According to the New Testament, Jesus used his finger to write on the ground during the story of the adulterous woman.
The episode appears in John 7:53–8:11 in many English Bibles. Religious leaders bring a woman accused of adultery before Jesus and ask how she should be treated. Jesus bends down and writes with his finger on the ground, then later writes again. The passage never states what he wrote.
Jesus’s response, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone,” shifts attention from the woman’s accusation to the accusers’ own moral condition. One by one, they leave, and Jesus tells the woman to go and sin no more.
A major textual issue surrounds this passage. The earliest and best-known Greek manuscripts do not include it in this location, and some later manuscripts place it elsewhere in John or Luke. It remains famous in Christian tradition, but readers should distinguish its traditional reception from questions about its manuscript history.