Table of Contents

Variants 3
Pericope of the Adulteress

Most modern translations include a twelve-verse narrative in the Gospel of John 7:53-8:11. Like the long ending of the Gospel of Mark, this constitutes a large block of text that was not in the earliest of surviving manuscripts. In fact, it does not first appear until the Codex Bezae from the 5th century.

This narrative is known by biblical scholar Daniel B Wallace as "my favorite passage that isn't in the Bible." It is one frequently quoted in church services as an example of forgiveness, and it had screen time in both The Passion of the Christ and the Bible Miniseries.

In this famous story, Jesus is outside the temple, and the Pharisees are trying to catch him in a trap: they drag out a woman caught in adultery, who would be sentenced to stoning by old Mosaic Law. Jesus quietly draws/writes in the sand then stands up and says, "Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” The crowd slowly disperses until only Jesus and the woman are left. When no one condemns her, Jesus says that he will not, either, and he tells her to go live a life without sin.

How did it originate?
Though this passage does not contain any actions that would break from those Jesus may have undertaken, the grammar and word choice are not the style of John. Over the past couple decades, biblical scholars have more closely tied it to Luke's writing style, but it does not appear in any of the oldest manuscripts for the Gospel of Luke (yet some newer ones do have it).

Unlike the Mark long ending, this passage does not seem to have simply come from sermon notes or an attempt to fill in textual gaps. The earliest known references to a similar passages are by Papias, a disciple of John in the very early 2nd century, and the Didascalia, a Christian treatise from around the year AD 230. The current debate is that they both seem to have drawn from source material that Luke used when composing his gospel. It is possible that he cut it from the final autograph when evidence that it really happened was not backed by solid evidence, yet his original notes may have survived from some time.

Why is it still included?
Since there is still debate as to the origin, the teams behind the modern translations are reluctant to completely drop the passage. They do, however, include notices (either footnotes or large-blocked text) that the passage is not in the earliest manuscripts or that it has "floated" to different locations in the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Luke.

What would its removal change?
There are plenty examples of both forgiveness by Jesus and of the Pharisees trying to catch Jesus in a legalistic trap (which always fails) throughout the gospels, so the removal of this passage would change nothing from a dogmatic view. In fact, none of the textual variations ever found between the nearly 6000 manuscripts, from single words to larger passages, change anything. This, along with the Mark Long Ending, just happen to be the two largest disputed passages by textual critics, so they receive the most attention.