Early Christian Re-Writing and the History of the Pericope Adulterae

JENNIFER WRIGHT KNUST

Texts, even sacred texts, are never fixed. Meaning is never stable and interpretations shift in concert with the changing concerns of those who present them. These principles are readily demonstrated by a consideration of the complex history of the pericope adulterae—a story about Jesus, an adulteress, and a group of interlocutors found in the Gospel of John. This story is absent from many early gospel manuscripts and is remarkably unstable when it does appear. There are a few second- and third-century citations of the tale, but they do not mention the identity or motives of the interlocutors, nor do they specify the guilt (or innocence) of the woman or the men who accused her. By contrast, fourth- and fifth-century exegetes regularly suggested that the interlocutors sought to test Jesus, represented the woman as guilty, and claimed that “the Jews” were damned for their sins, readings that were preserved in gospel manuscripts. The pericope adulterae, increasingly invoked to produce Christian hegemony at the expense of “the Jews,” real or imagined, became a story about Jewish sin and Christian difference. This interpretation then influence the transmission of the tale, though traces of earlier readings lingered.

Efforts to fix the content and meaning of “sacred text” by ancient Chris- tians and others is always also an attempt at social scripting, as Vincent Wimbush has reminded us. “Sacred texts,” he observes, “are as much determined by society and culture as society and culture are determined

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Radcliffe Institute (January 2004) and the Society of Biblical Literature (November 2004). I am grateful to the audiences of these presentations for their helpful comments and suggestions, especially to Bart Ehrman, Kim Haines-Eitzen, and David Parker for the advice they so gener- ously offered both before and after the presentation to the Society of Biblical Litera- ture. I am equally grateful to the Editorial Board of JECS, including three anonymous readers, for their helpful comments and critique. Of the many friends and colleagues

Journal of Early Christian Studies 14:4, 485–536 © 2006 The Johns Hopkins University Press 486 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES by (among other things, to be sure) sacred texts.”1 The creation, definition, and interpretation of sacred text, therefore, regularly influence con- tests for authority and the control of truth. Since historical circumstances change, sacred text changes as well: new interpretive methods are developed, purporting to offer privileged access to the meaning of the text; new text critical methods are invented which, in theory at least, permit a better text to be found; new editions proposing to provide better access to a text’s contents are copied or printed; and battles are fought over the best text and that text’s true meaning. Not everyone escapes these battles unscathed, as recent reassessments of Christian appropriation and re-situation of Jewish scriptures as “about Jesus Christ” have shown.2 Already in the second century Justin Martyr argued that Christians alone were able to read Scripture properly while Jews, failing to read in light of Christ, abused and misunderstood their own biblical books. Having failed to read correctly, Jews lost any claim they once had to the title “Israel.” They had been replaced by Christians, the “true Israel,” as predicted by the prophets, since Christians, preferring the Septuagint to the Hebrew but reading both correctly, knew that Jesus is the messiah and the son of God.3 To argue otherwise was to invite eternal

who provided invaluable feedback througout this project, I would especially like to thank Roger Bagnall, Elizabeth Castelli, Christopher Celenza, Consuela Deutschke, Fiona Griffiths, Caroline Johnson Hodge, Laura Nasrallah, and the merry band of palaeographers I worked with during a wonderful summer of research and study at the American Academy in Rome. (Thanks Christine, Eileen, Lorenzo, Manu, and Sonia!) Any remaining mistakes and shortcomings are, of course, my own responsibil- ity. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Academy in Rome, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Radcliffe Institute for making it possible for me to conduct the research upon which this essay is based. 1. Vincent L. Wimbush, “Introduction; Reading Darkness, Reading Scriptures,” in African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures, ed. Vincent L. Wimbush with the assistance of Rosamond C. Rodman (New York: Continuum, 2000), 15. 2. Frances Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), esp. 9–28; Judith Lieu, Christian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), esp. 27–61. 3. As Michael Mach puts it, “This system according to which the whole of the Jewish Bible becomes a Christian book exacts a high price: the polemics against the Jews” (Michael Mach, “Justin Martyr’s Dialogue cum Tryphone Iudaeo and the De- velopment of Christian Anti-Judaism,” in Contra Iudaeos: Ancient and Medieval Po- lemics between Christians and Jews, ed. Ora Limor and Guy G. Stroumsa [Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1996], 46). See also Tessa Rajak, “Talking at Trypho: KNUST/PERICOPE ADULTERAE 487 destruction, or so Justin warned.4 Two hundred years later, Jerome could safely return to the Hebrew version of the biblical books when compiling his Latin translation: learning from the Hebrews/Jews, Jerome proposed to correct possible Christian misinterpretation with Jewish expertise even as he assumed that Jewish knowledge has been surpassed and thereby made available for Christian consumption.5 Nevertheless, Jerome, like Justin, continued to assert that only Christians actually know how to read the Bible properly: Jews may be handy experts regarding the books they share with Christians, but they do not truly understand what they are reading. As Judith Lieu has observed, “sharing . . . may not be cooperative,” but may, in fact, lead to conflict and struggle as groups—Christian and Jew- ish—attempted to define their identity over and against a rival.6 Struggles over the meaning, significance, and content of sacred text, then, point to larger struggles over status, control, and group definition.

CHRISTIAN SACRED TEXT, “THE JEWS,” AND THE PERICOPE ADULTERAE The importance of sacred text to group definition, described so nicely by Wimbush and others, suggests that the textual instability of various biblical passages involving “the Jews” merits further consideration. As Bart Ehrman, Kim Haines-Eitzen, and David Parker have shown, sacred books could and did change and a variety of passages were edited such that they came to say what particular Christians already knew them to mean.7 As

Christian Apologetic as Anti-Judaism in Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jew,” in Apologetics in the Roman Empire: Pagans, Jews, and Christians, ed. Mark Edwards, Martin Goodman, and Simon Price in association with Christopher Rowland (Ox- ford: Oxford University Press, 1999), esp. 71–75, and Judith Lieu, Image and Reality: The Jews in the World of the Christians in the Second Century (Edinburth: T & T Clark, 1996), 113–48. 4. Mach, Dialogue with Trypho, 131–40. 5. See Andrew Jacobs, The Remains of the Jews: The Holy Land and Christian Empire in Late Antiquity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 79–83; Stefan Rebenich, “Jerome: The ‘Vir Trilinguis” and the ‘Hebraica Veritas,’” VC (1993): 50–77. 6. Lieu, Christian Identity, esp. 38–43, 53–61, 78–85. 7. Bart D. Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Kim Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of Letters: Literacy, Power, and the Transmitters of Early Christian Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); D. C. Parker, The Living Text of the Gospels (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1997). 488 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES such, New Testament books remained “living texts,” subject to editorial revision and interpretive rewriting. In some cases, this rewriting may be traced to the doctrinal and theological concerns of developing Christian communities.8 Unstable texts, then, may point to issues of contention and debate. Eldon Epp explains, “the greater the ambiguity in the variant readings of a given variation unit, the more clearly we are able to grasp the concerns of the early church.”9 It is no surprise, then, that attempts to articulate Christian difference at the expense of “the Jews” influenced the transmission of New Testament books. Already in 1966, Eldon Epp demonstrated that the text of Acts in Codex Bezae (D), an early fifth-century Latin-Greek bilingual New Testa- ment, “shows a decidedly heightened anti-Judaic attitude and sentiment” revealed by a tendency to portray the Jews as more hostile toward Jesus, more culpable for his death, and more antagonistic toward the apostles.10 More recently, Kim Haines-Eitzen has argued that the omission of Jesus’ prayer on the cross in Luke 23.34a (“Father forgive them for they know not what they are doing”) from some gospel manuscripts occurred under the influence of popular Christian polemics regarding Jewish culpability for the crucifixion.11 As we shall see, the pericope adulterae, a remarkably unstable gospel story involving Jesus, an adulteress, and a group of scribes and Pharisees now found in the Gospel of John (7.56–8.11), seems to have undergone a similar development. Though early references neglected to mention “the Jews” when alluding to this story, late antique patristic exegesis placed increasing emphasis on the illegitimate motives and guilty consciences of the woman’s accusers, who are regularly identi-

8. This situation continues to this day, as debates over editions such as the Inclu- sive Language Lectionary (National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A.) demonstrates. 9. Eldon Jay Epp, “Text-Critical, Exegetical, and Socio-Cultural Factors Affect- ing the Junia/Junias Variation in Romans 16,7,” in New Testament Textual Criti- cism and Exegesis. Festschrift J. Delobel, ed. A. Denaus (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2002), 234. 10. Eldon Jay Epp, The Theological Tendency of Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis in Acts, Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 165–66. 11. Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of Letters, 119–23. Jesus’ prayer is missing from many gospel witnesses, yet, as she notes, there is internal evidence from Luke-Acts suggesting that the verse was integral to that author’s narrative. Moreover, Irenaeus and Origen thought the verse was genuine, and many early witnesses do preserve it. She concludes that the verse was deleted by some in light of their conviction that the Jews should not be forgiven for their participation in Jesus’ death. Also see Parker, Living Text, 162 and 173–74 (on the overall instability of the Lukan passion narrative). KNUST/PERICOPE ADULTERAE 489 fied simply as “Jews.” A parallel development is found in late antique and early medieval gospel manuscripts. Absent from the earliest gospel codices and unstable when it does appear, the pericope adulterae experienced a particularly complex transmission history. Codex Bezae (ca. 400) provides the earliest manuscript witness.12 The scribe of Codex Vaticanus (B)—a highly regarded fourth-century Greek copy of the Bible—seems to have known that the story was present in some copies of John, though he did not include it; instead, he indicated that one or more of his exemplars contained the pericope by placing a series of dots (or “umlauts”) at 7.52.13 Most of the scribes who copied the passage included it after John 7.52, others placed it in the Gospel of Luke,14 one copied it after John 7.36, and some appended it to the end of John.15 This textual instability, coupled with the differences in vocabulary and syntax between the pericope and the rest of John’s gospel, have led most contemporary scholars to conclude that the story was not Johan- nine, at least not originally. Though the story is unlikely to have been present in the earliest editions of John, it was known by at least a few Christians from the mid- to late-second-century onward, though they may not have found the story in gospel books. As I have argued elsewhere, the pericope adulterae, or some version of it, was perceived to be “gospel”—in the sense of “a good story about Jesus”—by the late second century, whether or not it was known from a written Gospel.16 By the fourth century, the pericope

12. On the date of Codex Bezae, see D. C. Parker, Codex Bezae: An Early Christian Manuscript and Its Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 281. 13. Philip Payne and Paul Canart, “The Originality of Text Critical Symbols in Codex Vaticanus,” NT 42 (2000): 105–13. 14. The story appears after Luke 21.38 in most of the manuscripts belonging to Family 13. For a general discussion of this family of manuscripts and its origin, see Bernard Botte, “Ferrar (groupe de manuscrits),” in Supplément au dictionnaire de la Bible, ed. Louis Pirot (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1938), 3:272–74. For an edited text of the pericope adulterae as it appears in this family, see Jacob Geerlings, Family 13—The Ferrar Group, Studies and Documents 20 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1961), 128–30. 15. The tale was omitted by the scribes of Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus, without any indication that it was known. Some scribes omitted it, but left a space for its insertion (e.g., L). It is present, but marked, in several manuscripts, including 892, E, in M, and P. It was appended to some gospels (e.g., V). It was included without marks in D, G, U, K and elsewhere. It appears after John 7.36 in one manuscript (225). Parker, Living Text, offers a helpful summary of the various locations chosen for the pericope (96). 16. See my “Jesus, an Adulteress, and the Development of Christian Scripture,” in A Tall Order: Writing the Social History of the Ancient World. Essays in Honor 490 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES adulterae appears as a regular proof-text among Latin-speaking Chris- tians. The story remained less well known in Greek Christian traditions, though it appears in a commentary of Didymus the Blind,17 is depicted on a few fifth- and sixth-century Egyptian pyxides,18 and is discussed in the writings of one anonymous sixth-century Greek chronicler.19 It was eventually incorporated into the liturgy of the church of Palestine and was read during the feast day of Saint Pelagia.20 The story continued to

of William V. Harris, ed. Jean-Jacques Aubert and Zsuzsanna Várhelyi, Beiträge zur Altertumskunde 216 (München and Leipzig: K. G. Saur, 2005), 59–84. 17. Commentary on Ecclesiastes 2236b–13a (Greek text with German translation edited by Johannes Kramer and Bärbel Krebber, Didymos der Blinde. Kommentar zum Ecclesiastes. Vol. 4, Kommentar zum Ecclesiastes Kap.7 – 8,8 [Bonn: Rudolf Habelt Verlag, 1972]). 18. See Gertrud Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, trans. Janet Siligman (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, Ltd., 1971), 1:160–61; Wolfgang Fritz Volbach, Elfenbeinarbeiten der Spätantike und des frühen Mittelalters, 3rd ed. (Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1976), 112, plates 179 and 180; A. Darcel and A. Basilewsky, Collection Basilewsky. Catalogue raisonné precédé d’un essai sur les arts industriels du Ier au XVIe siècle (Paris: Vve A. Morel and Cie, 1874), vol. 1, 6; vol. 2, plate 27. Schiller and Volbach identify the carving of a woman and Jesus as the pericope adulterae, Darcel and Basilewsky as the woman with a hemor- rhage. The presence of the pillars of the temple on either side of Jesus suggest the first interpretation, the placement of the woman’s right hand—she is touching Jesus’ cloak—suggests the latter. 19. [Zacharias Rhetor], Historia Ecclesiastica 8.7, written in Greek in 569 ce by an anonymous compiler who used Zachariah of Mitylene’s Chronicle as a source (hence the mistaken attribution), among other sources. Book 8 is the author’s own contribution. Preserved in Syriac. See Historia Ecclesiastica. Zachariae Rhetori Vulgo Adscripta, edited with Latin translation by E. W. Brooks, 2 vols., CSCO Scriptores Syri, Series 3, Volume 6 (Leuven: I. B. Istas, 1924); English translation with introduction and critical notes by F. J. Hamilton and E. W. Brooks, The Syriac Chronicle known as that of Zachariah of Mitylene (London: Methuen, 1899). 20. Harald Riesenfeld makes this point, “The Pericope de adultera in the Early Christian Tradition,” in The Gospel Tradition. Essays by Harald Riesenfeld (Phila- delphia: Fortress Press, 1970), 109. Riesenfeld suggests that a liturgical connection between the adulteress and Pelagia could have been in place by the fifth century. The evidence, however, is much later. The story appears in only one of the three tenth- and eleventh-century Syriac lectionaries discussed by Lewis and Gibson (Codex A of 1030 ce; Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson, The Palestinian Syriac Lectionary of the Gospels. Re-edited from Two Sinai MSS. and from P. de Lagarde’s Edition of the “Evangeliarum Hierosolymitanum” [Jerusalem: Raritas, 1971]). The feast day of Saint Pelagia (October 8) is mentioned in three liturgical manuscripts listing saints’ feast days: codex 40 of the monastery of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem (10th–11th cent.), codex 266 of the monastery of Saint John the Theologian on the Isle of Patmos (9th–10th cent.), codex gr. 1590 of the Bibliothèque Nationale (6th cent.), and codex E. 5, 10 of the Bodleian Library (1329) (Juan Mateos, Le Typicon KNUST/PERICOPE ADULTERAE 491 be rewritten and rethought over the long history of its reception, as is evident from the numerous textual variations associated with the passage when it does appear. In his text critical commentary to the New Testament, Metzger discusses seven variants in the pericope adulterae: the phrase toËto d¢ ¶legon peirã- zontew aÈton, ·na ¶xvsin kathgore›n aÈtoË (“they said this to test him, so that they might have a charge against him”), which usually appears at verse 6a; variants regarding the pronouns aÈtÒn . . . aÈto›w in verse 7; a comment found in some manuscripts specifying what Jesus wrote on the ground, usually at verse 8 (ßnow •kãstou aÈt«n tåw èmart¤aw; Jesus wrote “the sins of every one of them”); the statement, present in some manuscripts, that the woman’s accusers left after being “accused by their conscience,” inserted at verse 9 (ÍpÚ t∞w suneidÆsevw §legxÒmenoi); various additions following presbut°rvn designed to indicate that all of the accusers went away; elaborations at verse 10a indicating that Jesus looked at the woman; and the addition “those accusers of yours” (§ke›noi oﬂ katÆgoro¤ sou) in some manuscripts at verse 10b.21 Among the longer variants, only the statement “they said this to test him . . .” is generally considered to have been present in the most primitive forms of the story.22 Metzger attributes the lengthy interpretive glosses to a desire to “satisfy pious curiosity.”23 Pious speculation is an inadequate diagnosis of these variants. The additions and glosses here do not simply enhance the story. Rather, they specify the illegitimate motives and guilty consciences of the woman’s accusers and they do so in ways that directly parallel comments made in late antique

de la grande église. Introduction, texte critique, traduction et notes [Rome: Pont. In- stitutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1962], 2 vols). 21. Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament. 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994), 189–90. 22. Von Soden, in his famous discussion of the pericope, made similar interpretive decisions. He determined that toËto d¢ ¶legon peirãlontew aÈton, ·na ¶xvsin kathgore›n aÈtoË was present at 6a in m0, his reconstructed Urform of the text, though he rejected ßnow •kãstou aÈt«n tåw èmart¤aw and ÍpÚ t∞w suneidÆsevw §legxÒmenoi as later expansions (Hermann F. von Soden, Die Schriften des Neuen Testaments in ihrer ältesten Erreichbaren Textgestalt [Berlin: Verlag von Alexander Duncker, 1902], 1:486–524; reconstruction of m0, 500). Ulrich Becker’s reconstruction of “ein ideales Normalexemplar” of the pericope excluded the “testing” comment as well as the more commonly excluded description of what Jesus wrote and the note that the accusers were convicted by their conscience, Jesus und die Ehebrecherin: Untersuchungen zur Text- und Überlieferungsgeschichte von Joh. 7 53–8 11 (Berlin: Verlag Alfred Töpel- mann, 1963), 73. Becker’s extensive and careful study of the witnesses to the pericope adulterae remains unrivaled to this day. 23. Metzger, Textual Commentary, 189. 492 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES patristic exegesis. Did the Jews bring the woman to Jesus to trap him? Patristic authors and scribes were not so sure, at least not initially. Did Jesus’ act of writing on the ground damn the woman’s accusers? Eventu- ally, answers were provided to this question. Were the accusers particularly guilty and sinful? According to later exegetes and scribes, they were. Throughout late antiquity, authors and scribes were at work rethinking, reinterpreting, and rewriting the pericope adulterae in such a way that the story gained an increasingly anti-Jewish meaning. Of course, one does not need to wait until late antique patristic exegesis or the chance survival of a few gospel manuscripts to find instances of Christian anti-Judaism. Anti-Jewish arguments were put forward by members of the Jesus movement from the earliest period,24 though disparaging, universalizing remarks about “the Jews” often had little or nothing to do with actual “Jews” at all.25 A Christian author might identify a fellow Christian as a “Jew” if it suited his argument;26 alternatively, an author might invent a fictional, or loosely historical, “Jew” for the pur-

24. For example, some followers of Jesus identified as Jews and then attempted to demonstrate that other Jews—those who do not follow Jesus—are not actually Jews at all. This seems to be the position of the author of the Gospel of Matthew (for further discussion see esp. Amy-Jill Levine, “Anti-Judaism and the Gospel of Mat- thew,” in Anti-Judaism and the Gospels, ed. William R. Farmer [Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1999], 9–36). Paul offers another alternative, arguing that the followers of Jesus were adopted into Abraham’s family, irrespective of their previous ancestry, while worrying that his “brothers according to the flesh” (Rom 9.3) had failed to understand the truth as he perceived it (for further discussion of the complexity of ethnic labeling in Paul, see Denise Kimber Buell and Caroline Johnson Hodge, “The Politics of Interpretation: The Rhetoric of Race and Ethnicity in Paul,” JBL 123 [2004]: 235–51). 25. On “the Jews” as a symbol of difference within the Christian community, see esp. Miriam S. Taylor, Anti-Judaism and Early Christian Identity: A Critique of the Scholarly Consensus, Studia Post-Biblical 46 (Leiden: Brill, 1995). Also see Lieu, Christian Identity, and Image and Reality: The Jews in the World of the Christians in the Second Century (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1996). Guy G. Stroumsa is not entirely convinced by Taylor; see “From Anti-Judaism to Antisemitism in Early Chris- tianity?” in Contra Iudaeos: Ancient and Medieval Polemics between Christians and Jews, ed. Ora Limor and Guy G. Stroumsa (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1996), 1–26. 26. E. Leigh Gibson argues that this was the strategy of the author of the Mar- tyrdom of Polycarp. The mob of “Jews” in the Martyrdom served as stand-ins for a rival set of Jesus believers who were thereby rebuked for their failure to adopt “true Christianity”; see “The Jews and Christians in the Martyrdom of Polycarp: Entangled or Parted Ways?” in The Ways that Never Parted, ed. Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed, Texts and Studies in Ancient Judiasm 95 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 145–57. KNUST/PERICOPE ADULTERAE 493 poses of self-definition and identity creation.27 This was especially the case in heresiological literature, which accused target Christians of being either “too Jewish” or “too Greek,” a rhetorical strategy that can already be found in the anti-heretical writings of Irenaeus of Lyons (ca. 130–202).28 By the fourth century an intentional confusion of the categories “Jew” and “heretic” had become a common rhetorical feature of Christian writings.29 Christians, it would seem, regularly produced the “Jews” that they needed.30 Interpretations of the pericope adulterae participated in this process: the story gained an increasingly anti-Jewish meaning across a spectrum of late antique and early medieval witnesses. This observation is not offered as a proof of an inevitable or unchanging Christian anti-Judaism; Christian anti-Judaism was both specific and historically situated. Still, the transmission history of the pericope adulterae may point to a naturalization of anti-Jewish rhetoric such that stock charges against “the Jews”—however deployed—could influence gospel books and patristic exegesis independently of shared interpretive traditions. At the same time, anti-Jewish interpretations of this story, first introduced in the fourth century, produced and maintained difference such that “Christians” knew they could not be “Jews,” suggesting that boundaries may have been more slippery than Christian authors would admit. The timing of these sorts of interpretations was not coincidental. As Andrew Jacobs has pointed out, post-Constan- tinian Christian discourse employed charges against Jews and complaints

27. The apparent purpose of Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho; for discussion, see Mach, Dialogue with Trypho, 27–47 and Rajak, “Talking at Trypho,” 59–80. 28. After placing the Jews outside of salvation for an alleged failure to read the Scriptures properly (Adv. Haer. 4.23.1, 26.1, 33.1), Irenaeus further disparaged his Christian opponents by accusing them of adopting pseudo-Jewish practices and procedures: though they were demon-inspired gentiles masquerading as Christians, they foolishly acted like “Jews” (Adv. Haer. 1.21.3; 1.26.2; 1.27.2–4). For discussion of early Christian claims regarding their superior “race” or “ethnos,” see esp. Denise Kimber Buell, “Race and Universalism in Early Christianity,” JECS 10 (2002): 429–68; eadem, “Rethinking the Relevance of Race for Early Christian Self-Definition,” HTR 94 (2001): 449–76; Caroline Johnson Hodge, “‘If Sons, then Heirs’: A Study in Kin- ship and Ethnicity in Paul’s Letters” (PhD diss., Brown University, 2001). 29. For example, Athanasius accused Arian Christians of adopting “Jewish” methods of scriptural exegesis and the Melitians—a group of “schismatics” in Upper Egypt— with a perverse and supposedly “Jewish” love of separatism (David Brakke, “Jewish Flesh and Christian Spirit in Athanasius of Alexandria,” JECS 9 [2001]: 453–81, esp. 467–77). See also Averil Cameron, “Jews and Heretics—A Category Error?” in The Ways that Never Parted, 345–60 and Alain Le Boulluec, La notion d’hérésie dans la literature grecque IIe-IIIe siècles, 2 vols. (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1985). 30. A paraphrase of Brakke, “Jewish Flesh,” 478. 494 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES about heretical Christian Judaizing to instantiate and elaborate “a new mode of Christian identity” that enabled Christians to establish primacy for themselves in a new, imperially privileged situation: the rhetorical domination of “the Jew” in the Christian literature of the fourth through the sixth centuries gave Christian imperial power “discursive life,” sig- nifying not only that this power had become real, but also contestable.31 Late antique re-writing of the pericope adulterae can be placed in this context. Though the pericope adulterae was not necessarily or inherently about the hypocrisy and culpability of “the Jews,” it came to be reread, and rewritten, in this way. This essay proceeds chronologically, introducing patristic citations of the pericope and then discussing the ways it appears in various extant gospel books. Though most scholars believe that some version of the pericope adulterae would have been found in a minority of copies of John by no later than the third century, strictly speaking, Codex Bezae provides our earliest known example. Following the lead of recent New Testament text critics, Bezae and the other gospel manuscripts discussed here are viewed as evidence not only of particular text-types but also as products of particular Christian communities at particular times. Thus, these manuscripts provide more than a possible window into a reconstructed “primitive text.” They also reflect the concerns of Christians at the time they were copied and therefore represent a moment in the history of the interpretation of the books they contain. Given the nature of our evidence, we cannot determine with any certainty when a particular detail was introduced into the Gospel of John. We can, however, observe when and where interpretive glosses first appear. We can also note parallels with other interpretations, those found in patristic writings, liturgical practice, and in Christian art. In the process, we can detect the mutually reinforcing interactions of sacred text and social script. There are four main sections to the body of this essay: the next section presents the earliest citations of the story, observing that none of these interpreters made much of “the Jews,” their hostility, or their culpability vis-à-vis the woman or Jesus; a discussion of a citation found in a commentary by Didymus the Blind, the first post-Constantinian discussion of the tale, follows; then the pericope adulterae as it first appears in John is considered, from the earliest text of the story in Codex Bezae to the commentary of fourth- and fifth-century authors, each of whom emphasized the guilt and sin of the Jews; finally, the after-life of post-Constantinian

31. Jacobs, Remains of the Jews, passim, quotations from 12, 208–9. KNUST/PERICOPE ADULTERAE 495 interpretation is explored, calling attention to the impact of anti-Jewish patristic exegesis on the reception of the pericope adulterae.

NEITHER DO I JUDGE YOU: THE PERICOPE ADULTERAE IN THE SECOND AND THIRD CENTURIES According to Eusebius, Papias, a second-century bishop of Hierapolis, knew a story involving a woman accused of sins before the Lord, a story that Eusebius (and maybe Papias?) also found in the Gospel according to the Hebrews. Eusebius writes that “[Papias] has put forth also another story concerning a woman falsely accused of many sins before the Lord, which is contained in the Gospel according to the Hebrews.”32 It is not entirely clear whether or not Papias (or Eusebius) had some version of the pericope adulterae in mind here. First, the woman was accused of unspecified “sins” rather than one specified “sin”; second, she was “falsely accused” or “slandered” (diabãllv), a reading that seems surprising in light of later interpretations of the story, all of which assume her guilt.33 Even so, Rufinus read this sentence as a reference to the pericope; he substituted “muliere adultera” for gunaikÚw §p‹ polla›w èmart¤aiw when translating the Historia Ecclesiastica from Greek to Latin in the early fifth century. Also, the reading “sin” or “sins” can be found in a few gospel manuscripts, providing further support to the view that Papias was citing the pericope adulterae.34 If this is a reference to a version of the story known

32. h.e. 3.39.17: §kt°yeitai d¢ ka‹ êllhn ﬂstor¤an per‹ gunaikÚw §p‹ polla›w èmart¤aiw diãblhye¤shw §p‹ toË kur¤ou, ¥n tÚ kayÉ ÑEbra¤ouw eÈagg°lion peri°xei (SC 31:157). 33. The Didascalia Apostolorum, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine assume she was guilty. 34. As David Parker notes, a tenth-century Armenian translation of the Gospel of John also contains the detail that the woman was “taken in sins” instead of in one “sin” or “adultery,” providing at least some textual support to Papias’s version (Liv- ing Text, 99–100). Becker presents convincing arguments in favor of the view that the pericope adulterae was intended (Jesus und die Ehebrecherin, 105–16). Ehrman argues that Papias knew the story from an oral source—he preferred oral sources—and that Eusebius recognized it as a story found in the Gospel according to the Hebrews (Bart D. Ehrman, “Jesus and the Adulteress,” NTS 34 [1988]: 29–30). Others have been less sure. See William L. Petersen, “OUDE EGV SE [KATA]KRINV. John 8:11, the Protevangelium Iacobi, and the History of the Pericope Adulterae,” in Sayings of Jesus: Canonical and Non-canonical. Essays in Honor of Tjitze Baarda (Leiden: Brill, 1997,) 196–97 and Dieter Lührmann, “Die Geschichte von einer Sünderin und an- dere Apokryphe Jesusüberlieferungen bei Didymos von Alexandrien,” NT 32 (1990): 305–7. Lührmann presents a particularly convincing argument. He points out that Rufinus knew the story and so read what he knew into his translation of Eusebius. 496 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES to Papias and possibly found in the Gospel according to the Hebrews, then the emphasis here is on the woman and the accusation against her, which was understood to be false, not on the woman’s accusers. Another second-century reference to the pericope adulterae may be present in the Protevangelium Iacobi, an apocryphal gospel designed, in part, to defend the virginity of Mary. According to the Protevangelium, Mary was dedicated to divine service as a young child by her pious parents and raised as a pure virgin in the temple. Her miraculous pregnancy came as a surprise not only to her fiancé Joseph but also to the high priest and the other temple functionaries; they quite naturally concluded that she had violated her pledge and engaged in pre-marital sexual intercourse. Vehe- mently declaring their innocence, the holy couple submitted to an ordeal designed to uncover any possible porne¤a, drinking a concoction that would reveal their transgression if guilty or, conversely, demonstrate their innocence.35 When they passed the test, the priest declared, “If the Lord God has not revealed your sins, neither do I judge/condemn you” (PI 16.2). This statement directly parallels the judgment rendered by Jesus in the pericope adulterae: John 8.11 reads oÈd¢ §g≈ se [kata]kr¤nv; the Protevangelium reads oÈd¢ §g∆ [kata]kr¤nv Ímçw.36 The circumstances faced by the holy couple and the plight of the woman accused of adultery are remarkably similar: both were accused of sexual misconduct by pious Jews, both were brought before a male religious figure for judgment, and, in both cases, the evidence of sexual misconduct appeared to be overwhelming—Mary was visibly pregnant and the adulteress was caught in the act (compare John 8.1–11 to PI 15.1–16.2). Together these coincidences have convinced some scholars that the Protevangelium specifically alluded to thepericope adulterae here.37 If so, then the author and his audience must have known the story well enough that an oblique allusion was sufficient to call the tale to mind. They must also have regarded the story with a degree of affection such that an inter-textual allusion of this sort might lend authenticity to the author’s own narrative.

Eusebius, on the other hand, didn’t know the story from John and so couldn’t check Papias’s source. Also, there are too many differences between the reference in Papias and the versions found in copies of John and the reference is simply too fragmentary to determine with any certainty whether or not Papias knew the story from the Gos- pel according to the Hebrews or if he knew this story at all. 35. Compare Num 5.11–31. 36. As Petersen points out, the PI and John 8.11 share a point of textual instability here, with some manuscripts of both reading kr¤nv and others katakr¤nv. 37. See discussion in Petersen. KNUST/PERICOPE ADULTERAE 497

Of course, Mary was found innocent of the charges against her. Her purity and virginity are among the central themes of the Protevangelium. As such, if this is an allusion to the pericope adulterae, it seems likely that this author perceived the adulteress to be innocent as well. Why would he evoke the pericope adulterae, comparing the unquestionably innocent Mary to the adulteress, if he believed the woman to be guilty? Moreover, as we have seen, Papias also understood the woman—if, indeed, this is the same woman—to be “falsely accused” or “slandered” rather than guilty as charged. Moreover, as Ulrich Becker and others have noted, the apocryphal story of Susanna may have provided a model for early versions of the pericope adulterae.38 In that story, the Judean matron Susanna was falsely accused of adultery by two lustful elders; she would have been stoned to death save for the intervention of Daniel who, inspired by the Holy Spirit, recognized her innocence and arranged for her acquittal. In other words, the Susanna story, like the pericope adulterae, involves a woman accused of adultery by elders who allege that they caught her in the act; both women are then rescued from stoning by a righteous Judean prophet. The Protevangelium, however, draws no parallels between the scribe who initially accuses the holy couple of porne¤a and the men who accuse the adulteress, nor does his allusion call to mind their guilt or hypocrisy. Indeed, in the Protevangelium, the high priest of the temple serves as a hero analogous to Daniel and Jesus—he acquits Joseph and Mary and sends them on their way (PI 16).39 The scribe who lodged the initial complaint simply disappears.

38. Becker, Jesus und die Ehebrecherin, 51; J. Martin C. Scott, “On the Trail of a Good Story: John 7.53–8:11 in the Gospel Tradition,” in Ciphers in the Sand: Inter- pretations of the Woman Taken in Adultery (John 7.53–8.11), ed. Larry J. Kreitzer and Deborah W. Rooke (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 65–72; Frances Taylor Gench, Back to the Well: Women’s Encounters with Jesus in the Gospels (Louis ville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 147–48. Interestingly, a connection between the pericope adulterae and Susanna was preserved in the Roman liturgy, though the adulteress’s guilt was assumed by Latin church fathers. 39. Tim Horner has recently raised the interesting question of whether or not the Protevangelium ought to be rethought: perhaps it originated from a “Jewish Chris- tian” milieu. Though initially it seems outrageous that anyone knowledgeable about Judaism could suggest, for example, that Mary was raised as a virgin in the temple, upon closer inspection, the Protevangelium actually displays some knowledge of specific Jewish customs as outlined in the Mishnah and repeatedly treats Jewish main characters as heroes. Though this discussion is outside the scope of my essay, it is interesting that the Protevangelium can imagine the priest at the temple (and the mid- wives who examine Mary) as true heroes of the story. See his “Jewish Aspects of the Protoevangelium of James,” JECS 12 (2004): 313–35. 498 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

A clear reference to a version of the pericope adulterae appears in the Didascalia Apostolorum, a third-century church manual preserved in the Apostolic Constitutions. The author of the Didascalia reminds church leaders to receive repentant sinners back into the church in imitation of Jesus:

But if you do not receive the one who repents, because you are without mercy, you will sin against the Lord God. For you do not obey our Savior and our God, to do as even He did with her who had sinned, whom the elders placed before Him, leaving the judgment in His hands, and departed. But He, the searcher of hearts, asked her and said to her, “Have the elders condemned you, my daughter?” She said to him, “No, Lord.” And he said to her, “Go, neither do I condemn you.” (2.24.6)40 This version lacks narrative details found in later patristic exegesis and preserved in gospel manuscripts: the interlocutors are identified as “elders” rather than as scribes, Pharisees, priests, or Jews;41 these elders brought the woman before Jesus for judgment and departed before judgment was rendered; there is no mention of Jesus writing on the ground or of the intended punishment; finally, the woman’s sin remains unspecified. Discrepancies between the earliest references to the pericope have led Bart Ehrman to posit that there may actually have been two different sto- ries involving a (sexually) sinning woman that were eventually conflated to form the version now found in John, one preserved in the Gospel according to the Hebrews, and the other known to Papias and the author of the Didascalia, perhaps from an oral source.42 These early citations share certain features: the focus is on the woman, who was accused of “sin” rather than adultery, and those who accuse her play only a small role. In the case

40. English translation of the Syriac by Arthur Vööbus, The Didascalia Apostolo- rum in Syriac, CSCO, Scriptores Syri 177 (Leuven: Sécretariat du CSCO, 1979). The Latin text reads: praesbyteri ante eum, et in eo ponentes judicium exierunt; the Greek oﬂ presbÊteroi ¶mprosyen aÈtoË, ka‹ §pÉ aÈt“ y°menoi tØn kr¤sin §j∞lyon. See Erik Tidner, Didascalia Apostolorum, Canonum ecclesiastorum, Traditionis apostolicae versiones Latinae (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1963). Tidner handily places the Greek and Latin fragments in parallel columns. 41. The majority of manuscripts identify the interlocutors as “scribes and Phari- sees” (e.g, ff 2, M, K, Family p, Family 13). Some manuscripts identify them as “high priests” (U, 892). D offers the unique solution of calling them “scribes and Pharisees” in verse 3 and “priests” in verse 4. Like the Protevangelium, the Didascalia seems to have a complex relationship with Jews and Judaism. As Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert has argued, this author “thinks Jewish,” seeking to offer an “alternative Mishnah” for the followers of Jesus; see her “The Didascalia Apostolorum: A Mishnah for the Disciples of Jesus,” JECS 9 (2001): 483–509. 42. Ehrman “The Adulteress,” 34–38. KNUST/PERICOPE ADULTERAE 499 of Papias and the Protevangelium, the woman may have been perceived as innocent of the charges against her; by contrast, the Didascalia assumes she is guilty. The Didascalia reports that elders brought the woman before Jesus, perhaps on analogy with Susanna, who was also accused by elders (Dan 13.34–41, LXX), both the Protevangelium and the Didascalia refer specifically to the last line of the story (“neither do I condemn/judge you”), and none of these early references stress the hypocrisy or the culpability of the accusers. Indeed, when they are mentioned, they simply leave the judgment up to Jesus. However, beginning in the fourth century, a new interpretive tradition begins to emerge.

THE CONSCIENCES OF THE ACCUSERS: THE PERICOPE ADULTERAE AS INTERPRETED BY DIDYMUS THE BLIND Didymus the Blind (ca. 313–398), an Alexandrian teacher and theologian, wrote a series of extensive biblical commentaries over the course of the mid- to late- fourth century. Designed to stimulate his students to embrace Christian virtue, his commentaries on Genesis, Job, Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and Zechariah interweave detailed biblical commentary with direct citations from gospel books, the letters of Paul, and other early Christian writings.43 As such, Didymus continued the project of his predecessor Origen (ca. 185–253), teaching the Septuagint as a “classic” from which moral lessons could be drawn and thereby appropriating Jewish scriptures for the sake of a new Christian paideia.44 Didymus cites the pericope adulterae in the context of his discussion of Ecclesiastes 7.21–22, which he cites at length:

And do not take to your heart all the words that will be spoken, in order that you will not hear your slave curse you, since you will often be wicked, and you will have evil in your heart in much the same way, and you will also curse another.45

Didymus applied this passage from Ecclesiastes to contemporary Christian slave owners, urging them to judge their slaves primarily by action rather

43. See Richard A. Layton, Didymus the Blind and His Circle in Late-Antique Alexandria (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004). 44. See Young, Biblical Exegesis, esp. 21–27, 82–96; Layton, Didymus the Blind, esp. 8–12, 135–43, 151–58. 45. 222.19–20 (ed. Kramer and Krebber, Didymos der Blinde, 4:86; English translation my own). Note that this is Didymus’s own text of Ecclesiastes rather than a standard form of the LXX. 500 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES than by intention; after all, he suggests, they themselves are liable for at least a few wicked thoughts. The pericope adulterae was introduced as a proof of this principle:

We find, therefore, in certain gospels [the following story]: A woman, it says, was condemned (katakr¤nv) by the Jews (oﬂ ÉIouda¤oi) for a sin (§p‹ èmart¤&) and was being taken to be stoned in the place where that was customary to happen. The Savior, when he saw her and observed that they were ready to stone her, said to those who were about to cast stones, “He who has not sinned, let that one take a stone and cast it.” If anyone is conscious (sÊnoida) in himself not to have sinned, let him take a stone and smite her. And no one dared. Since they knew in themselves and perceived that they were also liable for some things, they did not dare to strike her.46 Didymus reports that he found the pericope adulterae “in certain gospels” (¶n tisin eÈaggel¤oiw). The meaning of this phrase is a subject of some debate. Did he mean that he found the story in certain gospel manuscripts, the conclusion of the editors of the Commentary on Ecclesiastes, or perhaps he meant that he found the story “in certain [apocryphal] Gospels,” as one recent commentator suggests?47 Wherever he found it, his presentation is somewhat different from what we have seen thus far. According to Didymus, the woman was accused by “Jews,” not by elders, and these Jews were “liable (ÍpeÊyunow) for some things.” As such, they were unable to carry out the stoning once detained by Jesus. In this version, Jesus intervened uninvited; he was not asked for his opinion, but witnessed the scene as an outsider. Still, his authority was accepted by the woman’s accusers,

46. 223.7–13 (ed. Kramer and Krebber, Didymos der Blinde, 4:88): f°romen oÔn ¶n tisin eÈaggel¤oiw: gunÆ, fhs¤n, katekr¤yh ÍpÚ t«n ÉIoud[a¤]vn §p‹ èmart¤& ka‹ èpest°lleto liyobolhy∞nai efiw tÚn tÒpon ˜pou efi≈yei g¤n[esy]ai. ı svtÆr, fhs¤n, •vrak∆w aÈtÆn ka‹ yevrÆsaw ˜ti ßtoimo¤ efisin prÚw tÚ liy[obol]∞sai aÈtÆn, to›w m°llousin aÈtØn katabale›n l¤yoiw e‰pen: ˘w oÈk ¥marten, afi[r°]tv l¤yon ka‹ bal°tv •autÒn. e‡ tiw sÊnoiden •aut“ tÚ mØ ≤marthk°nai, lab∆n l¤yon paisãtv aÈtÆn ka‹ oÈde‹w §tÒlmhsen: §pistÆsantew •auto›w ka‹ gnÒntew, ˜ti ka‹ aÈto‹ Ípe[Êyu]no¤ efis¤n tisin, oÈk §tÒlmhsan §ke¤nhn. English translation based on that of Bart Ehrman, “The Adulteress,” 25. 47. The editors of the Commentary conclude that Didymus must have found the story in some, but not all of his copies of John. Bart Ehrman disagrees, noting that Didymus, along with his fellow Alexandrians Clement and Origen, accepted the Gos- pel according to the Hebrews as a legitimate, if spurious source. Therefore, Didymus could have been referring to the fact that he found the story in various books that contained gospels, including John and, presumably, the Gospel according to the He- brews (Ehrman, “The Adulteress,” 25–38). Dieter Lührmann concludes that Didymus can only have found his version of the pericope in an apocryphal gospel, probably the Gospel of the Hebrews (“Die Geschichte,” 289–316, at 290–311). KNUST/PERICOPE ADULTERAE 501 who “did not dare to strike her” once their sin had been pointed out. The emphasis, then, is placed on the guilty consciences of the accusers rather than on the vindication or forgiveness of the woman.48 A focus on the accusers’ guilt enabled Didymus to demonstrate a main point in his interpretation of Ecclesiastes 7: Christian masters should acknowledge that they, too, have been guilty of wicked thoughts and, therefore, they ought to be patient with their slaves. Slave owners were exhorted to follow the example of the Jews here, who recognized their own sinfulness, and Jesus, who showed mercy to the woman. Still, Didy- mus went on to argue, it is appropriate to punish disobedient slaves once their bad intentions reach the point of action.49 In Didymus’s reading, then, the belated self-knowledge of the woman’s accusers served as a caution- ary example designed to provoke self-awareness on the part of Christian slave owners. The recognition and acknowledgement of inner wicked- ness would enable them to avoid a mistake only narrowly escaped by the woman’s accusers. They had judged too quickly and about a matter that did not concern them, but Jesus intervened. Didymus’s speculation regarding the consciences of the woman’s accusers implied that all are sinners. Everyone is capable of harboring evil in their hearts, including Christian masters. Nevertheless, by focusing on the inner disposition of the woman’s accusers, identified here simply as “Jews,” Didymus singled out Jewish, not Christian, hypocrisy. The sinfulness of these Jews provided the moral of the story and a demonstration of Didymus’s larger point. Didymus referred to the sinfulness of Jews on other occasions as well. For example, in his commentary on Zechariah 5.5–8 (ca. 380), he com- bined Isaiah’s denunciation of Israel as a “nation of sinners” (Is 1.4) with Daniel’s denunciation of the elders who lusted after Susanna (Dan 13.28, LXX), Paul’s suggestion in Acts that the magician Elymas was a “son of the devil” (Acts 13.10), and Matthew’s claim that the scribes and Pharisees are murderers (Matt 23.30–32) to explain Zechariah’s prophecy regarding a wicked woman in a basket. According to Didymus, Zechariah’s prophecy was, ultimately, about Jesus: he had exposed beforehand the audacity of those Jews who would crucify the Lord. The measure of their impiety was fully revealed when they condemned to Jesus to death, as Zechariah

48. Compare Ehrman, “Jesus and the Adulteress,” 31: The comment regarding their consciences “heightens the sense of the accusers’ own guilt and thus their un- worthiness of executing judgment.” 49. Commentary on Ecclesiastes 223.14–20 (ed. Kramer and Krebber, Didymos der Blinde, 4:88). 502 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES had predicted they would and in imitation of those Jews who had mur- dered the prophets before him.50 Didymus’s use of the terms sÊnoida (to be conscious of something) and sune¤dhsiw (conscience) in his Commentary on Genesis (ca. 350) is also revealing. In this commentary, Didymus asserts that those who are truly holy possess a clear conscience, and can therefore walk with God or gaze upon God’s face, but those who have committed sin endeavor to hide away, as Adam and Eve did after the fall and Cain after murdering Abel.51 The attempt to hide from God is interpreted as a proof that the logos reprimands the consciences of grave sinners whether they repent or not. Thus, even hypocrites are reproved in their hearts, however unrepentant and recalcitrant they may be; by contrast, virtuous men, cleansed body and soul, boldly offer pure praises to God.52 The assertion, then, that the Jews “perceived that they themselves were guilty in some things” does not necessarily indicate that the woman’s accusers had repented and would seek forgiveness. Rather, this comment simply implies that “the Jews,” like Adam, Eve and Cain, had been reproved in their hearts by the logos. After all, that was whom they were speaking with at the time. Didymus’s commentaries were designed for the edification of (male) Christian students in Alexandria. As such, they were in-group documents directed at Alexandrian Christians, and not at Jews. Nevertheless, by composing commentaries on biblical books such as Ecclesiastes, Didy- mus furthered a long-standing effort on the part of Christian authors to appropriate Jewish scriptures, transforming these scriptures into Christian books that could be understood properly only in light of Christ. Interpret- ing a wise saying from Ecclesiastes by means of a story about Jesus, both of which supposedly offered moral lessons to Christian slave owners, he transformed Ecclesiastes into a Christian book. At the same time, implic- itly comparing bad Christian slave owners to bad Jews, Didymus shamed some Christians by assimilating them to the category “Jew.” As such, he,

50. Commentary on Zechariah 82.27–29(=1,366): tÒte gãr tÒte tÚ m°tron t∞w dussebe¤aw aÈt«n peplÆrvtai, ˜te sÁn to›w profhteÊsasin tÚn profhteuy°nta kat°krinan yanãtƒ (SC 1:386). Compare 195.25–196.25 (=3,56–58. The “true Jews” are the “spiritual Jews” who adore Christ and the one true God, not the Jews of Je- rusalem; SC 85:644–46); 234.19–23 (=3, 196. This passage discusses the influence of “the black one” and alludes to the Epistle of Barnabas 4.10, 20.1; SC 85:714); 310.6–16 (=4,126–28. The thirty pieces of silver given by the Jews to Judas are said to reveal their depravity. They are said to have blasphemed the Lord when he was crucified for all creation, which was predicted by the prophets; SC 85:864–65). 51. Commentary on Genesis 84.3–86.6; 87.1–9 (=3,6–8; SC 233:196–202). 52. Commentary on Genesis 125.11–27 (SC 233:293–95). KNUST/PERICOPE ADULTERAE 503 like many of his contemporaries, employed the label “Jew” to produce Christian difference.53

THE PERICOPE ADULTERAE IN THE GOSPEL OF JOHN As observed above, Codex Bezae is the earliest manuscript witness to the pericope adulterae. In his exhaustive study of this manuscript, David Parker concludes that it was copied ca. 400 from older bilingual Latin- Greek exemplars, possibly in Berytus, Syria. He explains: the Latin half- uncial employed by the scribe resembles that script as it was developed in the east and employed in legal writings. Moreover, Berytus, a center for Latin learning and the study of Roman law, remained a Greek-speaking city with Greek serving as the first language of the students at the city’s law school. As such, Berytus is an excellent candidate for city of origin.54 Bezae is known for its free text, especially in Acts, and for its preference for a vernacular style in both the Latin and the Greek.55 Though unique among early New Testament codices, Bezae is not necessarily as exceptional as it seems: the text of the gospels remained fluid well into late antiquity56

53. On this strategy among the writings of Athanasius of Alexandria, see Brakke, “Athanasius.” A relationship between Didymus and Athanasius is likely: According to Rufinus, Didymus’s appointment as doctor scholae ecclesiasticae was approved by Athanasius (Historia Ecclesiastica 11.7), Didymus cited Athanasius’s teachings on at least one occasion (Commentary on Zechariah 64.28–29) and, as Richard Layton has argued, Didymus, like Athanasius, defended Nicene Christology by inveighing against many of the same “heretics” named by the bishop in his writings (Layton, Didymus the Blind, 15–18). 54. Parker, Codex Bezae, 261–78. Allen Callahan disagrees, asserting that Egypt may be a more logical locale; see “Again: The Origin of the Codex Bezae,” in Codex Bezae: Studies from the Lunel Colloquium. June 1994, ed. D. C. Parker and C.-B. Amphoux (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 56–64. While Callahan’s discussion is interesting and should not be discounted, I am persuaded by Parker’s analysis. Also see Parker’s response, “The Palaeographical Debate,” Codex Bezae: Studies from the Lunel Col- loquium, 334–35. Other sites of origin have been proposed as well, including Lyons, where Bezae was known from the early middle ages. 55. See Parker, Codex Bezae; J.-M. Marconot, “Les marques de l’oralité dans le Codex de Bèze” and J. M-Auwers, “Le texte latin des Évangiles dans le Codex de Bèze,” Codex Bezae: Studies from the Lunel Colloquium, 65–73 and 183–216. 56. This principle is summed up rather nicely by Wisse: “Until the modern period, lectio facilior was potior, and not lectio difficilior or lectio brevior!” (Frekerik Wisse, “The Nature and Purpose of Redactional Changes in Early Christian Texts: The Canonical Gospels,” in Gospel Traditions in the Second Century: Origins, Re- censions, Text, and Transmission, ed. W. L Petersen [Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989], 46 n. 27). 504 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES and the texts it contains are based on earlier exemplars, now lost to us, which are likely to have included the pericope adulterae. Copying the pericope adulterae in the Gospel of John, the scribe preserved what was an accepted reading in his context. As such, the Bezan text of the pericope adulterae offers not only the first extant manuscript witness to the story, but also a glimpse of into the history of its interpretation.57 In Syria ca. 400 the pericope adulterae was being read in the following way:

Jesus proceeded to the Mount of Olives, and in the morning he appeared again in the temple and all the people were coming toward him. The scribes and Pharisees brought a woman taken in sin and stood her in the middle [of them]. The priests said to him, to test him, so that they would have a charge against him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in the very act of committing adultery. In the law Moses commanded that such a woman be stoned, but what do you say?” And bending down, Jesus wrote with his finger in the ground. Since they remained, questioning, he looked up and said to them, “Let the one of you who has not sinned throw the first stone at her.” Bending down again he wrote with his finger on the ground. Each of the Jews left, beginning from the eldest, so that all had gone and he alone remained. And the woman was in the middle. Jesus looking up said to the woman, “Is there no one to condemn you?” She said to him, “No one Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go and from now on sin no more.”58

57. Michael Holmes makes a similar point: The scribe of Bezae displayed an “attitude of liberty” with respect to the text, and, as such, Bezae offers “a window into the literary and social context of the Christian movement in the second century” (Holmes places this “liberty” in the second century by noting that the versions available to us predate the survival of particular manuscripts. While that may be true, I am adopting a more conservative approach here, introducing the evidence in the chronological order in which the sources actually appear). See his “Codex Bezae as a Recension of the Gospels,” in Codex Bezae: Studies from the Lunel Colloquium, 151–52. My approach is also informed by Leonard Boyle, Integral Palaeography (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001); Armando Petrucci, Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy: Studies in the His- tory of Written Culture, ed. and trans. Charles M. Radding (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); Michael A. Singer, “The Glossa ordinaria and the Transmis- sion of Medieval Anti-Judaism,” in A Distinct Voice: Medieval Studies in honor of Leonard E. Boyle, O.P., ed. Jaqueline Brown and William P. Stoneman (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 591–605. 58. Folio 133b, line 24–135a, column 2, line 3: ihw de eporeuyh eiw to orow tvn elaivn: oryrou de palin parageinetai eiw to eieron kai paw o laos hrxeto prow auton agousin de oi grammateiw kai oi fari- saioi epi amarteia: gunaika eilhmmenhn kai sthsantew authn en mesv. legousin autv ekpeirazontew auton oi Ûereiw Ûna exvsin kathgoreian autou didaskale auth h gunh kateilhptai epautofvrv moixeuoÇmenh mv#shw de en tv nomv ekeleu- KNUST/PERICOPE ADULTERAE 505

Though the version of the pericope found in Bezae is much fuller than any version cited earlier, traces of earlier versions linger: the woman is a “sinner” (Papias, the Didascalia and in Didymus’s Commentary);59 the men are described variously as scribes, Pharisees, priests and Jews yet a connection with elders remains (the men described as departing “from/beginning with the elders, apo tvn presbutervn/incipientes a presbyteris); finally, the story includes the line “neither do I condemn you,” the very same verse cited in the Protevangelium and the Didascalia. Nevertheless, new elements are also present: the men approach Jesus in order to trap him; Jesus is depicted as writing on the ground twice, both before and after suggesting that the one who has not sinned should throw the first stone; finally, the woman is told to “go and sin no more,” implying that she is guilty. The placement of this story within the Gospel of John may have influenced some of these details: the previous chapter repeatedly mentions a (purported) plot of “the Jews” (oﬂ ÉIouda›oi) to have Jesus killed (7.1, 10–13, 19, 25, 30), Jesus had already been teaching in the Temple for a few days (7.10, 14, 37), the Jews, the priests and the Pharisees had already

sen taw toiautaw liyazein: su de nun ti legeiw o de ihw katv kucaw: tv daktulv kategrafen eiw thn ghn vw de epemenon ervtvntew anekucen kai eipen autoiw: o anamarthtow #mvn prvtow ep authn baletv liyon kai palin katakucaw tv daktulv kategrafen eiw thn ghn: ekastow de tvn Ûoudaivn ejhrxeto arjamenoi apo tvn presbutervn vste pantaw ejelyein kai kateleifyh monow: kai h gunh en mesv ousa anakucaw de o ihw eipen th gunaikei pou eisin oudeiw se katekreinen kakeinh eipen autv oudeiw ke o de eipen oude egv se katakreinv #page apo tou nun mhketi amartane palin iesus autem abiit in montem olivarum. mane autem iterum venit in templum et omnis populus veniebat ad eum adducunt autem scribae et pharisaei in peccato (muliere) mulierem conpraehensam et statuentes eam in medio dicunt illi temptantes eum sacerdotes ut haberent accusare eum magister haec mulier con- praehensa est palam in adulterio moyses autem in lege praecepit tales lapidare. tu autem nunc quid dicis iesus autem inclinatus. digito suo scribebat in terram cum autem inmanerent interrogantes erexit se et dixit illis quis est sine peccato vestrum prior super eam mittat lapidem et iterum inclinatus digito suo scribebat in terram. unusquisque autem iudaeorum exiebant incipientes a presbyteris uti omnes exire et remansit solus. et mulier in medio cum esset erigens autem se iesus dixit mulieri ubi sunt nemo te condemnavit ad illa dixit illi nemo domine ad ille dixit nec ego te condemno vade et ex hoc iam noli peccare. Critical edition by Antonio Ammassari, Bezae Codex Cantabrigiensis. Copia esatta del manoscritto onciale greco-latine dei quattro Vangeli e degli Atti degli Apostoli scritto all’inizio del V secolo e presentato da Theodore Beza all’Università di Cambridge nel 1581 (Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1996), 282–85. 59. Lührmann also notes connections between Didymus’s citation of the story and the text of D (“Die Geschichte von einer Sünderin,” 293–94). 506 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES been presented as looking for a controversy, and the subject of judge- ment—divine and human—had already come up (7.24, “Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment [NRSV]).60 Moreover, as George Aichele points out, the enigmatic action of writing on the ground makes particular sense in John: Jesus is Word and can therefore be expected to write.61 The content of this writing remains unspecified but Jesus’ action seems to have something to do with judgment, especially of the men in question.62 As we shall see below, this is precisely how Jesus’ action was interpreted by contemporary patristic authors. It is not certain when these details were introduced into the narrative, nor can we know when the story was first placed in John. Surely this story, or a version close to it, was already present in some copies of John long before Bezae was copied. It is interesting to note, however, that the very same narrative details that appear for the first time in Bezae, at least in terms of our extant evidence, are also the focus of late antique patristic exegesis. The D-text suggests that the scribes, Pharisees, priests, or Jews sought to test Jesus by approaching him; a similar suggestion is found in the writings of Ambrose and Augustine. Didymus suggested that the Jews departed conscious of their own sins; Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine also discuss the guilty consciences of the woman’s accusers. Bezae describes Jesus bending down and writing (or “inscribing” in the Greek version: kategrãfen); Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine each speculate regarding the content of this writing. Though they each put forward different theories regarding Jesus’ writing, each connects this act to a condmenation of the Jews. In every case—the the testing of Jesus, the writing on the ground, and the consciences of the accusers—interpretive expansions specify the culpability and illicit motives of the Jews in this story.

60. See Gench, Back to the Well, 144: “[I]f John 7:53–8:11 is read with sustained reference to its immediate and larger literary context, one can hardly escape the impression that Jewish religious leaders (and indeed “the Jews” as a whole) are consis- tently portrayed as villains and bad guys.” 61. Though, as Aichele observes, nothing is actually written here, a detail which makes sense in the world of John where denotation repeatedly fails (John 20.30–31; 21.24–25): George Aichele, “Reading Jesus Writing,” Biblical Interpretation 12 (2004): 353–68. 62. Compare Ex 32.31–33; Ps 69.28; 139.16; Dan 5.5–9, 24–25; 12.1; Phil 4.3; Rev 3.5; 13.8; 17.8; 20.12–15; 21.27. Derek Krueger discusses the continuing association of divine writing and judgment; see his Writing and Holiness: The Practice of Authorship in the Early Christian East (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). The Teaching of Addai (ca. 414), with its striking image of resurrected bodies with their deeds literally written on their flesh for all to read, is especially interesting (Kreuger, 150–56). KNUST/PERICOPE ADULTERAE 507

Ambrose, an Adulteress, and “the Jews” Ambrose referred to the pericope adulterae on several occasions: in personal letters, a discussion of the fiftieth Psalm, a homily on Abraham, a discussion of the Holy Spirit, and a commentary on Luke.63 His most extensive citations are found in two personal letters, both of which consider whether it is proper for Christians to recommend or carry out the death penalty. In the first, he argues that Christian judges can properly render judgment and “carry the sword” (i.e., execute criminals), though a show of mercy is often the better choice;64 in the second, he considers the propriety of bishops recommending the death penalty, concluding that mercy is to be prefered over judgment and reformation over punishment while avoiding the central question by refusing to advocate either for strict mercy or for strict condmenation.65 For Ambrose, then, the pericope adulterae, a story involving the legally sanctioned execution of an adulteress, was an appropriate source for Christian considerations of capital punishment. Retell- ing this story at a time when Christian bishops such as himself could and did actively involve themselves in the affairs of empire, Ambrose read the tale as a proof of the culpability and damnation of “the Jews.” Indeed, in both letters Ambrose reserves his judgment for the Jews alone. The woman deserved mercy—after all, she remained with Jesus—but these Jews had rightly earned the second death: eternal damnation. Citing the story at length, Ambrose treats each narrative element in turn, summarizing the tale in his own words. In both letters he emphasizes the illegitimate motives of the Jews who brought the woman before Jesus. The first letter states: “When the Jews had found an adulteress they brought her to the Savior, seeking to entrap him, so that if he freed her he might appear to destroy the law”66; in the second letter Ambrose adds:

63. epp. 50 (Ad Studium), 68 (Ad Irenaeum), Apol. 1.10.51; Abr. 1.4.23; Spir. 3.15; Luc. 5.47. 64. ep. 50. 65. ep. 68. For discussion of both of these letters, see Thomas O’Loughlin, “A Woman’s Plight and the Western Fathers,” in Ciphers in the Sand: Interpretations of the Woman Taken in Adultery (John 7.53–8.11), ed. Larry J. Kreitzer and Deborah W. Rooke (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 90–92. 66. ep. 50.4: Nam cum adulteram reperissent Iudaei, obtulerunt eam salvatori, captantes ut si absolveret eam, videretur legem solvere. Trans. Mary Melchior Bey- enka, Saint Ambrose. Letters, FC (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1954), 493; Latin text edited by Gabriele Banterle, Sant’Ambrogio. Discorsi e Lettere II/II. Let- tere 36–69, Sancti Ambrosii Episcopi Mediolanensis Opera 20 (Milan: Biblioteca Ambrosiana, 1988), 82. 508 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

The Jews had devised this stratagem so that, in case she was set free contrary to the Law, the sentence of the Lord Jesus might be charged with being contrary to the Law, but, if she were condemned according to the Law, the grace of Christ might seem void.67 Ambrose then connects this testing theme to the just damnation of the Jews a few lines later. Speculating regarding what Jesus wrote on the ground, Ambrose states: “What did he write except the prophetic saying, ‘earth, earth, write that these men have been disowned’ (Jeremiah 22.29)?”68 Dis- inheritance is deserved, he asserts, because “they tempt their Father and flood the Author of salvation with insults.”69 A similar interpretation is offered in the second letter:

He wrote on the ground with the finger with which He had written the Law. Sinners are written on the ground, the just in heaven, as you have it said to the disciples: “Rejoice that your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10.20). But he wrote a second time, so that you may know that the Jews were condemned by both testaments.70 Here Ambrose plays on the notion that God inscribed the law with his finger (Exodus 31.18); Jesus writes with his finger as well, and his writing has the force of divine law. In this case, divine law places the Jews outside of salvation. After all, he explains, the Jews misread their own Scriptures and therefore justly remain outside, seeking the “leaves of the tree and not its fruit.”71 The vitriol of Ambrose’s interpretation is noteworthy. At one point, he compares the actions of the Jews in the pericope adulterae to a man who allows a speck of lust to blind him to the truth of his own sin (Matt 7.3),

67. ep. 68.2: Id enim Iudaeorum commentata est tergiuersatio, ut, si contra legem absoluveretur, contra legem prolata Domini Iesu sententia teneretur, si autem dam- nata esset ex lege, uacare Christi videretur gratia (ed. Banterle, Discorsi e Lettere, 194; trans. Beyenka, Letters, 468). 68. ep. 50.4: Quid scribebat, nisi illud propheticum: Terra, terra, scribe hos uiros abdicatos (ed. Banterle, Discorsi e Lettere, 82; trans. Beyenka, Letters, 493). 69. ep. 50.5: In terra autem scribuntur abdicati a patre proprio, qui patrem ten- tant, et contumelias irrogant auctori salutis (ed. Banterle, Discorsi e Lettere, 82; trans. Beyenka, Letters, 493). 70. ep. 68.14: Scribebat autem in terra digito, quo legem scripserat. Peccatores in terra scribuntur, iusti in caelo, sicut habes dictum ad discipulos: Guardete, quia nomina uestra scripta sunt in caelis. Secundo autem scripsit, ut gemino testamento Iudaeos scias esse damnatos (ed. Banterle, Discorsi e Lettere, 200; trans. Beyenka, Letters, 472). 71. ep. 68.15: Sequebantur enim diuinarum lectionum quaedam uelut arborum folia, non fructum, qui uiuebant in umbra legis et solem iustiae uidere non poterant (ed. Banterle, Discorsi e Lettere, 200; trans. Beyenka, Letters, 472). KNUST/PERICOPE ADULTERAE 509 concluding: “The sacrilegious affrontery with which the Jews refused to acknowledge the Author of their salvation indicates the greatness of their crimes.”72 In other words, from Ambrose’s perspective, the woman’s accusers were so blinded by their lust for the blood of Jesus that they could think of nothing else. They did eventually leave, but they remained unrepentant. Ambrose explains: “When they heard these words they went out, one by one, beginning with the eldest, and they sat down thinking about themselves.”73 Ambrose then goes on to spell out what Didymus had only implied: the Jews may have had guilty consciences but they neither sought nor obtained divine forgiveness.74 Rather, they remain “written on earth.” Conversely, the woman was given the opportunity to repent and, Ambrose concludes, she did. Commenting on this interpretation, Thomas O’Loughlin remarks, “These statements by Ambrose may appear very harsh toward the Jews, but in a context where adultery was preached as one of the three great sins, it is a remarkable statement about the serious- ness of sexual sins.”75 By contrast, I would argue that these statements are fully in keeping with positions Ambrose takes elsewhere regarding the Jews: he regularly recommends clemency and privileges for Christians while at the same time arguing that Jews ought to be scorned. Ambrose may have been quite concerned about adultery—his interest in sexual asceticism and strict sexual morality for all Christians is well documented76—but he also held strong views regarding the place of the Jews in a newly Chris- tian Roman empire. Moreover, his exegesis of the pericope adulterae is consistent with the supercessionist attitude he adopts in other writings. Ambrose presents the two testaments as Christian books, with the Old Testament fulfilled by Christ and only understood properly in light of his actions in the world. Thus, the Hebrew patriarchs taught Christian, not Jewish, virtue: knowledge of their sayings and their deeds benefits young

72. ep. 68.13: sacrilegium perfidiae, quo Iudaei negabant propriae salutis auctorem, sceleris magnitudinem personabat (ed. Banterle, Discorsi e Lettere, 200; trans. Bey- enka, Letters, 472). 73. ep. 68.15: Audientes autem hoc uerbum exierunt foras unus post unum, incipientes a senioribus, et sedebant cogitantes de se (ed. Banterle, Discorsi e Lettere, 200; trans. Beyenka, Letters, 473). 74. ep. 68.15: Bene ait quod exierunt foras, qui nolebant esse cum Christo. Foris littera est, intus mysteria (ed. Banterle, Discorsi e Lettere, 200; trans. Beyenka, Let- ters, 472). 75. O’Loughlin, “A Woman’s Plight,” 91. 76. See esp. Elizabeth A. Clark, Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); and Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 349–60, 363–65. 510 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

Christian men, yet Jews failed to understand or obey God’s commands.77 Given his privileged position as bishop of Milan, this rhetoric could have dire consequences for actual Jews. Seeking ascendancy for Nicene Christians, Ambrose recommended dis- criminatory policies towards the Jews and occasionally he succeeded. In one infamous episode, he successfully lobbied Theodosius I to abandon efforts to rebuild a synagogue at Callinicum that Christians, at the insti- gation of their bishop, had burned to the ground.78 Initially, Theodosius required the bishop of Callinicum to support the rebuilding project, in harmony with both imperial precedent and imperial law.79 Ambrose was dismayed. He responded by arguing that Theodosius was in effect forc- ing a Christian bishop to become an apostate since the bishop could not in good conscience contribute to the upkeep of another religio.80 The emperor risked incurring divine disfavor if he pressed the policy, Ambrose claimed. After all, the downfall of Theodosius’s predecessor Maximus was a just and divinely ordained punishment for the impiety he displayed by supporting the reconstruction of a synagogue in Rome. From Ambrose’s perspective, then, Christian violence against synagogues and Jews should remain unpunished.81 The suggestion that a Christian judge could either

77. See De Abraham, De Iacob et uita beata, De Ioseph, De Isaac uel anima with discussion by Marcia L. Colish, Ambrose’s Patriarchs: Ethics for the Common Man (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005). Colish discusses the frequent interweaving of New Testament passages with appropriate passages from Genesis and other Old Testament books in Ambrose’s patriarch treatises, though she does not discuss any relationship between this exegetical strategy and Ambrose’s other remarks about “the Jews.” 78. ep. 40 (compare Codex Theodosianus 16.8.21). See discussion by C. Lam- bert, “Théodose, Saint Ambroise et les Juifs a la fin du IVe siècle,” in Politique et Religion dans le judaïsme ancien et médiéval, ed. D. Tollet (Paris: Desclée, 1989), esp. 81–83. 79. On imperial law and the Jews, see esp. Amnon Linder, The Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987). 80. Lester L. Field, Jr., Liberty, Dominion, and the Two Swords: On the Origins of Western Political Theology (180–398) (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 198. 81. Ambrose made similar arguments against imperial support for pagan worship. For example, when, in 384, Symmachus petitioned Valentinian II to restore the Altar of Victory in Rome, Ambrose responded with a petition of his own: to restore the altar would be an affront to the emperor who, as a Christian, ought not to be com- pelled to follow any other religio (Field, Liberty, Dominion, and the Two Swords, 194–96; Neil McLynn, Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994], 151–52). The suc- cess of Ambrose’s involvement with the court of Theodosius I is striking. When the Emperor Theodosius ordered a mass execution of those involved in the assassina- KNUST/PERICOPE ADULTERAE 511 legitimately carry out the death penalty or choose to show mercy in imitation of Jesus, then, was hardly an innocent theoretical exercise emphasizing the dangers of adultery. As bishop of Milan, the imperial capital in the West, Ambrose actively involved himself in state procedures and state sponsored executions, both as intercessor and as instigator. The amplifi- cation of Jewish guilt in Epistulae 50 and 68, though not central to the message of either letter or of the pericope adulterae, reflected and justi- fied anti-Jewish policies and procedures he recommended elsewhere. In Ambrose’s reworking of the passage, the pericope adulterae had become a sacred text capable of providing further warrant for anti-Jewish attitudes and policy.

The Pelagians Are Pharisees: The pericope adulterae and Jerome Jerome also did not offer direct commentary on the pericope adulterae, but cited it in the context of a larger argument, in this case against the Pelagians. According to Jerome, the Greek word énamãrthtow—found in the saying “let the one without sin be the first to cast a stone”—must be translated as “without sin,” a philological fact that, to Jerome, indicates that no one could be without sin. Therefore, the Pelagians are mistaken in their views. The focus of this argument was neither Jews nor the pericope adulterae per se. Nevertheless, when referring to the story Jerome offered a series of interpretive asides that, cumulatively, heightened the hostility, hypocrisy, and shame attributed to the woman’s accusers. Once again, their illegitimate motives and guilty consciences were emphasized. Jerome began his discussion of the pericope by noting that the story is found “in many of both the Greek as well as the Latin copies” of the Gos- pel of John (in multis et Graecis et latinis codicibus).82 He then summarizes tion of the Gothic general Butheric, Ambrose responded by retreating outside of the city—Milan was serving as the Western imperial capital at the time—and composing a letter to the emperor that recommended public penance. After all, even King David repented of his sins, offering penitence in the form of a public sacrifice. Theodosius, mindful of the tenuousness of his own position, humbled himself and accepted Am- brose’s recommendation (ep. 51.7–9; see discussion in McLynn, Ambrose of Milan, 291–360; John Curran, Pagan City and Christian Capital: Rome in the Fourth Cen- tury, Oxford Classical Monographs [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000], 209–17; Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire [Madi- son: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988], 108–13). Ambrose’s larger political efforts on behalf of Nicene Christians are vividly described by Virginia Burrus, The Making of a Heretic: Gender, Authority, and the Priscillianist Controversy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 84–89. 82. Pelag. 2.17 (CCL 80:75–78; trans. J. N. Hritzu, Jerome: Dogmatic and Polemical Works, FC 53 [Washington DC: Catholic University of America, 1965], 321–22). 512 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES the tale: an adulterous woman was accused before the Lord, “the scribes and Pharisees kept accusing her and kept earnestly pressing the case, for they wished to stone her to death, according to the law.”83 Not only did they wish to test Jesus, their desire for violence led them to press their case eagerly. Refusing to respond, Jesus “‘began to write with his finger on the ground’ the sins, to be sure of those who were making the accusation, and of all mortal beings, according to what is written in the prophet, ‘They that depart from you shall be written on the earth’”(Jer 17.13).84 After arguing that Jesus’ statement “Let him who is without sin among you cast a stone at her” disproves Pelagian theology, Jerome continues: the accusers fled “for the very merciful judge had given them an opportunity to retreat in their shame.” Bowing his head again, the men left one by one “to avoid his eyes.”85 In Adversus Pelagianos, Jerome’s focus is the Pelagians, not Jews, and he is specific rather than general in his charge: the scribes and Pharisees are “written on the earth,” not “the Jews.” He ends book two—the context of his citation of the pericope adulterae—by warning that Pelagian theology is actually a form of “Pharisaic pride,” assimilating the Pelagians to the category “Pharisee” rather than to the category “Jew.”86 Never- theless, his interpretation augments the negative portrait of the scribes and Pharisees already implicit in Johannine versions, such as is found in Bezae. His suggestion that the scribes and Pharisees desired (cupientes) the woman’s death was a decidedly negative evaluation of their character given the ancient commonplace that those who execute justice, especially capital punishment, ought to be motivated by reason rather than desire.87 His further suggestion regarding Jesus’ writing—Jesus used his finger to inscribe a divine indictment into the ground—indicates that Jesus/God had

83. Pelag. 2.17.18–19 (CCL 80:76): Accusabant autem et uehementer urgebant Scribae et Pharisaei, iuxta legem eam lapidare cupientes. 84. Pelag. 2.17.20–23 (CCL 80:76): At Iesus inclinus digito scribebat in terra: eorum uidelicet qui accusabant, et omnium peccata mortalium, secundum quod scriptum est in Propheta: Relinquentes autem te, super terram scribantur. 85. Pelag. 2.17.29–33 (CCL 80:76): Et quia accusatores omnes fugiunt (dederat enim uercundiae eorum clementissimus iudex spatium recedendi, rursum in terra scribens terramque despiciens), paulatim discedere et oculos illius declinare coeperunt. 86. Pelag. 2.25. See discussion by Jean Benoît, Saint Jérome et l’hérésie, Collec- tion des Études Augustiniennes Série Antiquité 161 (Paris: Institut d’Études augustiniennes, 1999), 411–12. 87. Hence, Ambrose argued that good Christian judges and bishops should reason- ably endeavor to offer mercy whenever possible in imitation of Christ. On this commonplace, see William V. Harris, Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). KNUST/PERICOPE ADULTERAE 513 sealed their divinely (and prophetically) ordained damnation. Juxtaposing Jesus’ divine knowledge and mercy with their deficient self-knowledge and cruelty elevates Jesus while disparaging his opponents. Jesus knew what they were thinking, what they had done, and what they would do. Even so, he shows mercy toward the woman and toward them. By contrast, the scribes and Pharisees were blinded by their desire to stone the woman and abandoned their murderous designs only after Jesus/God convicted them of their sins. Jesus then allowed them to run away, an opportunity these men would have denied the adulteress. Jerome’s interpretive expansions underscore the sinfulness of the accusers: they desired the woman’s death, their sins were known to Jesus, they were shamed and they were damned. Jerome’s rhetoric regarding Jews, scribes and Pharisees is complex, here and elsewhere. Indeed, this interpretation of the pericope adulterae does not apply to Jews at all; it is directed at Pelagian heretics. Still, Jerome does make a habit of representing his Christian opponents as “Judaizers” (Iudai- zantes), or, in this case, as “Pharisees,” a strategy that may be related to the tenuousness of his own position.88 Famous for his controversial decision to employ the Hebrew texts of biblical books when composing his Latin translations of the Bible, he may have needed a strong defense of his own status as a Christian, untainted by Jewish influence.89 As Hillel Newman has noted, Jerome was careful to portray himself as an outstanding and highly knowledgeable Christian text critic who, though a beneficiary of Hebrew learning, was certainly not a “Jew.”90 Indeed, he was better than the Jews—and most Christians—at reading and translating biblical books, a point he also makes when discussing the pericope adulterae.91 Acknowl- edging that he found the pericope adulterae “in many manuscripts, both Greek and Latin,” he signals that he is an excellent text critic—he has checked the sources and read them in both of the languages in which they appear.92 He also asserts that, unlike the Pelagian “Pharisees,” he truly

88. See Hillel I. Newman, “Jerome’s Judaizers,” JECS 9 (2001): 421–51. 89. Jacobs, Remains of the Jews, 72–83; Rebenich, “Jerome: The ‘Vir Trilinguis’ and the ‘Hebraica Veritas,’” 50–77. 90. Newman, “Jerome’s Judaizers,” 444. 91. See esp. ep. 112.22.3, discussed by Jacobs, Remains of the Jews, 96. 92. Jerome’s remarks here are similar to those he makes regarding his facility with the “vir trilinguis,” including Hebrew (Rebenich, “Jerome: The ‘Vir Trilinguis’ and the ‘Hebraica Veritas,’” 53, 56, 62–65). Benoît points out that Jerome repeatedly turns to scriptural arguments when combating the Pelagians: according to Jerome, they are poor exegetes who fail to read Scripture correctly, let alone understand it (Saint Jérome et l’hérésie, 69–73, 382–84). 514 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES understands the Greek version of the story. They clearly do not understand the meaning of énamãrthtow. His reading of the pericope adulterae, then, is reminiscent of arguments he makes elsewhere: heretics are Pharisees (or pseudo-Jews), Jerome is an excellent scholar and text critic, and the Phari- sees (Jews or pseudo-Jews) have been “written in the earth.”

Augustine and the “Sterile Stone” Jerome’s younger contemporary and sometime rival Augustine was a particular fan of the pericope adulterae. He cited the story on no fewer than ten occasions, often at length, and employed the tale as a central proof- text in his treatise De adulterinis coniugiis. Augustine’s primary interest in the story had to do with his understanding of God’s mercy and Jesus’ voluntary humility. In Epistula 153, he cites the story to exhort bishops to intercede for the guilty in imitation of Jesus;93 in De adulterinis coniugiis he argues that husbands ought to be willing to receive their repentant adulterous wives back into their households in imitation of Jesus, a position he defended again in Retractiones; 94 in the Tractatus in evangelium Iohannis he emphasizes Jesus’ gentleness and God’s mercy toward the woman.95 Nevertheless, his elaborations regarding the Jews in this story continued to stress their hostility, culpability, guilty consciences, and divinely condemned state. The Jews did not merely bring the woman before Jesus, they tempted (temptantes) him to violate either the law or his divine mercy. They did not simply leave the scene; they withdrew struck by justice and their consciences “as if [struck] by a spear the size of a beam.”96 Jesus did not simply doodle in the dust, an option recommended by some modern interpreters;97 he wrote their sins upon the earth, showing that the Jews, unlike the Christians, were “sterile stone” that could not bear divine fruit.

93. ep. 153, in Sant’Agostino: Le Lettre, ed. with Italian translation by Luigi Car- rozzi (Rome: Città Nuova Editrice, 1971), 2:522–55. 94. Adult. (CSEL 41:347–410); Retract. 1.18 (CSEL 36:93); also see Serm. Dom. 1.16,43 (CCL 35:48). A similar point is made in Spec. 28 (CSEL 12:196), a work attributed to Augustine by Possidius (see Georges de Plinval, “Une ouevre apocryphe de Saint Augustin: Le ‘Speculum quis ignorat . . .’ (CSEL, XII),” in Augustinus Magister. Congrès international Augustinien, Paris, 21–24 septembre 1954, Communications, vol. 1 (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1954), 187–92. 95. Tract. Io. 33 (CCL 36:306–11). 96. Tract. Io. 33.5.33 (CCL 36:309): tamquam trabali telo percussi. 97. See, for example, Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John, I–XII, Anchor Bible 29 (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 334: “There remains the much sim- pler possibility that Jesus was simply tracing lines on the ground while he was thinking, or wished to show imperturbability, or to contain his feelings of disgust for the violent zeal shown by the accusers.” KNUST/PERICOPE ADULTERAE 515

Thus, Augustine, despite his distinctive and original attitude toward Jews, furthered an interpretive trend that had already been promoted by his teacher Ambrose.98 Augustine treats the pericope adulterae at length in the thirty-third tractate on John, a discussion of John 7.40 to 8.11.99 Commenting on the verse “they were saying this to test him,” Augustine suggests that the woman’s accusers were “tormented by jealousy and envy over . . . [Jesus’] truth and gentleness” and so put up a stumbling block in the form of a legal question about the adulteress.100 In doing so, they were attempting to slander Jesus while behaving both as enemies of the law and betrayers of Moses, or so Augustine suggests. Moreover, these soon-to-be murderers of Jesus would also be guilty of a capital offense; therefore they deserved to be stoned with the woman.101 Yet, instead of succumbing to their trap, Jesus responded with perfect justice, gentleness and truth, replying, “Let the one who is without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her.”102 He then writes on the ground, inscribing the law, which they had failed to understand fully. Augustine does not specify the content of the writing here; rather, he interprets it as a sign that God would no longer write on “hard men,” that is, on “stone”:

What else did he signify to you when he wrote on the ground with his finger? For the Law was written by the finger of God; but because they were hard men, it was written on stone (cf. Ex 31.18). Now the Lord was writing on the ground, because he sought for fruit.103

98. On Augustine’s more tolerant position regarding his Jewish contemporaries, see Paula Fredriksen, “Excaecati Occulta Justitia Dei: Augustine on Jews and Juda- ism,” JECS 3 (1995): 299–324, and “Secundum Carnem: History and Israel in the Theology of St. Augustine,” in The Limits of Ancient Christianity: Essays on Late Antique Thought and Culture in Honor of R. A. Markus, ed. William E. Klingshirn and Mark Vessey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 26–41. 99. The date of this work is a subject of considerable debate, though tractate 33 is usually dated later than the earlier chapters, perhaps as late as the 420s. For the dating of Augustine’s works, I have relied on the helpful chart by James J. O’Donnell, Augustine. Confessions, vol. 1: Introduction and Text (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), lxv–lxix. 100. Tract. Io. 33.3.2 (CCL 36:307). English translation by John W. Rettig, St. Augustine. Tractates on the Gospel of John 28–54, FC 88 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1993), 54. 101. Tract. Io. 33.4.36–38 (CCL 36:308). 102. Tract. Io. 33.5.7–8 (CCL 36:308): Qui sine peccato est uestrum, inquit, prior in illam lapidem mittat. 103. Tract. Io. 33.5.15–18 (CCL 36:308): Quid uobis aliud significat, cum digito scribit in terra? Digito enim Dei lex scripta est, sed propter duros in lapide scripta est. Nunc iam Dominus in terra scribebat, quia fructum quaerebat. 516 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

Augustine concludes this discussion of the accusers by emphasizing their guilty consciences: they were “slandering without” but Jesus forced them to examine within and “each one, gazing upon himself, found himself a sinner.”104 It was right for them to leave, Augustine concludes, since the sinning woman ought not to be punished by sinners.105 Augustine had considered the pericope earlier, in a letter written in 413 or 414 to Macedonius, a church administrator in Africa. This letter offers a discussion of whether or not priests and bishops should intercede for those condemned of serious sins, concluding that intercession is both appropriate and necessary, despite the unfortunate fact that some sinners may only feign contrition.106 Judges should also show compassion; refusing to be “influenced by their personal anger” good judges “act as agents of the law” while remembering that they, too, require God’s mercy.107 Augustine offers the pericope adulterae as an illustration of these principles. Jesus’ interaction with the Jews and the woman demonstrates that accusers should not be influenced by a desire for revenge, that judges should remain mindful of “common human weaknesses,” and that priestly intercessors should recognize that, by interceding for others, their own sins may be pardoned. Jesus, Augustine explains, is a good judge. He did not reject the law when he stated, “He that is without sin among you, let him cast a stone at her,” but rather, “by rousing fear in those whose verdict could have put her to death, He recalled them to thoughts of mercy.”108 Among those present, only Jesus could have met the criteria of sinlessness and thus only he was fit to throw the first stone. Thus, hearing his verdict, the “savagery

104. Tract. Io. 33.5.1–11; 31–34 (CCL 36:307–9). 105. Tract. Io. 33.5.33–34 (CCL 36:309): Haec uox omnino iustitiae est; qua iustitia illi tamquam trabali telo percussi, sese inspicientes et reos inuenientes, unus post unum omnes recesserunt. 106. ep. 153.3–4, to Macedonius (ed. Carrozzi, 2:530–35). English translation by Wilfrid Parsons, Writings of Saint Augustine: vol. 11, Letters, vol. 3, FC (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1953), 281–303. 107. Ep. 153.3.8 (Carozzi, Sant’Agostino: Le Lettre, 2:530): Proinde licet accusato- ris alia persona sit, alia defensoris, alia intercessoris, alia iudicis, de quorum propriis officiis nimis longum est, et non necessarium hoc sermone disserere; sic tamen etiam ipsos criminum ultores, atque in hoc officio non ira propria concitatos, sed legum ministros, nec suarum, sed alienarum examinatarum iniuriarum vindices, quales iu- dices esse debent, terruit censurea divina, ut cogitarent sibi propter sua peccata Dei misericordiam necessariam, nec putarent ad culpam sui officii pertinere, si quid erga eos misericorditer agerent, quorum vitae necisque haberent/ legitmam potestatem. 108. ep. 153.4.9 (ed. Carozzi, Sant’Agostino: Le Lettre, 2:530): Ita nec Legem improbavit, quae huiusmodi reas iussit occidi; et illos terrendo ad misericordiam re- vocavit, quorum iudicio haec posset occidi. KNUST/PERICOPE ADULTERAE 517

[of the Jews] died as their conscience trembled” (cecidit saevitia, tremente conscientia) and they slipped away from the scene, one by one.109 Augus- tine ends the discussion by arguing that Christians ought to be able to do better than those Jews:

Let the piety of Christians yield to this sentence as the impiety of the Jews yielded to it; let the humility of adorers yield as the pride of persecutors has yielded; let the submission of the faithful yield as the lying pretense of the tempter yielded. Pardon the wicked good Sir; be more perfect as you are more merciful, humble yourself more profoundly as you rise higher by your power.110 In other words, Christians, including Augustine’s colleague Macedonius, must not allow themselves to become like the Jews in the pericope adulterae: impious, prideful, lying tempters and persecutors.111 Rather, they should hear Jesus’ rebuke all the more and willingly humble themselves by displaying mercy toward even the most reprehensible sinners. In De consensu evangelistarum (after 399), Augustine had experimented with yet another interpretation of the pericope adulterae, this time offering a series of speculations regarding what Jesus wrote. He presents three options: Jesus was indicating the “people of the character of these men would be written on earth, and not in heaven”; Jesus was symbolically demonstrating his humility by “bowing down his head”; or Jesus was showing that the time had come for the law to be written not “on sterile stone” (i.e., on the Jews) but “on a soil that would bear fruit” (i.e., on the Christians), an interpretation also found in the tractates on John, as we have seen.112 Augustine offered a different but related option regarding

109. ep. 153.4.11. 110. ep. 153.4.11 (Carozzi, Sant’Agostino: Le Lettre, 2:534): Cedat huic senten- tiae pietas Christianorum, cui cessit impietas Iudaeorum; cedat humilitas obsequen- tium, cui cessit superbia persequentium; cedat confessio fidelis, cui cessit simulatio tentatoris. Malis parce, vir bone: quanto melior, tanto esto mitior; quanto fis celsior potestate, tanto humilior fiere pietate. 111. Compare Psal. 50.8: “It is a just law that orders an adulteress to be executed, but this just law demands innocent administrators. . . . Those who had brought her were ashamed, but did not ask forgiveness. . . . That was what the Jews who brought the woman refused to do. They recognized their wounds when the doctor pointed them out, but they did not seek healing from the doctor” (trans. Maria Boulding, The Works of Saint Augustine, 3.16, Expositions of the Psalms 33–50, ed. John E. Rotelle [Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2000], 416). 112. Cons. 3.10.17 (CSEL 43:411–12): quando digito scribebat in terra, tamquam illos tales in terra scribendos significaret et non in caelo, . . . aut quod se humilando, quod capitis inclinatione monstrabat, signa in terra faceret, aut quod iam tem- pus esset, ut in terra, quae fructum daret, non in lapide sterili, sicut antea lex eius conscriberetur. 518 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES what Jesus wrote in Contra adversarium legis et prophetarum (419 or 420): Jesus wrote in fulfillment of Jeremiah 17.13, “Let all those who abandon you be confused; as they withdraw, let them be written upon the earth.” He explains:

We do well to understand that Jesus meant these people, when the Jews withdrew, defeated and confused, one after the other, when they heard, “Let him who is without sin cast a stone at her first (John 8.7–9). Then he wrote on the earth with his finger, showing the number to which they belonged.113 Augustine’s approach to the pericope adulterae, therefore, repeats interpretive elaborations already present in the writings of those who came before him. Didymus the Blind had configured his retelling of the pericope adulterae around the guilty consciences of the Jews who accused the woman. Ambrose had also emphasized the inner shame of the Jews, describing them as cunning and bloodthirsty. He then asserted that they were written out of salvation, a fact inscribed by Jesus into the ground. Jerome had also connected Jeremiah 17.13 with Jesus’ writing. All of these themes appear in Augustine’s writings: the men knew they were guilty, they left the scene with trembling consciences, they were guilty of pursuing the death of Jesus and they were “inscribed upon the earth” (Jer 17.13). Augustine’s inclusion of the interpretive decisions of his predecessors was probably intentional. Prior to the fifth century, patristic authors rarely cited their colleagues explicitly, preferring “unsignalled borrowing or textual dependence” that, by means of silent assimilation, produced the appearance of doctrinal and interpretive harmony.114 Augustine’s careful articulation of three possible meanings to Jesus’ writing on the ground illustrates the point nicely: Jesus may have been literally writing the men into/onto the earth (Ambrose, Jerome) or he may have been fulfilling

113. Leg. 1.20.44 (CCL 49:77): Uniuersi qui derelinquunt te confundantur; receden- tes super terram scribantur? Quos bene intelligetur significasse Iesus, quando Iudaei uicti atque confusi, cum audissent: Qui sine peccato est prior in illam lapidem iaciat, unus post alterum recesserunt. Tunc autem ille ostendens de quo numero essent digito scribebat in terra (compare Jerome Pelag. 2.17; trans. Roland J. Teske, The Works of Saint Augustine, 1.18, Arianism and Other Heresies, ed. John E. Rotelle [Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1995], 388). 114. Mark Vessey, “The Forging of Orthodoxy in Latin Christian Literature: A Case Study,” JECS 4 (1996): 495–513, at 501. Applying this observation to a study of Augustine, Éric Rebillard concludes that Augustine only rarely included explicit patristic citations in his writings, but, when he does, he seeks to argue from the (real or imagined) consensus of orthodox colleagues in such a way that he remains unbound by the authority of his predecessors, “A New Style of Argument in Christian Polemic: Augustine and the Use of Patristic Citations,” JECS 8 (2000): 559–78. KNUST/PERICOPE ADULTERAE 519

Jeremiah 17.13 (Jerome). Alternatively, he may have been indicating his humility or demonstrating that God would now write on fruitful soil (the Christians) rather than on sterile stone (the Jews), Augustine’s own ideas. In other words, Augustine placed himself within a line of patristic interpretation—he was simply repeating and acknowledging established tradition, though he does so without attribution—yet he did not hesitate to introduce his own, unique perspectives. In addition to drawing on the interpretations of others, Augustine’s readings of the passage reproduced attitudes toward the Jews and Judaism he had developed early on. As in the propositions on Romans, Augustine suggests that the sinful, be they Christian or Jewish, should “flee to the doctor [Christ],” something that the Jews in the pericope adulterae had failed to do.115 Similarly, he claims that Christian sinners ought to listen to their consciences in imitation of the Jews who, upon hearing Christ, left the woman alone.116 In this way, Augustine presents sinning Jews and sinning Christians as morally equivalent.117 He also stressed the truth and validity of Mosaic law, observing that the law ordering that the woman be stoned was right and just.118 In De adulterinis coniugiis, Augustine explains that execution for adultery was a proper requirement under the “old law” because no sacrifice could wipe away such a heinous crime. Mercy is possible under the new covenant, however, because Christ’s blood cleanses sins, making God’s mercy available to the penitent.119 An emphasis on God’s mercy toward sinners of all sorts, Jewish or Christian, is a distinctive feature of Augustine’s commentary on the passage, as is his defense of Hebrew law as good and salvific prior to the advent of Christ. Nevertheless, by repeating and amplifying the interpretive elaborations of his predecessors, and by claiming that the Jews were “sterile stone” rather

115. Leg. 1.20.44. Here Augustine was denouncing an anonymous “heretic” who, apparently, lampooned the idea that God would create rainbows as a reminder to himself not to flood the earth. Augustine defends God’s action by pointing out that God also writes the names of the just in heaven and the damned in the earth, a principle found in gospel books as well (citing Luke 10.20). Jews were actually beside the point in this discussion. 116. ep. 153.4.11. 117. See discussion in Fredriksen, “Excaecati Occulta Justitia Dei,” 304–5. 118. Serm. Dom. 43; Tract. Io. 33.4.3, 5.2; Adult. 6.5. Augustine first defended this position in other ways in Faust.; see Faust. 12.3–4, with discussion by Fredrik- sen, “Excaecati Occulta Justitia Dei,” 315. Also see Fredriksen, “Secundum Car- nem,” 29, 35–37. 119. Moreover, David, prefiguring the new situation, took back Saul’s daughter though she had been the wife of another during her separation from David (Adult. 6.5). 520 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES than fertile soil, Augustine continues to specify Jewish sin, hostility, and condemnation, and he does so in such a way that the interpretive moves of his predecessors were further solidified. The culpability of the woman’s accusers was now clear.

The pericope adulterae after Augustine By the fifth century, the pericope adulterae had gained a secure home in much of the Latin West.120 Cassiodorus (ca. 485–580) mentions the story at length in his commentary on Psalm 57.6, including many of the interpretive glosses with which we are now familiar: the Jews maliciously questioned Jesus, Jesus bowed down in disappointment at their hard-heartedness, and the men, by attempting to trap Jesus, actually trapped themselves in “the pit,” that is, in hell.121 From the late fifth century onward the story was read in Rome on the third Saturday of Lent at the titulus Gai—later, the church of Santa Susanna—as part of the Lenten stational liturgy.122 It is

120. For a different opinion, see O’Loughlin, “A Woman’s Plight,” 100–103. He suggests that, outside of the writings of Augustine, the pericope adulterae was rarely mentioned or used. If one includes liturgical, art historical, and text critical evidence, however, the picture changes dramatically. It is true that the story was never as popular among theologians as it was with Augustine, but, as well shall see, the story remained very much a part of church tradition. 121. Expositio Psalmorum 56.7 (CCL 97:510–11). For discussion, see O’Louglin, 99–100. 122. It is difficult to date the introduction of the Roman stational liturgy or the introduction of the lectionary readings associated with each day with any precision. Still, the Lenten portion of the practice—which would include the visit to the titulus Gai and the reading of the pericope adulterae—was the earliest development. See the careful discussion by John F. Baldovin, The Urban Character of Christian Worship: The Origins, Development, and Meaning of Stational Liturgy, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 228 (Rome: Pont. Institutum Studiorum Orientalium, 1987), 143–53. Frere suggests that the pericope adulterae and other gospel readings associated with the Lenten stations must have been in place by 700, if not earlier. The earliest lectionaries, but not necessarily the earliest manuscripts, which may be quite late, do not include Thursdays, added by Pope Gregory II (715–731). Also, the earlier stational lectionaries list the Saturdays as “feria vii” rather than “sabbato”; so, for example, in lectionaries of the earliest type, the third Saturday is listed as “feria vii. ad. s. susan- nam. 86 Io. perrexit Iesus in montem oliueti . . . vade et amplius iam noli peccare.” See W. H. Frere, Studies in Early Roman Liturgy. Vol. 2, The Roman Lectionary, Alcuin Club Collections 30 (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), iii–iv, 8, 81. A similar conclusion is reached by Theodoor Klauser; see Das Römische Capitulare Evangeliorum. Texte und Untersuchungen zu seiner Ältesten Geschichte, vol. 1, Typen, Liturgiewissenschaftliche Quellen und Forschungen 28 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1972), xi–xxviii. Handily, Klauser lists and groups the extant manuscripts by date and type; the pericope adulterae appears in every case and on the allotted day. KNUST/PERICOPE ADULTERAE 521 found in six Old Latin gospels and was included by Jerome in what would become the Vulgate.123 Codex Fuldensis, copied in Capua between 541 and 546, includes the pericope in a gospel harmony that follows the Diates- saron order but contains the Vulgate text.124 One eighth- or ninth-century Latin scribe was so committed to including the tale that he copied it out onto a separate piece of parchment and then attached it to the margin of an older gospel where it was lacking.125 The narrative is also depicted in medieval art: it appears on an elaborate early ninth-century golden gospel book cover from Trier,126 on a tenth-century ivory gospel book cover from Mailand or Reichenau,127 in an illumination of the Gospel of John

123. These are: aur (Codex Aureus Holmiensis; Stockholm, Kungl. Biblioteket A.135), c (Codex Colbertinus; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale lat. 254), d (the Latin side of Codex Bezae), ff 2 (Codex Corbeiensis; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale lat. 17225), j (z) (Codex Sarzanensis, fragments of Luke and John; Sarezzano bei Tortono [Prov. Alessandria], Chiesa s. n.), r1 (Codex Usserianus Primus; Dublin, Trinity College 55 [A.IV.15]). It was not included in b (Codex Veronensis; Verona, Biblioteca Capito- lare cod. VI), but the folia from the relevant section of John is missing. Buchanan speculates that it may have been present originally (E. S. Buchanan, The Four Gos- pels from the Codex Veronensis b [Old Latin Biblical Texts VI; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911], vii–ix). The scribe of Usserianus Primus has imported the pericope adulterae from a vulgate gospel book rather than from an Old Latin exemplar; nevertheless, he was careful to include it. This suggests that the pericope was known in Ireland by the late sixth century, the date at which this manuscript was copied (see T. K. Abbott, Evangeliorum versio antehieronymiana ex codice Usseriano [Dublin, 1884]). For a helpful description of these manuscripts, with bibliography, see Roger Gryson, Altlateinische Handschriften Manuscrits Vieux Latins. Répertoire descriptif. Première partie: Mss 1–275, Vetus Latina, Die Reste der Altlateinischen Bibel 1/2A (Freiburg: Herder, 1999). 124. Critical edition by Ernest Ranke, Codex Fuldensis. Novum Testamentum Latine Interprete Hieronymo. Ex manuscripto Victoris Capuani (Marburg and Lip- sius: Sumtibus N. G. Elverti Bibliopolae Academici, 1868). 125. This is l (Codex Rehdigeranus of the Gospels; Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz Depot Breslau 5), critical edition by Heinrich Joseph Vogels, Codex Rehdigeranus (Collectanea Biblica Latina 2; Rome: Pustet, 1913). Vogels includes a plate of the relevant folio. 126. Codex Aureus Monacensis (München, SB: Clm 14000), discussion with plates by O. K. Werchmeister, Der Deckel des Codex Aureus von St. Emmermam. Ein Goldschmiedewerk des 9. Jahrhunderts (Baden-Baden and Strasbourg: Heitz GMBH, 1963). Jesus is depicted bending down to write the words “whoever is without sin” (si quis sine peccato). 127. Now held at the Free Museum, Liverpool. See Adoph Goldschmidt, Die Elfenbeinskulpturn, vol. 2, Aus der Zeit der karolingischen und sächsischen Kaiser, VIII–XI (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1918), 19 and plate v; J. O. Westwood, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Fictile Ivories in the South Kensington Museum (London: George E. Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1876), 142 plate xii. 522 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES from the tenth-century Codex Egberti, and on an eleventh-century wall painting at the church of Saint Angelo in Formis.128 Old Latin gospel books and the Vulgate preserve the story in a relatively consistent manner: a woman caught in adulterio (or moechia or peccato) is brought before Jesus by scribes and Pharisees. She is placed in the middle and Jesus is addressed. The Latin text of Bezae specifies the motives of the accusers at this point: priests (sacerdotes) sought to tempt Jesus in order to have an accusation against him.129 The Vulgate and several Old Latin gospels offer a similar comment after the accusers speak, suggesting that “they,” presumably the scribes and Pharisees mentioned earlier, said this to tempt him.130 Jesus then writes on the ground, raising his head to state “whoever is without sin, let him throw a stone at her,” but in slightly different way in each case.131 Jesus bows again to write and they leave, beginning with the eldest (incipientes a presbyteris or adcipientes a senioribus or incipientes a senioribus). Jesus then speaks to the woman, asking if anyone has remained to judge her. When she replies in the negative, Jesus tells her to go and sin no more. The story remained more fluid among Greek-speaking Christians, as Greek gospel manuscripts reveal. As we have already noted, Bezae is the earliest Greek manuscript witness; Codex Basiliensis (E, eighth century) provides the next earliest example.132 Basiliensis and virtually all the manu-

128. See Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, 160–61, plates 458 and 461. In the illumination, Jesus writes “terra terram accusat.” 129. Compare the Armenian gospel book Codex San Lazzaro (1230), where the high priests and the Pharisees bring the woman before Jesus, and two other Arme- nian Gospel books that suggest that the high priests asked Jesus the question (Becker, Jesus und die Ehebrecherin, 180–81). 130. aur, c, ff 2, r 1, j: haec dicebant temptantes eum ut haberent eum accusare, with slight variations. 131. Si quis vestrum sine peccato est, ipse prior super illam iniciat lapidem (Vul- gate); for a full illustration of the many variants to this verse, as well as the others, see Adolf Jülcher, Itala. Das Neue Testament in Altlateinischer Überlieferung, vol. 4, Johannes-Evangelium (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1963), 84–87. 132. Codex Basiliensis (E, 8th cent., Basel, Universitäts Bibliothek Cod. AN III 12). Lührmann makes the interesting observation that, in the case of the pericope adulterae, the Latin text may have actually influenced the Greek instead of the other way around. The Latin remains relatively stable, as we have seen, and it was incorporated into the Latin canon early on by means of its placement in the Vulgate (“Die Geschichte von einer Sünderin”). By contrast, the pericope remains unstable in Greek manuscripts and is frequently obelized when it does appear. On the significance of this obelizing, see L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 9–14 (on this practice as it developed among pagan Alexandrian scribes) and 60–65 (on the text critical habits of eighth and ninth-century Byzantine scribes and KNUST/PERICOPE ADULTERAE 523 scripts of the “Byzantine text-type” include the pericope but, as we shall see, even these include several important variations.133 Still, the story is largely absent from Greek exegesis until the twelfth century, leading Bruce Metzger to declare that: “No Greek father prior to Euthymius Zigabenus (twelfth century) comments on the passage, and Euthymius declares that the accurate copies of the Gospel do not contain it.”134 Actually, Metzger was not quite correct. The story was cited by one Greek father during the sixth century, in a work that is not widely known and preserved only in Syriac, the Historia Ecclesiastica mistakenly attributed to Zacharias Rhetor. This citation is so remarkable that it deserves to be reproduced here: Now there was inserted in the gospel of the holy Moro the bishop, in the eighty-ninth canon, a chapter which is related only by John in his gospel, and is not found in other manuscripts, a section running thus: “It happened one day, while Jesus was teaching, they brought Him a woman who had been found to be with child of adultery, and told Him about her. And Jesus said to them (since as God He knew their shameful passions and also their deeds), ‘What does He command in the law?’ And they said to Him, ‘That at the mouth of two or three witnesses she should be stoned.’ But He answered and said to them, ‘In accordance with the law, whoever is pure and free from these sinful passions, and can bear witness with confidence and authority, as being under no blame in respect of this sin, let him bear witness against her, and let him first throw a stone at her, and then those that are after him, and she shall be stoned.’ But they, because they were subject to condemnation and blameworthy in respect of this sinful passion went out one by one from before Him and left the woman. And when they had gone, Jesus looked upon the ground and, writing in the dust there, said to the woman, ‘They who brought thee here and wished to bear witness against thee, having understood what I said to them, which thou hast heard, have left thee and departed. Do thou also, therefore, go thy way, and commit not this sin again.’”135 scholars). Also see Vessey, “Forging Orthodoxy,” 509–11 (on Jerome’s application of the practice to the works of Origen). 133. On the Byzantine text as it appears in the Catholic Epistles, see Klaus Wachtel, Der byzantinische Text der katholischen Briefe: eine Untersuchung zur Entstehung der Koine des Neuen Testaments (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1995). Though Wachtel does not address the Gospel of John, his discussion of the Byzantine text remains helpful for our purposes. Wachtel suggests that, though elements of the Byzantine text can be found already in the fourth century, it remained an evolving tradition. See also Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Trans- mission, Corruption, and Restoration, 4th ed. (New York and Oxford: Oxford Uni- versity Press), 279–80. 134. Metzger, Textual Commentary, 220. 135. [Zechariah Rhetor], Historia Ecclesiastica 8.7; trans. Brooks. Petersen calls attention to this citation though he does not discuss it, “OUDE EGV SE [KATA]KRINV,” 200, also see Becker, Jesus und die Ehebrecherin, 179. 524 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

Bishop Moro seems to have had access to a very odd version of the pericope. In most gospel manuscripts the pericope adulterae is placed within canon 86, not 89. The issue at hand in his version was “shameful passions” rather than an attempt to trick Jesus. Jesus writes on the ground only after the men leave. Thus, the writing serves not as an indictment of the accusers but as a pause in the narrative. Most strikingly, the woman is described as pregnant from adultery and therefore clearly guilty. Finally, the woman’s accusers are never labeled. Are they Jews, scribes and Phari- sees, or priests? The author does not specify. He also notes that the story is found in no other copy of John known to him. Interestingly, Jews are beside the point; they are not even mentioned. By contrast, Greek gospel books include several details specifying the sin and guilt of the woman’s accusers. For example, the scribes of Codex Basiliensis (E, seventh century) and Codex Cyprius (K, ca. 1000) included a detail specifying the troubled consciences of these men: “but hearing [Jesus] and being accused by [their] consciences, they left.”136 Codex U (ninth century) suggests that Jesus wrote “the sins of every one of them”; Codex 264 (twelfth century) places this comment earlier, the first time that Jesus writes.137 Finally, all the extant manuscripts containing the tale include a comment regarding the illicit motives of the accusers—they sought to test or tempt Jesus in order to bring a charge against him—but they do so in different ways. E, K, P (ninth century) and a majority of witnesses repeat the charge twice, first suggesting that the accusers spoke to Jesus “testing” (peirazontew) prior to asking their of Jesus and then again afterward: touto de elegon peirazontew auton ina exvsin kathgorein auton.138 The scribe of D suggested that priests (iereiw) questioned Jesus to

136. E, K (ca. 1000; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France gr. 63): oi de akousantew kai upo thw suneidhsevw elegxomenoi ejerxonto eiw kayÉ eiw arjamenoi apo tvn presbutervn. I would like to express my gratitude to the staff of the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes, section grecque, for their assistance in locating microfilms of these manuscripts as well as many of the others discussed below. Also see the critical apparatus to the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece, 27th revised edition (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1998). Aland and Aland suggest that 579 (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France gr. 97), several other witnesses, and at least five Bo- haric versions include this variant (Novum Testamentum Graece, 274). 137. U (8th or 9th cent., Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana I.8 [1397]) and 264 (12th cent., Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France gr. 65): enow eskatou taw amartiaw autvn. 138. The text of P has been reconstructed by Jacob Geerlings on comparison with other manuscripts of this family, “Family P in John,” Studies and Documents 23 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1963), esp. 97–100: “Appendix A: The Pericope Adulterae in Family P.” For further examples, see Reuben J. Swanson, ed., New Testament Greek Manuscripts: Variant Readings Arranged in Horizontal Lines KNUST/PERICOPE ADULTERAE 525 tempt him (ekpeirazontew rather than simply peirazontew). The scribe of M (ninth century), or perhaps an early corrector, appended a version of the comment to the end of the pericope.139 In other words, Greek gospel manuscripts are unstable at precisely those points where earlier patristic authors did not agree. At the same time, these manuscripts include innova- tive elaborations that specify the guilt of the woman’s accusers. The parallels between these points of textual instability and late antique patristic elaboration are clear (see Table 1 below). The instability of the pericope adulterae bears out a principle introduced at the start of this essay and does so in a remarkable way: unstable texts point to the concerns of the church. Patristic authors could not decide who was bringing the charges against the woman, at least not initially. Were these men elders, scribes and Pharisees, priests, or simply Jews? The manuscript witnesses are equally unsure, as we observed in our discussion of Bezae above.140 Were elders involved? If so, how? Again, the manuscript witnesses were not sure. Interpretive glosses and commentary regarding the consciences of the accusers, present already in the work of Didymus the Blind, are also present in Byzantine manuscripts. A tradition regarding the hostile motives of the accusers was developing among patristic authors; this tradition appears in Bezae and in the manuscripts as well, both Greek and Latin. The instability of the testing motif—it appears in three different locations and in different versions—suggests that the story once circulated without it.141 Yet, over the course of the development of against Codex Vaticanus (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press and Pasadena, CA: Wil- liam Carey International University Press, 1995), 106. 139. M (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France gr. 48): touto de eipan peirazontew auton ina exvsi kathgorian kat autou. Becker suggests that the verse was added by a later hand (Jesus und die Ehebrecherin, 56–57). 140. Similar disagreement is found in later manuscripts, with the majority iden- tifying the accusers as “scribes and Pharisees,” but others mentioning priests, high priests or simply Jews. As we have seen, Bezae specified that the men left “from the elders,” perhaps on analogy with the Susanna story. This detail remains unstable as well, with various solutions proposed. 141. Noted by Becker already in 1963. As he points out, the comment about testing interrupts the flow of the narrative and finds no fixed place in the manuscripts (Jesus und die Ehebrecherin, 56–57). A majority of scholars have rejected Becker’s suggestion and therefore include the statement in their edited texts. Still, the instability of this verse should give further pause. If the periciope adulterae is to be understood as an interpolation, in part, because of the instability of its form, its absence from many early manuscripts, and the variety of places where it can appear, the same criteria should apply to this verse. The statement—which is an editorial gloss—contains several textual variants, appears in at least two, if not three locations, and may be missing entirely from M, if it was in fact added by a later hand. Table 1. Summary of Witnesses and Interpretive Expansions*

The Identity of The Motives of the The Consciences Source The Woman the Interlocutors Interlocutors What Jesus Wrote of the Accusers

Papias (Eusebius She is falsely h.e. 3.39.17) accused of many — — — — disputed sins. Protevangelium Innocent? Iacobi — — — — disupted Didascalia She sinned. Elders They left the judg- apostolorum ment up to Jesus. — —

Codex Vaticanus The scribe knows — — — — — the story but does not include it. Didymus the She was con- Jews The accusers Blind, demned by the — — “knew they were Commentary on Jews for a sin. liable for some Ecclesiastes things.” Codex Bezae Taken in sin, but Scribes, Phari- They sought to test caught in the act sees, priests, Jesus. — — of committing Jews; the Jews adultery. left “beginning with the eldest.” (continued on p. 527) * Note: The Gospel manuscripts included here are intended to be representative rather than complete. The additions “Jesus wrote the sins of every one of them” and the accusers “knew they were liable for some things” are present in the vast majority of Byzantine texts, with some variation. Other Old Latin gospels also include the tale, and in ways similar to those listed here. Table 1 (continued). Summary of Witnesses and Interpretive Expansions

The Identity of The Motives of the The Consciences Source The Woman the Interlocutors Interlocutors What Jesus Wrote of the Accusers

Ambrose An adulteress The Jews The Jews sought “to Jesus wrote “Earth, earth, write The accusers ep. 50, 68, Apol. entrap him” (ep. that these men have been dis- “knew the righ- Dav. 1.10.51; Abr. 50) and “devised owned” (Jer 22.29; ep. 68). teousness of His 1.4.23; Spir. 3.15; this stratagem”(ep. Jesus wrote their names on the sentence” (68). Luc. 5.47 68). ground (ep. 50). They were written on the ground, “so that you may know that the Jews were condemned by both Testaments” (ep. 50). Rufinus, transla- An adulteress The Jews tion of Historia — — — Ecclesiastica Jerome An adulteress Scribes and They desired to Jesus wrote their sins, showing They retreated in Pelag. 2.17 Pharisees stone the woman. that “They that depart from you shame and left “to shall be written on the earth” (Jer avoid his eyes.” 17.13). Augustine An adulteress The Jews The woman He indicated that such people “He recalled to Psal. 50; Serm. was “brought would be written on earth (Cons. them thoughts of Dom. 1; Faust. before Him by 4.10.17). mercy by rousing 22.25; ep. 153; his tempters” He showed that the time had fear in them” (ep. Tract. Io. 33; (Cons. 4.10.17; ep. come from writing, not on stone, 153.4.9; Adult. Adult.; Leg.; 153.4.9). but on earth that could bear fruit 2.6). Retract. 1.18.9; He was “tempted by (Cons.. 4.10.17; Tract. Io. 33.5). The accusers looked Spec. 28 (in His enemies,” they He wrote a saying of the prophets within themselves chronological “laid a stumbling (Jer 17.13; Leg. 1.20.44). and knew they were order) block for him” guilty (Tract. Io. (Tract. Io. 33.4) 33.5). (continued on p. 528) Table 1 (continued). Summary of Witnesses and Interpretive Expansions

The Identity of The Motives of the The Consciences Source The Woman the Interlocutors Interlocutors What Jesus Wrote of the Accusers

Cassiodorus An adulteress The Jews They questioned Jesus bowed down at their Expositio Jesus maliciously. hardheartedness. — Psalmorum 56.7 They were damned. Codex Corbeiensis An adulteress Scribes and They sought to test Old Latin Gospel Pharisees. They (temptantes) Jesus. — — left “from the eldest.” Codex Fuldensis An adulteress Scribes and They sought to test (copied 541–546) Pharisees. They (temptantes) Jesus. — — vulgate Gospel left “from the harmony eldest.” Roman Stational An adulteress, Scribes and They sought to test Liturgy (5th to 6th but associated Pharisees. They (temptantes) Jesus. — — cent.?) The vulgate in liturgy with left “from the text is read at both Susanna eldest.” Santa Susanna (LXX) and Santa Susanna Ivory Pyxides (5th Depicted with Not depicted or 6th cent.) her left hand — — — disputed at her forehead and her right touching Jesus’ cloak [Zacharias Rhetor] Pregnant by Not identified They sought Jesus’ Jesus wrote after they left. Chronicle (569) adultery (simply “they”) opinion. — (continued on p. 529) Table 1 (continued). Summary of Witnesses and Interpretive Expansions

The Identity of The Motives of the The Consciences Source The Woman the Interlocutors Interlocutors What Jesus Wrote of the Accusers

Codex Usserianus An adulteress Scribes and They sought to test Primus (6th or 7th Pharisees. They (temptantes) Jesus. — — cent., Ireland) left a senioribus. Old Latin Codex Aureus An adulteress Scribes and They sought to test Holmiensis (7th Pharisees. They (temptantes) Jesus. — — cent.) Old Latin left a senioribus. Codex Basiliensis An adulteress Scribes and They spoke “and reproved by (8th cent.) Pharisees “testing” and then — their conscience” Byzantine Gospel; again “they said this they left: the text is marked that they might have kai upo thw a charge against suneidhsevw him.” elegxomenoi

Codex U of the An adulteress Highpriests They sought to test Jesus wrote “the sins of each one Gospels (8th or Jesus. of them”: — 9th cent.); the enow ekastou autvn taw amartiaw text is present and unmarked Codex Campianus An adulteress Scribes and The comment “they (M) (8th, 9th, Pharisees said this to test him” — — or 10th cent.) is appended to the Byzantine Gospel; pericope. the text is marked (continued on p. 530) Table 1 (continued). Summary of Witnesses and Interpretive Expansions

The Identity of The Motives of the The Consciences Source The Woman the Interlocutors Interlocutors What Jesus Wrote of the Accusers

Codex Aureus A woman, Scribes and The vulgate text Jesus is depicted writing “whoever Monacensis (9th probably an Pharisees suggests that they is without sin.” — cent.) Vulgate adulteress, is sought to test Jesus. Gospel with a depicted golden cover depicting the scene Codex A, Syriac She is a sinner. Scribes and They sought to test Lectionary (10th (émartanom°nh) Pharisees Jesus. — — cent.) Codex Cyprius An adulteress Scribes and They spoke “and reproved by (K, ca. 1000) Pharisees “testing” and then — their conscience” again “they said this they left: that they might have kai upo thw a charge against suneidhsevw him.” elegxomenoi KNUST/PERICOPE ADULTERAE 531 the gospel tradition, this feature of the narrative was expanded such that they were said to be testing or tempting Jesus, to trap him. This development accords with a further emphasis on testing among the patristic authors, especially Ambrose and Augustine. Finally, speculation regarding what Jesus wrote, present in the writings of Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine, also finds a place in Byzantine gospel books. Like Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine, this addition specifies that the men were sinners, written on the earth.142 New Testament scholars, though aware of the instability of this tale, have not noticed the anti-Jewish impact of these glosses. Instead, the comment about the testing of Jesus is regularly understood as an original element of the story; it provides yet another example of the attempt of scribes and Pharisees to trap Jesus.143 The note about the consciences of the accusers is taken as an explanatory gloss.144 The detail “Jesus wrote the sins of every one of them” is rejected as a later pious addition or a bit of popular theology.145 As one study puts it, the note regarding what Jesus wrote is “patent gloss” that adds nothing to the narrative.146 Yet all three textual variants do accomplish something: the testing motif highlights the illegitimate motives

142. Tommy Wasserman recently examined the presence of this variant in a set of medieval manuscripts known as the “Patmos family.” These manuscripts share a common reading at verse 8 of the pericope adulterae: they include the variant “the sins of every one,” omitting aÈt«n. Wasserman completed a quantitative analysis of test passages drawn from Matthew, Mark, and Luke, as well as John, concluding that the relationship between this family of manuscripts is actually quite complicated. The shared expansion at verses 6–9 in the pericope adulterae, therefore, rather than providing evidence of a common archetypical exemplar, may, in fact, be attributable to the impact of “popular theology.” In other words, the view that Jesus “wrote the sins of each one” was so popular that it could enter manuscripts independently of a shared tradition. Wasserman concludes: “the history of readings is not synonymous with the history of manuscripts although the two categories surely overlap.” Tommy Wasser- man, “The Patmos Family of New Testament MSS and Its Allies in the Pericope of the Adulteress and Beyond,” TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism 7 (2002), online: http://purl.org/TC/vol07/Wasserman2002/Wasserman2002.html, paragraph 48. 143. Compare Matt 12.14, 38; 15.1; 19.3; 22.15; Mark 3.6; 8.11; 12.13; Luke 6.7; 11.53; John 7.32; 11.57. 144. Metzger, Textual Commentary, 190. 145. Metzger, Textual Commentary, 190; Wasserman, “The Patmos Family of New Testament MSS,” paragraph 41. 146. Maurice A. Robinson and William G. Pierpont, The New Testament in the Original Greek According to the Byzantine/Majority Textform (Roswell, GA: Original Word Publishers, 1991), 495 (with corrections now available in Maurice A. Robinson, “Preliminary Observations regarding the Pericope Adulterae based upon Fresh Col- lations of Nearly All Continuous-Text Manuscripts and All Lectionary Manuscripts Containing the Passage,” Filologia neotestamentaria 1 [2000]: 54–55). 532 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES of the interlocutors. Without it, one might develop an interpretation such as is found in the Didascalia Aspostolorum where the men simply bring the woman to Jesus and leave before the judgment is rendered. The comment regarding their pricked consciences further identifies these men as sinners. Finally, the specification regarding the content of Jesus’ writing singles out the interlocutors for special condemnation. Without this gloss, the meaning of Jesus’ enigmatic action remains obscure, open to a variety of interpretive possibilities. After all, the accusers simply left. Perhaps they, like the woman, avoided condemnation.147 With the addition “he wrote every one of their sins on the ground,” such an interpretation is made increasingly difficult. Therefore, these textual emendations do not simply satisfy pious curiosity, they control the meaning of the story, confirming Jesus’ divine knowledge and depicting the interlocutors unambiguously: they are sinners with guilty consciences and hostile intentions toward both the woman and Jesus.

ANTI-JUDAISM, SACRED TEXT, AND THE SCRIPT As we have seen, the presumed meaning of the pericope adulterae has been as fluid as its text. Multiple meanings have been imputed into this story from the moment it first appeared until today. The woman could be viewed as innocent (Papias, the Protevangalium Iacobi, perhaps Didymus the Blind), or guilty of a sin (the Didascalia Apostolorum, Didymus the Blind, the D-text), sins (Papias), or adultery (the majority of witnesses). In a particularly unique twist, pseudo-Zacharias thought she was pregnant by adultery. The interlocutors were identified as elders (Didascalia), Jews (Didymus, Ambrose, Augustine, the D-text at verse 9), scribes and Pharisees (Jerome, the majority of textual witnesses, including the D-text at verse 3), and priests (a few manuscript witnesses, including the D-text at verse 4). Their intentions were also variously interpreted: they sought Jesus’ opinion (Didascalia), they wanted to test or tempt him (the majority of manuscript witnesses, Ambrose, Augustine, Cassiodorus), they were eager for the woman’s death (Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine), and they desired not only her death but Jesus’ death as well (Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, Cassiodorus). Their guilt was also a subject of creative debate: they had guilty consciences (Didymus, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, Byz- antine Gospel books), they were sinners (Didymus, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, Byzantine Gospel books), and they were damned (Ambrose,

147. A possibility mentioned by Gail O’Day, “John 7:53–8:11: A Study in Mis- reading,” JBL 111 (1992): 640. KNUST/PERICOPE ADULTERAE 533

Jerome, Augustine, Cassiodorus). The content of Jesus’ writing, once this feature was added to the narrative, provided rich ground for speculation. Augustine offered six different possibilities, repeating the ideas of his predecessors while adding his own. The pericope adulterae, then, has contained multiple and sometimes conflicting meanings. Still, beginning in fourth century, interpretive asides and editorial glosses specifying the sins of the Jews became prevalent, controlling the story’s “true meaning.” This story had become yet another proof of Jewish hostility, culpability, and damnation. The struggle for imperial favor first granted to Christianity under Constantine and then consolidated under the Theodosian emperors was achieved, in part, by a Christian discourse that used Jews to think with.148 As Seth Schwartz observes, hostility to Jews and Judaism expressed in imperial Christian writing “reached an unprecedentedly high pitch” that was “increasingly reflected in imperial legislation, as well as in an every increasing number of local acts of persecution and violence.”149 We have already noted Ambrose’s participation in both this rhetoric and in the development of anti-Jewish imperial policy, including his efforts to undermine the rebuilding of a synagogue in Callinicum. It is perhaps no accident, then, that anti-Jewish readings of the pericope adulterae first appear at this time. Nevertheless, anti-Jewish commentary on the part of the Christian authors we have surveyed was specific and contextual, put forward to accomplish particular ends. Didymus’s off-hand remarks about the bad consciences of the Jews in this story participated in a larger effort on his part to create a Christian paideia on the basis of the Septuagint. Ambrose’s suggestions regarding Christian involvement in capital cases, made, in part, by means of exegesis of the pericope adulterae, furthered his political efforts on behalf of Nicene Christians. Augustine’s emphasis on the mercy of God and the justice of divine law, Mosaic and Christian, informed his exegesis. Still, he repeated a series of anti-Jewish asides, thereby satisfying his interest in promoting an impression of orthodox consensus. Though each of these authors had his own reasons for presenting the pericope adulterae in the ways that he did, the cumulative effect of their arguments was to empha- size the hostility and culpability of Jews. This interpretive tradition had a wide impact, such that later Christians read the pericope adulterae as

148. Jacobs, Remains of the Jews, 25. Also see Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society 200 BCE to 640 CE (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 179–202; Averil Cameron, The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, AD 395–600 (London: Routledge, 1993), 57–80. 149. Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, 181. 534 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES being about Jewish sin and edited their gospel books accordingly. What began as particular, specific instances of anti-Jewish interpretive expansion became general and traditional.150 Nevertheless, traces of earlier readings lingered. An association with the story of Susanna and the elders was maintained long after patristic com- mentators had come to assume the adulteress’s guilt. Reading the pericope adulterae at Santa Susanna each Lenten season, the Roman church was reminded of the forgiveness of the adulteress even as they remembered the Susanna rescued by Daniel and the (legendary) Roman martyr, Susanna niece of Pope Caius, supposedly executed under Diocletian for refusing to marry or recant her Christianity.151 Then there was the curious, persistent

150. A direct literary relationship between patristic exegesis and scribal gloss would be difficult to prove. We cannot know when a particular reading entered the gospel tradition, only that it was in place by the time a particular manuscript was copied. Therefore, it is possible that interpretive elaborations regarding the Jews were already in place in some gospel manuscripts before Jerome ever suggested that Jesus wrote the sins of each in the ground. A widespread and by then well-established tradition of anti-Judaism may have been enough to convince scribe and church father alike that this story was a reprimand of the Jews. Still, interaction between patristic exegesis and the developing Byzantine gospel tradition is possible. As Sansterre has shown, one could find Greek books in Rome throughout the seventh and eighth centuries and Greek-Latin bilingualism was not unknown in the city. Thus, Greek-speaking Christians and monks may well have heard versions of the sorts of interpretations offered by Latin fourth- and fifth-century patristic authors (Jean-Marie Sansterre,Les moines grecs et orientaux à Rome aux époques byzantine et carolingienne: milieu du VIe s–fin du IXe s, Mémoires de la Classe des lettres 2.66 [Bruxelles: Palais des acadé- mies, 1933], 65–76, 174–206). Also, compilations of orthodox patristic exegesis and commentary were available from the late fifth century onward.Florilegia prepared for church councils included works of Latin fathers, translated into Greek for the benefit of Greek council participants (see Alexander Alexakis, Codex Parisinus Graecus 1115 and Its Archetype [Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collec- tion, 1996], 1–42). In other words, there were frequent and consistent interactions between Greek- and Latin-speaking Christians throughout this period. Therefore, a relationship between Latin patristic exegesis and Byzantine gospel traditions cannot be ruled out. However this interpretive unison was achieved, it is clear that by late antiquity the meaning of the story had become more and more fixed, at least when it came to the Jews. 151. This legend was composed in the late fifth or early sixth century and thetitulus Gai renamed in her honor. On Santa Susanna, see Hippolyte Delehaye, Les origines du culte des martyrs, 2nd rev. ed. (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1933), 275–76; Charles Pietri, Roma Christiana: Recherches sur l’Église de Rome, son organisation, sa politique, son idéologie de Miltiade à Sixte III (311–440) (Bibliothèque des écoles françaises d’Athènes et de Rome 224; Paris: École Française de Rome, 1976), vol. 1, 498–514. On the association between the titulus Gai and Santa Susanna, see Pio Frachi de’Cavalieri, Note Agiografiche, Fascicolo 7, Studi e Testi 49 (Rome: Tipo- grafia Poliglotta Vaticana, 1928), 185–202. The Susanna from the Septuagint version KNUST/PERICOPE ADULTERAE 535 textual instability at the point of the story when the accusers leave. All the manuscripts, Greek and Latin, indicate that they left “beginning with the elders” or “from the eldest,” or some variation of the same. Could this instability be linked to earlier traditions that identified these men as “elders,” perhaps on analogy with the elders and Susanna? Susanna may linger here as well. One also wonders if the odd comment regarding a pregnant adulteress, found in the Chronicle of pseudo-Zacharias Rhetor, may reflect the continuing influence of an interpretation along the lines of the Protevangelium Iacobi. As noted above, in that story, Mary was discovered to be pregnant, possibly as a result of porne¤a, only to be vin- dicated by means of the test of the bitter water. Perhaps Mary and the adulteress had been further confused, such that the adulteress had now become pregnant as well. If it is the case, as I asserted at the start of this essay, that the creation, dissemination, and interpretation of sacred text is also an act of social scripting, then we might ask: What sort of script is this? Interpretive expansions and scribal rewritings are not innocent but implicated in a larger effort at social and scriptural fixing and, in the case of thepericope adulterae, this scripting came to specify Jewish sin and the woman’s guilt. These interpretive turns may seem obvious or even inevitable in light of late antique interest both in “sinning women” and in a Christian hegemony achieved, in part, by assertions about Jews.152 Yet no single reading was of Daniel remained popular in Rome and throughout the Western church. There are early images of Susanna and the elders in the catacombs of Priscilla, she is mentioned by Novatian, Athanasius, Cyril, Ambrose, Cyprian, Eusebius, and others, and was memorialized in a glorious crystal goblet produced for the Carolingian emperors. See Temi de iconografia paleocristiana,Sussidi allo studio delle antichità cristiana 13 (Città del Vaticano: Pontificio Instiuto di archeologia cristiana, 2000), s.v. “Susanna”; Betsy Halpern-Amaru, “The Journey of Susanna among the Church Fathers,” in The Judg- ment of Susanna: Authority and Witness, ed. Ellen Spolsky, SBL Early Judaism and Its Literature 11 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996), 21–34; L. V. Rutgers, Subterranean Rome: In Search of the Roots of Christianity in the Catacombs of the Eternal City (Leuven: Peeters, 2000), 98; Valerie I. J. Flint, “Susanna and the Lothar Crystal: A Liturgical Perspective,” Early Medieval Europe 4 (1995): 61–86. 152. On the significance of viewing the woman as a pitiable sinner, see O’Day, “John 7:53–8:11: A Study in Misreading,” 631–36. Prostitute saints become popular in late antiquity and are treated in a manner similar to the way that Augustine treats the adulteress: as the most miserable sinners imaginable, their transformation in Christ demonstrates God’s extraordinary mercy and power. John Chysostom makes precisely this point when discussing an unnamed prostitute in a homily on Matthew: “Let no one who lives in vice despair; let no one who lives in virtue slumber. Let neither the latter be confident, for often the prostitute will pass him by; nor the other despair, for it is possible to surpass even the first” (Hom. in Matt 77.4 [PG 62:636]). This 536 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES guaranteed, nor did any one reading prevail for all time. Indeed, modern interpreters continue to rethink and rewrite this story in ways that expose their own interests and projects, be they text critics who insist that the story ought to be expunged because it was not part of the original Gospel of John or feminist critics who argue that the story demonstrates Jesus’ refusal to view anyone as an object.153 Demoting the pericope adulterae to brackets, text critics do more than marginalize the story, they demonstrate their own scientific fitness and scholarly expertise. Feminist critics, arguing that the story is really about a divine insistence on the full humanity for women, do not simply uncover the “true meaning” of the pericope, buried under centuries of androcentrism, they find scriptural warrant for their understanding of Christian feminism. In other words, the interweaving of social and sacred text continues apace and the pericope adulterae, with its evocative instability and tantalizingly empty narrative, provides particularly fertile soil for just this sort of cultural work.

Jennifer Wright Knust is an Assistant Professor at the Boston University School of Theology, Boston, Massachusettts

sort of interpretation made a particular impression on Byzantine liturgy, such that the pericope adulterae was read on the feast day of Saint Pelagia (as noted above, the date of this association is not clear). On Saint Pelagia, see Pierre Petitmengin, Péla- gie la Pénitente: Métamorphoses d’une légende (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1981). Maria, the niece of Abraham, and Mary of Egypt offer further examples. Maria, niece of Abraham is described in the Life of Abraham, CSCO 322–23, Scriptores Syri, 140–41; the Life of St. Mary of Egypt may be found in PG 87(3): 3693–726 and PL 73:671–90. For English translations, see Benedicta Ward, Harlots of the Desert (Kal- amazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1987) and Sebastian Brock and Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Holy Women of the Syrian Orient (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987). 153. See, for example, Bruce Metzger, The Text of the New Testament: Its Trans- mission, Corruption, and Restoration (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), v (the title of this work is revealing). Feminist interpretations of this story include those of O’Day, Gench, Scott, and Luise Schottroff, Lydia’s Impatient Sisters: A Feminist Social History of Early Christianity, trans. Barbara and Martin Rumscheidt (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995), 180–85. I am sympathetic with these readings, but I would argue that they produce one possible and historically situated meaning for this story rather than the truth of its contents and implications. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.