Table Of ContentShadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion, Philippa Berry and Andrew Wernick, eds.
Routledge: London and New York, 1992, pp. 226-237
Intolerable Language: Jesus and the Woman Taken in Adultery
PATRICIA KLINDIENST
‘He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood
lives in me
and I in him.
As I, who am sent by the living Father,
myself draw life from the Father,
so whoever eats me will draw life from me.
This is the bread come down from heaven;
not like the bread our ancestors ate:
they are dead,
but anyone who eats this bread will live for ever.’
He taught this doctrine at Capernaum, in the synagogue. After hearing it,
many of his followers said, ‘This is intolerable language. How could
anyone accept it?’
(John )1
The phrase the Jerusalem Bible translates as ‘intolerable language’ is rendered as
‘a hard saying’ in the Revised Standard Edition. The Oxford Bible’s comment on Jesus’
‘hard’ words is notably bland: ‘Hard saying means offensive or difficult, but not
obscure.’ Perhaps. But freedom from the threat of offence, that is, obedient reception of
official interpretation—eating Jesus’ word prefigures the eucharist2— is purchased only
by retrospection, a look back from ritual to its constituting moments. This can silence in
us the utterly believable question which the text records as one unmediated response to
hearing Jesus speak of himself so strangely: ‘How could anyone accept it?’ The text
records the prophet’s complex speech-act as well as dramatizing the problem of its
reception: the shock and confusion of hearing the ground of one’s belief shifted.
Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion, Philippa Berry and Andrew Wernick, eds.
Routledge: London and New York, 1992, pp. 226-237
PATRICIA KLINDIENST
2
It has always been important for the exegetes, who mediate the gospel’s reception, to
distinguish the good from the bad reading of this text—which calls continual attention to
the perilous distance between speaker and listener—by referring us to the differences
among listeners in the text. What we decide Jesus means is, John insists, a matter of life
and death: on our acts of interpretation Christians stake their lives. And as we have
struggled to understand what authentic witness to this text might mean, we have often
been taught that we must not be like ‘the Jews’, here set up as prime examples of bad or
literal readers. It is history, specifically, the history of Christian intolerance—persecution
in the name of the victim -which has made the Christian Church’s tendency to define
itself at the expense of the gospel’s bracketed other, ‘the Jews’, intolerable. We must
question the way the gospels constitute themselves as Christianity’s founding texts,
bearing in mind, always, that they are not finished; they are not primarily or ultimately
texts. The gospels are opened to fresh interpretations in their ongoing life as liturgy, as
the revised rubric for Good Friday makes stunningly clear. In the post-Holocaust, post-
Vatican II era, the American Catholic Church has the worshipping community play every
role in the Passion. In our own language, it is we who shout ‘Crucify him!’ ‘We’ become
‘them’, the turbulent crowd; we, Christians, step into the place of ‘the Jews’ and hear one
of our own play Pilate. In a ritual with the potential to move us to self-recognition (if we
connect our words with our deeds), we enter into the corporate act of worship as the
internal elements of doubt and discord and own our responsibility for abandoning Jesus,
our complicity in his death—and the death of innocent millions. This act of ritual
substitution of ‘us’ for ‘the others’, if we let its deep structure change us, might counter
Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion, Philippa Berry and Andrew Wernick, eds.
Routledge: London and New York, 1992, pp. 226-237
PATRICIA KLINDIENST
3
the history of violence worked in the name of our cult’s founding victim, by preparing us
(I hope) to stand with the persecuted. In the move from gospel text to liturgical
performance, we become actors in the drama—still present, still opening its threat and
promise—but only by yielding up our mythic innocence and ‘the Jews" mythic guilt.
In what follows, I bear in mind, then, the power of John’s testimony as
contemporary ritual practice seeks to transform it, redeeming his gesture towards marking
a new (old) victim—‘the Jews’ (a reductive epithet he employs for a heterogeneous
people at least seventy times in his testimony)—even as he discloses, with astonishing
power of vision, how Jesus was marked and taken for confounding both religious and
secular constructions of difference and identity.
The story I will re-read here is one I heard as a child as part of liturgy, moved by
the terror at its heart, and the hope in its unexpected conclusion. Terror for the way men
presume to decide the fate of a woman whose bonds to other women—mother, sister,
daughter, friend—have been entirely erased; hope in the realization that Jesus frustrates
one of the oldest bargains between men in the history of western culture: the ritual
exchange of women to mark the boundaries of patriarchal power.
As I will argue here, in choosing to insert the homeless pericope of Jesus and the
woman taken in adultery (which many attribute, for its elegance, to Luke) into a critical
sequence of crises in John, gospel scholars have generated a text of great power. For
here Jesus makes visible a relationship between words and flesh that opens into a
moment of peace and reciprocity, unexpectedly, where even those who wish to speak
Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion, Philippa Berry and Andrew Wernick, eds.
Routledge: London and New York, 1992, pp. 226-237
PATRICIA KLINDIENST
4
magnanimously for the text and its founding victim have missed it. And they have missed
it, I think, because it is so hard to see Jesus as a body.
In his discourse on the bread of heaven, Jesus calls attention to his real, physical
body, and in John this body is the ground of God’s original utterance of all being. For in
his retrospective Prologue, a provocative supersession of Genesis 1, John makes the
stunning claim that God’s Word has become flesh (1:14) and dwelt among us; Jesus is
Word Incarnate, there from the beginning, though John did not know this until after the
resurrection. John’s Gospel comes into being to bear witness not only to the good news
but, less obviously, also to testify to the author’s own failure to understand until after he,
too, had abandoned Jesus to judgment and death.
Breaching the decorum of synagogue instruction, Jesus is a provocateur. He
makes his gendered, sexual body the referent for the ‘word of God’, for ‘bread of
heaven’, manna that kept alive the persecuted and exiled chosen people in the desert.
What is he doing when he says ‘eat me and live for ever’? The echo of American sexual
slang in his provocation may help us register the shock of the moment—how obscene it
could feel for someone local, so known, so ordinary, to appropriate the language of
transcendence, to locate the hope of a whole people in himself and the claim that the old
fathers are ‘dead’ while his Father is ‘alive’. Biblical commentators mute this offence, as
if it is not necessary to feel the living, costly question posed here. Jesus may offend his
interlocutors in the text, ‘the Jews’, but we who receive it, ‘Christians’, must be
cushioned from offence. Why? What happens if we read the text against (or from) our
own gendered bodies in relation to Jesus’ and learn from our anxiety?
Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion, Philippa Berry and Andrew Wernick, eds.
Routledge: London and New York, 1992, pp. 226-237
PATRICIA KLINDIENST
5
I do not make this suggestion casually. The text itself positions us for such a
question. For those who decided how to construct the text of John’s gospel have made a
fascinating choice: tradition juxtaposes the critical moment when people begin to say of
Jesus, ‘He is the Christ’ (7:41), upon which ‘the chief priests and Pharisees’ decide to
arrest him (which closes John 7), and the story of the adulterous woman (which opens
John 8).3
They all went home, and Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. At daybreak he
appeared in the Temple again; and as all the people came to him, he sat down and began
to teach them.
The scribes and Pharisees brought a woman along who had been caught
committing adultery; and making her stand there in full view of everybody, they said to
Jesus, ‘Master, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery, and Moses
has ordered us in the Law to condemn women like this to death by stoning. What have
you to say?’ They asked him this as a test, looking for something to use against him.
But Jesus bent down and started writing on the ground with his finger. As they
persisted with their question, he looked up and said, ‘If there is one of you who has not
sinned, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.’ Then he bent down and wrote on the
ground again. When they heard this they went away one by one, beginning with the
eldest, until Jesus was left alone with the woman, who remained standing there. He
looked up and said, ‘Woman, where are they: Has no one condemned you?’ ‘No one, sir,’
she replied. ‘Neither do I condemn you,’ said Jesus. ‘Go away, and don’t sin any more.’
(7:53-8; 1-11).
Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion, Philippa Berry and Andrew Wernick, eds.
Routledge: London and New York, 1992, pp. 226-237
PATRICIA KLINDIENST
6
The narrative is framed as a scene of instruction, ‘he sat down and began to teach
them’, which is immediately interrupted by another, ‘Teacher . . . what do you have to
say . . .?’ We can take this as a model of how this text interrupts John’s own, and find our
own scene of instruction. The teaching begins with a challenge presented to Jesus, a call
for interpretation which is presented as a matter of life and death. ‘Teacher,’ they said to
him, ‘this woman has been caught in the very act of adultery. Now in the Law Moses
ordered such women to be stoned. But you—what do you have to say about it?’ This
lesson begins from a body, specifically the body in relation to other bodies. This works
on three levels: the woman’s use of her body in relation to two men (her spouse, her
adulterous partner); the men’s use of her body in relation to Jesus; Jesus’ use of his body
in relation to every other body present. She wills the first use of her body between two
males;4 the group of men will the second; Jesus wills the third.
The woman is presented to Jesus not as the subject but as the object of inquiry,
just as she is linguistically presented first as the object of verbs which take the men as
subjects: they ‘led her forward’, they ‘caught her in the act’. For the accusing crowd, the
subject of this linguistic transaction is ‘it’, or ‘something’, not ‘her’ or ‘someone’,
signalling that the abstract principle of legal and social contract (right marital exchange,
which ensures the internal coherence of any culture) is more primary than the living
being, the woman. In their offer of a body as if it were a text, the group of men betray a
triple refusal to take responsibility. They take responsibility neither for the violence they
would do her (stoning), nor for the violence they are doing her by using her as an object
of exchange, nor finally for the violence they wish to do Jesus, through her. At the same
Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion, Philippa Berry and Andrew Wernick, eds.
Routledge: London and New York, 1992, pp. 226-237
PATRICIA KLINDIENST
7
time, in asking Jesus to assume responsibility, they bear witness to the connection of law
to person, speech to body, self to other in the act of sundering each of them. In bearing
witness as they do, the accusing men—eyewitnesses deceptively sure of their authority to
bring the woman to trial—open the very notion of witness to reinterpretation. They, and
Jesus with them, also bring to light the violence inherent in the ritualized exchange of
women. Jesus takes responsibility for the resolution of this crisis which
links his fate to hers: if he fails to condemn her he will seem to violate Mosaic law,5 and
if he condemns her, he violates Roman law, for in this period it is believed that the
Sanhedrin’s power to levy a death sentence was removed by Roman decree.6 Jesus
evades this carefully constructed double bind—his entrapment between two laws, one
religious and one secular- but in a way no one expects. The narrator at this point brackets
the prophet’s trial: the aside, ‘They asked him this as a test, looking for something to use
against him’, invites us to look at the structure before us. Jesus responds to both the
spoken and unspoken (the content as well as the intent) of this challenge in silence, with
his body. He answers their question by moving: he bends down to draw in the dirt. But
the crowd does not see his bodily gestures as a reply. Feeling that Jesus is evading the
task of answering them, they ask again. Moving again, this time straightening up, Jesus
used words: ‘If there is one of you who has not sinned, let him be the first to throw a
stone at her.’ Then he repeats his first gesture, bending again, but this time the Greek
verb is more precise: Jesus bends down to write.7 The second time Jesus bends down, the
connection between language and the body hits home. Now the crowd of men respond to
Jesus’ words with their bodies. The men, who a moment earlier signalled their violent
Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion, Philippa Berry and Andrew Wernick, eds.
Routledge: London and New York, 1992, pp. 226-237
PATRICIA KLINDIENST
8
unanimity by speaking with one collective voice, unified by two enemies—the woman,
the prophet—now, one at a time, begin to move. ‘But the audience went away one by one
starting with the elders’. Each enacts, in silence, his own self-judgment before the others.
Having arrived as an undifferentiated crowd, they leave as individuals, and they
do not ‘take’ the woman with them. What has happend here?
In the preceding chapter, John is careful to tell us that Jesus has already been threatened
with arrest—‘the Jews’ are trying to kill him (7:1). He has begun to warn everyone, in
language they cannot understand, that he will soon leave them (7:35, 8:21ff). In the
passages which precede and follow this story, Jesus speaks a great deal, and passionately,
about law, witness, testimony, judgment and love. Here, he says almost nothing. Here, he
acts rather than speaks: or, to be precise, he testifies far more powerfully with his body
than with his words.
Though, by definition, it takes two to commit adultery, and though we are told
that the woman was caught in the act, so that the man must also have been caught, she
alone is subjected to the crowd’s legal authority and ultimate punishment: death by
stoning outside the city’s walls. Death by stoning is anonymous ritual muder: no one
strikes first, no one touches the victim, so as not to risk becoming polluted with
responsibility for murder. There is no question of a hearing (the very privilege the
Temple police insist must be granted Jesus in chapter 7, when they return to ‘the chief
priests and Pharisees’ empty-handed, having refused to arrest him). Actions have spoken
louder than words. The female’s body is her speech, and having performed it by having
sex with someone not her legal spouse, she has forfeited the position of word-speaker.8 In
Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion, Philippa Berry and Andrew Wernick, eds.
Routledge: London and New York, 1992, pp. 226-237
PATRICIA KLINDIENST
9
contrast, the males’ words are offered as their definitive speech-acts, proffered as if
detached from their gendered, sexual bodies. This is not, however, how Jesus appears to
receive them.
Jesus undermines the apparent differences between the righteous men and the
guilty woman. And he does so precisely by way of referring to the men as individuals
with personal histories, and by relocating their speech in their bodies. By his words, Jesus
refers each man back to himself, making each answerable for himself. His counter-offer
works precisely because these men share with Jesus a field of reference: a wish, however
occluded and corrupted by wordly power, social prejudice and fear of the prophet’s
authority, to honour God. Earlier, in chapter 7, Jesus offered the confusing and
paradoxical imperative, ‘Do not keep judging according to appearances; let your
judgment be according to what is right’ (7:24). Chapter 8 opens with this example of how
it works. At the same time, this scene enacts Jesus’ insistence that there is a model of
expulsion, or ‘casting out’ of evil, which is grounded not in a self-interested
misrecognition of the scapegoat but in the instant of self-recognition which begins from a
genuine discovery and acceptance of the likeness between the guilty other and one’s
hidden self. Jesus incites the men to open in themselves the place of the other, the sinner,
and to keep it inside, rather than projecting it onto a surrogate.
Jesus undermines an interdependent set of socially defined differences it is
extremely dangerous to disrupt or confuse at any time in any culture: between the
innocent and the guilty, and between good violence (legal execution) and bad (murder).
In confounding these distinctions, Jesus simultaneously exposes their foundation in a
Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion, Philippa Berry and Andrew Wernick, eds.
Routledge: London and New York, 1992, pp. 226-237
PATRICIA KLINDIENST
10
primary biological difference the crowd exploits: the asymmetrical relation of female to
male. Jesus works a different kind of distinction, that between the spiritually (not the
sexually) faithful and unfaithful. The erotic is the pretext, not the text, of this transaction.
In judging, Jesus was to have made himself vulnerable to judgment. But he refuses to
judge. He signifies this by moving: bending down before accusers and accused alike.
This apparently cryptic gesture has spawned innumerable esoteric explanations.
Raymond Brown, editor of The Anchor Bible’s volumes on John, begins a lengthy
summary of theories with the question, ‘What did Jesus draw on the ground with his
finger?’ Most commentators have argued that Jesus is writing a biblical passage that
indicts the accusers; a few think he is buying time, pondering what to do or displaying
‘the Semitic custom of doodling on the ground when distraught’. Brown concludes, ‘one
cannot help but feel that if the matter were of major importance, the content of the
writing would have been reported’.9
When the field of reference for our reading is the figural body, a text (what Jesus
writes), we blind ourselves to the possibilities of Christian theology for a reading of
Jesus’ literal body as an incarnated, enacted utterance (what Jesus does). As the struggle
to read Jesus’ gesture as if he were secretly still judging is abandoned, as content is let
go, the question of what oc;urs when Jesus bends to write can now emerge as the
question of his intent in moving. The gesture functions structurally: Jesus bends down to
break the spell of unanimity generated among the crowd of men all of whom stand up, as
one, before him. The body’s participation in a web of meaning, the person as the truly
significant, seems quite clear to him, and he uses his gendered body to refuse the violent
Description:Intolerable Language: Jesus and the Woman Taken in Adultery 'hard' words is notably bland: 'Hard saying means offensive or difficult, but not . slang in his provocation may help us register the shock of the moment—how
