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Essay on An Analysis of the Story of the Adulterous Woman

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An Analysis of the Story of the Adulterous Woman

Look which of you that never sin wrought,
But is of life cleaner than she,
Cast at her stones and spare her not,
Clean out of sin if that ye be.
(N-Town: Woman Taken In Adultery: Medieval Drama; Bevington, David; Houghton Mifflin, 1975)

Who among us has never sinned? And, in our place as fellow victims of our own all too human nature, have we any right to pass judgement on those who do the same as we do, if with less discretion? If so, this begs the question of whether morality lies in following the social mores or if it is all in hiding from the public eye how often you don’t follow them. It seems that Jesus, or at least John’s version1 of Jesus and, later, the …show more content…

This would place the original writing of the gospel at no later than 100 A.D., and very likely somewhere around 80 A.D. John’s writings, then, are the reminiscences of an elderly man looking back on his time with the Messiah; the views presented in the gospel are more likely to be what he felt and could believe in at the time of the writing, not at the time of his discipleship. This gives John’s gospel a more mature ambiance than those of the Synoptic writers, who were younger men, and more inclined to write clear-cut, propaganda packed texts.

Unlike the Synoptic writers, John avoids descriptions of the origins and early childhood of Jesus, which none of the gospel writers would have known much about, except through less accurate tales than the ones upon which the rest of the writings are based. John also includes a significant amount of material not found in the
Synoptics. In addition to the Adulterous Woman, all the other material in John 2-4, which covers Jesus' early Galilean ministry, is not found in the Synoptics. Prior visits of Jesus to Jerusalem before the Passion Week are mentioned only in John. Nor do Matthew, Mark or Luke mention the resurrection of Lazarus found in John
11. John presents his material in the form of extended dialogues or discourses rather than the pithy sayings found often in the Synoptics; this holds a certain appeal to the scholarly mind, which

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