Doodling in the Style of Jesus: A Non-Interpretation of the Adultery Pericope

Abstract

In the story of the adulterous woman, Jesus is remembered to have saved a woman’s life by writing on the ground. What he wrote, however, is not preserved in any tradition. That hasn’t stopped commentators from imagining what he might have written. But why imagine he wrote at all? Why imagine there's “content” there to be interpreted? Perhaps when confronted with an ethical dilemma he wanted no part of, Jesus simply bent down and began to doodle. If so, then what matters is the fact that he doodled, the shapes and the size and the squiggly lines of his doodling. In this article, I want to offer a reading of John 7:53-8:11 that engages with the very act of Jesus's wordless doodling. I then want to try and tease out a few ethical principles from this doodling. By focusing on a story where Jesus was remembered primarily for his gestures and not simply his speech, and by reimagining a Christian ethics that emerges from the space opened up by those gestures, we are keeping front and center the conviction that Christian ethics is a matter of style.