"Communist party officials in China have rewritten one of the Bible’s most powerful accounts of Jesus Christ’s grace and divinity by blasphemously claiming the Saviour stoned to death the woman caught in adultery.
The well-known New Testament account in John's Gospel (8:3-11) is completely altered to depict Jesus Christ as a devious murderer, and self-proclaimed “sinner”, in a “professional ethics and law” text book used in Chinese vocational secondary schools.
The textbook’s amended version of the account states, “The crowd wanted to stone the woman to death as per their law. But Jesus said, ‘Let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone.’ Hearing this, they slipped away one by one. When the crowd disappeared, Jesus stoned the sinner to death saying, ‘I too am a sinner. But if the law could only be executed by men without blemish, the law would be dead.’”
The Biblical account describes how the scribes and Pharisees attempt to set a trap for Jesus in the temple courts, asking if an adulterous woman should be stoned as Moses commanded in law. Jesus replies, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”
Each of the men drops his stone on the ground and departs. And Jesus, who has been stooping down write on the ground, looks up and asks the woman, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” “No one, sir,” she said. “Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”
My prayer is that one day, persecution of Christians, or indeed other religious minorities in China, will come to an end. This pariah state must change.
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