With the advent of live-streaming, we priests here at Saint Mary’s have been doing more formal preparation and writing out our homilies for weekday Eucharists. On Monday, March 30, Monday in the Fifth Week of Lent, the gospel was John’s account of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery.[1] My preparation included coming across an explanation for its complicated textual history. In some important manuscripts it’s found in Luke. It is absent “from the best Greek [manuscripts].”[2] Raymond Brown in his An Introduction to the New Testament wrote that, though canonical, “almost certainly it is out of context here in John.”[3] He suggests that the story may have “traveled independently of the four Gospels and could not be included until there was a change in the church’s reluctance to forgive adultery.”[4]
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