They should be executed.
Cited passages
“ ‘The man who commits adultery with another man’s wife, even he who commits adultery with his neighbor’s wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.
How should adulterers be punished?
- Law, morality & ethics
- Law & ethics
- Old Testament vs. New Testament
- Leviticus
- John
The tension
Leviticus 20:10 commands the execution of both the adulterer and the adulteress. The pericope adulterae in John 7:53-8:11 has Jesus refuse to condemn a woman caught in adultery and instead invite the sinless to throw the first stone — effectively suspending the death penalty.
Proposed answers
People have answered this in several ways; GEBible presents them as equal peers.
They should not be punished.
Cited passages
The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman taken in adultery. Having set her in the middle, they told him, “Teacher, we found this woman in adultery, in the very act. Now in our law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. What then do you say about her?” They said this testing him, that they might have something to accuse him of. But Jesus stooped down and wrote on the ground with his finger. But when they continued asking him, he looked up and said to them, “He who is without sin among you, let him throw the first stone at her.” Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground with his finger.
Notes on manuscript readings that bear on this passage — where the surviving witnesses differ over what the text says. Presented for transparency as the textual critic’s description, not as GEBible’s conclusion about the tension.
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Genuinely disputed among scholars
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
Two distinct problems sit beneath this entry, and the text-critical one is larger than the harmonization debate it is usually framed around.
First, the passage cited against Leviticus 20:10 is almost certainly not original to the Gospel of John. The pericope adulterae (John 7:53-8:11) is absent from the earliest and best Greek witnesses — Papyrus 66 and Papyrus 75 (both later second/early third century), Codex Sinaiticus, and Codex Vaticanus — and from the early Syriac, Coptic (Sahidic), and several Old Latin traditions. Where it does appear in later manuscripts it floats: some place it after John 7:52, some after John 7:36 or 21:25, and a family of minuscules inserts it into Luke after 21:38. Its vocabulary and style are markedly un-Johannine. Bruce Metzger's *Textual Commentary* assigns the omission an {A} certainty and the Committee printed the passage in double brackets; the NA28 critical apparatus likewise marks it as a later insertion. Bart Ehrman (*Misquoting Jesus*) and Chris Keith (*The Pericope Adulterae, the Gospel of John, and the Literacy of Jesus*) accept the manuscript verdict: a free-floating oral tradition, plausibly authentic in some kernel, that was secondarily woven into John. To cite it as Scripture's verdict on adultery against Leviticus 20:10 is therefore to cite a text the critical consensus regards as a later interpolation — a fact the entry's framing passes over.
Second, granting the passage as canonical (as it functions in the received text and most printed Bibles), the strongest harmonization comes from D. A. Carson and, similarly, Andreas Köstenberger's BECNT *John*: Jesus does not abrogate the Mosaic penalty but exposes a procedural defect. The Torah's own evidentiary rule (Deuteronomy 17:7) requires that "the hands of the witnesses shall be first upon him to put him to death," and Leviticus 20:10 demands the death of *both* parties — yet only the woman is produced, the male partner conspicuously absent though the act was "in the very act." The accusers are explicitly described as "tempting him, that they might have to accuse him" (John 8:6), so the case is a legal trap, not a regular prosecution. "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone" can be read as challenging the moral standing of the would-be executioner-witnesses. On this reading Jesus operates within the law rather than against it, and it is a defensible construal of the narrative as it stands.
What even Carson's reading leaves unresolved is the remainder in Jesus' own words. He does not say, "this prosecution is procedurally defective; retry it with proper witnesses and the second offender." He says, "Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more" (8:11). That is a refusal to apply the penalty, not merely a delay of it, and the story has functioned in Christian tradition precisely as a softening of Levitical severity. James Dunn, in *Jesus Remembered*, observes that whatever the historical Jesus taught about adultery — and Matthew 5:27-30 internalizes and intensifies the standard rather than abolishing the external sanction — the cultural memory of Jesus that generated and preserved this pericope was already moving away from capital punishment. The Levitical death penalty for adultery left no significant trace in early Christian practice.
Where the critical reading lands: structurally moderate but textually weak. The contradiction leans on a passage the critical consensus considers non-original to John; granting the passage, the procedural-defect harmonization is reasonable yet does not erase the de facto suspension of the death penalty. The honest core is that early Christianity, whoever authored the pericope, was already abandoning Levitical execution for adultery.
Sources for this reading