The pericope of the woman taken in adultery is the most-loved passage in the gospels and the clearest illustration of what a canon actually is. It is absent from the earliest and best Greek manuscripts of John, absent from the early Syriac and Coptic versions, unmentioned by the Greek fathers who commented on John verse by verse, and in a handful of manuscripts it appears somewhere else entirely, including after Luke 21. Virtually every modern critical edition brackets it, and virtually every pulpit preaches it anyway. The usual scholarly judgement is that it is an authentic early tradition about Jesus that circulated orally and was written into John later. Which puts a genuine question to every branch: Rome and Orthodoxy can say the church's reception makes it scripture, while the strictest doctrines of inerrancy, which attach to the original autographs, have the hardest time explaining why the most famous story about mercy in the New Testament may not have been in the book to begin with. It is also worth noticing what the story omits: the man.