ContradictionsReading order 194Bible context 2 min read
How should adulterers be punished?
The legal command requires execution, while Jesus places a moral condition on those who would initiate it.
- Textual conflict
- Interpretive tension
- The passages pull in different directions, but the conflict depends on how their wording, scope, or narrative context is read.
- Importance
- Major
- A major event or claim with wider implications.
Mandatory execution meets Jesus' additional condition of a sinless first accuser, but the supplied scene does not show acquittal or abolish the penalty.
An editorial assessment of the quoted passages. Importance describes the stakes; it does not increase certainty. Reading order weighs both.
Both participants in adultery must be put to death
And the man that committeth adultery with another man’s wife, even he that committeth adultery with his neighbour’s wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.
Leviticus 20:10
Translation / edition: King James Version (KJV)
Read the full chapter:Leviticus 20
Jesus requires a sinless accuser to cast the first stone
And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst, They say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act. Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou? This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not. So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her