Gallery
Adulteress
Jesus shields the woman taken in adultery from an angry mob in this 5-foot-tall painting by German artist Max Beckmann. Here Jesus says with gestures what he says aloud in John 8:7: “Let he who is without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her.” At his feet lies the untouched first stone.
Jesus is teaching in the Temple when an angry crowd of scribes and Pharisees brings the adulterous woman before him. “Teacher,” they say, “this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women [Leviticus 20:10; Deuteronomy 22:22]. Now what do you say?” (John 8:4–5).
Jesus stands up and delivers his famous speech about the first stone, and the scribes and Pharisees disperse, “one by one,” leaving Jesus alone with the woman.
“Go your way,” he tells her, “and from now on do not sin” (John 8:11).
Beckmann painted this work shortly after serving as a medic at the front in World War I, an experience so traumatic that he suffered a breakdown. Here, the violence of war is remembered in the soldiers (who carry spears, not stones) and the aproned butcher at right, whose hands are splattered with blood.
In Beckmann’s painting, the woman kneels, eyes closed, hands in a gesture of prayer. The contemptuous butcher and Jesus both have their eyes closed, too: the former because he cannot see the truth; the latter, because he already knows the truth.
Beckmann often included himself in his paintings; the figure of Jesus is a self-portrait.