What does ‘let him who is without sin cast the first stone’ mean?

The scene in the Temple

John sets it at dawn in the Temple courts, where Jesus sits teaching a crowd. Some scribes and Pharisees push through with a woman and stand her in the middle of everyone.

Teacher, we found this woman in adultery, in the very act. Now in our law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. What then do you say about her?

John says plainly that it is a test, “that they might have something to accuse him of” (John 8:6). A clever one, too. Say “stone her,” and he usurps Rome, which most historians think kept the death penalty for itself; at Jesus’s own trial his accusers tell Pilate, “It is illegal for us to put anyone to death” (John 18:31). Say “let her go,” and he sets himself against Moses.

Someone is missing

The law they cite names two people: “the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death” (Leviticus 20:10; also Deuteronomy 22:22). The woman was caught “in the very act,” so the man was there too. He is not in the scene. Jesus does not mention it. He stoops and writes on the ground with his finger. What he wrote, nobody knows. Some guess the accusers’ sins; others point to Jeremiah, where those who forsake God “will be written in the earth” (Jeremiah 17:13).

Why the first stone

When they keep pressing, he straightens up.

He who is without sin among you, let him throw the first stone at her.

The words echo the law of stoning itself. Moses required at least two witnesses, and the witnesses had to begin the execution.

The hands of the witnesses shall be first on him to put him to death, and afterward the hands of all the people.

So Jesus does not abolish the law. He asks who is fit to go first. Nobody is. They leave “one by one, beginning from the oldest” (John 8:9), until he is alone with the woman, still standing in the middle. Later Jewish law grew wary of executions too: the Mishnah calls a court that puts one person to death in seven years destructive (Makkot 1:10).

“Go and sin no more”

“Woman, where are your accusers? Did no one condemn you?” “No one, Lord.” “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way. From now on, sin no more” (John 8:10–11). He refuses both the stones and the excuse. The King James Version (1611) gave English the familiar forms, “let him first cast a stone at her” and “go, and sin no more,” and “to cast the first stone” now means to be first to condemn others while ignoring your own faults.

A story that wandered

Most Bibles carry a footnote here. The oldest copies of John, two papyri from about AD 200 and the great codices of the 300s, do not have this story. The oldest Greek manuscript that does is Codex Bezae, from about AD 400, and later copies place it after John 7:52, elsewhere in John, or in Luke. Many scholars think it is an old story that found its home late. Early in the 100s, Papias already knew a story of a woman accused of many sins before the Lord, and Jerome kept it in his Latin Bible. Most Bibles print it today, often in brackets.