In Islam, Muslims revere the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ as the best of creation and as God’s Chosen Final Prophet and Messenger. One of the clearest manifestations of the reverence displayed towards him ﷺ is the extraordinary level of care that Muslims developed around attributing words to him.

It is known that the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ issued severe warnings against attributing things to him that were not true. This is something that the Muslim community took very seriously, with many scholars dedicating their lives to verifying prophetic reports, sifting the authentic from the inauthentic.

Hadith were not merely collected. They were subjected to a technical discipline concerned with both isnad (chain of transmitters or narrators) and matn (actual text of the report). Scholars investigated whether or not transmitters had actually met, when and where they lived, their reliability and precision, if their memories had deteriorated, if a chain was continuous without gaps, if a narrator practised tadlis (concealment of details), if a report contradicted stronger transmissions, and if an apparently sound report contained an ‘illah (hidden defect).

Entire biographical traditions, namely ‘ilm al-rijal (the study of the narrators of hadith) and al-jarh wa ‘l-ta’dil (the critical evaluation of their reliability through disqualification and validation) developed for evaluating transmitters, alongside increasingly sophisticated classifications such as sahih (rigorously authentic), hasan (excellent), da’if (weak), and mawdu‘ (fabricated).

Muslim scholars understood that reports could be misremembered, distorted, and fabricated and falsely attributed to the Prophet ﷺ. As such, they developed a meticulous methodology that was designed specifically to distinguish “this saying circulates among Muslims” from “the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ actually said this.”

This tradition was famously challenged by Orientalists such as Ignaz Goldziher and Joseph Schacht. Goldziher treated much of the hadith corpus as reflecting later political, theological, and legal controversies projected backwards onto the Prophet ﷺ. Schacht argued, especially regarding legal traditions, that isnads had often been “projected backwards” from later jurists to earlier authorities and eventually to the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ.

Of course, this skepticism did not go unchallenged. From a traditionalist Sunni perspective, Muhammad Mustafa al-A’zami (may Allah have mercy in him) attacked Schacht’s methodology and emphasized evidence for the early written transmission of hadith. Meanwhile Harald Motzki, hardly a traditional Sunni apologist, used detailed source criticism and isnad-cum-matn analysis to argue that at least some traditions could be traced considerably earlier than the Schachtian model allowed, helping dismantle the easy assumption that late surviving compilations necessarily implied late invention.

The practical result is quite obvious, and I can relate a personal anecdote. Years ago, while reading Julius Evola’s Metaphysics of War, I came across what he presented as a “well-known and quite characteristic saying” of the Islamic tradition. Discussing jihad and the superiority of the warrior’s path, Evola writes: “The blood of heroes is closer to the Lord than the ink of scholars and the prayers of the pious.” I remembered the passage because something about it immediately seemed off to me. And, in fact, the problem was much worse than I had initially remembered: Evola was not simply reproducing a dubious hadith. He was apparently misquoting or, at the very least, radically reformulating a hadith whose attribution to the Prophet ﷺ is itself already very unsound.

This was highlighted in the footnote. The translator-editor conceded, “I am uncertain of the origin of this saying,” before acknowledging that it is contradicted by another narration, which he renders: “The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyr.” The familiar maxim is usually transmitted in forms such as “the ink of the scholars is greater than the blood of the martyrs” or in a related report according to which the ink of the scholars and the blood of the martyrs will be weighed on the Day of Resurrection, with the ink of the scholars outweighing the blood of the martyrs.

So Evola effectively completely reversed the purport of famous saying. Where the familiar formulation places the scholar’s ink above the martyr’s blood, Evola’s main text places the warrior’s blood above the scholar’s ink, conveniently producing a maxim far better suited to his own glorification of the “holy warrior.”

The issue is that the prophetic versions of the saying have been classified as da’if, and some critics went further and classified particular forms as mawdu’, that is, fabricated as a Prophetic attribution.

The maxim has instead been attributed more authentically as the statement of al-Hasan al-Basri, one of the great scholars from the tabi’un. This is the generation that immediately following the sahabah, i.e., the Prophetic Companions (may Allah be pleased with them), having met at least one sahabi. He was therefore a figure from the salaf (i.e., the blessed first three generations).

Thus, a statement can be “beautiful,” “ancient,” and attributed to one of the greatest early Muslims, and a hadith critic can still clarify that none of this makes it a saying of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ.

Now, imagine applying anything approaching that standard to Christianity… forget Julius Evola… forget some obscure saying buried in a medieval collection… one of the most famous stories about Jesus in the entire Western world, the source of one of the most famous sayings ever placed in his mouth, has a textual history so extremely problematic that even modern Christian biblical scholarship itself overwhelmingly accepts that it was not originally part of the Gospel in which Christians have been reading it for centuries.

A Fake Story?

The passage in question is John 7:53–8:11, traditionally called the Pericope Adulterae: the story of the woman caught in adultery. The scribes and Pharisees bring a woman before Jesus (peace be upon him), saying that she has been caught in the act of adultery. They remind him that the Law of Moses commands punishment for such an offence and demands his judgment. Jesus initially refuses to answer, bends down, and writes with his finger on the ground. They continue pressing him until he stands and delivers the immortal line:

Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.

The accusers depart one after another, beginning with the eldest. Jesus is left alone with the woman. He asks where her accusers have gone and if anyone has condemned her. When she answers that none has, Jesus replies that he too does not condemn her and tells her to go and sin no more.

It is difficult to overstate how culturally important this episode has become, as “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone” has escaped Christianity altogether and entered ordinary Western speech.

Paintings, films, sermons, novels, and political rhetoric (including against Muslims) have reproduced it endlessly.

More importantly, the episode provides an almost perfect summary of the Jesus preferred by much of modern Christianity: merciful rather than punitive, concerned with the sinner rather than the legal penalty, and apparently frustrating religious authorities who wish to impose the severity of Mosaic law.

For many Christians, this is not merely a story about Jesus; it encapsulates who Jesus is.

There’s just one rather serious problem: there is overwhelming textual evidence that the author of John did not write it.

The story is absent from Papyrus 66 and Papyrus 75, two of our earliest and most important substantial manuscript witnesses to the Gospel of John, generally dated around the late second or early third century. It is likewise absent from the two great fourth-century Greek biblical codices, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus. Nor is this merely a case in which damaged manuscripts happen to have lost the relevant pages. In these witnesses the text simply moves from John 7:52 to John 8:12. The narrative about the adulterous woman is not there.

This point deserves emphasis because “the earliest manuscripts do not contain it” can sound far less devastating than it actually is. We are not saying that the story happens to be absent from two or three irrelevant scraps. Papyrus 66 and Papyrus 75 are among the most important early witnesses to John that survive, while Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are foundational witnesses for reconstructing the Greek New Testament. The witnesses closest to the earliest recoverable textual history of John do not know the story in the place where millions of Christians eventually came to read it.

Nor is the problem confined to Greek manuscripts. A number of important early versions of John omit the passage, and several early Christian commentators pass directly from John 7:52 to 8:12 without commenting upon what would otherwise be an extraordinarily memorable episode. Origen, for example, produced extensive commentary on John without giving us evidence that the adulteress story formed part of his Johannine text. John Chrysostom likewise comments across this portion without the passage.

Even more damning is what happens when the story finally becomes securely visible in the manuscript tradition: it cannot decide where it belongs.

The familiar position is after John 7:52, which is why modern Bibles call it John 7:53–8:11. But this is not its only location. Some manuscripts place it after John 7:36. Others move it to after John 8:36. Some place it at the end of the Gospel, after John 21:25. And most remarkably, an important group of manuscripts, the family conventionally designated f13, does not place it in John at all… it inserts the story into the Gospel of Luke, after Luke 21:38. There is also manuscript evidence for its placement at the end of Luke.

If a passage had disappeared accidentally from one branch of the manuscript tradition but remained firmly anchored at the same location everywhere else, one could at least construct a relatively straightforward theory of accidental omission. But the Pericope Adulterae does not behave in such a manner: it is absent from the earliest major witnesses, enters the manuscript tradition later, and then appears at several different locations. At some point, scribes apparently possessed a story regarded as sufficiently authoritative or edifying to preserve, while lacking a stable textual location for it.

What I’m saying here is not even some sort of obscure “conspiracy theory.” It has been rendered a consensus in modern Biblical scholarship. As one Christian website puts it:

This entire section, 7:53-8:11, traditionally known as the pericope adulterae, is not contained in the earliest and best mss and was almost certainly not an original part of the Gospel of John. Among modern commentators and textual critics, it is a foregone conclusion that the section is not original but represents a later addition to the text of the Gospel. B. M. Metzger summarizes: “the evidence for the non-Johannine origin of the pericope of the adulteress is overwhelming” (TCGNT 187).

Think about what this means… we are not discussing a disputed article, a changed verb tense, or whether or not a manuscript reads “Jesus Christ” rather than “Christ Jesus.” An entire narrative is mobile: a woman, an accusation of adultery, a confrontation with religious authorities, Jesus writing mysteriously on the ground, a sequence of departures, a final exchange with the woman, and one of the most famous sayings attributed to Jesus in human history.

Where does this episode belong? After John 7:52? In another part of John? At the end of John? In Luke? The manuscript tradition, quite literally, gives more than one answer.

There are internal reasons for suspicion as well. Textual critics have long noted that the vocabulary and style of the passage contain features that are unusual for John, while some features appear more congenial to Luke. This does not prove by itself that Luke wrote it, but it reinforces the external manuscript evidence that the passage interrupts rather than naturally belongs to the Johannine text. Remove John 7:53–8:11 and the surrounding discourse flows directly from 7:52 into 8:12. Insert it, and an independent narrative suddenly appears in the middle and disrupts the flow.

Again, this is why the basic textual conclusion is not some discovery of “Muslim polemicists looking for an embarrassing Bible contradiction.” It is standard New Testament textual criticism.

Modern translations routinely signal the problem themselves. Some bracket the passage. Others place it in the text while adding a note explaining that the earliest manuscripts do not contain it. Modern critical Greek editions mark it as textually secondary. Christian scholars may disagree about whether or not the underlying story is historically authentic, how early it circulated, or why scribes eventually incorporated it, but the proposition that John 7:53–8:11 was originally written at this point by the author of the Fourth Gospel is extraordinarily difficult to defend against the manuscript evidence.

Now, imagine presenting this as a hadith… imagine that one of the most famous sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ was embedded in a complete narrative that could not be found in our earliest important witnesses to the book that is supposedly preserving it… imagine that it suddenly appeared in later manuscripts, but some transmitters put it in one chapter, others in another chapter, others at the end of the book, and still others inserted the entire story into a different collection altogether… then imagine that, unlike an ordinary hadith, we did not even possess a named isnad telling us who allegedly heard the story from whom.

Would a muhaddith declare this sahih because he felt the story was “spiritually moving”? Would he say that many Muslims quoted it, therefore the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ must have said it? Would its presence in millions of printed copies somehow reconstruct the missing chain tracing it backwards?

Of course not. He would immediately ask the questions that the evidence demands: Who transmitted it? From whom? When does it first become securely attested? What is the relationship between the surviving witnesses? Why do the earlier witnesses omit it? Why does its location fluctuate? Why does one branch of transmission put it in an entirely different book? Is the wording stable? Does its language resemble that of the supposed author? Could the story be older than its insertion into the written text? If so, how much older? And even if the tradition itself is ancient, what evidence carries us from “an early Christian story about Jesus” to “Jesus actually said these words”?

With the Pericope Adulterae, Christianity confronts the same distinction on a vastly larger scale. The story may be ancient, it may seem beautiful to some, it may even, for all we know, preserve some authentic memory of Jesus, but none of those propositions establish that it belonged to John, and none by itself establishes that Jesus uttered the famous sentence that has been attributed to him.

Yet, the sentence did not survive merely as an anonymous Christian tradition accompanied by a warning about its uncertain transmission. It somehow entered the Gospel text, it acquired chapter and verse numbers, it was copied, translated, preached, painted, and memorised as Scripture. Generations of Christians encountered “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone” not as a later tradition possibly preserving an authentic saying of Jesus but simply as something Jesus says in the Gospel of John.

Islam certainly encountered fabricated hadith. Nobody acquainted with Islamic scholarship could seriously deny this reality. The classical scholars themselves filled volumes identifying them and raising awareness about them, warning the Muslims about quoting them. But that is precisely the point: a fabricated or weak report did not become authentic merely because some Muslims thought it sounded nice.

Meanwhile, one of the most famous sayings attributed to Jesus in Western civilization comes to us inside a narrative that the earliest major manuscripts of John do not contain, whose position wanders through later manuscripts, and which in some witnesses migrates out of John altogether and finds its way into Luke.

Christians could (and perhaps should) learn a valuable lesson from such a peculiar and revealing situation.

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