The Stone He Could Have Thrown

A Case Brought to the Wrong Court

The scribes and Pharisees did not carry a woman into the Temple courts that morning. They carried a case, and she happened to be the exhibit.

John tells us plainly what they were up to. They stood her in the middle of the crowd and said, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery” (John 8:4, ESV). Then they quoted Moses, and asked Jesus what He would say. John does not leave us guessing about their motive either.

“This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him.”

— John 8:6 (ESV)

So the woman was bait. Anyone who has watched a family quarrel turn into a trial at a burial knows how this goes. A real wrong has been done, everyone present is quietly sure of it, and yet the shouting has very little to do with the wrong. It has to do with who will be made to look small by the end of the afternoon.

To tell this story properly, we have to start with something many preachers skip.

What the Oldest Manuscripts Tell Us

The story of the woman caught in adultery is not found in the earliest copies of John’s Gospel. That’s no rumour from a hostile website. The people who spend their lives reading these manuscripts agree on it, and Christians should be the first to say so.

Jennifer Knust and Tommy Wasserman, two scholars who have given years to this one passage, list the witnesses that leave it out. They include two of the earliest papyrus copies of John (Papyrus 66 and Papyrus 75), and the great codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. The oldest Syriac and Sahidic Coptic versions leave it out as well, along with the Gothic version and several Old Latin copies. They call the case that the story was not written by John “overwhelming” (Knust & Wasserman, 2020, p. 22). The earliest Greek manuscript to include it is Codex Bezae, from about the year 400. In a Greek commentary from the twelfth century, Euthymius Zigabenus admits that in the more accurate copies it is either missing or marked with a sign to show doubt. Their own judgement is that the story most likely entered a Greek manuscript of John in the West, perhaps in Italy, in the early third century.

The story is old, then, but it did not begin in John. Why did it survive? Jerome, writing in 415, says it is found “in many of both the Greek as well as the Latin copies,” which is how Knust and Wasserman render his words (2020, p. 39). Augustine, a little later, knew that copies differed. By about the fifth century the Greek tradition had given it a chapter number of its own. And the scribes did something to their own manuscripts that I find quietly moving. They marked the passage with signs and little notes, so that anyone reading would be reminded how the story had come to them. Nobody was hiding the problem. The copyists told the reader.

Modern Bibles follow that example. The ESV, which I am quoting here, prints the passage inside double brackets so that the reader sees the line drawn.

Now, the strongest form of the objection. A sceptic says, quite fairly, that if this story was not in John’s Gospel as John wrote it, then a preacher who builds a message on it is preaching a legend, and the church has been rather quiet about that. I think that is a hard objection, and I would not wave it off.

Here is where I land. Nothing I need to say about grace depends on this one story. Paul writes, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1, ESV), and John records Jesus saying in chapter 3 that God did not send His Son into the world to condemn it. Those texts stand in every manuscript. The story of the woman illustrates that teaching and doesn’t hold it up. The church received it, copied it and kept it for sixteen centuries, I think because it sounded so exactly like Him. That is my judgement, and I hold it as a judgement, not a proof. If you decide the passage doesn’t belong in John, you’ll still have the gospel. You’ll have lost a very good story, and that’s all.

So read what follows as a scene the church has long believed captures the Lord truthfully, told with the scholars’ caution printed on the label.

What the Law Actually Asked For

The accusers were right about the sentence. Leviticus is not vague.

“If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.”

— Leviticus 20:10 (ESV)

Deuteronomy says the same, and says it more fully.

“If a man is found lying with the wife of another man, both of them shall die, the man who lay with the woman, and the woman.”

— Deuteronomy 22:22 (ESV)

Both of them. The man and the woman. Which makes one question impossible to avoid, however politely we try.

Where was the man?

Adultery takes two people. John’s own report, in the accusers’ mouths, is that she was caught “in the act.” Whoever she was with was, on that account, caught in the act as well. Yet the only person dragged into the Temple courts was the woman. Whatever else the scribes were doing, they weren’t applying Moses. They were applying Moses to the one defendant who suited them, and quietly losing the other. Deuteronomy 22:23 and 24 shows the Law could be hard on women, since it speaks of a betrothed woman in a city and has both parties stoned at the gate. Hard, yes. Lopsided, no. The Law named the man every time.

There is a second thing the accusers skipped. Moses did not allow a death sentence on a crowd’s say so. The same book is firm about proof.

“On the evidence of two witnesses or of three witnesses the one who is to die shall be put to death.”

— Deuteronomy 17:6 (ESV)

And in the next verse it says who acts first.

“The hand of the witnesses shall be first against him to put him to death, and afterward the hand of all the people.”

— Deuteronomy 17:7 (ESV)

The witnesses had to be the first to lift a stone. That is a heavy thing to ask of anyone. It meant that a person who accuses with the intent that someone should die must be ready to carry out the sentence with their own hands. The Law also warned that a witness found to be lying was to suffer the penalty he had planned for his target (Deuteronomy 19:18 to 19). Moses had built a fence round the courtroom, and the men in John 8 had climbed over it before the day’s business began.

Moses on One Side and Rome on the Other

The usual reading of the trap is this. If Jesus said, “Stone her,” He could be reported to the Romans for ordering an execution that only the governor had the right to order. If He said, “Let her go,” He could be called a man who set Himself above Moses. Either answer would hand the crowd what they wanted.

I should say that John does not spell out the two horns. He gives us only the word “test” and the phrase “some charge.” The reading comes from the setting, and it is a sound one. John 18:31 has the Jewish leaders telling Pilate that it is not lawful for them to put anyone to death, and Acts 7 shows that a mob could and did stone a man to death, so historians argue about how tightly Rome held that right at any given time. The trap does not need the law to be clear. It needs only that the answer could be turned against Him in either direction.

Rome had its own view of adultery, and it is worth knowing. Under the Lex Julia of 18 BC, Augustus made adultery an offence to be tried before a court, with penalties that included a loss of property and, for the wife, banishment to an island (CSUN, n.d.). A father or a husband caught in a narrow set of circumstances could kill an offender on the spot, but the law surrounded even that with conditions. In other words, neither Moses nor Rome knew of the arrangement the crowd was proposing, which was a verdict by acclamation in an open courtyard. Both legal systems, whatever else we say about them, asked for a court and for evidence.

Jesus declines the legal quarrel they have set up. He bends down, and writes on the ground with His finger. John does not tell us what.

It gets more attention than it deserves, but a word is in order. Some readers across the centuries have heard an echo in it. The tablets of the Law were, according to Exodus, “written with the finger of God” (Exodus 31:18, ESV), and here is the Lord writing again with a finger. Augustine, preaching on this chapter, set the two writings side by side, and said of the second, “The Lord now wrote on the ground, because He was seeking fruit” (Augustine, n.d., Tractate 33). It is a lovely thing to notice, and I notice it too. But John never says what the finger is doing, and I’d be claiming more than I can support if I told you the writing is a hidden proof of anything. Better to say what the text does say. He did not answer at once. He would not be hurried. A crowd that wants an answer in five seconds has usually decided already what it will do with it.

The One Person Who Qualified

When they pressed Him, He stood and gave His answer.

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

— John 8:7 (ESV)

People take this sentence two wrong ways. Some use it to say that nobody may ever judge anything, as if Jesus had handed out a permanent excuse. Others think He was inventing a softer ethic to replace the harsh God of the Old Testament. Both readings miss that He is speaking in the grammar of the Law itself. Deuteronomy 17 had already said the accusers must act first, and many readers hear an echo of that rule here. He is simply asking them to qualify.

And they could not qualify. John says that “they went away one by one, beginning with the older ones, and Jesus was left alone” (John 8:9, ESV). The oldest went first, as you would expect. Longer lives have longer ledgers. Nobody threw a stone, and nobody needed Jesus to explain why.

This is where the story turns. The crowd has gone, and everyone who had a claim to speak has left because they were disqualified. But one person in that courtyard was not disqualified. He had no secret. He hadn’t set the trap, or hidden the other party. He was the one human being present who had a right, under the very Law being cited, to take up the stone.

He could have thrown it. And He did not.

Augustine, who knew this chapter well and preached on it in North Africa, put it better than I can. After the accusers left, he said, “the two were left alone, the wretched woman and Mercy” (Augustine, n.d., Tractate 33). A fifth century bishop in Hippo, and a Nigerian reader in the twenty first century, can find the same thing in that line. She was left with the only Person who could have condemned her justly, and He was the one who didn’t.

Then He asked where her accusers were. She said none remained.

“Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.”

— John 8:11 (ESV)

Look at what He didn’t say. He didn’t say she had done nothing, or that adultery was a small matter, or that Moses was out of date. The command to sin no more only makes sense if there was something to leave behind. Yet He refused the sentence, and He gave her a future.

Where the Stone Landed

An honest listener asks the next question straight away. If the Law said death, and the one person qualified to carry out the sentence refused to, did justice simply go missing? Did God look the other way?

The New Testament answers that it did not. Paul says that God put forward Christ as a propitiation by His blood, and that this was so that God would be shown to be just and also the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus (Romans 3:25 to 26). The sentence was not cancelled. It was carried. The penalty that the Law asked for in that courtyard, and that every sin in every life asks for, was taken by the One who had the right to give it. Outside the city walls, the stone found its mark. It landed on Him.

You don’t have to lean on any Western theory about courtrooms to see it. Any Nigerian family knows that a real debt has to be settled by somebody, and that a wrong can’t be dismissed just because the offender feels sorry. The cross is where God settled it, in His own body, on a Friday afternoon.

So I don’t think the woman was simply let off. She was covered. The distance between those two words is the distance between a mercy that costs nothing and the mercy of Calvary.

Women Still Standing in the Middle

It would be easy to file all this under ancient history, but Nigerians have watched a version of that courtyard in our own time.

Consider a case that the whole country watched. On 22 March 2002 a Sharia court in Funtua, in Katsina State, sentenced a woman named Amina Lawal to death by stoning for adultery, after she had given birth outside marriage. The man she named as the father was acquitted. On 25 September 2003 a panel of five judges of the Katsina State Sharia Court of Appeal overturned the sentence. Four of them held that her right to a proper defence had not been ensured, that her pregnancy was not enough circumstantial evidence, that her confession was not valid, and that only one judge had sat where three were required (Amina Lawal, n.d.).

I don’t tell this to score a point against our Muslim neighbours. Their own judges threw the sentence out on the strength of their own law’s demand for proof, which is to their credit. I tell it because the shape matches John 8. A woman stands alone in the dock. The man is somewhere else. And the only thing that stopped the stones was a stubborn insistence that accusation is not evidence and that a verdict needs a lawful court.

Most of us will never see a stoning. Many of us will see something that works the same way, only quieter. Picture a church (this is a scene I am imagining, not a report). A young woman is found to be pregnant outside marriage. On Sunday a leader stands before the congregation and announces her name and what she has done. The young man responsible, who attends the same church and sings in the same choir, is not mentioned. Everyone in the building understands the arrangement. Church discipline, as Jesus describes it, starts somewhere else.

“If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone.”

— Matthew 18:15 (ESV)

Between you and him alone. The first step in the Lord’s own method is a private conversation, with the aim of winning someone back, not of winning an argument. A rebuke designed to be seen is too often a stone with a pulpit behind it.

The same thing happens on our phones. A screenshot goes into a family group, then into three more, and by evening a stranger in another city has an opinion about a person he has never met. The woman in John 8 faced a crowd of a few dozen. Today’s crowd arrives faster and doesn’t forget. The Lord’s challenge to men holding their stones is just as good a question for a thumb hovering over the forward button.

Taking Your Hand Off the Stone

If you have been the woman in this story, with your name in people’s mouths and a sin that is real and not imaginary, the story was kept for you. It never says your sin was small. It says the One who is able to condemn you has chosen to carry the sentence Himself, and that His word to you is “go, and from now on sin no more.” To be told to go is a kindness. It means there is a life to go back to.

And if you are the one holding a stone, think of the last time you passed a story about someone’s failure to a friend. What did you hope it would do? Then think of the person you know who is carrying a sin quietly, and ask whether a private word, offered this week and meant for their good, is in order. Jesus began with the crowd and ended with the woman. Most of us are better at the first. I’d like to see our churches known for the second, for people who stay behind after the others have gone.

References

Biblical References

Acts 7:57 to 60 (ESV). The stoning of Stephen, which shows that a mob could kill by stoning in this period and that historians cannot treat the question of authority as simple. Referred to, not quoted.
Deuteronomy 17:6 to 7 (ESV). The requirement of two or three witnesses and the rule that the witnesses cast the first stones, which is the background to Jesus’ challenge.
Deuteronomy 19:18 to 19 (ESV). The penalty for a lying witness, showing that the Law protected the accused. Referred to, not quoted.
Deuteronomy 22:22 to 24 (ESV). Death for both man and woman in adultery, so the absent man is a gap in the accusers’ case.
Exodus 31:18 (ESV). The tablets written with the finger of God, held loosely as an echo that readers since Augustine have noticed.
John 3:17 (ESV). God did not send His Son to condemn the world, one of the stable texts on which the doctrine of grace rests. Referred to, not quoted.
John 8:3 to 11 (ESV). The passage under discussion, which the ESV prints in double brackets. Verses 4, 6, 7, 9 and 11 are quoted.
John 18:31 (ESV). The Jewish leaders tell Pilate they cannot put anyone to death, the usual background to the trap. Referred to, not quoted.
Leviticus 20:10 (ESV). The Law’s sentence on both adulterer and adulteress.
Matthew 18:15 (ESV). The first step of church discipline is private, set against public exposure.
Romans 3:25 to 26 (ESV). God is shown to be just and the justifier through Christ’s blood, which answers what became of justice. Referred to, not quoted.
Romans 8:1 (ESV). No condemnation in Christ, the doctrine that stands whatever one decides about the passage’s place in John.

Other Sources

Amina Lawal. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved 25 October 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amina_Lawal
Augustine of Hippo. (n.d.). Tractate 33 on the Gospel of John. In P. Schaff (Ed.), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Series 1 (Vol. 7). New Advent. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1701033.htm
CSUN. (n.d.). Lex Julia de adulteriis (18 B.C.). California State University, Northridge. https://csun.edu/~hcfll004/Adulteriis.html
Knust, J., & Wasserman, T. (2020). The pericope of the adulteress (John 7:53 to 8:11): A new chapter in its textual transmission. Svensk Exegetisk Årsbok, 85, 22-55. https://publicera.kb.se/sea/article/download/15085/12019/27553

Translation Notices

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.