There are some ancient manuscripts of the New Testament that do not have this passage about the woman taken in adultery at all, and for that reason many liberal and unbelieving scholars believe it is not authentic. In some modern translations of the Bible it will be marked as, ‘Not in such-and-such manuscripts’. Of course, those manuscripts that leave out this account are at fault and are in error, and generally the suggestion is that they come from fairly corrupt sources, and the priests who made them did not want this account to be in the New Testament because they felt it would encourage adultery. They felt that the Lord appears to be quite slack in his dealing with adultery. So human beings, possibly, have stood in judgement on the passage and taken it out. However, in the most reliable manuscripts and the oldest, it is certainly there, that the scribes and the Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery.
One of the points that unbelieving scholars make is – this is not like John. John never uses this phrase, ‘the scribes and the Pharisees’. Matthew, Mark and Luke do, but John does not. When John wants to refer to the leaders of the Jews, he simply says, the Jews. But it is actually vital in this instance that John should particularly identify the scribes and the Pharisees, because it is those two parties alone that would ever have put up this problem and this test to Christ. The Pharisees stood out in that they were meticulous in insisting on the literal application of every element of the ceremonial law, including all the penalties. To them, righteousness consisted in honouring every detail of ceremony and the penalties for offences. Furthermore the scribes were the scholars, the doctors of the law. They were the professors in the Rabbinical schools who did nothing else in their life but study the ancient law of God, and debate it. Roman law forbids us carrying out the stoning of a betrothed woman who commits adultery even before her marriage ceremony but what does the law say? The Sadducees would not have brought a charge like this. They were not that interested in the law. They were the kind of more liberal wing of the Judaism of the time. So it is absolutely relevant that John departs from his usual practice of saying, the Jews, and specifically identifies these two parties, the scribes and the Pharisees.