However, most conservative churches—like the Eastern Orthodox, say, or the RC’s as they were pre-Vatican II —don’t care. The text is part of what the Church made part of the canon, and as such is to be taken as canonical, regardless of fine details of authorship. Rather like the status of II Peter.

And, of course, concluding that it’s not part of the original text of John wouldn’t necessarily mean that the story was untrue; for that matter, it might be more reliable than John.

The article manages to see most of the trees, but then entirely miss the forest.

“Wikipedia claims about 1.5 million articles, but what it does not say is that a large number of those articles have zero educational value. For example, Wikipedia has 1075 separate articles about “Moby” and “song”.[48] Many hundreds of thousands of Wikipedia articles—perhaps over half its website—are about music, Hollywood, and other topics beneath a regular encyclopedia. This reflects a bias towards popular gossip rather than helpful or enlightening information.”

As we stated in the other thread, the Jewish equivalent of Nusruddin is “Joha the Trickster.”

The writing in dirt may be an indirect reference, one commentator noted, to the Old Testament “law of jealousy”. Jesus is writing the ‘curse’ or the passage in the sand.