Jesus and the Adulteress

I

The opening verses of chapter eight of John (with 7,53) present one of the most puzzling episodes in the New Testament. There is widespread agreement that the pericope was not part of the original Gospel. It is missing from the earliest manuscripts¹. In the manuscripts in which it does appear it is usually in this position, but sometimes after John 8,36 or John 8,44, or even after Luke 21,38. The language also seems not to be consistent with the general pattern in John². Still, the view of Bruce Metzger is one widely held: "At the same time the account has all the earmarks of historical veracity. It is obviously a piece of oral tradition which circulated in certain parts of the Western church and which was subsequently incorporated into various manuscripts at various places"³. In presenting a new interpretation of the pericope I will leave open its genealogy⁴. My concern is with its meaning. My mention of the episode’s genealogy should not mislead. I am not concerned with its historicity or otherwise. Whether such an episode actually occurred or not, the anomalies or troubling features in the tradition equally require an explanation.

I believe it would be generally accepted that the episode has never been adequately explained. I should like to begin with listing the troubling features.

II

1. The woman is accused of adultery; we are told she was caught in the act (v. 4), yet she has not been tried for the crime, nor apparently will she be. Jesus asks if no one has condemned her (v. 10), and she replies, "No one, sir" (v. 11).

2. Although she has not been tried or condemned, Jesus accepts that the woman is guilty. "Go your way, and from now on do not sin again", he says (v. 11).

3. We are not told of the evidence for this adultery. Adultery, with its penalty of stoning to death, was very difficult to prove. Two eye-witnesses were required who could testify to the unequivocal nature of the act, to the time when and the place where it occurred⁵.

4. The witnesses are remarkably absent from the scene: they do not appear in front of Jesus, and according to Jesus (and contrary to Scripture) it is not they who should cast the first stone.

5. Where is the adulterer? If the woman was caught in the very act of adultery, the man would also most probably have been caught. And the man was equally liable to the death penalty; Lev 20,10: "If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death"⁶.

6. Why was the woman brought by the Pharisees and scribes to Jesus? We are told that it was "to try him" or "to tempt him". What can this mean? The usual explanation⁷ is that this is connected with the Sanhedrin’s loss of power to inflict the death penalty. I am not convinced that the Romans had taken from the Sanhedrin the power to impose the penalty of death⁸, but let us take the worst case scenario for me and assume they had. The argument is, I suppose, that if Jesus said the woman should be stoned, then he would offend the Romans, and be in danger. This approach to the issue I find unconvincing. Why on earth would the Romans be angered if Jesus, a private individual, claimed that an adulteress should be stoned? He would not even be insisting that a verdict of the Sanhedrin should be enforced. There had been none.

Even more to the point, on this approach the Pharisees are putting themselves, not Jesus, at risk with the Romans. It is they who claim that the law of Moses that they follow imposes the penalty of death by stoning. They even said "Moses commanded us (h(mi=n) to stone such women". The supposed scenario and its explanation are entirely implausible.

7. The outcome, when Jesus says, "Let anyone who is among you without sin be the first to throw a stone at her" (v. 7), is psychologically unreal. The normal reaction would be for everyone to grab a rock, not to

disappear (v. 9). To some at least the words would seem to be a challenge. Actually, this translation of The New Revised Standard Version is not quite accurate. More accurate, I believe, would be "Let the one who is among you without sin ...".

8. Why is the person without sin singular, not plural, and what sin is he free from? All sins? Or one relating to adultery or to this adultery? And, in the rabbinic tradition, it is the witnesses who have to throw stones first⁹.

9. What is the purpose of Jesus writing on the ground? Why is the act of writing stressed — we are twice told of it, at v. 6 and again at v. 8 — when we are not told, and cannot discover, what he wrote?¹⁰

10. Why was this an issue on which to test Jesus? What had it to do with him?¹¹

With all these problems the representation in the pericope cannot have historical accuracy. Reasonably, Duncan Derrett claims that parts of the text "cannot be understood as they stand"¹². Are we to follow Derrett in thinking the woman was caught in a trap set by her husband who thus was at fault for not preventing a crime?¹³ Or should we, like Ulrich Becker, strip away texts of the pericope as secondary¹⁴. Again I wish to emphasize that the oddities of the pericope are in the tradition. Their existence in the tradition has to be accounted for, independently of any question of historical truth.

III

For my explanation of the episode I wish to make two assumptions that I hope will not be judged unreasonable. My first assumption is that the episode as it was originally had a point. My second assumption is that the troubling elements of the episode should illuminate that point. They are survivals¹⁵. A satisfactory explanation of the original tradition should cause these elements to be less troubling. The main troubling points are again that proof of adultery is declared, the woman has not been tried, no one condemns the woman, the adulterer does not appear, the supposed witnesses have no role, Jesus is asked his stance vis-а-vis the Mosaic law, his response is ambiguous, "Let the one who is without sin throw the first stone". Above all perhaps, we are expressly told that the Pharisees and scribes were out to trap Jesus.

I would put the episode in a specific historical context. Jesus had declared that a woman whose husband had divorced her and who remarried committed adultery (Matt 5,31-32; 19,3-9; Mark 10,2-9.) The woman brought to Jesus was, I suggest, a remarried divorcйe. By Jesus’ own claim she was thus an adulteress, but not for the Pharisees. Moses allowed divorce, Jesus forbade it. The trap of the Pharisees for Jesus was this: the law of Moses demanded death by stoning for an adulteress; Jesus claimed remarried divorcйes were adulteresses though Moses did not, and neither did the Pharisees. Would Jesus follow his argument to its logical conclusion and impose death on a remarried divorcйe? The scribes and Pharisees brought the woman to Jesus very precisely to test him.

We can see now why there was no trial before the Sanhedrin. For the Pharisees there had been no crime. The problem of evidence of adultery and of the difficulties of proof disappears. For Jesus, the remarriage of the divorcйe was itself adultery. Besides, we are no longer concerned with a trial and its practical problems. We are confronted rather with a theoretical issue: namely, would Jesus make a divorcйe who remarried be liable to suffer the Mosaic penalty for adultery?

Jesus wrote on the ground but we are not told what he wrote. The purpose of the writing was to give time for reflection, to put distance between the charge and Jesus’ response. What Jesus wrote is thus of no consequence, with no need to record it. The time for reflection was for both Jesus and the Pharisees.

Jesus’ "The one among you who is without sin, let him cast the first stone at her" (v. 7) is typical of him. Jesus is on the attack against the Pharisees. "The one without sin" is ironic. The Greek a)nama/rthtoj is singular. This does not mean "anyone". He is singling out an individual. The person he means is the ex-husband: for the Pharisees the husband had not sinned in divorcing his wife, for Jesus he had. For the Pharisaic position we have Mishnah Gittin 9.10:

a. The House of Shammai say, "A man should divorce his wife only because he has found grounds for it in unchastity,
b. "since it is said, Because he has found in her indecency in anything (Dt. 24:1)".
c. And the House of Hillel say, "Even if she spoiled his dish,
d. "since it is said, Because he found in her indecency in anything".
e. R. Aqiba says, "Even if he found someone else prettier than she,
f. "since it is said, And it shall be if she find not favor in his eyes (Dt. 24:1)"¹⁶.

Thus, at least for the supporters of the school of Hillel (of around 70 BC to AD 10) and Rabbi Akiba (of around 45-135), the divorcing husband needed no excuse for his act, hence was without sin. It would be unreasonable to suppose that their position was not also held even earlier. Much early evidence is lost¹⁷. Jesus’ attitude is different, expressed most notably at Matt 5,31-32:

"It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce’. But I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery".

A husband who divorces his wife, except for unchastity, causes her in the eyes of Jesus to commit adultery, i.e. when she remarries.

We can go further. We know from Matt 19,3-9. that this was an issue of contention between Pharisees and Jesus: The Pharisees put the question of the lawfulness of divorce in the context of testing Jesus. In fact, the Greek peira/zontej, is the same in Matt 19,3, Mark 10,2, and John 8,6, "tempting (him)"¹⁸. Also, in all three passages the issue is framed in terms of a supposed disagreement between the law of Moses and the stance of Jesus. This is precisely a tricky issue to bring to Jesus. Indeed, it is the issue on adultery for the Pharisees to bring before Jesus.

C.K. Barrett¹⁹ cites with approval a then unpublished paper of David Daube in which Daube suggests that: "in its original context, the slogan ‘He that is without sin among you, let him be the first to cast a stone at her’ is directed specifically against the unfair treatment of women by men and their laws; and that it is representative of a strong movement in Tannaitic Judaism". If this view of Daube is plausible, as it is to me, it would even be strengthened if in the pericope the one without sin who had to cast the first stone was the divorcing husband. In Jesus’ eyes, it was he who caused his ex-wife to commit adultery.

Not only that, but if Jesus’ challenge to cast the first stone was not to the crowd in general but to the ex-husband we can understand why there was no response but the crowd melted away. Moreover, for the husband too, his ex-wife would not have committed adultery: he could not cast the first stone.

John 8,6, indeed, is very specific. The scribes and Pharisees were "tempting" Jesus so "that they may have [reason] to accuse him". What was to be the ground of this intended accusation? It cannot have been, I have already claimed, an accusation to the Romans that he was seeking to have the Sanhedrin put the woman to death, a power that the Romans had supposedly taken from the Jews. Rather, the accusation would be before the Jews themselves, that Jesus was seeking to alter the law of Moses. Such an accusation could be seen as plausible. Indeed, one part of the double-headed charge against Stephen — and which led to his lynching after an abortive trial before the Sanhedrin — was precisely that Jesus was speaking "blasphemous words" against Moses (Acts 7,11) and the law (Acts 7,13), and changing the customs which Moses delivered to the Jews (Acts 7,14). The innocent-seeming question, but meant as a trap, to Jesus about the adulteress was full of danger to him.

Jesus’ response discomfited the scribes and Pharisees: "They, having heard, and convicted by conscience, went out one by one, beginning from the older to the very last" (John 8,9). Jesus, as elsewhere when faced with a legal issue, sidesteps the question²⁰. In this instance his adversaries are defeated because Jesus, not responding directly to the question or giving a legal opinion, transfers the possible crime of the adulteress to the sin (in Jesus’ view) of her sinless husband who divorced her. It should be remembered that in Jewish law divorce proceeds from the husband.

IV

It has long been recognized that there is a relationship of some kind — connected with an attempt to make the law apply less unequally to women — between our passage and rabbinic interpretation of the ancient ordeal of a wife whom a husband suspected of adultery which he could not prove²¹. Num 5,11-31 prescribed that the priest make a mixture of water and dust from the floor of the tabernacle, and have the woman drink it and swear an oath, and if she were unfaithful she would suffer a gruesome fate. The rabbis interpreted this to mean that only if the husband were guiltless would she suffer the fate from the curse²². Since Johanan ben Zaccai did away with the institution and this must have been before the destruction of the Temple in AD 70 (or Johanan’s action would have been pointless), then the rabbinic debate and interpretation must have been earlier still²³.

This modification of the import of the curse will have been present to the minds of the onlookers who put Jesus to the test. The woman was to suffer only if the husband was guiltless. Jesus’ reply was thus very much directed towards the sinfulness (in his view) of the husband who divorced. Jesus could only confute the Pharisees and scribes by the use of Scripture and its interpretation. He relied on the new rabbinic interpretation of Num 5,30-31: "And if the man is clear of sin, then the woman shall bear her sin"²⁴. On this view, if the man was not clear of sin, the woman would not bear her sin.

V

I have left aside to this point the answer to the basic question, "Where is the adulterer?" My reason is that his absence from the scene is the strongest evidence that the pericope as it stands is unrealistic. If she were caught in the act then so would he have been, and the penalty for both was the same. He, too, should have been brought before Jesus. His absence must be explained. My answer is that for the Pharisees there was no adultery, no catching in the act, and no adulterer. Their only interest was to test Jesus: would he say the woman was an adulteress to be stoned? Of course, no doubt, they could also have claimed the new husband was an adulterer. But why should they? There was no need for that for the purposes of the test²⁵.

VI

The trap set for Jesus by the question did contain a very particular danger. King Herod had married Herodias who was a divorcйe, having been married to Herod’s half-brother. Jesus’ response to the adulteress would be interpreted as his response to Herodias. John the Baptist preached repentance for the remission of sin. The account in Mark 6,17-29 is instructive. Herod, we are told, imprisoned John "for Herodias’ sake". John then specifically told Herod that it was not lawful for him to have his brother’s wife, and Herodias hated John as a result²⁶. Consequently she had him beheaded. Jesus, who had been baptized by John would be seen as his follower, and would arouse the same suspicions in Herodias. Indeed, it appears from Mark 3,6 that the supporters of Herod were deeply hostile to Jesus even before the Pharisees were²⁷.

We now see a further reason for the crowd melting away. No one would throw the first stone when the adulteress represented Herodias²⁸.

VII

One issue remains. For my thesis to have plausibility I must explain why the pericope never states that the adulteress, caught in the act, is in fact a remarried divorcйe. The most plausible explanation is also the simplest. In the early traditions about Jesus there was recorded this episode. It presented problems that would be blurred in oral repetition. First, Jesus would appear more loving and forgiving if the context were generalized. Second, Jesus would not appear to be faced with a strong moral and legal dilemma of his own making if the context were generalized. Such a blurring may appear in Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiae 3.39.17, when he cites Papias (who was bishop of Hierapolis in the first half of the second century) as having "expounded another story about a woman who was accused before the Lord of many sins, which the Gospel according to the Hebrews contains". We have no other account of a woman being accused before Jesus so probably the episodes are the same. If so, John’s version of an accusation of adultery is blurred into an accusation of many sins²⁹. The original version may well have been specific. The scribes and Pharisees may have brought the woman to Jesus and said, "Teacher, this woman was divorced and remarried, and so is caught in the very act of adultery...".

My approach also helps with a well-known difficulty. The episode is regarded as having existed in the early tradition and as giving the authentic voice of Jesus, even if the episode is not historically accurate. Quite so. The original version must indeed be early because the penalty for adultery was changed to strangulation in the early second century³⁰. But then there is a problem with the fact that the pericope is not in the early manuscripts, and its location in John varies with the manuscripts that do contain it, and it even appears in Luke. This would suggest some discomfort with the episode, an unwillingness to ignore it yet a reluctance to accept it. But if my "Sitz in Leben" of the pericope is acceptable the difficulty disappears. The pericope shows Jesus as having great magnanimity of spirit. He also won the debate with the Pharisees. He does in every debate. But here there is a difference from his other confrontations. His victory here was only in the short term. Even those who were not Pharisees would realize with a little reflection that Jesus was caught in a trap he himself had made. The law of Moses was quite explicit on the penalty for adultery. Jesus had widened the scope of adultery. He could not deny the death penalty for adultery — he does not — unless he renounced the Mosaic punishment or disclaimed his own stance on divorce or adopted the rabbinic interpretation of the ordeal in Num 5,11-31. His supporters sought to control the matter by removing the specifics of the case — a remarried divorced woman — to make him generally merciful: but they still felt discomfort, and were unsure of how to deal with the situation. The problem for the early Christians, separated now from Judaism, was the greater in view of their hostility to divorce, and their strict attitude to sex outside of marriage.

I wrote above that Jesus’ victory here was only "in the short term". But I need to be more specific. The problem for his response would appear only when early Christianity began to split from Judaism. Jesus’ response was very correct and subtle according to the Pharisaic tradition. I have claimed elsewhere that though Jesus was contemptuous of Pharisaic teaching he could also at times use sophisticated legal argument³¹. Here, I believe, we have another example.

Hesitation to accept my thesis will reasonably continue because there is no direct textual evidence that Jesus was represented as considering the specific situation of a remarried divorcйe. I understand. Arguments from silence are scarcely attractive. But I would invite the following considerations. First, the pericope, which cannot in origin have been as it now is, contains very serious problems for understanding what was going on. On my approach these problems disappear. Second, we can now, for the first time I think, understand the difficulties in the manuscript tradition: was the episode, historical or not, however reformulated, to be treated as canonical? Third, we can empathize with the reasons for the deletion of the immediate context.

The problem of the pericope can be simply stated. The facts in the tradition cannot be as set out³². The episode must date from an early tradition. Early Christians were both troubled by the episode and deeply attached to it. My scenario gives, I suggest, a plausible early setting, and would explain why the pericope was changed yet retained.

On the interpretation I am suggesting the pericope is quite remarkably neat. The scribes and Pharisees could reasonably claim that the woman was caught in the very act of adultery. Though for them there was no adultery, there was ipso facto for Jesus when a divorcйe remarried. The Pharisees did not produce the witnesses requisite for proof of adultery. From the stance adopted by Jesus witnesses were superfluous: the adultery was flagrant. The phrase in v. 4, e)p' au)tofw/rw| "in the act", is an exaggeration, but very understandable.

One final point. Once Jesus was believed to have taken a stance on divorce as in Mark 10,2-9 and Matt 5,31-32; 19,3-9, then a debate such as I postulate for the beginning of John 8 is almost inevitable. Jesus had not come to abolish the law but to fulfill; not one letter, not one stroke would pass from the law until all was accomplished (Matt 5,18-19). Moses permitted divorce and remarriage (Deut 24,1-4). Jesus opposed divorce. He regarded remarriage as adultery. This issue he debated with Pharisees (Mark 10,2-9; Matt 19,3-9). Moses commanded that adulteresses be put to death (Lev 20,10; Deut 22,22). The mode of execution was stoning. Obviously then, it would be of great interest to the Pharisees to know if Jesus would both follow the law of Moses that adulteresses should be stoned to death and his own teaching that to remarry was to commit adultery. The context in which I site the pericope is both plausible and one likely to find its way into a tradition about Jesus³³.

SUMMARY

Many factors contribute to a re-examination of the story of the adulterous woman (John 7,53–8,11). This essay responds to these factors by its defense of the suggestion that the woman is a re-married divorcйe, at fault not with the Mosaic Law, but with the teaching of Jesus on divorce.

Notes:

^* For my beloved mentor, David Daube, died 24 February, 1999.

¹ For the manuscript history see, e.g., U. BECKER, Jesus und die Ehebrecherin (Berlin 1968) 8-13; B. METZGER, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (Stuttgart ²1984) 187-188.

² See, e.g., J.D.M. DERRETT, Law in the New Testament (London 1970) 156-157; C.K. BARRETT, The Gospel According to St. John (Philadelphia ²1978) 589-590; P. PERKINS, "The Gospel According to John", NJBC, 965; METZGER, Textual Commentary, 188; L. MORRIS, The Gospel According to John (Grand Rapids 1995) 778-779. A particularly fine account of the problems of origins, canonicity and meaning of the pericope is R.E. BROWN, The Gospel According to John I-XII (New York 1966) 332-338.

³ METZGER, Textual Commentary, 188.

⁴ I do agree, of course, that meaning and context are much intertwined. But since I am proposing a fresh interpretation I prefer not to complicate matters by offering a hypothetical genealogy for the pericope. Still, see the final section of this paper. Some commentators on John leave the whole pericope out of account: e.g., J. ASHTON, Understanding the Fourth Gospel (Oxford 1991).

⁵ Susanna (chapter 13 of the Greek Daniel: mid-second century); mSan 5; bSan 30a. For an extreme analysis of the difficulty of proof see DERRETT, Law, 160-163; cf. MORRIS, John, 781.

⁶ See also Deut 22,22.

⁷ See, e.g., BARRETT, St. John, 591-592; PERKINS, "The Gospel According to John", 965; MORRIS, John, 782.

⁸ A. WATSON, The Trial of Jesus (Athens, GA 1995) 100-112; with slight modifications, id., Jesus: a Profile (Athens, GA 1997) 85. Still, I would accept that at least later the Romans claimed sole authority to try secular capital crimes, and they might include adultery among these though it was not capital under Roman law: Origen (in the translation by Rufinus) on Romans 6,7. But it should be noted that Jesus’ "Let the one among you that is without sin be the first to throw a stone" implies that in fact an adulteress was liable to be stoned by the Jews. Moreover, the very clear implication of Origen’s Letter 14 is that still in the third century Jews were putting criminals to death in accordance with the law though without Roman authority: see, e.g. D. DAUBE, The New Testament and Rabbinic Judaism (London 1956) 306-307; WATSON, Trial, 110-111.

⁹ Deut 17,6-7; mSan 6.4; cf. DAUBE, New Testament, 304-305, 308-310; id., Collected Works I: Talmudic Law (Berkeley 1992) 167-171.

¹⁰ For one ingenious attempt to discover what he wrote see DERRETT, Law, 176-182; see also BROWN, Gospel, 333-334, and the works he cites.

¹¹ But the first nine Greek words of the verse, corresponding to "But they said this, testing him, that they might accuse him", are omitted from a few manuscripts: see METZGER, Textual Commentary, 189. However the statement is then made elsewhere in the pericope.

¹² DERRETT, Law, 158.

¹³ DERRETT, Law, 161-165.

¹⁴ BECKER, Jesus, 165-168.

¹⁵ This time, regarding the troubling elements as additions is no solution.

¹⁶ The translation is that of J. NEUSNER, The Mishnah. A New Translation (New Haven 1988) 487.

¹⁷ See, e.g., DAUBE, New Testament, 166-169; C. CARMICHAEL, The Story of Creation (Ithaca 1996) 39, n. 16.

¹⁸ Cf. BARRETT, St. John, 591.

¹⁹ BARRETT, St. John, 590. The paper has since been published: see infra my section IV.

²⁰ See, e.g., Mark 2,23-28 and 7,6-13, and the discussions in A. WATSON, Jesus and the Law (Athens, GA 1996) 37-41, 55-56.

²¹ See above all, D. DAUBE, "Biblical Landmarks in the Struggle for Women’s Rights", Juridical Review 23 (1978) 177-197, at 187-197, and the works he cites. An abridged and revised version is in D. DAUBE, Appeasement or Resistance (Berkeley 1987) 29-31.

²² SifNum 5,31; jSot 24a; bSot 74b. For details of the argument see DAUBE, "Landmarks", 189-190.

²³ Cf. DAUBE, Appeasement, 30.

²⁴ See DAUBE, Appeasement, 30.

²⁵ There is, of course, a strong element of sex discrimination: it is the woman, not the man, who is humiliated before Jesus. If we leave specifics out, then to produce the woman, not the man, is more dramatic. Adultery by a woman has always been regarded as more serious than adultery by a man.

²⁶ Mark 6,16-29.

²⁷ For the argument see WATSON, Jesus, 23-30.

²⁸ We do not know where the episode is envisaged as having taken place. If the pericope was supposed to occur outside the lands of Herod, the first stone-thrower would still be at risk.

²⁹ See, e.g., MORRIS, John, 779, n. 5.

³⁰ See DAUBE, "Landmarks", 188; BECKER, Jesus, 166-167.

³¹ WATSON, Jesus and the Law, 103-110.

³² This is so whether the confrontation was an historical occurrence, or simply envisaged.

³³ I hesitate to offer an explanation of Jesus’ "go and sin no more" in v. 11. There is more than one possibility. The simplest is perhaps that the words were added to the tradition once the pericope was removed from its original context of the remarriage of a divorcйe.