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CHAPTER 1
The Pericope Adulterae and the Rise of Modern New Testament Scholarship
Books and the texts they preserve are human products, bound in innumerable ways to the circumstances and communities that produce them. This is also true of the New Testament, despite its status as a uniquely transcendent, sacred text, held by some to be inspired by God. Human communities also preserve and transmit these books, a process that has inevitably impacted which texts have been passed on, how, and in what form(s). In this way, the collection of books now known as the New Testament carries forward not only texts but also the temporally situated and finite contexts that have determined the ways in which these books are copied, printed, and/or presented. A comparison of the vast array of Gospel book copies, manuscripts, and editions proves the point: Christians across place and time simply do not hold the same sort of book in their hands, read the same collection of biblical books, and copy or preserve them in the same way. Even if the text of the Gospels could be fixed — and, when viewed at the level of object and material artifact, this goal has never been achieved — the purported meanings of texts also change. New interpretive perspectives are developed, seeking to offer better access to the meaning of the text; new translations are produced, designed to update or improve earlier versions; new critical methods are invented that, in theory at least, permit a more accurate text to be found; new editions that alter the text, however slightly, are copied, printed, and published; and battles continue to be waged over the "best" text and its "true" meaning. This sort of cultural work has yet to succeed in producing a consensus either about the New Testament's text or that text's meaning. Paradoxically, attempts to edit and preserve these important books multiplies rather than settles the many forms in which they appear, as each generation revises both the New Testament and the Gospels in concert with its own aspirations, assumptions, theological perspectives, and available technologies.
In the context of modern New Testament scholarship, the example of the pericope adulterae offers a striking confirmation of this fact: This particular text has moved into and out of critical editions of the New Testament — and Gospel commentaries designed to accompany them — since the Renaissance, and in a way that illustrates the remarkable shifts in European and Euro-American scholarship taking place at the time. Inspired by the Renaissance cry "back to the sources," scholars like Lorenzo Valla and Desiderius Erasmus expressed growing concerns about the character of the church's received text, in this case the Latin Vulgate. In the process, they gained a new awareness of the absence of this passage from certain Greek witnesses. Still, they defended the pericope's authenticity and canonicity, which they regarded as self-evident. With the rise of an Enlightenment turn toward "science," and informed by a Protestant preference for "the original," however, critics like Johann Jakob Griesbach, Karl Lachmann, Constantin von Tischendorf, Samuel Tregelles, and, finally, B. F. Westcott and F.J.A. Hort reevaluated the evidence for the pericope and concluded that it was not Johannine after all. Responding to the (re)discovery of very old manuscripts and participating in philological developments associated with nineteenth-century philological and text-critical work, these critics came to reject the canonical status of a number of verses, most prominently, the pericope adulterae. Yet other scholars responded in horror to these "advancements," offering vigorous defenses of beloved texts and rejecting the "eclectic" New Testament editions that marginalized them, a phenomenon that continues to this day. The gradual but by now "traditional" placement of the pericope adulterae in brackets, in an appendix, or in a critical apparatus — as well as the continued rejection of such editorial (mis)placements — encapsulates fundamental theological divides about the degree to which faith ought to be confirmed by science and science by faith, and does so within the material text of the New Testament.
Scholarly interpretations of the pericope adulterae in commentaries and monographs have followed a similar trajectory. With the rise of modernity, as Hans Frei famously observed, the meaning of a text came to be linked to: (a) "what the original sense of a text was to its original audience" and (b) "the coincidence of the description with how the facts really occurred." Critical engagement with the pericope confirms this observation: rejected as Johannine, the story nevertheless continued to be regarded as a genuine historical memory about Jesus, despite its displacement from critical editions. Now received by most as non-Johannine (i.e., non-original), and therefore irrelevant to discussions of the initial author(s) and audience of John, the pericope remains "historical" nonetheless (in Frei's terms, a passage capable of addressing "how the facts really occurred"). Other (newly) spurious passages have been treated differently. For example, the Longer Ending of Mark — the only other interpolated Gospel text as lengthy as the pericope adulterae — came to be regarded by the majority of scholars as a supplementary addition, placed there either by the evangelist himself or by an inventive secondary editor who sought to harmonize this Gospel with the others. Among those who accepted the theory of an interpolated Longer Ending, the historicity of its contents also became suspect, and investigations into the "original sense" or "original audience" of the Longer Ending were therefore transferred to the early second century. Why did secondary writers import such texts into the Gospels?, it was asked, a question that has now been asked of the pericope adulterae as well. The modern preference for the historical sense of biblical stories led to a significant reevaluation not only of these two Gospel texts but also of their possible meanings, with one predominantly regarded as "historical" but not "canonical" and the other as "canonical" but not "historical," interpretations that continue to influence the scholarship on these passages to this day. The judgment that the pericope adulterae is historically valuable and yet canonically suspect therefore stands at the very heart of modern New Testament scholarship, as this scholarship has developed since the Enlightenment.
The Pericope Adulterae and the Rise of Modern Textual Criticism
Summarizing the results of eighteenth-century text-critical work, Samuel P. Tregelles (1854) paid particular attention to two controversial passages in the Gospels: the pericope adulterae and the Longer Ending of Mark (Mark 16:9–20). By then, both passages had been subjected to significant scrutiny, the pericope adulterae beginning with suspicions raised by Valla (1505), Erasmus (1535), and Theodore Beza (1565), and the Longer Ending beginning with the work of Johann Albrecht Bengel (1734), Andreas Birch (1788), and, most prominently, Johann Jakob Griesbach (1789). Both passages, Tregelles observed, are absent from important early manuscripts, less than firmly linked with the canonical Gospels by patristic writers, and different in style and substance from the evangelist's own text. Even so, his recommendations about how to treat each text were quite different: Only the most stubborn believer, he argued, suffering from an "inertness of mind" that has "rendered many unconscious of what has been deemed the most manifest facts of criticism" would dare to assert that the pericope adulterae is in fact Johannine. Nevertheless, Tregelles continued, "I see no reason for doubting that it contains a true narration." Thus, the story may not be Johannine, but it remains a valid source for those interested in the actions of the historical Jesus. By contrast, though the Longer Ending was absent from the earliest edition of Mark, it should nevertheless be viewed as unquestionably canonical. Added to the Gospel very early on, perhaps by the evangelist himself and certainly no later than the second century, the antiquity of these verses grants the passage the force of canon, despite the "continuing testimony" that it was not always part of the book.
Behind the juxtaposition of these two passages, and Tregelles's differing treatment of them, lay three centuries of text-critical scholarship. When preparing his Novum instrumentum omne (1516), Erasmus did not question the authenticity of the Longer Ending. He did, however, take note of problems with the pericope adulterae, even as he defended its legitimacy and printed it within his editions. By the time Tregelles printed his own Greek New Testament (1857), however, the textual history of both the pericope adulterae and the Longer Ending had been thoroughly rewritten, with both passages serving as definitive examples of later editing. Other briefer Gospel passages were also called into question, most prominently, a detail about an angel who stirs the waters of the Bethesda pool (John 5:3b–4) and a description of Jesus sweating drops "like blood" in the Garden of Gethsemane (Luke 22:43–44). In Tregelles's context, where valued philological facts and documentary evidence were favored over church traditions, none of these passages could stand uncontested: each is absent from important early manuscripts, less than firmly connected with the canonical Gospels by patristic writers, and different in style and substance from the author's own text, at least in the opinion of interpreters at the time. A few premodern readers and editors were also aware that the pericope adulterae, the Longer Ending of Mark, and the bloody sweat of Jesus were not always found in Gospel copies but, unlike their modern counterparts, these scholars had concluded that these passages should be retained. Operating out of a different set of text-critical and interpretive assumptions, premodern scholars treated their unstable texts differently and, as a result, produced different material texts. The New Testament text, and the pericope adulterae more specifically, can therefore serve as one important measure of the dramatic shifts in orientation toward the past provoked by Christian humanism and the Protestant Reformation.
The worry that the pericope adulterae may not, in fact, be authentic to John began with the writings of Valla, though the story retained its usual place in printed Greek Gospel books, unmarked and without emendation, well into the nineteenth century. Erasmus, who was responsible for producing the first printed critical editions of the Greek New Testament in Western Europe, was aware that a number of Greek manuscripts omitted or displaced the passage to another location, yet he included it in his Greek editions of the New Testament and in his Paraphrase on John (1522). When making this judgment, Erasmus reviewed much of the same evidence known to scholars today — Jerome acknowledged that the passage could not be found in every copy, important Greek writers did not discuss the story in their works, Eusebius of Caesarea attributed it to the Gospel of the Hebrews, and many Greek copies omit it. Even so, he decided, the story is likely to be Johannine: known to Papias, worthy of the gospel, sanctioned by the church, especially well received in Latin, and evaluated positively by Valla, his important predecessor, in Erasmus's opinion the pericope should be regarded as authentic. At a textual level, this decision would remain unchallenged for nearly three centuries: subsequent editions and revisions of Erasmus's text, including those that came to be known as the Textus Receptus (the "text received by all"), retained an unmarked pericope adulterae.
Erasmus's Greek New Testament served as the base text for numerous published editions that appeared over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including the important editions of Robert Estienne (Stephanus) who developed the versification system used in New Testaments today. Estienne's text was slightly revised and reprinted, first by Theodor Beza and then by Abraham and Bonaventura Elzevier of Leiden, whose seven editions (published between 1624 and 1678) were widely dispersed in Protestant communities across Europe and Great Britain. In a preface to their 1633 edition, Daniel Heinsius used the phrase "Textus Receptus" for the text based on Erasmus's work. Still, scholars in this tradition retained the memory of the pericope adulterae's unusual place in extant manuscripts, even as it continued to be printed as part of the main text of John. In 1557, Estienne published a third volume of his New Testament accompanied by notes (adnotationes) prepared by Beza (successor to Calvin in Protestant Geneva), which Beza then expanded in a Greek-Latin edition published in 1565. As Jan Krans has shown, Beza shared Erasmus's observations about the pericope, but he read the facts differently. The passage is not found in the writings of Chrysostom, Beza noted; Eusebius attributed it to Papias and the Gospel of the Hebrews, and it is not present in every manuscript; moreover, he argued, Jesus would surely not have remained alone with a woman, particularly in the Temple, and John 8:11 does not lie easily beside John 8:12. Parting company with Erasmus, he therefore concluded that the entire reading should be called into doubt. Comparing additional manuscripts and compiling a much more complex critical apparatus, John Mill significantly expanded the available data in his critical edition of 1707. He printed the 1550 edition of the Textus Receptus but incorporated a list of the multiple problems with the pericope adulterae in the apparatus, including its absence from many manuscripts; Eusebius's identification of the passage with the spurious Gospel of the Hebrews; the obeloi that mark it in the margins of many Greek copies; Jerome's, Ambrose's, and Augustine's awareness that it is found in many (but not all) Greek and Latin copies of John; and its omission from the Eusebian canons. Still, he noted, the story is traditionally recounted during Quadragesima (Lent) in the West, the Venerable Bede cited it at length, and Stephanus (i.e., Estienne) retained it in his edition. Thus, the passage, though in doubt, has certainly been received as canonical in the Latin West.
The instability of the Longer Ending of Mark also attracted attention, but not until the late eighteenth century. Beza expressed no doubts about it in a larger discussion of the number of witnesses to Jesus's resurrection; he simply assumed its authenticity. Mill printed it in 1707, reaffirming its genuineness. Johann Albrecht Bengel observed that the ending was not found in every Greek copy, speculating that perhaps the ending had been added to bring Mark into harmony with the other Gospels. In a series of notes published between 1788 and 1801, Andreas Birch noted a discrepancy in this passage between Codex Vaticanus and other manuscripts and also observed that these verses are excluded from the Eusebian canons; these facts further called this passage into question. His analysis went on to influence Griesbach, who suggested that the ending of Mark cannot have been composed by the evangelist; instead, the true ending must have been lost. Griesbach therefore relegated the Longer Ending to brackets when printing his edition of 1789. In his estimation, the Longer Ending was neither canonical nor historical; inconsistent with the way Mark used Matthew and Luke in his Gospel (Griesbach argued that Mark was later than and derivative of Matthew and Luke) and absent from the best manuscripts, verses 9–20 should be expunged.
As James Kelhoffer has shown, Griesbach's "bold thesis" about the Longer Ending had a "profound impact on scholarship," first by casting serious doubts on the Markan authorship of these verses and second by opening up speculation regarding the "true" ending of the Gospel. After Griesbach, these verses had to be explicitly defended by those who accepted them. Increasingly persuaded by Griesbach's opinion, both text critics and interpreters began to exclude these verses from Mark's Gospel. Griesbach's decision to place the Longer Ending in brackets also set the stage for the more sweeping editorial changes to the New Testament made by Karl Lachmann, the first scholar to print a Greek text other than the Textus Receptus. Three centuries of European scholarship on the Greek New Testament had finally convinced a small set of scholars that the Textus Receptus inaccurately represented the New Testament text, a conclusion brought on, in part, by observations about the discrepancies among witnesses to the pericope adulterae and by concerns about the suitability of the Longer Ending. The scientific investigation of extant manuscripts, plus optimism about the potential results of careful philology, had paved the way for a fundamental shift in New Testament criticism, one that informs the field to this day.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "To Cast the First Stone"
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