Pericope Adulterae

Pericope Adulterae is an interpolation.
For a thousand years prior to the Renaissance, the Latin translation known as the Vulgate had been the Bible in common use, and the Greek text was largely ignored. This changed in the 1500s, which brought a renewed interest in compiling the original versions for study and comparison with Latin. The first to complete a modern compilation of the Greek text was Erasmus, who consulted as many libraries as he had access to, and compiled what he thought to be the authoritative text, or “received text,” which was supposedly the text directly as had been received from the authors. Thus its name, the Textus Receptus. This version became the foundation for new translations into the common tongues of the day (English, German, etc.) as most of the population could not speak or understand Latin anymore. The King James used the TR as its foundation, and many modern translations are updates or revisions of the KJV text (RSV, ESV, NASB, NKJV, AMP, etc).

It wasn’t until much later that manuscripts were uncovered or made available in the West that scholars noticed were lacking the Pericope Adulterae. Since the story appeared in early translations like Wycliffe and the King James, and it proved to be quite popular, modern translations kept it, albeit as a footnote or in brackets. It’s impossible to be absolutely certain it’s a later addition, but it’s highly likely that it was.
There is strong consensus from conservative to liberal that the passage is not part of John’s Gospel.
This story is dismissed as non-canonical based on its very poor manuscript evidence. There are no major Greek manuscripts prior to the eighth century that include the story except Codex Bezae, possible the most free of all the uncials. It is known in the Old Latin versions, indicating that the story was known in the western church. The western fathers are aware of the story as well (Ambrose (d. 397), Pacian of Barcelona (c. 350), Ambrosiaster (d. 350) and Augustine (d. 430) and Jerome (d. 419)). There are many ninth century byzantine texts that include the story, but often with an indication by the scribe that the story was doubtful. It is missing in all major Greek manuscripts and in all eastern versions and eastern fathers, as well as the earliest lectionaries.

Internal evidence is not much better. The location of the story shifts from John 7:53 to the end of John, to after Luke 21:38 (The Farrar group) or Luke 24:53 (a corrector of mss 1333). Gary Burge notes that the story fits awkwardly in the flow of John’s gospel, possibly explaining the wide variety of placements within the New Testament. Additionally, the twelve verses of the story have the highest rate of major text variants in the New Testament.

Here is an article in a conservative journal which argues the story is not part of John’s Gospel. Gary M. Burge, “A Specific Problem In The New Testament Text And Canon: The Woman Caught In Adultery (John 7:53-8:11)” JETS 27 (1984): 141-148.
The Pericope Adulterae is not in P66 and P75, both assigned to the late 100s or early 200s. Nor is it in Codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. The first surviving Greek manuscript to contain the pericope is the diglot Codex Bezae, produced in the 400s or 500s (& the form of its text has affinities with “Western” readings used in the 100s and 200s). Codex Bezae is also the earliest surviving Latin manuscript to contain it.
Larry Hurtado argues for it as a later addition, not in the original gospel.
https://ehrmanblog.org/the-woman-taken-in-adultery-in-the-king-james-version/

Scholarly articles that argue for Pericope Adulterae being an interpolation:

Cf. P. W. Comfort, Commentary, 258–259; C. Keith, ‘The Pericope Adulterae: A Theory of Attentive Insertion’, in D. A. Black and J. N. Cerone (eds.), The Pericope of the Adulteress in Contemporary Research (LNTS 551; Bloomsbury T&T Clark: London [et al.] 2016), 89–113 (esp. 90–93); J. Zumstein, Johannesevangelium, 316–317. For an analysis of distinctively Lucan features of Jn 7:53–8:11, see K. R. Hughes, ‘The Lukan Special Material and the Tradition History of the Pericope Adulterae’, NovT 55 (2013) 232–251 (esp. 238–239).

Text-Critical Problems

The original Greek text of John 7:53-8:11 is unclear: more than 80 textual variants can be found in this passage of 183 word (J. Rius-Camps, ―The Pericope of the Adulteress Reconsidered. The Nomadic Misfortunes of a Bold Pericope‖, NTS 53 (2007): 383). Originally, the pericope did not belong to the Fourth Gospel (B.M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (London: United Bible Societies, 1975), 219-222). Metzger has submitted three arguments for this:
This:

• a) **the passage is missing in many early and authoritative Greek manuscripts and ancient translations; **
• b) the language and the style of John 7:53-8:11 deviate from the rest of the Fourth Gospel;
• c) this passage interrupts the connection between John 7:52 and 8:12 (P.H.R. van Houwelingen, Johannes. Het Evangelie van het Woord (Commentaar op het Nieuwe Testament; 3rd ed.; Kampen: Kok, 2007), 428-429)
  Initially, this story was reputedly excluded from the Gospels because of Jesus‘ rather too tolerant attitude towards adultery. In a number of manuscripts, it was later inserted in various places in the Gospels, not only following John 7:52 (as in Deuteronomy, in some old Latin manuscripts, in the Vulgate, and in many late Greek minuscules), but also after John 7:36, or 7:44, or 21:25, or after Luke 21:38 or 24:53 (U. Becker, Jesus und die Ehebrecherin. Untersuchungen zur Text- und Überlieferungsgeschichte von Joh. 7,53-8,11 (BZNW 28; Berlin: Verlag Alfred Töpelmann, 1963). A recent study on the origin of the pericope is provided by J. Rius-Camps, ―The Pericope of the Adulteress Reconsidered. The Nomadic Misfortunes of a Bold Pericope‖, NTS 53 (2007): 379-405).

According to B.D. Ehrman, ―Jesus and the Adulteress‖, NTS 34 (1988): 24 44 (37), three versions of the story circulated by the fourth century AD: ―(1) the entrapment story in which Jesus freely pardons a sinful woman, known to Papias and the author of the Didascalia, (2) the story of Jesus‘ intervention in an execution proceeding, preserved in the Gospel according to the Hebrews and retold by Didymus in his Ecclesiastes commentary, and (3) the popular version found in MSS of the Gospel of John, a version which represents a conflation of the two earlier stories” (D. Lührmann, ―Die Geschichte von einer Sünderin und andere apokryphe Jesusüberlieferungen bei Didymos von Alexandrien‖, NT 32 (1990): 289 316).

Textual Corruption (Prof. Wasserman)

A few scribes, unsure about how they ought to handle differences between their exemplars, appended the tale of the adulteress to the end of the Gospel (Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson, The Palestinian Syriac Lectionary of the Gospels, Re-Edited from Two Sinai MSS. and from P. de la Garde’s Edition of the “Evangeliarium Hierosolymitanum”; Matthew Morgenstern, “Christian Palestinian Aramaic,” in The Semitic Languages: An International Handbook, 628–37 (esp. 631); Lucas Van Rompay, “Christian Writings in Christian Palestinian Aramaic,” in Encyclopedia of Religious and Philosophical Writings in Late Antiquity: Pagan, Judaic, Christian, 64–65). In one family of manuscripts, the pericope was incorporated into the Gospel of Luke (Jacob Geerlings, Family 13 (The Ferrar Group): The Text according to Luke; Bernard Botte, “Ferrar (groupe de manuscrits),” in Supplément au dictionnaire de la Bible, 3:272–74; Didier Lafleur, La Famille 13 dans l’evangile de Marc; Jac Dean Perrin Jr., “Family 13 in St. John’s Gospel”); other locations were also possible, includ ing after John 7:36, 7:44, 8:12, or between Luke and John (Chris Keith, The Pericope Adulterae, the Gospel of John, and the Literacy of Jesus, 120–21; Kurt Aland, Barbara Aland, and Klaus Wachtel, eds., Text und Textwert der griechischen Handschriften des Neuen Testaments, part 5, Das Johannesevangelium, vol. 1, 2.211–15; Maurice A. Robinson, “Preliminary Observations regarding the Pericope Adulterae Based upon Fresh Collations of Nearly All Continuous-Text Manuscripts and All Lectionary Manuscripts Containing the Passage,” Filología Neotestamentaria 13 (2000): 35–59).

The memory of the story’s uncertain place in the Gospel was retained. Byzantine scribes often placed a series of asterisks next to the text, either to indicate that it should be skipped by the reader (the passage was omitted from the Pentecost liturgy, which jumped to John 8:12) or to show that it was spurious (Codex Basiliensis; Basel, Universitätsbibliothek AN III 12, fol. 276; Codex Petropolitanus; Codex Tischendorfianus III; Codex Athos Dionysiou). A few scribes left a blank space where it could be copied, but omitted it just the same (Codex Sangallensis). Augustine, aware of the problem with the passage, proposed an unlikely explanation for the story’s occasional omission from the Gospels: it is not found in every copy of John, he argued, because “men of slight faith,” afraid that their wives might commit adultery after hearing about the woman, deleted it (Adulterous Marriages 2.7.6) (De adulterinis coniugiis, CSEL 41:345–410; H.A.G. Houghton, Augustine’s Text of John: Patristic Citations and Latin Gospel Manuscripts, 258–59, 346–47).

Other (newly) spurious passages have been treated differently. For example, the Longer Ending of Mark—the only other interpolated Gospel text as lengthy as the pericope adulterae—came to be regarded by the majority of scholars as a supplementary addition, placed there either by the evangelist himself or by an inventive secondary editor who sought to harmonize this Gospel with the others (James A. Kelhoffer, Miracle and Mission: The Authentication of Missionaries and Their Message in the Longer Ending of Mark, WUNT 2.112, 1-46). Among those who ac cepted the theory of an interpolated Longer Ending, the historicity of its con tents also became suspect, and investigations into the “original sense” or “original audience” of the Longer Ending were therefore transferred to the early second century.

1. The Pericope Adulterae and the Rise of Modern Textual Criticism

The Pericope Adulterae and Biblical Scholarship

Rudolf Bultmann’s influential commentary on the Gospel of John (1964) included the following notice in a footnote printed at the bottom of the page: “As the textual tradition shows, 7.53–8.11 belonged neither to the Fourth Gos pel in its original form, nor to the ecclesiastical redaction, and it is therefore omitted here” (Rudolf Bultmann, Das Evangelium des Johannes; trans. by G. R. Beasley-Murray, Rudolf Bultmann, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, 312n2). C.H. Dodd’s commentary (1953) adopted a similar approach; in a note buried at the bottom of the discussion of John 7:1–52, Dodd stated: “The Pericope Adulterae, vii.53–viii.11 in the Textus Receptus, is omitted as being no part of the original text of this Gospel” (C. H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, 346n1). States had argued actively for the story’s exclusion in their commentaries, of fering little in the way of exegesis and much more on the reasons for the story’s appropriate exclusion. Bernhard Weiss (1902), Theodor Zahn (1904), and Walter Bauer (1925), for example, listed and discussed evidence already known to Griesbach, Lachmann, Nestle, and others, refusing to treat the pas sage as Johannine (Bernhard Weiss, Das Johannes-Evangelium, 261–67; Theodor Zahn, Das Evangelium des Johannes, 398 (Excurs V, 712–18); Walter Bauer, Das Johannesevangelium). Alfred Loisy (1921), J. H. Bernard (1929), and R. H. Light foot (1956) followed suit.

Chris Keith’s The Pericope Adulterae, the Gospel of John, and the Literacy of Jesus (2011), the most recent and lengthy study of the pericope adulterae to date, also takes a step away from these earlier approaches, but differently. Keith leaves aside questions of the story’s canonical status and historical veracity and instead addresses the implications of the interpolation of the peri cope within John. According to Keith, the story as told within John was in tended to portray Jesus as “grapho- literate,” that is, as fully literate and capable of competing with other literate men, particularly scribes (Keith, Pericope Adulterae, 141–60). Seeking to ex plain why the story was interpolated, not whether the story is true, historically speaking, Keith’s conclusion—the story was likely designed to resist out sider critique at a time when the church needed both literate leaders and a literate Jesus—argues against those, like Becker, Brown, and O’Day, who have suggested that the story was intentionally suppressed. On the contrary, Keith suggests, Jesus’s literacy had become such an important point of contention that this story was added to the Gospel of John after initial dissemination, perhaps as a response to those who denigrated Jesus’s lack of formal educa tion. Jesus knew how to read and write, this story insists in answer to the ques tion raised in John 7:15, “How does this man know his letters, when he has not been taught?” (Keith, Pericope Adulterae, esp. 203–4, 223–32, 249–56; Edgar J. Goodspeed, A History of Early Christian Literature, 7). Therefore, what Jesus wrote was not the issue, but that he wrote and how he wrote. In this interpretation, the historical setting of early Christianity, not of the historical Jesus, provides a key to the story’s meaning, to its placement within John, and to the intentionality of the interpolator, not the evangelist.

1. The Strange Case of the Missing Adulteress

Rejecting the pericope adulterae as a late non- Johannine interpolation in his study of early Christian papyri, a reappraisal of the text of the Gospels by Philip Comfort lamented the habit of printing the tradition at all: “True, the passage has been bracketed, or marked off with single lines . . . , or set in italics. But there it stands—an obstacle to reading the true narrative of John’s Gospel” (Philip Wesley Comfort, Early Manuscripts and Modern Translations of the New Testament, 116; Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra, “Is ‘Go and Sin No More’ Biblical?,” Christianity Today 52, no. 6 (2008): 46). Comfort argued that printing the story mars the Gospel and misleads contempo rary readers; its presence should be attributed to “misguided scribal liberty” rather than to the intentions of the evangelist (Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 187–90; Barrett, Gospel according to St. John, 491; Brown, Gospel according to John, 332–38; Lindars, Gospel of John, 305–6; Rudolf Schnackenburg, Gospel according to St. John, 2:162–69). Andreas J. Köstenberger ex presses a similar attitude in his Baker Exegetical Commentary on John: “proper conservatism and caution suggests that the passage be omitted from preaching in churches” and it should not be regarded as “part of the Christian canon” (Andreas J. Köstenberger, John, BECNT, 248). Still, some ancient Christians cannot have shared this perspective: somehow, somewhere, and in light of some other set of assumptions and concerns, this pericope was added to (or, less likely, omit ted from) the Gospel of John. By interpolating the pericope adulterae, as well as a few other remarkable passages and verses, some contingent of early Gos pel editors and/or scribes held a rather different attitude toward Gospel texts, one that enabled them to import (or delete) a large block of text like the peri cope adulterae.

Our task in this chapter is to try to imagine how this could have happened, especially since scribes generally copied their exemplars rather closely (James R. Royse, Scribal Habits in Early Greek New Testament Papyri). Unfortunately, no early Christian writer describes the editing principles that were applied to Gospel manuscripts at this early stage; thus, the initial rationale for the inclusion or exclusion of this story (and others as well) has been lost. Still, of this we can be sure: By the fourth century, two different Gospels of John were circulating, one with the pericope adulterae and one without it

The Transmission of the Gospel of John in the Second and Third Centuries

To date, eighteen second- and third- century papyri with portions of the Gospel of John have been found, all in Egypt, but no two are identical in their particulars (Egbert Schlarb and Dieter Lührmann, Fragmente apokryph gewordener Evangelien in Griechischer und Lateinischer Sprache, 22; Eldon J. Epp, “Are Early New Testament Manuscripts Truly Abundant?,” in Israel’s God and Rebecca’s Children: Christology and Community in Early Judaism and Christianity; Essays in Honor of Larry W. Hurtado and Alan F. Segal; Juan Chapa, “The Early Text of John,” in The Early Text of the New Testament, table 8.1). None of these earliest manuscripts copy the pericope adulterae, however, including the two that contain the relevant section of John (𝔓66 and 𝔓75). 𝔓66 (Papyrus Bodmer II), the only other major third- century witness both to the Gospel of John and to the omission of the pericope, was executed with much less precision (Victor Martin, Papyrus Bodmer II, Évangile de Jean, chap. 1–14; and Papyrus Bodmer II, Supplément: Évangile de Jean, chap. 14–21).

Introducing the Adulteress

Keith suggests that the interpolator brought the pericope into John in order to answer the question “How is this man [Jesus] learned, having never been educated?,” a challenge that is launched at Jesus by his rivals in John 7:15. The pericope adulterae addresses this challenge directly by illustrat ing Jesus’s full knowledge of the Mosaic law, and not only that but a true and just judge, Jesus is also “grapho- literate” (i.e., he possesses the highest level of literacy attainable for his time) (Chris Keith, The Pericope Adulterae, the Gospel of John, and the Literacy of Jesus; also see Chris Keith, “Recent and Previous Research on the Pericope Adulterae (John 7.53–8.11),” 381–84). By presenting Jesus writing on the ground, a narrative detail included in the Johannine version of the pericope at verses 6 and 8, the interpolator intended a double meaning, at once attesting to Je sus’s scribal literacy and to his identity as author of the Decalogue, a point that was made plain by means of a Johannine literary technique: the double reference (Keith, Pericope Adulterae, 174–99, 201–2).

Responding to the “Suppressed Theory”

The hypothesis that the story may have been intentionally removed from written Gospel traditions by Christian scholars, Gospel editors, fearful husbands, or uneasy bishops is much more difficult to establish (Susan Treggiari, Roman Marriage: Iusti Coniuges from the Time of Cicero to the Time of Ulpian, 282–84; Judith Evans-Grubbs, “‘Marriage More Shameful than Adultery’: Slave-Mistress Relationships, ‘Mixed Marriages,’ and Late Roman Law,” Phoenix 47, no. 2 (1993): 125, 129; Melissa Aubin, “‘She is the beginning of all ways of perversity’: Femininity and Metaphor in 4Q184,” Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal 2, no. 2 (2001): 1–23). Augustus targeted adultery on the part of Roman matrons, making various forms of punishment obligatory (D 48.5.21.1, Papinian; D 48.5.24.1, Ulpian; and D 48.5.21.1, Macer). Faithful to the principle “neither add to nor take away from,” few Christian writers (if any) would admit to bowdlerizing their Gospel books. They might accuse “heretics” or “Jews” of this kind of self- interested textual alteration, but genuine Christians were expected to treat their Scriptures, including their Gospels, with greater care (Denise Kimber Buell, Making Christians, 69–71; David Brakke, The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity; Averil Cameron, “How to Read Heresiology,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33, no. 3 (2003): 471–92; Alain le Boulluec, La notion d’hérésie dans la littérature grecque IIe-IIIe siècles).

At the level of small changes, extant early Gospel copies tell a slightly different story, but even then omissions (deletions?) tend to be comparatively insignificant, amounting only to a few words or a line, and many of these omissions can be traced to common copying errors like homoioarcton and homoeoteleuton (that is, er rors caused by the eye of the scribe passing from one word, or part of a word, to another with a similar sequence of letters, causing him or her to miss inter vening text) (Metzger, Textual Commentary, xxvii; Kurt Aland and Barbara Aland, Text of the New Testament, 285). It therefore seems unlikely that the pericope adulterae would have been deliberately excised from the Gospels, at least on editorial grounds. T here is yet another problem with the suppression theory: If the story was perceived as objectionable, this difficulty could have been overcome by means of interpretation instead of the rather more extreme step of deletion. A long tradition of allegorical exegesis had already preserved even the most troubling passages in Homer from outright excision, though, as is well known, Homer’s presentation of the gods did sometimes offend (Apthorp, Manuscript Evidence, 82–83; Franco Montanari, “Zenodotus, Aristarchus and the Ekdosis of Homer,” in Editing Texts: Texte edieren, 1–21; Robert D. Lamberton, Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition, 108–33; Robert D. Lamberton, “The Neoplatonists and the Spiritualization of Homer,” in Homer’s Ancient Readers: The Hermeneutics of Greek Epic’s Earliest Exegetes, 115–33; Francesca Schironi, “Greek Commentaries,” DSD 19 (2012): 401–2; Martin L. West, “Zenodotus’ Text,” in Omero tremila anni dopo, 137–42; Lührs, Untersuchungen zu den Athetesen Aristarchs in der Ilias; Helmut van Theil, “Zenodot, Aristarch und andere,” ZPE 90 (1992): 1–32, and “Der Homertext in Alexandria,” ZPE 115 (1997): 13–36).

Outright deletion of the pericope adulterae would be not probable:

The Alexandrians Philo, Clement, and Origen were particularly sophisticated in this regard: applying metaphysical as well as grammatical, historical, and figural insights to their books, they discovered multiple meanings in their texts, an interpretive strategy that offered at least some degree of flexibility when “unseemly” (ἀπρεπές) or puzzling texts were encountered. Exodus 21:33–34 (a set of instructions regarding what to do if a calf falls into a pit) was reinterpreted by Clement as a recommendation that deep gnosis be revealed only to those ready to receive it;29 and Exodus 8:11–21 (the plague of gnats) was viewed by Origen as a biblical condemnation of those who engage in the pesky and irritating art of dialectic.30 These exegetes did defend what they understood to be the “plain” or “literal” meaning of the books they revered, just as certain scholars of Homer continued to insist that one should “clarify Homer on the basis of Homer” (Ὅμηρον ἐξ Ὁμήρου σαφηνίζειν),31 but that did not prevent them from discovering multiple figu rative meanings as well.

As the second and third centuries progressed, deletion seems even less probable.

Scribal Habits, Textual Omissions, and the Possible Deletion of the Pericope Adulterae

Recent studies of the most ancient copies of the New Testament books have uncovered a striking fact: scribes omitted portions of the texts they were copying more often than they added to them (Apthorp, Manuscript Evidence, 82–83; Franco Montanari, “Zenodotus, Aristarchus and the Ekdosis of Homer,” in Editing Texts: Texte edieren, 1–21; Robert D. Lamberton, Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition, 108–33; Robert D. Lamberton, “The Neoplatonists and the Spiritualization of Homer,” in Homer’s Ancient Readers: The Hermeneutics of Greek Epic’s Earliest Exegetes, 115–33; Francesca Schironi, “Greek Commentaries,” DSD 19 (2012): 401–2; Martin L. West, “Zenodotus’ Text,” in Omero tremila anni dopo, 137–42; Lührs, Untersuchungen zu den Athetesen Aristarchs in der Ilias; Helmut van Theil, “Zenodot, Aristarch und andere,” ZPE 90 (1992): 1–32, and “Der Homertext in Alexandria,” ZPE 115 (1997): 13–36). Dirk Jongkind discovered that the two scribes he compared were more likely to omit than to add, though they omit ted at different rates, and the extent of their singular readings shows that each scribe had distinctive copying habits (Jongkind, Scribal Habits, 200–201, 219–21, 240–41, 246).

An earlier and more limited study of Galatians by Moisés Silva complements these findings. Comparing the text of Galatians in 𝔓46, Codex Sinaiticus (א 01), Codex Vaticanus (B 03), and Codex Alexandrinus (A 02), Silva found that omissions significantly outnumbered additions in three of these manuscripts (𝔓46, א 01, B 03). Juan Hernandez’s study of the text of Revelation in Codex Sinaiticus (א 01), Codex Alexandrinus (A 02), and Codex Ephraemi Rescrip tus (C 04) also found a general tendency for omission in the singular readings he studied, a somewhat surprising result, especially in the case of Alexandrinus (Hernandez, Scribal Habits, 70–75, 87, 110–13, 126, 145–48, 153, 193; Hernandez, “The Apocalypse in Codex Alexandrinus: Its Singular Readings and Scribal Habits,” in Scripture and Traditions: Essays on Early Judaism and Christianity in Honor of Carl R. Holladay, ed. Patrick Gray and Gail R. O’Day, NovTSup 128, 341-58).

Nevertheless, when it comes to the earliest copies of the Gospel of John, the general tendency to omit is also evident, as Peter Head has shown (Head, “Habits of New Testament Copyists,” 400, 407). In his analysis, Head includes fourteen early manuscripts, including four fragments of 𝔓45 omitted from the International Greek New Testament Project’s edition of the papyri (𝔓5, 𝔓6, 𝔓22, 𝔓28, 𝔓39, 𝔓45, 𝔓52, 𝔓66, 𝔓90, 𝔓95, 𝔓106, 𝔓107, 𝔓108, and 𝔓109. In terms of 𝔓45 and 𝔓66).

Eusebius was not satisfied with leaving the story unattributed. Instead he grouped this episode with other parables and teachings of the Savior “communicated to [Papias] by word of mouth” and ascribed it to the Gospel of the Hebrews (Hist. eccl. 3.39), thereby excluding it from the Gospels “uni versally agreed upon” (ὁμολογουμένοι) by the churches (3.25.3). When Didy mus the Blind (ca. 313–98) told a story about Jesus and an adulteress, he also observed that it was present only “in certain Gospels,” a phrase that likely suggests that he did not know the passage from John, yet he appreciated it nonetheless. Jerome was familiar with the Johannine pericope adulterae; still, he acknowledged that it was not in every copy: when he cited the passage in an argument against the Pelagians, he mentioned that he found it “in many copies of the Gospel of John,” and therefore not in all of them (Jerome, Pelag. 2.17; CCSL 80:76). Jerome’s explicit recognition of the story’s textual problems was offered after the fact; when completing his new Latin translation of the Gospels several decades earlier, he included the pericope within John, guaranteeing its abiding pres ence in the Latin Christian tradition (Wasserman, “Earth Accuses Earth,” 420–22).

1. Eusebius’s copy of John didn’t have the Pericope Adulterae

** Of course, this also means that four of these eleven manuscripts excluded the passage, though in one case it was added later on:**

• Codex Vercellensis (VL 3, a), 4th cent.
• Codex Brixianus (VL 10, f), 6th cent.
• Codex Monacensis (VL 13, q), 6th or 7th cent.
• Codex Rehdigeranus (VL 11, l), which omitted the passage initially; in the eighth or ninth century it was added to the margins at the appropri ate section of John.
  The only mixed text to exclude the pericope adulterae is Codex Sangallensis (interlinearis) (VL 27, δ), a Greek Gospel manuscript (Gregory- Aland 037) with interlinear Latin text.

The only mixed text to exclude the pericope adulterae is Codex Sangallensis (interlinearis) (VL 27, δ), a Greek Gospel manuscript (Gregory– Aland 037) with interlinear Latin text.

• In Basiliensis, the presentation of the pericope adulterae on folia 275v–76v includes paratextual rubrics also found in other Byzantine manuscripts, plus a few unique details. The pericope adulterae was omitted from this reading, as it is to this day. Neither Ammonian sections nor Eusebian canon numbers appear on these folia because, as we have already noted, Eusebius did not include them when developing his system.

Continuous Text Majuscule Manuscripts to the Tenth Century with Kephalaia and Titloi: AO2; CO4; NO22; YO34; O38; etc don’t have the Pericope Adulterae