For me, these words summed up what I saw as the very heart of Jesus: “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” In that one sentence I saw the great love, compassion, mercy and forgiveness of Christ. And I needed that line to be true to soothe me over my many sins; Jesus loved me anyway, no matter I did. Yet there is ample proof this was made up by a translator centuries after Jesus spoke. The oldest copies of the Gospel of John don’t have that story. In fact, that story doesn’t show up anywhere, on anything, until the fifth century AD—about 400 years after Jesus died.

The first text to include this story is an old Greek and Latin translation of the Gospels called the Codex Bezae. That codex is notorious for slipping in the odd extra detail that doesn’t show up anywhere else. And this story, in particular, is worded in a way that some Biblical scholars say doesn’t quite sound like it was written by the same person who wrote the rest of the Book of John. What troubled me is that I really, really needed Jesus to have said those words for it to be real.