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In his opening statement in his disputation with the Abbot of Crosraguel, Knox had proudly contrasted the moral integrity of the Protestant ministers with the flagrant vice of the priests of the old church:

“If our lives shall be compared with the lives of them that accuseth us, be it in general or be it in particular, we doubt not to be justified, both before God and man. For how many ministers this day within Scotland is my Lord Abbot … able to convict to be adulterers, fornicators, drunkards, bloodshedders, oppressors of the poor widow, fatherless, or stranger … ?”

But before this statement was published in the verbatim report of the disputation, the case of Paul Methven had made a mockery of Knox’s words.

Methven had been elected as the minister of Jedburgh after the victory of 1560. This was an important position, because the Borders [a region bordering England] had not yet been converted, and Knox attached great importance, for political as well as religious reasons, to making the Borders Protestant. Methven, who more than any other man could be said to have started the revolution of 1559 with his passionate sermons in Dundee, seemed an eminently suitable person for the post.

But in the autumn of 1562, rumors began to circulate in Jedburgh that Methven was committing adultery with his young maidservant while his elderly wife was absent from home. When the rumors reached the General Assembly at Edinburgh during its meeting in December, the Assembly directed Knox to investigate the charge and to report to the church session of Edinburgh and to John Spottiswood, superintendent of Lothian. Knox traveled to Jedburgh with some elders of the church of Edinburgh, and on January 3, 1563, began hearing the case.

He admits, in his History, that he and his colleagues were very eager to find Methven not guilty, and “having a good opinion of the honesty and godliness of the man, travailed what they could (conscience not hurt) to purge him of the slander.”

When the evidence of eye-witnesses was becoming so strong that it would not be ignored, the maidservant’s brother suddenly arrived in Jedburgh. This man disclosed that his sister had recently had an illegitimate baby in his house, and that he knew that Methven was the father. When Methven saw the brother appear as a witness, he immediately left Jedburgh and disappeared.

Knox and the elders returned to Edinburgh to report that Methven was guilty. Spottiswood and the Edinburgh church session thereupon summoned Methven to appear to hear sentence passed against him, but he fled to England, and in his absence was deprived of his office as a minister, and excommunicated.

The action of Knox, in exposing the guilt of Methven, is a tribute to his integrity. He gave an honest judgment, although he must have realized the jubilation with which the Catholics and the enemies of the church would greet the verdict.

In his account of the upsurge of 1558–59, he did not try to minimize Methven’s part, describing how in 1558 “did God stir up his servant Paul Methven (his later fall ought not to deface the work of God in him).” Knox used the case of Methven to contrast the determination of the Protestant church to punish sin with the way in which the Catholic church had tolerated the immorality of so many bishops and abbots, and pointed out that the adultery of David and the abnegation of Peter had not vitiated the truth of the doctrine they had previously taught.

In 1566 Methven returned to Scotland and asked the forgiveness of the church. He was ordered to stand outside the church door and “sit on the stool of repentance” in Edinburgh, Jedburgh, and Dundee, after which he would be released from excommunication and readmitted as a member of the congregation.

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