Woman Caught In Adultery: Everybody Must Get Stoned

Woman Caught In Adultery by He Qui, China, 2001Moses proclaimed that if you commit adultery you must get stoned.  These days we get stoned and then commit adultery.

Har.

While we're on the subject of the Gospel of John, one of the questions that typically comes up in classes is, "Okay, what was Jesus writing on the ground in John 8:6-8?"

There appear to be two memes in evangelical circles. One is that Jesus was writing the sins of the woman's accusers.  Sounds very medieval, and I should see if I can track down a source for that.  The other is the question, "Where is the male adulterer?  Takes two."

Both memes show a persistent misunderstanding of John, I think.

Personally, I'd say that for those who are interested in knowing what the Jewish Rabbi wrote on Thursday February 6, 30 C.E., in the dust of the temple courtyard, I'm not answering your question.

If you're wondering, "What point was John  [or John's redactors, since the story seems to be a late addition to the gospel] trying to make?" I might be able to help you.

Okay, so let's look at the text and figure this out.  John 8 from the ESV:

²Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him, and he sat down and taught them. ³The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in the midst ⁴they said to him, "Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. ⁵Now in the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?" ⁶This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. ⁷And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, "Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her." ⁸And once more he bent down and wrote on the ground. ⁹But when they heard it, they went away one by one, beginning with the older ones, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. ¹⁰Jesus stood up and said to her, "Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?" ¹¹She said, "No one, Lord." And Jesus said, "Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more."]]

Basic literary analysis: let's begin with setting.

We're in the Temple, appropriate for its suggestion of Judaism and its demands, which is one of the themes of the Gospel.  John almost reflexively juxtaposes Judaism with faith.  Those who get it (that is, those born of the Spirit) are almost invariably contrasted with those who are, well, merely Jewish.  One is wine, the other water.

The Jewish temple, one of the architectural marvels of the near east, was in Mark's gospel a symbol of Roman collusion, and "one stone would not be left upon another" because it was anti-Israelite to be so deep in cahoots with the Romans that they could set up an abomination of desolation there in the temple.  (See Mark 13.)  God would judge the Jews and Romans alike for that, and the only safety was in the kingdom of the Messiah.

In John, though, it's a symbol for Judaism pure and simple.

Second, our characters.

We have Jesus, the incarnate logos who emerges out of God and is creation's user-interface for God.  There are scribes and Pharisees, John's black-hats.  And of course there's a woman caught in adultery.

Women in John are interesting.  They potentially represent several things, but I think on the whole they symbolize a condition of the reader: they are the confused and benighted and sinful souls that are imperfectly wed to God through the logos.  In encountering Jesus they rarely make a profession of faith (for they stand in for the reader who is urged to make that decision), but they are potentially there to receive the logos as a woman conceives in her womb, and to be faithfully married to the logos and so restored and whole.

Against this backdrop of Jewish legal purity the Pharisees come bringing an impure soul, quoting the law ("God's word," some have called it). 

So what's at stake in this High Noon showdown is nothing more nor less than Judaism and the Torah (Jewish law) itself.

Immediately Jesus bends down and writes in the dust.

Who could miss the symbolism?  Well, I mean, besides people who don't believe in symbolism, only in fact.

The law, written famously on stone by the finger of God and later by Moses himself, is being shown up by Jesus as being written in dust.Jesus Looks Like He's Secretly Packing, Here. I Know What You're Thinking, Punk. Did He Just Write Six Verses, Or Only Five?

Jesus wrote the Torah in the dust.

The Torah does indeed demand the blood of such a woman.  (Note that it's virtually unthinkable that the Pharisees would have actually stoned the woman in the temple area, surrounded by Roman guards and credible witnesses.)

But John 3:17 and the gospel's persistent rejection of Judaism's purity as a sufficient description of God's demands precludes any possibility that John's Jesus will participate in the condemnation that the Torah will exercise over the woman.

No, there were six stone water jars there for the Jewish rites of purification, and Jesus changes the water inside them into wine.  These are symbols and metaphors for how John perceives the man who wipes out the Torah's condemnation with a wave of his hand.

If John was a Jew at all (I tend to doubt it), he was a strange one, perhaps a Sadducee convert: but he was a peculiar individual, regardless, who saw Judaism as completely empty until filled by the logos.