument, it is not necessary that the woman was truly guilty for Jesus to win the exchange; Mark Edwards, John (Malden: Blackwell 2004), 90, cautions that some scholars cite 5:14 (healing the paralytic) in the case that “go and sin no more” does not necessarily signify an incrimination. R. E. Brown, The Gospel According to John v. 1 (New York 1966), cited in Edwards, John, 90, notes that the difference here is that a sin is alleged.

[8] Deuteronomy 22:22-25.

[9] Mark Edwards, John, 88; Everett Falconer Harrison, "The Son of God among the sons of men: VIII- Jesus and the woman taken in adultery," Bibliotheca Sacra 103, no. 412 (October 1946), 433-4.

[10] Anthony Phillips, “Another look at adultery,” 7: “in flagrante delicto,” Phillips cites Number 5:13.

[11] Id., at 15-17. Phillips’ article is contra H. McKeating, who ascertains that there are alternatives to execution, including stripping and lashing. It is with this in mind, or with being apprehended mid-intercourse, that one could plausibly conclude that she may not be fully clothed.

[12] Michaels, The Gospel of John, 499 n. 167; The King James version of the Bible is notorious for including this phrase. Most other Bibles omit this phrase.

[13] Id., at 494, concludes that because of the “clear link to a preceding narrative of some kind” in the first verse, the excerpt can only be “part of some Gospel somewhere.”

[14] “What I say” better as “my words,” in accordance with Greek; the writing on the ground may have some resonance with this verse.

[15] Christopher Maronde, “Moses in the Gospel of John,” Concordia Theological Quarterly 77, (2013): 23-44.

[16] Id., at 26-7.

[17] Michaels, The Gospel of John, 496: based on Pilate’s two commands that seem to acknowledge that Jewish leaders do have some power to execute.

[18] As Everett Falconer Harrison, "Jesus and the woman taken in adultery," 434, writes, “Could these men have stooped to such a depth of hardness and indelicacy that they bring this woman's sin into the open and publish it abroad in her very presence, unless they were goaded by a design so evil that it blinded them to a sense of propriety and kindness? How different was the conduct of Joseph on discovering that Mary, his betrothed, had conceived!”

[19] Septuagint (LXX), the translation the writer would likely have had. German Bible Society, academic-bible.com, s.v. “Deuteronomy 6:16,” www.academic-bible.com.

[20] Michaels, The Gospel of John, 498-9.