"Let He Who Is Without Sin" Isn't in the Oldest Copies of the Bible

Did you know one of the most famous mercy stories in the Gospels — the woman caught in adultery, Jesus writing in the dust, "let he who is without sin cast the first stone," "go and sin no more" — isn't in the earliest manuscripts of the Bible?

The passage is John 7:53–8:11, traditionally called the "pericope adulterae" (Latin for "the passage about the adulteress"). It's one of the most beloved passages in the New Testament. It's also one of the most textually contested.

The earliest Greek manuscripts of John do not contain it:

— P66 and P75 (papyrus fragments, late 2nd / early 3rd century) — missing
— Codex Sinaiticus (4th century) — missing
— Codex Vaticanus (4th century) — missing
— Codex Alexandrinus (5th century) — missing
— Codex Ephraemi (5th century) — missing

When the passage does appear in later manuscripts, it appears in different positions. Some place it at John 7:53. Some at the end of John (after John 21:25). Some after John 7:36. Some in Luke, after Luke 21:38. This "floating" position is itself strong manuscript-criticism evidence that the passage wasn't originally part of John's Gospel — copyists didn't know where it belonged because it wasn't there to begin with.

The vocabulary and syntax also differ from John's typical Greek style. The earliest Greek manuscripts that include it are 9th century or later (Codex Bezae is the earliest major Greek witness, 5th century, and it has a noticeably different text overall).

Most modern translations now bracket the passage and add a footnote noting that the earliest manuscripts don't include it. The ESV, NIV, NASB, NRSV, and CSB all flag it.

So what's going on?

The current scholarly consensus — including Reformed scholars like Bruce Metzger, D.A. Carson, and Andreas Köstenberger — is that the passage is most likely an authentic piece of oral Jesus tradition that wasn't originally in John, but circulated independently in the early church and was eventually written into John (and sometimes Luke) by later copyists who couldn't bear to lose it. The story "sounds like Jesus" — His mercy toward the broken, His shame for the hypocrites, His refusal to be cornered by religious-political traps — and the early church preserved it even when they couldn't decide where it belonged.

Whether or not it was original to John, the Christ in the story is the Christ of the rest of the Gospels. The doctrine of inspiration isn't threatened by honest textual criticism — what's preserved is what God preserved in the canon, and the truth of Christ's mercy and confrontation with hypocrisy is taught throughout Scripture.

Some stories are too true to lose.

(See ep10 — Mark Ends in Silence — for the parallel textual-criticism reveal about Mark 16:9–20.)

📖 Passages: John 7:53–8:11, John 21:25, Luke 21:38