The pericope adulterae
Curiosity killed
Shipmate
in Kerygmania
This comes out of the Honest Interpretation thread in Purgatory, from a bit before the link, @MPaul was using the story of the woman taken in adultery, to argue that Jesus was following the Law, John 7:53-8:11. My interest isn't so much with @MPaul's argument, but the other tangent on this thread, which was discussing the inclusion of this pericope. This Bible Gateway link prefaces the passage with:
Quoting the most relevant parts of that discussion:
@Leo and @mousethief then got into a side discussion as to how this could be an inserted text:
To which I replied:
I'm still interested in the question as to whether this passage be included in John? How reliable is its inclusion? Has it been incorporated from a non-canonical gospel as suggested in the Wikipedia article?
The earliest manuscripts and many other ancient witnesses do not have John 7:53—8:11. A few manuscripts include these verses, wholly or in part, after John 7:36, John 21:25, Luke 21:38 or Luke 24:53.
Quoting the most relevant parts of that discussion:
It is in the Bible. It was referred to as early as the 3rd century. Augustine referred to it. Jerome said it was in early codices but obviously we cannot check that.Curiosity killed wrote: »And again, arguing from the story of the woman taken in adultery is arguing from a later insertion into scripture that may or may not have happened and may or may not relate to Jesus as the earliest manuscripts and many other ancient witnesses do not have John 7:53 to 8:11 (Bible Gateway). It is known as the pericope adulterae, see discussion here.
Can one cast doubt on its authority because it is omitted from some early manuscripts when it is actually in about 900 others? ( my Thompson Chain reference says this). It does seem clear that it was inserted and the experts seem to believe it was not put there by John.
But..it is in the Bible and though there are questions over how it got there, it has retained its place. It does seem to be agreed that it was based on a strongly held tradition that was factual.
Hoskyns says: (Sir Edwin Hoskins..The Fourth Gospel..1947 Appendix..P566)
“The external evidence seems to demand that the story was current in the very early days as an authentic episode in the ministry of Jesus, but that it was not contained in any of 5he four gospels which cam to be regarded as canonical though it was contained in that literature which lay on the fringe of these gospels “
John is actually a very different doc to the Synoptics as we all know. It is not, as far as my studies suggest, intended as a consecutive narrative, more a collection of encounters to establish Jesus’ divine identity and mission.
@Leo and @mousethief then got into a side discussion as to how this could be an inserted text:
mousethief wrote: »Mistakenly added a whole pericope? That makes no sense. Say rather they were copying from a different original than you want them to have done.It was copied wrongly - the copyist made a mistake: missed or added words.mousethief wrote: »What makes a manuscript "wrong"?
Yes - just as everything in Mark 16 after v. 8 is addition.
To which I replied:
Curiosity killed wrote: »The Bible Odyssey site (link) gives an overview that matches my understanding of the history of this passage:Interestingly enough, the earliest manuscripts of the Gospel of John do not contain this beloved passage. Indeed, the first manuscript to contain the story is from around 400 C.E. Around 4% of Greek manuscripts that include the passage place it in locations other than John 8:1-8:11; the earliest of these is from around the ninth and tenth centuries C.E. This perplexing manuscript history fuels debates about whether the story was originally in John’s Gospel and, if so, where. The majority of scholars believe a later Christian scribe inserted the passage into John’s Gospel at John 8:1-8:11 and that the alternate locations are due to the effects of later liturgical reading in what is known as the lectionary system.
And according to the Wikipedia article (link):andThe pericope is not found in most of the early Greek Gospel manuscripts. It is not in P66, and it is not in P75, both of which have been assigned to the late 100s or early 200s. Nor is it in two important manuscripts produced in the early/mid 300s, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. The first surviving Greek manuscript to contain the pericope is the Latin/Greek diglot Codex Bezae, produced in the 400s or 500sAccording to Eusebius of Caesarea (in his Ecclesiastical History, composed in the early 300s), Papias (circa AD 110) refers to a story of Jesus and a woman "accused of many sins" as being found in the Gospel of the Hebrews, which might refer to this passage or to one like it.
There is lots more in the Wikipedia article, including discussion on the lectionary theory, why this passage should or should not be included in John, and a whole lot more.
I'm still interested in the question as to whether this passage be included in John? How reliable is its inclusion? Has it been incorporated from a non-canonical gospel as suggested in the Wikipedia article?
Comments
One of the documents I read suggested that it may have come originally from the Gospel of the Hebrews which was a disputed book of the early church, and was not included in the canon when that was agreed.
How and why it ended up in John's gospel is baffling to me. It clearly doesn't belong there. But I tend to regard it as "authentic" as any other story about Jesus during Holy Week.
In the Gospel of the Hebrews? So reckoned Eusebius.
Then C5 Peter Chrysologus preached on it.
If we now concede the essence of all scholarship on the matter to be trumped by Wikipedia, that is like saying that encyclopaedia britannica is trumped by talk back radio.
The story of the adulterous woman is not proven by any of the possibilities postulated to be unauthentic as an incident in Jesus life. In fact the evidence we have suggests the opposite.
Neither has anyone shown that John did not write it. The gospel of John is composed entirely of material selected to demonstrate Jesus credentials as ‘son of God’. There is no claim to consecutive chronology of his ministry here. An example is the cleansing of the temple. John places this story at the beginning. Othe gospels put it at the end. John is easily the most symbolic and livery gospel. By placing it at the start, John illustrates a bigger truth. Jesus came to ‘cleanse God’s house’.
The story of the woman is also strategic. It brings To a head the issue of his relationship to Moses and John makes a theological point by its inclusion. Now if he included it later after reflection..after initial copies were in circulation, but while this long lived apostle was still alive..such an action is in character as the entire gospel is a conflation of stories calculated to make his theological points.
Incidentally, Jn 21 itself also appears to have been added at a later date. Jn 20 reads as though it was the original end of the gospel. However, in style and ethos, both Jn 1-20, and Jn 21 read as though they were written by the same person, as though Jn 21 was added as a sort of afterthought.
My own view, for what it is worth, is that I think this pericope is rightly in the gospels, and is authoritative but I am agnostic as to where it should be put or who wrote it.
However, if we are speculating here, it is possible John himself added it later as apparently, Papias https://gotquestions.org/Papias-of-Hierapolis.htmlrefers to it maybe that is possible as he was C60-160 and maybe his life overlapped with John himself but as we cannot really know, I am inclined to take the passage as read. As the whole gospel is a non sequential compendium, this would not be out of character.
No He doesn't.
Sorry, the capitalized 'He' is in appropriate. And BroJames goes some way to correcting himself.
As I posted 15 up: "According to Eusebius of Caesarea (in his Ecclesiastical History, composed in the early 300s), Papias (circa AD 110) refers to a story of Jesus and a woman "accused of many sins" as being found in the Gospel of the Hebrews, which might refer to this passage or to one like it. "... From your friend, my friend, everybody's friend, Wiki.
Eusebius said Papias said the Gospel of Hebrews said Jesus said.
does really make you wonder why it's such a highly regarded piece of scripture.
It is clear from the closing comments in the Gospel of John that there WERE lots of stories about Jesus floating around. Some (most?) were probably "apocryphal" in the sense of being secondary or tertiary generation. But it is perfectly plausible to think that some "genuine" stories continued to float around outside the canonical gospels for some time and may have ended up in one or more of the apocryphal gospels.
This is what I think we have in this pericope.
(The great Biblical scholar Joachim Jeremias published a small book in the 1950s, called "Unknown Sayings of Jesus". If you can get your hands on a copy, it is worth having. In it, Jeremias looked at 21 sayings/stories which he regarded as having good claims for being considered as "genuine" as anything found in the canonical gospels. I don't know if anyone has done anything similar in recent years.)
Because ignoramusses like me loved it. Saw the transcendent emotional genius of Jesus' divine nature in it, unaware of the common knowledge among divines, who never mention from the pulpit, or even in print (that's you Bell, McLaren), that it's synthetic.
My own fault for not reading the small print.
St. Paul records Jesus as having taught that “it is more blessed to give than to receive” - something which doesn’t appear in any of the (subsequently written) canonical gospels.
Your assertion that the adultery story is fake has no more backing than my assertion that it was a true record which, for reasons now lost, didn’t initially make it into one of the canonical gospels.
I have no problem agreeing that the gospel writers drew from stories that were part of the oral tradition, and adapted and arranged those stories to fit the overall message they wanted to convey. And that’s one reason it doesn’t bother me to think that may have happened later with this pericope.
I just wouldn’t call that “making up” the story. I’d call that drawing from and adapting stories in the oral tradition.
Unless @Martin54 was trying to say that the story was made up, in the sense of being a fabrication, when it first became part of the oral tradition.
In like manner, the stories of Lear and Richard III existed, but Shakespeare made up plays based on those stories.
It's such a beautiful, profound story it was the last towering instance of the fingerpost for me. I tear up writing that. Nearly, it was premonitory. The story of the story is... singular. One can hope Augustine was right: 'Certain persons of little faith, or rather enemies of the true faith, fearing, I suppose, lest their wives should be given impunity in sinning, removed from their manuscripts the Lord's act of forgiveness toward the adulteress, as if he who had said, Sin no more, had granted permission to sin.', De Adulterinis Conjugiis.
From the link, it was well formed around 250, but not 110: "According to Eusebius of Caesarea (in his Ecclesiastical History, composed in the early 300s), Papias (circa AD 110) refers to a story of Jesus and a woman "accused of many sins" as being found in the Gospel of the Hebrews, which might refer to this passage or to one like it.
In the Syriac [originally Greek] Didascalia Apostolorum, composed in the mid-200s, the author, in the course of instructing bishops to exercise a measure of clemency, states that a bishop who does not receive a repentant person would be doing wrong – "for you do not obey our Savior and our God, to do as He also did with her that had sinned, whom the elders set before Him, and leaving the judgment in His hands, departed. But He, the searcher of hearts, asked her and said to her, 'Have the elders condemned thee, my daughter?' She said to Him, 'No, Lord.' And He said unto her, 'Go your way; neither do I condemn thee.' In Him therefore, our Savior and King and God, be your pattern, O bishops.""
As mousethief said, my paraphrase, all of the gospels were synthesized, it's a question of degree.
So if The Gospel to The Hebrews contained text they wanted to canonise, then maybe adding it to John was the way to include it.
From https://www.traditioninaction.org/religious/f005rp.htm
Every sermon I've ever heard on this passage seems to include some pointless speculation on what he could have been writing. This speculation is pointless because the only possible answer is We Don't Know. Which raises the question: So why mention it then?
To my mind, the most credible explanation is that the person who reported this story to the Johannine Community said he'd seen Jesus writing stuff down because he had in fact seen Jesus writing stuff down, and he didn't say what Jesus wrote down because he couldn't read. Whereas I think if you'd invented the story to make some kind of Theological Point, you would make the meaning of his writing stuff down more explicit.
And I also think it’s a fascinating detail that’s hard not to speculate about. It’s tantalizing. I see no harm in speculating about it as long as it’s remembered that we can’t know for sure, and as long as the speculation is a side issue that doesn’t obscure focus on the real import of the story.
I think one of the best ones was a shopping list.