When a group of scribes and Pharisees brought an adulteress before Jesus who had been caught "in the very act," it was their intention to trap Jesus by pointing out a major inconsistency between his teachings and the teachings of the Old Testament.

"Now Moses in the law commanded us," they said with self-righteous smirks on their faces, "that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou?"

If Jesus told them to pardon her, they would have called him out for not being true to the Mosaic law, given by God to remove unfaithful spouses from the Hebrew gene pool. However, if he had been true to the Mosaic law, they would have called him out for contradicting his own preachings of love and forgiveness for the sinner. In this manner they knew that they have a sure-fire way to "have to accuse him."

Faced with a clear contradiction and no way around it, Jesus knew exactly the course that a true disciple of Christianity should take such as to avoid becoming entrapped and reduce the cognitive dissonance as much as possible.

After pretending not to have heard them and doodling mindlessly on the ground, thus reducing their feeling of control of the conversation, and letting them repeat the question in order to make themselves feel more foolish when the answer was given, he rose up and said "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her."

Thus, re-directing their question into the form of an attack against their character, he managed to undermine their credibility, labeling them as sinners and thus unworthy of making any valid religious or moral assessments.

Never-mind that despite the deflection, Jesus still undermined the law of Moses. Certainly nobody who had stoned an adulteress in the name of God for the past 1,400 years had been without sin.

It's no wonder Mormons feel they have to follow his shining example.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/08/2011 08:28PM by kimball.

Jesus's ability to cleverly undermine the Pharisees, and be a thorn in their collective sides (through this story and the parables) is what makes him real to me. If he didn't exist, he would have had to have been invented. But I do believe that he existed.

Einstein was asked if he thought Jesus existed and said that he did because his personality shone through so clearly in the gospels. BTW, the story of the woman taken in sin isn't in the earliest manuscripts. It was added later. Of course ,it could have been part of the oral tradition.