John 7:53-8:11 – The Gospel of John

Welcome to City Church Dublin Semmon Archives.

Join us this week as we continue to walk through the book of John in our series, The Gospel of John.

Let me add my welcome to Benz.

My name is Mark.

I'm one of the leaders here at City Church.

If you're new or visiting with us, you're very welcome here.

We're going to be looking at that passage that Clay read for us just in a moment.

If you need a Bible, if you don't have one on your phone or you didn't come with a hard copy while I'm praying, my eyes will be closed.

It'll be fine.

You can sneak down.

There are hard copies here at the front.

You can grab one.

It's really good to have the scriptures open on your uh in front of you, on your lap or in your hand, just to be sure that I'm not making stuff up.

It's good to test what the speaker says against the scriptures.

Uh, one of the questions that uh comes up most frequently, uh either in this context at City Church or indeed on campus with uh with students is the question of can I trust the Bible?

How do I know that what I have is reliable?

How do I know that uh the what I have isn't just a uh a collection of uh musings on the divine, a collection of uh fairy stories.

The Irish comedian Darrell Brain called the Bible a collection of fairy stories just to get the kids to go to sleep uh uh during a long camel ride out of Egypt.

But is that all the Bible is?

Uh this morning is strange uh because this morning is the kind of text, it's the kind of sermon that you really want to come up upon once in a decade, uh maybe, maybe more, because if you've got a hard copy of your Bible, or indeed you might see a little footnote on your electronic copy, we didn't put it on the screen, but if you look at your hard copy or you see a little uh a little one or a footnote, you'll tap that, and what you'll read there is this you'll read the earliest manuscripts do not include John 7, 53 to 8.11.

That is, they don't include the story that Clay just read for us.

They're not in the earliest manuscripts.

Is Dan Brown right?

Is it all revealed?

Da Vinci Codes true.

What do we do with that?

Now we could just kind of gloss over that.

We didn't put it on the screen.

I could have just pretended that it wasn't there, but that's not the way we do things at City Church.

We don't just gloss over.

I believe that the scriptures will stand up to our scrutiny and to our questions, so we're going to deal with it.

It's interesting as well that this elements of this text, you think of uh Jesus' response, let him who is without sin cast the first stone or be the first to throw a stone.

That's kind of seeped into the kind of Western societal consciousness that might ring a bell somewhere.

And so it's not just that it's some obscure text that we're coming to this morning, it's a text that we're told isn't in the earliest manuscripts of John, and yet it seems to have had this impact and this influence on us.

So, what do we do with it?

I think it's important to point out that it is a good thing that Bible translators and biblical scholars have been deliberate in pointing out the various portions.

There's only really a handful of portions like this one that aren't included in the original manuscripts in order to give you the confidence that what's going on isn't some sort of Da Vinci Code-esque conspiracy.

That these texts are identified, they are flagged up for your scrutiny rather than just, well, we'll just not mention that.

We'll just we'll just pass that by.

All that said, this sermon is gonna be slightly different over the next few minutes because the first half of our time together this morning is going to be thinking about the issue of whether or not texts before us are reliable.

We're gonna have a brief introduction uh into the field of biblical scholarship, into what you call text criticism.

You're welcome.

I hope you brought some coffee in uh from outside and you run out and grab a cup as we start.

So we're gonna look at can I actually trust what's in front of me?

How do we deal with a text like this?

And so if you're coming here this morning with questions like, Can I trust the Bible?

I hope that actually we'll give you some food for uh for thought there.

And then in the second half of the talk, we will look at the text uh itself and discern its uh its meaning and how it applies to us.

The first question that I want us to consider is Is this story, is the story recounting the woman caught in adultery, is it original to John?

That's our first question.

Is it original to John who wrote the rest of the gospel?

The answer to that question is that the vast, vast, vast majority of biblical scholarship conclude that it is not part of the original text of John's gospel.

It would be a lot easier if I could stand up here and go, there's uh there's there's this new thinker who's brought new evidence to us.

Actually, we can be really confident that that John actually wrote it.

No, the vast majority of good, rigorous biblical scholarship concludes that this these verses are not original to John.

There are a number of good reasons for thinking this.

First being that the earliest manuscript evidence that contains these verses do not exist before the fifth century, the 400s AD.

So prior to that, no manuscript of John contains these verses.

Second reason for thinking this is that actually it interrupts the narrative.

The flow of the narrative continues seamlessly from 751 or 752 to uh 812.

So let me let me read that, cutting out the section before us.

It says, They replied, Are you from Galilee too?

Search and see that no prophet arises from Galilee.

Again, Jesus spoke to them, saying, I am the light of the world, whoever follows me will not walk in darkness.

There is a seamless flow, and this text interrupts the narrative.

That's the second reason.

Third reason is that in the original Greek that the New Testament was written in, the vocabulary of this section is vastly, vastly different to the rest of John's gospel.

There are words used here that John doesn't use anywhere else.

Fourth reason is that the church fathers, those uh those men who lived in the uh in the first few centuries after the apostles, they don't engage with this as part of John's gospel.

They seem to be, in some senses, unaware of it until you get to Augustine, who again is living in the fifth century.

And fifthly and finally, this section moves in the manuscripts.

Sometimes it's here after 752, sometimes it's earlier after 736, sometimes it's at the end of John's Gospel in John 21, sometimes it's in manuscripts of Luke.

So it floats depending on the manuscript.

So all that said, this creates a picture that leads us to conclude that this section isn't original to John.

This creates at least two issues.

First of all, does this undermine our confidence in the Bible?

And then, secondly, the question of, well, what should we do with this text?

Let's take that first issue of our confidence in the scriptures.

The first thing to say is that this field of biblical scholarship, of textual criticism, is a it's not a new field, it's a long-standing, highly rigorous, highly technical, extremely professional discipline.

Some of you come from very professional fields where there is rigor and checks and balances, where you don't just make stuff up because you know, if you're a medical doctor, people's lives are at stage, at stake.

Text criticism, biblical scholarship, has that sort of rigor.

People take it extraordinarily seriously.

For the last 500 years, since the invention of the printing press 500 years ago, there has been a fairly standardized printed text of the Bible that was based, uh, speaking of the King James Bible, being the first English printed text, the King James Bible was based on a few crucial manuscripts.

For example, the the Latin Vulgate, we don't need to go too much into that.

However, prior to printing, you had 1,500 years from the death and resurrection of Jesus to the development of the printing press, 1,500 years where biblical texts and books were handwritten by faithful copyists, by monks in monasteries who preserved the scriptures, who made copies and handed them down.

And those copies were rigorously done.

And as time has gone on, we have found more and more earlier manuscripts, manuscripts that date further back into the second century.

So the the hundred years immediately following Jesus' death and resurrection, that which they hadn't discovered 500 years ago.

So you take, let me give you uh an innocuous example of how the uh how the kind of the handwriting uh develops things.

So if you flip back, we looked at this a few weeks ago, flip back to John chapter 5.

John 5 · chapter mention

Back in John chapter 5, or you flip up to it, what you'll see there is that there is there's no verse 4.

John 5 · chapter mention

So it goes from verse 3, in these, so it's in the colonnades, in these lay a multitude of individuals, blind, lame, and paralyzed.

And then verse 5, one man was there who had been an invalid for 38 years.

And there's in my Bible, there's a little kind of footnote there to say that the verse 4 was inserted, but not part of the earliest manuscripts.

And verse 4 reads, For an angel of the Lord went down at certain seasons into the pool and stirred the water.

Whoever stepped in first after the stirring of the water was healed of whatever disease he had.

Now, here's what happened.

You have copyists who are copying the story of the healing at the pool, where the man says, Who's who, Lord, is to put me into the water when the water is stirred up?

A few hundred years passed, and these copies are being passed down and passed down and passed down.

It comes to a monk who goes, Well, people aren't going to know why the guy said, Nobody's there to put me in when the water stirred up.

What does he mean the water stirred up?

Who stirred up the water?

And why is there this idea that he needed to be in there?

And so he goes and he researches and he looks at uh contemporaneous kind of Jewish accounts of it, and he discovers, oh, they believe that an angel came and stirred up the water.

And whoever got in first got healed.

And so what that guy does is not insert a verse, he inserts it in the margin.

There's a little commentary at the side saying, they believe that an angel came down and stirred up the water in the margin.

That text gets passed on, passed on, passed on.

Another guy comes along and goes, there's this bit in the margin.

Is it because he lost his maybe he lost his place and he meant that it was going to go in there?

That was supposed to be verse four.

And so I'm going to put it into the body of the text.

And so what we have in that situation is an innocuous, helpful commentary on what people believed at the time.

Do you see?

Going back to our issue.

In terms of confidence, let's talk about numbers.

It's remarkable to note that there are very works that have a very few manuscripts, and yet we rely upon them, we take them as uh as historical, as relaying the historical events, and yet the manuscripts that we have are much later than the events.

So if I get a click, I'm going to show you a table of just a few of them.

Uh this is a list here of various historical uh documents.

First being Caesar's Gallic Wars.

So the first, the events were written around about 50 BC.

That's when Caesar was doing his thing, uh, crossing the Rhine and uh and slaughtering the Gauls.

The known copies of that event are 10, and the earliest one is from 900 AD.

So there's about a 900-year gap between the earliest, between the event itself and the earliest known manuscript.

Take Tacticus's history of the Roman Empire, uh, 400 uh BC.

How many copies?

It in the world, again, a huge, this time 1300-year gap between the event itself and the earliest known manuscript.

Tacticus' annals, 100 AD, uh, 20 copies known in the world, and the earliest being from 1100 AD, again, about a thousand-year gap.

Let's compare that to the New Testament.

Next slide, please.

New Testament, written between 50 and 95 AD, known copies, known manuscript evidence, 5,000.

5,000, the earliest known manuscript from 120 AD, from the second generation after the death of the apostles.

If you go this afternoon to the Chester Beatty Library, you will see the Chester Beattie manuscript of John's Gospel.

It is there in Dublin Castle.

It is free to enter, and the Chester Beattie manuscript is dated from 200 AD.

And so what we see not only is there more manuscripts, they are earlier and more contemporaneous with the events that took place.

More manuscripts certainly means more potential variation, but it also means that you're more likely able to work out what was original to the biblical author.

And so it builds confidence that what you have in front of you in the Bible is actually what was written down by the biblical authors.

This is just one good reason.

We could go into uh all of the reasons for for why we can trust the gospels as eyewitness testimony.

We don't have time for that.

There's just one good reason why we can actually have confidence in the Bible.

Now, what about this text specifically?

Well, it was part of the received text that uh went into the printing of the King James Bible 500 years ago, and that's why it's endured.

However, as people, as good archaeological evidence has come up, the earliest manuscripts don't contain it.

That's why it's got the square brackets around it, that's why it's flagged up.

It is crucial to note that this text does not change or affect any biblical doctrine.

There is no Christian thought at stake by including or indeed discounting this text.

Rather, it cements Christian thinking and Christian doctrine that is laid down elsewhere.

Moreover, this text does have a ring of history to it.

It feels like Jesus.

It sounds like Jesus.

John himself, at the end of the gospel, at the uh at the end of John 21, says that Jesus did very many things in the presence of his disciples, but these things are written down so that you may know that Jesus is the Christ and have life in his name.

He's saying there's other stuff that we didn't include.

Jesus did loads of things.

The world couldn't contain the books of all of the deeds of Jesus.

Or again, there's an instance in the book of Acts when Paul is talking to the elders at Ephesus in Acts chapter 20, where he says, For as the Lord has said, it is better to give than to receive, but there's nothing in the Gospels where Jesus says that.

Acts 20 · chapter mention

And so there's an awareness in the first century of sayings and deeds of Jesus that aren't in the Gospels.

Because the Gospel writers are writing a particular history with a particular purpose.

But this section feels like it could have happened.

Just because it doesn't wasn't original to John doesn't mean that we should conclude that it's a completely fictitious event.

To say nothing of the fact that the event itself is beautiful and compelling and moving and rich with meaning.

So all of that said, what am I going to do?

Well, after not just not a little bit of reflection, I'm going to preach the text.

I'm going to preach the text, show you the points that it's making, and show you the point that the points that it's making are confirmed by other parts of the Bible.

So what's going on in these verses?

If, by the way, you have more questions about trusting the Bible, there is a little book called Can I Trust the Bible by Barry Cooper.

Uh it is tiny we may even have copies in the storeroom that we can that we can dig out.

And you can have those for free.

We used to give them away.

But there are lots of reasons to trust the scriptures, and again, I'm happy to talk about that after the service.

So what's going on in these verses?

Well, the first thing that we realize is there's a trap.

There's a trap being laid for Jesus by the Pharisees.

He's teaching, and they bring him a woman, and explain that she is an adulteress.

It is certainly true that in the Old Testament law, the penalty for adultery was death by stoning.

But Jesus had a reputation, didn't he, for uh hanging out with socially undesirable types?

He seemed to be uh quite at ease with sinful people.

He had a reputation for being uh compassionate and merciful.

So here's the trap.

Is Jesus going to set aside the Mosaic law and spare the woman?

So they have a charge against him.

That's what they're trying to do.

That's what we're told in verse 6.

They said this to test him that they might have some charge to bring against him because they're looking to arrest him, but they need grounds to arrest him on.

And if he is being seditious and subversive to their law, they have a charge against him.

The other aspect of the trap is say he uh sides with the Pharisees, condemns the woman, the woman dies, and his reputation as a compassionate, generous, gracious teacher lies in tatters.

And so they think, aha, we've got him in this in this catch 22.

But there's something fishy going on.

Where's the guy?

Where's the guy she had the affair with?

Moses in the law condemn both parties.

But they've arrived just with the woman.

So how committed to upholding the law are they?

This looks like a chauvinistic manipulation of religious law.

But also, there were lots of provision within the Old Testament law and the Old Testament sacrificial system to show mercy on sinful, sinful people, on sinners, on people who had committed adultery.

If in the Old Testament every person who committed adultery was immediately killed, you wouldn't have King David.

You wouldn't have Psalm 51.

And that great Psalm of repentance after his adultery with Bathsheba.

Not only that, but he was a murderer who murdered her husband.

So the Pharisees come and their desire is for blood.

They want justice and have no interest in mercy.

So they test Jesus, and Jesus begins to draw on the grind this little detail of Jesus bent down and began to draw on the grind.

Now we have no idea what Jesus was writing or what he was drawing.

He might have been writing, neither do I condemn you.

Maybe.

But we don't know.

He might have been drawing a line in the sand.

If you've everybody seen the The Passion of the Christ, you have that great kind of slow motion where he's kind of drawing a line in the sand with him and the woman on one side and the Pharisees on the on the other.

We don't know.

You might want to think about it a little bit like a scene in a movie where uh where the bad guys burst into where the hero is, and the hero is so aware of his power and authority that he's just super chill.

He's there at his desk, he's continuing to finish off his paperwork, and the baddies are there, and they've got their guns trained on them.

I don't know how you hold a gun like that.

Whatever, bow and arrow.

And there's and they're shouting at him, and he's just totally chill.

It's kind of like that.

It kind of ratches up the intensity of the of the scenario.

They're threatening him, but he's unfazed.

And then he stands up and he gives them an answer.

Let him who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.

What an answer.

It's not an excuse for her.

He doesn't excuse her sin.

It's not like, actually, guys, God's pretty fine with adultery.

God's really not.

He doesn't excuse it.

Rather, he turns the focus of attention.

He goes right to the heart of the issue with sin.

That sin is an issue of the heart.

You can think, perhaps, that sin is what you do, the bad things that you carry out, that you think, but actually, sin is much deeper than that.

It is not an outside thing, it's not even just an action thing, it is part of who we are.

It is an issue of our heart.

When Jesus says, let him who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her, it's uh it's possible that he's uh not just talking about sin in general, but he could be being specific here.

Not so much uh you have to be sinless in order to condemn people.

Um that would be pretty legally imperfect.

Every judge, every uh magistrate uh had to be sinless.

But rather he is kind of saying, well, you have to not be guilty of the same sin.

Especially because for Jesus, adultery was just the manifestation of lust.

That if you lusted in your heart, you'd already committed adultery.

Remember the Sermon on the Mount?

That if you lust in your heart, you have already committed adultery.

And so he returns to drawing on the ground, and each one of them begins to leave because they are their consciences are are pricked.

Notice the little phrase there in verse nine.

But when they heard it, they went away one by one, beginning with the older ones.

Beginning with the older ones.

Not to give the Pharisees too much credit, but it is worth just bearing in mind that it is often as we get older that our awareness of our limitations, of our frailties, of our sins, of our need for mercy and grace increases.

There can be a hubris, an arrogance, a hypocrisy that comes with immaturity.

The older ones leave first.

But for Jesus to reply in this way, what is he doing?

He's drawing the Pharisees and our attention to the idea that justice should be built upon compassion and grace.

That the foundation of justice is grace.

Jesus elsewhere confirms this, builds this up, where he looks at the Pharisees.

So Matthew 9.13, he looks at the Pharisees and says, Have you not read in the Old Testament, have you not read?

God says, I desire mercy, not sacrifice.

As God's saying, the thing that's important to me is not ritualistic, legalistic keeping of the law, it's mercy.

If you are unmerciful and just going through, keeping the letter of the law and going through all of the motions, you've missed the point.

Or even earlier in chapter 7, what we just saw a couple of weeks ago, the whole issue in chapter seven is that Jesus had healed a man who was paralyzed for 38 years and he did it on the Sabbath, and they can't get over the fact that he broke the Sabbath law.

And he looks at the Pharisees and says, guys, you've totally missed the point.

You've missed the point of the Sabbath.

You've missed the point of the law.

If you're thinking that it's more important for me not to do any work than to say, rise up, take your bed, walk to heal this man is somehow of less significance or is indeed wicked, you've completely missed the point.

You've completely missed the point.

Heartless legalism misses the point of the law.

Merciless condemnation misses the point of Christianity.

The foundation of Christianity is grace.

How does Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount say that the law is fulfilled?

By love.

Love of God and love of neighbor.

How does Jesus finally?

How does Jesus regard this woman's sin?

He looks at her, and in verse ten he says to her, Jesus stood up and said to her, Woman, where are they?

Has no one condemned you?

She said, No one, Lord.

And Jesus said, Neither do I condemn you.

Go.

And from now on, sin no more.

Neither do I condemn you.

So Jesus is fine with sin.

Fill your boots, live how you like.

Let's pray.

No.

Good.

Still awake.

Neither do I condemn you, continue as you are.

No, it's neither do I condemn you, now go and sin no more.

Jesus neither condemns nor condones.

Rather, he forgives and transforms.

Why should the woman caught in adultery from this moment on seek to live a life that is turned away from sin?

Why should she go on to sin no more?

What is her rationale for obeying Jesus' command to go and sin no more?

Have you thought about that?

Is it because she still has to fear stoning?

Is it because the law continues to hang around her neck like a noose, tightening with every sinful deed?

Because there are religious hypocrites sharpening their knives around every corner, ready to stick it in?

No, what is her rationale for going and sinning no more?

It is that she has encountered the grace and compassion of Jesus.

She has encountered the grace and compassion of Jesus.

And so he says, Go and sin no more.

That's the rationale.

Salvation, becoming a Christian, being transformed by the Spirit of God, really is by grace.

That unmerited, unbounded, vast and free kindness of God, that though the world and the devil and our own conscience all stand around us with arms full of stones, with murderous intent, ready to condemn us for our sin, we fall at the feet of Jesus and cast ourselves upon his mercy and hear his words.

Neither do I condemn you.

And I go and sin no more.

Some of you here this morning believe that you should be sinlessly perfect now, that you cannot turn to Jesus until you've tidied yourself up, that you are more morally respectable and presentable.

And the burden of that drains you of your joy and exhausts you emotionally and spiritually speaking.

You need to experience the grace of the Savior who looks at you and says, Neither do I condemn ye.

For some of you, your rationale for living a holy life is built on fear.

Why should I obey God?

Because He'll be angry with me.

Why should I continue to fight against this sin?

Because if I don't, God will be displeased with me and I'll lose my salvation.

Or you fear the judgment of others.

Now, brothers and sisters, the basis for the Christian living a holy life is an encounter with the grace of God.

You cannot live a holy life until you have encountered the grace of God.

If you try to live a holy life without the grace of God, without casting yourself upon his mercy and hearing him say, Neither do I condemn you, you'll be crushed under the weight of the laws and requirements and commandments and perceptions of others and opinions of others, of what they require of you, it will crush you.

If you try to be holy out of fear, it will lead you to hypocrisy.

You'll live a double life.

Maybe you're living a double life now.

If you try to be holy out of fear, you will do things in the shadows.

And then come here and say different things and do different things.

And you'll be this disintegrated person.

What you need is an encounter with the grace of God.

You need to throw yourself upon Him, His mercy, and hear Him say, Neither do I condemn you, now go.

Sin no more.

Enabled and empowered by my grace.

If you try to live a holy life out of fear, you'll become cruel.

That's what happened to the Pharisees.

The Pharisees had lost sight of mercy.

They could only see justice.

There was no more grace left in their theology.

And so they became cruel.

You will become cruel if you try to live your Christian life motivated by fear, because you're constantly trying to say, I'm better than that person.

And so you'll judge them and you'll condemn them in order like two people drowning.

You'll push them under the water in order to save yourself.

Until you realize that you're both drowning and need to cast yourself upon the mercy of God, you're done for.

You'll become cruel.

You'll become disillusioned and exhausted by your failure.

Only grace can empower holiness.

Because only grace keeps you coming back.

You know, I have that experience.

I'm sure you have that experience, I'm sure it's not just me.

I pray it's not just me.

Of coming back to God and saying, God, it's me.

It's the same sin.

I need your mercy again.

I need your grace again.

Yes, it's the same, it's the same thing.

It feels like progress in that area of my life is glacially slow.

And I need you again.

And sometimes what happens there is that you think, I can't go back to God.

I can't go back to God with the same thing.

I can't keep on going back and saying, I need your mercy again, I need your grace again.

And so you stay away when that's the worst thing that you could do.

The father in the prodigal stands with his arms open wide, ready to put the robe on his son, to kill the fattened calf and the ring on his finger.

The father stands with arms wide open, ready to hear that same prayer that you've prayed for the thousandth time, ten thousandth time, millionth time.

And yes, progress in this life is sometimes glacially slow.

And you need to have a perspective of years, you need to have the perspective of eternity.

Sometimes you look back over the course of a year and think, I haven't made any progress in that.

But sometimes you look over the course of ten years.

Or even five years ago.

Actually, I'm not the same person.

I'm not who I was.

I'm not what I want to be, isn't that the John Newton thing?

You know, I'm not what I now ought to be.

I'm not what I now want to be.

But I'm not what I was.

And I'm not by the grace of God what I one day will be.

Your holiness has to be motivated by the grace of God.

Neither do I condemn you.

Jesus doesn't just wink at sin.

We know he doesn't just wink at sin.

He hates it.

He hates it so much.

He died for it.

It killed him that he might destroy its power.

The power of sin has been broken over your life if you are a Christian.

Its presence remains like the corpse of this dying dragon that you that you that you haul around with you.

But its power has been broken.

And so, as Paul says in Titus, we can now say no to worldly desires and sinful pleasures.

Did you know that?

Because of Jesus' death for you.

And now everyone who comes to him, he says, Neither do I condemn you.

Receive my grace.

Receive the power of my spirit.

Remember two weeks ago, what's he giving?

He's giving he's giving rivers of living water.

The spirit poured out, enabling you to live a holy life.

And so he says, Go and sin no more.

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