Jimmy Akin

A reader writes:

I read online recently (sorry, lost track of the link) that there was significant evidence that the story of the women caught in adultery in the Gospel of John was a late addition rather than part of John’s original Gospel.

I’d never heard this before, so I don’t know if this is some weird biblical scholarship theory or something moderately mainstream.  And if it is correct what, if anything, is the Church’s reaction to the question?  The article mentioned the story not appearing in a number of early manuscripts of the New Testament, and also said that although Augustine and later Fathers mentioned it, that earlier writers like Tertullian and Origin seemed not to be aware of its existence.

The claim that this passage in John’s Gospel–known as the pericope adulterae ("the passage of the adulterous woman"; John 7:53-8:11)–was not originally in this gospel is not at all fringe biblical scholarship. It is quite mainstream, and you’ll see it noted in the footnotes of some Bibles that the passage may not be in the original.

A good, brief summary of the reasons why it is so regarded is offered by Wikipedia:

The pericope is now viewed by critical scholars of the New Testament as an interpolation: it is argued that it disrupts the story told at the end of chapter 7 and in the remainder of chapter 8; it uses Greek more characteristic of the synoptic Gospels than of John; it appears in only one early Greek manuscript and sometimes appears in different places in later manuscripts, even interpolated in one case into the Gospel of Luke. B. M. Metzger writes that the evidence for the non-Johannine origin of the pericope of the adulteress is overwhelming.

So it’s not oddball scholarship that suggests this, which leaves the reader’s question of what–if anything–the Church’s reaction has been.

The Magisterium of the Church has not, to my knowledge, taken specific action regarding this passage, leaving us to apply the general principles that would be applied to any such manuscript discrepancy.

First, the passage is found in the Vulgate (including the Neo-Vulgate). Now, the Council of Trent issued a definition in which it said:

if any one receive not, as sacred and canonical, the said
books entire with all their parts, as they have been used to be read in the
Catholic Church, and as they are contained in the old Latin vulgate
edition; and knowingly and deliberately contemn the traditions aforesaid;
let him be anathema [SOURCE].

This has led some to suppose that if a passage is found in the Vulgate that it must, ipso facto, be sacred and canonical and thus in the original manuscripts, but this is not what Trent was saying. The Council was not attempting to address the question of what passages were in the originals. What it was doing was repudiating the Protestant claim that the deuterocanonicals were non-canonical. Among the deuterocanonicals are certain passages of Daniel and Esther that are not found in Protestant Bibles (e.g., Bel and the Dragon, the song of the three children). Trent’s reference to accepting "said books entire with all their parts" is meant to emphasize that not only the seven books that are wholly deuterocanonical are to be accepted as sacred and canonical but that the books that have deuterocanonical parts (i.e., Daniel and Esther) are to be accepted as wholly sacred and canonical as well.

The Council was not attempting to determine–beyond this–the authenticity of particular passages. Indeed, there were minor variations in what passages were included in different editions of the Vulgate itself, and there was no edition of the Vulgate that could be appealed to to unambiguously settle such questions. What specific passages were in the originals thus has to be determined by textual criticism, using the best manuscripts and manuscript-evaluation techniques that we have available.

This point was made by Pope Pius XII in his encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu:

Nor should anyone think that this use of the original texts, in accordance with the methods of criticism, in any way derogates from those decrees so wisely enacted by the Council of Trent concerning the Latin Vulgate. It is historically certain that the Presidents of the Council received a commission, which they duly carried out, to beg, that is, the Sovereign Pontiff in the name of the Council that he should have corrected, as far as possible, first a Latin, and then a Greek, and Hebrew edition, which eventually would be published for the benefit of the Holy Church of God. If this desire could not then be fully realized owing to the difficulties of the times and other obstacles, at present it can, We earnestly hope, be more perfectly and entirely fulfilled by the united efforts of Catholic scholars [Divino Afflante Spiritu 20].

He went on to write:

And if the Tridentine Synod wished "that all should use as authentic" the Vulgate Latin version, this, as all know, applies only to the Latin Church and to the public use of the same Scriptures; nor does it, doubtless, in any way diminish the authority and value of the original texts. For there was no question then of these texts, but of the Latin versions, which were in circulation at that time, and of these the same Council rightly declared to be preferable that which "had been approved by its long-continued use for so many centuries in the Church." Hence this special authority or as they say, authenticity of the Vulgate was not affirmed by the Council particularly for critical reasons, but rather because of its legitimate use in the Churches throughout so many centuries; by which use indeed the same is shown, in the sense in which the Church has understood and understands it, to be free from any error whatsoever in matters of faith and morals; so that, as the Church herself testifies and affirms, it may be quoted safely and without fear of error in disputations, in lectures and in preaching; and so its authenticity is not specified primarily as critical, but rather as juridical [Divino Afflante Spiritu 21].

Here Pius XII articulates two points that are of use in assessing the pericope adulterae:

(1) the authenticity of the Vulgate is not critical but juridical, which means that Trent legally bound Catholics of the Latin Church of its day to use the Vulgate publicly but it did not attempt to set up the Vulgate as the official critical edition of the Bible so that we would no longer have to look at the original language manuscripts to determine what was supposed to be in a particular passage.

This means that whether the pericope adulterae was in the original manuscripts or not has to be settled by recourse to the original language manuscripts, not simply the Vulgate.

(2) The reason for the special juridical authenticity of the Vulgate is because its use through so many centuries had shown that "in the sense in which the Church has understood and understands it, [it is] free from any error whatsoever in matters of faith and morals."

This means that the pericope adulterae–by being included in the Vulgate–does not contain errors of faith or morals when properly understood.

And so those would be the two points that–in the absence of a current, binding statement from the Magisterium on the authenticity of the passage–one would naturally conclude regarding it: Critical scholarship must determine whether the passage was in the originals but, even if it was not, the passage does not contain errors of faith or morals when understood in a Catholic sense and so it may safely be appealed to as a passage from which Christians may learn.

MORE ON THE PERICOPE ADULTERAE.