Should adulterers be put to death?

Leviticus 20:10 is part of the civil law of Israel, a nation under God’s direct rule, with its own judges and courts. A death sentence needed a trial and the evidence of at least two witnesses (Deuteronomy 17:6; 19:15), and the law named both guilty parties: “they shall both of them die” (Deuteronomy 22:22). It treated adultery as a crime against the covenant of marriage on which families and the nation rested, not as a private matter.

John 8 is not a trial. The scribes and Pharisees brought the woman as a trap: “This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him” (8:6). Under Roman rule the Jewish authorities could not lawfully carry out a death sentence (18:31). If Jesus said ‘stone her’, he could be denounced to the Romans; if he said ‘let her go’, he could be accused of setting Moses aside. The case was also irregular. She had been taken “in the very act” (8:4), yet the man was not brought, though the law required both. Jesus did not deny the law. He turned it on the accusers: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her” (8:7). Under the law the witnesses had to throw the first stones (Deuteronomy 17:7). When the accusers had gone, one by one, no one was left to condemn her (8:9-10).

“Neither do I condemn thee” is not a verdict that she was innocent, nor approval of what she had done; Jesus adds at once, “go, and sin no more” (8:11). He was not acting as a civil judge, an office he refused elsewhere (Luke 12:14), and he had come so “that the world through him might be saved” (John 3:17). The New Testament still treats adultery as grave sin: “whoremongers and adulterers God will judge” (Hebrews 13:4). But it does not give the church the sword of Israel’s courts. The church’s discipline is exclusion from its fellowship, with the hope of repentance (1 Corinthians 5:1-5, 13).

Mercy from the one who bears the penalty

Many Christians add that Jesus could forgive without saying the penalty was unjust, because he was about to bear the penalty of sin himself (compare Romans 3:25-26). On this view John 8 shows mercy offered on the ground of the cross, not the law being cancelled.

Christians differ on how far, if at all, the civil penalties of the law of Moses should guide modern law. What Jesus wrote on the ground (8:6, 8) is not recorded, and suggestions about it remain guesses.