Where did the story of the woman caught in adultery come from?

This morning, I read John 7:53–8:11. It’s a familiar story – the scribes and Pharisees confront Jesus with a woman caught in the very act of adultery, pointing out that the Law of Moses commands that such a woman be stoned. It seems like a trap – challenging Jesus on his teachings about mercy, repentance, and forgiveness, in order to force him either to go against the Mosaic Law or to lose credibility with the common people who followed him for his compassion.

Instead of answering, Jesus bends down and writes something on the ground with his finger. People have speculated over the ages about what he might have written: the sins of the accusers? “Where is the man she was caught in adultery with?” (since the Law of Moses says both parties should be punished – see Leviticus 20:10 and Deuteronomy 22:22)? Or perhaps the names of the accusers who themselves had committed adultery? We will likely not know this side of heaven.

Finally comes his beautiful response: “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more.” It so powerfully balances justice and mercy.

It’s such an evocative story—no wonder we love it. But there is one problem: the earliest manuscripts of the Gospel of John do not contain this story. And its style and vocabulary are noticeably different from John’s, more similar in tone and wording to Luke’s Gospel. In fact, in some later manuscripts, the story is found inserted into Luke 21:38 instead of John 7/8.

So, the evidence is strong that this was not part of John’s original Gospel but was inserted later. Yet many scholars still believe it is probably a genuine anecdote from Jesus’ life. It is consistent with Jesus’ character and teaching style—turning legal traps into moral challenges and surprising reversals.

By the late 300s, when Jerome translated the Bible into Latin (the Vulgate), this story was already widespread and present in many Greek and Latin manuscripts. Some early Church Fathers—like Didymus the Blind (c. 390)—refer to a similar story, although not as part of John’s Gospel, suggesting it may have circulated as a stand-alone tradition from the time of the apostles.

There was, in fact, a large body of early Christian writings that didn’t survive to modern times. Some of these writings likely included sayings and stories about Jesus that were considered authentic but were not included in the canonical Gospels.

One well-known example of a lost written source is Q—the hypothetical document believed to have been a common source for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke (since they share many identical sayings not found in Mark). In the ancient world, copying from another’s work wasn’t considered plagiarism or dishonest—it was expected. So, Matthew and Luke likely copied from this earlier source, which seems to have consisted mostly of Jesus’ sayings without much narrative.

In the TV series The Chosen, Q is portrayed as a collection of notes written by Matthew, imagined as neurodivergent (perhaps functionally autistic) with a meticulous attention to detail. This is, of course, a dramatized hypothesis—but it’s a moving one. The real Q may well have been compiled by someone like that: a devoted follower of Jesus, committed to preserving his teachings accurately.

In the same way, the story of the woman caught in adultery may have been part of that early, now-lost body of tradition. By the 4^thcentury, scribes may have inserted it into John’s Gospel at this juncture because it fit the flow of the narrative and preserved a beloved and compelling story that bore all the marks of Jesus’ voice.