Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • We are so used to thinking of Jesus as a divinity whom we accept or reject on the basis of faith

  • that we are apt to miss a far more relevant detail: that he was an extremely acute philosopher,

  • whose rules on human conduct maintain a deep and ongoing applicability. One of the most

  • salient of his lessons comes in chapter eight of the Gospel of Saint John. Jesus has recently

  • come down from Galilee to Jerusalem when some Pharisees, members of a sect focused on precise

  • adherence to Jewish tradition and law, present him with a married woman whom they have caught

  • having sex with someone other than her husband. ‘Teacher,’ they ask him, ‘this woman

  • was caught in the very act of committing adultery. In our law, Moses commanded that such a woman

  • must be stoned to death. Now what do you say?’ Jesus is being edged into a trap. Will he

  • say that it's completely fine to have an affiar? Or will the mild mannered preacher

  • of love and forgiveness turn out to be just as strict about legal matters as the Jewish

  • authorities he liked to criticise? Jesus makes a deft move. He doesn’t categorically deny

  • the mob the right to stone the woman to deathbut he adds one apparently small but in

  • practice epochal caveat to this right. They can kill and destroy her to their hearts content

  • if, but only if, they can be absolutely sure that they have first satisfied one crucial

  • criteria: they have never done anything wrong themselves.

  • Importantly, by this Jesus doesn’t mean if they have never slept around outside of

  • their marriage, he means if they have never done anything wrong at all, whatsoever, across

  • any area of their lives. Only absolute moral purity grants us the right to be vicious,

  • high-handed and unsparing towards transgressors. An important principle of ethics is being

  • introduced: we are to be counted as properly innocent not when we are blameless in this

  • or that area, but when we have done nothing wrong whatsoever, at any point and in any

  • Jesus responds to the Pharisees with what have become immortal

  • words: ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone…’ The mob, understanding

  • the rebuke, put down their projectiles and the terrified woman is spared. The real target

  • of this story is a perennial problem in the human soul: self-righteousness. Self-righteousness

  • is the degenerate outgrowth of something otherwise extremely valuable: a desire to be in the

  • right. The problem is that being in the right in some areas has a fateful tendency to lead

  • us to see ourselves as morally blameless across our entire lives and therefore encourages

  • a particular mean-spiritedness and inhumanity towards those who transgress in situations where we have been good

  • Jesus’s

  • point is that the surest way to be kind is not to take pride in never having done a particular

  • species of wrong. It lies in seeing that, inevitably, we too have been foolish and cruel

  • at other moments, and in using that knowledge to foster compassion towards those whom it

  • lies in our powers tostone’. A world in which we keep our own wrongs firmly in

  • mind becomes, paradoxically, a properly virtuous and humane place.

  • If you liked this film, please subscribe to our channel and click the bell icon to turn on notifications.

  • Our Great Thinkers book collects some of the most important ideas from eastern and western culture from across history. Exploring what they can offer us in the 21st Century.

We are so used to thinking of Jesus as a divinity whom we accept or reject on the basis of faith

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it