The Mystery of the Woman Caught in Adultery

An excerpt from Dr Esolen’s In the Beginning Was the Word: An Annotated Reading of the Prologue of John, which "should be required spiritual reading for all Catholics who assist at the TLM".

From One Peter Five

By Anthony Esolen, PhD

Why modern exegetes confuse, the passage is the power of Christ's mercy.

One of the best literary commentaries ever written on the Prologue of St. John’s Gospel is undoubtedly Anthony Esolen’s In the Beginning Was the Word: An Annotated Reading of the Prologue of John, which overthrows modern assumptions and delights the inward heart on every page. This profound work should be required spiritual reading for all Catholics who assist at the TLM, where these opening verses of the Fourth Gospel are read after nearly every Mass. Some time ago we shared one excerpt; today we are pleased to share another.—TSF

Why Modern Exegetes Are Often Wrong in Their Views of Biblical Authorship

Forensic experts in handwriting can tell a true signature from a forged signature by some tic or habit betrayed by the forger, or by some telltale that suggests that the forger has stopped or slowed down in the middle of writing a single letter in a word. A man’s signature is not quite like a fingerprint, but it is close. We are tempted to believe that the same science that can sort out a genuine signature from a forged signature can reliably be applied to authors, even when the texts in question are few and rather short. Let me assure the reader that this is not so.

I have already said that no one would assign The Merry Wives of Windsor and King Lear to the same author, if we did not already know that Shakespeare wrote both plays. And, granting that Shakespeare wrote both, no one would assign them to the same period of his career, if we did not already know the dates they were licensed for performance. Here we are talking about texts that are longer than any of the gospels, and much longer than any of the letters of Saint Paul.

Suppose we had every one of Shakespeare’s plays, but suppose their authors were all unknown. Suppose also that we knew that sometimes two or three men would collaborate on a single play. The theories such a condition would engender! Consider the climax of All’s Well That Ends Well,when the callow young Bertram is presented with evidence of his having gotten with child not an unmarried woman he tried to seduce, but his own wife Helena, whom he had abandoned. Abashed, he says to the king:

 If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly,
I’ll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly. (V.iii.315–316)

That is a terrible rhyme, and the repetition of “ever” makes the couplet even worse. Yet no one doubts that Shakespeare wrote those lines. It is the same playwright who, just a few moments before, had the King utter these rhymes to Bertram, when both he and the young man believe that Helena is dead:

Our rash faults
Make trivial price of serious things we have,
Not knowing them, until we know their grave.
Oft our displeasures, to ourselves unjust,
Destroy our friends and after weep their dust. (V.iii.60–64)

Those are mighty lines, and wise. They are utterly Shakespearean. Yet, as I said, Shakespeare wrote the banal lines too.

Those are from the same scene in the same play. To what dizzying multitude of authors would we assign the early history plays of King Henry the Sixth, the standard comedies of errors, the sprightly romantic comedies with a heroine at the center, the ghastly and farcical tragedy of Titus Andronicus, the nervous political plays on the reigns of Henry the Fourth and Henry the Fifth, the profound personal tragedies of Hamlet and Othello, the theological problem-plays The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure, the cynical social analyses of Troilus and Cressida and Timon of Athens, the lean and spare Roman plays of Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, the opulent Antony and Cleopatra,and the rich romances, of profound theological import, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale,and The Tempest! We would have two Tudor historians, one much more accomplished than the other. We would have the bourgeois comedian. We would have the mighty aristocratic tragedian. We would have the clotted but sometimes fascinating author of farce. We would have the Pauline theologian. We would have the hanger-on of lawyers. We would have the classicist, always with Plutarch at his side. We would have the Christian romancer. And each single play too might break up into pieces. Yet we know that we have only one author, except for two plays for which we know that Shakespeare was a collaborator and not the principal, and it sometimes shows and it sometimes does not (Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen).

William Thackeray wrote, and drew the illustrations for, a couple of stories for children. Their language and their manner are nothing like what we get from the slashing and highly intellectual satirist in Vanity Fair. Cervantes was an unsuccessful playwright whose poetry gives little indication of the mighty many-spirited genius who wrote Don Quixote. Dante, in La Vita Nuova, wrote a markedly lame sonnet, “Love and the gentle heart are both one thing,” in the middle of a work that for its potent drama is unlike anything anyone had written before. In that same La Vita Nuova, Dante often follows up his poems with what to our ears is most dreary and unnecessary identifications of their parts, thus: “This sonnet is divided into two parts. In the first part, I talk of love as it is in potentiality. In the second part, I talk of it as the potentiality is reduced to act. The second part begins: Beauty appears. The first part is also divided in two. In the first, I tell what the subject is wherein this potentiality exists. In the second, I tell how this subject and this potentiality are brought into being together.” And so it goes on. It is not at all to our taste. It is not what we think a poet would do. But if we did not know better, we might suppose that a tedious commentator had obtruded himself upon the poet, and there would be learned disquisitions separating the one from the other. Why, we might see arguments, with evidence adduced, showing not only that Dante did not write the commentaries, but that Lapo di Gianni or some other of his contemporaries did.

Therefore there is no way, none, that anyone can justify on stylistic grounds a negative assertion, for example that Saint Paul did not write the letters to Timothy, or that John did not write the Apocalypse. People write in different ways for different purposes. They write in different ways at different times. Sometimes they are in a hurry. Sometimes they dictate a letter—Saint Paul seems to have done so: “I, Tertius, who wrote this epistle, salute you in the Lord,” says his secretary (Rom. 16:22). That alone is enough to make it impossible for us to say, for example, that Saint Peter did not write his epistles: “By Silvanus, a faithful brother unto you, as I suppose, I have written briefly” (1 Pt. 5:12). That is because the secretary will clean up the grammar of the person dictating, or will filter the dictation through his own sense of where sentences begin and end.

We can apply this reasoning to the twelve verses from John 7:53 to 8:11, which do not appear at all in some of the ancient manuscripts. Some people therefore have tried to justify their omission and have attempted to find some slight hitch in the style for support. I do not find any hitch at all, but a single word here or a pause there will not do, no more than the uncharacteristic repetition of the word “ever” in the lines that I have cited from All’s Well shows that Shakespeare did not write them. It is not enough evidence for the weight of the assertion. It would be like trying to balance a pyramid upon its apex.

Meanwhile, the passage, which tells of the woman caught in adultery, is utterly convincing as an event from the life of Christ. It is another one of those moments that defies imitation. Recall when the Pharisees and the Herodians, enemies of one another but united in their enmity of Jesus, try to set a trap for Jesus by flattery, saying, “Master, we know that thou art true, and carest for no man: for thou regardest not the person of men, but teachest the way of God in truth: Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar, or not?” (Mk. 12:14). Jesus sees through their words, “knowing their hypocrisy,” that is, their play-acting (15). So he brings them on stage too: “Bring me a penny, that I may see it.” Notice that he does not then say, “I see whose image is on this coin, and hence I draw this conclusion.” He makes them say the words that will stick in their own throats. “Whose is this image and superscription?” he asks, “and they said unto him, Caesar’s.” Whereupon Jesus says, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (15–17). That is no mere evasion, but a revelation which the statist Herodians on the one hand and the theocratic Pharisees on the other were not prepared to hear or to understand. But it is in accord with what Jesus says elsewhere: “My kingdom is not of this world” (Jn. 18:36).

Jesus is sitting down and teaching in the temple, and things seem calm enough, when suddenly the scribes and Pharisees bring to him a woman caught in adultery. It must have been a dramatic scene, because they say they caught her, as we say, in flagrante delicto. “Now Moses in the law,” they say, “commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou?” (Jn. 8:5). The pronoun is emphatic. We might say it this way in English: “But you, what do you say about it?”

Again they seek to hem him on both sides. If he agrees, he will appear subordinate to them, and he will seem to have enjoined upon them an act of capital punishment, forbidden to them by their Roman overlords: “It is not lawful for us to put any man to death,” they say to Pilate, when Pilate obviously wants no part of dealing with Jewish theological controversies (18:31). Given the many crimes for which Moses prescribed the punishment of death, the enemies of Jesus can only be referring to Roman law. “We have no king but Caesar,” they say, either lying so as to keep on the lee side of Roman relations with the Jews, or condemning themselves of apostasy by their own words (19:15). But if Jesus does not agree that the woman should be put to death, he will appear to have treated the law of Moses with contempt, and in the very temple itself.

At this point “Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground” (8:6). It is another of those things that an eyewitness remembers, an apparently irrelevant detail of a scene that strikes the mind and remains there, with power to bring back to immediacy the whole drama. Nevertheless, we are within our rights to ask what Jesus is doing here. John is too chaste to say. If he were making it up, he would say something, and in fact some over-helpful copyist in one manuscript has supplied a suggestion, that Jesus was writing down their sins. Perhaps he was. Perhaps he was not. We do not know. Maybe it was the words le’olam chasdo, his mercy is forever (cf. Ps. 118:1). Maybe it was the words ’ahabta le-re‘aka kamoka, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself (cf. Lev. 19:18). Maybe it was the words that David wrote, when he had been caught in adultery with Bathsheba: channeni Elohim ke-chasdeka, Be gracious to me, O Lord, like unto thy mercy (cf. Ps. 51:1). Perhaps in glory we will be given to know what it was. It is the only time in the gospels that Jesus is shown as writing something. I suppose, whatever it was, it was something that the accusers of the woman should have known.

Jesus allows them to go on, as the tension mounts. Then he got up from his stooping (Greek anekypsen) and said to them, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her” (Jn. 8:7). Then he stoops down again and resumes his writing on the ground.

To catch the full power of what Jesus says here, we should notice something that comes across in Greek and Hebrew but not in English. In John’s Greek, the man without sin is anamartetos,someone without hamartia, sin. The word for sin comes from archery: it is to miss the mark, to shoot the arrow awry. The same sort of metaphor underlies the Hebrew verb chata, to sin,meaning also that you err, you miss your way, you go wide of the mark. Who then would be more fit to cast the first stone at the sinful woman, than one whose aim has always been true?

But we know that our aim is not true. The people know it. That is why they leave, quietly, one by one, from the eldest to the least. They have not trapped Jesus in their play. Jesus has convicted them in his play. And again he got up from stooping (Greek anakypsas), and now he brings the woman into the play. He does not at first interpret for her what has happened. He asks her for her interpretation: “Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee?” (8:10).

Man, ever quick to condemn, so long as it is not himself! The woman, who through the whole scene has made no plea, no excuse, replies simply, “No man, Lord.” To which Jesus replies, “Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more” (11). It is as if he had said, “Go, and wander no more from the way.” He does not specify the wandering. He does not do what elsewhere he shows himself quite willing to do, to name our shameful deeds. He simply says, “Go, and sin no more.” He might as well have said, “Come, follow the way.”

All of that, in a few lines of text. As I have said, it defies imitation.