Jesus and the Adulteress

Abstract

The story of Jesus and the Adulteress (John 7. 53–8. 11) is fraught with historical and literary problems, many of which have seemed insoluble. On only two points is there a scholarly consensus: the passage did not originally form part of the Fourth Gospel, and it bears a close resemblance to Synoptic, particularly Lukan, traditions about Jesus. The arguments for these judgments are overwhelming and do not need to be repeated here. In some respects these unanimous conclusions have themselves brought into sharp focus the thorny problems of the story's textual and pre-literary history: (1) Textual. Since the oldest and best textual witnesses of the Gospel of John do not contain the passage, how should the allusive references to it from the second and third centuries be evaluated? Did Papias know this story? If so, did he find it in the Gospel according to the Hebrews? Or was it Eusebius, who informs us of Papias's knowledge of this or a similar story, who found it there? What form of the story was known to the author of the Didascalia and his subsequent editor, the author of the Apostolic Constitutions? Did Origen know the story? If not, when was it first accepted into the Alexandrian canon? (2) Preliterary. How should this story be classified form-critically? And in whatSitz im Lebenof the early church would it have thrived? Does the story preserve authentic tradition from the life of Jesus? Scholarship has reached an impasse on these questions because the early evidence is so sparse. Martin Dibelius's famous pronouncement from a different context applies here as well: ‘Enlightenment is to be expected not from new hypotheses but only from new discoveries.’

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