Jesus Doodles In Dirt

No minister of God has discovered what Jesus wrote in the dirt. I have. Why?

The Pope is not in the House. The elected evangelicals in congress refuse to serve a secular government. And, the wild-guessing games go on. It is time to bring the Capping Stone down upon their heads – and cast out the pretenders! Put up – or shut up! We want the truth!

Jon

The Women taken in adultery

John 7:53-8:11

Then each of them went home, while Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him and he sat down and began to teach them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery; and making her stand before all of them, they said to him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground. When they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders; and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus straightened up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, sir.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.”

The Women taken in adultery

Jesus is in Jerusalem. On such occasions he appears to have spent the night in Bethany at the home of Martha, Mary and Lazarus or out in the open on the Mount of Olives. At daybreak he came to teach at the Temple. As he is teaching, a group of men drag a woman caught in the act of adultery before him. “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?”

Pharisees get a bad press in the Gospels. Verbal terrorists trying to trip Jesus, lobbing tricky questions, stones in hand. The woman must have been terrified. She is a pawn in a deadly game in which his enemies sought to destroy Jesus.

If Jesus said, stone her he would fulfil the Law of Moses but break Roman law which forbade any condemnation to death, except someone condemned by the Romans themselves!

Was it to gain time that he bent down and began writing with his finger in the dust or was he, perhaps, writing down the sins of her accusers? They persist in their questioning.

In execution by stoning, there was a ritual. The eldest flung the first stone. Jesus looked up: “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” He didn’t eyeball them, didn’t’ look at them. Jesus’ body language is non-confrontational. He bends down and begins doodling in the dust once again giving them time to scan their own lives, their own record on sin.

You have to admire their honesty. They walked, beginning with the eldest. When Jesus looked up, they were gone. “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, sir.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.”
As sinners we can identify with the woman taken in adultery and identify those who cast stones in our own lives, but are we able to identify with the forgiving heart of Jesus or do we belong to those who take pleasure in other peoples wrongdoing, keep reminding others of past failures, stirring it in moments of ill humour, light vigil lamps to others mistakes or do we forgive and forget without hoarding the hurt?

Why did Jesus write on the ground?

Posted 10 August, 2009 – 17:46 by Andrew

The story of the woman caught in adultery who is dragged by the scribes and Pharisees to Jesus for judgment (John 7:53-8:11) is a fascinating one, for various reasons. I made extensive use of it in a sermon on gentleness at Crossroads in the Hague yesterday – I love the way that Jesus stills the storm and so gently restores the woman’s humanity. But I probably gave myself too much freedom to explore some of the literary questions that it raises.

Christopher Hitchens, who thinks that ‘religion poisons everything’, is very excited to discover that the passage was not originally part of John’s Gospel and cites the fact as evidence that the New Testament can’t be trusted (143-145). He admits to being dependent here on the work of Bart Ehrman, who has done his best in recent years to hold up for public scorn the text critical flaws of the New Testament documents. We can hardly expect Hitchens to have taken the trouble to read the many critiques of Ehrman’s books (The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture and Misquoting Jesus) that have exposed the tendentious nature of his scholarship; but it is odd that he picks on a passage whose formal ‘inauthenticity’ is openly acknowledged in the marginal notes of most modern Bibles. He didn’t need Ehrman to point that out to him. The suspicion is that the story also gives Hitchens an opportunity to snigger at the anxieties of sexually frustrated religious males.

But is the passage inauthentic? Eusebius reports that Papias referred to a story of Jesus and a ‘woman accused of many sins’ which could be found in the no longer extant Gospel of the Hebrews. Both the 3rd century Syriac Didascalia Apostolorum and Didymus the Blind appear to refer to the incident, though without linking it to John’s Gospel. It also fits the pattern and literary style of the controversies between Jesus and the scribes and Pharisees.

The only detail that has always struck me as out of place is the writing on the ground – a bit too arbitrary, opaque, meaningless, cabalistic, even gnostic. The young man who runs away naked when Jesus is arrested (Mark 14:51) belongs in the same category, as does perhaps the application of mud to the eyes of the blind man (John 9:6). But I was unaware of a rather long-standing tradition of interpretation that associates Jesus’ action with Jeremiah 17:13, which casts it in a very different light:

O Lord, the hope of Israel, all who forsake you shall be put to shame; those who turn away from you shall be written in the earth, for they have forsaken the Lord, the fountain of living water.

This would make the writing on the ground another one of Jesus’ acted parables, an allusive gesture, much like the calming of the storm (Matt. 8:23-27; cf. Ps. 107:25-30) or the entry into Jerusalem (cf. Zech. 9:9). It is Jesus’ way of saying to the scribes and Pharisees, who always hear but do not understand, that they have turned away from the fountain of living water – and of course, that they face the same judgment, the same devastation, as the apostates of Jeremiah’s generation.

J. Jeremias makes the point very well in The Parables of Jesus, 228:

If we may assume that the pericope de adultera ([John] 7.53 ff.) rests on early tradition, then the writing in the sand is another example of parabolic action; it would have reminded her accusers, without openly putting them to shame, of the scripture which said: ‘They that depart from me shall be written in the earth’ (Jer. 17.13), and his action would have said to them, ‘You are those of whom that scripture speaks’ – a silent call to repentance.

Moreover, Jesus has just announced in the temple, “Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water’” (John 7:37-38). It seems likely, therefore, that the allusion to Jeremiah 17:13, with its reference to a ‘fountain of living water’, may have been a factor in the insertion of the story at this point in John’s Gospel.

This sort of covert, unself-conscious detail makes me much more confident that the story, whatever its provenance, really does belong here.

As a footnote, Diogenes Laertius 2.127 tells the story about the irascible philosopher Menedemus (300 BC):

…when a young man behaved with boldness towards him, he did not say a word, but took a bit of stick and drew on the floor an insulting picture; until the young man, perceiving the insult that was meant in the presence of numbers of people, went away.