So about this:
Except that is not, in fact, what happened or what Jesus, in fact, said.
1. The woman had, in fact, sinned. She was caught in the very act of adultery, which is, in fact, a sin.
2. Jesus did not say she had not sinned. He said he did not condemn her for having sinned. That is what forgiveness means. We do not forgive things that are not sins. We *excuse* things that are not sins. Forgiveness is for sins.
3. Jesus also does not condemn the sinners who used her as a pawn. He teaches them to condemn their own sin and repent of it. Nobody is damned by Christ in that story, because “God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” (Jn 3:17).
As reworked in this cartoon, the story becomes a tale of smug self-approval for the cartoonist and his audience in which they get to point fingers and condemn the Judgmental while approving of themselves for being Judges. It stops being about forgiveness and starts being about self-approval for contemporary Christians who like to pose in front of their vanquished culture war enemies.
Conclusion: Don’t put words in Jesus’ mouth. He can speak for himself.
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3 Responses
Ah yes,the culture wars. I am weary of them. Perhaps we need a ceasefire?
The story of the woman taken in adultry is in all likelihood not in the original text
Of John
A common theory. An alternative explanation: It was in the original text of John, but it was excised from the early texts because it was too uncomfortable for the audiences. When it was added back, there was a problem with the placement and the language because the Gospels already underwent some editing already in the first centuries.
The reason for the censorship was simple: the hyperbole was too much for the audiences to stomach. Adultery was the most inexcusable sin at the time. It would be similar to how we feel about pedophilia. That was precisely why the passage uses it as the archetypal “worst sin”.
Another explanation is that the text was the original one, but used a different example of sin that was too much of a Semitism, so it needed to be rewritten to fit the circumstances of a different sin. The editor used slightly different language than John did, so the passage sounds awkward.
Alternatively, both of these explanations are true: the original passage was about the adulterous woman, the sin in question was changed to something Semitic to accommodate the audiences, but then groups of people who had the original Gospel of John passed onto them protested that it’s not in the text they know. By that time, the Semitism was too obscure to Gentiles and Jews alike, and Christianity was well-rooted, so the message of forgiveness was more powerful than the revulsion of adultery, so they agreed to change the passage to the original—without questioning the different language through different traditions.