John Chapter 8:12-20

This is actually a decently clean break point. Depending on your thoughts about the validity of Verses 1-11, this section would seem to be occurring directly after that. My initial reaction is that the previous section is, indeed, a later interpolation. I base this largely on the fact that Jesus did not forgive the woman’s sin. That being said, if Verse 1 actually did belong to Chapter 7, then we have Jesus going to the Mount of Olives in the evening, and then teleporting magically to this location where we pick up the action. I say that because there is no narrative bridge between 8:1 and 8:12. As with so many of these arguments, that’s hardly decisive, so again, I leave you to your own decision on the matter. Does it matter? Yes, at least to a point. It does make one have to consider the historicity of any of this. As mentioned, it appears that John’s gospel is not well-regarded for historically accurate information; ergo, the presence or absence of the Adulterous Woman narrative probably doesn’t make much difference as far as scholarly opinion goes. So, once again, the decision is yours.

Text

12 Πάλιν οὖν αὐτοῖς ἐλάλησεν ὁ Ἰησοῦς λέγων, Ἐγώ εἰμι τὸ φῶς τοῦ κόσμου: ὁ ἀκολουθῶν ἐμοὶ οὐ μὴ περιπατήσῃ ἐν τῇ σκοτίᾳ, ἀλλ’ ἕξει τὸ φῶς τῆς ζωῆς.

So again Jesus spoke with them. “I am the light of the kosmos; the one following me does not walk about in shadow,  but out in the light of the life.

Generally, it does not bode well for brevity if I stop after the first verse, but there are all sorts of problems in this one sentence. As mentioned above, there is no transitional text if one does not accept the Adulterous Woman story. Further review, this is easily solved if one does not consider Verse 2 to be part of the interpolation, but the continuation of, or response to, Verse 1 in which Jesus went to the Mount of Olives in the evening and then went to the Temple the next morning. Problem solved.

And that sort of obviates the next problem, that he “again” began teaching them. Even this may not be too serious since “again” could refer to the prior day, or the prior week. It simply can mean that Jesus had the habit of teaching them, so any problem may be of my creation. But, these are things that occur to me about the text, and they should be discussed to see whether the text makes sense on its own terms, or if it’s internally inconsistent. Perhaps not in this case. 

“I am the light of the kosmos…one following me walks in the light of life.” Of course, this is usually translated as “light of the world” and I admit that this is an instance where that is perhaps the preferred rendering over leaving it as kosmos. There is a real difference between the concepts the two words engender. Using “world” puts things into a human perspective whereas referring to the entire kosmos, the entire universe is on a very different scale. A cosmic scale, one might say. To choose one over the other requires us to get inside–or at least try to–John’s head to divine his intentions. One could easily argue that kosmos is more in keeping with Jesus as the Logos, the organizing, rational principle of, well, the entire universe, is it not? 

A couple of things must must be said. Yes, positing Jesus as the Rational Principle of All Creation is a Greek concept. But Logos is a Greek concept. Switching back and forth between a Greek and a Judaic understanding leads to inconsistencies in the message put across. This is precisely where we have to get inside John’s head. I have often described John as a theologian, but it needs to be stressed that, at the time John wrote, theology had not been invented yet. That would not occur for another century, or even two. And I must admit that it’s difficult for me to read a lot of this and not filter it through the theological views of the Patristic thinkers, and even more through the filter of later Mediaeval theology. But here’s the thing: theology was invented precisely in order to bring the NT into line with Greek Philosophy (using the capital “P” there). It was invented to try to make sense of the potential internal inconsistencies that exist between gospels, or even within individual gospels, and this is the sort of situation in which some sort of untangling is necessary. The world or the entire universe? 

Then we have to ask what the term kosmos meant in the First Century. There is reason to suppose that, to most, or at least many, speakers of Greek, the term would have been understood much as we understand “the world”. That is, our planet, the terra firma under our feet and the skies above our heads. To a few more, the concept would likely have meant something like the solar system: our earth, the moon and the sun, and the seven known planets. A few more would have included the “fixed stars” (as opposed to the planets which wandered about the night sky), meaning those composing the constellations. If I had to guess, I would say John probably mean the solar system. The origin of YHWH as a sky-god, which likely carried into Jewish thought–as we see in Genesis–was probably set into the minds of anyone with any education, and we know John was educated since he could write. So my uptake on this is John probably had something more grand in mind than just “the world”.

However, there is another wrinkle to all of this which definitely helps explain why anything other than “the world” sounds strange to our ears. We are Western Christians, heirs to the Latin Church centered on Rome rather than of the Greek East centered on Constantinople. Our ancestors read the Bible in Latin for a thousand years, and one can tell. As we’ve gone along, I’ve pointed our several places where the modern translations, which includes the KJV, followed the language of the Latin Vulgate rather than the original Greek. The Greeks were artists and philosophers; the Romans were engineers. They built roads and bridges and aqueducts that are still useful, or even in actual use, today. In the Roman mind, the mundus was not quite the kosmos; the mundus much more closely resembled “the world” rather than the universe, or even the solar system. Of course, our term is German: die Welt. JHaven’t read enough of the proper sort of French to have a good sense of what le monde connotes, let alone the German chops to unravel die Welt. But I suspect that both are much closer to our idea of “the world” than to any Greek concept of the solar system or universe. After all, even though they don’t speak a Romance language the Germans are Latin Christians. And so are native speakers of English. 

12 Iterum ergo locutus est eis Iesus dicens: “Ego sum lux mundi; qui sequitur me, non ambulabit in tenebris, sed habebit lucem vitae”.

13 εἶπον οὖν αὐτῷ οἱ Φαρισαῖοι, Σὺ περὶ σεαυτοῦ μαρτυρεῖς: ἡ μαρτυρία σου οὐκ ἔστιν ἀληθής.

14 ἀπεκρίθη Ἰησοῦς καὶ εἶπεν αὐτοῖς, Κἂν ἐγὼ μαρτυρῶ περὶ ἐμαυτοῦ, ἀληθής ἐστιν ἡ μαρτυρία μου, ὅτι οἶδα πόθεν ἦλθον καὶ ποῦ ὑπάγω: ὑμεῖς δὲ οὐκ οἴδατε πόθεν ἔρχομαι ἢ ποῦ ὑπάγω.

So the Pharisees said to him, “You witness to yourself. Your witness/evidence is not the truth”. (14) Jesus answered and said to them, “And if I give witness about myself, my evidence/witness is the truth, since I know whence I came and where I go. You, in contrast (δὲ) do not know whence I came nor where I am going.

A couple of quick grammar notes. The word μαρτυρία, martyria, is the root of the word “martyr”. As such, the usual translation would be “witness”. However, it also refers to the testimony or the evidence given, as in court. I did the hyphenation to indicate that the same Greek word is behind both. “Providing witness” is a bit awkward in English in most respects. One does not “provide witness” to the police or in court; however, in a religious context, “providing witness” is of course acceptable; however, the meaning is rather specialized, appropriate to fairly specific circumstances. It is quite possibly–or even probably–anachronistic. Bear in mind that “martyrs”, as we immediately understand the term, had not been designated as such, as a specialized term, at the time when these events would have occurred. The first martyr was St Stephen, who was stoned in Acts 7:54ish, after the Resurrection and Ascension. And the term “martyr” is not used of him. Indeed, the term is not really used as such anywhere in the NT. As used, the term comes from judicial and/or other legalistic settings, and this was the base meaning of the word until sometime even after John wrote this gospel. My attempt to pin down the first use of the term to mean someone put to death for their beliefs wasn’t fruitful; my suspicion is that the word as such probably does not date before the mid-Second Century, perhaps 20-30 years after John wrote. It would have been applied retrospectively, but only after a certain number of people were so killed that they warranted a specialized term.

The other grammatical point occurs in Verse 14. We have discussed the Greek words men…de before; they are a rhetorical device used to set up an “On the one hand/on the other hand” distinction. The first of the words, men, is used very infrequently. It’s understood most of the time, and actually inserting it may have been considered a bit amateurish. In contrast, the second word, de is very, very common, used all the time. Mostly it means “but”, but it is frequently used as “and” as well. Counting the uses of kai–the “official” word for “and”–vs de, is sometimes used to detect the influence of one gospel on a later gospel, although I have no idea what this is supposed to prove. After all, I’m not a textual/literary guy, so such stylistic subtleties may be lost on me. Here I added the “in contrast” because it did not feel like a simple “but” would truly get the point across. I felt it needed to be more forceful. 

There is also the idea of Jesus’ evidence being “true” to be considered, but let’s save that for the next bit of commentary.  

13 Dixerunt ergo ei pharisaei: “Tu de teipso testimonium perhibes; testimonium tuum non est verum”.

14 Respondit Iesus et dixit eis: “Et si ego testimonium perhibeo de meipso, verum est testimonium meum, quia scio unde veni et quo vado; vos autem nescitis unde venio aut quo vado.

15 ὑμεῖς κατὰ τὴν σάρκα κρίνετε, ἐγὼ οὐ κρίνω οὐδένα.

16 καὶ ἐὰν κρίνω δὲ ἐγώ, ἡ κρίσις ἡ ἐμὴ ἀληθινή ἐστιν, ὅτι μόνος οὐκ εἰμί, ἀλλ’ ἐγὼ καὶ ὁ πέμψας με πατήρ.

17 καὶ ἐν τῷ νόμῳ δὲ τῷ ὑμετέρῳ γέγραπται ὅτι δύο ἀνθρώπων ἡ μαρτυρία ἀληθής ἐστιν.

18 ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ μαρτυρῶν περὶ ἐμαυτοῦ καὶ μαρτυρεῖ περὶ ἐμοῦ ὁ πέμψας με πατήρ.

19 ἔλεγον οὖν αὐτῷ, Ποῦ ἐστιν ὁ πατήρ σου; ἀπεκρίθη Ἰησοῦς, Οὔτε ἐμὲ οἴδατε οὔτε τὸν πατέρα μου: εἰ ἐμὲ ᾔδειτε, καὶ τὸν πατέρα μου ἂν ᾔδειτε.

20 Ταῦτα τὰ ῥήματα ἐλάλησεν ἐν τῷ γαζοφυλακίῳ διδάσκων ἐν τῷ ἱερῷ: καὶ οὐδεὶς ἐπίασεν αὐτόν, ὅτι οὔπω ἐληλύθει ἡ ὥρα αὐτοῦ. 

[ Jesus is still speaking ] “You judge according to the flesh, I do not judge in this manner. (16) And if I judge so, my judgement is truthful, since I am not alone, but I am also the one sending me, the father. (17) And in your Law it is written that the evidence of two men is true. (18) I am the one evidencing (witnessing does not work in English) about myself and the one having sent me, the father, testifies/gives evidence about me”. (19) So they said to him, “Where is your father?” Jesus answered, “You know neither me nor my father. If you knew me, and (then) you would know my father”. (20) He spoke these words in the treasury, teaching in the Temple. And no one bothered him, since his hour had not yet come.

A few more words about μαρτυρία, martyria, are in order. Everything translated as “evidence” or “testimony” or anything such comes from the single Greek word; English is more nuanced, or has a wider variety of words from which to choose. This is largely because English has accumulated so many words from so many languages that our vocabulary can sometimes be an embarrassment of riches. So we get the incident in Verse 18. “I am evidencing” is not proper English grammar, but “I am witnessing” has entirely a different meaning. So I had to warp the grammar to indicate that the root word martyria is behind the English. “The evidence of two men is true” also comes from the same Greek word. The thought being expressed is that if two people provide the same information to the authorities, or in a legal setting, one corroborates the story of the other so the evidence provided can be accepted as accurate. Unless the two are in collusion. It may help to understand how civil legal proceedings worked in most of the ancient world. Oftentimes, especially in less complex societies, each side brought in people who would swear an oath that one person or the other was telling the truth. Depending on how many swore for each side, and the relative social status of those attesting, the judge (a leading citizen or noble of some sort) would render his judgement. This is the sort of swearing and/or false witness that is prohibited in the Decalogue. We think of swearing as naughty words, and of giving evidence in the form of (sworn) testimony, but legal proceedings in ancient societies didn’t quite work like that, so the concepts do not translate cleanly.

So here Jesus is saying that he swears for the father, and the father swears for him. Ergo, per the Law, what they say is true/accurate/the truth–more on that shortly. In a sense Jesus is sliding towards the line of a logical fallacy if he doesn’t actually cross it. It has to do with the swearing process of the ancient world vs. the giving testimony process of our world. In our courts, prosecution and defense each present a case, an argument, where evidence points (or doesn’t) to a conclusion. The more evidence on side has, the more air-tight their case is. Jesus’ pronunciation under those circumstances does not really hold water; however, if he and the father are swearing to the same terms of reality under the ancient concept of testimony, he is correct. Well, he would be correct if we know, or can at least presume to know that to which Jesus and the father are attesting, or giving testimony.

There is an alteration of two words for “true”. In Verse 13, rendered it as “true”. In Verse 16, I rendered a different form of the word as “truthful”. They are both adjectives; neither is the actual word for “truth”. Does this matter? In English, not so much.  But, as we mentioned, English vocabulary is many times the size of Greek voabulary. As such, nuances bump up against each other and the distinctions blur. Having so many fewer words, one suspects that the choice of one or the other matters. Once again, however, looking to the Vulgate we note that the word is the same in both places. My crib translations all choose “true”, except for a couple that prefer “valid”; however two use “valid” in Verse 13 and one of these two also uses “valid” in Verse 16. What this tells me is that we have another instance of Western, Latin Christianity. Being philosophically inclined, the Greeks may well have seen a distinction between the two words. Being engineers, the Romans may not have. Unfortunately, we do not have enough examples of the two words in Greek to get a firm sense of what the difference was, assuming there was one. And being heirs of the Latin Church, the distinction is lost on us. Or is it? Note that three of my crib translations chose “valid”; The NIV in Verse 13, and the NRSVC in both Verses 13& 16. To be honest, I’m not really all that in tune with the NRSVC. In fact, I had never heard of it until one of the times my laptop was improperly shut down and that version came up when I reopened the site  https://thebible.org/gt/index. The NIV, however, is well-known and respected. That it even chose “valid” the one time seems significant, to some (however minor) degree. The problem is that “valid” and “true” are not synonyms. The latter is a subset of the former, especially in terms of Logic, that branch of philosophy known as Formal Logic. An argument can be valid without being true. “Valid” is an appraisal of the logical formation of the argument: does the conclusion follow from the premises, as stated. All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; Ergo the conclusion is Socrates is mortal. In Math, this takes the form A = B; B = C, ergo, A = C. One can create a valid argument, but one in which a premise is not true. The conclusion will follow from the premises, but it will not be true due to the false premise. Something like, “All men are gummy bears”; “The famous philosopher Socrates is a man”; Ergo, the famous philosopher Socrates is a gummy bear. Valid argument, ridiculous conclusion. So the question is, why did these two versions choose to translate as “valid”? My answer: because the did not understand the distinction between “true” and “valid”.

This is all part of the ongoing discussion of the relationship between Jesus and the father. Having sneaked a glance ahead, it appears that what we get in this particular and arbitrary selection is rather an introduction to the fuller discussion that lies in wait for us ahead. The actual discussion plays off the idea of corroborating testimony, but only in rather an off-hand manner. When Jesus says that he and the father have the same evidence, his interlocutors ask Jesus where his father is. From one perspective this makes perfect sense; testimony is to be given in court where it can be judged. If Jesus can’t produce his father in court, then, the latter’s testimony is null and void; this is, I believe, what Jesus means about them judging according to the flesh, which the NIV & REB respectively render as “by human/worldly standards”, so we are back on the distinction between flesh and, presumably, spirit; this latter word is not used in this particular spot, so the contrast is understood rather than made patent. This, in turn, may imply that John considered the explicit distinction unnecessary, which implies in turn that the flesh/spirit dichotomy was widely understood among that section of the population that would have an interest in hearing the teaching of a holy man, an itinerant preacher. In turn, this should bring to mind the realization that, by the time John wrote, some sense of Dualistic thinking–whether Gnostic or not–had taken hold in the thought-world at large. Maybe.

This is significant for the relationship of the Gospel of Thomas to the canonical NT. The flesh/spirit is explicit here to a degree that does not occur in earlier writings. Yes, Paul made the distinction, but so did Plato half-a-millennium prior to Paul. But even so, it does not appear very clearly in the Synoptics; ergo, if it had been a prominent part of Pauline teaching, it seems that it had been mostly lost between Paul and Mark, or Paul and John for that matter. As a result, it is improbable in the extreme that the very strong dualism of the Gospel of Thomas had developed by the 90s, let alone the 50s. If you wish to read a really good take-down of the early date of Thomas, see Michael Bird’s treatment in his book The Gospel of the Lord. It’s succinct and deadly. From here on, I may just refer to that work whenever I feel the need to rant on G Th.

The high point of this discussion comes at the end of Verse 19. There Jesus says that knowing the father is to know Jesus and vice-versa. Really, though, this just continues on Jesus’ theme of his identity with the father. 

“But no one bothered him (i.e., tried to arrest him) because his hour had not come”. This brings up two points that are more or less interrelated. On one hand, this goes to the question of why Jesus was ultimately arrested and executed. “For his teaching” is the standard answer. But–and this point is made elsewhere–why then, and why not now? Well, his hour had not come. This is a not-so-roundabout way to say that the pre-determined order said to wait. That is, this is a statement of Fate, which had ordained when it would happen and nothing could prevent, or even alter this destiny. The entire doctrine of Free Will was invented to counteract exactly this sort of thinking, usually called “Pagan Fatalism”. It is at the root of astrology, which is based on the passage of time a the stars and planets move through their orbits; so all parts of our lives had an appointed hour, and Homer tells us that not even Zeus can alter Fate. Okay, that’s Zeus, but what about YHWH? Or God? It became intolerable for the later-but-still-early Christian thinker–perhaps especially Augustine–to accept that God could be compelled by anything. Hence Augustine’s position against Pelagianism, which held that humans could merit salvation. So this sort of fatalist thinking that we encounter here in Verse 20 became unacceptable, but it was written so it did not, or could not be erased or go away. This led to some serious logic-bending to square the two circles, and frankly, I don’t believe the various arguments about Free Will and God’s Plan have ever been successfully made to harmonize, at least not to the strictures of Greek Philosophy. 

That’s all fine and good and a great topic of conversation for college freshpeople sitting in the hall of their residence hall at 200 am. But it has actual repercussions for the topic at hand in at this particular instant and on the topic of Jesus’ arrest. Apparently, we are to understand that it took a certain amount of time before the authorities came to see Jesus as a sufficiently sufficient threat that they felt compelled to arrest him. And of course, this is a completely logical argument. There is one problem. Someone (Crossan?) has suggested that the Cleansing of the Temple was the final straw that compelled action since he was striking at the economic root of the Temple’s existence. Naturally, this cannot be tolerated. But what about the first Cleansing that we saw in Chapter 2? Of course, only in John do we find this occurring twice; and, since John’s historicity is not highly valued, this can be shrugged off as a twinning such as we encountered with the Feedings of 5,000 and 4,000. And so it can. But (did you hear that coming?) there is another way to look at the Cleansing(s). We have (well, I have) noted that there is a disjunction between Jesus’ career as a preacher and his very sudden fall from grace, which occurred in less than a week: he went from triumph on Palm Sunday to arrest on Thursday night. The crowd that cheered him on Sunday was clamoring for his execution on Friday. Yes, crowds are fickle* but the transition of five days seems a bit too dramatic, and so possibly a bit contrived for the sake of the drama.

Now, I fully understand that my last statement is pretty much the equivalent of “only a fool or madman would mess with Matthew’s arrangement of the Q material in the Sermon on the Mount”. In fact, the analogy is almost exact: both are value judgements, the former set forth on the basis of my values. More, not only do I present no objective evidence for my judgement, no objective evidence is possible. In my defense, I would suggest that I am setting forth a chain of events for which we have a narrative account. We are not challenging the chain per se, but suggesting that the account does not make sense on its own terms; in short, that the account as we have it is internally inconsistent. There is no such internal inconsistency between the way Matthew and Luke handle the alleged Q material. There are, of course, differences between the two authors, but that is to be expected. Luke did not set out to write another gospel that simply recopied what Matthew had written. What’s the point?

The internal inconsistency of the account is summed up nicely by Jesus’ question when he was arrested: Why now? I taught in the Temple daily and you did nothing. So why now?” Recall that in the Synoptics Jesus only teaches in Jerusalem once. As such, we are to believe that he so stirred up the populace in a week’s time that the authorities felt compelled to act. But, they did not do it at the moment of the Cleansing, when an arrest would have been easily justifiable, and when Jesus had only entered town that morning. Yes, Jerusalem was full of pilgrims for the Festival, and some of these pilgrims came from Galilee and so were familiar with Jesus and his teaching. But Jesus incited the crowd within the span of a few hours? Call me skeptical. Which leads to my next point: that, rather than a twin, John added the first Cleansing as a means to indicate that the authorities were already on notice that Jesus was trouble. 

But his hour had not yet come. In other words, God’s plan had to wait for the “proper” moment because God’s plan required all the pieces to be in place. We will come back to this later when discussing the next installment of the Cleansing.

*Here’s a thought about the fickleness of the crowd, or “the mob”. Aristocratic-tending thinkers held that democracy was bad because the crowd–the mob–was easily swayed and so prone to  violent swings of mood. The idea of democracy had never really taken root in the Near East, and had fallen out of favor at Rome. Ergo, all the political thought was against mob rule, or democracy. Here we have an excellent example of the fickleness and violent mood swings of the crowd, so this provides a nice bit of pro-aristocratic or pro-authoritarian political propaganda. I do not suggest that was the point of the change of heart in Jerusalem. Rather, I suggest that the author of the PN would have had thus anti-popular bias at the forefront of his mind. As an educated person, he would have been familiar with the anti-populist bias in pagan political thought that had existed since Plato. After all, it was the populist, democratic mob in Athens that condemned and executed Socrates. Just keep this in mind as we proceed.

15 “Vos secundum carnem iudicatis, ego non iudico quemquam.

16 “Et si iudico ego, iudicium meum verum est, quia solus non sum, sed ego et, qui me misit, Pater.

17 “Sed et in lege vestra scriptum est, quia duorum hominum testimonium verum est.

18 “Ego sum, qui testimonium perhibeo de meipso, et testimonium perhibet de me, qui misit me, Pater”.

19 Dicebant ergo ei: “Ubi est Pater tuus?”. Respondit Iesus: “ Neque me scitis neque Patrem meum; si me sciretis, forsitan et Patrem meum sciretis ”.

20 Haec verba locutus est in gazophylacio docens in templo; et nemo apprehendit eum, quia necdum venerat hora eius.

John Chapter 8:1-11

Chapter 8 starts with a story that is not in all the mss traditions. Apparently, it is absent from the earliest Greek mss that we possess, but it appears in later Mediaeval mss. Apparently it is also not consistently placed here, at the beginning of Chapter 8. Apparently a number of modern translations mark this off from the rest of the text to indicate the questionable status, but the demarcation is often subtle or not fully explained. I was unaware of this questionable status, but my lack of knowledge is meaningless; the degree of my ignorance is astonishing. I have no desire to wade into arguments for or against inclusion. I can add nothing relevant to the discussion. The fact is, though, that the story is in most versions, however well or poorly commented that there are questions about the section. So we will include it.

While I don’t have the chops to discuss this in a scholarly fashion, there is nothing to prevent me from engaging in wild speculation about why it does not appear in our earliest mss. After all, wild and unsubstantiated speculation is rather a specialty of mine; without it, none of us would be here. One of the commentators discussing the location of the placement, whether it should be found here, or in Chapter 7, or elsewhere dismisses the problem; it’s a true story, so what difference does it make? I tend to agree with him, but for the opposite reason. The story may be True, it may impart Revealed Truth, but that does not mean this story records any sort of event that actually took place in Jesus’ life, or even in his lifetime. The fact that it is missing from the earliest mss does present the likelihood that this story was created later, perhaps much later that the rest of the gospel. And recall what we said about the structure of John’s gospel: it is not episodic as are the Synoptics. Rather, it is integrated, an ongoing disquisition of the revelation of Jesus as Christ, a divine entity somehow equal to The Father. This story is an episode. It stands alone. The marriage at Cana could perhaps be so categorized, but the sign performed there takes that story to the supernatural or divine level whereas this one remains purely human.

What I get from the addition of this story at a later date is a great example of how the gospels were created, perhaps before they were written. This story was added after the gospel had already been written, but it indicates how the process of continued revelation worked. In her wonderful book, The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels sets out that sometime in the mid-First Century what can be called the institutional Church was going about the process of setting the canonical NT. One of the problems was the Gnostic tendency to hold to continued revelation, whereas the Church was keen on eliminating such new revelations as they ran the risk of producing teachings and beliefs that were not consistent with what the Church was trying to establish as orthodoxy. This sort of continued revelation is likely where those portions of Matthew and Luke not in Mark–and that includes the so-called “Q” material–originated. Hence we get the Workers in the Vineyard and the Prodigal Son and the Marriage at Cana. And this story of the adulterous woman we are about to read.

Text

​​1 Ἰησοῦς δὲ ἐπορεύθη εἰς τὸ Ὄρος τῶν Ἐλαιῶν.

2 Ὄρθρου δὲ πάλιν παρεγένετο εἰς τὸ ἱερόν, καὶ πᾶς ὁ λαὸς ἤρχετο πρὸς αὐτόν, καὶ καθίσας ἐδίδασκεν αὐτούς.

3 ἄγουσιν δὲ οἱ γραμματεῖς καὶ οἱ Φαρισαῖοι γυναῖκα ἐπὶ μοιχείᾳ κατειλημμένην, καὶ στήσαντες αὐτὴν ἐν μέσῳ

4 λέγουσιν αὐτῷ, Διδάσκαλε, αὕτη ἡ γυνὴ κατείληπται ἐπ’ αὐτοφώρῳ μοιχευομένη:

5 ἐν δὲ τῷ νόμῳ ἡμῖν Μωϋσῆς ἐνετείλατο τὰς τοιαύτας λιθάζειν: σὺ οὖν τί λέγεις;

6 τοῦτο δὲ ἔλεγον πειράζοντες αὐτόν, ἵνα ἔχωσιν κατηγορεῖν αὐτοῦ. ὁ δὲ Ἰησοῦς κάτω κύψας τῷ δακτύλῳ κατέγραφεν εἰς τὴν γῆν.

7 ὡς δὲ ἐπέμενον ἐρωτῶντες αὐτόν, ἀνέκυψεν καὶ εἶπεν αὐτοῖς, Ὁ ἀναμάρτητος ὑμῶν πρῶτος ἐπ’ αὐτὴν βαλέτω λίθον:

8 καὶ πάλιν κατακύψας ἔγραφεν εἰς τὴν γῆν.

9 οἱ δὲ ἀκούσαντες ἐξήρχοντο εἷς καθ’ εἷς ἀρξάμενοι ἀπὸ τῶν πρεσβυτέρων, καὶ κατελείφθη μόνος, καὶ ἡ γυνὴ ἐν μέσῳ οὖσα.

10 ἀνακύψας δὲ ὁ Ἰησοῦς εἶπεν αὐτῇ, Γύναι, ποῦ εἰσιν; οὐδείς σε κατέκρινεν;

11 ἡ δὲ εἶπεν, Οὐδείς, κύριε. εἶπεν δὲ ὁ Ἰησοῦς, Οὐδὲ ἐγώ σε κατακρίνω: πορεύου, [καὶ] ἀπὸ τοῦ νῦν μηκέτι ἁμάρτανε.]] 

Jesus set out to the Mount of Olives. (2) Early he again went to the Temple, and all the people came to him, and having sat he taught to them. (3) And the Scribes and Pharisees led in a woman taken in adultery, and standing her in the midst (4) they said to him, “Teacher, this woman was taken in flagrante in adultery. (5) In the law Moses commanded us to stone such sort. So what do you say?” (6) They said this testing him, so that they might have his self-incrimination. But Jesus bent over and was writing upon the ground with his finger. (7) As they remained asking him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let the sinless one of you cast the first stone upon her.” (8) And stooping over again he kept writing on the ground. (9) Those leaders from the elders hearing began leaving one by one, and he was left alone, and the woman was in the middle. (10) And standing upright, Jesus said to her, “Where are they? Does no one condemn you?” (11) And she said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Woman, nor do I condemn you. Go [and] from this moment do not sin again.”

First a minor point. The Greek is “teacher”, from the verb “to teach”. The Latin is magister, “master”, as in Master of Arts. Or as Goethe has Faust say, “They call me Master, and even Doctor”, referring to the degrees conferred upon him. Interesting. The term “master” as a degree would not be invented for another thousand (and more) years. 

Again we get the precise siting of the event. As mentioned previously, these sorts of details are the sorts of things that get added to a story upon retelling. They flesh out the narrative, imparting a more natural feel and flow, allowing the reader/listener to slip into the story more easily. But they add nothing to the story/lesson except color. And commentators have noted that this verse should actually be placed at the end of Chapter 7 rather than be the first of Chapter 8. I understand the rationale behind this observation, but how does that square with the whole story being absent from the earlier mss? One commenter states that these geographical details are added as explanation for a Greek audience, but I fail to see how this helps. Someone unfamiliar with Jerusalem & environs (like me, E.G.) is not likely to provide better understanding. I understand Jerusalem, but the Mount of Olives or Sheep’s Gate really don’t help much. Sometimes such details are critical to the narrative. My favorite example of this is Thucydides describing how the Plataian soldiers only wore one sandal to get better footing in the snow as they tried to break through the Spartan blockade of their town. But then, in military events details tend to matter more: the location provides terrain, which can be a crucial factor. Here, that Jesus went to the Mount of Olives sort of a throwaway incidental. But, to be fair, we should note the existence of comments suggesting that the Mount of Olives was where Jesus customarily stayed when he was in Jerusalem for festivals. There are a ton of assumptions there that I will not go into further; we can summarize the status of these assumptions with the question, “based on what evidence?”

In the final analysis, IMO, the Jerusalem details exist because John was, or at least was using, a source based in Jerusalem; I lean strongly to the former. Now this would indicate that the Jerusalem Assembly may have reconstituted itself by this point. This would be another indication of a date later than is often credited. In the Synoptics, Jesus and his disciples go to Jerusalem once. This suggests a time when the Jerusalem Assembly once led by James, brother of Jesus, did not loom large in the mind of the new Church. This, in turn, also surely indicates a worldview that existed after the destruction of the Temple. This almost assures that the Synoptics were indeed written in the period of, say, 70-90/5. I would put Mark shortly after 70, the Destruction being the major impetus for Mark’s decision to write a gospel: the Old Guard was passing, and so it seemed like a good idea to write stuff down. On the other end, I would suggest Luke as contemporary with Josephus and his Antiquities of the Jews; there are certain overlaps in the historical accounts of the two works, most notably the background Josephus provides that Jesus was executed by the “leading men” of the Jews. That could have come from Matthew–or Mark for that matter–but somehow Luke seems a better fit, a judgement based on not much in particular. [As always: I reserve the right to alter that view upon receipt of additional information. Ed.] It is possible that Josephus provides a terminus ante quem for Luke. In the Synoptics, Jesus went to Jerusalem once; in John, most of the action of the gospel occurs there. This is a pretty substantial hint that Jerusalem mattered again. For that to happen, a certain amount of time must have elapsed.

The whole bit about Jesus scratching in the dirt with his finger is curious. Was this meant as a reference to the Dekalogue, written by “the finger of God”? Or was it Jesus sort of ignoring them due to his annoyance? This being me who’s looking at this, I am of a mind to envision Jesus writing what are called characteres, letters or symbols with magical significance. They play a large role in what are called the Greek Magical Papyri (PGM) as part of a spell. Their use continued–or was resurrected–by the Magoi of the Renaissance era, people like my buddy Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim. He’s the real-life man who inspired Viktor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s famous novel. Yes, that Frankenstein. (Note that Viktor’s creature did not have a name; he was simply Frankenstein’s monster.) Of course, I have no basis for claiming that Jesus was inscribing characteres, but it’s as good an explanation as others that I have read. And then there is this: recall that this story is omitted from the earliest Greek mss. Was it omitted because of the implication of Jesus performing magic? Then at a later time when the idea of drawing out characteres had faded from common knowledge, the story was put in because it was a good story with a good, strong moral. This magic stuff could be very important. Some of those who have been following this blog will perhaps recall that I have a theory that Jesus was executed for performing magic. I won’t go into it all again at this point, but this story could indicate that Jesus the wonder-worker was a tenacious memory. Jesus’ name crops up in any number of magical texts, stuff written by pagans. He was invoked as a powerful magician. I have more to say about this, and about the activity in Acts of the Apostles.

Note, after all, that we are told that Jesus again straightened up, that he unbent, that he was no longer writing in the dirt when he addressed the woman. That’s truly an odd detail, and one has to ask why it’s there. Most commentators try to sidestep, or brush off the question of what he was writing, and why. It’s not what’s important they say. And yet John thought it important enough to give sort of a play-by-play of Jesus bending over and standing erect again. It kinda has to matter. There are suggestions that he was writing down her sin, and the requisite punishment, or the names of the accusers,  or the sins of the accusers, or that he was averting his eyes from the naked woman–she was taken in the act, after all. It has also been offered that the name of the sinner and the sin had to be written in some non-permanent medium, and that the dust on the floor of the Temple was a common method/medium. The biggest problem I have with this is that any non-Jewish audience would not have had a clue about this. Indeed, we don’t get it, the commentary is uncertain, and the mystery remains. Sure, it’s possible, and in fact has a degree of plausibility about it. But the fact that this is mysterious to us with our vast apparatus of biblical commentary and research into the customs of Judaism makes this seem a little less likely. If the answer is this straightforward, why is the question answered with such a variety of responses? It’s like the etymology of a certain nasty word: there are at least two different explanations of the word as an acronym as each is put forth as authoritative. The fact that there are two possibilities pretty much nails that neither one is correct. And so here.

Most of the commentaries are sure to point out that Jesus did not approve of, nor accept, nor forgive her sin. Hmm…Jesus forgave the paralytic at the Sheep’s Gate, but not this woman’s. Interesting. Of course, the paralytic’s sins were unspecified whereas hers was flagrant, and a dire blow to the patriarchy which demands the certainty of parentage of any heir. As such, Jesus apparently could not forgive it. Really? This runs rather counter to idea that any sin can be forgiven, save for one against the sacred breath. Here’s another interesting possibility: this story was left out because Jesus did not forgive her sin. Those composing the canonical NT decided this could not be authentic because of the lack of forgiveness.(This has merit, but I prefer my magical theory. But then, it is my theory.) Actually, what I see as the real significance of the lack of forgiveness as a pretty strong indicator that this story was composed outside of the body of John’s gospel. It was composed by someone who perhaps was on the side of the older brother of the Prodigal Son, thinking that a little more punishment and a little less forgiveness of human frailty is needed. This does not provide an indication of a time-frame, since the rather more rigid attitude exists pretty much at any time among the greater body of believers, so it’s not like it represents a later–or an earlier, for that matter–development of the attitude towards adultery. The punishers are eternal.

1 Iesus autem perrexit in montem Oliveti.

2 Diluculo autem iterum venit in templum, et omnis populus veniebat ad eum, et sedens docebat eos.

3 Adducunt autem scribae et pharisaei mulierem in adulterio deprehensam et statuerunt eam in medio

4 et dicunt ei: “Magister, haec mulier manifesto deprehensa est in adulterio.

5 In lege autem Moyses mandavit nobis huiusmodi lapidare; tu ergo quid dicis?”.

6 Hoc autem dicebant tentantes eum, ut possent accusare eum. Iesus autem inclinans se deorsum digito scribebat in terra.

7 Cum autem perseverarent interrogantes eum, erexit se et dixit eis: “Qui sine peccato est vestrum, primus in illam lapidem mittat”;

8 et iterum se inclinans scribebat in terra.

9 Audientes autem unus post unum exibant, incipientes a senioribus, et remansit solus, et mulier in medio stans.

10 Erigens autem se Iesus dixit ei: “Mulier, ubi sunt? Nemo te condemnavit?”.

11 Quae dixit: “Nemo, Domine”. Dixit autem Iesus: “Nec ego te condemno; vade et amplius iam noli peccare”.

Summary John Chapter 7

We’ve been on a bit of a hiatus, so my apologies. I finally succumbed to Covid. Oops. Wasn’t fun, but hardly horrible. I’ve been sicker. Anyway, more or less back to “normal” (?) and back on schedule. My thanks for your patience.

This felt like a difficult chapter. It feels like it took me this long to sort of clue into what this gospel is all about. The Synoptics are much more staccato, like a machine gun, firing off a dozen stories per chapter. Parable, healing, teaching, interaction, more teaching…This gospel is different. Pretty much every chapter has turned into a long interaction, a discussion of sorts between John and some group. We would not be mistaken if we were to say that the group in each chapter can be described by–or subsumed within–the term “The Jews”. There are nuances to this categorization; in Chapter 6 we were told they were actually “The Leaders” (of “The Jews”). Here in Chapter 7 they there was a faction of the Pharisees mixed in. The presence of this group is unusual in John; they’ve only been mentioned less than a handful of times whereas they are ubiquitous in the Synoptics. This is our first clue. The presence of “rowers” is our second.

The shuffling of personnel, of dramatis personae, if you will excuse the term, indicates that John is coming from rather a different place than the Synoptics. We noted as early as Chapter 1 that John has the perspective of someone from Jerusalem, rather than from the provinces, or even a different country–since Mark supposedly wrote in Rome. At least, that’s according to one theory. The biggest difference, which only stuck me just now as I was re-reading through the chapter is that there is very little actual teaching in the chapter. There is no Sermon-on-the-Mount-style explanation of what one needs for salvation (however defined), or living a holy or sanctified or justified life. Rather, we get Jesus’ (continued) explanation of who he is and how he fits into the grand scheme of the kosmos and into what we may call God’s Plan. Or something such.

One one hand, this really doesn’t leave a lot of room for commentary. The action is physical and not theological. There are no (well…) truly theological points being made. It is textual exegesis in a very real way, of course. It is Jesus going through Hebrew Scriptures and fitting himself into the world of the prophecy that unfolded in the continued, or continuing, revelation of the Promise of the Messiah made to the Peoples of Israel and Judah. I simply do not have the chops to go into the intricacies of the HS as they are said to pertain to Jesus. But then, I’m not sure Luke had the chops, either. Recall the journey to Emmaus when Jesus walked with two unnamed disciples, during which Jesus explained to them all the ways in which the HS foretold Jesus’ coming and his mission. To my best recollection, that is not the only time Jesus did this, but it’s the one at the top of my memory. It’s the occurrence about which it’s the most explicitly stated that Jesus–or anyone–was able to do this. Honestly, I’ve always been a bit…miffed? Put out? Disappointed?…that the explanation that Jesus provided was not set out in detail. I would find this very useful, and very interesting. And now I’m curious whether this explanation has ever been set out at length and in detail. If it hasn’t been done, then why not? This strikes me as exactly the sort of thing that one of those Catholic monks during the Middle Ages who was deeply versed in Scripture would have–indeed, should have–done. But I’ve never come across it. Nor have I ever heard–that I recall, admittedly, and my memory on such is far from trustworthy–have run across no allusion that it was done, just as none of the Early Christian writers alluded to anything even vaguely resembling Q. Why not? And I mean that as a serious question? That is exactly the sort of undertaking that some Churchman of the period between Augustine and Aquinas (give or take) would have been zealous to undertake. It’s the sort of exercise that one of those zealous Mediaeval Popes should have been eager to commission. And yet, nothing. Why not?

Part of the answer, per my theory, is that this is more or less what John is doing in his gospel. Now, there are dozens, hundreds (at least) of exegeses of John put to paper or pixels in the last two millennia. I was surprised to learn that the theory that Matthew had been a pagan rather than a Jew had been floated by someone before my time. Silly me, thinking I could be original about such a thing! So if this is a commonplace understanding of John’s gospel, well, that’s what happens when you get a dilettantish neophyte writing about this stuff. I am always quick to point out just how much is overlooked when such a dilettante writes history; Jared Diamond and his book Collapse springs immediately to mind. If I’ve made such a layperson-type mistake, then my apologies. In my defense, however, I would just add that it’s such marvels of stumbled-upon discovery are the reason I set out on this voyage in the first place. For those of you who have been reading and studying the NT for years, if not decades, I do appreciate your indulgence and forbearance when I sound like a nincompoop by making such “revelations” of insight.

After all, one could argue–or at least suggest–that Matthew did much the same thing if on a more limited scale. He is, after all, the first to mine quotes from the HS to support his position. “He will be called a Nazarene” (Mt 2:23) comes to mind, but there are others. After all, Matthew invented the story of the Slaughter of the Innocent so he could support the event with the reference to the lamentation in Rama of Rachel weeping for her children. Indeed, since Matthew included actual quotes, one could suggest–if not argue–that Matthew’s scale was grander than John’s was. Luke, with is penchant to follow up and “correct” Matthew when needed, or to abridge Matthew when necessary, added the story of Emmaus to do the latter. I’ve done a quantity comparison of the number of quotes provided by Matthew, Luke, and John. They fall into that order descending: Matthew has about 60, Luke about 50, and John about 25, approximately half of Luke. The comparison was cursory, so can’t pull many–if any–definitive conclusions at this point, because the raw numbers are just that: raw. There needs to be a qualitative analysis. Some of the quotes may be repeated within a given gospel, there are a number that are shared, especially between Matthew and Luke, such as the quotes found in the Temptation of Jesus early on in the gospel. At this point we need to look at which are repeated, which stand alone in each, and perhaps come to an hypothesis about why each included and excluded the ones they did. I am particularly curious to see how or whether Luke “corrected” Matthew, if we can even tell..

Regardless, John and his approach to the topic is different from his predecessors, both in quantity and in kind. John includes quotes, but half as many as Luke, but that’s not the relevance. Rather, John dedicates the entire gospel to an extended review and discussion of how Jesus fits in. In turn, this accords with what we have been saying about John writing a gospel intended to summarize and encapsulate–no, to explain who Jesus was, what Jesus was, and why Jesus was.

This is easily one of the shortest chapter summaries I’ve ever produced, but I don’t feel like there are sufficient individual quirks to require lengthy breakdown and discussion of the text. As always, I reserve the right to change my mind without advance notice. Regardless, it will be interesting to see how it all unfolds from here. This is why it’s so much fun to make it up as I go along. It’s all a surprise to me, too.