Should the story of the Woman Caught in Adultery be in the Bible?

Dear Apologist, I have heard that the story of the woman caught in adultery wasn’t originally in John’s Gospel.  How do we know it is inspired scripture?


The Old and New Testaments are the word of God handed down through the history of the Church.  But due to the natural corrosion which everything undergoes, we do not possess any of the original manuscripts of the books and letters contained therein.

Instead, we have copies compiled from around the Christian world.  These copies are compared with one another to discern what was contained in the originals - a process called "lower textual criticism."

So, suppose 5 manuscript lineages have a verse written one way and only 1 has it written in a different way. The logical thing to do is assume the 5 got it right.  That's how critical editions of the New Testament are compiled today.

Now, around the time of the Protestant revolt there was a renewed interest in reassembling what the original Greek autographs had said.  And what they found out was that many of the earliest manuscripts lacked the story of the woman caught in adultery.  This has led some to wonder whether the story ought to be regarded as inspired scripture.

However, this invites a few questions:

• How do we know what constitutes scripture in the first place?  What is our standard?

• Is it by examining textual evidence and concluding whether a document was written by an Apostle?  Who says that should be the standard?

Because if that was the case, our confidence in Scripture would always be subject to the whims of the latest scholarship. And it would also cast doubt on the canonicity of Mark, Luke, Hebrews, and Titus!

[Note: These questions are truly unanswerable for non-Catholics and non-Orthodox]

Well, the matter was taken up at the fourth session of the Council of Trent in mid-1500’s.  They did not concern themselves with questions of original authorship or manuscript comparison.  Instead, they asked the question:

What texts the Holy Spirit had led the Church to venerate down through history?

The council concluded that all the writings found in Saint Jerome’s Latin Vulgate were to be considered inspired and canonical:

"But if any one receive not, as sacred and canonical, the said books entire with all their parts, as they have been used to be read in the Catholic Church, and as they are contained in the old Latin Vulgate edition; and knowingly and deliberately contemn the traditions aforesaid; let him be anathema."

Thus, we have it on the authority of Christ’s Church -(which the Holy Spirit guides into the truth)- that the story of the woman caught in adultery should be received as inspired.