by Jack Miles
But is it because Jerusalem is rejecting God Incarnate that he will abandon them to the Romans? It may as easily be the other way around: Because God knows that he will abandon Jerusalem to the Romans, he must arrange for Jerusalem to abandon him to the Romans first. They must abandon their God to the enemy so that he may be exonerated when, as it will seem to them, he abandons them to the same enemy. The destruction of Jerusalem, like the death of the Messiah, will be preceded by raucous Jewish quarrels—in fact, by a true civil war—and followed by a deathly silence. The first atrocity is a gloss, in advance, on the second.
At moments like these, Jesus seems to locate himself in the eternity whence he comes (“In the beginning was the Word”). That the Temple auditors hear so little suggests to the reader that perhaps, even with the best will, no one can hear everything that is being said. Some of them think, with a naive literalism, that if Jesus is going so far away that he cannot be followed, then he must be leaving Judea for the Greek-speaking diaspora around the Mediterranean. Their guess misses all that is dark and vast about Jesus’ statement, yet—irony within irony—they are right by being wrong. The word Greeks as they use it need not imply Gentiles, any more than the word Galileans does. Just as there are Galilean Jews, or Galileans accepted as children of Israel, so also are there Greek Jews. In other words, the word Greeks, deliberately ambiguous, may refer either to Greek-speaking Jews of the diaspora or to the much larger population of Gentiles in the huge Greek-speaking Mediterranean world. But in either sense, the mistaken guess of those who listened to Jesus is true in a way they do not guess, for Christianity will spread around the Mediterranean by traveling, at first, from synagogue to synagogue through a network of Greek-speaking Jewish communities, only later spreading outward from those communities into the larger Gentile world. Paul will do what those listening to Jesus guess that he himself may be about to do.
Meanwhile, in the eyes of the Jewish authorities, any full-blooded Jew who would defend this Galilean risks being damned as an ignorant Galilean himself—ignorant of the law and therefore doomed to break it and to fall under the Lord’s curse: “Accursed be anyone who does not uphold the words of this law by observing them” (Deut. 27:26). Nicodemus tries to fight Deuteronomy with Deuteronomy, alluding to Deuteronomy 1:17: “You shall not be partial in judgment; you shall hear the small and the great alike” (RSV). His efforts fail, but the failure matters little: Jesus’ enemies are powerless against him, for “his hour [has] not yet come” (John 8:20), and it will not come a moment sooner than he wishes.
HE REFUSES TO CONDEMN AN ADULTERESS
Under the Jewish law of Jesus’ day, adultery was a sin with a different meaning for men and for women. If a married man had sexual relations with an unmarried, unbetrothed woman, he was not guilty of adultery; but if a married woman had sexual relations with any man other than her husband, she was guilty of adultery and would be stoned to death if caught. As for the unmarried, a woman observant of the law was allowed no sexual relations before marriage, and her abstinence was enforced by her family. A man observant of the law faced no comparable prohibition, though in general the only unmarried women culturally available for sex were prostitutes.
Consent played no role in these reckonings. Sexual access to a young woman was a family asset, and he who stole that asset risked reprisal, even if the young woman was willing. The greater peril by far, however, was hers. A bride who could not produce the blood proof of her virginity on her wedding night could be stoned to death. A man risked death only when the woman he slept with was married or betrothed to someone else and when he was caught in the act by two eyewitnesses.
Circumstantial evidence was not enough to convict either a man or a woman of adultery. However, here too there was a double standard. In the absence of the required eyewitness testimony, a husband suspicious of his wife could bring her before a priest, who would require her to drink “the water of bitterness,” water mixed with dust from the floor of the Tabernacle or Temple. If she was guilty, the Lord would strike her “thigh” (a euphemism for her genitals)—that is, she would suffer a painful urinary infection—and she would say “Amen, Amen,” admitting her sin. At this point, she would fall under the Lord’s curse against adultery and could be put to death (Num. 5:12–31). No provision was made for a suspicious wife to require her husband to drink the water of bitterness.
Despite what this double standard might seem to suggest, adultery was not seen ultimately as the betrayal of a husband by a wife but as an offense against God. Accordingly, a wronged husband did not have the right to commute the death sentence of an adulterous wife to some smaller punishment. Adultery was close to an unforgivable sin. Only apostasy matched it in gravity, an equation that explains, in part, why these two sins were so closely associated in ancient Israelite prophecy.
Against this background, what is the already endangered Jesus to say when a woman caught in the act of adultery is brought before him in the Temple itself?
At dawn, Jesus appeared in the Temple again. All the people gathered around him, and he sat down and began to teach them. The scribes and Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in the act of adultery. Forcing her to stand there in the middle, they said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the Law, Moses has ordered us to stone women like this. What say you?” They asked him this as a test, seeking a charge to use against him. But Jesus bent down and started writing in the dust with his finger. When they persisted in their questioning, he rose up and said, “Let him among you who is without sin cast the first stone at her.” Then he bent down again and resumed writing in the dust. When they heard this, they went away one by one, beginning with the eldest, and Jesus was left alone, and the woman still standing there in the middle. Jesus stood up and said, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”
“No one, sir,” she replied.
“Neither do I condemn you,” said Jesus. “Be on your way, and from now on sin no more.” (John 8:2–11)
In the classic manner of biblical narrative, this episode stops just short of making perfect sense, forcing the reader by its economy to complete its sense by answering the questions it leaves unanswered.
A first and obvious question: Is the woman innocent or guilty? Jesus is not asked to make that determination. The scribes and Pharisees present her as unquestionably guilty, a woman who has literally been caught in the act. But are they telling the truth?
An answer is suggested by the fact that Jesus begins writing on the ground. From writing on the ground, it is a small step to writing on the wall. What Jesus may intend to bring to the mind of the scribes, experts in scripture, is the scene in the Book of Daniel in which writing appears ominously on the wall at a feast held by a doomed Babylonian monarch. If the words that Jesus writes on the ground are the famous (and quickly written) Aramaic words mene, mene, teqel, and parsin (Dan. 5), then there may come quickly to the scribal mind the fact that Daniel had once rescued a woman falsely accused of adultery. On that occasion (Dan. 13), two of the most respected elders in the community had hidden themselves in the beautiful Susanna’s locked garden, accosted her as she bathed, and said that unless she lay with them, they would report that they had come upon her in the garden lying with a young man who had escaped when discovered. She refused them, they carried out their threat, and her stoning was about to begin when Daniel broke in to expose inconsistencies in their testimony. In the end, Susanna was spared, and the perjured elders were stoned to death in her place.
As we noted earlier, Jesus reads minds. Like Daniel, he has the powers of a seer. As he delays his reply and writes on the ground (the one and only time Jesus is described as writing), is this the chain of association he wants to call to their minds?
Other questions arise. For one, why does Jesus bend down? To write on the ground, one must look down, of course, but Jesus may have had a second reason. A convicted adulteress was stripped naked before her stoning. A woman caugh
t in the act of adultery might be unveiled humiliatingly for her trial (as Susanna was) or even stripped to the waist. After writing what he writes, Jesus looks up only long enough to speak a single sentence to the scribes and Pharisees, then looks down again. By the time he looks up for the second time, the men are gone; and if her clothes were disheveled, the woman has had time to rearrange them. Speculative? Of course. Historical? Certainly not: The story of the adulteress brought to Jesus in the Temple is a very late addition to the Gospel of John with a particularly weak claim to historicity. But it is impossible to exclude it from the imagination and therefore from a literary reading of this episode.
Stoning was a form of execution designed not to exclude the community at large, as is the case today with the sanitized barbarity of capital punishment in the United States, but to involve it both physically and emotionally. There was no designated executioner. The men of the community did the killing themselves, all participating in the same way at the same time, a rule that, in a close-knit community, must have served as a deterrent, rather than an incentive, to the use of capital punishment. There was just one exception to the rule of execution by universal, simultaneous action, but it happens to bear directly on Jesus’ response. In the case of an apostate convicted by at least two eyewitnesses, according to Deuteronomy 17:5–7, the stones were not to be thrown all at once. The witnesses were required to throw the first stones; only then could the other men of the community join in.
Is this a clue to Jesus’ strategy when he speaks so unexpectedly of the throwing of the first stone? Under Mosaic law, when an adulteress as distinct from an apostate was to be stoned, the eyewitnesses, of whom the husband would almost always be one, were not required to throw the first stone. The law that did not permit a husband to spare an adulterous wife did, at least, provide that he would not himself have to take the lead in bashing her to death. But is Jesus intensifying the law, rather than breaking it, in the paradoxical way we have seen him manage before? Could this be what is meant when he says, “Let him among you who is without sin cast the first stone at her”? Is the import, in other words, “Let the innocent party—the wronged husband—begin the execution of the guilty party”? If so, then Jesus is once again employing his strategy of shaming by paradoxical hyperagreement. The younger men might not take the point immediately, but the older men certainly would. They might appreciate that even a husband who wanted to see his cheating wife die in an anonymous hail of rocks would not want to throw the first rock himself, with the eyes of his fellows—not to speak of her eyes—fixed upon him.
A fourth question arises. What if, instead of this paradoxical hyperagreement with the Law of Moses, Jesus had put himself in routine and uncontroversial agreement with it? What if he had replied simply, “If the Law of Moses says to stone her, then do what you must do”? What sort of “charge to use against him” would that reply occasion? If the scribes and Pharisees are laying a trap, how does the trap spring shut?
Elsewhere, the Gospel of John 18:31 states that under the Roman occupation, Jewish authorities have been deprived of the right to inflict capital punishment. Granting that this is the case, if Jesus takes it upon himself to say that the adulteress should be stoned, he will have broken the laws of Rome. But if Jesus says the woman should be spared or even brought before the Roman authorities, he will have broken the Law of Moses. Either way, he will have provided his enemies an accusation to use against him. Either way, he will have been stopped.
The scribes and Pharisees, protecting themselves against the Romans, do not say, “Join us in stoning this sinner.” They stop short of saying even “We believe that she should be stoned. What do you believe?” But subtle as his opponents are, Jesus is subtler still. In the end, it is they who must retreat, and so it happens once again that the bridegroom of Israel finds himself alone with a woman of questionable—or, at any rate, questioned—reputation. In the stunned privacy of the moment he could say anything he wanted, about adultery or anything else. What does he choose to say?
Strikingly, though he says nothing either to affirm her innocence or to diminish the gravity of adultery as a sin, he chooses not to condemn her, even privately. Recall that he is God and that the rule of stoning is a rule that he himself established. Why has he broken it? What explanation can be offered when he says, “Neither do I condemn you,” other than that he has grown more merciful?
According to Exodus 34:6, a passage already quoted, the Lord is “a god merciful and gracious, slow to wrath, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love unto the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin, but letting nothing pass and visiting the sins of the parents upon the children and the children’s children unto the third and the fourth generation.” But God has never, in his long life, allowed his mercy to overcome his justice as Joseph, in the Book of Genesis, does when he spares Judah, the half-brother whose idea it had been to sell the boy Joseph into Arab slavery for twenty shekels of silver. The triumph of mercy comes when Judah, not recognizing the now grown Joseph, offers himself as Joseph’s slave in exchange for the freedom of Benjamin, Joseph’s full brother. Joseph in that moment (Gen. 44–45), touched by Judah’s selfless courage, spares him when, in accordance with the law, he might have had him put to death. These actions set a standard of mercy that God himself has so far never met. But he meets it with this woman. Is God changing?
Between the lines of more than a few Psalms, Israel hoped that God would change. For example, a softened, poetic expansion of Exodus 34:6 is offered in Psalm 103:8–14 (italics added):
The Lord is merciful and gracious,
slow to wrath and abounding in steadfast love.
He will not always chide,
nor will he hold his anger forever.
He does not deal with us by the measure of our sins,
nor requite us in proportion to our iniquities.
For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his steadfast love for those who fear him.
And as far as the east is from the west,
so far does he remove our transgressions from us.
As a father pities his children,
so the Lord pities those who fear him,
For he knows our frame,
he remembers that we are dust.
If we grant that the alleged adulteress is an actual adulteress and that she has been brought before God Incarnate, then the Psalmist’s hope seems not to have been in vain. Men, speaking for the Lord, were prepared to deal with her according to her iniquity. The Lord himself has chosen to remember that she is dust.
The long-suffering Job yearned to see such a moment, a moment when righteous men, men who presumed to speak for God, would be struck dumb as God spoke simply but eloquently for himself. To God’s presumptuous defenders, Job—tempted to (and accused of) blasphemy—said:
Will you speak falsehood for God,
and lie on his behalf?
Do you presume to do favors for him,
and make his case for him?
Will it go well for you when he finds you out?
Or do you think to fool him as you fool men?
Will he not expose you
if you hide your bias?
Will his majesty not terrify you,
and dread of him overwhelm you?
(13:7–11)
The Lord tarried long before vindicating the supposedly blasphemous Job, but in the end he rebuked those who presumed to defend God just as Job had dreamed he would. “You have not spoken rightly of me,” the Lord said to them, “as has my servant Job” (42:8).
If the Lord has grown more merciful, then those who think to do his will by stoning an adulteress proceed on a false premise. Moreover, those who, figuratively speaking, would stone Israel, saying that the nation’s infidelity has made its continuing oppression well deserved, serve him equally ill. The husband of the adulteress was not the only innocent party in the circle of men standing around
her. If stones were to be thrown, surely Jesus himself met his own criterion. Surely he was sinless enough to have thrown the first stone, but he chose not to do so. As he refrains from condemning her, will he now, as God Incarnate, refrain as well from condemning Israel?
Hitherto, the perfect innocence of God has been the premise for all the abuse that he has seen fit to heap upon Israel. He was the faithful bridegroom, she the faithless bride. But is the premise still adequate? In his relations with Israel, the Lord has been like an outraged husband who, just before he rips off his wife’s blouse and smashes her in the mouth, screams out the damning word “Slut!” He insisted that the Assyrians and the Babylonians were not battering Israel, he was doing so, but then had he not every right? What husband, wronged as he had been wronged, would do less? Once, God spoke that way, but does he still?
Just what are the rights of a cuckolded husband? On an earlier occasion, some Pharisees had approached Jesus and, “to put him to the test, said, ‘Is it against the Law for a man to divorce his wife on any pretext whatever?’ ” Some taught that adultery was the only ground for divorce. Others admitted other, less weighty grounds. What position did Jesus take?
He replied, “Have you not read that the Creator from the beginning created them male and female and that he said: This is why a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife, and the two become one flesh? So then they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let no man put asunder.”
They said to him, “Why then did Moses establish that by a writ of dismissal a man could divorce his wife?” He said to them, “It was because you were so hard-hearted that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but it was not like this in the beginning.” (Matt. 19:4–8)
