Early Christian Re-Writing and the History of the Pericope Adulterae

Abstract

Texts, even sacred texts, are never fixed. Meaning is never stable and interpretations shift in concert with the changing concerns of those who present them. These principles are readily demonstrated by a consideration of the complex history of the pericope adulterae—a story about Jesus, an adulteress, and a group of interlocutors found in the Gospel of John. This story is absent from many early gospel manuscripts and is remarkably unstable when it does appear. There are a few second- and third-century citations of the tale, but they do not mention the identity or motives of the interlocutors, nor do they specify the guilt (or innocence) of the woman or the men who accused her. By contrast, fourth- and fifth-century exegetes regularly suggested that the interlocutors sought to test Jesus, represented the woman as guilty, and claimed that "the Jews" were damned for their sins, readings that were preserved in gospel manuscripts. The pericope adulterae, increasingly invoked to produce Christian hegemony at the expense of "the Jews," real or imagined, became a story about Jewish sin and Christian difference. This interpretation then influence the transmission of the tale, though traces of earlier readings lingered.

Changing things around: Dramatic aspect in the <i>Pericope Adulterae</i> (Jn 7:53–8:11)

“…11.Solid work has been done by Klindienst (1992), Bart Ehrman (1988), Chris Keith (2008Keith ( , 2009Keith ( , 2013, Jennifer Knust (2005Knust ( , 2006, Knust and Wasserman (2010), John David Punch (2010) and Wieland Willker (2014), to name but a few. They all provide extensive bibliographies for interested readers.…”

The Initial Location of the Pericope Adulterae in Fourfold Tradition

“…Numerous scholars suggest that the diacritical umlaut between John 7 and John 8 in Codex B implies that the scribe knows PA at this location, but does not copy it either because his exemplar does not contain it or he regards it as inauthentic. 66 Summarizing other manuscript evidence, Parker says, A few copies of the Byzantine text use symbols taken from Alexandrian scholarship to indicate that a passage is probably an interpolation. Some of these manuscripts place the fi rst marker not at verse 53 but at 8.2 or 8.3, showing that they regarded the fi rst couple of verses as genuine.…”