Father Stephen De Young:

Then the scribes and Pharisees brought to Him a woman caught in adultery. And when they had set her in the midst,  they said to Him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in adultery, in the very act.”

So they show up, they brought someone with them this time, they toss her down in the middle. They say, “We caught this woman in the act of adultery.” Now, what’s the obvious problem here? Was she committing adultery by herself? Wasn’t there someone else involved in the adultery, right? We’re not even told that this woman was married. She might not even be the married person.

Interlocutor: There seems to be a double standard.

Fr. Stephen: Well that, essentially, who knows who it was? But you noticed. And we’re supposed to see that because one of the images that’s used in the Old Testament over and over again in the Old Testament, then this, of course, gets carried over into the New Testament, when God speaks to the people who he set up as rulers in Israel, he refers to them as shepherds, He says, “These are my sheep and I brought you in as a shepherd to watch over and protect my sheep.” And then he frequently uses the image either of, “But you’re actually wolves and you’re preying on the sheep,” or, “You’re like shepherds who I hired to watch my sheep, and you went and cooked a big meal and ate my sheep. You fed off of them. You exploited them, you used them, when I gave them to you to protect and care for and nourish.”

And so that imagery is going on here. This woman is one of the people without rights, without power in that society, and they’re picking on her, not the other party who was involved, not the man who was involved. They made no inquiry in the situation. They’re just like, “Oh, this woman’s sinning, she’s no good.” And they are exploiting their power over somebody who’s weak rather than trying to protect and help this person.

“Now Moses, in the law, commanded us that such should be stoned. But what do You say?”

They’ve been doing this a lot, right? Trying to pit Jesus against Moses. “Moses said we should stone her to death. What do you say?” Now, remember, they’re doing this in front of all the people who are becoming Jesus’s disciples. So what are they trying to do? They’re trying to get him to publicly disagree with Moses. They know enough about Jesus to say, “Oh, see, if he has pity on her, if he has compassion on her,” which is another reason why they took the woman and not the man. If he has pity or compassion on her, he’s going to have to say Moses was wrong. If he says that, the people will be done with them. If he says, “Okay, stone her to death.” Then the people will say, “What’s he doing to this woman?” So the people also be done with them. This is something we’re going to see with the Pharisees. They try to set these sort of Catch 22 booby traps for Jesus.

Interlocutor: I have a question. Back to this woman, who was committing in adultery, like you said, with someone? Back in those days, was it just the woman that was convicted or the man was too?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And in fact, if you actually read the Torah, if she was an unwilling participant, she would not be, just the man would be. So there would normally be a determination as to whether or not she was a willing party. If she was a willing party, they would both face the penalty for adultery. If she was not, if he essentially raped her or forced her, then it would just be him.

Interlocutor: Well, where’s the man?

Fr. Stephen: Exactly. But see, with the man, their trap wouldn’t work. Because the trap is, Jesus either has to say “Moses was wrong” or he has to basically victimize this woman. Approve victimizing this woman. That’s the trap that they think they’ve set. They’re not asking an honest question now.

Interlocutor: They seem to be aware and think that the people are aware also of Jesus as a very compassionate person.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Well, remember, how has he been become known to them? As the person who’s healing the sick. Is this very compassionate person.

Interlocutor: Because the trap wouldn’t work if they didn’t know that about him and everyone knows about him.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

This they said, testing Him. That they might have something of which to accuse Him. But Jesus stooped down and wrote on the ground with His finger, as though He did not hear.

So Jesus sort of ignores them and starts doodling around on the ground, right.

So when they continued asking Him, He raised Himself up and said to them, “He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first.”

So he says, “Okay, you’re right. The law says she should be stoned to death. So whoever of you here has not sinned,” notice he doesn’t say who isn’t a sinner. Because they didn’t consider themselves sinners. He says, without sin, you’ve never sinned. You lead us off, throw the first rock, and then we’ll all stone her to death.

And again He stooped down and wrote on the ground.

So then he sits back out and doodles again.

Then those who heard it, being convicted by their conscience, went out one by one, beginning with the oldest even to the last.

So they all kind of go and turn around and walk away, not just because they’re, “Well, I have to admit I have committed a sin,” but also, none of them are going to stand there in public in front of everyone and say, “I have never committed…” in front of this crowd.

Interlocutor: It’s a good thing Gail’s great aunt wasn’t there.

Fr. Stephen: There’s always one, yeah, there’s always one. No, that’s one of the things they teach you at seminary. You never say, like when you’re giving a survey, you never say, “Is there anyone here who thinks they’ve never sinned?” because someone will raise their hand. There’s always one. You never say that. Are you going to throw rocks at Him? Okay.

And Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst.

So they all leave, just leaving the woman there because of course, they don’t care about her. It’s not that they really wanted to stone her to death. They were just trying to trap Jesus, so they just leave her there.

When Jesus had raised Himself up and saw no one but the woman,

Of course Jesus knows what’s going on, He’s sort of, “Oh, did everyone leave?”

He said to her, “Woman, where are those accusers of yours? Has no one condemned you?”

So he says, “Hey, all those people here accusing you of committing adultery, where’d they all go? There’s nobody here testifying against you.”

She said, “No one, Lord.”

And Jesus said to her, “Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more.”

Now, why does he say, “Nor do I condemn you?” Well, because Jesus actually is without sin. So he actually could say, “You are sinful”. She was committing adultery, right? There’s nothing here that she wasn’t committing adultery. Jesus said not come to condemn, that’s not why he’s come.

Interlocutor: She calls him Lord.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Well, sort of. The word kyrios in Greek, like most words, has multiple usages. One of them is that it was used in the Old Testament in place of the name Yahweh, because it means “Lord” or “Master”. So it was used in that way. And for example, when we’re reading St. Paul’s Epistles and he says “Jesus is Lord”, or, “Jesus is both Lord and Christ”. He’s using Lord in that sense and says that he’s the Lord, he’s God. However, it was also used sort of the way we use the word Sir or Mister. Now, we forget etymologically, where those words come from. Sir comes from sire, like the King, sire. That’s where sir comes from. And Mr. comes from master and Mrs. comes from mistress. I remember my grandmother would write like, a birthday card or something to us, and she put on the envelope, Master Stephen De Young in the old-fashioned calligraphy. But yeah, that’s where that comes from. That’s where that comes from. And so similar to that, they would use the word kyrios to refer to God as their lord and master. But also sometimes just to address a person is okay. So it is a show of respect. But my point is just we can’t read into that, “Oh, she realizes that Jesus is God.” It doesn’t necessarily mean all that.

Interlocutor: I was taught at some point that Kyrie eleison, which we say so much, was something that people shouted to soldiers who were having a triumph, and the response was to throw coins. So there’s a special context there, that if you want to get goodies from authority, you say that. And the point that was being made when it was explained to me was that when we say, “Lord have mercy”, we often have in mind don’t do something bad, whereas it also contains the idea of…

Fr. Stephen: Show kindness.

Interlocutor: Show kindness, or show blessing.

Right. But that’s just another use of kyrie.

Fr. Stephen: A number of those terms and phrases had… And when we get into St. Paul’s Epistles, we’ll talk about that more, because St. Paul is deliberately, in some cases, subverting some of these things, taking some of these titles that were given to Caesar and applying them to Jesus, for example, which was high treason, which is why he ends up getting executed. Why he ends up getting beheaded by Nero, but he’s deliberately doing some of… But a lot of these phrases like “Savior of the world”, that was one of the titles of Caesar. And kyrios was one of the titles of Caesar. There’s a whole series of those that… divi filius the Son of God was one of the titles of Caesar. So a lot of these things had sort of this Roman usage, too.

Interlocutor: There really wasn’t much that you could say about God that wasn’t said about Caesar [Laughter].

Fr. Stephen: Right. Well, because the whole point was that Caesar was setting himself up as a god. That’s why he took all those things upon himself. And it really goes back before Caesar. It goes back to the Greeks. The Seleucids particularly took most of those titles. Antiochus I Soter, the savior, Antiochus Epiphanes “The manifestation of God”. So they started it and then Caesar sort of balled up all those titles and put them on himself.

So, this last passage we read, John 8, verse 1 through 11, is my favorite story about Jesus that isn’t in the Bible. Now, look, you’re looking at a Bible and you’re saying, “Well, wait, there it is.” Let me explain what I mean by that. Our earliest copies of the Gospel of John do not have that passage. The earliest copies of New Testament books that have that passage are copies of Luke, and it shows up in two different places in the Gospel of Luke.

Interlocutor: In today’s Gospel?

Fr. Stephen: No. Eventually. Eventually, around the 8th or 9th century. It settles here in John, chapter 8. But before that, it’s sort of floating around. Now, let me explain what I mean, though. How does that happen? How does that happen? Because we tend to have this view, and it comes out of actually a lot of people, even if they weren’t Protestants, even if they were atheists, they were from Protestant background in biblical studies, where when they talk about a book of the Bible, they’re talking about the “original text”. The idea of the “original text” is problematic for a number of reasons. Probably the best example of this is Second Corinthians, because here’s how Second Corinthians was written:

St. Paul, when he wrote a letter, did not sit down and write the letter, right. The way we think of it. And we know, especially with St. Paul, that for a fact, because he tells us in his epistles who it was who was actually doing the writing. And there are a couple of places where he says, “See with what large letters I’m writing with my own hand,” where he went in and wrote something. So we know normally he was not the one writing it. And the way that worked was he’d have what we would call a secretary, it was called an amanuensis in Greek. That person you would dictate. And it wasn’t always strictly dictation. Sometimes it was dictation. Sometimes he would just run through and they’d write exactly what he said. Other authors would just kind of give a general would say, talk about this, make this point… outline, and they would work it up and make it nice and polish up the grammar and everything. And then after that process, the person who wrote it, who spoke and dictated it, would take it and look at it and make corrections that they wanted to make. “I don’t like how you said that. Use this word instead of…. Take this out. Now that I think of it, take this out. We don’t need that, add this sentence.” They would go and make changes, give it back, and they would polish it up.

Now, Second Corinthians becomes even more problematic, though, because after that process, what we now have as Second Corinthians is two different letters St. Paul wrote. He actually wrote four letters to the Corinthians. At least one of them is completely lost, because God didn’t want us to have it, for whatever reason. But what we call Second Corinthians is two of those letters put together, stitched together into one book. So at some point after St. Paul sent those two letters, the two of them were brought together into this one piece and edited together because there’s only one introduction and one conclusion rather than the two. The bodies of the two letters have been brought together. Around 100 AD, the people who are making the copies of the biblical text took all of St Paul’s letters and put them together into a collection so they didn’t circulate like, “I have a copy of Romans”, “I have a copy of First Corinthians”... No, they had a copy of Paul’s letters that included all of them. Every manuscript we have on St Paul’s letters comes from one of those collections. We don’t have any from before they was collected, when they were separate.

So, what is the original text of Second Corinthians? Is it what St. Paul said first? Is it what he wrote down first? Is it after the corrections? Is it the two letters separately? Is it the two together? Is it the two together in the collection? What is the original text? So we have to get past the idea of the “original text”. The texts go through this process and we believe that God is involved in this process, that it isn’t that God sort of came and whispered in St Paul’s ear, “Write this”, and then it was let loose into the world and whatever happened to it happened. But God is part of this process. Like I said, the reason why we don’t have that other letter to the Corinthians is because God didn’t want us to have it.

Interlocutor: How did we know it was written?

Fr. Stephen: Because St Paul makes reference to writing at least four different letters to the Corinthians. He also makes reference to writing one to the Lacedaemonians that we don’t have. God didn’t want us to have it. If He wanted us to have it, we’d have it. So this shaping and these changes that take place over time, God’s part of that process too, of preserving the Bible in the church and making sure that we have the Bible he wants us to have in every generation.

So, the fact that this text bounces around and only shows up later shouldn’t be a problem for us as Orthodox Christians. Because God was part of the process by which it showed up and by which it landed here in St John’s Gospel,

Interlocutor: It connects to the Holy Spirit being active within the church and not a static…

Fr. Stephen: Exactly, right. Again, this wasn’t just something that happened back in the past, but the Holy Spirit is still here, He’s still alive, He’s still working and still active. So it shouldn’t bother us. Now in terms of the mechanics of how this happened, how precisely it happened, we have to remember that when we think about the Bible, we think about this that we have in front of us. But this is relatively recent. This is post-printing press. Before there was a printing press, you did not have this. There were codices, there were books that were hand copied, but what was in them might vary quite a bit. And the further you go back, the more it varies. That’s why I’m not going to get into this discussion at this point. But the whole discussion of what books are canonical and what books aren’t what books are, part of it gets really complicated if you start looking at the actual books we find in the ancient world, because they have all kinds of stuff in there. Just as one quick example, if you buy the standard version of the Septuagint, the Old Testament in Greek, if you go and buy that, it’s a blue book. It was put together by a German fellow named Rahlfs. It’s about that thick. And if you go and you look at it, not only are there a whole bunch of things that nobody thinks are part of the Old Testament in there, he’s got the nine biblical odes in there, the nine biblical odes that we sing in matins the 9th Ode being the Magnificent from Luke 1. Well, nobody thinks Mary’s song is part of the Old Testament, right? Why is it in that book? Well, it’s because that was somebody’s Bible that they brought to church, and they have the hymns that they sang in church in the back of the book.

But so anyway, we think of it as sort of the set thing, right, and we just print more copies, and they stay the same every generation because we’re printing them from the same masters, they’re not hand copied. But for most of the church’s history and even today, 40% of the manuscripts we have in the Bible are lectionaries. So the Bible for most of its history has not been this. It’s been more like the two books we have over in the church, the book of the Epistles and the Gospel book. And what you’ll find if you look at those is not only do they have the books of the Bible separate, but if you look, they’re not… it doesn’t start with Matthew 1:1 when you look at the Gospel book and run through the end of John, they’re arranged according to readings, according to the church calendar. And sometimes things go out of order, like last week we were reading Gospels on Sunday from the Gospel of Matthew, but the Gospels during the week were from the Gospel of Mark. So they’re not set up in order like that. They’re set up according to the liturgical calendar, and they’re in these chunks. There’s the technical term for the term of the pericope. They’re in these sections, these readings.

Well, what happens if you have a reading in all your lectionaries that when you pick up a copy of well, here’s the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. And this reading is in our lectionary, and we read it every year on this day, but I can’t find it in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John well, you try and figure out where it goes, because it’s part of the Bible, because the Bible is what you read in church. This thing you have at home, that’s secondary. The Bible is what’s read in church.

Interlocutor: The actual definition of the Bible was that which is read in church.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Yes. That’s the canon. What is read in church. So if this is read in church, it’s part of the Bible, but it’s not in our Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. So we have to figure out where to put it. Well, so how would you figure out where to put it? Well, what’s the reading the day before from and what’s the reading the day after from? Well, if in your lectionary it’s Luke, this reading about the adulterous woman, more Luke, you’re saying, “Oh, well, it must be put there in Luke.” If it’s a different place in Luke, you put it in a different place. If it’s in the Gospel of John, you put it in the Gospel of John. It’s where it fell in the readings. And so that’s how it ended up moving around. So it’s part of the text of Scripture as read in the church, even if it wasn’t part of the Gospel of John, when the Gospel of John was, quote-unquote, “originally written”, however, we want to define that. And so this is the place where the Holy Spirit in God’s wisdom has finally put it. So that’s sort of how that happened.

Among theological nerds, this is a famous biblical problem. It’s called the pericopae adulterae. You could go on YouTube and find people literally debating for hours whether this should be in the Bible or not. That’s why I took the time there for five minutes or so to explain the issue. Because this is a big issue for people. But we have an understanding in the Orthodox Church that can explain this. And it can explain how it is that it’s not in the quote-unquote “Bible”, but is in the lectionary and therefore is in the Scriptures, where we can understand that.

The other similar passage to this where the same thing happened is what’s called the longer ending of Mark, sometimes because our oldest copies of Mark don’t have it. But if you notice in matins we have the Eothinon readings. We have eleven readings that we cycle through Gospel readings in matins. They’re all appearances of Christ after his resurrection. And if you go and look, one of them, believe it’s the fourth, if I remember it correctly, third or fourth. Anyway, one of them is the longer ending of Mark. And if you look where it comes to the list of readings, it’s right after the shorter ending of Mark. So it’s another case where we had this text that’s in our lectionary that wasn’t in…

Interlocutor: It is in here?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, in the Orthodox study Bible, it’s there at the end of Mark. So they said, “Well, where do we put this?” Well, it’s after the last reading from Mark, and it’s before the first reading from Luke, so this must be the end of Mark. And so that’s where it ends up being put.

Interlocutor: Well, I think this in lots of ways, goes back to the very first things you said tonight about the people who don’t know God and don’t want to know God, not understanding what Jesus says. I thought when you were saying that, and you said last week, too, of some conversations I’ve heard or overheard where people were just trashing Christianity, and often they’re trashing the Bible. Well, they don’t even know where these passages come from. And all of these kinds of things, because what their point ultimately is, “Is there is any God? I’ve never met him.” I mean, it all comes down to that. That’s the point they’re trying to prove. And so I understand that we can know these things and even appreciate them and see them as the work of the Holy Spirit, and we can read these passages and see what the intent is. But you can also go to these same passages that we’ve been looking at and start tearing them to shreds because that’s what you want to do with them. Oh, exactly. You want to discredit the whole idea of God and Christianity. Yeah, you can do that.

And the last time I was working in the library at UL, and this young fellow came in talking to somebody who evidently did his teacher, and he was just going on and on and on about how absurd… he’d been to a church. Never been to one very often, but he’d been to one recently. He just couldn’t believe the foolishness of these people and the things that they believed and the things that they were claiming to say. I could hear them all and think, “Yes, we do think that. Yeah, that’s right. Yes, it’s true. That’s pretty mysterious and pretty hard to…” You know he’s saying. I don’t know if that’s what he’s really saying. That the Trinity, how can you have three people that are one person? That’s what we think it is. And, no, we don’t know how we can think that. We do think. And it was such a revelation to me of how it is ultimately a matter of faith. It’s a matter of what’s inside you and how you respond. Not that a person could just read the Bible, say, and say, “Oh, well, that’s all obviously true,” unless they saw something more.

Fr. Stephen: Then it would be like the Pharisees thought… If you understood. It would be matter of intelligence. If you knew the law like we do, if you’d studied like we have, if you were smart like us, you’d get this. Then it would be. But that’s not and so we see that exact opposite dynamic here. It’s the people who they think are foolish and dumb, who are actually the ones who are wise enough to really see and understand and they’re the ones who are professing themselves to be wise, they become fools.

Interlocutor: I really think it comes to you. It comes to you from God, but by means of the way you were raised and your life experiences and the things you value. And all of those things are necessary for you to come to the Bible, bring those things with you to the Bible or to the liturgy or whatever, and then you’re able to see what’s going on there. If your disposition is entirely opposite… I remember someone who went to an Orthodox wedding said, “Did they say everything three times?” [Laughter].

Fr. Stephen: Again and again is right.

Interlocutor: And I’m thinking it’s more beautiful if we say that 3 times.

Interlocutor 2: Actually, I feel sorry for that man. I did feel sorry for him. How many people he was probably never introduced to God.

Interlocutor: No, he wasn’t.

Interlocutor 2: He didn’t have a clue. The Pharisees knew a little.

Interlocutor: Well, the Pharisees actually knew a lot.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Less than they thought they did.

Interlocutor 2: Yeah. But this man probably was, like I said, never introduced.

Interlocutor: He said, “So I’ve only been to church a few times in my life. I haven’t been in years. I went to this church. Would you believe what these people think?” And he was going on and on. I knew I could tell that the professor was a Christian and was not saying very much, but it was a fascinating conversation, and exactly my reaction was one of sorrow and pity, because in our world today, it’s hard to get introduced to God.

Interlocutor 2: It’s getting harder and getting harder and harder. You’re talking about saying everything three times. Well, my first experience when I came here, and I said, I’ve never seen people make the sign of the cross so much in all of my life. That was my first time seeing it. It’s like every other sentence, they were making the sign of the cross. And my gosh.

Interlocutor: Well, you know, growing up Protestant and not making the sign of the cross ever, I just love making the sign of the cross. I hate it if I miss one.

Interlocutor 2: Well, I do it after.

Fr. Stephen: Well, on your point, David Bentley Hart is an Orthodox philosophy professor who wrote a really good book a few years ago dealing with some of these new atheists, Richard Dawkins and these people, he said that listening to most atheists talk about religion is like listening to a tone-deaf person talk about music. They don’t have a religious sensibility. They don’t understand. He said that’s one of the things that makes, for example, Nietzsche’s criticism of Christianity so biting is that he actually understood what Christianity was about and rejected it. But most of these atheists now have no idea, can’t explain to you what Christianity is. And when they try to, it’s something that no Christian recognizes as what they actually believe.

Interlocutor: I know someone who is atheist, but then he talks about the devil. So I’m thinking to myself, well, if there’s evil, then there has to be. good. How can you be atheist? Because atheist, there’s nothing yeah,

Fr. Stephen: It’s really a matter of… there’s been too much of a schism in Western religion in particular, between theology and thought about God on the one hand and life on the other. As if, I don’t have to actually live the Christian life. I don’t have to fast and worship and pray and do all that. I can just kind of sit and ponder and muse to myself. So you have on one hand, these people who are living very active Christian life, you have these sort of contemplative people over here. And the reality is you can’t have one without the other, because without holiness in your life, you can’t draw close to God. And without drawing close to God, you can’t understand the Scriptures, you can’t understand, quote unquote theology. You can’t understand any of these things. So you have to have both. There has to be integrity there. And again, that’s part of what St. John is doing. These people, the Pharisees, are hypocrites. They have no integrity, right? They have a head full of knowledge about the law, but they don’t keep the law themselves. As Jesus pointed out last time, their heart is far from God, and so there’s no integrity there. And so they don’t really understand even the things that they think they know. On the other hand, these people who are very simple people with no education whatsoever, basically peasants, but who are trying to live lives drawing close to God, they have this vast wisdom and understanding of God and his creation that the others lack, even though they don’t have the book learning to maybe put it into the right words. They have that sense and that feeling.