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...