What was Jesus writing in the dirt?

from the old testament

• The Old Testament provides key background material for this story. The first is that the Mosaic Law strongly condemned adultery, with death being its prescribed penalty. For example, Leviticus 20:10 reads, “If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.” The Pharisees' actions in the story are thus grounded in a real command and, on the surface, a legitimate understanding of the Law.
• A second piece of background material, depending on how one understands the story (see the New Testament section), is that Moses received the law from God, said to be written by His finger: “he gave to Moses, when he had finished speaking with him on Mount Sinai, the two tablets of the testimony, tablets of stone, written with the finger of God” (Exodus 31:18).

from the new testament

• The story appears in John 7:53–8:11. However, a serious textual issue is that it is absent from the oldest biblical manuscripts. This implies it was added later, at some unknown time, and does not appear in any manuscripts until around the fifth century AD. Therefore, while some scholars still believe it’s original, the vast majority do not. This is why most Bibles place double brackets around the text, or similar markers, to signal to the reader that it’s unreliable. Therefore, one should not draw any doctrinal conclusions from it, but instead treat it as an ancient, fictional story.
• The story begins with the scribes and Pharisees bringing a woman to Him, saying she was caught in adultery (John 8:3). They pointed out that the Mosaic Law said that such a woman should be stoned, asking Jesus what He thought (John 8:4–5). Consistent with actual historical accounts, they were not asking out of genuine curiosity, but to test Jesus (John 8:6).
• The story then says that “Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground” (John 8:6) before standing up and telling the men, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her” (John 8:7). He then bent back down and continued writing. The men left one by one until none remained (John 8:9), and the story concludes with Jesus forgiving the woman’s sin (John 8:10).
• Throughout church history, Christians have proposed various explanations for Jesus writing on the dirt. These explanations range from Jesus writing some or all of the Ten Commandments to writing the Pharisees’ specific sins to a “dramatic pause” before replying.
• However, because the author intentionally left out what Jesus purportedly wrote, we can only surmise that the act of writing, not the content, was the point of the story. Because Jesus’s finger is explicitly mentioned, the author may have intended the reader to think about how God wrote the Mosaic Law with His finger. If so, Jesus was being shown to be God, writing as He had done with Moses, or, at the least, demonstrating that He had authority over Moses in reply to the Jewish leaders' appeal to Moses’ authority.

implications for today

What implications can we draw from a disputed passage that is unlikely to be a true account?

First, we should be transparent about this passage. Our faith is reasonable, and we are not afraid to examine ancient manuscripts to ensure we apply to our lives only what is God-breathed (2 Timothy 3:16–17). We should not be concerned about a passage like this but hold it up as an example of what it means to handle Scripture carefully (2 Timothy 2:15).

Second, though the story is likely not genuine, it has persisted for around 1,500 years because it portrays Jesus and the Pharisees in ways that ring true. The attempt to entrap Jesus is reminiscent of many other accounts, and Jesus’ response, turning their argument back on them, is also common. This story thus reminds us of a biblical truth: the self-righteous often hate Jesus and what He stands for because He exposes them for who they are.

Third, as this article discussed, the most probable understanding of Jesus writing with His finger in the dirt is that the reader is to picture God writing the Law on the tablets. Whether that was the author’s meaning, this account again rings true with the rest of Scripture. In the undisputed Gospel accounts, Jesus regularly declared Himself divine (John 10:30) and the people recognized that His authority was unlike that of any others (Matthew 7:28–29). This story reminds us that Jesus was not only human, but the God-man who came to save us from the ramifications of our sins. From adulterous women to the self-righteous, Jesus has the authority to forgive anyone of his or her sins (cf. Mark 2:5–10).