There’s been quite a bit of discussion as of late concerning the Pericope Adulterae (John 7:53-8:11). A few weeks ago Ed Komozsewski posted his summary of the first day of the Greer-Heard forum in which Dan Wallace debated Bart Ehrman about the reliability of the NT manuscripts. One commentator–a skeptic named Vinny–brought up the Pericope Adulterae in a comment, to which I responded saying:
(2) The Pericope Adulterae need not be original to the text of John, to be historical. I’m not saying that it did or did not happen, but it is entirely plausible that it (or something very similar) did, and because it was an existing tradition that did have some historical veracity, it crept into the text.
Well since then, an article in Christianity Today came out on this very passage which has drawn some reaction from bibliobloggers. This article relied heavily on the research of Daniel Wallace. Anyone who follows Wallace’s blogging, knows that this is his favotire passage that’s not in the Bible. Wallace’s statements drew a reaction from Jason Oliver Evans, in which he argues that the passage “conveys a powerful truth about Christ [...and...] to remove this passage would be a sad thing for believers.” Roger Mugs also believes we should leave it in the Bible when he says:
I tend to think when it says “all scripture is breathed out by God,” that God had some idea what the Bible ending up in our hands would look like, he knew this would be in, it is compatible with other teachings by Christ and probably should be taken as equal to the rest of the scripture.
Mike Bird says that he wouldn’t preach this text and calls for all pastors to run adult Sunday school classes on textual criticism. Then, one of Wallace’s best and brightest students (to hear him tell it), Tim Ricchuiti, weighs in with a post on the Pericope Adulterae and the Canon of the New Testament, saying that “It’s time to relegate John 7.53–8.11 to the footnotes, or to the bins of the history books.” Doug Chaplin responded to Tim with both agreement about the inauthenticity of the passage, and disagreement about the canonicity of the passage, in his post Committing adulteration with inspired texts? In this post Doug also linked to some questions that Kevin Sam was asking about the Pericope Adulterae. Roger Mugs returns, this time after doing a bit of research on the passage, and now he’s convinced that it’s Scripture.
My take is quite simple. I ask the question: Is it in the KJV? If the KJV was good enough for Paul and Jesus, then it’s good enough for me. And if Paul and Jesus read John 7:53-8:11 then I’ll read it too. Plus, we all saw The Passion of the Christ and that scene was in the movie, so it must be in the book, because we know that Mel Gibson got everything straight from the Bible. And I’ll leave it at that. Let those fancy shmancy textual critics go play with their manuscripts. 
B”H
Posted in Humor, New Testament, Scripture
