I. _The facts._ (1) The passage in question is wanting in many if not most of the best MSS.; pre-eminently the Alexandrian, the Vatican, the Ephraem, and the Sinaitic. Of the great manuscripts, the Cambridge alone contains it. (2) It is transposed in some documents; one places it in John after 7:36; ten at the end of John; four in the Gospel of Luke, at the close of ch. 21. (3) In those MSS. which contain it there are great variations. Griesbach distinguishes three entirely different texts; the ordinary text, that of the Cambridge MS., and that resulting from a collection of other MSS. Alford gives these three in his Greek Testament. Sixty various readings are found in these twelve verses. “No genuine apostolic text has ever undergone such alterations.”--(_Godet._) (4) The style and character of the narrative is strikingly unlike John. These differences are partly verbal, and are apparent only to the Greek scholar. Ten expressions are given by Meyer as non-Johannean. They are partly structural, and as easily recognized by the English reader as by the Greek scholar. Such are the propounding of a question concerning the law to tempt Christ, and the departure of Christ at night from the temple, both of which agree rather with the Synoptics’ account of the last sojourn in Jerusalem than with John’s account of this period of Christ’s ministry. If the account is omitted altogether, the discourse in ch. 7 and that in ch. 8 appear to be in close connection; the interruption of this incident is not very clearly cognate to either discourse; and it is not John’s habit to narrate incidents that are not connected with and do not lead to some discourse of the Lord. (5) Among the fathers Origen, Chrysostom, Theophylact, and Tertullian are altogether silent about the passage; Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine recognize it as authentic; among critical scholars Lucke, Tholuck, Olshausen, De Wette, Luthardt, Hengstenberg, Schenkel, Godet, Lachmann, Tischendorf, Alford, and Schaff apparently agree in regarding it as an addition by some other hand to John’s Gospel; Bengel and Hilgenfeld are the only scholars of widely recognized reputation who defend its Johannean authorship. (6) But though the narrative is unlike John, the act is very like Jesus. The whole scene possesses an air of historic reality: the arrest of the woman, the demand on Jesus, the Pharisaic contempt for public morality in obtruding the crime and the criminal on public attention in the temple courts; the attempt to entrap Jesus; the skill of his reply; the subtle recognition of the woman’s shame and despair, and the gentle avoidance of adding to it, in turning the public gaze from her to himself by writing on the ground; the final confusion of the Pharisees and release of the woman. It is impossible to believe that any monkish mind conceived of this and added it to the narrative. The deed is the deed of Christ, whether or no the record is the record of John.