Sayings of Jesus: ‘Go, and sin no more’
A constant danger for modern readers of the New Testament (and preachers who are either insufficiently familiar with the principles of biblical interpretation or fail for whatever reason to practice them) is to read the first-century Graeco-Roman Jewish text through a modern lens—our contemporary western ways of thinking—as if the stories were taking place today within a middle-class societal context. This can lead to some appalling misreadings of what the text was saying in its original setting.
This is starkly exemplified in two well-known stories of Jesus’ encounters with women: the ‘Samaritan woman at the well’ (John 4) and the ‘woman caught in adultery’ (John 8) where modern social assumptions (and judgements) get ‘read-into’ the stories, leading to conclusions about those women that are derived neither from the texts themselves nor from an informed reading-in-context.
I have previously written about the Samaritan woman at the well (where, incidentally, Jesus does not use the captioned phrase, ‘Go, and sin no more’)—see https://www.steveburnhope.com/blog/the-samaritan-woman-at-the-well?rq=Samaritan. I commend it to you for reading in conjunction. Here, however, we will consider the second story. It’s short enough to reproduce in full (John 8:3–11):
The scribes and the Pharisees brought in a woman who had been caught in adultery. Forcing her to stand in their midst, they said to him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of adultery. Now, in the law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. What do you have to say?”
They asked him this question as a test so that they could bring a charge against him. Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they continued to persist in their question, he straightened up and said to them, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Then he again bent down and wrote on the ground.
When they heard his response, they went away one by one, beginning with the elders, until Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Then Jesus straightened up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She replied, “No one, sir.” “Neither do I condemn you,” Jesus said. “Go on your way, and sin no more.
The use of the Greek term for ‘adultery’ tells us that the woman was likely either married or betrothed. However, it indicates nothing about her consent—a willing participant, as we would generally assume to be the case today. All it says is that she was caught in the act of adultery, not that she was in an ongoing adulterous relationship mutually entered into.
The religious men who ‘caught’ her in the act quote Torah—or rather, they misquote it, in a selective and misogynistic way, presumably quite deliberately. Deuteronomy 22:22, to which they are alluding, says that “If a man is discovered committing adultery, both he and the woman must die” (so, too, Leviticus 20:10). Here, however, not only is the man nowhere to be seen (strongly implying that the whole thing was indeed a set-up—a pre-planned entrapment—in which the woman was being used as a pawn to engineer a situation to discredit Jesus) but the men’s motive clearly has nothing to do with a concern for either justice or holiness. Lest we should miss that, John is explicit: They asked Jesus this question as a test so that they could bring a charge against him.
Religious people—then and now—specialise in cheap accusations of ‘liberalism’ and failing to uphold ‘the authority of Scripture’, which is exactly the strategy we see deployed here, in the ‘Gotcha!’ question with which they expect to entrap Jesus. It’s a version of “The Bible clearly teaches . . .” They are blatantly and mercilessly weaponising Scripture, in this case through a half-truth ‘proof text’ wielded against a vulnerable woman—abusing their superior male power, for their own ends.
Today’s assumption that the woman was presumably a willing participant flies in the face of everything we know about the social context at the time. It’s one thing to notice the absence of the man in this kangaroo courtroom scene—most evangelical commentators and would-be preachers can see that—and yet the customary reading still assumes a mutual guilt (“It takes two to tango. . .”). The reality is that there are many ways in which this scenario could easily have been engineered by men plotting it against the woman, centred in the patriarchal male power and female vulnerability to coercion that was embedded in the cultural context. Mutual consent, in the context of an ongoing secret relationship, would be the least plausible assumption, which, indeed, the story itself implies to anyone familiar with the social context of that world. There are several more credible reasons why she may have had no choice—including economic dependency, a landlord or patron demanding sexual favours, exploiting a husband’s absence, or physical threats. There may well have been ‘no escape’ for her.
Ironically, at the very end of the preceding chapter, John 7, Nicodemus (who Jesus famously met with in chapter 3 for the ‘born–again’ conversation) asks a rhetorical question of his religious colleagues: “Does our law condemn a man without first hearing him to find out what he has been doing?” (John 7:51). This judicial privilege was not extended to this woman before they summarily condemn her in John 8.
(You may have heard it said that a woman could not testify in court; this was not universally the case, but cultural factors meant that women’s testimony was considered unreliable and likely to be disbelieved in a male-dominated system. Tellingly, though, the woman’s voice is absent here.)
This way of reading the power dynamics in the story is consistent with the Church Fathers: as a tale of coercion, manipulation, and injustice focused on the men’s actions and motives. It’s only when we get to the Reformation—the birth of evangelicalism—and the Victorian era, that it becomes a moralising text about sexual misconduct. A ‘merciful reading’ centred on the woman’s likely coercion becomes a ‘moralising reading’ centred on the woman’s behavioural choices as a willing co-participant (if not also a seductive temptress). The change in interpretive emphasis was drawn more from the contemporary culture than the context of Scripture.
We then see Jesus writing in the ground with his finger. The standard evangelical interpretation of what he’s doing may be the case, at least as a secondary factor: that Jesus is looking away to spare the woman’s blushes, and not least if “caught in the very act” implies nakedness or dishevelled dress (consistent with yet more cruel and gratuitous public humiliation from these supposedly virtuous religious men). However, several biblical scholars suggest there’s a direct allusion to Jeremiah 17:13: “All who abandon you will be put to shame. They will disappear like names written in the dust, because they have abandoned you, the Lord, the spring of fresh water.”
In the chapter preceding this story, John 7:38 (remember there were no chapter breaks in the original), John has Jesus saying, “Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them” (this follows two earlier references to ‘living water’ in the story of the Samaritan woman at the well in chapter 4). Now, perhaps, we have a second and stronger allusion to that Jeremiah text—now paired with, “names written in the dust.”
Did Jesus “write in the dust” the names of some of the woman’s accusers in the story? Or perhaps he was simply writing “Jeremiah 17:13”—which may have been enough to make the point. If so, the damning accusation that Jesus is making is that they have abandoned God, and they will be put to shame. Their ‘names’—their heritage, their future—will “disappear like names written in the dust.” Perhaps the second time Jesus writes in the dust, he’s writing the other two scriptural references: Deuteronomy 22:22 and Leviticus 20:10, which the accusers have deliberately misquoted.
The men slip away, one by one. Once they are gone, Jesus says, “I do not condemn you.” Why? He has refused to participate in a show trial based on unjust ground rules set by religious bigots who have failed even to enquire of the accused concerning her coercion or consent. God is a God of justice, who would not countenance a rigged courtroom.
“Go, and sin no more” is deliberately ambiguous concerning the ‘sin’ involved in what has just happened; it is forward–looking and entirely non-specific instruction. Jesus does not say, “Go and stop your sexual sinning.” This does not mean that Jesus is indifferent to sexual ethics and still less to adultery, as his statements elsewhere make clear. Rather, it’s a refusal to affirm the jurisdiction of a ‘religious morality court’ that was patently incongruent with divine justice.
One final thought from the blog title. Surprisingly, perhaps, given the number of encounters Jesus had with individuals, only on two occasions does he use the phrase, “Go, and sin no more” (the Greek is identical). One is in this story, where a linkage to prior sexual immorality could be assumed. But the only other time, it is said to a disabled man who has just been healed by Jesus. It seems fair to think that in both cases it is intended to be forward- rather than rearward-looking.
Image: Gustave Doré, Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, engraving from La Sainte Bible (1866). Public domain.