The Woman Caught in Adultery

Of the various visual media which have been used to recontextualize Bible stories and characters, photography offers a particularly direct connection with our modern world. Artists have recontextualized Christ through photography in a wide variety of ways, often choosing to appropriate him in order to comment on socio-political issues of the day.

In 1982, Duane Michals staged a series entitled Christ in New York, at a time when Christian conservativism in the U.S. was increasingly vociferous in defending traditional family values—opposing, among other things, abortions and homosexuality. Michals’s series shows a haloed man appearing in six scenes that include Christ sees a woman being attacked and Christ is shot by a mugger with a handgun and dies. In each, Michals included a pencilled caption: a description that emphasizes Christ’s relative passivity in the scenes.

It is a crafted narration of something like the Passion: things either happen in front of Jesus as detached observer, or they happen violently to him. Christ is beaten defending a homosexual in this sense conflates some of the foreboding events that happen either side of the woman’s judgement in John’s Gospel. The crowd wants to seize Jesus, the teachers of the law want him arrested (7:30, 32, 44), and this escalates to a near-tipping-point of tension when they pick up stones to stone him (8:59). He is the one under attack, under condemnation.

That Michals shows us this premature crucifixion as a moment of defence, however, is poignant in a number of ways. It brings us back to the text about the woman caught in adultery, and to the issue of what, or who, is defended and why. As a gay man, Michals’s Catholic upbringing led to his own experiences of condemnation, and he has acknowledged that this work came out of his anger towards the religious hypocrisy of the time. By putting Christ in the way of a man who is accused of being in sin, and representative of many others accused in this way, the defence is clear. Michals would have his Jesus intervene in the political-religious righteousness of the day, this time offering a physical protection that is at once simply human and divinely loving. It is sharply observed, with both wryness and pathos, bringing us face-to-face with Jesus’s sacrificial act of salvation.

References

Gottschalk, Karin. 2017 [2002]. ‘Duane Michals: Asking Questions Without Answers’, www.Untitled.net, available at https://creativityinnovationsuccess.wordpress.com/archive/duane-michals-asking-questions-without-answers/ [accessed 28 June 2022]

Mirlesse, Sabine. 2013. ‘Duane Michals by Sabine Mirlesse, 26 March 2013’, www.bombmagazine.org, available at https://bombmagazine.org/articles/duane-michals-1/ [accessed 28 June 2022]

In John’s Gospel, it is the accused woman who is brought before Jesus, but not the man. The crime of adultery, according to Deuteronomy 22:22, demanded that both man and woman receive the death penalty. Such a stark punishment was, by Jesus’s time, forbidden under Roman law, and the woman’s accusers here knowingly draw Jesus into the question of whose authority he will respect.

The woman alone is charged. This (commentators speculate) suggests a set-up: the death penalty would have been carried out by witnesses to the crime—who would hurl the first stone—and for this to have happened the husband may have acted to frame his wife (Derrett 1963: 5; Beasley-Murray 1987: 146). Either way, the assumed moral superiority of the male teachers of the law assumes a gendered inequality, which allows them not merely to expose only the woman, but also to gamble her life in their preoccupation with trapping Jesus.

Many artists in recent times have been concerned to highlight the effects of traditional patriarchal societies on women, where today they are still silenced, suffer, and are even killed, at the hands of state-sanctioned misogyny. Shqipe Kamberi’s 2017 exhibition in Kosovo, Consciousness: Past and Present, consisted of mask-like plaster reliefs of a female face, often incorporating elements of traditional Albanian textiles. She focusses on the strict customs of the Kanun (laws which govern some parts of rural Albania and Kosovo) with respect to the duties of a wife. Her brides’ faces always have covered or closed eyes, and she has talked about the loss of rights and identity which women experience in this culture.

Female artists elsewhere in the world are working to expose yet more disturbing practices: Sheida Soleimani’s installations and Shamsia Hassani’s graffiti art address Sharia law and the stoning of women in Iran. Like them, Kamberi understands art to be a means of bringing visibility to her subjects. Although her works of art—with their contortions of folds and coverings—recall the aggression they have suffered, her brides nevertheless appear.

To Jesus, women appeared. As with the woman of Samaria (John 4), Jesus creates a space for an accused woman not just to be seen, not even just to be defended, but to be wholly liberated. We can pray that for suffering women in our world today, such freedom will be equally real and their appearing (through feminist art) just as powerfully transformative.

References

Beasley-Murray, George R. 1987. John, Word Biblical Commentary (Milton Keynes: Word Publishing), pp. 143–47

Derrett, J. D. M. 1963. ‘Law in the New Testament: The Story of the Woman Taken in Adultery’, New Testament Studies, 10.1: 1–26

The beating of a swallow’s wings,

A stone jar poised as if to fall,

A fierce and unforgiving sun

That beats upon a whitewashed wall

That finds and tracks each human flaw

And reads the writing in the dust

Of broken hopes and powdered dreams

And love reclassified as lust.

Where images of shameful death

Describe a life defined by blame,

The beatings of a swallow’s wings

Above a place of public shame

Are like the barest breath of grace

That stir the unforgiving air:

That shift the gaze and lead the eye

Beyond the camera’s fatal stare

To where one writes within that dust

Of dry bones in a bone-dry place,

Of broken hopes and powdered dreams -

The unseen, unhoped, words of grace

Which free accuser and accused 

Which spell out how our life begins;

A motion like a breath of grace:       

The beating of a swallow’s wings.

(‘Writing in the Dust: The Men Taken in Hypocrisy’ by Roger Wagner)

Roger Wagner’s painting, to which this poem is an accompaniment, sets the scene in a concrete arena, a bleak prison-like space characterized by an almost monochrome palette.

An earlier version of this painting, from 2013, has a warmer sandy-yellow tone in both ground and figures’ robes, as well as including the green of palm trees in the now-empty background sky.

Arena or prison: both are manmade institutions for judgement, the poverty and harshness of whose processes are foregrounded here. The latter is a corrective facility for criminals; the former a place of spectacle and public scrutiny whose shifting forms traverse both the ancient Roman circus and the ubiquitous screens of modern media. In this painting, phone and film cameras are held aloft alongside machine guns in a veritable shooting gallery along the bottom edge.

This hardened world is the one where the ‘breath of grace’ swoops in almost unnoticed in the figure of the swallow. A symbol in Renaissance painting of Christ’s resurrection, the swallow’s appearance in the spring in Europe was understood to herald new life. In a moment of unexpected appearing, Wagner’s swallow—on canvas and in verse—is a figure for grace. The surprise of its gratuitous appearance in a situation apparently without grace is like the interruption of historical time by a kairos, a moment charged with transformative possibility. Like the barest tufts of grass near Jesus’s finger, life irrepressibly stirs when condemnation stops.