Re: adultery

From: Paul S. Dixon (dixonps@juno.com)
Date: Mon Jan 26 1998 - 20:58:23 EST


On Mon, 26 Jan 1998 19:37:37 -0500 Jim West <jwest@highland.net> writes:
>At 06:19 PM 1/26/98 -0600, you wrote:
>
>>Jim,
>>
>>Are you seriously saying that a married woman in biblical times never
had
>>an illicit affair, let alone was never caught in the act of doing so.
It
>>seems to me that in this instance you are importing what happened to a
>>woman when her husband divorced her (according to Jesus' reading of
such
>>activity) into a story which says nothing about the woman in question
being >>divorced.
>>
>>Jeffrey Gibson
>>jgibson@acfsysv.roosevelt.edu
>>
>
>No, no, no. Once more (and for the final time) the import of the
passive is
>the simple fact that in 1st century Palestinian society, the woman was
>powerless- the man was powerful- and as a result the adulterer was the
>man while the adulterated was the woman.
>
>Did women have flings- yep! Did they reap the social wrath for it-
>yep! Did men get off "scot free"- yep! (there are too many
contemporary
>events which parallel this to mention!!). In sum, this is what Jesus
>protests against in the synoptics and John. Where is the man in John 8?
 He
>must have been there!!! Where is the divorced husband in the Synoptics?
 
>Living life while the woman is left destitute.
>
>The use of the passive is intentional, clear, and probably stems from an
>authentic Jesus tradition (the famous criteria of dis-similarity).

Jim, I think I understood your original question. Carl was arguing for
the middle voice in Jn 8 (which I do not disagree with). Though I
responded to his response, it was not to argue for or against his
position (which he and perhaps other may have thought). Rather, I was
coming back to the original question and directing it to the only passive
form, as found in Mt 5:32.

I do not disagree with you, but I question the possible 'so what' of your
position. Are you suggesting that the woman who was made to commit
adultery by remarrying after her previous husband divorced her, is
therefore not guilty of committing adultery herself? This, of course, is
the position many take. My point is simply that this conclusion is not
stated in the text and is not implied.

Somebody raised the question whether the GNT or the LXX ever has the
woman committing adultery explicitly. I know Carl is going to check this
out tomorrow at the office, but I can hardly wait. I ran a preliminary
check of *MOIC* in the GNT and the LXX and found 32 occurrences in the NT
and 39 in the LXX. If I get time tonight, and if I can't resist, then
I'll try to check out each one. Otherwise, I'll let Carl run with it.
After all, he is the Terrell Davis of the B-Greek list (now how many of
you will wonder what that means). Psst, Jeffrey, Logos 2.0c has a
wonderful search machine and is compatible with at least Microsoft
Windows and most word processors.

Paul Dixon

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