Bearing Faithful Witness

In the story, a woman adulteress (but no adulterer) is brought to Jesus by scribes and Pharisees; should she be stoned? is the question they ask; Jesus is compassionate; no one presses the case; the woman finds new life where life could have been denied.

Christians must guard against anti-Judaism in interpreting this story. It is easy to make the scribes and the Pharisees the bad guys, the poor woman the victim, and Jesus the rescuer. But we do not know what the scribes and Pharisees intend to do with the woman; they only cite what the law allows, not what they intend (8:5; see Lev. 20:10); in the end, they do not stone her, presumably because they agree with Jesus’ position; maybe they "are dissuaded from stoning the woman, having made Jesus’ position their own" (so Luise Schottroff, Lydia’s Impatient Sisters: A Feminist Social History of Early Christianity, Louisville: Wesminster John Knox Press, 1995, p.266, n.19; also see pp.180ff. and 267, n.32.); or maybe that was also their position all along; maybe the woman knows this. We are told only that they want to "test" Jesus (8:6) and, it seems, he passes the test.

Christian feminists and others sometimes exhibit anti-Judaic interpretations of this passage by claiming that Jesus is presented in radical discontinuity with his Jewish roots. But everyone in the story is Jewish; Jesus is a Jew. His attitude to the woman in the passage represents the possibility of renewal within Judaism, and this is recognized by everyone in the story.

Rabbi Gunther Plaut, talking about what became Talmudic teaching on Leviticus 20:10, says:
"The talmudic rabbis, with their great concern for the sanctity of human life, were openly opposed to capital punishment. But, since they had to recognize the letter of the Torah law, they sought a variety of means to render these penal laws inoperative. Thus, in some instances, they held that the Torah referred to death by divine intervention, not to death imposed by a court. They further devised a system of technicalities to prevent the conviction of a defendant for a capital crime. This somewhat offhand approach was relatively easy for them, since the Roman government denied Jewish courts jurisdiction over capital cases."
(The Torah: A Modern Commentary, New York: The Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1981, p.907.)

As one reads from Plaut, one remembers again the popular Biblical story of Esther which celebrates finding creative space for humanity in the midst of irrevocable (Persian) law. Feminist scholar Danna Fewell states, "This text [Esther], like rabbinic commentary [itself], keeps the canon from becoming a law that cannot change; it helps to keep the canon alive and talking." (Quoted in Alice Ogden Bellis, Helpmates, Harlots, and Heroes: Women’s Stories in the Hebrew Bible, Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994, p.215; see the whole discussion pp.215-16.) This "finding of space" for life has traditionally been a Jewish endeavour in the attempt to understand and apply Torah. Perhaps that is what the "testing" of Jesus is all about. At any rate, Plaut’s comments on capital punishment surely help us "Judaize" the story of the "woman taken in adultery." (They also give us additional perspective on the death of Jesus itself.)

Jesus noted that everyone at heart is an eager and willing adulterer by nature. He also realized and observed that sexual morality, as such, had become thoroughly warped and inverted. Hence, in his sermons he concluded, in effect: "There’s really no point in obeying such a sham morality anymore." The Jewish Rabbis at Jamina forty years later came to the same conclusion, while they were meeting to decide on the final text for their OT.

Jesus also befriended prostitutes (adulteresses by definition), declaring that they stood at the head of the line into God’s kingdom. He dismissed sexual "misconduct" as a plausible basis for any divine Judgement.

Jesus declared the opposite morality as true. "The one who loves the most and the best (erotically) is forgiven everything," he said. "And whoever does this to excess shall be greatest in the kingdom of Heaven."

The Bible uses adultery not as a sexual sin but as a metaphor about disloyalty to the state.

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