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Given the context in Don Juan, the Gospel reference is evidently to the final verse ofthe story of the woman caught in adultery, John 8:1-11, wherein Jesus also famouslydeclares, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her” (verse 7).The poem preaches the message of the Gospel in this stanza, taking Jesus as themodel of Christian behaviour, whilst also presenting the practical social value of sucha system (12.79.630-1). The poet is not merely pointing out that the English arefailing, but is aligning himself with Jesus in the process. Notably, however, thisbiblical story has Jesus violating Mosaic Law by dispensing with the death penalty foradultery (Deuteronomy 22:22). It is an example of Jesus’ essentialising behaviour,taking mercy as an ideal and elevating it over justice, an ethic with which Byronappears to have sympathized.Don Juan is replete with biblical references, and, while this was common for theperiod, that custom is not satirized by the poem, even though Don Juan deliberatelyopposes customs regarding the moral propriety of its subject matter and expressions.Don Juan’s frequently-positive use of the Bible, and the absence of any negativevaluation of that text, makes contemporary and subsequent charges of blasphemyrather less secure, especially when the poem shades into an essentialising, idealisingmoral discourse.The DecalogueThere is a more complex borrowing from the Bible. At the time of its publication,one of the most heavily criticized passages in Don Juan was the set of poeticalcommandments, an imitation of the Ten Commandments, in stanzas 204-6 of Canto I.This is denounced by the Literary Gazette as “the most indefensible of these lapses[…] a profane parody, in which some of our modern bards are roasted”, and theEuropean Magazine very similarly calls it an “unpardonable and profane parody”. 207It is indeed profane, at least in the sense of putting the form of the sacred to a nonsacreduse, but it is hardly unusual for the period, at least in private discourse. J CHobhouse, writing to Byron, says that, in “the unjust steward in the Gospels”, where207 Literary Gazette, July 17, 1819, 449-51; July 24, 1819, 470-3, RR, IV, 1406-12: p.450 (1407);European Magazine, LXXVI (July 1819) 53-56, RR, II, 965-8: p.54 (966).132