^* For my beloved mentor, David Daube, died 24 February, 1999.

¹ For the manuscript history see, e.g., U. BECKER, Jesus und die Ehebrecherin (Berlin 1968) 8-13; B. METZGER, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (Stuttgart ²1984) 187-188.

² See, e.g., J.D.M. DERRETT, Law in the New Testament (London 1970) 156-157; C.K. BARRETT, The Gospel According to St. John (Philadelphia ²1978) 589-590; P. PERKINS, "The Gospel According to John", NJBC, 965; METZGER, Textual Commentary, 188; L. MORRIS, The Gospel According to John (Grand Rapids 1995) 778-779. A particularly fine account of the problems of origins, canonicity and meaning of the pericope is R.E. BROWN, The Gospel According to John I-XII (New York 1966) 332-338.

³ METZGER, Textual Commentary, 188.

⁴ I do agree, of course, that meaning and context are much intertwined. But since I am proposing a fresh interpretation I prefer not to complicate matters by offering a hypothetical genealogy for the pericope. Still, see the final section of this paper. Some commentators on John leave the whole pericope out of account: e.g., J. ASHTON, Understanding the Fourth Gospel (Oxford 1991).

⁵ Susanna (chapter 13 of the Greek Daniel: mid-second century); mSan 5; bSan 30a. For an extreme analysis of the difficulty of proof see DERRETT, Law, 160-163; cf. MORRIS, John, 781.

⁶ See also Deut 22,22.

⁷ See, e.g., BARRETT, St. John, 591-592; PERKINS, "The Gospel According to John", 965; MORRIS, John, 782.

⁸ A. WATSON, The Trial of Jesus (Athens, GA 1995) 100-112; with slight modifications, id., Jesus: a Profile (Athens, GA 1997) 85. Still, I would accept that at least later the Romans claimed sole authority to try secular capital crimes, and they might include adultery among these though it was not capital under Roman law: Origen (in the translation by Rufinus) on Romans 6,7. But it should be noted that Jesus’ "Let the one among you that is without sin be the first to throw a stone" implies that in fact an adulteress was liable to be stoned by the Jews. Moreover, the very clear implication of Origen’s Letter 14 is that still in the third century Jews were putting criminals to death in accordance with the law though without Roman authority: see, e.g. D. DAUBE, The New Testament and Rabbinic Judaism (London 1956) 306-307; WATSON, Trial, 110-111.

⁹ Deut 17,6-7; mSan 6.4; cf. DAUBE, New Testament, 304-305, 308-310; id., Collected Works I: Talmudic Law (Berkeley 1992) 167-171.

¹⁰ For one ingenious attempt to discover what he wrote see DERRETT, Law, 176-182; see also BROWN, Gospel, 333-334, and the works he cites.

¹¹ But the first nine Greek words of the verse, corresponding to "But they said this, testing him, that they might accuse him", are omitted from a few manuscripts: see METZGER, Textual Commentary, 189. However the statement is then made elsewhere in the pericope.

¹² DERRETT, Law, 158.

¹³ DERRETT, Law, 161-165.

¹⁴ BECKER, Jesus, 165-168.

¹⁵ This time, regarding the troubling elements as additions is no solution.

¹⁶ The translation is that of J. NEUSNER, The Mishnah. A New Translation (New Haven 1988) 487.

¹⁷ See, e.g., DAUBE, New Testament, 166-169; C. CARMICHAEL, The Story of Creation (Ithaca 1996) 39, n. 16.

¹⁸ Cf. BARRETT, St. John, 591.

¹⁹ BARRETT, St. John, 590. The paper has since been published: see infra my section IV.

²⁰ See, e.g., Mark 2,23-28 and 7,6-13, and the discussions in A. WATSON, Jesus and the Law (Athens, GA 1996) 37-41, 55-56.

²¹ See above all, D. DAUBE, "Biblical Landmarks in the Struggle for Women’s Rights", Juridical Review 23 (1978) 177-197, at 187-197, and the works he cites. An abridged and revised version is in D. DAUBE, Appeasement or Resistance (Berkeley 1987) 29-31.

²² SifNum 5,31; jSot 24a; bSot 74b. For details of the argument see DAUBE, "Landmarks", 189-190.

²³ Cf. DAUBE, Appeasement, 30.

²⁴ See DAUBE, Appeasement, 30.

²⁵ There is, of course, a strong element of sex discrimination: it is the woman, not the man, who is humiliated before Jesus. If we leave specifics out, then to produce the woman, not the man, is more dramatic. Adultery by a woman has always been regarded as more serious than adultery by a man.

²⁶ Mark 6,16-29.

²⁷ For the argument see WATSON, Jesus, 23-30.

²⁸ We do not know where the episode is envisaged as having taken place. If the pericope was supposed to occur outside the lands of Herod, the first stone-thrower would still be at risk.

²⁹ See, e.g., MORRIS, John, 779, n. 5.

³⁰ See DAUBE, "Landmarks", 188; BECKER, Jesus, 166-167.

³¹ WATSON, Jesus and the Law, 103-110.

³² This is so whether the confrontation was an historical occurrence, or simply envisaged.

³³ I hesitate to offer an explanation of Jesus’ "go and sin no more" in v. 11. There is more than one possibility. The simplest is perhaps that the words were added to the tradition once the pericope was removed from its original context of the remarriage of a divorcée.