Cast the first stone

There's a well-known proverb in our culture:  "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone."

(It is often butchered as "Let he who ..."  That's a subject for another post.)

This is, of course, one of the sayings of Jesus; it is found in the Christian scriptures at index John 8:7.

Which translation of the bible gives this exact phrasing of the saying?

The King James Version (KJV)?  The Revised Standard Version (RSV)?  These would be reasonable first candidates.

In fact, this exact phrasing is not in any version the bible in English.  We probably get it from the translation of William Tyndale -- found in the "Tyndale Bible" (1535), the Matthew Bible (1537), and the Geneva Bible (1560) -- who rendered it thusly:

Let him that is among you without sin, cast the first stone at her.

We get the popular phrasing by dropping the prepositional phrases "among you" and "at her" so as to generalize from the context of the narrative, and by replacing "that" with "who" per modern styling.

The KJV and RSV use the following constructions, respectively:

He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.
Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.

What these do differently from the Tyndale/Geneva is apply "first" to the throwing or the thrower (respectively) rather than to the stone.

Most English versions follow one or the other of these two, although a few do follow the Tyndale/Geneva.  (Of course, paraphrases do their own thing. For example, The Message gives it as: "The sinless one among you, go first: Throw the stone.")

It is interesting to realize that this expression became common before the widespread adoption of the KJV (the Authorized Version), which was published in 1611.

Massively Parallel Proselytizing

(Note: There is no "Tyndale Bible", as Tyndale died before completing his project. But the parts he had completed were incorporated into the Matthew Bible and subsequently into the Geneva Bible. BibleGateway has the New Matthew Bible (NMB), a "gently updated" version.)

Latin: primus
Greek: πρωτος