of William Barclay’s work, and making a selection from that ever-increasing catalogue is an impossible task. It is nonetheless my hope that the exploration that begins with these volumes of The New Daily Study Bible will go on in the discovery of new writers and new books.
Throughout the editorial process, many conversations have taken place – conversations with the British and American publishers, and with those who love the books and find in them both information and inspiration. Ronnie Barclay’s contribution to this revision of his father’s work has been invaluable. But one conversation has dominated the work, and that has been a conversation with William Barclay himself through the text. There has been a real sense of listening to his voice in all the questioning and in the searching for new words to convey the meaning of that text. The aim of The New Daily Study Bible is to make clear his message, so that the distinctive voice, which has spoken to so many in past years, may continue to be heard for generations to come.
Linda Foster
London
2001
INTRODUCTION
(by John Drane)
The chapters covered in this volume raise many questions – about the nature of Jesus’ teaching, about the value of John’s information, and about the social dynamic of life in the earliest Christian communities. They were all familiar enough in William Barclay’s day, but his intention had always been to comment on the actual message of the text as it might impinge on the lives and spiritual development of his twentieth-century readers. This made his work widely accessible, though it inevitably meant that he rarely provided a definitive account of such historical and literary questions. Consequently, the differences between John’s chronological scheme of the final week of Jesus’ life and the picture presented in the synoptic gospels only feature in a short appendix, while there is no real consideration of why a central event of that week in the synoptic accounts – the Last Supper – was left out of John’s narrative, or why Jesus’ teaching here is so different from the parables found in the other gospels.
Another surprising omission is the way Barclay has relatively little to say about the circumstances of the church group for whom this gospel was originally written. At the time of its compilation, Christians were clearly in the midst of some bitter arguments with the Jewish community, and this comes out at many points in the text. Of course, what they were arguing about was not racially motivated, but concerned the nature of true spirituality. Later generations, however, picked up some of the nuances of this debate and used it as justification for the kind of anti-semitism that eventually led to the Nazi Holocaust. Had he been writing today, William Barclay could not have avoided addressing this issue – though, in fairness to him, it is only since his death that this connection has been fully appreciated.
There are plenty of good things in here to make up for such deficiencies. Barclay is at his best when breathing new life into the characters who feature in these stories – Pilate, Peter, Mary and John, among many others. Moreover, his comments (14:6) about the nature of truth, emphasizing its personal rather than propositional nature, speak directly to the concerns of today’s people, who like Pilate are still asking what truth might be. This is just one reason among many why William Barclay still has much to offer to spiritual searchers in a postmodern generation.
John Drane
University of Aberdeen
2001
JOHN
WRETCHEDNESS AND PITY
John 7:53–8:11
And each of them went to his own house; but Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. Early in the morning he was again in the Temple precincts, and all the people came to him. He sat down and went on teaching them. The scribes and Pharisees brought a woman arrested for adultery. They set her in the midst and said to him: ‘Teacher, this woman was arrested as she was committing adultery – in the very act. In the law Moses enjoined us to stone women like this. What do you say about her?’ They were testing him when they said this, so that they might have some ground on which to accuse him. Jesus stooped down and wrote with his finger on the ground. When they went on asking him their question, he straightened himself and said to them: ‘Let the man among you who is without sin be the first to cast a stone at her.’ And again he bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. One by one those who had heard what he said went out, beginning from the eldest down to the youngest. So Jesus was left alone, and the woman was still there in the midst. Jesus straightened himself and said to her: ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’ She said: ‘No one, sir.’ Jesus said: ‘I am not going to pass judgment on you either. Go, and from now on, sin no more.’
[This incident is not included in all the ancient manuscripts and appears only in a footnote in the Revised Standard Version; see the Note on pp. 337–9.]
THE scribes and Pharisees were out to get some charge on which they could discredit Jesus; and here they thought they had impaled him inescapably on the horns of a dilemma. When a difficult legal question arose, the natural and routine thing was to take it to a Rabbi for a decision. So the scribes and Pharisees approached Jesus as a Rabbi to challenge him with the question of a woman taken in adultery.
In the eyes of the Jewish law, adultery was a serious crime. The Rabbis said: ‘Every Jew must die before he will commit idolatry, murder or adultery.’ Adultery was, in fact, one of the three gravest sins and was punishable by death, although there were certain differences in respect of the way in which the death penalty was to be carried out. Leviticus 20:10 lays it down: ‘If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbour, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death.’ There the method of death is not specified. Deuteronomy 22:13–24 lays down the penalty in the case of a girl who is already betrothed. In a case like that, she and the man who seduced her are to be brought to the city gates, ‘and you shall stone them to death’. The Mishnah, that is, the Jewish codified law, states that the penalty for adultery is strangulation, and even the method of strangulation is laid down. ‘The man is to be enclosed in dung up to his knees, and a soft towel set within a rough towel is to be placed around his neck (in order that no mark may be made, for the punishment is God’s punishment). Then one man draws in one direction and another in the other direction, until he be dead.’ The Mishnah reiterates that death by stoning is the penalty for a girl who is betrothed and who then commits adultery. From the purely legal point of view, the scribes and Pharisees were perfectly correct. This woman was liable to death by stoning.
The dilemma into which they sought to put Jesus was this. If he said that the woman ought to be stoned to death, two things followed. First, he would lose the name he had gained for love and for mercy and would never again be called the friend of sinners. Second, he would come into collision with the Roman law, for the Jews had no power to pass or carry out the death sentence on anyone. If he said that the woman should be pardoned, it could immediately be said that he was teaching people to break the law of Moses, and that he was condoning, and even encouraging them to commit, adultery. That was the trap into which the scribes and Pharisees sought to lure Jesus. But he turned their attack in such a way that it recoiled against themselves.
At first Jesus stooped down and wrote with his finger on the ground. Why did he do that? There may be four possible reasons.
(1) He may quite simply have wished to gain time and not be rushed into a decision. In that brief moment, he may have been both thinking the thing out and taking it to God.
(2) Certain manuscripts add: ‘as though he did
