Manuscript 758 and the Story About the Adulteress

          Recently at the blog of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, a writer presented minuscule 758 (from the 1300’s) as if it shows that a copyist expressed doubt about the legitimacy of the story of the adulteress by adding marks alongside the story in the margin of the manuscript.  He wrote:    

          “Some scribe (either the original one or a later scribe), upon seeing that this passage was included in John’s Gospel, put markings in the margins to denote its disputed status. However, the markings only cover John 8.3-11, leaving 7.53-8.2 unmarked.”

          If one turns to the pages in question (starting with image 318959, = page-view GA_758_0265b), one can see that the manuscript has a lectionary apparatus built into the text; i.e., lectionary-related notifications for the lector (the person who read selections from the manuscript aloud in worship-services) have been written in red within the text, in space reserved for them. 

Saint Pelagia, pictured before her conversion
(with Saint Nonnus, to the left) and after.

          Following John 7:52, there is an abbreviated note instructing the lector that when reading the lection for Pentecost, he should skip (up. kt. ts. N) from that point to the beginning of 8:12 (where, in the margin, there is an abbreviated note that means, resume here for Pentecost).  At the beginning of 8:3 there is an Αρχη symbol (written in red and embedded in the text), which means “Start here,” and on the next page – although one cannot see this using the cropped pictures at the CSNTM blog – in the upper margin (see Image 318960, = GA_758_0266a), a rubric identifies the reading For the Penitents (i.e., Saint Pelagia and the other Penitent Women), complete with the incipit-phrase to be used at the beginning of 8:3.  A Τελος (“Stop here”) symbol then appears at the end of 8:11 – to be precise, it appears after the “Again” (Παλιν) at the beginning of verse 12, because that is where a blank space had been left to add the lectionary apparatus) – to designate the end of the lection for Saint Pelagia’s Day, followed immediately by the “Resume here” symbol which told the lector where he was to resume reading on Pentecost. (This is augmented by a note meaning “Resume here for Pentecost” in the side-margin beside the same line.)

          I submit that the horizontal lines that accompany John 8:3-11 in manuscript 758 were most definitely not added by a scribe “to denote its disputed status,” as if the person who added these lines accepted John 7:53-8:2 but questioned 8:3-11.  Instead, the horizontal lines in this manuscript (and in others) alongside 8:3-11 were intended to identify the lection for Saint Pelagia’s annual feast-day (October 8), embedded within the lection for Pentecost.

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.
        

A Textual Mystery: The Case of the Adulteress and the Repeated Verse

          In a recent lecture given at the Escola Teológica Charles Spurgeon in Fortaleza, Brazil, Dr. Daniel Wallace encouraged his listeners to adopt and spread his view regarding John 7:53-8:11 (a passage known as the pericope adulterae, the segment about the adulteress) – the widely held view that these 12 verses are not part of the original text of the Gospel of John.    

Daniel Wallace, a professor at Dallas
Theological Seminary, delivering a lecture
at Escola Teologica Charles Spurgeon
in Brazil in early August 2015. 

          At several points in the lecture, Dr. Wallace – regarded by many as one of the leading New Testament textual critics in the USA – misrepresented the evidence.  For example, he claimed, “We don’t have any church fathers to comment on this passage until the tenth century,” and he stated that D, K, and Gamma are the only three uncials that have the passage. 
          Today I will not review the many patristic utilizations of John 7:53-8:11 by writers such as Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, Prosper of Aquitaine, Peter Chrysologus, and so forth.  (I have done that elsewhere already.)  Nor will I sift through the fifteen uncial manuscripts that contain at least part of the passage, or the 1,360 minuscules that contain the passage, or other witnesses such as the chapter-titles in Codex Fuldensis.  Instead I wish to clear up a little mystery regarding the format of the text in minuscule 115, which Dr. Wallace described in his lecture.

            At the 20:50 point of his lecture, Dr. Wallace mentioned that in minuscule 115, the pericope adulterae appears after John 8:12.  He proposed the following explanation for this:  “Here’s what I think happened:  the scribe who’s copying this manuscript out believed that the pericope adulterae was authentic.  And as he’s copying the manuscript in front of him, he copies John 7:52, and then John 8:12, and he goes, ‘Wait a minute!  What happened to the story of the woman caught in adultery?’  So he probably put that manuscript down, and found another manuscript in the monastery that had the story, and that’s what he then copied.  And so at the end of the pericope adulterae we have John 8:12 again, and then the rest of John’s Gospel continues.”

In manuscript 115, John 8:12 appears after John 7:52,
and after John 8:11, thus formatting the lection for
Pentecost as one uninterrupted segment of text.

            That is not remotely the reason why the copyist of 115 put John 8:12 in the text twice.  The repetition of John 8:12 – that is, its appearance in the text after John 7:52 and again after John 8:11 – reflects the influence of the Byzantine lection-cycle upon the text.  (A lection is a Scripture-passage selected to be read in a specific annual sequence, or on a specific annual occasion.)  In the Byzantine lection-cycle, the lection for Pentecost consisted of John 7:37-52 + 8:12; the final verse concluded the reading on a positive note.  The story about the adulteress, having its own distinct theme unrelated to Pentecost, was not read on that day; instead, John 8:3-11 was typically the lection for the Penitent Women (usually represented by Saint Pelagia), read on October 8.

In MS 476 on fol. 173r, John 8:12
is added in the margin beside the
end of 7:52, to finish the lection
for Pentecost.

          When a lector was not using a lectionary, but was reading, instead, from a copy of the four Gospels, he had to depend on the supplemental index of lections and upon marginalia to know what passage was to be read on what day.  Sometimes, medieval copyists made the lector’s job on Pentecost a little easier by adjusting the format of the passage that was to be read at Pentecost.  In MS 476, for example, after the manuscript was made, someone wrote John 8:12 in the margin where John 7:52 ends, so that the final verse of the Pentecost-lection could be read by the lector without any need to search for the verse in the next chapter.

          The copyist of minuscule 115 (or the copyist of 115’s exemplar, or some ancestor-copy of 115) took things one step further, and inserted John 8:12 directly into the text after 7:52, so that the entire lection could be read as one uninterrupted piece.  In minuscule 2751, the same phenomenon may be observed:  we see John 7:52, followed by 8:12, followed by 7:53-8:11, followed by 8:12.  According to Dr. Maurice Robinson’s collations of all Greek manuscripts of the pericope adulterae, this is also a feature of MSS 1050, 1349, and 2620.  No one was exclaiming, “Wait a minute.”  The inclusion of John 8:12 between John 7:52 and 7:53 was a practical way to ensure that the lector would easily complete the lection for Pentecost.

          Occasionally the usual lection-cycle was influenced by local adaptations.  In MS 449 (a two-volume manuscript; the Gospel of John is in the second volume), on fol. 116r, John7:52 ends at the end of a page.  Usually the lectionary apparatus (the lection-names and numbers, and symbols embedded in the text and/or in the margins, often accompanied by incipits, phrases to use when beginning to read a lection) would instruct the lector at this point to jump to the beginning of 8:12, by means of a hyperbale (“skip ahead”) symbol, typically written in red.      

The lectionary-based adaptation in MS 2751
resembles the format seen in MS 115:
John 8:12 appears after 7:52, and after 8:11.

          In MS 449, however, the hyperbale symbol does not appear until after John 8:2, on the following page (which begins with 7:53).  That is not all:  before the hyperbale symbol, the text of 8:2 merges with the beginning of 8:12, so as to read, και πας ο λαος ηρχετο προς αυτον και καθισας εδιδασκεν αυτους λεγων εγω ειμι – that is, “and all the people came to him and, sitting down, he taught them, saying, ‘I am’” – and then the hyperbale symbol appears, instructing the lector to skip ahead to the arxou (“resume”) symbol on 117r, where 8:12 begins.          
          Apparently, in the lection-cycle where MS 449 was used, the Pentecost-lection included 7:53-8:2, so as to leave no material unused before the beginning of the lection for Saint Pelagia’s feast-day.

          (In case anyone is wondering, “Why would lectionary-influence cause 8:12 to be repeated instead of just being transplanted to follow John 7:52 in the passage assigned to be read on Pentecost?”, it should be noted that lections sometimes overlapped, and this is one such case:  John 8:12 concluded the lection for Pentecost, and also began the lection that was to be read on the fourth Thursday after Easter (typically identified in lectionary-related marginalia as Day 5 of Week 4); this lection consisted of John 8:12-20.)

MS 449, vol. 2, fol. 116v:  "hyperbale"
appears (in red) appears after John 8:2
(and part of 8:12) to instruct the lector
to skip ahead to 8:12. 

          Thus the mystery of the repeated occurrence of John 8:12 in MS 115 (and a few other manuscripts) is solved.  The factor that resolves this little puzzle – the influence of the lection-cycle – may suggest the resolution of some other mysteries that involve John 7:53-8:11:

           · If someone in an early church that used a basic lection-cycle (not a fully developed lection-series for every day of the year, but something limited mainly to Easter-time and other major holy days, including Pentecost) prepared a manuscript of the Gospels for a lector, with symbols intended to instruct the lector to skip from the end of John 7:52 to the beginning of John 8:12, and then such a copy was placed into the hands of a meticulous and mechanically-minded professional copyist who was unfamiliar with the lection-cycle, the copyist might misinterpret the symbols to mean that he, the copyist, ought to skip from the end of John 7:52 to the beginning of 8:12.  This would result in the instant loss of the 12 verses in between. 

          · If a manuscript were prepared in a locale where the Pentecost-lection included John 7:53-8:2, with symbols instructing the lector to skip from the end of 8:2 to the beginning of 8:12, and a professional copyist might misinterpret the symbols as if they were meant for him, the manuscript the copyist made would include John 7:53-8:2 but not 8:3-11.

          · Some copyists, in the course of preparing copies of the Gospels that they expected to be used for lection-reading, being aware of the difficulties that were caused for lectors by the presence of John 7:53-8:11 embedded in the Pentecost-lection, might simplify things by removing the whole section and placing it at the end of the Gospel of John.
          · Some copyists, in the course of preparing copies of the Gospels that they expected to be used for lection-reading, might take a more drastic step, and remove the passage from the Gospel of John so that the Pentecost-lection would be uninterrupted, and transplant the passage into Luke, at the end of chapter 21 – a location chosen not only because of the similarity between Luke 21:38 and John 8:2, but also because the lection for the annual feast-day for Saints Sergius and Bacchus, on October 7, consisted of Luke 21:12-19, and it was convenient to have the lection for the next day – October 8, the annual feast-day for Saint Pelagia – at the closest subsequent break in the narrative.           

            Forms of the text which would result from these four hypothetical scenarios all exist in the extant manuscripts: 

            · In approximately 270 Greek manuscripts, John 7:53-8:11 is not in the text of John at all.  (These manuscripts include the best representatives of the Alexandrian text.) 

            · In 18 manuscripts, John 7:53-8:2 follows 7:52, but verses 3-11 are absent.  (In minuscule 105 (Codex Ebnerianus), John 7:53-8:2 follows 7:52 in the text of John; John 8:3-11 was added after John chapter 21 by a medieval monk).  Evidence from the Aramaic lectionary (formerly known as the Palestinian Syriac lectionary) demonstrates that this arrangement was in use when the exemplars of its extant representatives were made. 

            · In three chief members of the family-1 group of manuscripts (1, 1582, and 2193), John 7:53-8:11 is not in chapters 7 and 8 of John, but is present after chapter 21.  A note in MSS 1 and 1582 states that the passage was found in an exemplar after the part that says, “Search and see that a prophet does not arise out of Galilee,” that is, after John 7:52.

            · In the group of manuscripts known as family 13, some manuscripts (13, 69, 124, 346, and others) have John 7:53-8:11 at the end of Luke 21.  

            The influence of the lection-cycle (in some cases, a simple series of selections for the major feast-days, and in other cases the substantially complete Byzantine lection-cycle) accounts for the unusual treatments of John 7:53-8:11 that are observed in the extant manuscripts of the Gospel of John.  (For example, it explains why the copyist of minuscule 225 placed John 7:53-8:11 before the passage that consists of the Pentecost-lection.) 

            One mystery that remains unexplained is the mysterious silence from many commentators (and professors) about the influence of the lection-cycle upon the text of John 7:53-8:11.  Commentators – especially commentators who endorse the Alexandrian text of the Gospels almost entirely – typically mention that many manuscripts do not have the passage – but they do not mention the relationships of these manuscripts, as if suddenly, one should count manuscripts instead of weigh them. 

          Commentators mention that in some manuscripts, the passage is accompanied by asterisks – but they only rarely mention that in 130 manuscripts, the asterisks accompany only John 8:3-11 – the lection for Saint Pelagia’s feast-day – and not John 7:53-8:2.  The commentators then describe the asterisks as expressions of scribal doubt, without even mentioning the possibility that the asterisks are merely part of the lectionary-related marginalia, intended (when alongside John 7:53-8:11) to convey that the passage should be skipped in the course of the Pentecost lection, or (when they accompany John 8:3-11 (with variations:  in Codex E the asterisks begin at 8:2; in MS 685 curvy lines appear, rather than asterisks)) to identify the lection to be read on Saint Pelagia’s feast-day. 

          Why does it seem that some commentators want their readers to see only some of the relevant evidence regarding John 7:53-8:11?  Why do some scholars, when discussing this passage, avoid mentioning that Jerome stated that he found it in many manuscripts, both Greek and Latin?  Why do scholars who advocate the Alexandrian text almost 100% seem so timid about allowing all the evidence to be displayed, and even more timid about allowing it to be seen in clear detail?

          Perhaps it is not such a mystery after all.  In any event, I think that researchers should refrain from proposing that the story about the adulteress should not be in the Bible until they have studied the evidence much more, and much more carefully, so as to be able to describe the relevant evidence thoroughly and accurately, and recognize the influence of the lection-cycle when it is right in front of their faces.  When they can do that, they might no longer want to make such a proposal.