Earth accuses earth: The Pericope Adulterae (Notes on John 7:53-8:11)

I have been ruminating over this passage for quite a long time without reaching any very firm conclusions, but I think it's time I posted what I have, in the hope that others may have some useful comments, and so that I can move on with the rest of the Gospel.

Since this is a narratively simple episode, best discussed as a gestalt, I shall depart from my usual practice of interspersing the text with my commentary. Instead, the text is reproduced at the beginning for the reader's convenience, and my commentary, organized by topic rather than by verse, follows.

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The text

[53] And every man went unto his own house.

[8:1] Jesus went unto the mount of Olives.

[2] And early in the morning he came again into the temple, and all the people came unto him; and he sat down, and taught them.

[3] And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst, [4] they say unto him, "Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act. [5] Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou?"

[6] This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him.

But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not.

[7] So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her."

[8] And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground.

[9] And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst.

[10] When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her, "Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee?"

[11] She said, "No man, Lord."

And Jesus said unto her, "Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more."

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Does this episode belong in the Fourth Gospel?

This passage is of dubious authenticity. A very large number of the oldest manuscripts exclude it entirely, while many others mark it as questionable. Some include 7:53-8:2 but exclude 8:3-11, or vice versa. A handful relocate it to a different part of the Fourth Gospel (after 7:36, 8:12, or 21:25) or even to the Gospel of Luke (after 21:38 or 24:53). The broad consensus of scholars is that it was not part of the original text of the Fourth Gospel, though it may still be an authentic story about Jesus. Of course, another possible explanation for its inclusion in some manuscripts but not others is that it was in the original but was removed by later editors.

I will say first of all that John 7-8 flows better if this pericope is not included. In 7:14, Jesus appears in the Temple and begins to teach; in 8:59, he leaves the Temple. The text between those two verse is presented as a sort of dialogue, with Jesus' teachings interspersed with reactions from the Pharisees and others. Right in the middle of this we have the Pericope Adulterae. The Pharisees bring the woman to Jesus, but in the end they all leave, one by one, until "Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst" (8:9). He then tells the woman to "go, and sin no more" (v. 11), and so she apparently leaves as well. So now Jesus is all alone in the Temple, but the very next verse begins, "Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying . . ." Okay, so maybe it was only the Pharisee accusers who left, not the other people in the Temple -- but in v. 13 Jesus is immediately answered by "the Pharisees," and the dialogue continues! It would almost make more sense if 7:52-8:2 (where everyone goes home, Jesus goes to the Mount of Olives, and they meet again at the Temple the next morning) were placed after 8:3-11 rather than before it, but no manuscript has this, and anyway in 8:20 Jesus is still in the Temple, not on the Mount of Olives.

Placing the pericope after John 8:12 is even worse, since v.13 not only has the Pharisees responding (after they had all just left) but pretty clearly responding to what Jesus said in v. 12. Those manuscripts that put the pericope at the very end of the Gospel, after the epilogue, are obviously including it as a sort of appendix ("here's one more story about Jesus we found") rather than as part of the text itself. The only attested Fourth Gospel position for the pericope that seems to work fine textually is after 7:36 -- but there is virtually no support for this placing, which occurs only in a single manuscript dated 1192.

As for the content of the pericope, I find it to be more Synoptic than Johannine in nature.

For example, the story begins (for unclear reasons, since nothing happens there!) with a reference to Jesus going to the Mount of Olives -- a place mentioned three times each in Matthew and Mark, and four times in Luke, but nowhere else in the Fourth Gospel. In all three Synoptics, for example, the Mount of Olives is where Jesus is betrayed by Judas and arrested; in the Fourth Gospel, this takes place "over the brook Cedron, where was a garden" (John 18:1). Since Jer. 31:40 specifies that the brook Kidron was in a valley, these are not two ways of referring to the same place, despite the tradition of conflating them into a non-biblical "Garden of Gethsemane." (Only the Fourth Gospel mentions a garden; Gethsemane is a "place" on the Mount of Olives, mentioned in Mark and Matthew.)

This is also the only place in the Fourth Gospel where we read of the Pharisees "tempting" Jesus (cf. Matt. 16:1, 19:3, 22:18, 22:35; Mark 8:11, 10:2, 12:15; Luke 10:25, 11:16, 20:23) "that they might have to accuse him" (cf. Matt. 12:10; Mark 3:2; Luke 6:7, 11:54). This is clearly more of a Synoptic trope, as is the portrayal of the Pharisees as "hypocrites" (a word that does not appear in the Fourth Gospel) who accuse others of sin without being sinless themselves. The refusal to punish the adulteress is also broadly consistent with the "resist not evil" morality of Matthew. In contrast, the only arguably "Johannine" content I can find in this episode is limited to the expressions "Moses in the law" (cf. John 1:45) and "sin no more" (cf. John 5:14).

Based on these considerations, I would assume that this pericope does not really belong to the Fourth Gospel and should be treated the way we treat material from the Synoptics or the non-canonical Gospels -- accepting it only tentatively, and only to the extent that we judge it to be consistent with the message of the Fourth Gospel. I take the other Gospels seriously and consider them valuable -- traditions about Jesus must have come from somewhere, and the default hypothesis is that they came from things Jesus really said and did -- but they must be interpreted in light of what the Fourth Gospel tells us was Jesus' central message. I obviously do not read the Fourth Gospel "in isolation" as Bruce Charlton does in Lazarus Writes -- but I do, per my blog title, insist on putting it first.

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The nature of the Pharisees' test

Moses said that "the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death" (Lev. 20:10) but did not technically specify stoning as the method of execution. That was the form the Mosaic death penalty generally took, though, and can be inferred in this case, too.

What was the catch-22 here? If Jesus had disagreed with Moses, that would obviously make him a heretic and a false prophet -- but if he had agreed to have the woman stoned? I don't think the first-century public would have found that shockingly cruel or anything; rather, the plan was to get Jesus into trouble with the Romans.

When Jesus was taken to Pilate, Pilate said, "Take ye him, and judge him according to your law," to which the Jews replied, "It is not lawful for us to put any man to death" (John 18:31). When Pilate finds Jesus not guilty and declines to execute him, the Jews protest, "We have a law, and by our law he ought to die" (John 19:17). Therefore, when they said it was "not lawful" for them to execute anyone, they were referring to Roman law, not the Law of Moses. The Romans gave the Jewish leaders some authority to govern and police their own, but they did not have the right to impose the death penalty. The scribes and Pharisees were trying to goad Jesus into defying Roman law. (This again marks this episode as belonging more to the Synoptic tradition, with its "Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar?" stories, than to the Fourth Gospel.)

Jesus' options (as intended by the Pharisees) were (1) to stone the woman in defiance of Rome, in which case the Jews would report him and have him arrested; (2) to let her go unpunished, or with some lesser punishment, in which case he could be accused of not following Moses; or (3) to accuse her before the Romans, in which case he could be accused of collaborating with the pagan occupiers. This third may not even have been a real option, since the Romans did not generally punish adultery with death anyway. Honor killings by family members were permitted in some circumstances, but courts typically punished adultery with fines or exile; perhaps non-citizens would have been treated differently, though.

But if this was a catch-22 for Jesus, why would it be less so for the Jewish authorities? How did they deal with cases of adultery? I would assume that, not wanting to anger the Romans, they went with option two and let it go unpunished or with a lesser punishment. The handful of references to stoning in the Gospels (Luke 20:6; John 8:59, 10:31-33) suggest that it was a sort of mob violence, not a punishment formally imposed by the Jewish leaders, although Jewish leaders did participate in the attempted stoning of Paul and Barnabas at Iconium (Acts 14:5). Subject to Roman compulsion, they had no choice but to let certain aspects of the Mosaic Law go unenforced. Why was this okay for them but not for Jesus? Why couldn't he just throw the question right back at them and ask whether they thought the woman ought to be stoned?

Because he was supposed to be the Messiah, and they weren't. The Messiah was supposed to throw off the Roman yoke and make the Law of Moses once more the law of the land. Faced with the same question they posed to Jesus, the Pharisees could say that the Roman occupation regrettably made it impossible to implement the teachings of Moses as fully as they should like, but that all this would be rectified when the Messiah came and assumed the Throne of David. For Jesus to say anything like that, though, would be tantamount to admitting he was not the Messiah.

"This they said tempting him," the author writes, meaning testing him. It is possible that this was, at least to some extent and for some of the Pharisees, a genuine test proposed in good faith. The real Messiah would not be afraid of the Romans but would fearlessly execute the law of Moses. So, was Jesus the real Messiah?

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The meaning of Jesus' writing on the ground

"As though he heard them not" is not in the original text but was considered by the King James translators to be implied by the context.

What did he write? Why did he write it instead of saying it? Why does the Gospel not tell us what he wrote? The medium must in some important way have been the message here; the fact of his writing on the ground with his finger was at least as important as the content of what he wrote.

A extremely clever, though of course entirely speculative, medieval tradition holds that he wrote, "Earth accuses earth." 

Jesus writing "Terra terram accusat" (Codex Egberti, 10th century)

This is such a perfect proposal that I wish I had thought of it myself! First, it succinctly expresses one of the main meanings of the pericope: the hypocrisy of those who accuse others of being what they themselves are -- in this case, mortal men and sinners, "of the earth, earthy." Second, by writing it on the ground instead of saying it, Jesus figuratively makes the earth itself accuse them of this hypocrisy. Earth accuses earth -- Heaven, represented by the Son of God, will not. Finally, the story ends when each of the accusers "being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one." Jesus had accused no one of sin; each accused himself. Earth accuses earth.

One hesitates to argue with perfection by proposing anything else that Jesus may have written instead -- but, well, rushing in where angels fear to tread is pretty much what we do on this blog, isn't it? I have no hope of coming up with anything as lapidary as "Earth accuses earth," but I'm not going to let that stop me from exploring the question.

"Earth accuses earth" focuses on the fact that Jesus wrote his message on the ground, but the other relevant point is that he wrote it with his finger. Doesn't that call to mind the "two tables of stone written with the finger of God" (Deut. 9:10, Ex. 31:18), the very source of the commandment, "Thou shalt not commit adultery"? Was Jesus' action meant to remind them of this? Was he subtly claiming to be the very God who gave Moses the Law? Is it possible that Jesus wrote on the ground, "Thou shalt not commit adultery," endorsing the Mosaic precept while simultaneously claiming to be its Author, at whose discretion it is enforced?

Also of possible relevance is Jeremiah 17:13.

O Lord, the hope of Israel, all that forsake thee shall be ashamed, and they that depart from me shall be written in the earth, because they have forsaken the Lord, the fountain of living waters.

The juxtaposition of "written in the earth" with "the fountain of living waters" is very interesting because in the Fourth Gospel as we have it now, the Pericope Adulterae comes just a few verses after Jesus says, "He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water" (John 7:38). This is evidence that the story does belong here after all.

The most common interpretation of Jeremiah's "written in the earth" is that it refers to impermanence -- that those who forsake the Lord will disappear like words written in the dust. A minority view is that it means "recorded in the underworld" or "listed among the dead." Whatever the precise meaning of the phrase, the point is that those who are "written in the earth" are those who "have forsaken the Lord, the fountain of living waters." The Pharisees knew the prophetic literature very, very well and would surely have understood the allusion, particularly if Jesus had just recently been talking about rivers of living water. Could he have written the names of the Pharisee accusers in the earth -- with all Jeremiah had made that imply?

"Written in the earth" also contrasts with "written in stone" -- the latter expression meaning, with reference to the stone tables of Moses, that something is fixed, unalterable, and non-negotiable. What is "written in the earth," in contrast, can be read now but will have disappeared by tomorrow. This may be a reference to the idea that "the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ" (John 1:17). As I said of this passage in my notes on John 1:

Mosaic "truth" was limited by its character as a set of laws -- that is, generalizations derived by abstraction and implemented by ignoring most of the specific details of any given situation. Laws as such can only aspire to be rough approximations of the truth, which is ultimately individual, specific, personal. Christ -- at least the Johannine Christ -- brought both grace and truth by transcending law.

Jesus' choice to respond to the Pharisees' question by writing in a medium designed to be temporary and ephemeral may have meant that he did not intend to establish a law or set a precedent to be followed rigorously in all future cases.

More generally, this episode highlights the fact that Jesus was able to write but, unlike a Moses or a Muhammad, chose not to deliver his message in the form of a new sacred text. "New Moses" though he may have been, he had no interest in producing Torah 2.0. The fact that we have multiple Gospels, all of uncertain authorship, all somewhat mutually contradictory, may have been something Jesus positively intended, a feature rather than a bug. Like Socrates, who also famously left no written works, Jesus brought not a new body of doctrine to be accepted on authority, but a new way of thinking and living -- written, as Paul of Tarsus would later put it, "not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart" (2 Cor. 3:3). It is ironic that mainstream Christendom has nevertheless come to treat four of the Gospels, and even the epistles of Paul, precisely as the Pharisees treated the carved-in-stone pronouncements of Moses. (Socrates was spared this fate, which instead fell to his grand-disciple Aristotle.)

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Jesus' response as a rhetorical riposte

Considered only as a clever way of getting out of the trap that had been set for him, Jesus' response is pretty good. In theory, he is endorsing the Mosaic punishment and calling for it to be executed -- but the way in which he calls for it ensures that no stoning will actually take place, and thus no trouble with the Romans. Furthermore, he pretty much forces the accusers to admit that they themselves are sinners and unworthy judges. I'm sure the real reason many of them left was that they were afraid of the legal consequences if they took it upon themselves to carry out a vigilante execution -- but after what Jesus had said, it could only look as if they had left due to their guilty conscience. Rhetorically, this was a successful move.

A possible rejoinder from the Pharisees would have been to ask why Moses allowed sinners to cast the first stone. But perhaps he didn't. At a time when sin was strictly defined by 613 highly specific commandments, there may have been quite a few people who could say they were "without sin" -- just as many of us today can honestly say we have no criminal record. Jesus' rhetorical demand that a sinless person cast the first stone served to highlight how Man's understanding of sin had changed and deepened since the days of Moses -- yes, even among the legalistic Pharisees. In Mosaic times, when sin and crime were interchangeable, it would have been perfectly reasonable to insist that the law be enforced by those who were not themselves criminals. But to the people of Jesus' time, who understood that everyone was a sinner, the Mosaic approach no longer made sense.

Going by our stereotype of the Pharisees, we would expect one of them to have confidently stepped forward and said, "I keep all 613 commandments faithfully and even tithe mint, anise, and cumin. Hand me a stone." Why didn't they? Two reasons, both of which I have already mentioned.

First, they were afraid to defy Rome by carrying out a vigilante execution. Second, they really were "convicted by their own conscience"; human consciousness had changed a lot since the days of Moses, and even the Pharisees -- living after Isaiah and all the others -- realized that sin was something deeper and broader than the Mosaic list of thou-shalt-nots. Even the rich young man who confidently said of the Mosaic commandments, "All these things have I kept from my youth up," immediately added, "What lack I yet?" (Matt. 19:20). People understood that sin was universal, that no one could claim to be morally perfect. If nothing else, some of the Pharisees must have realized that being unwilling to defy Caesar to obey Moses -- fearing man more than God -- was itself a sin.

One possible weakness of Jesus' answer, as a rhetorical strategy, is that after inviting the one without sin to cast the first stone, he himself didn't cast the first stone, either. Wouldn't the Pharisees have used this against him, saying that Jesus had implicitly admitted to being a sinner and could therefore not be the Messiah? In theory, they could have, but they obviously didn't. If they wanted to argue that Jesus was a sinner, it was much easier and less embarrassing to bring up his Sabbath-breaking and such, rather than this episode.

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Jesus' response as a precept of criminal justice

I have said that Jesus' writing in the earth may have been meant to show that he was not proposing some timeless principle to be applied in all cases. Nevertheless, we never expect Jesus to engage in mere rhetorical tricks; he must also have been teaching and exemplifying some concept of more general applicability -- but the message he appears to have been conveying is a difficult one to accept: that only those who are themselves "without sin" have the right to punish criminals -- meaning that no one has the right to punish criminals, except God, who generally refrains from doing so in this life, as does Jesus in this story. This is a hard saying; who can hear it? It is certainly understandable why the pericope has been so controversial. It is in broad harmony with Jesus' other teachings in the Synoptics and particularly Matthew -- resist not evil, turn the other cheek, give to him that asketh thee, put up again thy sword into his place, do good to them that despitefully use and persecute you -- but how could human society function if people lived by such a maxim? We have all heard a million times how all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing; and how we first pity, then endure, then embrace -- and many of us have observed in real time what happens when laws are not enforced, and just how swiftly the seeds of decriminalization and tolerance blossom into mandatory celebration and moral inversion.

To be clear, Jesus is certainly not saying that adultery is not blameworthy -- his "neither do I condemn thee" is immediately followed up with "sin no more," implying that the woman is guilty of sin -- but, human nature being what it is, wouldn't a policy of not punishing adultery encourage people to think that adultery is acceptable? It is not practical or desirable for all sins to be criminalized and punished, whether by society at large or by the Church -- but this naturally leads into the trap of paying less attention to sins that are not formally "against the rules," or thinking of them as not really being sins. This is analogous to the tendency of methodological naturalism in science to slide into metaphysical naturalism: We begin by excluding something from consideration for a particular practical purpose and end by excluding it from consideration altogether. Haven't we seen how hard it is for people to distinguish between "You will not be punished" and "You have done nothing wrong," between tolerance in the sense of mercy and tolerance in the sense of "diversity is our strength"? I mean, look what a slippery slope the decriminalization of sodomy turned out to be!

I don't have an answer to this. It is an observed fact that God, with very few exceptions, does nothing to stop people from doing bad things. That is to say, God does not enforce a moral law. (He seems to have done so more in the past, whether by direct intervention or indirectly through the Mosaic theocracy, but this is no longer the case and was already no longer the case in the time of Christ.) One possible interpretation of this is that we should imitate God in this -- "that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust" (Matt. 5:45). Another is that God doesn't enforce laws for the same reason that he doesn't provide food, shelter, and clothing for us: because he expects us to do it ourselves. Jesus' initial silence in response to the Pharisees could be interpreted as supporting the latter view: Don't ask me how or whether to punish adultery; that's for you mortals to work out. His later, verbal reply, though, seems to imply the opposite: that for mortals to pass judgment on mortals is hypocritical and unjust.

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Jesus' response as a spiritual precept

Most of us to whom the Gospel has come are not political or religious authorities in a position to punish or pardon sins, and so we are inclined to interpret "let him who is without sin cast the first stone" figuratively, as being about psychological attitudes of condemnation and forgiveness and about "being judgmental."

When the story is approached in this way, I think it is best understood in conjunction with the very similar saying about the mote and the beam (Matt. 7:3-4, Luke 6:41-42). "First cast out the beam out of thine own eye" -- not because it's "not fair" for one sinner to pass judgment on another, but because "then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye." This matter of seeing clearly is the central point of the mote-and-beam saying, and is why sin is referred to with the rather unusual metaphor of having something in your eye. Judgment, condemnation, and punishment may in many cases be right, necessary, and good -- but the human desire to punish is very rarely pure. Adultery is wrong and should have consequences, but those who pounce on one of their fellow sinners, haul her before the authorities, and howl for her blood are very rarely motivated by love, or even by a lofty passion for justice in the abstract. Their -- our -- vindictiveness much more often flows from a half-conscious congeries of insecurities, projections, overcompensations, and other such psychological phenomena for which we have the benefit of a much richer technical vocabulary than did Jesus' contemporaries, and they -- we -- desire the punishment of the sinner not so much despite as because of their -- our -- own guilty conscience.

This is not to say that stones must never be cast -- not at all -- but that the more sinful we are, the less we can see clearly when they should be, and at what targets -- and those who can see clearly see, as often as not, that stone-casting is not the answer. Overall, any enthusiasm for casting stones is a symptom and tends to disqualify one to do so.

Jesus lived and taught during the reign of Tiberius, and -- well, so do we. That is, we, too, live in a time of grotesque wickedness and depravity in high places, and not only in high places; and dwelling on the moral horrors all around us, and on precisely what those people deserve, is a constant temptation. Even when our moral judgments are right -- as the condemnation of adultery is right -- the thoughts, and the emotions that drive them, often do us little credit. "I hate them that hate thee, O Lord, . . . with perfect hatred" (Ps. 139:21-22) is an Old Testament stance. Jesus, we are told in the Gospel of Thomas, said rather, "Become passersby."

I once had a colleague who had a maddening but ultimately very helpful habit. Any time I made any negative comment on the behavior or character of anyone else, he would always say, "Yes, you're absolutely right. In fact, he's just like you that way!" and then, unfailingly, come up with some specific example of something I had once done that was in some way similar to what I was complaining about. He was remarkably, almost supernaturally, good at this, and you can imagine how annoying it was! He never did this when he himself was criticized, only when people criticized others to him. And he never actually defended the person; he would always enthusiastically agree: "Wow, what an asshole! It reminds me of that time you . . . ." And he could always think of something, something specific and true. I don't know if that means we tend to complain most about the things that remind us of our own faults, or if it just means that pretty much everyone has the same sorts of failings, differing only in degree, but at any rate his skill at finding such parallels was remarkable and remarkably infuriating. He never volunteered criticisms, either, except in response to hearing someone else criticized; he was like a living, breathing embodiment of "Judge not that ye be not judged" (Matt. 7:1).

Matt -- I'll call him Matt -- obviously didn't win any friends this way, but he did influence people. As you might imagine, I quickly learned to check myself before criticizing anyone else in his presence. At first I'd just think, "No, I'd better not say that, or he'll say something about me," but soon enough I was doing Matt's work for him and imagining specifically what he might say. In other words, I developed the habit of, before criticizing anyone else, thinking about the question of how I myself might be guilty of something similar. I may have gotten a little rusty in the years since I worked with Matt, but I think it was a worthwhile habit to develop. The Rosary prayers serve as a sort of reminder, with all their first person plural pleas for mercy: "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us" -- "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners" -- "O my Jesus, forgive us our sins; save us from the fires of hell; lead all souls to Heaven, especially those in most need of thy mercy." That last is particularly effective: praying for "those in most need of thy mercy" -- those one is naturally inclined to "hate with perfect hatred" -- but to word it as a prayer for us rather than for them. After all, we're only ordinary men.

When someone we know falls gravely ill or dies, our thoughts naturally turn to our own mortality and to the shortness and unpredictability of life. We should have a similar reaction when someone is "taken in adultery, in the very act," or anything similar. Rather than being occasion for gloating or vindictiveness, such incidents should turn our thoughts to our universal human frailty and remind us to "consider your ways. . . . Thus saith the Lord of hosts, consider your ways" (Hag. 1:5, 7).