The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (4th ed.)

In the Gospel of John (viii. 1–11), the Pharisees and scribes bring a woman taken in adultery to Jesus, that they may obtain his opinion as to the procedure to be observed against her; whereupon Jesus, by appealing to the consciences of the accusers, liberates the woman, and dismisses her with an admonition. The genuineness of this passage has been strongly contested, nay, its spuriousness might be regarded as demonstrated, were it not that even the most thorough investigations on the subject69 indirectly betray a design, which Paulus openly avows, of warding off the dangerous surmises as to the origin of the fourth gospel, which are occasioned by the supposition that this passage, encumbered as it is with improbabilities, is a genuine portion of that gospel. For in the first place, the scribes say to Jesus: Moses in the law commanded us that such should be stoned: now in no part of the Pentateuch is this punishment prescribed for adultery, but simply death, the mode of inflicting it being left undetermined (Lev. xx. 10; Deut. xxii. 22); nor was stoning for adultery a latter institution of the Talmud, for according to the canon: omne mortis supplicium, in scripturâ absolute positum esse strangulationem,70 the punishment appointed for this offence in the Talmud is strangulation.71 Further, it is difficult to discover what there was to ensnare Jesus in the question proposed to him;72 the scribes quoted to him the commandment of the law, as if they would warn him, rather than tempt him, for they could not expect that he would decide otherwise than agreeably to the law.

Again, the decision of Jesus is open to the stricture, that if only he who is conscious of perfect purity were authorized to judge and punish, all social order would be at an end. The circumstance of Jesus writing on the ground has a legendary and mystical air, for even if it be not correctly explained by the gloss of Jerome: eorum videlicet, qui accusabant, et omnium mortalium peccata, it yet seems to imply something more mysterious than a mere manifestation of contempt for the accusers. Lastly, it is scarcely conceivable that every one of those men who dragged the woman before Jesus, zealous for the law, and adverse to his cause as they are supposed to be, should have had so tender a conscience, as on the appeal of Jesus to retire without prosecuting their design, and leave the woman behind them uninjured; this rather [410]appears to belong merely to the legendary or poetical embellishment of the scene. Yet however improbable it may appear, from these observations, that the occurrence happened precisely as it is here narrated, this, as Bretschneider justly maintains,73 proves nothing against the genuineness of the passage, since it is arguing in a circle to assume the apostolic composition of the fourth gospel, and the consequent impossibility that a narrative containing contradictions should form a portion of it, prior to an examination of its several parts. Nevertheless, on the other hand, the absence of the passage in the oldest authorities is so suspicious, that a decision on the subject cannot be hazarded.

In any case, the narrative of an interview between Jesus and a woman of the above character must be very ancient, since, according to Eusebius, it was found in the Gospel of the Hebrews, and in the writings of Papias.74 It was long thought that the woman mentioned in the Hebrew gospel and by Papias was identical with the adulteress in John; but against this it has been justly observed, that one who had the reproach of many sins, must be distinct from her who was detected in the one act of adultery.75 I wonder, however, that no one has, to my knowledge, thought, in connexion with the passage of Eusebius, of the woman in Luke of whom Jesus says that her many sins, ἁμαρτίαι πολλαὶ, are forgiven. It is true that the word διαβληθείσης does not fully agree with this idea, for Luke does not speak of actual expressions of the Pharisee in disparagement of the woman, but merely of the unfavourable thoughts which he had concerning her; and in this respect the passage in Eusebius would agree better with the narrative of John, which has an express denunciation, a διαβάλλειν.

Thus we are led on external grounds, by the doubt whether an ancient notice refer to the one or the other of the two narratives, to a perception of their affinity,76 which is besides evident from internal reasons. In both we have a woman, a sinner, before Jesus; in both, this woman is regarded with an evil eye by Pharisaic sanctimoniousness, but is taken into protection by Jesus, and dismissed with a friendly πορεύου, go. These were precisely the features, the origin of which we could not understand in the narrative of Luke, viewed as a mere variation of the history of the anointing given by the other Evangelists. Now, what is more natural than to suppose that they were transferred into Luke’s history of the anointing, from that of the forgiven sinner? If the Christian legend possessed, on the one side, a woman who had anointed Jesus, who was on this account reproached, but was defended by Jesus; and on the other side a woman who was accused before him of many sins, but whom he pardoned; how easily, aided by the idea of an anointing of the feet of Jesus, which bears the interpretation of an act of penitence, might the two histories flow together—the anointing woman become also a sinner, and the sinner also an anointer? Then, that the scene of the pardon was an entertainment, was a feature also drawn from the history of the anointing: the entertainer must be a Pharisee, because the accusation of the woman ought to proceed from a Pharisaic party, and because, as we have seen, Luke has a predilection for Pharisaic entertainments.

Lastly, the discourse of Jesus may have been borrowed, partly from the original narrative of the woman who was a sinner, partly from analogous occasions. If these [411]conjectures be correct, the narratives are preserved unmixed, on the one hand, by the two first Evangelists; on the other, by the fourth, or whoever was the author of the passage on the adulteress; for if the latter contains much that is legendary, it is at least free from any admixture of the history of the anointing.

Having thus accounted for one modification of the narrative concerning the anointing woman, namely, her degradation into a sinner, by the influence of another and somewhat similar anecdote, which was current in the first age of Christianity, we may proceed to consider, experimentally, whether a like external influence may not have helped to produce the opposite modification of the unknown into Mary of Bethany: a modification which, for the rest, we have already seen to be easy of explanation. Such an influence could only proceed from the sole notice of Mary (with the exception of her appearance at the resurrection of Lazarus) which has been preserved to us, and which is rendered memorable by the declaration of Jesus, One thing is needful, and Mary hath chosen, etc. (Luke x. 38 ff.). We have, in fact, here as well as there, Martha occupied in serving (John xii. 2, καὶ ἡ Μάρθα διηκόνει; Luke x. 40, ἡ δὲ Μάρθα περιεσπᾶτο περὶ πολλὴν διακονίαν); here, Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus, there, anointing his feet; here, blamed by her sister, there by Judas, for her useless conduct, and in both cases, defended by Jesus.

It is surely unavoidable to say, if once the narrative of the anointing of Jesus by a woman were current together with that of Mary and Martha, it was very natural, from the numerous points of resemblance between them, that they should be blended in the legend, or by some individual, into one story; that the unknown woman who anointed the feet of Jesus, who was blamed by the spectators, and vindicated by Jesus, should be changed into Mary, whom tradition had depicted in a similar situation; the task of serving at the meal with which the anointing was connected attributed to Mary’s sister, Martha; and finally, her brother Lazarus made a partaker of the meal:—so that here the narrative of Luke on the one side, and that of the two synoptists on the other, appear to be pure anecdotes, that of John a mixed one.

Further, in Luke’s narrative of the visit of Jesus to the two sisters, there is no mention of Lazarus, with whom, however, according to John (xi. and xii.), Mary and Martha appear to have dwelt; nay, Luke speaks precisely as if the presence or existence of this brother, whom indeed neither he nor either of the other synoptists anywhere notices, were entirely unknown to him. For had he known anything of Lazarus, or had he thought of him as present, he could not have said: A certain woman, named Martha, received him into her house; he must at least have named her brother also, especially as, according to John, the latter was an intimate friend of Jesus. This silence is remarkable, and commentators have not succeeded in finding a better explanation of it than that given in the Natural History of the Prophet of Nazareth, where the shortly subsequent death of Lazarus is made available for the supposition that he was, about the time of that visit of Jesus, on a journey for the benefit of his health.77 Not less striking is another point relative to the locality of this scene. According to John, Mary and Martha dwelt in Bethany, a small town in the immediate vicinity of Jerusalem; whereas Luke, when speaking of the visit of Jesus to these sisters, only mentions a certain town, κώμην τινὰ, which is thought, however, to be easily reconciled with the statement of John, by the observation, that Luke assigns the visit to the journey of Jesus to Jerusalem, and to one travelling thither out of Galilee, Bethany would lie in the way.

But it would lie quite at the end of this way, so that the visit of Jesus must [412]fall at the close of his journey, whereas Luke places it soon after the departure out of Galilee, and separates it from the entrance into Jerusalem by a multitude of incidents filling eight entire chapters. Thus much then is clear: the author or editor of the third gospel was ignorant that that visit was paid in Bethany, or that Mary and Martha dwelt there, and it is only that Evangelist who represents Mary as the anointing woman, who also names Bethany as the home of Mary: the same place where, according to the two first synoptists, the anointing occurred. If Mary were once made identical with the anointing woman, and if the anointing were known to have happened in Bethany, it would naturally follow that this town would be represented as Mary’s home. Hence it is probable that the anointing woman owes her name to the current narrative of the visit of Jesus to Martha and Mary, and that Mary owes her home to the narrative of the meal at Bethany.

We should thus have a group of five histories, among which the narrative given by the two first synoptists of the anointing of Jesus by a woman, would form the centre, that in John of the adulteress, and that in Luke of Mary and Martha, the extremes, while the anointing by the sinner in Luke, and that by Mary in John, would fill the intermediate places. It is true that all the five narratives might with some plausibility be regarded as varied editions of one historical incident; but from the essential dissimilarity between the three to which I have assigned the middle and extreme places, I am rather of opinion that these are each founded on a special incident, but that the two intermediate narratives are secondary formations which owe their existence to the intermixture of the primary ones by tradition. [413]