Did Jesus stone or enable stoning?

 

John 8 seems to have Jesus saving a woman from stoning to death for adultery.  Christians teach that God wrote the Bible by guiding human authors and when you point out the text differences they say that text differences do not effect doctrine. The adulteress text is a text difference.  The Catholic Church despite that has declared it to be scripture.  But it floated around and ended up stuck in John 8.

 

 If this text shows Jesus lapsed in his repeated support for the Jewish Law including its cruelty then it would amount to affecting doctrine and thus invalid.  But the story is really about Jesus using the episode to deal with the hypocrisy of her accusers and is not about saving her life.  Jesus was in the Temple Courts and had to be very careful not to preach against the Jewish Law about stoning.  What about his own safety?

 

Let us read the story.
 
The Jewish leaders brought a woman caught in the act of adultery to Jesus. Read John 8 - New International Version (NIV)

1 Jesus went to the Mount of Olives.

2 At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them.

 

3 The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group

 

4 and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery.

 

5 In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?”

 

6 They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.

But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. [This was doodling BECAUSE he was tempted to have her stoned and luckily didn't act hastily.  Nobody says they read it or that it was meant to be read.  The notion he wrote down the names and partners of these men with whom they committed adultery is speculation.  It does not fit the principle that you must not read miracles into a text that way.  It is like saying the gospel accounts are untrue and it's a miracle if they ring true.  And if you want the story to oppose stoning women, do you want it to say it is only wrong if the accusers are as bad as her?]

 

7 When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” [Was he going to walk away only they were persistent?  Here he was assessing, he was saying it was a fact that they were sinners.  Prudent observation is a form of judging.  Condemning as in punishing and giving a penalty is another.  Notice that by calling them all sinners he was saying the same about the woman.]

 

8 Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.

9 At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there.

 

10 Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”

11 “No one, sir,” she said.

“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”

 

COMMENT:

 

What if Jesus slept with the woman in John 8 or was accused of doing so?  The accusers only said they knew she was guilty of adultery.  They didn't say they knew who with.  We don't need to assume they are picking on her and ignoring the man.  The man is not mentioned but maybe he was not identified.  There is no need to assume they were choosing to punish her while unjustly letting him go free.  Maybe the man was already stoned.  Feminists must not get carried away with this story. Note - there is no hint of the notion that only women were accused of adultery not men here.  That is irrelevant here.  Jewish law commanded both man and woman must die.  Feminists who claim to be Christian are simply foolish for saying that Jesus wanted the woman spared for the man she sinned with was being ignored.  Jesus would simply have said, "Where is the man?" and walked away if that were the problem.

 

You can take it either way.  If they were singling her out for stoning and not the man then Jesus was okay with that for he never objected.  He never even asked about what happened to the man.  Even if they were not singling her out he was not interested.

 

The story is incoherent. The accusers are said to be dishonest and only interested in using her to trap Jesus so they are unreliable and yet we have Jesus trusting what they said about her.  The chief mark of patriarchy is believing bad of women without regard for evidence or because clearly bad men slander them.   Patriarchal Jesus takes their word for it that she was guilty of adultery.  He judged her himself and called her a sinner with his passive-aggressive "Leave and avoid this sin". 

 

If they were that dishonest they would not have walked away when Jesus said the righteous one must cast the first stone.  They were hypocrites and now we are asked to believe that they wouldn't say, "We have no sin" and stone her.  Jesus was being insanely careless here.

 

If the woman was Jesus' mother, then this matches Jewish tradition that she was indeed adulterous.  And Jesus addresses the woman as "Woman".  He called his mother woman at the wedding feast of Cana and when he was dying.  The symbolism of John can make a case for this woman being Mary.

 

Jesus gave a core teaching in the Sermon on the Mount saying let your yes be yes and your no no.  So he was committed to saying what he meant.  He said, "If you want her stoned then fine but be worthy to do so."  The implication is they could find somebody worthy to do so.  Even he did not consider himself to be that person.  He declared stoning women for adultery to be honourable in itself and even before God.

 

The fact that the incident took place in the Temple courts and did involve the scribes and the Pharisees does not prove they were acting within the law.  They were trying to show Jesus up as a rebel against the divine law about stoning.  That was why it was in such a public space.  This was definitely an abuse of the law.  Plus Jesus had repeatedly given out to the scribes and Pharisees for abusing the law anyway.  No stonings took place in the Temple courts anyway.  Jesus knew that so he was definitely NOT saving her life. 

 

Jesus when he said the sinless person can cast the first stone would be thinking, "She was not tried for that crime and this is a lynch mob but they can get her stoned through the right channels and indeed may do that."   Instead of acting immediately he dragged it out punishing her by making her feel she was about to be killed.  He refused to just walk away for they could not stone her anyway.  They were not authorised. 

 

Jesus explicitly said that he would not be ever acting like an official judge in criminal actions. In Luke 12:14 he refutes the notion that he could act like that kind of judge.  The story does nothing to affirm modern trendy notions of capital punishment being wrong or of female equality.

 

He judged her as an adulteress and in those times that meant lifelong stigma that was a bigger torture than being stoned.  He said nothing about the extreme violence of stoning vulnerable women to death.  He could have said Rome's ban on killing anybody should be respected.  He said absolutely nothing which again left her in fear of being dragged before a mob again.  She simply was not going to be safe after leaving the Temple.  And what about the other women out there?

 

Some say, "He merely makes the accusers realise that they deserve stoning as much as she does so they walk away." If so then the most natural idea is that the accusers were also guilty of adultery. If so, then the story is not against stoning a woman to death but against selectively stoning people to death. The law of Moses recognised that everybody sins. Those men did not just commit ordinary sins and must have deserved stoning themselves and they had the honesty to walk away. The sin Jesus refers to is definitely capital sin - sin that asks for and deserves a cruel execution.

 

A story where Jesus is clearly in a trap cannot be used to argue that he respected the lives of women who committed adultery.  Yet the whole of Christendom lies that it argues for his positive view of women.

 

JESUS GETS HIS REVENGE ON HER FOR ADULTERY

 

Jesus could have taken the woman away. Nobody could force her to stay. He didn’t. We have no idea how degraded this woman felt for Jesus made her feel she was about to be stoned by a gang. It was a public humiliation. She was terrified. Jesus got his revenge on her this way. Do not underestimate how this experience left its mark on her forever. His telling her to sin no more after that was an implied threat. There was no compassion.  Remember also, he refused to tell the truth about her adultery.  It was no sin at all for she like nearly all girls of her time had no say and had to wed very young before they knew what they were doing.  She was married to be a breeder even though her risk of dying in childbirth was huge and her body was too childlike.  Do not underestimate the patriarchal vindictiveness of this man.