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Another Textual Analysis

of the Passage about the Adulteress
– A Response to Manuel Pereira –

James Snapp, Jr. – May 2015

Recently an essay by Manuel Pereira appeared online (at the Inerrant Word website and at the
website of Trinity Bible Church) in which the author rejected John 7:53-8:11 and proposed that it
does not belong in the Bible. I offer this essay as a response. In slightly more than half as many pages
as his essay contained, I intend to exhaustively answer his main arguments, and even address some
tangential points.
As Pereira defended his refusal to preach from John 7:53-8:11, he asserted that much of the
dispute about the passage “is over the position of tradition in relation to the premium of truth.” This
statement frames the controversy as if it is a contest of tradition (upheld by those who want to retain
the passage) versus truth (upheld by those who want to remove it). “It has touched the hearts of
millions,” Pereira said, but, “It lacks support in some significant textual witnesses of antiquity and
bears internal difficulties as well.” Thus the contest is presented as if one side is supported by
emotionally driven dogmatism, while the other side’s arguments are entirely scientific and objective.
Again and again, Pereira names “sentimental affinities” as the motivation of those who favor the
passage, while those who reject the passage (that is, those who agree with Pereira) possess “wide and
substantial arguments.”
I agree with Pereira’s premise that the fundamental question on this issue is the question of
whether or not John 7:53-8:11 was part of the original text of the Gospel of John. Sentiment should
have no place in the equation. I submit, however, that when he reached his conclusion that this
passage is not original and that it should not be preached, he did not adequately consider – and
probably was not even aware of – a scribal mechanism which accounts for the accidental loss of the
passage in a major early transmission-line.

Introduction to (Anti-Byzantine Bias in) New Testament Textual Criticism

As Pereira’s readers were introduced, in the course of three pages, to some principles of
textual criticism, they were also introduced to the pro-Alexandrian biases of the authors of the
works upon which Pereira very heavily relied in this section: Bruce Metzger (author of A Textual
Commentary on the Greek New Testament) and Bart Ehrman (co-author, with Metzger, of the fourth
edition of The Text of the New Testament). Readers were informed about conflations in the
Byzantine Text but conflations in Alexandrian manuscripts (for instance, in Vaticanus at Colossians
2:12, and in Sinaiticus at John 13:24) were not mentioned. The Western and Byzantine Texts were
described as harmonistic, but the harmonizations in Alexandrian manuscripts were not mentioned.
Pereira depended extensively upon the work of Metzger and Ehrman in his treatment of the
basics of New Testament textual criticism, and at times his statements reflect a lack of familiarity with
the subject-matter. For example, Pereira called the Koine text a subtype “closely related to the
Byzantine text type,” whereas it is just another name for the Byzantine Text, and he used the terms
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“Byzantine text” and “Textus Receptus” interchangeably, even though there are over 1,500 differences
between them. Pereira also repeated a starkly erroneous claim taken from Metzger and Ehrman:
the claim that the Western and Alexandrian Texts “are today considered by most critics to be far
superior” to the Byzantine Text. While there is little question that most textual critics today regard
the Alexandrian Text to be generally superior to the Byzantine Text, the Western Text contains far
more corruptions than the Byzantine Text. As I noticed that this indefensible claim was somewhat
casually repeated, and as I noticed that several skewed statements from Metzger and Ehrman were
also repeated without clarification, I got the impression that these statements have been absorbed
and recycled without being tested.
When scholarly works echo, it may be because they are hollow. When Pereira told his
readers that “The chief characteristic of Western readings is fondness for paraphrase,” and that in the
Western Text, “Words, clauses, and even whole sentences are freely changed, omitted, or inserted,” it is
not because he investigated the evidence and reached this conclusion. It is because he quoted
Metzger and Ehrman (The Text of the New Testament, fourth edition, page 277). And the reason
Metzger and Ehrman said this is that Metzger read Hort’s 1881 Introduction to the New Testament
in the Original Greek, on page 122 (section 173): “The chief and most constant characteristic of the
Western reading is a love of paraphrase. Words, clauses, and even whole sentences were changed,
omitted, and inserted,” etc. On one hand, there is nothing wrong with repeating accurate statements.
On the other hand, a high degree of casual dependence on earlier sources, combined with a lack of
independent research, tends to crystallize assumptions which might otherwise be overthrown by
fresh analysis. It also tends to promote the phenomenon known as “groupthink.”

Words from New Testament Scholars

Two sections sub-titled “Words from New Testament Scholars” and “Comments from Study
Bibles” constitute a large chunk of Pereira’s essay. Readers of these sections receive examinations
of examinations, instead of examinations of evidence. Several of the comments consist of broad
restatements of an academic consensus, generously seasoned with appeals to the “oldest and best
manuscripts,” with few specifics about the evidence involved.
All of the quotations in these sections amount to appeals to authority. I, too, could list
authorities for the opposite position – Robinson, Hodges, Punch, Burgon, Pickering, Fuller, Merritt,
and so forth. But no one should confuse appeals to authority with appeals to evidence – especially
when, as I shall show, the evidence involves a scribal mechanism which, to the best of my
knowledge, few of the authorities and commentators who reject John 7:53-8:11 have addressed, or
described, or provided an inkling of a hint that they are aware of its existence.

EXTERNAL EVIDENCE
Sixteen pages into Pereira’s essay, we meet seven groups of external evidence against the
genuineness of John 7:53-8:11. I shall review these groups individually.
(1) Early Greek manuscripts. The first kind of external evidence consists of the absence of the
passage in the “finest” Greek manuscripts. This, says Pereira, is “the foremost argument against the
passage.” These manuscripts are said to possess three especially important characteristics. They
are
(a) the earliest extant documents available,
(b) of the highest literary quality, and
(c) representative of an impressive breadth of diverse origination.
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The specific manuscripts to which he refers are P66, P75, , A, B, C, N, T, and W. A total of
268 Greek manuscripts do not include John 7:53-8:11, but only these nine fit the first criterion:
they are relatively early. And only P66, P75, , B, T, and W – six of these manuscripts – were
produced before the 400’s. Most of the others that Pereira listed – 22, 33, 124, 157, 209, 213, 397,
565, 713, 788, 799, 821, 828, 849, 865, 1230, 1241, 1242, 1253, 1333, 2193, and family 1424 – were
produced after the death of Charlemagne. Furthermore, about 120 of the 268 Greek manuscripts
that do not contain John 7:53-8:11 are copies of the Commentary of Theophylact with interspersed
or accompanying text; these 120 copies boil down to the one ancestor-manuscript of Theophylact’s
work.
If P66, P75, , B, T, and W all included John 7:53-8:11, the passage would be accepted. Since
none of them contain John 7:53-8:11, though, their testimony is regarded as secure evidence that
the passage is not original. However, at least two points are in order.
First, these six manuscripts are predominantly centered in Egypt; they do not represent “an
impressive breadth of diverse origination.” We shall revisit this point.
Second, neither the earlier age nor the general quality of a manuscript is a safeguard against
errors at any particular point. A copyist whose work is generally excellent may occasionally
accidentally skip a word, a phrase, or an entire segment of text. And even skilled professional
copyists were entirely capable of misunderstanding their exemplars when they encountered
unusual features therein.
In the case at hand, I submit that the meticulousness of an early Alexandrian copyist led him
astray when he encountered an unusual feature. The hypothesis is along these lines:
John 7:53-8:11 was in an exemplar used by a copyist in Egypt in the mid-100’s – having
descended to it from the autograph. By the mid-100’s, the churches in Egypt already possessed a
rudimentary lection-cycle for their major annual festivals, such as Easter, Pentecost, Christmas, the
Annunciation, and Palm Sunday. Regarding the Gospels-selections assigned to be annually read on
Sundays, the textual critic C. R. Gregory stated, “It seems to me likely that at an extremely early date
the lessons were chosen for the Sundays.” John Chrysostom, in the late 300’s, refers to the
assignment of specific passages for specific Sundays to be something established by previous
generations. His contemporaries Epiphanius and Augustine likewise indicate their familiarity with
reading-cycles used in their churches.
There is no need to imagine that these lection-cycles were the same everywhere, or that they
were not subject to gradual expansion and adjustment; the first point here is simply that the
celebration of a basic series of annual feast-days, including Pentecost, was an extremely ancient
practice. The second point is that in the ordinary Byzantine lectionary – attested in hundreds of
Greek copies – the reading assigned to Pentecost consisted of John 7:37-52 plus John 8:12 - this
final verse being included in order to end the reading-selection on a positive note.
With the factor of a basic annual lection-cycle in play, imagine an Egyptian copyist in the
100’s: his exemplar is a lector’s copy, and it contains notes and marks added by the lector to assist
him in the course of reading the Gospels in the church-services. The copyist comes to John chapter
seven, and sees, after the statement at the end of 7:52, instructions in the margin, which say: Skip
ahead. And so he skips ahead until he finds instructions in the margin which say, Restart here.
Therefore this dutiful copyist follows these instructions, and accordingly he does not copy John
7:53-8:11, just as – he supposes – he was instructed. And the manuscript (or manuscripts, if the
same copyist thus made several copies) which contained this mistake proceeded to affect both the
main Alexandrian transmission-stream and its neighbors.
Even in the “finest” manuscripts, copying-mistakes occurred. A few examples should be
sufficient to establish this point.
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● In Matthew 27:49, an incorrectly placed scribal note has invaded the text of the “oldest and
best” uncials, Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, conveying (in disagreement with John 19:34) that Jesus was
pierced with a spear before He died.
● In John 9:38-39, the entire phrase, “And he said, ‘Lord, I believe,’ and he worshiped Him, and
Jesus said” is missing from three of our “finest” manuscripts, namely P75, Sinaiticus (as initially
written), and W. This is accounted for by the existence of a very early copy of John in which the
passage was marked to draw the reader’s attention to the passage when it was used at baptisms
and in the confessions of catechumens – and the passage was lost due to the subsequent
misunderstanding of those marks by a copyist who, thinking that they meant that the words should
not be included, dutifully skipped them.
● Sinaiticus – one of our finest manuscripts – tells its readers in Matthew 13:35 that Isaiah
the prophet is being quoted (although the quotation is from Psalm 78:2). This probably echoes
marginalia in the copyist’s exemplar, added by an earlier copyist who attempted (erroneously) to
provide the name of otherwise unspecified prophet.
● In P75, the rich man in the parable in Luke 16:19 is given a name – Neues (that is, Nineveh,
with the first syllable missing) – but although P75 is our earliest manuscript of this passage, this
reading is regarded as an accretion.
● In Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, the reference to baptism in Mark 7:4 is replaced by a reference
to pouring.
● At the end of Mark 1:34 in B, C, L, W, (and added secondarily in Sinaiticus) the phrase “to
be the Christ” is added.
Many more examples of quirky and anomalous readings in early Alexandrian manuscripts
could be supplied. The point is that we have sufficient evidence that early Alexandrian copyists in
the second century were capable of misunderstanding notes and marks in their exemplars, and they
were also capable of rigorously producing copies affected by those misunderstandings. As a result,
John 7:53-8:11, when marked as a segment of text not to be included in the Pentecost-lection, was
vulnerable to accidental deletion at the hands of early Egyptian copyists.
(2) Early versions. The absence of John 7:53-8:11 in some ancient versions – including not only
Coptic dialects, but also the Ethiopic, Gothic, and Peshitta versions – is another important piece of
evidence against the genuineness of the passage. However, on the premises that the passage was
lost in Egypt in the 100’s, and that the resultant omission had a large impact on the transmission of
the text of the Gospel of John, this is not very surprising.
Granting that some versions of the Gospels produced in the 200’s-400’s do not include the
story about the adulteress, other versions – specifically, three Old Latin transmission-lines, the
Vulgate, the Palestinian Aramaic, and copies of the Harklean Syriac – include the story.
(3) Lectionaries. Pereira’s statement that John 7:53-8:11 is absent in ancient lectionaries is only
partly true. The passage is not included in the Synaxarion – the movable part of the lectionary, in
which the dates are annually reset so that the reading-list begins at Easter, regardless of what day
of the year it is. But most of the passage is included in the Menologion – the fixed part of the
lectionary in which readings are assigned to specific dates of the year, in honor of saints, martyrs,
etc.
In the Menologion, either John 8:2-11 or John 8:3-11 (local usage varied) is arranged as the
lection for Saint Pelagia of Antioch, or (combining the commemoration of two penitent women,
Pelagia of Antioch and Mary of Egypt) the Penitents, which is October 8. This accounts for some
features in the margins of some manuscripts, which shall be described later.
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(4) Writings of the Early Church. Pereira, echoing Metzger, Burge, et al, claimed that none of the
early Greek commentators say anything about this passage. We shall test that claim shortly. First,
let’s look at the evidence from the seventh chapter of the Didascalia Apostolorum, a text which is
generally assigned to the 200’s, and which thus competes with P66 and P75 in terms of age:
“If you do not receive the one who repents, because you are without mercy, you shall sin against
the Lord God; for you do not obey our Savior and our God, to do as He also did with her that had
sinned, whom the elders set before Him, and leaving the judgment in His hands, departed. But He, the
searcher of hearts, asked her and said to her, ‘Have the elders condemned thee, my daughter?’ She
said to Him, ‘No, Lord.’ And He said unto her, ‘Go your way; neither do I condemn thee.’ In Him
therefore, our Savior and King and God, be your pattern, O bishops.”
This is far from an exact quotation of the passage, but inasmuch as the author is appealing to
the incident as an authoritative and precedent-setting example of forgiveness, it is just the sort of
loose summary that one might feel free to make when taking for granted that one’s readers know
and accept the passage. And where else could they have encountered it, in a context that rendered
it authoritative, if not in their copies of the Gospel of John?
Far from Syria, in southern Spain, Pacian of Barcelona –who became a bishop in 365, at
about the same time when Codex Sinaiticus was being produced – mentioned the passage about the
adulteress in his Third Epistle to Sympronian – Against the Treatise of the Novatians. In paragraph
39, bishop Pacian writes with heavy sarcasm:
“O Novatians, why do you delay to ask an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and to demand life
for life? Why do you wait to renew once more the practice of circumcision and the sabbath? Kill the
thief. Stone the petulant. Choose not to read in the Gospel that the Lord spared even the adulteress
who confessed, when none had condemned her; that He absolved the sinner who washed His feet with
her tears; that He delivered Rahab at Jericho . . . .”
We see here that Pacian specifically describes the story as something people could read “in
the Gospel,” and thus the only reasonable conclusion is that Pacian expected his readers to be able
to find and read this story in their copies of Scripture, like the two other accounts to which he
alludes. Pereira told his readers, “Pacian of Barcelona show awareness of the story but without
connection to the Gospel of John,” but such minimalization is unwarranted. The burden of proof is
on Pereira to provide any basis for the idea that Pacian expected his readers to understand his
reference to “the Gospel” as something other than the text of the four Gospels.
Pereira also attempted to shrink the significance of the testimony of Ambrose, who was
bishop of Milan from 374-397. Ambrose of Milan cites John 7:53-8:11 repeatedly and extensively.
In Epistle 26, in which Ambrose comments on the passage at length, he states that “The acquittal of
the woman who, in the Gospel of John, was brought to Christ accused of adultery, is very famous.” This
contradicts the claim that the patristic testimony for John 7:53-8:11 is “quite isolated” – as if Milan
was some lonely backwater boondocks. In Epistle 74, paragraph 4, Ambrose utilizes John 8:11
again, and shows plainly that it was in his manuscripts of the Gospel of John in its usual place,
before 8:12.
Ambrosiaster, yet another writer of the mid/late 300’s, also refers to the story.
The testimony of Jerome must be examined in detail in order to remedy Pereira’s drastic
efforts to minimize it. “In his edited translation of the Gospel of John,” wrote Pereira, “Jerome
included the pericope de adultera, the rationalization of which was later defended: “In the Gospel
according to John in many codices [manuscripts], both Greek and Latin, is found the story of the
adulterous woman who was accused before the Lord.””
However, in 417, when Jerome states that the story about the adulteress in the Gospel of
John was found in many codices, both Greek and Latin, Jerome was not offering a “rationalization”
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or a “defense” of anything. There is no evidence that anyone was asking him why he had included
the passage in the Vulgate. Let’s take a closer look at Jerome’s statements.
Jerome wrote in Against the Pelagians, 2:17, “In the Gospel according to John, there is found, in
many of the Greek, as well as the Latin, copies, the story of the adulteress who was accused before the
Lord.” – In evangelio secundum Ioannem in multis et Graecis et Latinis codicibus invenitur de adultera
muliere, quae accusata est apud Dominum. In the same composition, Jerome offers the explanation
that Jesus, when he wrote in the earth, wrote down the names of the woman’s accusers, using a
phrase from Jeremiah 17:13 (“Those who depart from Me shall be written in the earth”) as the lens
through which to perceive this.
Thirty-three years earlier, in 383, Jerome had included John 7:53-8:11 in the Gospel of John
in the Vulgate Gospels. On two occasions, he describes how he went about his translation-project.
In the Preface to the Gospels, addressed to Damasus (the bishop of Rome who instructed him to
undertake the project), Jerome wrote that he had revised the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and
John “by a comparison of the Greek manuscripts. Only early ones have been used. To avoid any great
divergences from the Latin which we are accustomed to read, I have used my pen with some restraint,
and while I have corrected only such passages as seemed to convey a different meaning, I have allowed
the rest to remain as they are.”
Inasmuch as the presence or absence of 12 verses obviously conveys a different meaning,
this implies that (a) Jerome, in 383, found John 7:53-8:11 in ancient Greek manuscripts – that is,
Greek manuscripts which he considered ancient in 383, and (b) the church in Rome in 383 was
accustomed to read the passage.
In Epistle 27, To Marcella, Jerome wrote, “The Latin manuscripts of the Scriptures are
demonstrated to be faulty by the variations which they all exhibit, and my objective has been to
restore them to the form of the original Greek.”
So: Jerome depended upon Greek manuscripts when he assembled the Vulgate text of the
Gospels – including John 7:53-8:11 – and at the time this was done, John 7:53-8:11 was already
being customarily read in the churches in Rome. And, by 417, Jerome had encountered John 7:53-
8:11 in many Greek manuscripts and many Latin manuscripts. Considering that Jerome visited a
variety of locales, and considering that he specifically consulted ancient Greek Gospels-manuscripts
(I emphasize: they were considered ancient in 383) his testimony goes a long way toward counter-
balancing – if not outweighing – the list of Egyptian manuscripts which do not include the passage.
Pereira’s statement that Jerome’s testimony shows that “The evidence demonstrates a fairly
early popularity of the story among Latin Christians” is true, but there is clearly more to the picture:
the passage was not only in many Latin manuscripts; it was in many Greek manuscripts as well.
This does not fit a model of “quite isolated” distribution of copies of the Gospel of John with the
passage in the 300’s. In an attempt to salvage that model, Pereira minimized Jerome’s testimony via
three assertions:
(1) “The family of manuscripts from which Jerome apparently drew from was notoriously
‘wild’ and marked with great variation.” Jerome himself affirmed that this was true of the Latin
texts, but regarding the contents of his Greek manuscripts, such a claim is sheer assertion. We
would observe far less correspondence between the Vulgate and Greek manuscripts it if were true.
(2) “The Western textual base as well as audience is known to have accommodated
apocryphal material (other apocryphal stories are found in Western manuscripts).” Pereira has not
even attempted to make a case that Jerome’s Greek manuscripts had a Western character.
Furthermore, just look at the Vulgate Gospels: do you see a lot of apocryphal material there? Me
neither.
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(3) “Jerome served as single editor, whose procedure for including and excluding material
was quite proprietary.” “Proprietary” is not a synonym for “faulty.” Jerome was chosen to make a
standard Latin translation because he was considered the best-qualified man for the job. (If it had
been a large co-operative venture among a crowd of less-skilled scholars, an objection would be
made on that basis.) Besides, this did not give Jerome the ability to invent “many manuscripts, both
in Greek and in Latin,” containing John 7:53-8:11. These three attempts to muzzle Jerome’s strong
support for John 7:53-8:11 are only slightly short of mud-slinging.
Next we come to the testimony of Augustine, and again the need exists to ensure that his
evidence is not unfairly belittled. Augustine makes it clear that some manuscripts had the passage,
and some did not, and he asserts that the passage had been excised in some copies by men who
thought that their wives would use it as a pretense to be excused of adultery. That is probably just
his calculated guess – regarding which more shall be said shortly. But, contrary to the impression
given by Pereira, Augustine’s enthusiastic recognition of the passage as part of the Gospel of John
was no rare thing: Augustine’s Manichaean opponent Faustus utilized the passage too. Augustine
also mentions that some other opponents of Christianity used the statement that Jesus wrote in the
ground with his finger as an excuse to accuse Christ of childishness.
Prosper of Aquitaine (c. 440), in Call of All Nations, Book 1, chapter 8, devotes a paragraph
to the passage.
Peter Chrysologus, preaching at Ravenna c. 450, uses it as well, and Sedulius (c. 450, in
Carmen Paschale, Book 4) clearly alludes to it. (This Sedulius should not be confused with Sedulius
Scotus, who came along centuries later.) The author of the composition known as Apologia David
(probably not Ambrose, but someone else in the late 300’s) even refers to the story of the
adulteress as a lection from the Gospels which was read at the church where he preached. To these
witnesses, we must add Cassiodorus (c. 570), and the Nordenfalk Eusebian Canon-tables (from
the early 600’s), as witnesses supporting the inclusion of John 7:53-8:11.
The testimony of Didymus the Blind (c. 380) is vaguely worded, but it should be on the
scales: in his Commentary on Ecclesiastes, Didymus mentions that “We find in certain gospels: A
woman, it says, was condemned by the Jews for a sin, and was being sent to be stoned in the place that
was for that. The Savior, it says, when he saw her and observed that they were ready to stone her, said
to those that were about to cast stones, ‘He who has not sinned, let him take a stone and throw it. If
anyone is conscious in himself not to have sinned, let him take a stone and smite her.’ And no one
dared; because they knew in themselves and perceived that they, too, were guilty in some things, they
did not dare to strike her.”
Now, on one hand, Didymus’ phrase “in certain Gospels” (εν τισιν ευαγγελιοις) does not
specify that the passage was found in the Gospel of John. On the other hand, it seems to me that if
Didymus had intended to refer to a non-canonical gospel (such as the Gospel of the Hebrews),
rather than to the four Gospels, he would have used specific language to denote such a work. The
default understanding of the phrase “in certain Gospels” ought to be that the reference is to copies
of the four canonical Gospels. (It should be noted, by the way, that Didymus was blind from his
childhood, and while this did not make it impossible for him to quote substantial passages of
Scripture, it may explain why he loosely summarizes some episodes, as he does in this case.)
Next, we shall consult Book Eight of the Syriac Chronicle of Pseudo-Zachariah of Mitylene
in the British Library’s Add. MS 17202 (produced in the late 500’s or 600’s). This composition
mentions that in the Gospels-volume used by Mara of Amid (who lived in exile in Alexandria from
517 (or 519) until 527, “in the 89th canon, a chapter which is related only by John in his Gospel, and is
not found in other manuscripts, a section running thus: ‘It happened one day, while Jesus was
teaching, they brought him a woman who had been found to be with child of adultery, and told him
about her. And Jesus said to them, since as God he knew their shameful passions and also their deeds,
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‘What does He command in the law?’ and they said to him: ‘That at the mouth of two or three
witnesses she should be stoned.’
“But he answered and said to them: ‘In accordance with the law, whoever is pure and free from
these sinful passions, and can bear witness with confidence and authority, as being under no blame in
respect of this sin, let him bear witness against her, and let him first throw a stone at her, and then
those that are after him, and she shall be stoned.’ But because they were subject to condemnation and
blameworthy in respect of this sinful passion, they went out one by one from before him and left the
woman. And when they had gone, Jesus looked upon the ground and, writing in the dust there, said to
the woman: ‘They who brought you here and wished to bear witness against you, having understood
what I said to them, which you have heard, have left you and departed. Do you also, therefore, go your
way, and commit not this sin again.’”
Later I will refer again to this loose and embellished form of the story about the adulteress.
Here it is sufficient to show that in the early 500’s, an account in which Jesus prevented the stoning
of an adulteress was in a manuscript of the Gospel of John used by Mara of Amid. When one
considers the Greek comments from Didymus, and when one also considers that the Syriac
Chronicle of Pseudo-Zachariah is, at this point, utilizing a Greek source, the often-repeated statement
(from Metzger) that “no Greek commentator on the Gospel before Euthymius Zigabenus (twelfth
century) discusses the passage” requires so much qualification that it should have been abandoned
long ago.
Our final witness in this section is the Chapter-Titles of Codex Fuldensis. Codex Fuldensis
is a Latin New Testament produced in 546 under the supervision of Victor of Capua (in south-
central Italy). Its arrangement of the text of the Gospels was based on a harmony of the Gospels
which Victor suspected might be a rendering of Tatian’s Diatessaron (a composition made c. 172,
combining the contents of all four Gospels into one continuous non-repeating narrative). Since
Tatian, by the 500’s, was regarded as a heretic, Victor of Capua was reluctant to reproduce the
harmony-text exactly. Instead, he attempted to preserve the sequence of the Gospels-text so as to
imitate the sequence in his source-document (but with the genealogies of Christ added), using the
theologically uncontroversial Vulgate text instead of the text in his source-document. Victor also
preserved the chapter-titles which he found in his source-document. The story of the adulteress is
listed therein as chapter #120: De muliere a Iudaeis in adulterio deprehensa (that is, “About the
woman whom the Jews caught in adultery”).
The Arabic Diatessaron does not contain the story about the adulteress, but this may be
because the Arabic text was based on a Syriac exemplar, the text of which was conformed to the
Peshitta, which did not contain the passage. Although Pereira asserted that the Diatessaron does
not contain the story about the adulteress, this is not necessarily the case. If Codex Fuldensis’ Old
Latin exemplar’s chapter-titles echo the work of Tatian then we have here the echo of a second-
century composition, produced within two generations of the apostle John himself, that included
the story of the adulteress. If the case is otherwise, then at the very least, the chapter-titles
preserved in Codex Fuldensis attest to the presence of the story of the adulteress in another Old
Latin Gospels-text.
So: instead of an “overwhelming” mass of patristic evidence against John 7:53-8:11, we see
patristic support for the story, to various degrees, from before Charlemagne, from the following:
(1) the Didascalia Apostolorum (which was later recycled c. 380 in Apostolic Constitutions),
(2) Pacian of Barcelona,
(3) Ambrose,
(4) Didymus,
(5) Ambrosiaster,
(6) ancient Greek manuscripts used by Jerome in 383,
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(7) many Greek and Latin manuscripts seen by Jerome in the early 400’s,
(8) Augustine,
(9) Faustus,
(10) pagans mentioned by Augustine,
(11) Prosper of Aquitaine,
(12) Peter Chrysologus,
(13) Sedulius,
(14) the author of Apologia David,
(15) a Gospels-volume owned by Mara of Amid,
(16) Codex Fuldensis’ Source’s Chapter-Titles (which may echo Tatian, from c. 172),
(17) Cassiodorus, and
(18) the Nordenfalk Canon-tables.

(5) Marks that Accompany John 7:53-8:11 in Some Copies. Pereira repeated the claims of
various commentators (chiefly Metzger) that John 7:53-8:11 “is found marked in multiple witnesses
as suspicious,” and that it “is found with marks of suspicion,” and accompanied by asterisks or obeli
which “mark a word or passage as spurious or doubtful,” and so forth. He stated that in “E, M, S, Λ,
P, Ω, 1424mg, pm270” the passage is marked by obeli. Without question, he intended for his readers
to understand that these marks signified scribal doubt about the legitimacy of the passage.
However, in 130 of the approximately 270 manuscripts in which asterisks or other marks
are present on the pages where John 7:53-8:11 appears, they do not accompany the entire
passage, but only John 8:3-11. In these cases, the asterisks were not intended to convey doubt, but
were, instead, intended to point out the location of the lection for Saint Pelagia’s Day, within the
section of text that was to be skipped on Pentecost.
An example of this phenomenon may be seen in MS 685, to which Daniel Wallace drew his
readers’ attention in a blog-post in 2010. Wallace stated that the pericope adulterae “is marked as
dubious with vertical lines in the outside margin.” One can plainly see, however, the following
features on the page: (1) The squiggly lines are horizontal, not vertical. (2) The squiggly lines do
not accompany the entire passage; they begin at 8:3 and the start of the sentence is plainly
indicated in the text by an αρχη symbol, designating the beginning of a lection. (3) At the end of
John 7:52, there is a “jump” symbol, instructing the lector to skip
to John 8:12; this indicates the way the text was to be read on
Pentecost. (4) No squiggly lines accompany John 7:53-8:2; the
squiggly lines only accompany John 8:3ff. (5) At the top of the
page, the rubric for the lection for the Penitent Women is
written, along with the incipit, or introductory phrase, which the
lector was to use when reading that lection, beginning at 8:3.
Considering that in MS 685, the lection-title “For the
[Feast-Day of the] Penitents” (that is, mainly Pelagia of Antioch)
is written at the top of the page, and considering that the
squiggly lines begin and end where that lection begins and ends,
it seems unlikely that the squiggly lines were added as
“indications of doubt.” It seems more likely that the purpose of
these lines was to show the lector where that particular lection
started and stopped – normal symbols not being used because
they were liable to be confused with the symbols for the
Pentecost-lection.
 - 10 -
Now let’s consult one of the
codices which Pereira said was “marked
by obeli” – Codex M (021, Campianus,
from the 800’s). In Codex M, an asterisk
appears at the beginning of John 7:52 –
and it is accompanied by a jump symbol.
At the same line, in the outer margin,
there is a faint small red “+” symbol.
Another red “+” appears beside the
beginning of John 8:3. On the next page,
an αρξου symbol (meaning, “restart” or
“resume”) and an asterisk appear at the
beginning of John 8:12, while in the
outer margin there is a lectionary-
related note, which means, “For the fifth
day of the fourth week,” followed by the
incipit-phrase with which, on the fourth
Thursday after Easter, the lector was to begin reading John 8:12-20, the lection in the Synaxarion
assigned to that day. Meanwhile, in the last line of the first column, in a space between 8:12 and
8:13, there is a red cross (one of many which separate sentences in this manuscript), accompanied
in the lower margin by a note which means, “The end of the lection for the Feast” (i.e., the end of the
Pentecost lection).
Thus, it makes sense to regard the two asterisks in Codex M as features intended to help the
lector navigate the lection for Pentecost – that is, these asterisks’ purpose was to draw the lector’s
attention to the instructions to skip from the end of John 7:52 to the beginning of John 8:12 when
reading the lection for Pentecost.
Let’s consult another ancient manuscript which Pereira said was “marked by obeli”: Codex E
(07, Basiliensis, from the 700’s). In Codex E, at the end of John 7:52, a jump symbol instructs the
lector to skip ahead to the arxou (restart) symbol, which is located immediately before John 8:12.
Red asterisks appear in a column to the left of the text of John 8:2-11, and a red “+” appears beside
the beginning of John 8:3. A telos (stop) symbol appears at the end of John 8:12, and in the margin
at the top of the page on which John 8:12 appears are the heading and incipit for the lection for the
fourth Thursday after Easter, and in the margin alongside 8:12 is the αρχη symbol to show the
lector where that lection begins.
The asterisks alongside John 8:2-11 seem to have been added to indicate the extent of the
lection for the Feast-Day of the Penitents, inasmuch as a copyist would be more likely to begin the
asterisks at 7:53, rather than at 8:2 or 8:3, if these asterisks’ purpose was to express scribal doubt.
Besides attempting to present the asterisks as if they were all indications of scribal doubt
(without mentioning the lectionary-related “jump” symbols at all), Pereira offered only a partial
glimpse at the margin-notes about the passage. Echoing Hort’s 1881 Introduction, he pointed out,
“One scholium states that the Section was ‘not mentioned by the divine Fathers who interpreted
[the Gospel], that is to say Chrysostom and Cyril, nor yet by Theodorus Mopsuestia and the rest’:
according to another it was not in ‘the copies of (used by) Apollinaris’.” The second note is part of a
scholion found in Codex Λ; Pereira, however, did not inform his readers that there is more to that
note; it proceeds to state that the whole passage is in the ancient copies (Εν δε τοις αρχαιοις
ό λα κειται).
 - 11 -
Manuscript 135 (produced in the 900’s), in which John 7:53-8:11 appears at the end of John,
also has an interesting note, stating that the story was added because it was discovered “in ancient
copies” (εν αρχαίοις αντιγρά φοις).
Manuscript 34 (produced in the 900’s or 1000’s), in which the passage is accompanied by
asterisks, also has a note, stating that although the portion with asterisks is not present in a
multitude of copies, it is found in the old ones.
MS 565 (a purple minuscule from the 800’s or 900’s, affiliated with the f 1 group) does not
contain John 7:53-8:11 before John 8:12. Instead, after John 21, 565 contains a note: Το περι της
μοιχαλιδος κεφά λαιον εν τω παρα Ιωά ννου ευαγγελίω ως εν τοις νυν αντιγραφοις μη κείμενον
παρέλειψα· κατα τον τό πον δε κειται ουτως εξης του ουκ εγηγερται.” That is: “The chapter about
the adulteress, not being present in the current copies, was omitted; it was located right after ‘does not
arise.’” When this manuscript was in pristine condition, this note – a shortened form of the notice
which precedes the passage at the end of John in the chief representatives of f 1 – was almost
certainly followed by the entire passage, but the page has undergone extensive damage. The note
itself, however, sufficiently shows that either in the exemplar of 565, or in an earlier ancestor-copy
which was meticulously replicated (notes and all), John 7:53-8:11 was found immediately following
John 7:52, and the copyist moved it to the end of John in the copy he was making so as to conform
the text to other copies in circulation.
Now let’s clarify some of the claims that have been made about this piece of evidence. First,
we don’t have 270 manuscripts with asterisks alongside John 7:53-8:11. We have something like 98
manuscripts with asterisks or marks of some sort beginning at John 7:53, and something like 131
manuscripts with asterisks or marks of some sort beginning at John 8:2 or 8:3, and something like
41 in which the marks don’t fit either of those two descriptions. The marks in the second group
were not intended to convey scribal doubt (does anyone imagine that copyists thought that John
7:53-8:2 was genuine, and 8:3-11 was questionable?); they designate the extent of the lection for
the Feast-day of the Penitents (Pelagia of Antioch and Mary of Egypt).
I submit that in the manuscripts in which all of John 7:53-8:11 is accompanied by marks, this
does not mean that the copyist who added the marks considered the passage spurious. Instead,
these manuscripts may echo the existence of a slightly different division of early lections. In the
main form of the lection-divisions, the lection for Pentecost consisted of John 7:37-52 plus 8:12. But
in another form, the lection for Pentecost consisted of John 7:37-8:2 plus 8:12. (This form is
attested in Codex Λ (039), which has a “jump” symbol at the end of John 8:2, and asterisks alongside
8:3-11, plus the previously mentioned margin-note. It is also attested in ten manuscripts in which
part of John 8:12 is inserted between John 8:2 and 8:3.) The Palestinian Aramaic lectionary also has
the break between 8:2 and 8:3.) In this second form of the lection-divisions, margin-markings were
added to tell the lector to skip 8:3-11, and a misunderstanding of these marks has caused those nine
verses to be omitted in 18 manuscripts. Similarly as a result of the first division, a
misunderstanding of margin-markings caused 7:53-8:11 to be omitted in some of the earliest
copies.

(6) Variations in the Location of the Passage. Pereira, like many commentators, pointed to some
transplants of John 7:53-8:11 – chiefly its placement at the end of Luke 21, and at the end of the
Gospel of John – as evidence that it is not part of the original text. These dislocations of the passage,
he said, are “of no small significance,” (even though they represent less than 5% of the manuscripts
in which the passage is found). If they are a significant part of his case, he may want to reconsider
his rejection of the passage – for these dislocations are related to how the passage was used in
lection-cycles. Let’s take a closer look at the specific examples of dislocation which Pereira
described:
 - 12 -
(1) “In the Ferrar group of cursives it follows Luke 21:38.” – (This is only partly true; some
members of the Ferrar group (f 13) have the passage in the usual location in John.) The movement of
the passage so as to follow Luke 21:38 in some members of f 13 is easy to explain: these manuscripts
descend from a copy that was modified to make the lector’s job a bit easier: John 7:37-52 was
combined with 8:12 in order to form one continuous lection for Pentecost. John 7:53-8:11 was
moved to the end of Luke 21 because the passage included the Menologion-lection for October 8
(the feast-day of the Penitents, mainly Pelagia of Antioch), and earlier in Luke 21 is where the
Menologion-lection for the preceding day, October 7 (the feast-day of Saints Sergius and Bacchus –
the lection is Luke 21:12-19) is located. The next convenient insertion-point after Luke 21:19 is at
the end of the chapter – and the contents of Luke 21:38 (“Then early in the morning all the people
came to Him in the temple to hear him”) naturally invite the inclusion of the transplanted lection
there because the verse is verbally similar to the contents of John 8:2a (“Now early in the morning
He came again into the temple, and all the people came to Him”).
(2) “In 225 it comes after John 7:36.” – The copyist of 225, in the course of making the
lector’s job easier by reformatting the Pentecost-lection as one continuous lection, simply put John
7:53-8:11 before the beginning of the Pentecost-lection (i.e., before John 7:37-8:12). This is not the
only lectionary-related transplant in 225: John 13:3-17 appears in 225 not only in John, but also in
Matthew, after Matthew 26:20. If you consult the lectionary-related marginalia of medieval
manuscripts of Matthew, at 26:20 you will see a note instructing the lector to jump to John 13:3.
The person who made 225 decided to make things easier for the lector by inserting John 13:3-17 in
Matthew 26. Fortunately not many copyists followed his example, or else we might have to deal
with theories that John 13:3-17 was a “floating text.” Rather than imply that John 7:53-8:11 is not
original, its dislocation in 225 shows that it was moved to one side or the other of the Pentecost-
lection simply to make the lector’s job a little easier.
In over a dozen manuscripts (115, 476, 1349 and others), a similar rearrangement of the
passage has been carried out, except the story about the adulteress follows the Pentecost-lection-
text rather than precedes it. That is, the reader encounters John 7:37-52, and then 8:12, and then
7:53-8:11, and then 8:12 again.
(3) “In the Sinai Georgian MS 16 it follows 7:44” – This has been reported regarding not just
one, but three Georgian manuscripts. Considering that the earliest Old Georgian manuscripts do not
contain the passage at all, the presence of the passage in three medieval Georgian copies is
surprising – and I offer no explanation, except to hazard a guess that these three Georgian copies
echo an imperfect attempt by a copyist (perhaps Euthymius, who made an edition of the Georgian
text in the late 900’s/early 1000’s) to reinsert the passage into the text of John, based on his
possession of a copy in which the passage was at the end of the Gospel of John, preceded by a note
such as what is found in the leading members of f 1. (Indirect support for this idea may be deduced
from the general affinities between the Gospels-text of f 1 and the Old Georgian text.) (It is not
difficult to see how a copyist with a “Caesarean” exemplar, upon reading a note saying that the
passage was found after the section that refers to a prophet not coming from Galilee, could assume
that the intended reference was the section that contains John 7:41, rather than the one that ends at
7:52.)
A consideration of the Armenian and Old Georgian evidence may be instructive: the Old
Georgian version was translated from Armenian. Yet, while Armenian Gospels-manuscripts tend to
include John 7:53-8:11 at the end of the book, the earliest Old Georgian manuscripts do not have the
passage at all. This displays a scribal tendency (in one locale, at least) to drop the passage after it
was transplanted to the end of the book.
(4) “A number of MSS, including the Armenian, set it after 21:25.” – The most important Greek
manuscripts in which John 7:53-8:11 appears after the end of the Gospel of John are the leading
 - 13 -
1
members of the f group (specifically, manuscripts 1, 1582, and 2193, plus the damaged manuscript
565, in which, due to damage, the passage itself is not extant but an introductory note to it has
survived, as described earlier). Twenty-three assorted manuscripts that are usually not identified
as being related to f 1 also have the passage (or part of it) after the end of John 21.
When we are allowed a close-up look at the evidence from f 1, it is clear that these
manuscripts echo an exemplar or ancestor-manuscript made by someone who had observed that
many manuscripts did not have the passage after John 7:52, but who also possessed an exemplar
which did have it at that location. In manuscripts 1 and 1582, a note precedes the passage, as
follows:
“The chapter concerning the adulteress: in the gospel according to John, this does not appear
in the majority of copies; nor is it commented upon by the holy fathers who are known for their
exegetical works – I refer specifically to John Chrysostom and Cyril of Alexandria. Nor, indeed, does
Theodore of Mopsuestia. So it was not copied in the place where it is found in a few copies, at the
beginning of the 86th chapter following, “search and see that a prophet out of Galilee does not arise.”
In Codex Ebnerianus (GA 105, from the 1100’s), after John 7:52, John 7:53-8:2 in the text of
John, but the next verse in the text is John 8:12, minus its opening phrase, so as to yield the
equivalent of, “And he sat down and began to teach them, saying, “I am the light of the world,” etc.
In the margin next to 8:12, a note provided the incipit for the lector: “Begin this with, ‘Again Jesus
spoke to them, saying.’” Turning to the end of John in Codex Ebnerianus, we find, after the closing
book-title and subscription, John 8:3-11, in different handwriting. At the bottom of the page is the
lection’s title, “For the Penitents.” Instead of suggesting that John 8:3-11 was a “floating text,” what
we have here is evidence that the movement of the passage from the main text, to the end of the
book, was motivated by a desire to provide the Pentecost-lection in an uninterrupted form. It is
undeniable, inasmuch as 7:53-8:2 is in the text of John in Codex Ebnerianus, that in an ancestor of
Codex Ebnerianus, John 8:3-11 stood in the text in its usual place.
The Palestinian Aramaic Lectionary implies that the same thing happened elsewhere. The
200th lection in manuscript Pal-A (produced in 1030) of the Palestinian Aramaic Lectionary consists
of John 8:1-11, and John 8:1 concludes the 48th lection in Pal-A, Pal-B, and Pal-C (these names are
given so as to keep them distinct from the Greek manuscripts known as A, B, and C). This alone is
significant, inasmuch as it shows that the passage was included in the Palestinian Aramaic
Lectionary. But a more interesting feature is a heading-note that appears in Pal-A and Pal-B
following John 8:2: “The Gospel of John was completed in Greek in Ephesus.” In Pal-C, a heading-note
after John 8:2 reads, “The Gospel of John was completed by the help of Christ.”
Each of those two sentences is a subscription-note – the sort of note that typically appears at
the end of a Gospel. This implies (as J. Rendel Harris wrote back in the late 1800’s) that the people
who developed the Palestinian Aramaic lectionary used a copy of John in which John 8:3-11 was
located at the end of the Gospel of John (after the subscription-note that followed John 21), and
when the Aramaic Lectionary was made, the subscription-note was mechanically retained. This
shows that the passage was not a “floating” composition, inasmuch as 7:53-8:2 was in the text of
John. John 8:3-11 had been removed from John 8, to the end of the Gospel, in the ancestor-copy
upon which the Palestinian Aramaic Lectionary was based.
(Readers wishing to learn more about this may consult pages xv, lv, and lxx in The
Palestinian Syriac Lectionary of the Gospels, which was published in 1899 by Agnes Smith Lewis and
Margaret Dunlop Gibson. In 1881, this evidence was unavailable to Westcott & Hort, upon whose
work Pereira depended for his data about lectionaries.)
The leading representatives of f 1 and the extant manuscripts of the Palestinian Aramaic
Lectionary echo the formats of ancestor-manuscripts that were produced in the late 400’s and
500’s. The transplant of John 7:53-8:11, and of John 8:3-11, to the end of the book, did not begin
 - 14 -
1
when the f manuscripts and the extant Palestinian Aramaic Lectionary copies were made; it began
centuries earlier. The presence of the story of the adulteress at the end of John in Armenian copies
shows that it was in that location when the Armenian version was revised in the 430’s. Clearly,
although the current representatives of this format are medieval, the format itself existed in the
early 400’s.
Now then: if one were to only read the claims of Metzger and other commentators, one
could understandably imagine that the persons responsible for placing the story about the
adulteress at the end of Luke 21, or at the end of the Gospel of John, or on one side or the other of
the section of text that constituted the Pentecost-lection, were comparable to bombardiers
dropping bombs onto foreign territory. However, when the details of the evidence are given their
due weight, it becomes clear that the persons responsible for these dislocations were more like
gardeners, transplanting the passage from its place after John 7:52 in order to make the lector’s job
a little easier. Every Greek transmission-stream that displays a dislocation of the passage also
contains earlier evidence of the presence of the passage in its usual position before John 8:12.

(7) The High Number of Variants in the Passage. The final piece of evidence in Pereira’s case
against the genuineness of John 7:53-8:11 consists of the high number of textual variants in the
passage: it has, he states, “80 variants in 183 words.” However, this is not difficult to explain. After
the passage was removed so as to create one uninterrupted Pentecost-lection, and copies lacking
the passage had been distributed to other places, readers realized the error, and attempted to
remedy the situation by adding the missing episode back into the text. In some locales, though,
there were no copies of the Gospel of John that had not been affected by the mistake, and so some
copyists who had not memorized the text settled for the next best thing: a similar story which was
found in the works of Papias. (Eusebius of Caesarea, in Book 3, chapter 39 of his Ecclesiastical
History, composed in the early 300’s, states that Papias “relates another story of a woman who was
accused of many sins before the Lord, which is contained in the Gospel according to the Hebrews.”)
Some idea of the contents of this alternative version of the account may be perceived by
considering the details in the story as was described by Didymus, and as it was reported to have
appeared in a copy of the Gospel of John used by Mara of Amid in the early 500’s, which was
described earlier. The Armenian manuscript Matenadaran 2374 (formerly Etchmiadzin 229) also
has a very different form of the story. In this manuscript from the early 900’s, a story about an
adulteress precedes John 8:12, but instead of the usual contents of John 7:53-8:11, we find the
following:
“A certain woman was taken in sins, against whom all testified that she was deserving of death.
They brought her to Jesus (to see) what he would command, in order that they might malign him.
Jesus made answer and said, “Come ye, who are without sin, cast stones and stone her to death.” But
he himself, bowing his head was writing with his finger on the earth, to declare their sins; and they
were seeing their several sins on the stones. And filled with shame they departed, and no one
remained, but only the woman. Jesus said, ‘Go in peace, and present the offering for sins, as in their
law it is written.’”
This is clearly not John 7:53-8:11; it is a proxy, probably based on the similar story that was
preserved by Papias and/or the “Gospel of the Hebrews.” Once copies of John re-entered the
transmission-stream, such fill-ins were withdrawn, for the most part, but the traces of their visit
remain in a few witnesses such as Codex D, and Mara’s copy, and Matenadaran 2374, and in the
variant-readings that echo their more vivid details.
(A couple of other considerations may be noted. First, based on a few random checks in
Swanson’s horizontal-line comparison of major Greek manuscripts of John, I think it’s probably safe
to say that in a typical 12-verse segment of the Gospel of John, there are at least 70 variants.
 - 15 -
Second, the high amount of variants in John 7:53-8:11 may be a point in favor of its antiquity: a ship
with a clean hull is new; a ship with many barnacles clinging to it has been in the water for a long
time.)

(7.5) Augustine’s Theory of Protective Excision. Pereira devoted about a page to test the merits
of Augustine’s assertion that some men had removed the story about the adulteress from the text of
the Gospel of John due to concern that the account might be used by their wives to excuse adultery.
Pereira’s first reaction, like that of some other commentators, was to survey the other
instances of grace applied to not-so-exemplary women in the Gospels – specifically, the Samaritan
woman at the well, and the woman in Luke 6 who was a sinner – and ask, essentially, “If anyone had
been attempting to purge the Gospels of texts which could be misinterpreted so as to approve of
adultery, why were these other passages untouched?”.
I do not subscribe to the notion that anyone excised John 7:53-8:11 because they were afraid
that their wives might read it and conclude that they could expect to be forgiven after committing
adultery. Therefore I will not spend a lot of time answering that objection. Nevertheless at least
three points ought to be noticed:
(1) It cannot be ignored that the women in the other passages, by the time they leave the
narrative stage, are reformed, repentant souls – whereas no expression of repentance or acceptance
of Christ’s authority ever comes from the adulteress.
(2) The line of reasoning that says that that it is unlikely that someone removed one
passage, because he left two others alone, is fallacious; it is like listening to a bank guard report that
someone has stolen $50,000 out of the bank vault, and replying that this is highly unlikely because
$100,000 is still in the vault. People in antiquity did not always think things through carefully, or
only act methodically and thoroughly, any more than they do now.
(3) Augustine may have had in mind people who only had access to the Gospel of John, and
who thus did not maul the other passages because of lack of opportunity.
  Pereira’s second reaction was to ask, essentially, “Why would anyone with that motivation
remove John 7:53-8:2, instead of only 8:3-11?”. Now, I could point out that in 18 manuscripts, John
7:53-8:2 is in the text and 8:3-11 is absent. And I could also point out the possibility that John 7:53-
8:11 already stood as a lection when and where the offended persons lived; as a result, 7:53-8:2
would have been removed along with the rest simply because the verses were found together – like
pickpockets who steal their victims’ money and their expired grocery coupons, simply because they
are in the same wallet.
However, someone else will have to pursue that line of reasoning, because I don’t think that
Augustine really knew why some manuscripts did not contain the passage. I think he offered a
confident guess, and I think his guess was incorrect. All of the arguments against Augustine’s
assertion have no force at all against an explanation for the loss of John 7:53-8:11 that is more
plausible – specifically, the explanation that it was removed due to a second-century copyist’s
misunderstanding of written instructions intended for the lector regarding the content of the
lection for Pentecost.

INTERNAL EVIDENCE
 
As Pereira turned to the internal evidence, he listed three “substantial arguments” against
the genuineness of John 7:53-8:11: vocabulary, linguistic style, and differences in context. I will
address these arguments individually.
(1) Regarding vocabulary, his objection amounts to this: fourteen of the 82 words in John
7:53-8:11 are found nowhere else in the Gospel of John. However, he provided no baseline by
 - 16 -
which to evaluate the significance of this evidence; that is, he offered no calculation of how many
once-used words typically appear, on average, in the course of 12 verses in the Gospel of John. Are
there other 12-verse portions in the Gospel of John with similar rates of once-used words? Pereira
did not say.
Alan Johnson, in his article, A Stylistic Trait of the Fourth Gospel in the Pericope Adulterae?,
pointed out that in John 2:13-17, there are just as many once-used words as occur in John 7:53-8:11
– yet nobody concludes on this basis that John 2:13-17 must not be original. Clearly, simple
calculations of once-used words are not a reliable basis for showing which passages are Johannine
and which are not. Yet Pereira even attempts to depict words that John does use elsewhere as if
their presence in John 7:53-8:11 suggests non-authenticity, citing Andreas Köstenberger, he stated,
“Moreover, several other words occur only once or twice elsewhere in the Gospel.” Such specious
reasoning seems designed to reach a predetermined conclusion.
Also, Pereira, repeating a point made by Craig Keener, stated that the reference to “the
scribes” in 8:3 is not Johannine. In response, I would point out that in the text of f 1, the scribes
are not mentioned; f 1 supports, instead, οι αρχιερεις (“the chief priests”), a term which occurs in
eight other places in John.
(2) Regarding linguistic style, it is difficult to evaluate Pereira’s evidence, because he did
not supply a single specific example. Instead, he only presented assertions from various
commentators: “In general the style is not Johannine,” “The style is similar to the Synoptic
Gospels” (as if Matthew, Mark, and Luke all wrote in the same style!), and so forth. A statement
from Vern Poythress refers to “A significant number of disconformities to the Johannine pattern”
but the only ones that seem significant enough to mention are the absence of ουν and the
presence of δε. That small nail simply cannot hold the weight that Pereira attempted to place
upon it. Concentrations of δε also occur in John 5:2-13 (seven), 6:2-16 (seven), 11:1-13 (seven),
and 18:14-25 (nine). Shortages of ουν also occur in 1:1-20, 2:1-13, 3:1-24, 4:12-27, 5:1-15, and
11:22-30, and the word does not occur at all in chapters 14, 15, and 17. [See the analysis of
Punch.]
In addition, on the other side of the scales – and unmentioned by Pereira – is Alan
Johnson’s observation that the convergence of τουτο and δε and ελεγον in a peripheral remark in
John 8:6 is a Johannine syntactical feature – a “distinct literary trait” of Johannine style. It does
not bode well for Pereira’s analysis that he focused on a few pebbles while ignoring this large
boulder of stylistic support for Johannine authorship.
(3) Regarding differences in context, Pereira seems to have started with the premise that
the story does not belong between John 7:52 and 8:12, and proceeded to look for reasons to
confirm that premise. His first reason is one offered by James R. White: “The primary internal
consideration, aside from issues of vocabulary and style, is to be found in the fact that John 7:52 and
John 8:12 ‘go together.’ The story of the woman taken in adultery interrupts the flow of the text and
the events recorded by John regarding Jesus’ ministry in Jerusalem (7:45-8:20).”
This so-called ‘fact’ is nothing of the sort. Anyone can see that the scene in John 7:45-52
takes place in Jesus’ absence: officers who had been sent by the chief priests and Pharisees
return in verse 45, and a discussion about Jesus commences. Does James White or Manuel
Pereira or anyone else seriously suggest that this was happening in front of Jesus? Of course not;
it happened elsewhere. And that meeting ends at the end of John 7:52.
Without John 7:53-8:11, the very next thing that John wrote, after saying that the chief
priests and Pharisees told Nicodemus, in their private meeting, that no prophet has risen from
Galilee (or, adopting a different reading, that no prophet is to arise from Galilee), is, “Then Jesus
spoke to them again, saying, ‘I am the light of the world,’” and so forth. All of a sudden the scene
 - 17 -
changes from the Pharisees’ private meeting, to Jesus speaking to “them” when the “them” is not
limited to the individuals at the Pharisees’ private meeting. But with John 7:53-8:11 in the text,
the narrative flows more smoothly: the private meeting of the chief priests and Pharisees is
concluded; Jesus is teaching the same group of people in 8:12 that is present in 8:2; the
Pharisees’ presence with Jesus in 8:13 is explained by their entrance in 8:3.
What did Pereira bring to counter-balance that? Five points:
(1) John 8:1 says that Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. However, this is not disruptive. Jesus
had to go somewhere (as opposed to sleeping in the Temple) and John simply mentions where that
place was. The next morning, Jesus returns. This is about as non-interruptive and non-disruptive
as any report of such events could possibly be.
(2) 8:2 says that Jesus returned to the temple “early in the morning.” Of course this implies, as
Pereira pointed out, that a new day has begun. According to Pereira, this creates an interpretive
problem, namely, if Jesus said, “I am the light of the world” after the last day of the feast, then His
words do not correspond to the lighting of the temple’s lampstand, which happened on that day. In
other words, Pereira assumes that John must have intended that Jesus’ statement in 7:37-38 was
meant to stake a typological claim upon the imagery of the ceremonial water-pouring which
occurred on that day of the feast, and that John must have also intended that Jesus’ statement in
8:12 was meant to stake a typological claim upon the imagery of the ceremonial lampstand-lighting
which also occurred on that day.
However, John does not frame Jesus’ statement in 7:37 as if Jesus spoke simultaneously with
the water-pouring ceremony. Nor does John add any sort of parenthetical comment to ensure that
he gets this point across. It seems to me that John is not as interested in synchronizing Jesus’
statements and the temple’s ceremonies as he is in reporting events as they happened, and leaving
it up to readers to make the typological connections. But if one wants to see a typological emphasis
in 8:12, then simply notice that Jesus’ statement that He is the light of the world is particularly
appropriate in the early morning, as the lights that illuminated the temple were surpassed by
sunlight. Likewise the covenant of the Law, with its limited scope, was being surpassed, and a new
covenant was being inaugurated by Christ which would be for the whole world. And what an
appropriate sample of that truth it is that Jesus’ display of grace triumphs over the Pharisees’
demands for Mosaic justice in regard to the adulteress.
(3) Pereira claimed that continuity from 7:52 directly to 8:12 “is substantially required by
the language of 8:12.” Pereira stated that the words “Again therefore” (παλιν ουν) “simply do not
make sense following the pericope de adultera.” That’s just false. Pereira seems to have
misunderstood the phrase, as if it means that Jesus said something to the people again that He had
said before, or that he was continuing to say something that he had been saying previously – even
though there are at least two entire scenes (in John 7:40-52, no matter what one does with John
7:53-8:11) between Jesus’ statement in 8:12, and his earlier statement in 7:37-38. The introductory
phrase of 8:12 simply means that He spoke to the people again. This introductory phrase is entirely
sensible and appropriate when a crowd has already been mentioned (in 8:2), and when Jesus has
already spoken (in 8:7): He speaks as He teaches the crowd; he deals with the Pharisees; he speaks
to the adulteress; he speaks to the crowd again. Nothing at all is senseless in that sequence.
  (4) 8:9 leaves Jesus alone with the woman, and yet 8:12-13 presumes a crowd is present as in
7:37. This is a rather desperate objection. What did Pereira think was meant by the words “in the
midst” at the end of the verse?? Clearly the individuals who depart in 8:9 are the ones who brought
the adulteress to Jesus – not the crowd He was teaching. Even the driest imagination can easily
picture the scene in the temple as the accusers interrupt Jesus’ teaching-session, occupy space
around Him, and then depart, leaving Jesus and the adulteress alone in that particular small space,
around which the crowd is still present. To interpret the reference to Jesus and the adulteress
 - 18 -
being left alone, as if the watching, listening crowd had a reason to leave, and as if every Pharisee in
Jerusalem had been among those who brought the adulteress to Jesus, is to abandon common sense.
(5) 8:13 speaks only of Pharisees speaking to Jesus, which is customary for John but presents
an unexplained and indecipherable switch from the context of 8:3. According to the last observation,
there would be no Pharisees there to hear or respond to Jesus if 8:1-11 is inserted. The problem is
even worse for the text without John 7:53-8:11: the Pharisees are then at a conference by
themselves, and thus cannot be present to interact with Jesus in the temple. But come: nothing but
a determination to squint a problem into existence requires anyone to imagine that the Pharisees
who brought the adulteress to Jesus, and subsequently departed, were the only Pharisees in the
temple that day, as if no other Pharisees could be in the crowd.
Consider the case of John 9:35-41: there, Jesus seeks out the man who had received sight,
and after Jesus speaks in verse 40, “some of the Pharisees who were with him” ask a question, even
though no hint has been made about how or when these Pharisees arrived. They just step out of the
background. This is just the way John writes. Pereira’s fifth difficulty amounts to this: John did not
take the time to explain to his readers that there were more Pharisees at the temple besides the
ones who brought the adulteress.

MISCELLANEOUS CONCERNS
 
What is the Key Issue?
After discussing the external and internal evidence – the only evidence that matters as far as
the text-critical question is concerned – Pereira turned to some related concerns, such as the
historicity of the account. I take it for granted that if John 7:53-8:11 is considered part of the
original text of the Gospel of John, then its contents will be considered just as historically valid as
the rest of the Gospel of John. If John 7:53-8:11 is not considered part of the original text of the
Gospel of John, then the question of its historicity is superfluous. Pereira spent many paragraphs
saying, in several different ways, that if John 7:53-8:11 is not an original part of the Gospel of John,
then it should not be treated as part of the original text of the Gospel of John. I agree – but I have
reached a different conclusion, and say instead that because John 7:53-8:11 is part of the original
text of the Gospel of John, it should be treated accordingly.
Regarding everything brother Pereira said about historicity, inspiration, “inscripturation,”
and canonicity: unless one wishes to reformat John 7:53-8:11 as an extra book of the New
Testament (which is clearly not something that Pereira wants to do), all these issues are settled
when the question is settled about whether the passage is genuine or counterfeit.
Not everyone sees it that way. In the mid-1900’s, the leaders of the American Bible Society
and, subsequently, the United Bible Societies, arranged for the production of a manual Greek New
Testament. This was to be an ecumenical enterprise; its compilers were chosen from a wide
theological spectrum. The ecumenical movement of that era had no better friend than Bruce
Metzger, the most influential textual critic on the UBS compilation-committee. Bridled by an
ecumenical agenda, and fully aware that translations based on a Greek text of the New Testament
that diverged drastically from the Vulgate were unlikely to receive a Roman Catholic imprimatur,
the compilers included some passages – within double-brackets – which they very confidently
regarded as “later additions to the text.” (The need for the inclusion of these passages, before an
imprimatur could be received, was shown by the history of the Revised Standard Version: the RSV
New Testament was initially published in 1946, but did not receive an imprimatur until the release
of the RSV-Catholic Edition in 1965, after various changes had been made, including the placement
of Mark 16:9-20 and John 7:53-8:11 in the text, and an adjustment in the wording of Luke 1:28.)
 - 19 -
Evangelicals, for whom ecumenical concerns are not as high a priority as the purity of the
text of the New Testament, are under no such burden. Therefore a real risk exists that if they
remain convinced that John 7:53-8:11 was not in the autograph of the Gospel of John, they will
jettison John 7:53-8:11 from the New Testament text.

Overemphasizing Manuscripts’ Age = Automatically Accepting the Alexandrian Text

I wish to revisit something that brother Pereira described as the foremost argument against
John 7:53-8:11: its absence “in the finest Greek manuscripts.” I submit that inasmuch as John 7:53-
8:11 is genuine, and certain manuscripts do not contain it, their status as the “finest” manuscripts
may fairly be drawn into question. A degree of circularity is built into this “finest manuscripts”
nomenclature: if it is granted that the text which these manuscripts exhibit has been handed down
with particular accuracy, then they should be called the “finest” manuscripts, but the answer to the
question, “Is John 7:53-8:11 genuine?” to some extent answers the question, “Has the text of the
Gospel of John been handed down accurately in manuscripts that lack John 7:53-8:11?”.
Why should a reading that is manifestly ancient, and which is supported by 85% of the
extant Greek manuscripts, and against which there is no decisive internal evidence, be rejected? Of
course in response, those who reject John 7:53-8:11 appeal to the sheet-anchor of pro-Alexandrian
textual criticism: Step one: assert that manuscripts must be weighed, rather than counted. Step
two: give the manuscripts with the Alexandrian reading more weight than all the others. Voila.
That is exactly what has been done in the case of John 7:53-8:11. Although 85% of the Greek
manuscripts include John 7:53-8:11, it is argued that the 15% that do not contain the passage ought
to be assigned six times the weight of the manuscripts that contain it, because that 15% includes the
“best” or “finest” manuscripts.
How is “best” defined? As we already saw, Pereira supplied three characteristics: their age,
their literary quality, and their breadth of origination.
The second characteristic – the quality of the texts in these manuscripts – cannot validly be
used to resolve specific text-critical questions. Suppose a professional basketball player was
shooting free throws, and someone asked, “Did LeBron make the twentieth free throw?”. What is the
scientific way to find out? To say, “LeBron is one of our best basketball players, and he made sixteen
of the first nineteen free throws, so, yes; he must have made the twentieth one”? No; that’s a
probability, not evidence. A better approach is to look into what happened on the basketball court.
Similarly, even if it were granted that the text in these manuscripts is generally better than the text
in other manuscripts, simply saying, “Trust the best manuscripts” is no way to settle a specific
textual variant.
The third point – that the Greek manuscripts that lack John 7:53-8:11 are diverse – is
countered by the diversity of the manuscripts and patristic references in which the passage is
included.
This leaves the first point: the manuscripts without John 7:53-8:11 include the earliest
extant manuscripts. However, another way of referring to the oldest manuscripts is to call them the
manuscripts that have survived the longest – and the main factor that caused them to survive the
longest is simply the climate, not the skill-level of the copyists. Specifically, the low-humidity
climate of Egypt allowed papyrus there to be preserved, while elsewhere, New Testament
manuscripts made of papyrus naturally decomposed. We ought to recall, as Pereira reminded us,
that in about A.D. 300, Diocletian ordered all manuscripts of New Testament books to be burned.
We thus have very few manuscripts from the first three centuries of Christianity from outside
Egypt. But the later manuscripts from other locales echo ancient ancestors; they did not materialize
out of thin air.
 - 20 -
A manuscript may be the manuscript which has lasted the longest simply because it was kept
in a climate with low humidity, or because it was hidden in a remote monastery, or because it was
hidden in a clay jar, or because it was cherished as a relic associated with the bishop who
supervised its production, or because it was not used as much as other manuscripts. The thing to
see is that just because a manuscript is old, this is not a sufficient reason to assume that it was
accurately copied. An honest examination of the evidence simply does not allow us to pretend that
the Alexandrian Text is always right, or that a text from Egypt must be better because the Egyptian
climate allowed the papyrus there to last longer than elsewhere.
Pereira referred to “the amazing wealth of ancient witnesses to the original texts of the New
Testament,” but (I state again) only six Greek manuscripts that do not include John 7:53-8:11 – P66,
P75, , B, T, and W – have production-dates before the 400’s (and Codex W’s inclusion in that list is
tentative; it may be from the early 400’s). All six exhibit (to different degrees) the Alexandrian Text
of the Gospel of John – that is, a form of the text which circulated in Egypt.

John 7:53-8:11: A Floating, Edited, Accepted Insertion?

One more piece of internal evidence in favor of the genuineness of John 7:53-8:11 merits
special mention: the contents of the opening verse. Metzger described the passage as “a piece of
oral tradition,” and others have considered it a “floating” text, as if it gently fluttered like a butterfly
into the text of the Gospel of John. But what kind of composition begins with the statement that
everyone went to his own house? In 2014, at a conference of scholars at the Southwestern
Theological Baptist Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina, Dr. Maurice Robinson made this point
emphatically: responding to suggestions that someone had written the story to show that Jesus was
literate, Robinson pointed out that no one writes stories that way. We do not find stories that begin,
“Once upon a time, everybody went home.” Some audience-members at the conference laughed,
and the reason they laughed is because the statement is funny. It is amusing to suggest that an “oral
tradition” began that way. This point was conceded – but in order to salvage the idea that the
account began as an oral tradition, a second step of its production was posited in which the
beginning of the account was reworded in order to create verbal handles, so to speak, to connect
the narrative to the passage of John to which the interpolator wished to attach the interpolation.
And thus, what looks like a simple theory from a distance – there once was this story floating
around, and someone put it into the text of John – becomes more complicated when viewed up
close: there once was this story floating around, and somebody rewrote it, added extra
introductory material to it, and then – for whatever reason (some say to show that Jesus was
literate; some say to teach something about clemency in cases of major sins; some say something
else) – inserted it into the Gospel of John, right in the middle of a passage which formed the lection
for Pentecost, but although it was not accepted as part of the Pentecost-lection, and had never
before been seen in any manuscript of the Gospel of John, and was competing with a host of
manuscripts that did not contain it, the otherwise vigilant bishops and scriptorium-supervisors of
Christendom accepted it and, despite the obvious risk of controversy such a step invited, added it to
the text of their Gospels-manuscripts, as shown by its presence in 85% of the extant Greek
manuscripts. In addition, it somehow floated onto the end of Luke 21 in a few manuscripts.
Which hypothesis seems more probable?

Thinking Through the Implications of “Providential Preservation”

At one point, Pereira stated, “The vast number of manuscripts is an astounding testimony to
the unquestionable impact of the New Testament and the sovereign providence of God in preserving
 - 21 -
it.” I do not agree – but since Pereira has made this proposal, let’s briefly consider its implications
by looking at the contents of “the vast number of manuscripts” which God has providentially
preserved. 268 Greek manuscripts of John which contain 7:52 and 8:12 do not contain John 7:53-
8:11. But 1,476 Greek manuscripts of the Gospel of John contain John 7:53-8:11.
How can someone assert that this vast number of Greek manuscripts of the Gospel of John
shows God’s providence at work, and then proceed to reject their text of John 7:53-8:11?
I found it strange that although Pereira emphasized that the paramount question regarding
John 7:53-8:11 is the question of whether it was part of the original text or not, he confirmed that
God has “providentially preserved and orchestrated the inclusion of exactly what he had
predetermined to clearly communicate to His people.” It seems to me that the acceptance of the
premise that God has providentially preserved the exact text through which He desires to
communicate to His people would require one to accept John 7:53-8:11 as part of the canonical text
of the Gospel of John. Just look at the text via which God has been communicating to the church:
John 7:53-8:11 has been received in 85% of the Greek manuscripts that were used by the Orthodox
Churches, and it is in the Vulgate text of the Roman Catholic congregations (extant in thousands of
copies), and it is in the Textus Receptus which, for over 300 years, formed the definitive New
Testament base-text of Protestant Christendom. If this does not imply that the canonical Scriptural
status of John 7:53-8:11 is “a gift from God’s providential hand,” by which He has communicated to
His people, then it is not easy to see what meaningful significance the concept has.

CONCLUSION

It has been proposed that John 7:53-8:11 should not be considered Scripture, and that the
foremost reason to reject the passage is its absence “in the finest Greek manuscripts.” When we
obtain a close view of what is being described in this way, we see that the pivotal evidence amounts
to six Greek manuscripts (P66, P75, , B, T, and W) which, in the pertinent place in the Gospel of
John, are connected to a single transmission-line, specifically, the Alexandrian Text. This is,
however, balanced on the other side of the scales by witnesses of comparable date – the Didascalia
Apostolorum, Ambrose, Pacian, Augustine, Codex Bezae, Codex Fuldensis’ chapter-titles, and the
many Greek and Latin manuscripts mentioned by Jerome, etc. – which affirm the early existence of
the passage, and most of which support its inclusion in the usual place in the Gospel of John.
If the non-genuineness of John 7:53-8:11 is assumed, then the explanation of the available
evidence is complicated, involving stages of oral circulation, editing, insertion, and recirculation as
part of the text of the Gospel of John. When the genuineness of John 7:53-8:11 is assumed, then the
explanation of the evidence is much less complicated: the witnesses that do not support the
inclusion of the passage may all be traced back to an influential copying-center in Egypt in the mid-
100’s, where a mechanically minded copyist, using a lector’s copy as his exemplar, misunderstood
instructions to skip from the end of John 7:52 to the beginning of John 8:12.
The earliest manuscripts of the Byzantine transmission-line which show John 7:53-8:11
being skipped in the Pentecost-lection, and the earliest representatives of the Caesarean
transmission-line which show John 7:53-8:11 (and, in the Palestinian Aramaic Lectionary, 8:3-11)
being transplanted to the end of the Gospel of John, are not as old as the earliest Egyptian
manuscripts, but they are about as old as one could reasonably expect them to be considering the
differences between the Egyptian climate and the harsher climates elsewhere. The earlier
manuscripts representing these transmission-lines have not survived, but their voices survive loud
and clear in the multitude of copies which echo them.
 - 22 -
My examination of the internal evidence reveals no valid reason to deny Johannine
authorship of John 7:53-8:11. My examination of the external evidence indicates that an early
copyist omitted John 7:53-8:11 due to a misunderstanding of notes or marks which were intended
to tell a lector which text was to be read on Pentecost-Sunday.
Therefore I encourage ministers of the gospel everywhere to preach this text and give it the
respect and reverence that it deserves as part of the inspired Word of God.

●●●●●●●

For more information about the external evidence

pertaining to John 7:53-8:11, readers are invited to consult my book,
The Pericope Adulterae (John 7:53-8:11) – A Tour of the External Evidence,
which is available as a downloadable document
at the NT Textual Criticism group on Facebook.

●●●●●●●