Jesus and the woman taken in adultery
Based on Wikipedia: Jesus and the woman taken in adultery
Twelve verses that almost didn't make it into the Bible have given us one of the most quoted phrases in the English language: "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone." The story they tell—of a woman dragged before Jesus by religious authorities demanding her execution—appears in nearly every Bible you've ever held. Yet scholars have known for well over a century that these verses weren't part of the original Gospel of John. They were added later, probably centuries after John wrote his account. And yet, paradoxically, many of those same scholars believe the story itself is true—a real event from Jesus's life that circulated orally for generations before someone finally wrote it down in the margin of a manuscript, where it was eventually absorbed into the main text.
This is the Pericope Adulterae, a name that sounds like a medical condition but simply means "the passage about the adulteress" in scholarly Latin. It's a textual puzzle wrapped in a moral lesson, and understanding how it ended up in your Bible reveals something fascinating about how ancient texts survived the centuries—and what we can and cannot know about events that happened two thousand years ago.
The Scene in the Temple
The story opens with Jesus teaching in the Second Temple in Jerusalem. He'd spent the night on the Mount of Olives, and now, early in the morning, crowds had gathered to hear him speak. Then came the interruption.
A group of scribes and Pharisees pushed through the crowd, dragging a woman with them. They made her stand in front of everyone—the text is specific about this public humiliation—and announced their accusation: "Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery."
They weren't asking for Jesus's opinion. They were setting a trap.
"Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women," they said. "What do you say?"
The trap was elegant in its cruelty. Under the Hebrew Bible, adultery was indeed punishable by stoning. But here's the complication the Gospel writer notes: this was first-century Palestine under Roman occupation, and only the Roman government was legally permitted to impose the death penalty. Jewish religious authorities had lost that power. In practice, a rabbi's punishment for an adulteress was divorce and the forfeit of her marriage contract, known as a ketubah. So if Jesus endorsed stoning, he'd be advocating for vigilante justice that defied Roman authority. If he said to let her go, he'd appear to be contradicting Moses himself.
Jesus said nothing. Instead, he bent down and began writing something on the ground with his finger.
What Did He Write?
This small detail has fascinated readers for two millennia. The Greek word used is egraphen, which could mean "write" or simply "draw." Jesus might have been writing words, or he might have been tracing meaningless figures in the dust while he thought. The text never tells us what he wrote, and countless interpreters have filled that silence with their own theories.
Some medieval commentators suggested he was writing the sins of the accusers. Others proposed he was writing verses from the Hebrew scriptures about justice and mercy. The more prosaic possibility is that he was simply buying time, refusing to engage with the trap on their terms.
His accusers kept pressing. They wanted an answer.
Jesus straightened up and delivered one of the most devastating one-liners in religious literature: "Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her."
Then he bent down and went back to writing on the ground.
One by One
The text says they left "one by one, beginning with the elders." There's something almost cinematic about this detail—the oldest and presumably most respected members of the group departed first, perhaps because age had given them a more honest assessment of their own moral failings. The younger men followed, until Jesus was left alone with the woman still standing there.
"Woman, where are they?" Jesus asked, straightening up. "Has no one condemned you?"
"No one, sir."
"Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again."
This ending has struck readers as remarkable for what it balances: mercy without excusing the behavior, forgiveness combined with a call to change. Jesus doesn't say she did nothing wrong. He says he doesn't condemn her, and tells her to stop sinning. It's compassion with clear moral expectations—a combination that has resonated through Christian thought ever since.
The Problem with the Manuscripts
Here's where things get complicated. When scholars began systematically comparing ancient manuscripts of the Gospel of John, they noticed something troubling: the oldest copies we have don't contain this story at all.
Two papyrus fragments known as P66 and P75, dated to the late second or early third century—meaning they were produced perhaps a hundred years or so after the Gospel was originally written—don't have these twelve verses. Neither do two of the most important complete manuscripts from the fourth century, known as Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus. The first Greek manuscript we have that includes the passage is Codex Bezae, from the fifth or sixth century.
That's a gap of roughly three hundred years between when John likely wrote his Gospel and when we first see this story included in a Greek manuscript of it.
Even more telling: some manuscripts that do include the passage mark it with special symbols. Ancient Greek scribes had a system of critical marks, borrowed from scholars who edited Homer, to indicate when something in a text was suspected of being a later addition. The lemniscus and asterisk meant "this might not belong here." Scribes were copying the passage, but signaling their doubts about it.
And then there's the lectionary evidence. In the liturgical calendar of the Greek church, the Gospel reading for the feast of Pentecost runs from John 7:37 straight through to John 8:12—skipping these twelve verses entirely. The church's reading schedule appears to reflect an older tradition that didn't include the story.
How Did It Get There?
The scholarly consensus, established since the nineteenth century, is that this passage is what's called an interpolation—a later addition to the text. But "later addition" doesn't mean "fictional invention."
The prevailing theory goes something like this: the story of Jesus and the adulterous woman was genuinely ancient, circulating in the oral tradition about Jesus's life. It may have been written down in other texts—Eusebius of Caesarea, writing in the early fourth century, mentions that Papias, a church father from around 110 AD, referred to a story about Jesus and a woman "accused of many sins" found in something called the Gospel of the Hebrews. This might be the same incident, or something similar.
At some point, a scribe who knew the oral tradition wrote the story in the margin of his manuscript of John's Gospel. Another scribe, copying that manuscript, incorporated the marginal note into the main text, perhaps assuming the previous copyist had left it out by accident. The passage spread from there.
By the fourth century, it appears in some texts. By the fifth century, it was widely accepted. Jerome, translating the Bible into Latin in 383, found it in manuscripts he considered ancient and authoritative. Writing around 417, he reported that the passage appeared "in many Greek and Latin manuscripts" throughout Rome and the Latin West.
Evidence from the Margins
Though the Greek manuscript tradition is relatively late, there are earlier hints that the story existed and was known.
A document called the Didascalia Apostolorum, composed in Syria in the mid-third century, contains instructions for bishops about how to treat repentant sinners. The author tells a story that's clearly this one: "our Savior and our God" encountered "her that had sinned, whom the elders set before Him." The elders left "the judgment in His hands" and departed. Jesus "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.'"
That's from the mid-200s—earlier than our oldest Greek Gospel manuscripts that include the passage.
Didymus the Blind, a fourth-century theologian, writes that "we find in certain gospels" a story about a woman accused of sin who was about to be stoned until Jesus intervened by saying "He who has not sinned, let him take a stone and throw it." He's clearly describing this passage, though he's vague about which Gospel contains it.
The story also appears in Latin Christian sources—quoted by Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory the Great, and others. It's present in almost all manuscripts of the Vetus Latina, the Old Latin translation of the scriptures that predates Jerome's Vulgate. Pacian of Barcelona, writing around 365-391, sarcastically challenges his opponents: "Choose not to read in the Gospel that the Lord spared even the adulteress who confessed, when none had condemned her." He was a contemporary of the scribes who produced Codex Sinaiticus, the famous manuscript that doesn't contain the passage—yet he clearly knew it as part of the Gospel.
A Minority View
Not everyone agrees that the passage was added later. A minority of scholars have defended its originality as part of John's Gospel from the beginning.
In the nineteenth century, scholars like Frederick Nolan and John Burgon argued vigorously for its authenticity. More recently, scholars who favor what's called the "Byzantine priority hypothesis"—the view that later Byzantine manuscripts sometimes preserve earlier readings better than older Egyptian manuscripts—have continued to defend the passage. They argue that some manuscripts may have had the story removed, rather than other manuscripts having it added.
Burgon proposed an interesting theory: the passage might have been accidentally lost from many manuscripts due to a misunderstanding of how the lectionary system worked in the early church. If the passage was skipped during certain liturgical readings, copyists might have assumed it wasn't supposed to be in the Gospel at all.
A tenth-century author named Nicon wrote a treatise claiming that Armenian Christians had deliberately removed the passage from their manuscripts—suggesting that at least some ancient readers believed it belonged there and had been taken out.
Where Modern Bibles Put It
Today, most Bible translations include the passage but mark it somehow. The New Revised Standard Version, the New International Version, the English Standard Version, and others typically enclose these twelve verses in brackets or add a footnote explaining that "the earliest manuscripts do not include this passage."
A few translations take more dramatic approaches. The New English Bible and Revised English Bible move the passage to the very end of John's Gospel, after the conclusion—treating it as an appendix of sorts. The New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures, used by Jehovah's Witnesses, omits it entirely.
Catholic Bibles are required to treat the passage as canonical—officially part of scripture—so some Catholic editions of critical translations remove the brackets while keeping the explanatory footnote.
The Woman and the Missing Man
Readers throughout history have noticed something odd about this story: where's the man?
The accusers say the woman was "caught in the very act" of adultery. By definition, that act involves two people. Yet only the woman is dragged before Jesus. The Torah actually prescribes the same punishment for both parties in an adultery case. The fact that only the woman appears suggests either that the accusers let the man go—perhaps he was one of their own, or bribed his way out—or that they weren't really interested in justice at all. They needed a prop for their trap.
This has led some commentators to see an additional layer of hypocrisy in the scene. The accusers aren't just sinners in some general sense; they've already demonstrated their selective approach to the very law they claim to be upholding.
Cast the First Stone
The phrase "let him who is without sin cast the first stone" has transcended its biblical origins to become a common English idiom. When we say someone "cast the first stone," we mean they initiated criticism or blame, often hypocritically. The metaphor has proven remarkably durable—people who've never read the Gospel of John still use the phrase.
"Go and sin no more" has also entered common usage, though less universally. It captures that particular combination of forgiveness and expectation of change that the story embodies.
These twelve verses have shaped moral discourse for centuries. The passage argues, implicitly, that the right to judge others is constrained by our own moral failures—that punishment requires something like clean hands. At the same time, it doesn't dismiss the concept of sin or the importance of moral behavior. It's a story about mercy, but not about permissiveness.
A Story That Survived
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Pericope Adulterae is that it survived at all. Many stories about Jesus must have circulated in the first and second centuries that we'll never know. They weren't written down, or the manuscripts that contained them were lost, or they were never incorporated into the texts that the church eventually canonized.
This story made it. Someone thought it important enough to write in the margin. Someone else thought it important enough to incorporate into the text. Scribes copied it even while marking it with symbols indicating their uncertainty. Churches included it in their liturgy. Preachers quoted it from the pulpit.
There's a kind of democratic process visible here—not a single authoritative decision, but the accumulated judgment of countless copyists, readers, and communities over centuries deciding that this story, whatever its textual history, belonged in their scriptures.
Modern scholars can tell us, with considerable confidence, that these verses weren't part of what John originally wrote. But they cannot tell us, with the same confidence, that the event never happened. Many of them believe it did. The story has the marks of authenticity: the specific setting, the clever trap, the unexpected response, the deeply human moment when the accusers drift away one by one.
Whether you read it as history, as later tradition, or as some combination of both, the Pericope Adulterae remains one of the most powerful scenes in the Gospels: a woman facing death, a crowd ready to kill, and a teacher who bent down to write something in the dust before speaking words that changed everything.