Text and translation
Was the story of the woman caught in adultery part of John's Gospel?
The story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery, "let him that is without sin cast the first stone," is absent from the earliest manuscripts of John.
The passages
So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.
John 8:7
She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.
John 8:11
The problem
Among the best-known stories of Jesus, this one is missing from the oldest manuscripts of John, including the early papyri P66 and P75 and the codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. The earliest Greek manuscript with the story is Codex Bezae (fifth century). Many later copies include it, but some place it elsewhere: after John 7:36, at the end of John, or after Luke 21:38. The style and vocabulary differ from John. No Greek Father comments on it before the twelfth century.
What believers and scholars say
It is authentic John. Some defend the passage as part of the original Gospel, and suggest it was removed by scribes uncomfortable with Jesus's leniency. The evidence is thin, since the removal would have to be widespread and very early.
It is a genuine early tradition, added later. Most scholars, including many evangelicals, think the story is not by John, but that it is old and may preserve a real episode. Papias (in Eusebius) mentions a story about a woman accused of many sins, possibly the same. It circulated orally and was written into the margins of copies.
What the displacement shows. Knust and Wasserman argue that the variety of positions in the manuscripts shows a story that was loved and copied while the church debated how to handle it. They say that the wanderings of the story are themselves part of its history.
Modern Bibles. The NIV, ESV and others print the passage with a note or in brackets. The King James Version prints it without a break.
Where this leaves it
The story is probably old and not from John's pen. Whether that matters depends on how a reader sees the canon: as the text as recovered, or as the text as received. Churches have kept the story in their lectionaries for centuries while saying plainly that it is not in the earliest copies.
Sources and further reading
- Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (United Bible Societies, 1994), on John 7:53–8:11.
- Jennifer Knust and Tommy Wasserman, To Cast the First Stone: The Transmission of a Gospel Story (Princeton University Press, 2019).
- Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John I–XII, Anchor Bible 29 (Doubleday, 1966), Appendix.
- Chris Keith, The Pericope Adulterae, the Gospel of John, and the Literacy of Jesus (Brill, 2009).