From the Lips of Jesus or a Scribal Hand? “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” by Alan Kurschner.

Luke 23:34a is often known as the so-called, “First Saying of Christ on the Cross.” His intercessory prayer has been an indelible saying in the minds of the biblical literate (and not so literate) for centuries. This saying is perennial sermon fodder for pastors on Good Friday. And those who have viewed the poignant film The Passion of the Christ directed by Mel Gibson may be aware that these words are placed on Jesus’ lips, not once, but twice.

A few years ago I wrote a paper entitled, “Luke 23:34a: From the Lips of Jesus or a Scribal Hand?” In it I argued that this saying of Jesus on the cross is likely not original. It was sometime during the second century, probably the middle to the late part, that this saying was added, probably to a gospel harmony, and from then on it eventually found its way into all the text-types and the majority textual history thereafter.

I am not going to reproduce my entire paper here, but I will provide some points of discussion, namely on the textual evidence that shows that this reading lacks important textual support.

Documentary Evidence

There are substantially two readings, a short reading (omission) and a longer reading (insertion). The following Greek evidence is given in a bird’s-eye format, which will allow us to see the significant Greek witnesses all at once. The format here is taken from Reuben Swanson’s very helpful New Testament Greek Manuscripts: Variant Readings Arranged in Horizontal Lines Against Codex Vaticanus (Luke Edition).[1] Continue reading →

Dr. John Piper on John 7:53 to John 8:11:

[[They went each to his own house, look but Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him, and he sat down and taught them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in the midst they said to him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. Now in the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?” This 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. And 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.” And once more he bent down and wrote on the ground. But 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. Jesus stood up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.”]]

This message is the kind I may give once every decade or so. The reason it’s so rare is that the situation with our text is so rare. In most of your Bibles, you notice that John 7:53 to John 8:11 is either set off in brackets or is in a footnote. The reason for this is that most New Testament scholars do not think it was part of the Gospel of John when it was first written, but was added centuries later.

For example…

Don Carson, who teaches at Trinity, and is in my view one of the best New Testament scholars in the world, writes, “Despite the best efforts . . . to prove that this narrative was originally part of John’s Gospel, the evidence is against [them], and modern English versions are right to rule it off from the rest of the text (NIV) or to relegate it to a footnote (RSV).” (The Gospel According to John, 1991, p. 333)

Bruce Metzger, one of the world’s great authorities on the text of the New Testament until his death in 2002: “The evidence for the non-Johannine origin of the periscope of the adulteress is overwhelming.” (The Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 1971, p. 219)

Leon Morris: “The textual evidence makes it impossible to hold that this section is an authentic part of the Gospel.” (The Gospel According to John, 1971, p. 882)
Andreas Köstenberger: “This represents overwhelming evidence that the section is non-Johannine.” (John, 2004, p. 246)

And Herman Ridderbos: The evidences “point to an unstable tradition that was not originally part of an ecclesiastically accepted text.” (The Gospel of John, 1997, p. 286)

I think they are right. And this gives us a chance to spend a little while on the branch of Biblical Studies behind these judgments called Textual Criticism, and its implications for the trustworthiness and authority of the Scriptures. So let me summarize the reasons these scholars give for thinking this the story of the woman taken in adultery was not originally part of John’s Gospel, and then give some general thoughts about the science of Textual Criticism that helps make sense of the arguments.

Reasons This Section Isn’t Original to John’s Gospel

The evidence goes something like this:

The story is missing from all the Greek manuscripts of John before the fifth century.

All the earliest church fathers omit this passage in commenting on John and pass directly from John 7:52 to John 8:12.

In fact, the text flows very nicely from 7:52 to 8:12 if you leave out the story and just read the passage as though the story were not there.

No Eastern church father cites the passage before the tenth century when dealing with this Gospel.

When the story starts to appear in manuscript copies of the Gospel of John, it shows up in three different places other than here (after 7:36; 7:44; and 21:25), and in one manuscript of Luke, it shows up after 21:38.

Its style and vocabulary is more unlike the rest of John’s Gospel than any other paragraph in the Gospel.

Now saying all that assumes a lot of facts that many of you simply don’t have at your fingertips. And nobody expects you to. This is a hugely technical field of scholarship that at the upper levels requires not only the ability to read ancient languages, but the ability to read them in kinds of ancient handwritten scripts that are very demanding. So let me give you just enough so that you can make sense of these reasons.

The Science of Textual Criticism
The New Testament that we know was originally written in Greek. The first printed Greek New Testament—that came off a printing press—was published by Erasmus in 1516. It turned the world upside down. If you want a great glimpse of this period and the heroism it produced, read David Daniell’s biography of William Tyndale. Continue reading →

The text of John 7:53 through to 8:11 is known to Biblical scholars as The pericope adulterae. Concerning this, Associate Professor of Biblical Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary writes:

Have you noticed the double brackets in the ESV that surround John 7:53–8:11 in Logos Bible Software (if available)? Those double brackets mean that the ESV’s translation committee does not consider this passage to be original to John’s Gospel. You also find double brackets around Mark 16:9–20 in Logos Bible Software (if available).

Do you know what it means that these passages are marked off–correctly–as not coming from the authors of these respective Gospels? If John did not write what is enumerated as 7:53–8:11, that means it doesn’t belong between John 7:52 in Logos Bible Software (if available) and 8:12 in Logos Bible Software (if available) because it does not come from the author who was “carried along by the Holy Spirit.” If John did not write this passage, it isn’t Scripture because it was not “breathed out by God.” If it isn’t Scripture, it shouldn’t be in the text, and pastors shouldn’t preach it.

That’s what those double brackets mean about these passages. I submit that if a translation committee has come to the conclusion that they should put double brackets around these texts, they would serve pastors and Bible teachers better by putting these texts in a footnote rather than in the text. Those double brackets are too easy not to notice. The ESV puts John 5:4O in Logos Bible Software (if available) in a footnote because the editors do not think John wrote that verse. The same should be done with Mark 16:9–20 in Logos Bible Software (if available) and John 7:53–8:11 in Logos Bible Software (if available).

What is the evidence for such a conclusion? In what follows I will only present the evidence for John 7:53–8:11 in Logos Bible Software (if available), evidence that comes from the New Testament manuscripts (external evidence) and from the flow of thought in John’s Gospel (internal evidence). [If you’re interested in the Mark 16 issue, I discussed that passage also from the pulpit].

The Manuscripts

We are dealing with books written long before the printing press and long copied by hand. John 7:53–8:11 in Logos Bible Software (if available) is not in any of the earliest manuscripts, and Bruce Metzger notes that “No Greek Church Father prior to Euthymius Zigabenus (twelfth century) comments on the passage, and Euthymius declares that the accurate copies of the Gospel do not contain it.”

That means that at some point a scribe copied this passage into a manuscript of John’s Gospel, and then that got perpetuated. The fact that we have enough evidence to determine this to be the case should increase our confidence in the text of the New Testament. That there is a consensus on this point should make us more confident in the Scriptures not less.

John 7:53–8:11 in Logos Bible Software (if available) is not in any of the best texts: P66, P75, Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, etc. As the note above the passage in the ESV states, the earliest manuscripts do not include it. As the footnote in the ESV text states, some manuscripts contain this passage, but not following John 7:52 in Logos Bible Software (if available). Some have it after John 7:36 in Logos Bible Software (if available) or 21:25 in Logos Bible Software (if available) or even Luke 21:38 in Logos Bible Software (if available). Again, the fact that we have enough manuscript evidence to arrive at this conclusion shows that we can be practically certain about the original contents of the text of the New Testament.

The Flow of Thought in John’s Gospel

In addition to the manuscript evidence indicating that John the author of the Gospel did not put this passage here, we can also observe that the passage interrupts the flow of thought in this section of the Gospel. The opponents of Jesus are ready to kill him (John 5:18 in Logos Bible Software (if available); 7:19–20 in Logos Bible Software (if available), 25 in Logos Bible Software (if available)). They seek to arrest him (7:30, 32), and they are frustrated when the officers don’t bring him in (7:45–47). Their minds are made up. They have just rejected Nicodemus’s counsel that they investigate Jesus (7:51). They are past the point of testing Jesus or seeking charges to bring against him, as the interpolated passage has them doing in 8:6. They do not need charges against Jesus. He has called “God his own Father, making himself equal with God” (John 5:18 in Logos Bible Software (if available)), so they can bring him up on charges of blasphemy.

There are accounts in other Gospels similar to this one about the woman caught in adultery, but there are no accounts like this one in John. The passages most similar to this interpolated passage are the ones that depict the scribes and Pharisees disputing directly with Jesus over someone who is in need. Interestingly, the two accounts closest to this one involve the healing of the paralytic and the man with the withered hand. Mark places both of those incidents (Mark 2:1–12 in Logos Bible Software (if available); 3:1–5 in Logos Bible Software (if available)) prior to the Pharisees’ fateful decision to seek to kill Jesus (Mark 3:6 in Logos Bible Software (if available)).

John Doesn’t Talk This Way

Have you noticed that John always refers to the opponents of Jesus as “the Jews”? Did you notice that John never refers to the scribes? The only instance of the word “scribes” in John’s Gospel is in the interpolated passage at 8:3. In fact there are 14 words in John 7:53–8:11 in Logos Bible Software (if available) passage that occur nowhere else in John’s Gospel.

Continuity Between John 7 and 8

If we pass over 7:53–8:11, we find that the setting and situation in the rest of John 8 matches the setting and situation of John 7. As we move to John 8:12 in Logos Bible Software (if available), John continues to present Jesus speaking at the temple (7:28; 8:20) on the last and greatest day of the feast (7:37).

Not only is the setting of John 8 the same as that of John 7, the points under discussion are the same. Jesus claimed to be the fulfillment of the water pouring ceremony of the Feast of Tabernacles in 7:37–39. That water pouring ceremony likely commemorated the water from the rock in the wilderness (Exod 17:1–7 in Logos Bible Software (if available); Num 20:2–13 in Logos Bible Software (if available)). In addition to the water pouring ceremony there was a ceremonial lighting of candles, likely commemorating the way the Lord lit Israel’s way through the wilderness by the pillar of cloud and flame. In John 8:12 in Logos Bible Software (if available), Jesus will assert that he is the light of the world. Other points of contact between John 7 and 8 include the following:

Testimony, 7:18, 28; 8:13
Where Jesus comes from and where he goes, 7:25–30, 31–36; 8:14, 21–22 (cf. esp. 7:34–35 and 8:21–22)
Righteous judgment, 7:24; 8:15
The Jews don’t know God, 7:28; 8:19, 55
The seeking of glory, 7:18; 8:50, 54
A Plea to Translation Committees

Bible translation committees responsible for the ESV, CSB, NIV, NAS, and any other translation preached from pulpits should do pastors a favor and put these texts in footnotes. Mark 16:9–20 in Logos Bible Software (if available) was not written by Mark, and John 7:53–8:11 in Logos Bible Software (if available) was not written by John. Those passages do not belong in the text and should not be preached from pulpits. The snake-handlers are woefully mistaken. They should not think there is any warrant in the New Testament for such a practice. Similarly, those who cry that no one should throw stones anytime sinners are called to repentance have misunderstood this interpolated passage (Jesus does tell the woman to stop sinning in 8:11), but still the passage has no business in the text. It was not written by John, and it should not be there interrupting the flow of though between 7:52 and 8:12. Put it in a footnote.

[it was my privilege to preach John 7:53–8:29 in Logos Bible Software (if available) at Kenwood Baptist Church today, and for any who may be interested in the way I addressed this issue from the pulpit, the sermon audio is online].

At the 2013 Eastern Regional Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, held at LBTS, Dr. Dan Wallace presents his paper regarding Tischendorf and the Discovery of the Codex Sinaiticus.

In Session #2, Dr. Dan Wallace, in a lecture entitled, “Preserving the work of God” discusses the work of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts.

In former decades, the main question asked of the Bible was “Is it true?” Now it has become, “Did God really say that?”

Questions concerning the transmission of the text of Scripture used to be something only highly trained theologians needed to know. Yet now, because the attacks on the Bible are so mainstream, every Christian needs to know something about the issues involved. We need to know what we believe and why we believe it.

Dr. Dan Wallace, who many view as the leading textual scholar in our time helps us understand something of what we need to know: