Disputed authenticity of John 7:53-8:11

cloudyday2 · Feb 2, 2016

Here is the Wikipedia article

Bishop J.B. Lightfoot wrote that absence of the passage from the earliest manuscripts, combined with the occurrence of stylistic characteristics atypical of John, together implied that the passage was an interpolation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_and_the_woman_taken_in_adultery

So what do you believe about these verses?
- Are they an interpolation?
- If they are interpolation are they history or fiction?
- If they are fiction do you find them useful for inspiration?

There are other likely interpolations we could discuss, but this episode is interesting because so many people find it inspirational.

Hammster · Feb 2, 2016

I don't believe them to be inspired, and should not be included.

ewq1938 · Feb 2, 2016

cloudyday2 said:
Here is the Wikipedia article

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_and_the_woman_taken_in_adultery

So what do you believe about these verses?
- Are they an interpolation?
- If they are interpolation are they history or fiction?
- If they are fiction do you find them useful for inspiration?

There are other likely interpolations we could discuss, but this episode is interesting because so many people find it inspirational.

What God allowed in the bible is meant to be there.

peepnklown · Feb 2, 2016

American Standard Version (1901), Revised Standard Version (1946), New American Standard Version (1963), New International Version (1973), and the New King James Version (1980) all have marginal comments that basically say most of the ancient authorities omit John 7:53 – John 8:11 and those who contain it vary a lot from each other and contain variations of the text and the most reliable early manuscripts omit it.
I wonder how many Christians read the marginal comments in their versions.
I think based on its poor manuscript evidence we can most likely say it was added in at a far later time (at least for now).
Oh, and John 7:53 – John 8:11 does not appear in the Coptic, Syriac and the Armenian Bibles.
It does not appear in the Codex Vaticanus, the Codex Sinaiticus and later Greek manuscripts omit it.
It does appear in the Textus Receptus but, don’t get me started on how defective the text is.
I have a few good books I can recommend on the subject if needed.

cloudyday2 · Feb 3, 2016

ewq1938 said:
What God allowed in the bible is meant to be there.

Do you think it is historical or simply a useful fiction? Lightfoot believes it is historical even though it is an interpolation.

ewq1938 · Feb 3, 2016

cloudyday2 said:
Do you think it is historical or simply a useful fiction? Lightfoot believes it is historical even though it is an interpolation.

It involves Christ, so it is historical.

Commander Xenophon · Feb 3, 2016

I believe it to be genuine, taken from another lost document of the life of our Lord and inserted into St. John. Its acceptance and liturgical use by the early Church gives it authority, in the same way that the Longer Ending of Mark receives such authority.

cloudyday2 · Feb 3, 2016

Commander Xenophon said:
I believe it to be genuine, taken from another lost document of the life of our Lord and inserted into St. John. Its acceptance and liturgical use by the early Church gives it authority, in the same way that the Longer Ending of Mark receives such authority.

I imagine it to be a popular oral story that somebody decided to write-down in the margins of their manuscript of John. Then when that manuscript was copied, the scribe simply inserted the story in-line.

I suspect the story is fiction, but probably a lot of the other gospel stories are fiction too.

ChetSinger · Feb 3, 2016

cloudyday2 said:
I imagine it to be a popular oral story that somebody decided to write-down in the margins of their manuscript of John. Then when that manuscript was copied, the scribe simply inserted the story in-line.

I suspect the story is fiction, but probably a lot of the other gospel stories are fiction too.

My conclusion also is that it was an oral tradition that found its way into the gospels, sometimes in Luke and sometimes in John.

I'm not going to write it off as fiction. The gospels certainly don't include everything Jesus did during his ministry. And the lessons it teaches are compatible with the rest of the gospel. So I'm content to accept it as historical.

fatboys · Feb 3, 2016

ChetSinger said:
My conclusion also is that it was an oral tradition that found its way into the gospels, sometimes in Luke and sometimes in John.

I'm not going to write it off as fiction. The gospels certainly don't include everything Jesus did during his ministry. And the lessons it teaches are compatible with the rest of the gospel. So I'm content to accept it as historical.

Hold the phone here. I thought you guys believed that every scripture found in the bible was God breathed. Xplain

Hammster · Feb 3, 2016

fatboys said:
Hold the phone here. I thought you guys believed that every scripture found in the bible was God breathed. Xplain

We believe that the original autographs were God-breathed.

ChetSinger · Feb 3, 2016

fatboys said:
Hold the phone here. I thought you guys believed that every scripture found in the bible was God breathed. Xplain

I do believe scripture is inspired by God. How is my belief that this periscope was an oral tradition (of a genuine historical event) that was later written down differ from, say, my belief regarding the gospel of Luke? Luke, after all, wrote down oral traditions.

Does that satisfy your question?

peepnklown · Feb 3, 2016

cloudyday2 said:
Do you think it is historical or simply a useful fiction? Lightfoot believes it is historical even though it is an interpolation.

Well, of course Bishop J.B. Lightfoot would conclude the story to be authentic. He is a Christian.
In the end, I think we can agree the story was an interpolation.
Now we have to debate the authenticity of the story.
We have to understand the story varies from source to source.
Thus, when talking about authenticity we have to discuss which version of the story is authentic.
If it was a popular story then why was it excluded from the earlier manuscripts, versions of the Greek Scriptures and most of the early church fathers? If it was a popular story then why was it included so late?
Why when the story does appear it is frequently marked in a way to designate doubt on the part of the scribe?
We can go on and on.

cloudyday2 · Feb 4, 2016

peepnklown said:
Why when the story does appear it is frequently marked in a way to designate doubt on the part of the scribe?

I agree with your post, but I thought I should give some info I found last night on those scribal marks. This is an interesting theory:

One form of this theory is that at a very early date, an annual lection-cycle was developed for the major feast-days; in this lection-cycle, a specific segment of the Gospel of John was assigned to be read at Pentecost (which was celebrated by the Christian church from its beginning, having been adopted from Judaism): John 7:37-52, plus 8:12 (in order to close the reading on a positive note). This is still the form of the lection for Pentecost in the Byzantine lectionary-cycle, attested in hundreds of copies. In an early copy used by a lector (the person designated to read Scripture in early church-services), marks were added to signify that the reader was to stop at the end of 7:52, and skip to the beginning of 8:12. When a professional copyist, unfamiliar with the lection-cycle, used such a copy as his exemplar, he misunderstood the marks as if they meant that he, the copyist, should skip from the end of 7:52 to the beginning of 8:12, and thus the passage was dutifully skipped, and was lost, in a very influential transmission-line. Another form of this theory is that a very early copyist, preparing a Gospels-codex for liturgical use, transplanted the section to the end of John as a practical step, so as to simplify the lector's task on Pentecost (so that the lector would not have to pause to find the final portion of the lection), and after the section was thus transplanted, it dropped out altogether from the Alexandrian transmission-line which is represented by the oldest manuscripts, and from related branches (including one which later yielded, or influenced, the Syriac Peshitta).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_and_the_woman_taken_in_adultery

Of course another theory is that the absence from the church lection-cycle is evidence that the verse did not exist at the time the lections were created.

peepnklown · Feb 4, 2016

cloudyday2 said:
I agree with your post

I think so far the evidence shows John 7:53 – John 8:11 was an interpolation (‘an entry or passage that was not written by the original author’) and is not authentic.

ewq1938 · Feb 4, 2016

peepnklown said:
I think so far the evidence shows John 7:53 – John 8:11 was an interpolation (‘an entry or passage that was not written by the original author’) and is not authentic.

That doesn't make it non-authentic. God is the author and can inspire more than one writer for a book of the bible.

cloudyday2 · Feb 4, 2016

peepnklown said:
I think so far the evidence shows John 7:53 – John 8:11 was an interpolation (‘an entry or passage that was not written by the original author’) and is not authentic.

That is what I think too, but I wanted to point-out that the scribal marks around the interpolation were probably not a sign that the scribe doubted their authenticity. Probably these scribal marks were designed to help the people who read those verses for Pentecost. In the Greek churches, the Pentecost reading went: John 7:37-52 jump to John 8:12 (skipping the adulterous woman). The scribal marks probably helped the reader know where to stop and jump forward. My understanding is that the scribes who copied these manuscripts were usually bored senseless, and they would not have had the education or interest to question the authenticity of this interpolation.

Of course the Pentecost reading is good evidence that this interpolation did not exist in the earliest manuscripts - especially because John 8:12 ("then they all went home.") is not important enough to skip-over the story of the adulterous woman. Obviously that story was not present when the Pentecost reading was chosen by the church.

Commander Xenophon · Feb 5, 2016

fatboys said:
Hold the phone here. I thought you guys believed that every scripture found in the bible was God breathed. Xplain

This should not be taken to the extent of regarding scripture as uncreated or intrinsically perfect, like how Muslims view the Quran.

ViaCrucis · Feb 6, 2016

cloudyday2 said:
Here is the Wikipedia article

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_and_the_woman_taken_in_adultery

So what do you believe about these verses?
- Are they an interpolation?
- If they are interpolation are they history or fiction?
- If they are fiction do you find them useful for inspiration?

There are other likely interpolations we could discuss, but this episode is interesting because so many people find it inspirational.

- The Pericope Adulterae is not originally Johannean, that's almost certain.

- Perhaps one of the more likely scenarios is that it was something of a free-floating tradition. There were almost certainly a number of stories concerning Jesus that existed within the early Christian communities that were not contained in the Synoptics or John. St. Paul, for example, quotes a statement by Jesus that exists neither in the canonical Gospels nor in any non-canonical Gospels, in the case of Paul's quote in Acts 20:35 these non-written words of Jesus are known as Agrapha. Other interesting examples include the fragmentary Egerton Gospel which--where it is legible--parallels the Synoptics but includes an otherwise unknown miracle in its text.

- It's impossible to say whether the Pericope is fiction or not, its nature as a free-floating tradition inserted into John's gospel doesn't necessarily negate the truthfulness of its contents; nor the point of the narrative itself. There are too many questions left unanswered; however given the Pericope's antiquity and longstanding place in the Biblical Canon its removal would be far more controversial than its present inclusion. Therefore the best option I think is what most translations do and that is to provide marginal notes explaining that it is not found in the earliest manuscripts and was added at some later date. But removing it outright would seem to be nearly as extreme a move as a Bible publisher choosing to remove an entire book from the Bible--the contents of Scripture ultimately are not up to Bible printers to determine but are a matter for the Church.

-CryptoLutheran

ViaCrucis · Feb 6, 2016

fatboys said:
Hold the phone here. I thought you guys believed that every scripture found in the bible was God breathed. Xplain

Who is "you guys"?

The Scriptures--that is, the Bible--are received into and by the Church as divinely inspired.

Divine inspiration doesn't mean that the Scriptures are inerrant, or that there haven't been scribal edits/errors in the textual traditions. It means that they are inspired, God-breathed, useful and good for Christ's Church as 2 Timothy 3:16 says.

-CryptoLutheran

Disputed authenticity of John 7:53-8:11

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