ONCE LOST BUT NOW FOUND

ONCE LOST BUT NOW FOUND

Brett Todd

There is a Bible story that many scholars believe was once lost and hundreds of years later, found again.  It is one of the most beloved stories in the Bible, “The Woman Caught in Adultery” (John 7:53; 8:1-11).  As the story goes, a woman was caught (trapped) in the very act of adultery with a man.  So the religious leaders bring her to Jesus to see if they could trap Jesus into saying something contrary to the Law. But Jesus in his wisdom writes in the sand and tells the religious leaders, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”  It is a beautiful and captivating story.

Although this story is found in the Gospel of John, scholars agree, John didn’t write it.  It doesn’t belong in the Gospel of John. In fact, you cannot find it in any New Testament Greek manuscript prior to the end of the 5th-century.  This is hundreds of years after Jesus' death. There are possible hints of its existence from early Church Fathers, but no written manuscripts.  Additionally, it is apparent, the scribes who added this story to the Greek New Testament manuscripts, were not sure where to put it.  So, what they did is put it in several different locations in different manuscripts in the Gospel of John.  To be exact, when we look at these Greek manuscripts, we find this particular story in eleven different locations in the Gospel of John.  One scribe even put it in between the Gospel of Luke and John.

You might have even noticed in your Bible the double bracket [[  ]] around this story.  This indicates that this story is not in the oldest New Testament Greek manuscripts.  

With all of the above mentioned, we might ask, why did modern Scholars leave this story in the Bible if it wasn’t there in the first place?  Remember, the story was added to the New Testament hundreds of years later and scribes were not sure where to put the story in the Bible.  So why was it included in the Bible?   The answer is interesting. As scholars, not all, looked at this ancient story of “The Woman Caught in Adultery”, they agreed it had all the earmarkings of a historical Jesus story. 

You might ask, where did this story come from?  Scholars are pretty certain this is one of those once lost but now found authentic memory stories that were floating around for hundreds of years unattached to any written document.  It was a Jesus memory story passed down from one Christian to another by word of mouth until it found its way into the Gospel of John as we know it.

Again, it is important to understand not all of the memory stories of Jesus were passed down.  Many of them were not included in the Gospels because of time and space and were subsequently lost forever.  Possibly the author of the Gospel of John was referring to this when he said, “But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.” (John 21:25). There were so many Jesus memory stories that authors of the Gospels had to pick and choose which ones to share.  Those that were not used were lost forever in time.

In our next study, we will look at some other Gospels you may have not heard of and the diversity they brought to early Christianity?