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<I>Pericope Adulterae</I>

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<I>Pericope Adulterae</I> Novum Testamentum 51 (2009) 209-231 brill.nl/nt Th e Initial Location of the Pericope Adulterae in Fourfold Tradition1 Chris Keith Lincoln, Illinois Abstract Th is article responds to the recent claim of Josep Rius-Camps that the Pericope Adulterae was originally composed by Mark. Rius-Camps, in making his creative proposal, has over- looked signifi cant textual and patristic evidence regarding where early Christians con- fronted the story of Jesus and the adulteress. Th is evidence suggests that, while the Pericope Adulterae is not original to the Gospel of John, its fi rst location in fourfold gospel tradition was its traditional location, John 7:53-8:11. Keywords Pericope Adulterae; textual criticism; patristics; fourfold canon; Gospel of John Now, here is a mystery, or rather, here are several mysteries! A good story, characteristic of Jesus, but with a very uncertain origin, and a varied history.2 Josep Rius-Camps has recently put forward the argument that the Pericope Adulterae (hereafter PA) was originally composed by Mark and placed in his gospel after Mark 12:12.3 Th is modifi es an earlier publication of Rius- Camps, where he claimed PA was originally penned by Luke for his gos- pel.4 In the more recent article, he states his revised hypothesis as such: 1) Th is article is a modifi ed version of a chapter from Chris Keith, Th e Pericope Adulterae, the Gospel of John, and the Literacy of Jesus (NTTSD 38; Leiden: Brill, forthcoming 2009). 2) Frederick A. Schilling, “Th e Story of Jesus and the Adulteress,” ATh R 37 (1955) 92. 3) Josep Rius-Camps, “Th e Pericope of the Adulteress Reconsidered: Th e Nomadic Misfor- tunes of a Bold Pericope,” NTS 53.3 (2007) 379-405. 4) Josep Rius-Camps, “Origen Lucano de la Pericopa de la Mujer Adultera,” Filología Neo- testamentaria 6 (1993) 149-176. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 DOI: 10.1163/156853608X399142 210 C. Keith / Novum Testamentum 51 (2009) 209-231 Th e PA originally would have been part of the Gospel of Mark and would have been situated after the fi rst attack by the High Priests, the scribes and the elders, question- ing the authority of Jesus (Mark 11.27-12.12). Luke would have adopted it in his own work and would likewise have placed it after the fi rst confl ict of Jesus with the same Jewish leaders mentioned in Mark (Luke 20.1-19). Because of the moral strictness that prevailed at the end of the fi rst century, the PA would have been eradicated together with the end of the preceding pericope both from the Gospel of Mark and the work of Luke. For 20 or 30 years, the PA would have been freely transmitted, with the two primitive archetypes mutually infl uencing each other and giving rise to more textual variants than any other document in the NT. Gradually, as the churches collected together the four canonical gospels, the PA would have been inserted in diff erent places of the Gospel of John or the Gospel of Luke. Most of the communities that decided to reinsert it, would have done so in the Gospel of John.5 Rius-Camps’ proposal is creative, as it must be; for the diffi culty in assess- ing PA’s transmission history is in explaining how PA’s language contains so many non-Johannine elements and yet the manuscript tradition shows an overwhelming affi nity for a Johannine location. In addition, one must explain PA’s famous various locations in the manuscript tradition outside the traditional and majority location of John 7:53-8:11. I have proposed an alternative socio-historical context for PA’s insertion into gospel tradi- tion elsewhere,6 but in what follows I would like to focus solely upon the foundational “building block” of Rius-Camps’ proposal—the initial tex- tual location of PA in the fourfold gospel tradition. When a scribe fi rst decided to place PA in a gospel that would become part of the fourfold collection, where did he do so? I will demonstrate that the available evi- dence suggests that a scribe fi rst inserted PA into canonical tradition via a manuscript of the Gospel of John (hereafter GJohn), and at its traditional location, John 7:53-8:11.7 More succinctly, there is no evidence to support 5) Rius-Camps, “Pericope,” 395. Between initial submission of the present article and its going to press, Rius-Camps published a full argument for a three-stage composition history for Mark’s gospel. In this work, as in the quoted article above, he relocates PA to follow Mark 12.12. See Josep Rius-Camps, El Evangelio de Marcos: Etapas de su redacción (Estella: Verbo Divino, 2008) 92-94, 233. In this study, PA joins three “sequences” from Sec. Gos. Mark that Rius-Camps includes in his restructured version of Mark’s gospel (10-16). Since, at the time of writing, there are only two libraries in the United States with a copy of this book, I must express my gratitude to Leslie Starasta of the Jessie C. Eury Library at Lincoln Christian University in helping me acquire one of those copies. 6) Keith, Pericope Adulterae, n.p. 7) In addition to Rius-Camps, then, I will thus be arguing directly against, e.g., Walter Grundmann, Das Evangelium nach Markus (THKNT 2; Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsan- Th e Initial Location of the Pericope Adulterae in Fourfold Tradition 211 the idea that early Christians read PA in canonical tradition in any place other than John 7:53-8:11 until the late ninth/tenth century CE. Before proceeding, however, I should note here that my analysis will be based upon (overlooked) manuscript and patristic evidence of PA’s loca- tion in gospel tradition, which will be a methodological diff erence between Rius-Camps’ approach and mine. Rius-Camps relies heavily upon linguis- tic stylistic similarities between PA and the gospel authors (and stylistic diff erences with GJohn).8 Pace Rius-Camps, and others (some of whom enlist the linguistic style argument in order to assert Johannine author- ship),9 I am not confi dent that an analysis of linguistic style is able to demonstrate a previous textual or authorial source for PA. In an oft- neglected article, Cadbury had already argued along these lines in 1917. While observing the many linguistic similarities between PA’s author and Luke, he refuses to resolve whether those points of contact suggest that Luke himself wrote PA or someone whose style matched Luke’s.10 He even notes that if it was someone copying Luke’s style, then “style proves to be a most unreliable criterion.”11 Th e assumption behind arguments from style is that a later scribe would not have been able to mimic an earlier author’s style, and therefore that strong similarity suggests the same author. Th ere is, however, no reason why an astute later scribe could not have cop- ied an earlier style. Th e most that an argument built upon linguistic style can assert in a case like PA’s is a stronger or weaker affi nity between one author’s style and another’s.12 Furthermore, the question of PA’s textual composition (i.e., who wrote down the story) is technically a separate issue stalt, 1959) 245: “Kirchenväter und alte Textzeugen erweisen, daß weder diese Stelle ihr ursprünglicher Platz ist noch sie überhaupt zum Johannes-Evangelium gehört hat.” 8) Also, more recently, see Rius-Camps, Evangelio, 16. 9) E.g., Alan F. Johnson, “A Re-examination of the Pericope Adulterae, John 7:53-8:11” (Th D diss., Dallas Th eological Seminary, 1964); Alan F. Johnson, “A Stylistic Trait of the Fourth Gospel in the Pericope Adulterae?,” Bulletin of the Evangelical Th eological Society 9 (1966) 91-96. 10) Henry J. Cadbury, “A Possible Case of Lukan Authorship (John 753-811),” HTR 10.3 (1917) 243-244. 11) Cadbury, “Possible,” 244. Nonetheless, Cadbury seems to favour Lukan authorship of PA. See also Henry J. Cadbury, Th e Making of Luke-Acts (London: Macmillan and Co., 1927) 258. 12) And note here, that even this does not ultimately help with PA. For, within one verse PA’s author/interpolator seems to mimic both Johannine and Lukan style. John 8:6 parallels both John 6:6 (“but this they were saying to test him”) and Luke 6:7 (“in order to have [something] to accuse of him”). 212 C. Keith / Novum Testamentum 51 (2009) 209-231 from who inserted PA into gospel tradition and where, as one cannot assume from the outset that the same scribe committed both acts. Th us, my focus in the following study is not upon PA’s original author(s), but upon the textual location of its insertion and the manuscript locations that are known for PA.13 Th at is, instead of asking “Where could PA have been located based upon who might have written it?” I will be asking “Where could PA have been located based upon where early Christians read it?” I begin with the known manuscript locations for PA. 13) I will thus not dwell on possible alternative locations that lack concrete evidence, but mention them here. Th e eleventh-century MS 1006 claims that PA is from the Gos. Th om. (See Bart D. Ehrman, “Jesus and the Adulteress,” in his Studies in the Textual Criticism of the New Testament [NTTS 33; Leiden: Brill, 2006] 204 n. 26; repr. from NTS 34 [1988] 24-44). A famous statement in Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.39.17, suggests that PA (or a similar story) is from the Gos.
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