01/08/2018
The word of the Holy Bible isn’t always as clear-cut as we’d like it to be
‘Let He Who Is Without Sin Cast The First Stone’
One of the best-known stories in the Bible may have been completely made up by a translator.
It’s the famous story of Jesus drawing a line in the sand between a woman and the Pharisees who wanted to stone her to death. In most Bibles, it shows up between John 7:53 and 8:11, and it gives us one of the most quoted lines in Christianity: “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” (How it’s exactly written varies between different versions.)
The thing is, the oldest copies of the Gospel of John don’t have that story. In fact, that story doesn’t show up anywhere, on anything, until the fifth century AD—about 400 years after Jesus died.
The first text to include this story is an old Greek and Latin translation of the Gospels called the Codex Bezae. That codex is notorious for slipping in the odd extra detail that doesn’t show up anywhere else. And this story, in particular, is worded in a way that some Biblical scholars say doesn’t quite sound like it was written by the same person who wrote the rest of the Book of John.
A lot of people still argue it’s a true story, mostly on the basis that it sounds like the type of thing Jesus would do. There’s a lot of reason to believe, though, that the famous quote isn’t really the word of Jesus; it’s just something somebody slipped in four centuries later.