Even when I was Protestant, I held Scripture in high regard—so much so that when evangelical textual scholar Daniel B. Wallace declared in his debate with Bart Ehrman that the story of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53-8:11) is probably not in the original version of John, I listened. I wanted Scripture and not any man-made traditions or accretions in the text. If a pastor preached on this passage, I just didn’t listen. As Daniel B. Wallace said, “put simply, it’s my favorite passage that’s not in the Bible.”
After I became Catholic, I realized that this woman disproves the historical credentials of sola scriptura. Certain Protestants will try to show from history that their beliefs are not novel, but have some basis in prior tradition. This story, however, blows sola scriptura out of the water.
It is a clear case where an oral tradition was held for centuries as equal to the written word of God—so much so that it could be written into the Bible. This is precisely what Catholicism teaches about divine revelation: God’s word comes in two forms, Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition.
The eminent textual critic Bruce Metzger and his student, Bart Ehrman, write the following about this story in their classic work The Text of the New Testament: “The account is lacking in the best Greek manuscripts: it is absent from 𝖕66, 𝖕75, א, B, L, N, T, W, X, Δ, Θ, Ψ, 33, 157, 565, 1241, and fam. 1424.” These symbols and numbers might seem random, but they are extremely important. 𝖕66 is our earliest nearly complete Gospel of John (~A.D. 200), yet it lacks—not due to a tear or a missing piece—Jesus’ encounter with the adulteress. The story is also not found in the late second-century 𝖕75, another important manuscript. א represents Codex Sinaiticus, and B represents Codex Vaticanus, both of which are fourth-century textual witnesses of the Bible. The story is just not there.
So where does this story first appear in the textual record? Metzger and Ehrman note that “the earliest Greek manuscript known to contain the passage is Codex Bezae [5th cent.], which is joined by several Old Latin manuscripts (aur, c, e, f, f 2, j, r1).” Others have noted that certain texts like the third-century Didascalia Apostolorum and fourth-century writers like Didymus the Blind appear to know the story.
A Protestant might respond that this all demonstrates the Church’s fallibility, because it transmitted a story that is not originally in John’s Gospel. The fascinating thing is that Christian scribes and writers down the ages were aware that this story was not original to John’s Gospel . . . and that didn’t matter. They didn’t believe in sola scriptura.
H.A.G. Houghton in his textual commentary on the most recent edition of the Greek New Testament remarks that “several early Christian writers do not quote it in discussions of adultery or other relevant places, while others (such as Jerome and Augustine) observe that it is missing from manuscripts known to them.” Bruce Metzger in his textual commentary likewise notes that “in many of the witnesses that contain the passage it is marked with asterisks or obeli, indicating that, though the scribes included the account, they were aware that it lacked satisfactory credentials.” Regardless, they transmitted the text, and Jerome included it in the Vulgate.
So where did this story come from? Metzger asserts, “It is obviously a piece of oral tradition which circulated in certain parts of the Western church and which was subsequently incorporated into various manuscripts at various places.” He is open to it going back to Jesus himself rather than it being an early fiction: “At the same time the account has all the earmarks of historical veracity.”
Houghton himself concludes that “it is likely that this was an early tradition about Jesus which circulated separately outside the biblical canon (an agraphon), until editors inserted it at different places in the Gospels.” Notice what these scholars are saying: an oral tradition (possibly going back to Jesus and the apostles) made it into the biblical text. An oral tradition was held, even centuries after the apostles, as equal to written divine revelation.
Some Protestants might try to argue that the story actually belongs in Luke, and so it is not an extrabiblical tradition that has been inserted into the text, but a floating biblical text. But this objection also fails (it’s “a dead end”), as the passage is absent from our early manuscripts of Luke, and when it does appear in later manuscripts of Luke, the scribes placed it in different spots.
The Church transmitted the story for centuries precisely because it did not believe in sola scriptura. No matter how you put it, sola scriptura is a novelty.