The Woman in the Temple Yard

A note on alias John 7:53 to 8:1, sometimes used as a proof text for “love the sinner, hate the sin”. This is n o t original to the gospel of John, as many take for granted.

Codex Bezae shows that it originally followed Luke 21:37, con-trasting Judas's treason toward his Master to the woman's different kind of faithlessness toward her, the Husbander/Pater familias.

The parallel stories about Abram and Sarah in Genesis 12:11ff, 20:2ff and Isaak and Rebekka in 26:7ff show, however, that the point was precisely the approval or not of the Pater familias.

Obviously, Jesus' attitude was too lax for the Philosophically minded and the story of the woman in the Temple yard was cut out around 200 AD (out of the Alexandrian redaction), and "re-stored" only in the 5th to 6th century Byzantine redaction, and then to three different places in the gospel of John 7:36, 7:53-8:11 and 21:25, which lacks the Matt 5 and 19 stories about 7th Commandment moixeia.

This sometimes proof text for “love the sinner, hate the sin” is thus rather instable, and as such, a proof of the continuous pro-grammatic manipulation for Ecclesiological and Socio Political purposes of the Sacred Text in European Neo Platonist Academia, since the Imperial Academia Palatina at Aachen/Aix la Chapelle 1200 years ago (continued by its successors at Fulda, Oxford and Sorbonne).