The Adulteress Brought Before Jesus
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In some older manuscripts, it shows up in Luke.
The text from 7:52 to 8:12 is more natural and makes more sense with the story gone.
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Nick T
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This line of reasoning is really quite absurd. Religious mob violence is a very common phenomenon throughout history regardless of the particular laws of the religion or country involved.
Pakistan forbids murder and I'm pretty sure Sharia law requires a conviction in a Sharia court before any punishment can be carried out but that hasn't stopped fanatical mobs from stoning and killing perceived sinners and blasphemers, even if the accusations of adultery or blasphemy are tenuous at best. A mere glance at history will see that these are not isolated instances but rather relatively common occurrences in many highly religious societies regardless of the fact that no religion mandates or sanctions extra judicial violence in an official capacity. Often the authorities do not intervene unless they have a particular desire to save the acussed and I doubt for a 1st century Roman (or indeed even the local Jewish authorities) an adulteress (in this case) or christian (in the case of Stephen) who weren't even citizens were at the top of their priority list. Historical records such as that of Josephus, who records the killing of St James at the hands of a Jerusalem mob to the disapproval of many of the more educated jews of the city, testifies to the power of the mob.
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Nick T
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In response to the OP, I would say that this passage has traditionally been interpreted in a personal rather than a legal manner. That is to say the mob is not necessarily rebuked for acting according to law (which is you say they weren't) but rather because they rushed to judge and act against this woman in a personal sense.
This is why the "moral of the story" so to speak is that we as individuals are not to judge sinners, nor act against them, lest we fall into hypocrisy. It's not a commentary on whether the state as an institution can judge criminals in order to protect wider society.
This is why the "moral of the story" so to speak is that we as individuals are not to judge sinners, nor act against them, lest we fall into hypocrisy. It's not a commentary on whether the state as an institution can judge criminals in order to protect wider society.
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Well, it is actually, in many ancient manuscripts of the Gospel of John. Other ancient manuscripts omit it.
Augustine explains the situation as follows: "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."
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It could be absurd, if she was brought in by a mob. But she was not, was she? I find it incredible that learned and pious men would jeopardize their very souls for a traveling preacher by killing an adulteress without a proper trial.
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Never mind an adulteress; how about a king?
"Moreover Ahithophel said unto Absalom, 'Let me now choose out twelve thousand men, and I will arise and pursue after David this night: And I will come upon him while he is weary and weak handed, and will make him afraid: and all the people that are with him shall flee; and I will smite the king only: And I will bring back all the people unto thee: the man whom thou seekest is as if all returned: so all the people shall be in peace.'
And the saying pleased Absalom well, and all the elders of Israel."
...but I digress.
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These situations don't compare. I know what you are going for but I don't think we can compare people dragging a woman before a street preacher and people who have gained support attempting a coup.
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ViaCrucis
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That's actually a very common reading/interpretation of the text. The crowd that caught the woman in adultery were themselves guilty, they therefore had no moral high ground--Jesus calls them out on it, and they are forced to walk away.
-CryptoLutheran
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ViaCrucis
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I've never met anyone who has tried to use the story of the woman caught in adultery to say that we shouldn't have courts or systems of law by which to judge crimes.
Jesus isn't condemning courts or the rule of law by turning the issue back on the mob, He is exposing the illegality and injustice of the mob.
-CryptoLutheran
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Oh, I've heard people say the "cast first stone" thing when a person is accused of a crime or other misdeed.
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ViaCrucis
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I certainly don't doubt that, I've heard all sorts of weird out of context uses of Scripture. I've just never seen anyone try to exegete the text like that, it seems broken from the start.
There's certainly nothing in the text which indicates a condemnation of the rule of law or of courts of law.
-CryptoLutheran
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Yeah. I've seen it actually used to argue that the Torah law was fundamentally bad or something like that. But again, as soon as you turn it around on the person and ask why they are ok with their country having a code of law, they don't have a good answer except that it's "better" or something.
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he-man
he-man
The story of the adultress is a fabrication, inserted by someone at a much later date. The evidence against it is: . That א, (A), B, (C), (L), X, (Δ), 33, 131, and 157 omit it.
Grotius considered it as an addition to John’s Gospel from the hand of Papias or one of his friends and fellow disciples of John. Wettstein, Semler, Griesbach, and Wegscheider seemed to leave for it no place in Scripture. Lachmann omitted it from his text. It has been condemned as spurious by the great bulk of modern critics, even of different schools and on somewhat different grounds. Some have rejected it as a spurious forgery (see Hengstenberg, in loc.); Keim derives much the same conclusion from its supposed teaching.
The first Greek writer in the twelfth century (Euthymius Zygadenus) who in this portion of the Gospel refers to the passage distinctly says that from Joh_7:53 to Joh_8:11 the passage was not found, or it was obelized in the most accurate copies; wherefore, he adds, it was first a gloss, and then an appendix (παρέγραπτα, "written alongside of," καὶ προσθήκη, "added to"), and "a token of this is seen in the fact that Chrysostom had made no mention of it."
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Not true. A number of 2nd and 3rd century Christians refer to the story.
Augustine explains the situation as follows: "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."
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