Non-Believers' Favorite Parts of the Bible

[xpastor]

Well that explains some things. So when a woman started washing Jesus' "feet" in front of people, I can understand why he'd be upset when another woman wanted her to stop and do something else. That's just a whole different image right there.

In the Bible words don't always mean what you think they mean. For instance, adultery can mean infidelity in a traditional marriage. But in some cases it means that the person is worshiping another deity.

Consider the case when the crowd caught the woman in the very act of adultery. It doesn't make sense that they caught her having sex with another guy. It does make sense that she was caught performing a religious ritual to another deity other than to the traditional Jewish deity. Maybe she was seen worshiping a Roman deity.

Do it make sense that she would be having sex in plain sight or that the crowd would barge into her room? And if it was sexual they would have had to apprehend the man as well. Since her husband wasn't there it plainly is a story about her worshiping a foreign deity.

So when the crowd brought the woman to Jesus he couldn't condemn her because his momma had spent years telling him that his daddy was God and that he was the son of God. And he had been going around telling the folks that he was in fact the son of God and that they had to do what he said if they wanted to be "saved."

There are other stories about how the word adultery is used to mean the worship of other deities. You have to be aware of the context. If it's sexual it usually plainly says so.

You need to read a bit more carefully and also look at some modern biblical scholarship if you're going to pontificate like that.

1. It is true that the bible compares worshiping other gods to adultery. Usually it is not just one person, but rather the whole nation of Israel that is said to have committed adultery with false gods. However, the story you refer to is about plain old adultery.
2. It doesn't say that the whole crowd burst in on her. Just that she was caught in the act, possibly just by one person, her husband for all we know. People do get caught in the act by their spouses, you know. The crowd was assembled after she had been caught, supposedly to inflict the penalty for adultery which was stoning to death. There's a tip-off that the story is probably fictional. The Romans did not allow the locals to inflict the death penalty.
3. The woman taken in adultery is almost certainly just a made-up story. It is the most doubtful passage in the entire New Testament, appearing sometimes in Luke and sometimes in John, and not at all in the oldest manuscripts. In other words, long after Jesus' time, someone made up the story to argue that adulterous people should be forgiven rather than sanctioned with the ultimate penalty, which in Christian circles might be kicking them out of the church.
4. Nope. Jesus' mommy never told him that he was the Son of God. The vast majority of modern scholars believe that Jesus never made such a claim, and that it was written in long after his death.

Seriously, the first three gospels do preserve some of Jesus' teaching: the Sermon on the Mount, the parables, and his prophecies of a imminent end to the world. However, they have many additions to make a theological point both in Jesus' supposed teaching and in the miracle stories. You don't think that he really cast out demons or healed the blind, do you?