The last time I preached, I mentioned my love for footnotes, so in God’s providence, it’s fitting that today I am going to preach an entire sermon on a footnote.
The text today is the well-known story with Jesus’ encounter with the woman caught in adultery. It begins in 7:53 and goes through 8:11. Let me start by just reading the text, then I will explain what the footnote is about and then I’ll tell you how we’re going to proceed.
53 [[They went each to his own house, 8 1 but Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. 2 Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him, and he sat down and taught them. 3 The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in the midst 4 they said to him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. 5 Now in the Law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?” 6 This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. 7 And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” 8 And once more he bent down and wrote on the ground. 9 But when they heard it, they went away one by one, beginning with the older ones, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. 10 Jesus stood up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” 11 She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.”]]
If you look at your physical Bible, there are footnotes, brackets, double brackets––all sorts of things––signaling that something is different about this story. It’s like a check engine light. So, let’s get our code reader and figure out what the problem is. Bible translation committees are very nice people, they tell us what the code is. They’re nice enough to print it in our Bibles
Here’s the note: [The earliest manuscripts do not include 7:53–8:11]. Then there’s another footnote to the note. It’s getting very Christopher Nolan. “Some manuscripts do not include 7:53–8:11; others add the passage here or after 7:36 or after 21:25 or after Luke 21:38, with variations in the text.”
What’s going on here? Welcome to the academic discipline known as text criticism. Text criticism is the discipline that examines textual differences/variants in our biblical manuscripts. Before the printing press, biblical manuscripts were copied by hand. You can imagine, after copying by hand for hours on end, that there might be some errors or variants in the copies.
Text criticism, then, looks at those differences. The result is that this enhances our confidence in the credibility and reliability of the Bible that we have.
As Christians, we love the Bible. We believe God’s Word is inspired and inerrant (free from error). It’s our final authority in faith and practice and it’s completely true and trustworthy. So, when you mention variants within biblical manuscripts, that can make us a little nervous. Can we trust the Bible?
The answer is yes. We have really good answers to these questions. The question really is, how deep do you want to go in your search for the answers? Don’t’ be satisfied with simplistic answers. What’s a simplistic answer? That it’s all about power and control. That the church knows the Bible has been changed, and men in particular want to hold on to their power and authority to keep you from knowing the truth. (This is popularized by Dan Brown’s The Davinci Code but there are various versions of this in the cultural imagination).
If this doesn’t raise those sorts of questions for you––hallelujah! That doesn’t mean you’re anti-intellectual or anything like that. That’s a gift of faith and there’s nothing to be ashamed about in that. But for some of us, this raises questions like–– does this mean the Bible’s been changed? Can I trust the Bible? How do I know if there aren’t all sorts of variants in the Bible?
Five things to say in response.
- Bible translation committees are not hiding anything. When there is a significant variant, of which there are few, they print it on the page in a footnote.
- The vast majority of variants in the biblical manuscripts are what they call “nonsense readings.” What does that mean? A spelling error. “teh” instead of “the.” Or a scribe copied the same verse twice. It’s a variant but it doesn’t change the meaning or content at all. Nonsense readings don’t even warrant a footnote. They are obviously scribal errors.
- None of the variants, even significant variants, change or affect any essential Christian doctrine. Our belief in the resurrection doesn’t depend on a disputed textual variant.
- The variants do not affect our belief in the inspiration of Scripture or the inerrancy of Scripture. The Inspiration of Scripture is a mighty work of God through the Holy Spirit on the human authors of Scripture so that their freely composed writings are what God intended them to write. Thus, their writings are authoritative, trustworthy and true. Inerrancy refers to the fact that God’s Word is free from all error, in the original autographs. We don’t have the original copies. Inerrancy is really concerned with the objective ground of truth. God’s Word is our foundation for truth; God speaks in a truthful way.
When God inspired the original authors to write Scripture, he kept them from error. God did not keep scribes from error in their transmission of the biblical texts. But the textual differences actually helps us determine what the original message was. It enhances our confidence in the Bible that we have.
You might think that over time this leads to greater possibility of the biblical text to be corrupted. But it’s actually the opposite. The more data we have, the more biblical manuscripts we discover, we have greater confidence that the Bible we have accurately reflects the original message. So no translation is inspired (sorry King James Version only folks). But we can confidently say, this is God’s Word. We can stake our lives on it.
- And just in case you are worried that the Bible is riddled with all kinds of significant variants, there really are two significant ones that you should be aware of. I say “aware of” but you should not be alarmed. The first is the so-called Long Ending of Mark. The second is here in John. Both are double bracketed alerting you to the fact that the earliest manuscripts do not contain these sections.
That’s as technical as we’re going to get. If you want to dive into this deeper, let me give you a book and a website. The book is Scribes and Scripture by John Meade and Peter Gurry. It’s an excellent introduction to text criticism issues and the development of the canon. The website is textandcanon.org. This is the website for the Text and Canon Institute, which Gurry and Meade run out of Phoenix Seminary. It’s an excellent resource with articles, lectures, videos, etc on issues like this.
I’m convinced that a sermon is not a lecture. Sunday morning is about proclaiming the gospel through God’s Word. That presents a challenge when you come a text like this.
The near consensus among biblical scholars, and I should add evangelical, Bible-believing scholars, is that this section is not original to the gospel of John. John the apostle did not write this. The question becomes, do you preach it? Do you skip it? Do you preach it but ignore the footnotes? Well, you can’t do that because it’s printed on the page.
Preachers have to decide. I’m going to preach it. Why? Three reasons.
- Even though the overwhelming evidence is that this is not original to John, we have no reason to doubt that this actually happened. John himself tells us in 21:25, “Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.” In other words, I think what we have here is a true story of Jesus encountering this woman. Likely this was an oral tradition that circulated. You have references to this encounter all throughout the early church.
It makes sense. What’s not to love about this story? Everything about it is classic Jesus. The pharisees try to trap Jesus. Jesus turns the tables on them. Jesus treats this woman with dignity and compassion
- This is mainly for the young people. I’m not going to ignore the textual issues with this passage because I don’t want the first time you hear about these kinds of textual issues to be in a college classroom with some atheistic or agnostic or theologically liberal professor who tells you the gospels are unreliable or that we can’t know the true historical Jesus. If I ignored it, that would be a disservice to you. (I went up to Super Summer to talk through questions the youth had–– they are asking serious, deep, rigorous questions. And I’m glad you’re asking them!)
- The story is so popular in the wider culture, we need to pay attention to it. We need to be able to respond to what the wider culture says about this story.
In the popular imagination, this story encapsulates a tolerant, loving, non-judgmental Jesus, who intervenes and defends this woman against those men in particular who use the Bible to clobber others with judgement. All grace, no judgement, no speaking hard truths. As Terry mentioned a few weeks ago, the most popular Bible verse people in the culture know today is “do not judge.” But that’s stripped of all context. The same is true with this story.
If you just read the story, you recognize that the popular interpretation of this story couldn’t be more wrong. Jesus actually upholds the standard of divine justice in a number of ways, which we’ll discuss.
For those reasons, it’s important to preach this passage. Here’s how I’m going to approach this text. I’m going to show you how this story illustrates the gospel, namely that Jesus has come to call sinners to repentance. In the gospel, guilty sinners are declared righteous through faith in Christ.
I want to highlight three theological truths that this text illustrates. We derive these truths from the authority in other places of Scripture.
- Jesus upholds the standard of divine justice. (This is my longest point)
He does this in a number of ways; I’ll mention one here. Jesus upholds the integrity of divine justice by protecting the woman from mob justice. By turning the tables on the Pharisees, he is protecting the woman from those who would abuse the law in pursuit of their own sinful motivations. That this woman is brought before Jesus in the way that she is, is not just; it’s actually unjust.
How is it unjust? This whole thing is a set up. They’re going to humiliate this woman in order to trap Jesus. They’re trying to create a situation in which Jesus contradicts the Law. If Jesus says not to stone this woman, if she is in fact guilty, then he’s disregarding the Law of Moses. Or is he? There are a couple problems with their plan.
One problem is they’re selectively citing the Law. Here’s the statute. Deuteronomy 22:22 says “If a man is found lying with the wife of another man, both of them shall die, the man who lay with the woman, and the woman. So you shall purge the evil from Israel.” Leviticus 20:10 is also very similar, both the adulterer and the adulteress.
What’s the problem with the story in John? … Where’s the man? The Law requires punishment for both guilty parties. Now, I’m not going to talk about the role of capital punishment in the OT. In light of Christ’s fulfillment of the Law, we are in a different moment in redemptive history, and Paul outlines how the church ought to deal with sexual sin in the church in 1 Corinthians 5 through church discipline. All that to say, the death penalty is not the main focus of our attention here.
We shouldn’t think that in the OT they were just stoning people left and right. Yes, the death penalty is the punishment for this particular sin. However, it was actually very difficult to convict someone of this sin by the Law’s own standards. The Law required two or three eyewitnesses of the actual act. It was not enough to say, “I saw you at this place at this time.”
How does Jesus respond to their trap? He upholds justice by exposing their misuse of the Law. He exposes their sinful motivations. They set the trap. He stoops to the ground and writes in the dirt. There’s a lot of speculation about what Jesus wrote in the ground with his finger. Nobody knows what he wrote.
Then Jesus tells them in vs 7, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.”
Here’s what this does not mean. This does not mean that you have to be sinless to render a moral judgement. People tend to read this verse that way. Our justice system doesn’t work that way—only a sinless judge can render judgements. That’s not what Jesus is saying.
Some scholars think Jesus is alluding Duet 17:7, which said that the witnesses of the transgression were to be the ones to cast the first stone. Their response? They drop the stones, which indicates that they were not actually witnesses of the act; and they would thus be potentially bearing false witness (to bear false witness is a sin). Or perhaps they were guilty of the same sin themselves. Whatever the case is, Jesus is exposing their sinful motivations and the sinful way they abused the law to make a mockery of justice.
Jesus upholds justice by protecting her from the abuse of the Law.
Where else in Scripture do we know Jesus upholds and fulfills the standards of the Law? The Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5–7. Jesus acts as a greater Moses, who explains the true intent of the Law. You have heard it said, but I say to you… And in every case, be it anger/ murder, or adultery and lust, Jesus raises the bar.
In popular thought, people think the OT was really strict and Jesus lightened up a bit. He was all about grace. That’s not true. He actually raises the moral bar. And in doing so, he highlights our total inability to fulfill the requirements of the law by our own strength and he is pointing to the need for his perfect obedience and righteousness. How is our righteousness supposed to exceed the Scribes and Pharisees? We need his righteousness.
That’s the first point. Three theological truths that this text illustrates. First, Jesus upholds the standard of divine justice (we will come back to this).
- Jesus has come to call sinners to repentance.
Jesus came to save us from our sin.
At the end of this passage, vs 11, after all the woman’s accusers are gone, Jesus says to her, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.”
What kind of statement is that? That is a call to repentance. He is calling her to turn from her life of sin and live in obedience to God.
Yes, aspects of this story highlighted the injustice of the situation. Jesus highlighted the sinful motivations and hypocrisy of the Pharisees. The story even highlighted the humiliation and shame that this woman likely experienced as a result of this mob.
But abuse, power, and authority are not the central issues Jesus deals with. Even shame is not the central issue Jesus deals with here. Rather, it is sin. Shame is not the central problem. Sin is the central problem. Shame often results from sin. But Jesus doesn’t say, I do not condemn you, now go and do not be ashamed. No. He says, go and from now on sin no more.
I’m not denying the reality of shame. By saying sin is the central problem, I am warning against the secular impulse to replace the theological category of sin with the sociological category of shame. Sin is a vertical issue (affects our status before God). Shame is horizontal (negative emotions before others).
If sin becomes a purely horizontal concept, then you can overcome it with all kinds of resources and self-help practices. Christianity becomes a non-redemptive religion. But when sin remains a theological concept, only God’s grace is able to change our standing before God.[1]
Jesus wants her to recognize that she is made in God’s image, but she is a fallen sinner in need of repentance.
She must go to war with sin. She must put to death her old sinful lifestyle. Even amid all the other unjust elements of this narrative, Jesus assumes that she actually was guilty. There’s no blame shifting going on. “Jesus, you saw how it was unjust how they treated me.”
Jesus upholds the standard of justice by not allowing them to abuse the law. And he doesn’t relax the law by failing to acknowledge her sin. He wants her to recognize that she is a sinner in need of repentance.
In Luke 5:32, Jesus says, “I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.” That’s at the heart of Jesus’ ministry. We need to recognize that we are sinners in need of a Savior. That doesn’t mean we’re worthless and don’t have any value. We don’t like to think of ourselves as sinners, but it’s essential that we do. To recognize that we are sinners is simply to acknowledge that apart from Christ we are spiritually dead. And there’s nothing we can do to bring ourselves out of that state. We must be born again by the Spirit (John 3).
- The third theological truth. The gospel proclaims that in Christ, guilty sinners are declared righteous on the basis of faith.
This is known as the doctrine of justification by faith. How does God justify the ungodly? (That’s the question in Romans 3–4) How is somebody guilty declared righteous? To answer that we have to look at the cross of Christ.
But before we do that, how does this text illustrate justification?
How is this woman guilty but not condemned? If, as I’ve said repeatedly, Jesus upholds the standards of divine justice, how is Jesus able to say, “neither do I condemn you” and still be just?
Let’s look at the passage. Vv. 10–11: “Jesus stood up and said to her, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’ She said, ‘No one, Lord.’ And Jesus said, ‘Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.’”
What does this sound like? Sounds a lot like Romans 8:1: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
Romans 8:33–34 “Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died––more than that, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us.”
Woman, where are your accusers? Who is there to condemn? As Tim Keller says, it’s as if Jesus says, “I do not condemn you because I will be condemned for you.” I will take your condemnation on myself. Your sin will be condemned in my flesh on the cross. I will subject myself to an unjust trial. My righteousness, my perfect obedience will be reckoned to you.
If you are in Christ, you are guilty but not condemned because Jesus took your condemnation on himself. On the basis of his work, his sacrifice, his righteousness and perfect obedience, you are declared righteous. Not on the basis of anything that you’ve done, but solely on the basis of his merits.
Commenting on this passage, Tim Keller notes the importance of the word order in Jesus’ closing statement. He does not say, Go, and from now on sin no more, and then I will not condemn you.
That’s justification by works. That’s, try to live righteously and hope you are declared righteous at the end of your life. That’s Roman Catholicism. That’s not the gospel.
The logic of the gospel is that you have been declared righteous on the basis of faith in Christ; and now you go to war against sin. And you live an obedient life empowered by the Spirit to be conformed more and more into the image of his Son (Rom 8:29).
I have one application for us this morning.
- When Jesus shows us grace, it’s often accompanied by a challenge to grow and change.
“Neither do I condemn you. Go, and from now on sin no more.” He acts in grace, but he calls her to greater accountability. He calls her to go to war against her sin. To put to death her old ways of sexual immorality.
There’s a philosophy out there that says you can’t do this to someone. She’s been wounded. She needs to heal and be restored in community before we even begin to think about calling her to make changes in her life. That is simply just not true.
Now, Jesus is not a jerk about it. He simultaneously extends grace and compassion to her and challenges her to grow.
I never want to be at the point in my life when I’m ruined by my own sinful choices and I say, “Why did nobody ever tell me to kill my sin?”
We need to see that the call to repent from sin and resolve to put it to death is the most liberating and lifegiving thing you can tell someone.
If you don’t view your sin as something that needs to be put to death, then you secretly nurse it. If you don’t kill it, then it will take on a life of its own.
Paul says this in Romans 6:11 “So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.”
Let’s pray.
[1] David Wells, “Losing our Religion: The Impact of Secularization on the Understanding of Sin” in Ruined Sinners to Reclaim (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2024), 818–820.