first stone, The

THE following essay compares two texts that revolve around the same unpleasant but highly significant subject, collective stoning. The first one, located in the Gospel of John, is the famous episode of an adulterous woman whose stoning is prevented by Jesus. The early manuscripts do not contain this text. Many observers find it is more Lucan than Johannine. Whatever the case may be, its content is so unquestionably Christian that its scriptural authenticity is never questioned:

The scribes and Pharisees led forward a woman who had been caught in adultery, and made her stand there in front of everybody. "Teacher," they said to him, "this woman has been caught in the very act of adultery. Now, in the Law Moses ordered such women to be stoned. But you-what do you say about it?" (They were posing this question to trap him so that they could have something to accuse him of.) But Jesus simply bent down and started drawing on the ground with his finger. When they persisted with their questioning, he straightened up and said to them, "The man among you who has no sin-let him be the first to cast a stone at her." And he bent down again and started to write on the ground. But the audience went away one by one, starting with the elders; and he was left alone with the woman still there before him. So Jesus, straightening up, said to her, "Woman, where are they all? Hasn't anyone condemned you?" "No one, sir," she answered. Jesus said, "Nor do I condemn you. You may go. But from now on, avoid this sin." (John 8.3-11)

The prescription that makes adultery a capital crime applied only to women. At the time of Jesus, it had become controversial and was not always observed. Jesus is in a difficult position therefore. He cannot condone the stoning without betraying his own principles but, if he opposes it, he will be accused of contempt for the Law. The sentence he finally utters when his questioners insist, is one of the most famous in all four Gospels:

If there is one of you who has not sinned, let him cast the first stone.

In all languages of old Christendom, such expressions as "the first stone," "to cast the first stone," are very much alive. What can they mean in a world where the practice of stoning has been discontinued? Is the idea of the first stone really significant?

If we pose this question to the language obsessed critics of our time, they will come up with their usual answer. "The first stone," they will say, is a "rhetorical," a "purely rhetorical" device. We all thirst for significance and these critics' greatest pleasure is to disappoint us and make it clear that we, too, must be deconstructed. To them, even though language is everything, it is also nothing at all; it only gives "to airy nothing a local habitation and a name."

We cannot repeat "the first stone" nowadays, without remembering the innumerable repetitions behind us. Let us call this self-consciousness rhetorical, if we like the term but can we thus empty it of all significance? I do not think so. The first stone is still as powerful today, I believe, as when Jesus first used the expression.

How can we show this effectively? However great the Gospel text is, it will not suffice. The reason is simple. Because the sentence we want to explore was too influential, the first stone was never cast. The stoning did not occur.

In order to understand the role of the first stone, we need a second text, preferably independent from the Gospels and from Christianity itself, a text in which the first stone is actually cast and the consequences become visible. Such a text will teach us perhaps, why Jesus emphasized the first stone.

The second text I want to discuss is exactly what we need. It is thoroughly pagan. It portrays the actual stoning of an old beggar in the city of Ephesus. This horrible deed is supposed to have been instigated by Apollonius of Tyana, a famous spiritual leader of the second century A.D., a kind of guru we might say. Pagan circles found his "miracles" superior to those of Jesus.

The most spectacular of these, undoubtedly, is the Ephesus stoning. Whereas Jesus cured only one individual at a time, Apollonius is supposed to have cured the entire city with one single trick which turns out to be the stoning of that poor beggar. The account of this collective murder takes up a whole chapter in The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, a book authored by Philostratus, a third century Greek writer of some merit:

When the plague began to rage in Ephesus, and no remedy sufficed to check it, they sent a deputation to Apollonius, asking him to become physician of their infirmity; and he thought that he ought not to postpone his journey, but said: "Let us go." And forthwith he was in Ephesus . . He . . .called together the Ephesians, and said: "Take courage, for I will today put a stop to the course of the disease." And with these words he led the population entire to the theatre, where the images of the Averting god had been set up. And there he saw what seemed an old mendicant artfully blinking his eyes as if blind, and he carried a wallet and a crust of bread in it; and he was clad in rags and was very squalid of countenance. Apollonius therefore ranged the Ephesians around him and said: "Pick up as many stones as you can and hurl them at this enemy of the gods." Now the Ephesians wondered what he meant, and were shocked at the idea of murdering a stranger so manifestly miserable; for he was begging and praying them to take mercy upon him. Nevertheless Apollonius insisted and egged on the Ephesians to launch themselves on him and not let him go. And as soon as some of them began to take shots and hit him with their stones, the beggar who had seemed to blink and be blind, gave them all a sudden glance and showed that his eyes were full of fire. Then the Ephesians recognized that he was a demon, and they stoned him so thoroughly that their stones were heaped into a great cairn around him. After a little pause Apollonius bade them remove the stones and acquaint themselves with the wild animal which they had slain. When therefore they had exposed the object which they thought they had thrown their missiles at, they found that he had disappeared and instead of him there was a hound who resembled in form and look a Molossian dog, but was in size the equal of the largest lion; there he lay before their eyes, pounded to a pulp by their stones and vomiting foam as mad dogs do. Accordingly the statue of the Averting god, namely Hercules, has been set up over the spot where the ghost was slain. (363-67)1