STORY OF THE ADULTEROUS WOMAN
9:59 AM
The woman in this story is not given a name. The effect of this is two-fold:
it makes her anonymous, not an identifiable historical person
the writer can then more easily make her a symbol of ideas and attitudes.
Despite her lack of a name, the adulterous woman in John 8:1-11 is curiously real.
What the story is about:
The story of the woman taken in adultery is about the appropriate way for Christians to respond to sinners. It is also an extension of the teaching of Jesus in Matthew 7:1-5, ('You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor's eye') which urges us to look to our own faults rather than complacently focusing on the faults of others. The story falls into three sections:
WOMAN TAKEN IN ADULTERY: REALITY TODAY1 The scene is set, with time and place (John 8:1-3)
It is early morning, and Jesus is at the Temple, ready to teach whoever comes to listen to him. Some respected Jewish leaders bring a woman to him. She has been found guilty of adultery
2 The dilemma, and Jesus' response to it (John 8:4-11)
The leaders (scribes and Pharisees) challenge him to find a solution to a problem: what is to be done with this woman, who has been found guilty of adultery, a capital crime? Jesus parries their question by asking them, in essence, to examine their own consciences to see if they themselves are guiltless. One by one they leave, and Jesus tells the woman to go, and not to sin again.
See end of this page for historical background to this story and information about women's lives.)
Note for this gospel passage:
The story of the adulterous woman is quite different to the rest of the material in John's gospel, and more like the Synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke).
The Synoptic gospels tell relatively straightforward stories to illustrate Jesus' teaching. They are full of episodes, stories and teachings - one can imagine them being dramatically acted out and told as stories.
John uses a different writing technique. He wants to show that in Jesus, God is united with humanity, and his gospel is full of discourses, ideas, and profound theology.
Because the story of the adulterous woman is an almost visual narrative, many biblical scholars believe that it was a later insertion and did not form part of John's original gospel. They suggest that it was a particularly popular story about Jesus that for some reasons had not been included in the first three gospels, but was placed in the fourth gospel some time after John had completed writing it, virtually by popular demand.
THE SCENE IS SET
We are in Jerusalem, and it is not long before Jesus' own death. This is an introspective Jesus that we see, not the vigorous man who roamed the countryside of Galilee teaching anyone who would listen. This man knows he is in danger, knows he is surrounded by enemies. But instead of doing what the rest of us would do and heading back to Galilee and safety, he has come right into the hornet's nest and faced the danger head-on, in the Temple. His presence here is a tacit statement that he will not back down from what he believes. (To get an idea of what the scene would have been, go to the Temple reconstructions, floor plans and information at BIBLE ARCHITECTURE: JERUSALEM. Look especially at the Courts of the Women and of the Gentiles).
It is early morning, and the place is only beginning to stir. There are not many people around, not the crowds that will gather later in the day. In this muted atmosphere, in the great open courtyard of the Temple, he is approached by a group of people. They are the scribes and Pharisees, the educated people of their day, cautious, law-abiding, and economically prosperous, most of them lawyers and civil servants of one kind or another. They have worked hard to get where they are, and they take their responsibilities seriously. One of these responsibilities is maintaining stability in a society that is more than a little prone to instability. It is not easy to do. There have been frequent rebellions against the Romans, who take a savage stance if there is any trouble: the Roman practice is to first kill anyone who looks rebellious, then ask questions later. These scribes and Pharisees, much denigrated in Christian literature, are in fact trying to maintain the status quo as the Romans breathe down their necks.
They see Jesus as a threat to stability. He constantly challenges the traditional authorities and appears to have a gang of followers who accompany him everywhere. He disregards the normal Jewish ritual laws about eating by sitting down to meals with known law-breakers. With Passover now approaching and the crowds flocking to Jerusalem, he must be kept in check. Any hint of rebellion at this time will bring down the wrath of the Romans on a lot of innocent heads.
One way of containing him would be to discredit him as a teacher. If he is given an insoluble dilemma and fails to find a solution, his position of moral authority will be undermined, and people will be less likely to flock around him as they are now doing. This will diminish the danger he poses to himself, to them, and to others.
WOMAN TAKEN IN ADULTERY: BIBLE WOMEN; NAKED WOMAN They hit on a problem they themselves are wrestling with: what to do when the Law of Moses and the edicts of the Romans challenge each other. Such a situation arises whenever they are commanded by the Law of Moses to impose the death penalty for a particular offense, such as adultery. The Romans have authorized their appointee, the Governor, to impose the death sentence. No other person may do so. What, the scribes wonder, is the right thing to do in this situation? Follow the Law of Moses which as Jews they are required to do, and risk the consequences? Or sensibly do what the Romans command?
Some-one among them hits on the idea of posing this question to Jesus. They have been arguing about what to do with a particular case, the case of a woman who has been charged with adultery, and would like to hear what he says. It can do no harm to try. But there is also the possibility he will slip up when he responds, and if this happens they can organize some sort of accusation that will remove him from the public sphere, at least for the time being, at least until Passover is over.
They take the woman from her prison cell to the Temple precincts where Jesus is teaching, presumably in the outer courtyards of the Temple - the Court of the Gentiles or the Court of Women would be the only areas she could be taken, since a woman could not go any further into the holy area.
Much has been made of the fact that they take the woman but not the man with whom she has committed adultery, suggesting that the man has not been charged. This is not correct. By law, both parties to the adultery were charged and punished. There was no leniency shown to the man, and in fact Rabbinic law held that he was more responsible for what happened than the woman.
As for the woman herself, it is generally acknowledged that she is a young married woman. Nothing is known of her appearance, her financial status, or her family background. All we can surmise is that she was terrified, disheveled, and hopeless, since she had disgraced herself and her family, and now faced the horrific death sentence.
Stoning was a particularly brutal form of execution, but a strangely logical one in the context of the times. The first stones had to be thrown by the witnesses to the adultery, and then after that each member of the community in which the two adulterers lived had to come forward and throw a stone. The thinking behind this was that, since every person in the community threw stone, no one person could be held responsible for the death of the pair. This was important in a society that practised vendetta, and where pay-back would happen if a killing occurred.
THE DILEMMA, AND JESUS' RESPONSE TO IT
The scribes and Pharisees approach Jesus and present the dilemma. The woman is undoubtedly guilty of adultery, and according to the Law of Moses she should be punished by death. But this cannot be done, since the Roman overlords have stripped Jewish leaders of the power to execute a criminal. What is to be done?
Jesus recognizes immediately that it is a set-up. He knows that if he pronounces the sentence of death on the woman, he is flouting Roman law. If he lets her off, he is flouting the Law of Moses. What is he to do?
Instead of answering, Jesus does something unexpected - always a good ploy. He bends down and writes with his finger on the stone paving of the courtyard. What is he writing? Nobody knows. There have been many erudite theories on the subject, many clever suggestions, but no real answer. WOMAN TAKEN IN ADULTERY: BIBLE WOMEN; BATTERED WOMAN
The point is that he uses the time it took to write, and the act of writing, to unnerve his adversaries - and possibly to give himself time to think of a response, or calm his anger. Remember that he was man as well as God, with all a normal human being's doubts and uncertainties. Many people doodle when they are upset or deep in thought - perhaps he was one of them. He may also have been trying to avoid confrontation by pretending to ignore it, another common human ploy.
But the questioners are not to be put off. They keep on demanding an answer, until Jesus straightens up and faces them. Then he says the direct, devastating words that have shaped so much of Christian thinking: 'Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone.'
Then he bends down again and resumes tracing with his finger on the ground.
The authority of his words and presence obviously affects them. They are silenced at last. One by one, beginning with the most respected man among them, they melt away into the gathering crowd. Eventually, Jesus is left alone with the woman still standing in front of him. He straightens up again, and speaks to her. 'Where are your accusers?' he asks. 'Has no-one seen fit to condemn you?' She simply answers 'No-one, sir.'
'Then I do not condemn you either' says Jesus. 'Go on your way, and do not sin anymore.'
Jesus does not condone what she had done, or dismiss her sin as unimportant, or understandable. He knows, and she does too, that what she has done is wrong. But he condemns the sin, not the sinner, and commands her not to sin again. The woman is called to change, but the message is aimed directly at each one of us.
SUMMARY
A woman committed a serious sin against the community, the sin of adultery. It hurt herself, her children and family, and the people she knew. Her guilt was not questioned, nor was it condoned by Jesus.
The point of this story was not condemning the sinner, but calling the sinner to change, to be saved. Jesus wished each person there in the Temple courtyard that morning to see that they themselves were sinners, and that their chief responsibility was to mend their own ways.
Pointing the finger at others has always been a comfortable way of shifting the blame from ourselves. In recent years many Christians have taken to registering shock at social injustice in faraway places. They point to a tyrant in a foreign country or a rich man's greed and thank God they are not like that, ignoring tyranny in their own workplace or family, or their own runaway materialism. This story urges them to examine their own lives and ask how they themselves can be better people.
The message is aimed directly at each one of us.
ATTITUDES TO WOMEN AT THAT TIME
The gospel stories are often discussed as if they happened in isolation, outside the real world. But in fact the events in the stories occurred within a historical context, against a cultural background quite different to our own.
Greek philosophy was greatly admired at the time in the Mediterranean world, and it had a profound impact on the way that people saw their world. One of the greatest philosophers, Plato, proposed the theory of dualism, suggesting that everything in the cosmos had an equal and opposite other. This theory was not to women's advantage, since 'woman' was placed in a category containing elements that were viewed as negative:
Man - Woman
Civilization - Nature
Reason/logic - Emotion
Good - Evil
Light - Darkness
Keep in mind that
Civilization was the ideal; Nature was mistrusted and potentially dangerous
Logic and reason were admired, and emotion was to be subordinated.
Goodness was always preferable to evil.
Light, especially in the pre-industrial world, was preferred to darkness.
WOMAN TAKEN IN ADULTERY: BIBLE WOMEN; YIN AND YANG These are examples only, but they show that Platonic dualism placed women in a negative category. They were seen as closer to the natural/animal world than men. By nature they were irrational and untrustworthy, and therefore unfit to make their own decisions and govern their own lives. They had to be looked after and controlled, never treated as equals.
This differed from the traditional Jewish way of looking at the world, which saw all things in creation as integrated and complementary, rather than as opposites of each other. An example of this is the creation story of Eve, which relates that the first woman was created from a rib taken by God from Adam's side, thereby suggesting that a man could never be fully complete unless he was in partnership with a woman.
Jewish and Jewish/Christian women resisted the ideas of Platonic dualism, which patronized them and diminished their status. While Christianity remained a Jewish sect, the status of women within the Christian communities was high.
But as the ideas of Christianity moved out into the Gentile, Hellenised world, the first Christians found they had to use the Greek philosophical framework to explain their beliefs and be accepted. So Jesus' original ideal of mutual respect between the sexes was watered down and changed. Women found they were given roles that were acceptable in the outside, Hellenistic culture. In doing so, the Christian church stepped back from the radical ideals of the first Jewish/Christians.
Women were still powerful in the private sphere, but were shunted to the side in the public arena. This shows up, for example, in 1st and 2nd century re-tellings of the biblical stories. Where these stories had often had women as central characters, they now focused on men and male activities.
The ideal Roman matron
WOMAN TAKEN IN ADULTERY: BIBLE WOMEN; ROMAN WOMAN An example of this is the story of Moses’ birth in Josephus’ Antiquities (Josephus was a Jewish writer and historian of the 1st century BC).
In the original biblical telling of the story (in Exodus 1 and 2) the baby Moses is saved by the two midwives, (see their story in BIBLE TOP TEN: HEROINES), by his mother, by his sister, and by Pharaoh’s daughter – all, obviously, women.
In Josephus’ retelling of the story written in about 94AD, the focus is largely on Moses’ father Amram. He performs many of the actions previously attributed to the women. Female characters in the story are changed. The mid-wives in Josephus’ retelling
are Egyptian, not Hebrew
are unnamed
are not present at Moses' birth
kill Hebrew babies, not save them.
The basic story of Moses’ birth remains the same, but the female dimension has been lost.
There were reasons for the changes Josephus made to the story. He was trying to counter the anti-Semitism that existed in Rome at the time, so he wrote about Jewish women who behaved like decent Roman matrons! This ideal of Roman womanhood had been vigorously promoted in a ‘back to basics’ program by the emperor Augustus and the Roman authorities.
The ideal Roman woman, they said, was a mother of many children, content with her household duties. She kept to her traditional role, in the home, and did not speak assertively to the men in her family. She did not enter the public world. Most assuredly she did not commit adultery, or even place herself in a position where she might be suspected of adultery.
For additional information on the lives of women in the Bible, see
