The Doodling of Jesus: A Semiotic Inquiry into the Rhetoric of Immediacy

The pericope of the adulteress is one of the most famous, quoted, and studied passages in the Gospels. In particular, reams have been written on John 8, 6-8. Interpreters, who have analyzed every detail of if, have variously concentrated on the following questions: 1) Why does Jesus write? 2) Why does he stoop to write? 3) Why does he write on the ground? 4) Why does he write with his finger? 5) Why does he write twice? 6) Why does he write before and after the famous utterance: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her” (KJV)? But the question that most worried interpreters has been: What does Jesus write? The paper will tackle these questions through three moves. First, it will dwell on practices of writing, common in several cultures, in which doodling on the ground is meant to evoke a space of distance, detachment, and even hierarchical superiority in relation to the Law. Quoted references will include Aristophanes’ The Acharnians, among the Greeks, and, among the Arabs, numerous instances in Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī’s Kitāb al-aghānī (The Book of Songs), Ibn Khaldun’s Al-Muqaddima (Prolegomena), and Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī al-Masʿūdī’s Muruj al-dhahab (The Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems). Second, the paper will expound on a neglected aspect of scholarship on the pericope: at least since the Codex Egberti (10th century), John 6, 6-8 has been transposed into a lavish iconography, which offers an articulate typology of visual interpretations of it. The paper will survey them, and focus, again, on those that iconically “read” the writing of Jesus as doodling. This extensive iconography can be categorized intro three typologies. They each stem from a specific historical and cultural context and interpret the writing of Jesus in a particular way. In the first typology (Jesus writing), images show Jesus writing and specify the content of such writing. That is the case, for instance, of the Codex Egberti, a 10th-century Ottonian Evangeliary, according to which Jesus wrote “Terra terram accusat” (in Latin!). In the second typology (Jesus doodling), images show Jesus writing and depict its traces, but do not specify its content; in most cases, they limit themselves to evoke a certain quality of writing, or its alphabet. That is the case, for instance, of Pieter Aertsen’s two renderings of the pericope (1557-58; 1559), in which Jesus clearly writes in Hebrew, although it is not clear what. The paper will point out that, especially in 17th-century Christian painting, this visual reference to the Hebrew script results from knowledge about Jewish texts and liturgy (in particular, Sotah 17b), circulating in Christian communities with apologetic goals. Finally, the third typology (Jesus pointing) includes myriads of paintings in which Jesus writes, but the result of his writing disappears; a complex network of signs points at the gesture of Jesus’ writing, but the content of it is left blank. Such is the case of Valentin de Boulogne’s 1620 sublime depiction of the episode. Third, the paper will conclude by proposing a general interpretive hypothesis: in many exegetic and iconographic readings of the pericope, what Jesus does is actually not writing but un-writing the fundamentalist Law through the exemplary symbolical efficacy of doodling on the ground. A semiotic reading of the corporeal, kinetic, gestural, and graphic significance of doodling in this context will be offered. It will be pointed out, in particular, that doodling (in the pericope of the adulteress as well as in other contexts) brings about a semi-symbolic system (Hjelmslev) in which mediation of the written religious Law is deconstructed as hypocritical and replaced by a more immediate moral judgment, stemming from direct, non-verbal contact with a dimension that is construed as hierarchically superior to that of the verbal code of the Law. Such immediate contact with transcendence, as opposed to the mediated contact offered by hypocritical immanence, is figuratively rendered through the opposition between the written book and the doodling on the ground.