The Synchronicity Podcast

Episode 11 should be up soon. In it, we’re going to talk about a story that appears at the beginning of Chapter 8 in the Gospel of John. The story is about a woman who was allegedly found committing adultery. Jesus is asked whether she ought to face the death sentence for this act or not, and his response to the question (“Let the one without sin cast the first stone”) has become iconic of Jesus’ spirit of mercy, as well as his shrewd adeptness in responding to his critics.

If you look up this story in your Bible, you are likely to find a footnote that says it was not included in the “oldest and most reliable manuscripts” or something like that. For some people, footnotes like this create a lot of consternation. What does that mean? Is this part of the Bible or not? Are you trying to say it doesn’t “count”?

I’ll explore some of those questions in more detail during the podcast, but I thought it might be interesting to briefly explore – as best I can understand it – how Bible scholars get to the conclusion that this story wasn’t in the original version of the Gospel of John.

To illustrate, lets suppose we played a party game in which one person wrote down a sentence on a piece of paper and then gave it to another person. The second person then copies the sentence and gives THEIR copy (not the original) to another. This process goes on and on until we have an original plus seven copies. The copies are then given to someone who is charged with determining what the original paper said.

Lets suppose the sentences on the papers, in no particular order, go like this:

a: The quick frown fox jumped over the dog.
b: The quick frown fox jumped over the lazy dog
c: The quick brown fox jumped over the dog
d: The quack frown fox jumped over the lazy dog
e: The quick frown fox jumped over the lazy dog
f: The quick frown fox jumped over the lazy dog
g: The quick brown fox jumped over the dog.

In sorting these out, the first thing you might notice is that you see the recurrence of one particular pattern (b, e, and f) more than any other. Does that mean its the right one? Not really. It could mean that you had a particularly good run of accurate copyists at some point in the middle of the process.

The next thing you might notice is that a “frown” fox doesn’t make as much sense as a “brown” fox. “Frown” is a little awkward. However, thats probably not a helpful sign either. It is more likely that someone will intentionally try to make their copy more sensible than less sensible.

But the fact that people will try to “add” things to improve their copy can also help us here. In fact, its our main clue to how these might be ordered. Notice how the word “lazy” is included in some, but not all of the copies. If we assume someone decided to “improve” their copy by making the sentence more consistent with the conventional way it is worded, then we can assume all of the “lazy” copies come later in the process. We can thus assume that a, c, and g are more likely the early copies. Furthermore, since the period is missing from the later copies, we might also assume that it was accidentally removed from the c copy and that the a and g copies are closest to the original.

We can’t be certain of this, of course, but a and g seem like pretty good candidates for reflecting what was in the original.

Imagine going through this process with handwritten copy after handrwritten copy of the Gospel of John. Imagine also that you have some CSI-like skills that let you date the scrolls you are looking at, and that you also have some basic information about the region where the scrolls came from and the way the copies “moved” from town to town. All of this, together with some of the common-sense rules of thumb that we used in our illustration above, make it possible to give you a pretty good idea about where each scroll falls in the various “generations” of copies.

What you discover is that some scrolls have this story at the beginning of John 8 and some of them don’t, but the earliest “copies” of John 8 DON’T seem to have it. Like the word “lazy” in the sentences above, it seems to have appeared at a later point.

This means that someone, at some point while they were copying the book, made a conscious decision that the story really needs to be told – and not only that – but it needs to be told right HERE.

I think I understand why it seems to fit in this part of the book, and I for one am grateful that someone decided to do it. I’ll talk about this more on the podcast, because this is a story that needed to be told. It shouldn’t have been lost in history.

However, in the meantime, one of my original questions remains. Since this story isn’t part of the original writing, should it “count” as part of the Bible?

I’d be interested in hearing what you think.