The BECNT-John commentary (Andreas J. Kostenberger, p.247; BECNT stands for Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament) has an excursus on the passage (7:53-8:11) which they refer to as the pericope adulterae or the story of the adulterous woman.
The commentary excursus has two parts: An internal evidence part and an external one. Without typing all the details they consider, the internal evidence is judged thusly, "This represents overwhelming evidence that the section is non-Johannine." The commentary analyzed the uniqueness of the wording in comparison with the rest of John, as well as the way phrases or clauses were constructed. It also mentions "a penchant for kata-prefixes" in 7:53-8:11 which is unlike the rest of John.
On the "external evidence" side of things, it says "the entire twelve verses of the pericope adulterae are completely absent from all of the oldest manuscripts of the Gospel of John, the pericope first appearing [in the gospel of John] in the fifth-century Codex Gospel of John Bezae (D). Even after this, the spread into the MS tradition is very slow. Thus, scholarship has, almost universally, regarded the pericope as a later insertion for . . . reasons [that] are massive, convincing, and obvious."
A footnote mentions that "one of the few scholars favoring originality (on the grounds of Byzantine priority) is M. Robinson (1998: 1-17)."
The commentary then lists six reasons for excluding it:
- Its utter absence from all pre-fifth-century A.D. MSS
- Its appearance in no fewer than five different places in the MS tradition (after John 7:36, 44, or 52; at the end of John's Gospel; or after Luke 21:38), bearing all the marks of a "bouncing around . . . floating logion." All this suggesting an "unstable MS tradition."
- Non-Johannine literary features.
- The interruption of the narrative flow from 7:52 to 8:12, breaking up the literary unit 7:1 - 8:59; on a historical level, the setting of 7:53 - 8:1 suggests most plausibly Jesus' pattern during the week before his passion (cf. Mark 11:11, 19; 13:3; and esp. Luke 21:37).
- The lack of citation in early patristic writings up to the fourth century (the earliest Greek patristic reference of a variation of this narrative occurring in a commentary by Didymus the Blind [d. 398].
- The suggested scenario that the pericope passed from its original place in the Gospel according to the Hebrews to John's Gospel (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.39.17, citing Papias).
The commentary acknowledges that the story might be included among "other possibly authentic sayings of Jesus that may be found in NT apocryphal literature. Thus, though it may be possible to derive a certain degree of edification from the study of this pericope, proper conservatism and caution suggest that the passage be omitted from preaching in the churches (not to mention inclusion in the main body of translations, even within square brackets."
The commentary ends the excursus saying, "The present commentary therefore will follow the precedent of Origen (d. 253), who moved directly from 7:52 to 8:12, and refrain from further comment on 7:53 - 8:11.
A footnote states that, "A survey of major commentaries shows that about half provide a regular commentary (Carson, Laney, Lindars, Whitacre, Calvin, Westcott), while the other half refrain from comment (Michaels, Talbert, Stibbe, Brodie, D. M. Smith), in some cases choosing not to address the issue at all (e.g. Schlatter [1948: 205], who in his scholarly commentary moves directly from 7:52 to 8:12 without comment, though his popular commentary [1962: 139 - 41] does treat the pericope adulterae in deference to 'ecclesiatical tradition' "
