GA 1333 and the Story of the Adulteress

            It is difficult to exaggerate the extent of misinformation that is circulating in various commentaries regarding the pericope adulterae, or story about the adulteress (found in John 7:53-8:11 in most English Bibles, and in most Greek manuscripts).  Lately, one new bit of misinformation has been added to the pile:  the claim that in the medieval minuscule manuscript 1333, the passage about the adulteress is added to the end of the Gospel of Luke.  Dallas Theological Seminary professor Dr. Daniel Wallace, in a session on New Testament Textual Criticism in the Credo Course curriculum, was referring to minuscule 1333 when he said, as part of a lecture on the story of the adulteress, “In some manuscripts, it stands as an independent pericope between Luke and John.”
            To get some idea of how misleading such a description is, one must first be familiar with the evidence - which consists in this case of just one manuscript, not “some manuscripts.”  So let’s get a good look at the minuscule 1333, a manuscript which currently resides in Jerusalem, where it is cataloged as Hagios Sabas 243.  Black and white page-views of the manuscript are available at the website of the Library of Congress.  

            Minuscule 1333, assigned to the 1000s, is a Gospels-manuscript.  Most of the text is written in two columns per page, with 26 lines per column.  The main text is supplemented by Eusebian canon-numbers and section-numbers in the side-margins, although the Canon-tables themselves do not appear.  Chapter-numbers are also present in the side-margins, and chapter-titles appear in the upper margins.   There are a lot of short Arabic notes in the margin scattered throughout the manuscript.  (Perhaps it would be a worthwhile project for some Arabic-reader to study these notes.) 

            The manuscript has been prepared for liturgical use:  αρχη and τελος symbols appear frequently, and incipit-phrases are often supplied in the margins.  The Heothina-readings are marked.  Symbols (such as ※ and ⁘ and ⁒) of the sort which one might initially assume would link the text to marginal corrections lead instead to liturgical notes (most of which assign readings to specific days). 

            Here is a basic index; the links lead to page-views at the website of the Library of Congress:
Damaged lectionary-tables appear before the kephalaia-list for Matthew.   

Matthew begins below a headpiece similar to the kind often found at the beginning of lectionaries.

Matthew 6:13 includes the doxology to the Lord’s Prayer.

Matthew 16:2-3 is included in the text.

After the last page of Matthew, on which three lines (from Mt. 28:20) are written across the page, the chapter-list for Mark follows on the next page.  There is no subscription.

Mark begins without a headpiece.   

Mark 16:9-20 is included in the text and is identified in the margin as the third Heothinon-lection.

After Mark 16:20, a table of lections for Saturday and Sunday appears in the next two columns, beginning with a headpiece.

Before the chapter-titles for Luke, there is a filler-page.

Luke begins beneath a headpiece.

Luke 22:43-44 is included in the text.

The last six lines of Luke are written in a vortex format, that is, the lines are centered and become shorter as the end approaches.  There is no subscription.

John 8:3-11 is written on the page between the last page of Luke and the page which contains the chapter-titles of John.  The writing begins with a title that covers both columns:  The reading for the 8th of October, for Pelagia.  Then the first column begins with the words, εκ του κατα Ιω, that is, “From the [Gospel] according to John,” the usual sub-title used in lectionaries to introduce a lection from the Gospel of John.  This is followed by Τω καιρω εκεινω, that is, “At that time,” a routine incipit-phrase used to begin readings.  The rest of the text on the page consists of John 8:3-11.  

John 7:52 is followed by John 8:12 in the text.  A symbol resembling a patriarchal (two-barred) cross appears between the two verses.  Earlier in the text (on the facing page) the beginning of the lection for Pentecost is indicated in the text, and the lection is named in the upper margin. 

The closing lines of John 21 are formatted in a cruciform shape.  Arabic notes then appear.

A few Arabic notes and a brief Greek prayer appear near the end of the manuscript on leftover pages.

What should be deduced from this?  A few things:

● When 1333 was produced, it was copied from an exemplar that did not contain John 7:53-8:11.

● John 8:3-11 was added between the end of Luke and the chapter-list for John in order to provide the otherwise absent lection for Saint Pelagia’s feast-day (October 8).

● The titles that precede John 8:3-11 in 1333 show that this passage was not floating or fluttering around as an independent tradition; the passage is clearly identified as a lection from John.  It is misleading to describe it as an “independent pericope,” inasmuch as the person who wrote it had to have depended on a source in which it was identified as a part of the Gospel of John.  John 8:3-11 in 133 is not formatted in a way that can be reasonably construed as if it were seen as part of the text of Luke, nor is it formatted in a way that can be reasonably construed as if the scribe obtained his text of the passage from some independent non-Biblical source. 

● When and where John 8:3-11 was added to 1333, John 8:3-11 was part of the annual cycle of readings in the Menologion.    

● 1333 was initially formatted to include filler-pages; the presence of John 8:3-11 before the chapter-list of John and the presence of a lection-list before the chapter-list of Luke are probably both the work of a later scribe who used the filler-pages as a convenient place to add materials that would render the manuscript more useful for liturgical reading.

John 7:53-8:11: Why It Was Moved - Part 4

            At the outset of the fourth and final part of this series about why the pericope adulterae (John 7:53-8:11) is sometimes found in locations besides after John 7:52, let’s review what was observed in the previous parts: 

            ● In two Greek manuscripts (225 and 1128) the pericope adulterae was transferred to a location between John 7:36 and 7:37, so as to render the Pentecost-lection one uninterrupted block of text.  (Similarly, in a few manuscripts, the passage is transferred to a location following 8:12; again the reason for this was to render the Pentecost-lection one continuous block of text.) 

            ● In three Georgian manuscripts, the pericope adulterae was inserted between John 7:44 and 7:45.  This is the result of a medieval Georgian editor’s attempt to add the story into the Georgian text (which, in its earliest form, did not have the passage).  The person who made the insertion was guided by a note (similar to what is found in Greek manuscripts 1 and 1582) which stated that the pericope adulterae had been found in a few copies at the 86th section; the Georgian editor therefore put it at the very beginning of that section (i.e., immediately preceding John 7:45).

            ● In the family-1 cluster of manuscripts, the pericope adulterae was transferred to the end of the Gospel of John, accompanied (in the flagship manuscripts of the group) by an introductory note stating that it was not present in many manuscripts, and had not been commented upon by revered patristic writers of the late 300’s and early 400’s; for that reason, according to the note, it was removed from the place where it had been found in a few copies, in the 86th section of John, following the words “Search and see that a prophet does not arise out of Galilee.”  Yet this motive does not account altogether for the Palestinian Aramaic evidence, which implies that in manuscripts made prior to the creation of the Palestinian Aramaic lectionary, manuscripts existed in which John 8:3-11 (rather than 7:53-8:11) was transferred to the end of John, leaving 7:53-8:2 in the text.  (Notably, 18 Greek manuscripts similarly have 7:53-8:2 in the text, but not 8:3-11.)                    

           

          The evidence thus consistently supports the view that for every transplantation of the pericope adulterae, there is an explanation which shows that prior to the dislocation, the pericope adulterae followed 7:52 in earlier copies of John.  The more closely we look at the evidence, the more untenable the “floating anecdote” theory of Metzger, Wallace, White, etc. becomes. 

          But what about the small group of manuscripts in which the pericope adulterae appears at the end of Luke 21?  These manuscripts (mainly minuscules 13, 69, 124, 346, 788, and 826) echo a shared ancestor; this is just one of many distinct textual features that they share, setting them apart from the rest of the Greek manuscript-evidence.  Let me share the answer before I offer the evidence for it:  the presence of the pericope adulterae after Luke 21:38 in these manuscripts’ ancestor was an adaptation to the Byzantine lection-cycle, and almost certainly descends from a form of the Gospels-text in which the passage had already been transplanted to the end of John.

          In manuscript 13 (the namesake of the group), the Gospels-text is supplemented by symbols signifying the beginning (αρχη) and end (τελος) of the lections assigned to be read from day to day in the church-services.  For example, the parameters of the Pentecost-lection are thus indicated; an αρχη-symbol accompanies the beginning of John 7:47, and a τελος-symbol accompanies the end of 8:12.

          Manuscript 13 has, as a sort of appendix, an incomplete lectionary-table, stating which Scripture-portions are to be read on which days.  In the portion of the lectionary-table that lists readings for the month of October, the last extant entry is for October 7.  The last line on the page identifies this as the Feast-day of Saints Sergius and Bacchus (whose martyrdom is said to have occurred in the 300’s).  Unfortunately the next page (which would begin by identifying the passage to be read on that day – Sections 250-251 of Luke, that is, Luke 21:12-19) has been lost.  In the text of Luke 21 in minuscule 13, however, we can see the marks signifying where the lector was to begin and end this lection:  an αρχη-symbol appears (between πάντων and επιβαλουσιν) in 21:12, and a τελος-symbol appears at the end of 21:19.

John 7:53 follows Luke 21:38
in this column from minuscule 13.
The underlined words have replaced
some of the usual words in 8:2.

          Let’s take a closer look at the text of Luke 21 in minuscule 13.  Verses from this chapter had more than one use in the Byzantine lectionary.  Three blocks of text were extracted from it to form the lection for Carnival Saturday (before Lent).  In addition, portions from this chapter were to be read during the 12^th week after Easter. 

          We see the effects of this in minuscule 13.  Near the beginning of verse 8, an αρχη-symbol interrupts the text between ειπεν and βλέπετε.  The lector was then instructed at the end of verse 9 to jump ahead (the υπερβαλε symbol appears there).  An αρξου-symbol (meaning, “resume here”) appears in the margin alongside the beginning of verse 21, but this was part of the instructions for the Wednesday of the 12th week after Easter.  On Carnival Saturday, the lector was to jump to the beginning of verse 25 (where we find, in minuscule 13, the abbreviated note “αρξου τ. Σα.,” that is, “Resume here on Saturday”).  The lector was to continue from that point to the end of verse 27, where we find in minuscule 13 another υπερβαλε-symbol.  Jumping to the next αρξου-symbol, the lector was to then read verses 32-36, at the end of which we reach a τελος-symbol.  (In minuscule 13, there is also an αρχη-symbol at the beginning of verse 28 and a τελος-symbol at the end of verse 32; these were intended to signify the beginning and end of the lection for Thursday of the 12th week after Easter.) 

          There are two things to discern from all this:  (1) there is no convenient break in Luke 21 where one could insert a narrative, and (2) bits of Luke 21 before and after the lection for the Feast-day of Sergius and Bacchus were assigned to a prominent Saturday.  The lections for Saturday and Sunday are generally believed to have developed and been standardized (more or less) before the weekday-lections.

           Building on those two points, let us picture a scenario in which a copy of the Gospels which has the pericope adulterae at the end of John has come into the hands of a medieval copyist who wishes to place the passage into the text.  He could insert it in its usual place.  But, knowing that its contents were used annually as a lection for a specific day of the year, he might decide instead that it would be convenient to insert it where it could be easily found in the lectionary-sequence.  In that case, the natural place to insert the pericope adulterae would be at the end of Luke 21. 

One reason for this is that the contents of Luke 21:27-28 loosely square up with the contents of John 8:1-2.  Luke 21:27-28 was so similar to some of the contents of John 8:1-2 that the person who transferred the pericope adulterae to this location altered the text of John 8:2-3 to avoid what appeared to be a superfluous repetition:  after “And early in the morning he came into the temple,” the text of family-13 is και προσήνεγκαν αυτω οι γραμματεις” (“And the scribes presented to him . . .”), where the typical Byzantine text of John 8:2 is significantly longer:  και πας ο λαος ηρχετο και καθίσας εδίδασκεν αυτους· Αγουσιν δε οι γραμματεις (“and all the people came to him, and he sat down and taught them.  Then brought the scribes . . .”).  Here we have the textual equivalent of the fingerprints, or footsteps, of the editor of family-13’s ancestor-manuscript.

Another reason:  as already mentioned, the lection for October 7 was Luke 21:12-19.  The next feast-day in the Menologion, for October 8, was that of Saint Pelagia – and the text assigned to her feast-day was John 8:3-11.  A natural desire not to interrupt either the Pentecost-lection or the lection for Carnival Saturday was all that was necessary for the copyist of family-13’s ancestor-manuscript to insert the passage that contained the lection for October 8 in close proximity to the lection for October 7 (about as close as one could place it without disrupting the narrative and dividing the lection for Carnival Saturday).

It thus becomes clear that the location of the pericope adulterae following Luke 21:28 in the family-13 cluster of manuscripts does not imply that the pericope adulterae was previously unknown to the scribe who made the ancestor-manuscript of these copies; it conveys, rather, that the passage was known as the lection for Saint Pelagia’s feast-day, October 8 – and this is why it was placed near the passage which was read on the preceding day.

  

  Before concluding, I wish to mention one other case of the displacement of the pericope adulterae:  its treatment in minuscule 1333, in which John 7:52 is followed by 8:12 but John 8:3-11 is found between the end of Luke 24 and the beginning of John 1.  This piece of evidence is sometimes described imprecisely.  In minuscule 1333, John 8:3-11 (not 7:53-8:2) has been written in two columns on the page that follows the page on which the Gospel of Luke ends.  (Thus, no one should imagine that 1333 has the pericope adulterae as part of the text of Luke 24.)  A title identifies the text as a lection from the Gospel of John (εκ του κατα Ιωαννου), and a faint note in the margin states that this lection is to be read on October 8 to honor Saint Pelagia.

Minuscule 1333’s testimony is thus similar to that of manuscripts such as minuscule 1424, in which the pericope adulterae is absent in the text of John but has been added in the margin, with the exceptions that only John 8:3-11 has been added (probably from a lectionary) in this case, and that the person who added these verses in minuscule 1333 did so on a previously blank page between Luke and John instead of in the margin alongside the text of John 7-8.

John 7:53-8:11 and James White

 In a recent interview at Apologia TV, James White (of Alpha & Omega Ministries) offered some comments about John 7:53-8:11 which reflect a common misunderstanding of some evidence pertaining to that passage.  White, who does not believe that these 12 verses belong in the Bible, turned his attention to them about 52 minutes into the interview, stating that he was going to explain why most scholars are confident that the passage is not genuine.
         White proceeded to explain that although most manuscripts contain the pericope adulterae between John 7:52 and 8:12, it is also found in four other places:  “In manuscript 225, it’s found after John 7:36.  In manuscript 1, it’s found after John 21:25.  And here’s the important part:  in a group of manuscripts called family 13, it’s not in John.  It’s after Luke 21:38.  And in manuscript 1333, it’s after Luke 24:53.”

          These multiple locations, White stated, constitute “absolute evidence” that John 7:53-8:11 was not originally part of the Gospel of John, but was instead “a story, very popular, looking for a place to call home.”  (This remark from White is very similar to a sentence in a 2007 essay by Dan Wallace:  “The pericope adulterae has all the earmarks of a pericope that was looking for a home.”)

          In White’s 1995 book, The King James Only Controversy, the same evidence was cited, and in this respect White’s comments closely resemble the contents of Bruce Metzger’s 1971 Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament.  White, like Metzger, has omitted important aspects of the evidence, probably because the depth of White’s research on this subject did not go much further than reading Metzger’s work.  The improbability of White’s idea that the pericope adulterae was “a story looking for a place to call home” should already be obvious to anyone who ponders the contents of the first sentence of the account:  “And everyone went to his own house.”  That is simply not how one begins a story. 

          Before we look in detail at some aspects of the evidence that White did not share in his Apologia TV interview, there is something we should know about the Gospel-lection for Pentecost – that is, the Scripture-selection that was read annually at the Feast of Pentecost (one of the major feast-days of early Christianity, celebrating the coming of the Holy Spirit as related in Acts chapter 2).  This lection began at John 7:37 and continued to John 7:52, at which point the lector (the person designated to read the Scriptures in the church-services) was to skip to 8:12.  In many Gospels-manuscripts that are supplemented by what is known as the lectionary apparatus in their margins, symbols and notes instruct the lector to read the lection in this way.  

          The Pentecost-lection, in other words, consisted of John 7:37-52 plus 8:12.  In lectionaries, the passage is presented in precisely that form, making it easy for the lector to read the entire passage without having to pause and jump forward in the text to find the final portion.  The same motivation that led to the development of lectionaries – a desire to simplify the lector’s task – also led some copyists to reformat the passage that contained the Pentecost-lection in continuous-text manuscripts of the Gospels, with the result that John 7:53-8:11 was transplanted to other locations. 

          When we take a closer look at the manuscripts mentioned by White, it may become clear that once he studies them more carefully, he might not wish to continue to present them as “absolute evidence” in the future.

“In manuscript 225, it’s found after John 7:36.” 

          Which means that a copyist moved it so that it would appear immediately before the Pentecost-lection.  In manuscript 225, John 13:3-17 – the lection for the annual foot-washing commemoration on Maundy Thursday – is likewise moved; it is found not only in its usual place but also is embedded in the text of Matthew, following Mt. 26:20, conforming to the sequence in which it was read on Maundy Thursday.  If one knows nothing about lection-cycles, one might start imagining that John 13:3-17 was a very popular story that was looking for a place to call home, but the more one learns about lection-cycles, the less plausible that becomes.

“In manuscript 1, it’s found after John 21:25.”

          White makes it seem as if this means that someone had the pericope adulterae sitting around as a freestanding composition, and placed it at the end of the Gospel of John.  If, however, one notices the note that appears in manuscript 1 before the passage, a very different impression is received.  The note says:  “The chapter about the adulteress:  in the Gospel according to John, this does not appear in the majority of copies; nor is it commented upon by the divine fathers whose interpretations have been preserved – specifically, by John Chrysostom and Cyril of Alexandria; nor is it taken up by Theodore of Mopsuestia and the others.  For this reason, it was not kept in the place where it is found in a few copies, at the beginning of the 86^th chapter [that is, the 86^th Eusebian section], following, ‘Search and see that a prophet does not arise out of Galilee.’”

          Thus, according to this note, a copyist did not find this passage in most of his copies of the Gospel of John, and he also noticed that it was not commented upon by several patristic writers, so he removed it from where it had been found – after John 7:52 – and placed it at the end of the Gospel.  It had not been “a story in search of a home.”  According to this note, it had already had a home, following John 7:52, before it was moved to the end of the book.

In the Argos Lectionary,
the lection for Saint Pelagia's
feast-day is listed
for October 8.

          In addition, this note – which is also found in manuscript 1582, and thus echoes the archetype of family-1 – may be a copyist’s guess about how it ended up at the end of John’s Gospel, rather than an observation.  In two of the manuscripts that formed the basis for the Palestinian Aramaic lectionary, John 8:3-11, rather than 7:53-8:11, was transferred to the end of the Gospel of John.  This displacement of John 8:3-11 was not motivated by text-critical principles; like the dislocation of the entire pericope adulterae in 225, it was done to make the lector’s job on Pentecost a little easier – the difference being that in these manuscripts’ locale, the Gospels-lection for Pentecost included John 7:53-8:2.  Eighteen Greek manuscripts echo the same treatment of John 8:3-11, with the difference that instead of being transferred to the end of the Gospel of John, these nine verses have been dropped entirely from the text of these manuscripts, although 7:53-8:2 remains in the text after 7:52. 

          John 8:3-11 (or 8:1-11; there was some variation) was the lection for the feast-day of Saint Pelagia, or for The Penitents (this refers to a group of women famous for their penitence and austerity).  In dozens of manuscripts of John, 8:3-11 – not the entire pericope adulterae – are accompanied by symbols in the margin, not (as some researchers have claimed) to convey scribal doubt about the passage (as if the copyists accepted 7:53-8:2 but were suspicious about 8:3-11), but to thus show where, embedded within the Pentecost-lection, one could find the lection for the feast-day of Saint Pelagia, or for the Penitents, which was October 8. 

“And here’s the important part:  in a group of manuscripts called family 13, it’s not in John.  It’s after Luke 21:38.”

          The text of the pericope adulterae has been altered in the family-13 manuscripts; in 8:2-3, instead of reading “and all the people came to him, and he sat down and taught them.  Then brought the scribes,” they read, “And the scribes presented to him,” in order to avoid repeating material similar to the contents of Luke 21:37-38.
          Once again when we notice details which White did not mention (not due to any malevolent intent, of course, but due to plain ignorance of the evidence), the picture changes significantly.
         What has happened here is that someone who had a manuscript in which John 7:53-8:11 had been transferred to the end of John took things a step further to simplify things for the lector.  When transferred to the end of Luke 21, the passage would be easy to find in the cycle of readings for feast-days in the Menologion:  the lection for October 7, for Saints Sergius and Bacchus, was nearby, in Luke 21:12-19.  Almost all of the remainder of Luke 21 is discourse, making the end of the chapter the nearest convenient place in which to insert the narrative that constituted the lection for the next day, namely, October 8, for Saint Pelagia/the Penitents.         

“And in manuscript 1333, it’s after Luke 24:53.”

          When we consider the details which the shallowness of White’s research prevented him from detecting, the implications of the evidence drastically change from what he misrepresented them to be.  In manuscript 1333, John 8:3-11 is written on the page that follows the page on which the Gospel of Luke concludes, before the chapter-list for the Gospel of John.  

          What has happened is that after the text of John was written in 1333 without John 7:53-8:11, someone noticed that the passage used for Saint Pelagia’s feast-day was missing, and this person added it, preferring to use the blank page after the end of Luke instead of writing the passage in the margin alongside the end of chapter 7.  According to Maurice Robinson, in manuscript 1333, the verses are accompanied by abbreviated rubrics in the margin; one says, “The Gospel-reading for October 8, for Saint Pelagia,” and the other one says, “From the Gospel according to John.”  

          So instead of weighing in as evidence that the pericope adulterae was “a story looking for a place to call home,” as White has claimed, 1333 simply shows that John 8:3-11 was a lection designated to be read annually on October 8, and that even after someone made 1333 based on an exemplar that did not contain John 7:53-8:11, the lack of the lection for St. Pelagia’s Day was so problematic that someone saw fit to add the lection on a blank page of the manuscript.

          James White has asked, “If it was original, why, why, why?  If it was original, why would there be all this chopping-up of it?  It doesn’t make any sense” –  I interrupt to mention that he seems to have asked that question out of sincere perplexity.  But one’s perplexity should not be regarded as a platform from which to jump to a conclusion.  Nevertheless that is what White has done; his statement concludes:  – “unless it wasn’t original.”  Such a text-critical method is highly dubious.  It would be better to investigate the evidence more thoroughly, in order to answer the questions, as we have done here.

           This is, of course, not all that could be said about the pericope adulterae.  (I intend to say much more soon in a book on the subject.)  It should, however, justify a measure of concern when one encounters the claim that the transference of John 7:53-8:11 to locations after the end of John, or to one side or the other of the Pentecost-lection, or to the end of Luke 21, constitutes “absolute evidence” that these 12 verses were “looking for a home” or similar nonsense.  Such claims say more about the shallowness of the authors’ research than they say about how copyists treated the pericope adulterae and why they did so.