Introduction
The Pericope Adulterae (John 7:53-8:11) is said to be “A true story that is not inspired” by many modern seminary professors and pastors. Recently, Dr. Lanier from Reformed Theological Seminary presented the case that this passage does not belong in our Bibles today. Dr. Riddle took him to task in his Word Magazine (and James Snapp in the comments) for his lopsided (and in some places inaccurate) presentation of the data. In this article, I want to explain how the argument against the PA is only convincing due to biased presentations of the data. In other words, if the average person had the full picture of the data, they would likely not find any argument against the passage convincing.
A Summary of the Argument
The ESV Study Bible includes a note at John 7:53-8:11 which says, “There is considerable doubt that this story is part of John’s original Gospel, for it is absent from all of the oldest manuscripts…it is best to view this story as something that probably happened during Jesus’ ministry but that was not originally part of Scripture and should not be used as the basis for building any point of doctrine unless confirmed in Scripture.” In the various copies of the ESV, there is bracketed material that simply says, “[THE EARLIEST MANUSCRIPTS DO NOT INCLUDE JOHN 7:53-8:11]” and the entire passage is in double brackets. In short, translations like the ESV and NIV inform the reader that this passage should not be read as Scripture on the basis that “All” early manuscripts do not include it. Some commentators like Dr. Lanier and James White make the claim that it was a “floating tradition,” where it was allegedly never in the text at John 7:53-8:11 due to the fact that it is found placed at other locations in some manuscripts.
Problems with the Argument
In the first place, the strategy for arguing against this passage as authentic starts by under informing the layperson who reads any number of the popular modern translations. I want to start by addressing the argument on two points, 1) the claim that “All early manuscripts” exclude it is misleading, and 2) that dating a manuscript as early means very little as to the matter of authenticity.
The first claim, that “all early manuscripts exclude the passage” seems to rely on the assumption that the average Christian is unfamiliar with the manuscript evidence. It is simply not the case that “all” early manuscripts exclude the passage. GA 05 (400AD) includes the passage, so to exclude that witness you must say that late 4th century/early 5th century is not an “early” witness to the passage. In addition to GA 05, GA 02 and GA 04 from the same time period have what’s called a lacunae at John 7:52, a gap in the manuscript, leaving room for the passage. This indicates the scribe was aware of the passage as he was copying. If the claim is that the early church wasn’t aware of the passage at John 7:52, it would be an erroneous claim. This is further evidenced by references to the passage by Papias (100-130), the Didascalia (230), Didymus the Blind (350-398), and most importantly Augustine (more on that later).
The second assumption is that early dating of a manuscript means it is authentic. There is no textual scholar alive that would agree with the claim that the early dating of a manuscript indicates authenticity. Dr. Peter Gurry, in his book, A New Approach to Textual Criticism, states, “A text of a manuscript may, of course, be much older than the parchment and ink that preserve it” (3). In other words, there is no rule of textual criticism that says, “oldest means authentic.” While we’re on the topic of text-critical rules, Dr. Gurry says, “As with so much textual criticism, there are no absolute rules here, and experience serves as the best guide” (ibid. 57). The built in argument to the claim that “All of the earliest manuscripts exclude” a passage is that early must mean authentic. As I have demonstrated, the claim itself is erroneous, and even if it were true, it wouldn’t be a singular case for or against authenticity. In other words, the entire body of evidence should be considered, if we’re considering evidence at all. You can’t just look at one slice of data and make a conclusion.
If you’re going to provide manuscript evidence, however, I think it important to include all the evidence. James Snapp points out that 1,503 manuscripts include the passage and 272 omit it. Further, only 68 manuscripts support the “floating tradition” idea. According to Wilbur Pickering, the vast majority of extant manuscripts (85%) include the passage at John 7:52 and the minority exclude it (15%). There is also no evidence to support that the passage spontaneously appears later on in the manuscript tradition because it is in GA 05, and there are lacunae at the location in GA 02 and GA 04. Further, early citation of the passage dispels the notion that a scribe merely invented the passage in the 5th-8th century.
In short, presenting the argument in such simple terms as “all early manuscripts exclude it” is in the first place incorrect, and secondly it severely under represents the data. On the note of under representing the data, Dr. Lanier cites Chris Keith to support his “floating tradition” argument. For the uninitiated, Chris Keith is the foremost PA scholar alive, next to Tommy Wasserman and Jennifer Knust. In the very same article Dr. Lanier uses to support his “floating tradition” argument, Keith comes to the very opposite conclusion when he says, “There is no extant evidence that PA was read in a canonical gospel text in any location other than John 7:53-8:11 until the late ninth/tenth century CE” (Chris Keith. “The Initial Location of the Pericope Adulterae in Fourfold Tradition”. Novum Testamentum 51 (2009). pp. 209-231). In other words, another way to describe the “floating tradition” theory is pure textual mythology.
The Argument Against the PA is Well-Poisoning
If you have only ever heard that the PA doesn’t belong because “All of the earliest manuscripts exclude it,” you have had the well poisoned against your understanding of the data. In the first place, there are early manuscripts that have it, and there are earlier citations of the passage. You have been primed to disbelieve this passage by simply reading the ESV or NIV or any number of Bibles that bracket the passage (NASB) without hearing both sides of the matter. The Bible says, “He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him” (Proverbs 18:13). Yet the publishers of these translations and the scholars that present the argument in a lopsided way force people into a conclusion before they have heard the whole matter. This is an egregious abuse of authority by translation committees to funnel readers into a conclusion in this way without presenting all of the evidence.
Answering the Real Question of the PA
What my reader needs to understand is that the passage was in fact early and found at John 7:52. The question is not, “Is this authentic?” but rather, “Why did a small number of manuscripts exclude it?” Before I answer this question, I want to touch on a problem with using extant manuscript evidence at all. When scholars say, “all manuscripts,” what they actually mean is “surviving manuscripts.” It is foolish to assume that there were only several hundred early manuscripts, and we have all of them. The reality is, that thousands of manuscripts were destroyed due to the fact that paper is fragile. The reason we have early ones from Alexandria is partly due to the fact that Alexandria is dry, and has the best climate for paper to survive. The fact that a manuscript has survived does not speak to its authenticity or quality.
Further, there are early manuscripts that have survived that contain the reading, and were therefore copied from somewhere. That is to say, if a manuscript dated to 400 had the reading (GA 05), manuscripts before it had the reading, because that manuscript was copied from somewhere. We do not posses now most of the manuscripts that have existed in history. The fact stands, that we have less manuscripts now than have ever existed because more time has passed now than ever before. In fact, Dan Wallace says that we have lost somewhere in the ballpark of 500 manuscripts in the last ten years. So my statement is objectively true, even in the last ten years. We have less manuscripts now than we did ten years ago.
Now to answer the question of, “Why do some manuscripts not have the PA?” Fortunately, we have an answer from Augustine. “Certain men of little faith, or rather enemies of the true faith, fearing, I suppose, that their wives should be given impunity in sinning, removed from their manuscripts the Lord’s act of forgiveness toward the adulteress, as if He who had said, ‘sin no more,’ had granted permission to sin” (De adulterinis coniugiis 2.7). This is the context that helps us understand why GA 02 and GA 04 have a lacunae at John 7:52 and why GA 05 includes it. According the Augustine, there was a doctrinal controversy where men were concerned this passage gave their wives’ permission to commit adultery, and it was being excluded as a result.
The fact is, that Augustine considered the passage authentic, and even provided a polemic against those who were removing the passage from their manuscripts. This tells us two important things: 1) The passage was in manuscripts in the 4th century and 2) some people were removing it from manuscripts. If we trust that Augustine wasn’t lying, than it is a matter of fact that manuscripts had the passage, and the passage was being removed. This is important, because by the 9th century all of our manuscripts included the passage. A question I have is, do we think we have more context in 2026 than Christians in the 6th-9th centuries? Do we somehow know more, despite having less extant data? I think not. Christians were clearly aware of the textual controversy, and by the 9th century, it was concluded.
In Conclusion
It is quite apparent that the argument against the PA is biased from the start for most people due to the fact that their translation under represents or misrepresents the argument. Further presentations from modern scholars commit the same errors. Hardly any Christian even gets a chance to hear a positive presentation for the case to retain the PA before they’ve heard the negative multiple times. This means that anybody making the case for the PA is arguing as though the passage should be included and not retained. The fact is, the PA has overwhelming evidence, and the argument is not whether we should put the passage back into the text, because there was no good reason ever to eject it. It is our prerogative as Christians to retain the PA.
If the argument is that “earliest means authentic,” you stand alone in believing this axiom because readings found on later manuscripts could be the earliest witness to a passage. If the argument is simply counting manuscripts, you especially have no reason to doubt the PA because 1,503 manuscripts have it, including early ones. What this comes down to, and most scholars won’t admit this, is the secret rule of textual criticism: always prefer Sinaiticus (GA 01). The problem with this is that nobody knows who copied Sinaiticus, what manuscript it was copied from, and the text of Sinaiticus is hardly copied after the 4th century. In other words, Sinaiticus stands nearly alone in the manuscript tradition. It is a novel manuscript in our tradition of manuscripts. The church had set aside this manuscript for over 1,000 years, for good reason.
Many people believe that Sinaiticus represents a “text-type,” but this manuscript is not related closely enough to any other for that to be the case. Use of computer models has demonstrated this unequivocally, even though Burgon demonstrated this decades ago. Dr. Peter Gurry states, “The most significant and, for that reason controversial is that it has convinced the editors to abandon the concept of text-types traditionally used to group and evaluate manuscripts” (ibid. 7). This is primarily in reference to the so-called Alexandrian text type, because these same computer models have demonstrated the early readings of the Byzantine text (11). The point is, that even the computer models have demonstrated that later manuscripts contain early readings, and have validated the “later” Byzantine text as early.
Many people believe that the reason early manuscripts are so important is because they represent authenticity. There are no scholars making this claim today. So the bracketed material which serves as an entry point for most into the discussion means very little when considered. If it is the case that early does not mean authentic, and some early manuscripts include the PA, not only is the bracketed material in modern Bibles incomplete, it is inaccurate, and therefore misleading. Therefore it is my strong conviction that the PA should not only be retained, but defended as authentic and inspired.
For more on the topic, see Dr. Jeff Riddle’s pamphlet here.
The Young, Textless, and Reformed 