Where did the Woman Caught in Adultery go?
No, I’m not asking where she went after Jesus said “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more” (John 8:11) This morning as I was reading John’s gospel on page 1376 of The Oxford Study Bible, REB version,1 I noticed that chapter 8 began with verse 12. I quickly checked a few other translations (ESV, NIV, NAS, NRS, NET, KJV) and they all had 8:1-11. Where there are textual questions, you might expect to see square brackets around the text in question and/or a footnote (see Mark 16:9-20), but here it was just gone. A little digging revealed this:
Conspiracy of Silence –
In most every scholarly commentary John 8:1-11 is a source of genuine controversy. Conservative scholars agree that this incident is part of the original manuscript; but they can’t agree on where it belongs in the Gospel record. It seems that at the end of the first century or in the early part of the 2nd, some overly zealous Christians thought that this account made Jesus look soft on sin. As a result, there was a widespread conspiracy to expunge it from the record. “The reason probably is that in a day when the punishment for sexual sin was very severe among Christians this story was thought to be too easily misinterpreted as countenancing un-chastity.”2 Inspiration preserved the text, but some feel that it originally belonged to Luke’s Gospel.3
The idea that the verse numbers, or horror of horrors even which gospel, might be in question as to the proper placement of this passage could be a cause of great anxiety among us moderns. We forget that chapter and verse is a pretty late addition, as in the 1500′s for our English bibles. The controversy, to my mind, is more revealing of our problem over a “soft on sin” Jesus than which page, if any, this story belongs on.
The REB does include this story. It places it at the end of John’s gospel with this footnote:
This passage, which in most editions of the New Testament is printed in the text of John 7:53-8:11, has no place in our witnesses. Some of them do not contain it at all. Some place it after Luke 21:38. others after John 7:36, or 7:52, or 21:24.
I’m glad the story wasn’t missing after all. It’s an important story. Too bad that it was so embarrassing that it got shoved to the end of John’s book. It is kind of clumsy to place it there, but then again, to close John’s gospel with “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more” is more poignant than reminding us that there’s more to Jesus than fits in a bunch of books.
- Suggs, M. Jack, Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, and James R. Mueller. The Oxford Study Bible: Revised English Bible with Apocrypha. Oxford University Press, USA, 1992. ↩
- Leon Morris, The Gospel According to John revised, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 779. ↩
- Resolving Moral Conflict by Marcus Merritt. ↩
Tags: Scripture
Good thoughts on this Saturday morning Stu. I didn’t know about this textual variance, and find it very interesting, as you point out, that the decision is made based on “being too soft on sin.”
Greetings Stu,
Recently a dissertation was published that investigated this very passage, and its placement (and, in some cases, its absence) in the manuscripts. Drop me an e-mail and I can tell you how to get a copy. In the meantime, regarding Mark 16:9-20, I welcome you to visit my presentation that begins at
http://www.curtisvillechristian.org/MarkOne.html
Yours in Christ,
James Snapp, Jr.