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A look at diverse readings of a story, a scene, a religious tradition. Taking the gospel figure of the adulterous woman ( Luke 7) as a starting point, the youthful Hegel sets his philosophical analysis of forgiveness in a meditation on Law (Punishment) versus Reconciliation (Love). In his Aesthetics, the treatises on the romantic art movement and on paintings see in Mary Magdalen the figuration of a beauty in which interiority and exteriority are harmonised. In various writings on religion, the same character, now the figuration of the beautiful soul, has much to do with Jesus’s destiny, the forgiveness of sins and the idea of grace. These various representations introduce a break with other philosophical approaches of grace and forgiveness (Spinoza, Kant). Part II speaks of the adulterous woman, often identified with one of the other gospel women, as she might be represented in French religious litterature (Bérulle 1627, Charles de Saint Paul 1628, Lacordaire 1859) and painters of the Baroque period. A study of the numerous references to the adulterous woman in Kierkegaard closes the article. Unlike philosophical speculations or mystical “elevations”, this existentialist development of repentance and forgiveness is a meditation that is never far from a litteral reading of the New Testament.