King James Only?

Blogging our way through the King James Only debate

The KJV and the woman taken in adultery

The KJV’s inclusion of the woman taken in adultery has become a test case for claims that the King James Version alone preserves God’s Word. The passage, John 7:53–8:11, interrupts Jesus’ teaching in the temple, presents a sharp encounter with the Pharisees, and ends with a warning about judgement. Its vivid narrative attracts defenders as proof that the KJV preserves something modern translations have discarded.

Textual criticism asks a different question: which reading is best supported by the surviving manuscript tradition? Evidence comes from dated manuscripts, their relationships, quotations by early writers, and translations. These sources cannot place a sentence in the moment it was spoken, but they can show when a passage circulated, whether its wording was stable, and whether an omission was already visible in antiquity. For a broader treatment of that method, Norman Habel’s textual work provides a useful starting point.

The story within John’s Gospel

The narrative concerns a woman brought before Jesus by scribes and Pharisees. They accuse her of adultery and cite the law of Moses. Jesus initially says nothing, writes on the ground, then tells the offenders to leave, beginning with the one without sin. He tells the woman to go and sin no more. In the KJV, this exchange occurs immediately before Jesus’ declaration that he is the light of the world.

That placement matters to the argument about this pericope. Chapters 7 and 8 contain a sequence of confrontations and personal teaching associated with the festival of tabernacles. The story lets Jesus defeat legalistic opponents, illustrate his authority to spare and reprove, and offer forgiveness without surrendering his identity as the Messiah. It reads like a deliberate part of John’s narrative, which is why King James Only advocates often appeal to its literary coherence.

Literary coherence, however, cannot identify the manuscript reading by itself. Copies without the woman’s episode run directly from the invitation to drink in 7:37 to the continuation of Jesus’ teaching in 8:12. A copyist who omitted the story, or received a text without it, could readily see a smooth join. The evidence for its presence or absence must therefore be assessed in the manuscripts rather than settled by which narrative a reader prefers.

What the earliest Greek manuscripts show

P66, a papyrus dated broadly to the second or third century, lacks the episode. The same is true of P75, usually dated to the late second or early third century, and of the fourth-century codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. Their omission means more than the absence of modern printing: the story is absent from the physical pages, not merely moved to a marginal note or apparatus.

These witnesses do not all represent unrelated lines of transmission, and the earliest manuscript is not automatically the most accurate. Dates, provenance, and family relationships have to be considered together. Even so, this cluster shows that omission of the woman’s episode was an early reading available before the KJV translators or any modern Bible committee began selecting words.

Later Greek manuscripts commonly include the story. The fifth-century Washingtonianus places it in the margin beside the continuous text, while many later copies insert it into the body. Counting these manuscripts without distinguishing their dates or relationships would confuse numerical strength with historical priority. The early omission remains significant evidence even though the received Greek tradition eventually became dominant.

Patristic evidence and its limits

Church fathers knew this story. Jerome discusses the woman taken in adultery in his commentary on John, and his Vulgate tradition generally includes the episode. Augustine records that some Latin copies contained the account while others omitted it. By the end of the fourth century and into the fifth, the passage was therefore a known variant, not an invention associated with the King James translators.

Those references establish circulation in late antiquity, but they do not settle when the episode was first composed or whether its wording reproduced an earlier source. A father may quote a familiar form, abbreviate it, or mention an alternative reading. The absence from early copies bears on the history of John’s text, not necessarily on the age of every story within it. The patristic trail gives useful chronological limits; it cannot supply a missing original.

The Isaiah 7:12 argument

A common argument connects the episode with Jesus’ question in John 8:6, “What is the law among you?” In Isaiah 7:12, the KJV’s wording “the shadow of a third part of it” differs from the simpler “whether the shadow thereof shall go over” in some other English versions. The disputed Hebrew expression has been rendered “word of course” or associated with “deceit”, leading some to argue that Jesus exposed a plot rather than initiating a trap.

Another link is the Greek phrase pechra charaktir, usually translated “dishonourable word”, in Sirach 25:16. Proponents suggest that this idiom describes the accusation and helps account for Isaiah’s supposedly deceptive counsel. The Hebrew and Greek phrases require comparison with their contexts, but neither yields a universally accepted direct equivalent for “adultery”. The proposed connection remains an interpretive case, not a replacement for textual witnesses.

Meanwhile, Jesus’ response to the accusers concerns the legal accusation, personal guilt, and the danger of self-righteous condemnation. That makes the Isaiah reading relevant to the scene’s theme. It does not demonstrate that the earliest scribes already had this episode in John. A theological explanation of how the material fits cannot answer the separate historical question of whether the material was present.

Reading the major claims carefully

Several strong statements circulate in this debate. Each needs to be separated into a claim about manuscripts, a claim about reception history, and a claim about theology.

Claims to test against the evidence

Questions a textual analysis must ask

Modern versions differ in how they present the variant, so claims that “the Bible” removed the story obscure which edition is being discussed. Read together, the evidence supports caution rather than triumphalism. It also resists the opposite error of turning uncertainty into permission to alter any passage at will. Textual questions are answerable to degrees through disciplined comparison rather than slogans.

What the evidence means for Bible readers

The most cautious conclusion is that the earliest surviving Greek witnesses strongly favour the text of John without this episode. That does not prove that the story was a late medieval fabrication, and it does not require pretending that all later manuscripts are worthless. It does mean that describing the KJV’s inclusion as proof that modern editions deleted Scripture reverses the direction of the evidence.

The KJV’s inclusion does not prove deliberate addition either. Its translators revised existing English translations with reference to Greek and Hebrew evidence and available variant readings. A plausible explanation is that they inherited the episode through the received Greek text and English predecessors, as many other English translators before them had done. That inheritance does not establish the episode’s presence in John’s earliest recoverable text.

These questions surface far from seminary debates. An Australian reader may compare Bible apps over a flat white at a Melbourne café, while a Sydney family weighs different editions in a Christian bookshop. The local market offers many English translations, so the claim that one version simply reproduces “the Bible” deserves a careful answer.

Australian courtroom practice offers a useful analogy, though not a textual rule. Courts applying the Evidence Act 1908 (Cth) assess admissibility, relevance, and reliability; repeated assertion does not become proof merely through repetition. Manuscript questions similarly turn on date, provenance, wording, and relationships. A large body of later copies has historical value, but it does not automatically outweigh the earlier evidence.

Read the linked analysis, then check the verse references in the Greek witnesses for yourself. When the claim is that modern Bibles removed this story, respond with the chronology: the earliest witnesses already lack it, later copies widely transmit it, and its presence in the KJV reflects one branch of the textual tradition rather than immunity from critical scrutiny.