Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations and frequently cited works
- 1 The theory
- 2 The materials
- 3 The practice
- 4 ‘As our Saviour taught us …’: the Lord's Prayer
- 5 The sayings on marriage and divorce
- 6 The story of the woman taken in adultery
- 7 Secrets and hypotheses
- 8 The endings of Mark's Gospel
- 9 The last three chapters of Luke
- 10 The development and transmission of the Fourth Gospel
- 11 From codex to disk
- 12 The living text
- Index of citations
- Index of Greek New Testament manuscripts
- Index of names and subjects
6 - The story of the woman taken in adultery
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations and frequently cited works
- 1 The theory
- 2 The materials
- 3 The practice
- 4 ‘As our Saviour taught us …’: the Lord's Prayer
- 5 The sayings on marriage and divorce
- 6 The story of the woman taken in adultery
- 7 Secrets and hypotheses
- 8 The endings of Mark's Gospel
- 9 The last three chapters of Luke
- 10 The development and transmission of the Fourth Gospel
- 11 From codex to disk
- 12 The living text
- Index of citations
- Index of Greek New Testament manuscripts
- Index of names and subjects
Summary
Treat each according to his deserts, and who shall 'scape a whipping?
HamletThe passages covered so far have all been teaching firmly embedded in the canonical Gospels. That to which we now turn has had a different history. It poses a particular problem for those who believe that there is a single authoritative text, a problem that they generally ignore. For this passage is demonstrably spurious to that text. Read in the lectionaries of most denominations, it attests a tradition about Jesus received into several places in the Gospels at a later date. It is not part of the supposed authoritative and original text.
The story of the woman taken in adultery is one of the best-known examples of expansion to the Gospel text. It is generally known as the passage John 7.53–8.11, although it is found elsewhere in some witnesses. Present in the Authorised Version, it has been excised from most modern versions. But it has not gone out of use, nor has attachment to it diminished. It continues a part of the lectionary. This allows us to expand a point made at the end of Chapter 4. There we saw that our reading of one form of the text will be influenced by other forms. Here we learn that passages do not lose their influence once they have been declared and acknowledged to be spurious.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Living Text of the Gospels , pp. 95 - 102Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997