Where the manuscripts differ · John 7:53 - 8:11
The Woman Caught in Adultery
One of the most beloved stories about Jesus is missing from the earliest copies of John — and in the later copies that have it, it does not stay in one place.
The scribes and Pharisees drag a woman into the temple courts. They have a verdict ready and a trap set. Jesus stoops and writes on the ground. Then: "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her." One by one they leave, beginning at the eldest. "Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more."
It is one of the most loved passages in the New Testament, and one of the most textually difficult. The earliest copies of John do not have it. And in the later copies that do have it, it does not stay put — it turns up in several different places, including in a different Gospel.
This page does not ask you to give up the story. It asks you to see clearly what the manuscripts show, and to notice that the question "did this happen?" and the question "did John write it here?" are two different questions with two different answers.
What the manuscripts actually show
| Witness | Date | What it reads here |
|---|---|---|
| Papyrus 66 (P66) | c. AD 200 | Does not contain the passage. John 8:12 follows directly on John 7:52. |
| Papyrus 75 (P75) | c. AD 175-225 | Does not contain the passage. This is our earliest substantial copy of this part of John, and the story is simply not in it. |
| Codex Sinaiticus (א) | c. AD 330-360 | Does not contain the passage. |
| Codex Vaticanus (B) | c. AD 300-350 | Does not contain the passage. |
| Codex Alexandrinus (A) and Codex Ephraemi (C) | 5th century | Both are damaged exactly here, so neither can be read directly — but in each case scholars have measured the missing leaves against the surviving handwriting, and there is not enough room for the passage. The gap is too small to have held it. |
| Codex Bezae (D) | 5th century | Contains the passage in its familiar place after John 7:52. This is the earliest surviving Greek manuscript that has it. |
| The Old Syriac and the early Coptic versions | 3rd-5th century | Do not contain the passage. Its absence is not confined to Greek copies; the early translations into other languages do not have it either. |
| Later Greek manuscripts — and this is the striking datum | 9th century onward | Where the passage does appear, it moves. Most copies place it after John 7:52. Some place it after John 7:36. One family of manuscripts puts it at the very end of the Gospel, after John 21:25. Another family takes it out of John altogether and places it in Luke, after Luke 21:38. A passage that travels between Gospels is behaving unlike anything else in the New Testament. |
| Manuscripts that carry it under a mark of doubt | 9th century onward | Many copies that include the passage flag it with asterisks or obeli — the scribal signs for material known to be questioned. The scribes copied it and told the reader they had reservations. |
The case each way
That it belongs in the text
The story rings true, and that is not a soft argument. The Jesus in these twelve verses behaves exactly as the Jesus of the four Gospels behaves: he refuses the trap without conceding the law, he turns the accusation back on the accusers without contempt, he neither excuses the sin nor destroys the sinner. Whoever first told this story was not making up a character. He knew this one.
Augustine offered a specific historical explanation for its absence, and it deserves its weight rather than a footnote. In his treatise on adulterous marriages he wrote that some men of little faith removed the passage from their copies, fearing that their wives would take Christ's mercy toward this woman as permission. That is a bishop in the fifth century saying, in effect: I know why this is missing from some Bibles, and the reason is not that it is false. Deliberate removal is a real scribal behavior, and here it has a named ancient witness.
Jerome, working directly with Greek and Latin copies in the late fourth century, says the story was found in many of them (Against the Pelagians 2.17). He then included it in the Vulgate. Whatever the earliest papyri lack, Jerome was not inventing something out of nothing.
There are early traces of a story like it outside John. Eusebius reports that Papias — writing early in the second century — knew a story about a woman accused before the Lord of many sins, and says it was contained in the Gospel according to the Hebrews. Didymus the Blind, in the fourth century, refers to a similar account as being in certain Gospels. Something of this shape was circulating very early.
And a story this widely loved, this early, and this consistent with everything else we know of Jesus is an unlikely thing for someone to have simply fabricated. Invented material tends to serve an agenda. It is hard to name the agenda this passage serves; if anything it created problems for the church that preserved it.
That it came later
It is absent from the earliest and best witnesses, and the absence is broad rather than local. P66 and P75, Sinaiticus, and Vaticanus all lack it, and so do the early Syriac and Coptic translations. That is multiple text families, multiple languages, and multiple regions agreeing — which is a very different thing from one branch of the tradition losing a page.
The floating placement is the decisive structural point. Original passages do not wander. This one appears after John 7:52, after John 7:36, after John 21:25, and after Luke 21:38. That pattern is exactly what happens to a treasured piece of tradition that scribes wanted in the Bible and were not sure where to put — and it is exactly what does not happen to a paragraph that was in the text from the beginning.
The vocabulary and style are not typical of John. Scholars reading the Greek find the diction closer to Luke's than to John's — which fits neatly with the fact that one whole family of manuscripts places the story in Luke rather than in John. The manuscripts and the style point the same direction.
It interrupts the flow of John 7-8. In John 7:52 the authorities dismiss Jesus with "out of Galilee ariseth no prophet"; in John 8:12 Jesus says "I am the light of the world." Read straight through without the story, the scene is continuous — same setting, same confrontation, same opponents answering back in 8:13. Read with the story inserted, the temple debate stops for a night, everyone goes home, and then resumes as if nothing had happened.
The marks of doubt in the manuscripts that do carry it are themselves evidence. The scribes nearest to the tradition were not confident about it.