Shayne Looper: Should this story be in the Bible?

Why is it that some Bibles, including most modern translations, leave out John 7:53-8:11, the story of the woman caught in the act of adultery? If the events in this story did not actually take place, why did the King James Version, the Douay-Rheims, and other older translations include it? But if the story is true, if the events it narrates really happened, why do newer versions exclude it?

The explanation is that newer translations of the Bible make use of older — closer to the time of Christ — manuscripts than previous translators had available to them. The earlier manuscripts had not yet been discovered when St. Jerome translated the New Testament into Latin, or when the so-called “Received Text” was published in 1633.

The story of Jesus’s forgiveness of the adulterous woman does not appear in many of those earliest texts. We do not find a Greek manuscript that includes it until the Fifth century. The story does not appear in the earliest Papyri or in other important early texts.

In later texts that do include it, one sometimes finds asterisks or other indicators that denote a section of text was missing from earlier manuscripts. These marks suggest that even the ancient scholars who included the text knew there was a lack of manuscript evidence for it.

Besides this, there is evidence in the story itself that it comes from a different author. There are many words used in this short text that John never uses elsewhere. One out of every thirteen words in this text is never otherwise used by John, which makes it extraordinarily unlikely that he would have written it.

Furthermore, the story itself seems out of place. It interrupts the flow of the narrative between John 7:52 and 8:12. It looks as if it were inserted after the fact by some well-meaning scribe, who thought the story too important to pass up.

It seems impossible to me that John could have written this story, but that does not mean that the events in it did not take place. There are good reasons to believe that they did. For one thing, even before this story shows up in biblical manuscripts, church fathers like Jerome, Ambrose, and Ambrosiaster refer to it.

Another reason to accept the authenticity of the story, though not its authorship, can be found within the story itself. As C.S. Lewis pointed out, either the story of Jesus “doodling with his finger in the dust … is reportage … or else, some unknown writer in the second century, without known predecessors or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern, novelistic, realistic narrative.”

Ancient writers simply did not include seemingly irrelevant details in a story without explaining them. That style of writing would not be popularized for more than a millennium. It is far more likely that someone saw Jesus using his finger to write on the ground and reported what he saw.

Nerds like me can get so caught up in the arguments for and against the authenticity of the text that we miss the truth it contains. This picture of Jesus is consistent with the other Gospels’ portrayals of him as the “friend of sinners.” He did not, according to his own statement, come “into the world to condemn the world but to save it.”

The Jesus who says, “Neither do I condemn you,” reveals the character of the God “who is not willing that any should perish.” This theme is so much a part of John’s Gospel, it is easy to see how a scribe might attribute it to that apostle. Later in this same Gospel, John records Jesus as saying, “I did not come to judge the world, but to save it.”

Not only is the Jesus of this story consistent with his portrayals in other Gospels, but he also models the kind of response that he required from his own followers. He taught them not to judge. He also taught them to forgive. He further taught them that sin — adultery is one example — is a terrible thing that should be avoided at all costs. Each of these elements of Jesus’s instruction finds expression in this gem of a story.

— Shayne Looper is a writer and speaker based in Coldwater, Michigan. Contact him at salooper57@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Shayne Looper: Should this story be in the Bible?