The story of the woman caught in adultery is typically read as a story about the woman, adultery, and Jesus’ radical grace in refusing to condemn her. What can be easily missed are the social dynamics that are taking place around her. The story gives us an image of how religious authority, group solidarity, and accusation work together. It is just as much a story about the religious leaders being caught in accusation.
The accusations might be different today, and the stones take different forms, but the social processes are the same. Religious communities still reduce people to certain categories and use their exclusion as a way to reinforce the authority and righteousness of the leaders.
The woman caught in adultery is dragged into the temple by religious leaders while Jesus is teaching. She’s brought into the middle of the crowd, and we learn that she was caught in the act (Jn 8:2–6). The Pharisees believe that what they are doing by bringing her before the community is a righteous thing.
What possesses a group/mob of religious enforcers to do such a thing? The writer tells us they are trying to trap Jesus through publicly shaming her. However, the story exposes what is inside the people who accuse her.
How does this happen? It is through the language and roles prescribed by a group. Joe K. Adams writes, “It is largely by means of language and definition of role that groups cast a veil of illusions over the individual.” He goes on to say, “Roles not only prescribe the ‘moves’ which an individual is entitled to make in relationships with others; they penetrate the interior of the individual and prescribe his perceptions, thoughts, and feelings.”[1]
The role tells the religious leaders what they are entitled to do to her. They are the moral guardians and paragons of the community. The law supplies their scripting. The person is gone, and in her place is a category: sinner, adulterer. Only the ideologist-inquisitor can determine whether someone has deviated from the norm. The religious leaders have this authority. They determine who has deviated from the norms that they enforce and use measures such as stoning to enforce conformity. By labeling the woman, they move her entirely outside of the group and beyond what they consider decent. Doing this to a person plays an important role in the life of a community: it reinforces the norms for everyone else, solidifies the authority of the religious leaders, and allows them to present themselves as not like her and therefore righteous.
Culture, language, and roles make patterns of uniform thought and conduct. Once a role is established, perception and behavior are shaped by it. Collective language can bind and blind. The category describes what the woman has done, but the role determines what kind of person she is and what the group believes it has a responsibility to do to her.
Sociologist Tamotsu Shibutani describes how a group’s belief system and codes become the way people present themselves toward the world. He writes, “In this way, people in each cultural group are continuously supporting one another’s perspectives, each by responding to the others in expected ways.” Those in the group may not be aware that there are alternatives.[2]
The religious leaders reinforce one another’s perspective. A person’s moral indignation confirms the indignation of others. The leaders are authorized to provide an interpretation, and everyone responds in the expected way. It is not required for them to pause and reflect if they are seeing the woman clearly. Their response to her makes the interpretation feel clear.
In this community there is a “hierarchy of credibility” with the religious leaders at the top. Both they and the community believe that their spiritual authority has been sanctioned and blessed by God. Individuals who are in positions of social responsibility have greater influence and power to define what is true.[3] The hierarchy is really dangerous and messy when God is brought into the picture.
The religious leaders have social authority, the law, and they are the one group sanctioned to interpret it. Their interpretation of the woman trumps anything she might say about herself. They define who she is. In their religious minds, they know better than she does about how she should be living her life.
Erich Fromm gives an account of irrational, inflated authority and writes, “There is nothing more effective in breaking any person than to give him the conviction of wickedness.” Guilt is tied up with submission to authority that claims the right to accuse and diagnose.[4] The authority and the righteousness of the leaders are confirmed through the act of publicly shaming and exposing her.
Harold Garfinkel’s account of degradation ceremonies explains what the leaders are doing to her. They are publicly recasting her as a lower kind of person, in contrast to them. He writes:
Moral indignation serves to effect the ritual destruction of the person denounced. Unlike shame, which does not bind persons together, moral indignation may reinforce group solidarity. In the market and in politics, a degradation ceremony must be counted as a secular form of communion.[5]
The religious leaders experience a powerful sense of spiritual solidarity through ritually degrading the woman. Their moral indignation binds them together in a self-righteous community and reinforces their ideology. They establish their solidarity and righteousness by locating the evil in her. Misery loves company.
The denouncer speaks for the group’s values, and the accused is cast in the role of a sinner and an outsider. Garfinkel explains why the denouncer’s authority is accepted: “What the denouncer says must be regarded by the witnesses as true on the grounds of a socially employed metaphysics whereby witnesses assume that witnesses and denouncer are alike in essence.”[6]
The accusers, in their possessed solidarity, recognize themselves in each other and behave accordingly. They share a moral and metaphysical framework and assume that they are alike. Meanwhile, the woman is accused and turned into something not human. The accusers are nothing like her, while the woman disappears behind the category.
What business is it of the religious leaders or the community who she is sleeping with? They believe their religion, role, scripting, and law make it their business. The law gives them a role to play, and the role convinces them that they are entitled to take action. This isn’t naming a behavior they think is wrong. They drag a person into public, place her in the middle of a crowd, and use her body and what she is accused of as a way to tempt Jesus because of their conflict with him.
This points to the pathology of the religious leaders and their own need for the defense mechanism of accusation. What this does for them is assuage their guilty consciences by locating their evil in the other. Carl Jung writes, “It is in the nature of political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything he does not know and does not want to know about himself by foisting it off on somebody else.”[7]
They are looking at her, but what is going on inside of them? What is it about the group that makes them want to do this? This collective madness to stone a person. Where is the real sickness? Where is the real evil?
Esther Harding describes the violence that can possess ordinarily sober, law-abiding people intoxicated by a group’s emotion. In her discussion of lynching, she writes, “The victim of the lynching may have only the slenderest connection with the crime that is being avenged so violently and so lawlessly; yet he immediately becomes almost a demon or a devil to those caught up by the mob spirit.”[8]
The human is no longer being seen. The group of professional accusers can only see the role it has assigned to the person and feels justified in punishing her. She has become almost demonic in their eyes, while they experience themselves as pure defenders of righteousness.
Adams says, “The location of pathology in the dominant institutions of the culture is hardly in accordance with the tradition of any culture.”[9] The religious leaders have located the pathology outside of themselves and in the woman. But it’s theirs! Their roles, law, moral standing, and agreement with one another protect them from examination. Instead of asking what is wrong with her, what is wrong with the group that needs to do this to her? If the response from the accused is just more confirmation for the accusation, the person is then always under examination, and the group never is.
When they bring her to Jesus, they do so in order to trap him so that they might have something to accuse him of. They are trying to treat him the same way they treat the woman: by turning him into an accused non-human. Depending on how he responds, they can degrade him and move him outside the community, just as they have done with her. Jesus presents a serious threat to the religious establishment, and publicly degrading and discrediting him would reinforce their authority and superiority. They use her in a sick way, as an instrument for doing it.
What Jesus does is beautiful. He acts as though he doesn’t hear them (Jn 8:6). He gives them the grey rock technique and does not justify, argue, defend, or explain. Jesus refuses the role that they assign him. He does not approve of their degradation ceremony. He tells the one without sin to throw the first stone, and they leave, beginning with the oldest (Jn 8:7–9).
Jesus knows their type, and he can see the pathology happening and turns the mirror back on them. Jesus offers the religious leaders and those in attendance an opportunity for self-knowledge. The people who brought the woman to be examined are now being challenged to examine themselves, and the results are not good. The evil that they have foisted on her is really theirs. By the end of chapter 8, the same crowd insinuated that Jesus was born of fornication. He is called a Samaritan, accused of having a devil, and almost stoned. It’s a similar process.
This is a story about Jesus not condemning sinners. About a God who doesn’t throw rocks. Doesn’t pick up rocks. Especially at law-breaking, sinful, ungodly kinds of people. The one who could throw a stone doesn’t.
Jesus tells her, “Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more” (Jn 8:10–11). He does not keep her under his supervision. We don’t get an update on how she did afterward. There is no follow-up appointment with Jesus, no public accountability, and no permanent diagnosis. If she doesn’t live up to the standards of the local religion, she knows that she has encountered one person who will not condemn her.
Who shall lay anything to the charge of God’s elect? (Rom 8:33)
[1] Joe K. Adams, “Psychosis: ‘Experimental’ and Real,” Psychedelic Review 1, no. 2 (1963): 121–144.
[2] Tamotsu Shibutani, “Reference Groups as Perspectives,” American Journal of Sociology 60, no. 6 (May 1955): 562–569.
[3] Erich Goode, “A Sociological Perspective on Drugs and Drug Use,” in Drugs in American Society (Alfred A. Knopf, 1972).
[4] Erich Fromm, “Individual and Social Origins of Neurosis,” American Sociological Review 9, no. 4 (August 1944): 380–384.
[5] Harold Garfinkel, “Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies,” American Journal of Sociology 61, no. 5 (March 1956): 420–424.
[6] Ibid.
[7] C. G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self (Routledge, 2002).
[8] M. Esther Harding, Psychic Energy: Its Source and Its Transformation, 2nd ed. (Princeton University Press, 1973).
[9] Joe K. Adams, “Psychosis: ‘Experimental’ and Real,” Psychedelic Review 1, no. 2 (1963): 121–144.
