Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
John 7:53-8:11
The woman taken in adultery. The best manuscripts do not have this passage.
John 7:53-8:11, in every translation this tool compares.
A story appears in some old copies of a book, in different places, and in none of the oldest. It may still be a true story about the author's subject. Those are two different questions and most arguments collapse them.
Because it is the most famous disputed passage in the New Testament, the evidence against it is strong, and the honest handling of it is a model for every other textual question.
Every modern version prints it, bracketed, with a note that the earliest manuscripts omit it. The King James prints it without comment.
Textual, not lexical
The passage is absent from P66, P75, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. Where it does appear, manuscripts place it after John 7:52, after John 7:36, after John 21:25, and after Luke 21:38, which is a strong sign of a floating tradition. The vocabulary and style differ from the rest of John.
Nothing here is a translation question. It is entirely about which Greek text is being translated and how honestly the uncertainty is printed.
When a passage moves around between manuscripts, that movement is itself evidence. Stable text stays put.
Every major English version prints it with brackets or a note; none omits it entirely.
- Absent from P66, P75, Sinaiticus, Vaticanus
- Placed variously after John 7:36, 7:52, 21:25 and Luke 21:38
- Non-Johannine vocabulary and style
- Metzger, Textual Commentary, on the pericope adulterae
