The Woman Caught in Adultery: A Story John Didn't Write

The woman caught in adultery, told in John chapter 8, is one of the most familiar and beloved stories in the way of Jesus. It's the incredible scene where Jesus encounters hypocritical religious leaders who drag a woman to his feet, ready to stone her, and Jesus responds with those famous words: whoever is without sin, let him throw the first stone.

We know this story well. What many people don't realize is that John probably didn't write it.

So let's look at where this story actually comes from, why it ended up in John's gospel, why some manuscripts place it in Luke's gospel instead, and what we're supposed to do with the idea that a story sitting inside the Gospel of John wasn't written by John.

A Poor Title for a Deeper Story

In most of your Bibles, this passage is titled "The Woman Caught in Adultery." I think that's a poor choice of a title. These titles were added later by translators. They aren't original to the text. And framing the story this way misses what's actually going on.

I think this story is dealing less with what the woman was caught doing and more with the hypocrisy of the men who dragged her to Jesus's feet. It's been taught in churches for a long time, and today I want to unpack what's happening in the text and, more importantly, help us understand how this story got added to John's gospel later in the formation of what we call the Gospels.

To support this, I'm drawing from two texts I've relied on for years: The Historical Reliability of the New Testament by Craig Blomberg, a phenomenal historian whose work I've learned a great deal from, and The New Testament in Its World by N.T. Wright and Michael Bird, a top-notch survey of the New Testament with fairly current scholarship since it was published just a few years ago. I'd encourage you to pick up both.

You Should Never Read Just a Verse

One thing I've said before, and I wasn't the first to say it, is that you should never read a single Bible verse in isolation. Verses are almost always housed within a larger conversation or context, and if you're going to understand a verse, you have to understand what's happening around it. You should always know what comes before and after the passage you're reading.

One of the reasons this John 8 story really stands out is because of how much it doesn't fit the context it's been placed in.

Look at how John's gospel actually flows. In chapter 7, starting around verse 40, we find a crowd debating who Jesus is. Is he the prophet? Is he the Messiah, the Christ, the anointed one promised to rescue Israel? Some want to seize him. No one lays a hand on him.

Then the officers return to the chief priests and Pharisees, who ask why they didn't bring Jesus in. The officer replies, "No one ever spoke like this man." The Pharisees respond with contempt: "You haven't been deceived too, have you? Has any of the ruling council believed in him? This rabble who don't know the law are accursed."

Pause on that for a second. The religious leaders' argument is essentially: we haven't believed him, so why should anyone else? You still find that kind of reasoning in religious circles today. "This is what I believe, and because I'm the leader, you should believe like me too." But I digress.

Then Nicodemus, who had gone to Jesus at night back in chapter 3, speaks up: "Our law doesn't condemn a man unless it first hears from him and learns what he's doing, does it?" They fire back, "You aren't from Galilee too, are you? Investigate carefully, and you'll see that no prophet comes from Galilee."

And that's where chapter 7 ends: "And each one departed to his own house. But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives."

Now watch what happens next. Chapter 8 verse 1 begins the contested passage. Jesus goes to the Mount of Olives, returns early the next morning to the temple courts, and begins teaching. The experts in the law and the Pharisees bring a woman caught in adultery, make her stand before everyone, and ask Jesus what he says the law of Moses demands. The author steps in with a parenthetical note: they were asking this to trap him. Jesus bends down and writes on the ground. When they keep pressing, he stands and says, "Whoever among you is guiltless, let him be the first to throw a stone at her." He bends down again and writes. One by one, starting with the oldest, they walk away, until only Jesus and the woman remain. He asks her, "Where are they? Did no one condemn you?" She says, "No one, Lord." Jesus replies, "I don't condemn you either. Go, and from now on, don't sin anymore."

Then verse 12 picks back up: "Then Jesus spoke out again. I am the light of the world." And the Pharisees object, and the conflict continues.

If you strip out the adultery story and read straight from the end of chapter 7 into verse 12, the flow makes much more sense. The religious leaders challenge Jesus about the law and about Galilee, and then Jesus speaks again, just as he did before, making another bold claim that provokes the Pharisees. Chapter 8, verses 1 through 11, reads like a break in that flow. It doesn't quite fit.

If you look closely at your own Bible, you'll likely find brackets around John 8:1-11, or a footnote saying that some of the earliest manuscripts don't contain these verses. This isn't something translators are hiding from you. It's well known, and they tell you about it plainly.

What the Manuscripts Actually Show

So why does this story exist where it does in John's gospel if it isn't in the earliest manuscripts?

When scholars study copies of copies of these ancient writings, they're working with manuscripts that can be dated hundreds of years apart. Through handwriting analysis, translation choices, and other methods, scholars can identify which manuscripts are earlier and which are later. And when they look at the earliest manuscripts of John, this story of the adulterous woman simply isn't there. Later manuscripts, hundreds of years removed from the earliest ones, do include it.

Craig Blomberg points out something else worth noting: there's another long, well-known passage that's also missing from the earliest manuscripts, and it's in Mark's gospel. It's the ending of Mark, the resurrection appearance. The earliest manuscripts don't contain it either. These two passages, the longer ending of Mark and the woman caught in adultery, are the two longest stories about Jesus with no consistent presence across the earliest manuscript evidence.

Here's how Blomberg describes the situation with John 8: some manuscripts include chapter 7:53 through 8:11, some include only verses 3 through 11, with or without asterisks marking uncertainty. More strikingly, an important early family of manuscripts known as Family 13 places the story not in John at all, but after Luke 21:38. One manuscript places it after John 7:36. Another places it after John 21:25, at the very end of the gospel. And another places it after Luke 24:53, at the end of that gospel entirely.

What Blomberg is identifying is that this story seems to have existed independently somewhere in the broader tradition of stories about Jesus. Those copying manuscripts weren't sure what to do with it. Some added it to the end of John, as if to say, "I don't know where this goes, so I'll put it here." Some placed it in Luke instead and left it out of John entirely.

Think about that for a second. Some of the earliest copies of the New Testament don't contain this story in John at all. Some move it to Luke. This book that we hold as authoritative, that we believe carries wisdom and life for us, contains at least one story that the writer credited with that gospel didn't actually write.

Most scholarship, and I say most because there's always debate, concludes that John didn't write this story. At some point, a scribe added it later.

Wright and Bird in their New Testament Survey agree that the earliest manuscripts omit this passage, and later manuscripts place it at different points in John, and even in Luke. But they're careful to clarify that this doesn't mean it didn't happen. It may be that the story was considered so radical that some early scribes left it out. And they note something interesting about its placement in John: it has the effect of John's gospel opening with Jesus protecting a woman from being stoned, and ending with Jesus himself having to escape being stoned.

Why It Might Belong in Luke

So why would a scribe place this story in Luke's gospel instead? If you're familiar with Luke, one of the things that stands out is how much Luke emphasizes the role of women in Jesus's ministry. Luke names and references more women than any other gospel. That carries into Acts, since Luke and Acts were written as a two-part work, and women are featured prominently there too.

It makes sense that a scribe holding onto this story about a woman would think, "Luke is the gospel that keeps highlighting women in Jesus's ministry. This probably belongs there." I can't say for certain that's the reasoning, but it fits.

Why It Might Belong in John

As for why it appears where it does in John, Wright and Bird draw out an interesting thematic connection. If you read the end of chapter 7 through chapter 8 as one continuous story, forgetting about chapter and verse divisions for a moment, you get this: Jesus is in danger of being stoned. Then comes a story about an adulterous woman whom Jesus saves from stoning. And at the very end of chapter 8, in verse 57 and following, the Judeans challenge Jesus, "You are not yet fifty years old, and you have seen Abraham?" Jesus answers, "Before Abraham came into existence, I am." Then they pick up stones to throw at him, but he slips away and leaves the temple area.

A scribe looking at a story about stoning, framed by Jesus almost being stoned himself, may have placed this passage here because of that thematic connection. It's also tied to law. In chapter 7, the accusation against Jesus and his followers is that they don't know the law. Then in chapter 8, Jesus is immediately confronted with a legal question, and he applies the true sense of the law in a way that exposes the hypocrisy of those asking it. When Jesus later applies that same authority to himself, declaring "I am," it makes sense that they want to stone him again.

Thematically, from the end of chapter 7 through the end of chapter 8, this story fits remarkably well, which may explain why it landed here.

Where the Story Actually Came From

If you're familiar with the Q hypothesis, the idea of a shared source of sayings and stories about Jesus that Matthew and Luke both drew from but that isn't found in Mark, you know it's a way scholars try to explain how Matthew and Luke can share material with each other that Mark doesn't have. It's related to what's called the criterion of multiple attestation: when multiple independent sources tell the same story in a similar way, it's more likely to reflect something true, since those sources had no direct knowledge of each other.

It's plausible that the story of the woman caught in adultery was part of that broader circulating tradition of sayings and stories about Jesus, so well known and so loved that whoever was compiling the New Testament didn't want to leave it out.

There's nothing in this story that conflicts with orthodox teaching or creates theological tension. In fact, even skeptical scholars like Bart Ehrman generally agree that this story likely reflects something true about Jesus. It fits naturally with the kind of ministry Jesus was known for around Galilee.

My own sense is that this was a story or saying of Jesus that circulated widely, so good and so meaningful that later scribes felt it had to be preserved as part of the textual record of Jesus's life and words.

What This Means for Us

Here's the bigger question. It might be unsettling to learn that this story wasn't written by John and was likely added later by those compiling the New Testament. If your view of scripture is that God wrote it word for word, this might feel like a problem.

But I don't think it is. I think it actually reveals something more beautiful about how we got the Bible we have.

N.T. Wright has said something I keep coming back to: the Bible we have today is the Bible God wanted us to have. It's complex. It's nuanced. It's diverse. There's a lot to wrestle with. But that doesn't mean what we have isn't what God intended.

I find it beautiful that the God of the universe has used, and continues to use, people to carry his story forward, whether through the written text we have today or through our own lived experience of bringing his kingdom here on earth. I see no problem with the earliest church community recognizing a true and authoritative story about Jesus and wrestling with where to place it. If you're going to have four gospels, and this story needs a home, and you really love this story, it has to go somewhere.

That's why it sometimes appears at the end of John, sometimes at the end of Luke. The fact that this church community wanted to preserve this story, even though the writers of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John didn't include it themselves, feels to me like a beautiful act of inspiration by that community. They said, "We need this story in our text," and then applied real wisdom in deciding it best fit between John chapter 7 and the end of John chapter 8.

That, to me, is inspired. Not in the sense that God took someone's hand and wrote it down, or that scripture floated down from heaven in perfect finished form. It's inspired in the sense that what we have today passed through the rigorous care of a community that understood and had access to the apostolic witnesses, people who could say, "No, that's not what happened," and who instead preserved the content that was most life-giving about Jesus.

They didn't include everything. John's gospel itself ends by acknowledging that Jesus did far more than could ever be written down. Clearly there was editing involved, and what was chosen and preserved is something we can trust as authoritative.

So even though this story wasn't originally part of John and was added later, that shouldn't cause us worry. It should show us the great lengths people went to in order to preserve the stories that mattered most about Jesus's life.

Remember that the story God is telling through the Bible is a good story, and it's worth investigating. And remember that we don't judge Jesus by the abuse done in his name. We judge him by what he said and what he did.

This story in John 8 survived, and was preserved, because it was too important to leave out. It illuminates the kind of Jesus we serve: the kind who calls out religious hypocrisy and redeems and restores the people that hypocrisy hurts most.

That's a good story worth telling.

Sources

• Scripture references: John 7:40-53 and John 8:1-59 (New English Translation, NET Bible)

• Craig L. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the New Testament: Countering the Challenges to Evangelical Christian Beliefs (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2016)

• N.T. Wright and Michael F. Bird, The New Testament in Its World: An Introduction to the History, Literature, and Theology of the First Christians (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2019)