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 inter- pretations 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 inter- locutors 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 influ- ence 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, defini- tion, 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 devel- oped, purporting to offer privileged access to the meaning of the text; new text critical methods are invented which, in theory at least, permit a bet- ter 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 bib- lical 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 remark- ably 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.