RMJ has an interesting post up based on an article at the Daily Beast on the minor obsession over the authenticity of the story found in John's Gospel about Jesus getting the "woman taken in adultery" off, of him shaming the crowd about to stone her to death into letting her walk and of refusing to so much as condemn her as a sinner. The article takes as effective the use that atheists love to put the story to, of claiming that it's not something Jesus ever said because the story isn't found in the earliest manuscripts of John's Gospel and that it's not universally believed to be authentic to it, being a later invention.
As the article quotes two authors of a book on the passage say, the actual origin of the story is a mystery as is the way it found itself into what is taken as the authentic text of what we have as John's Gospel. When it's been thrown at me I think I've confounded the atheists who expect me to have a Protestant Fundamentalist belief in the literal truth of every word in the Bible by saying it wouldn't bother me if it wasn't something that happened even as I said that I believed what the story taught was authentically faithful to the Gospel of Jesus. I don't believe that something is true because Jesus said it, I said I thought Jesus said what he did because it was true. As it says in the Bible, he said a lot of things which the authors of those books couldn't put into the books. And I said that it was possible that the story did happen and just happened to come down in a different line of sayings and events which later Christians realized contained a truth too important to leave out. Which I think is some of what the authors are getting at, though I only have the article to go on.
What I'm as interested in is that if it was a later legend about Jesus, what was there about the inventors' beliefs about Jesus that would have made them think this was something he very well may have done and said.
If it isn't a journalistic style report - something which is a modern anachronism, anyway - it is certainly a way into understanding how early Christians understood Christianity, the status of women especially in relation to their being considered the property of their husbands or other men, the status given to the sin of adultery and lots of other things. It's a world of difference between this story and lots of the other legends carried in the "lost books" that are so popular among people who want to forget what Jesus said.
The article goes into a bit of that:
Though they are careful to point out that we don’t know for sure where the story came from or why it was added to the Gospel of John, Knust, an associate professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Boston University, and Wasserman, a professor of Biblical Studies at Ansgar Teologiske Høgskole in Norway, told The Daily Beast that the interpolation took place “in a context where Greek was used but Latin was also spoken, and probably because the interpolator thought it fit best into that Gospel.” They added that “we can only speculate about why John and not some other Gospel,” but mentioned several theories, including the prominence of stories about women in the Fourth Gospel. They also note the intriguing theory of New Testament scholar Chris Keith that, in addition to portraying Jesus as forgiving, the story also presents Jesus as able to write. Perhaps it was added, then, to combat the scandalous accusation that Jesus wasn’t fully literate.
“Once it was added,” they said “it made sense to many Christians to read it there.”
"In a context where Greek was used but Latin was also spoken," forces me to think how women, wives were treated in Greek and Roman law at the time. I don't think there would be many pagans who would not find this story a bit strange, at the very least.
It would be good to have a sense as to how the early Christians could be expected to have taken such a story and how various Pagan and Jewish communities might have taken it. If Jesus, presented as a great expert on The Law, considered the Son of God, the Light of the world, is letting a woman, a woman who has wronged her husband through committing adultery instead of being put to death would have been shocking or surprising to earlier and other traditions it would tell us a lot about why Christianity was distinctive. It is also worth noting that that was certainly not how civil law among governments deputed to be Christian treated such crimes later on. Apparently it was a story and an idea much more popular among Christians during a period when they were relatively powerless than when they held power. That's not a shock, the history of so much of civic Christianity has been one of how to ignore the radicalism contained in the Scripture, bowing to a pagan tradition that has never died and which has always more characterized secularized Christianity - much to the discredit of the word.
If they found that the story was what atheists love to say it is, an invention of later Christians, far from it being the "faith-killer" the story says it is, it would enhance my belief because such people who came up with such a story must have been genuinely changed by the Gospel, the Epistles, and their reading of the Prophets and the Law. In many Christian traditions that aren't as fanatically wedded to the text of Scripture as they aspire to follow its spirit, such a thing wouldn't be a faith killer at all.
In one of her essays when Marilynne Robinson addresses the disparaging use of the First Testament with all its horrific descriptions of the political-military contentions of the Kings and the earliest Prophets, many of them quasi-political "Judges" she asks what the New Testament would be like if it contained the history of Christian governments in the same number of centuries. It's a good question. As would a similar treatment of secular government since the late 18th century, assigning similar disparagement for their lapses as have been handed to the Hebrew tradition based on its confessions and ruminations over what its kings and priests and judges did. What would one that took in the current "evangelical" (not to mention right-wing Catholic, Jewish, etc) support for Trump be like? I'd suggest calling that book "Mammonists".
I'll add that when I heard the dirt-bag crook and thug Matthew Whittacker invoking the "New Testament" I felt like throwing up. Talk about the devil citing scripture. You might be tempted to say that it was the best thing about him if it weren't' clear as crystal that it was just part of his huckster come-on.
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