Casting the First Stone: What Did Jesus Write On the Ground?

The Woman Taken in Adultery, William Blake, c. 1805

“Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of committing adultery. In the Law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?,” asked the Pharisees.

March 6, 2024 by Fr Gordon MacRae

In the three-year cycle of Scripture Readings for Catholic Mass, the Eighth Chapter of the Gospel of John (8:1-11), the story of the woman caught in adultery, is assigned to the Fifth Sunday of Lent for one of those three years. This year it is the Gospel for the day after, March 18, 2024. It is an important story and one of the most cited passages of the Gospel. It is also one of the most popularly misunderstood. Having myself been stoned in the public square, I have long been intrigued and inspired by the deeper meaning of this account.

But before we travel into the depths of that wondrous account, Holy Week is coming, and that means some in the news media are already preparing for their traditional Easter Season stoning of your faith by the hyping and re-airing of Catholic scandal. The spurious tradition in our secular news media has already begun. Not much has changed since I last wrote of our experience of this annual media stoning in a 2022 post entitled, “Benedict XVI Faced the Cruelty of a German Inquisition.” We will link to it again at the end of this post. The media’s Holy Week hot seat when I first was inspired to write it was occupied by Pope Benedict XVI. I wrote it because Pope Benedict and I had both been subjected to a stoning in the public square at about the same time.

Stoning was the most common method of execution in ancient Israel, and was seen as the community’s “purging the evil from its midst” (Deuteronomy 21:21). Stoning was imposed as both a punishment and a deterrent for a number of crimes against the community including idolatry (Deut 17:5), blasphemy (Leviticus 24: 14-16), child sacrifice (Lev 20:2), sorcery (Lev 20:27), adultery (Deut 22:13-24), and being “a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey” (Oh, for the good old days of Deut 22:18)! That latter example reminds me of a post card I received years ago from my mother on vacation in her native Newfoundland:

“Dear Son: Newfoundland is as beautiful as I remember it. Right now I am standing at Redcliff, a 100-foot precipice where Newfoundland mothers of old would take their most troublesome sons and threaten to heave them over the edge. Wish you were here. Love, Mom.”

It is interesting that in that latter case — the stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey — the stoning was carried out by all the men of the community (Deut 21:21), and only the men. In each case, the punishment of stoning always took place outside of town. More importantly — and this has a bearing on the story of the woman caught in adultery in John 7:53-8:11 — the first stones could be cast only by firsthand witnesses of the offense. And the punishment could be imposed only when there were two or more such witnesses. “A person shall not be put to death on the evidence of only one witness” (Deut 17 6).

The Story’s Place in Scripture

The sources and limits of stoning in the Hebrew Scriptures present a necessary backdrop for a fuller understanding of John 7:53-8:11, the story of a woman caught in adultery. It’s best to let Saint John tell it:

“Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. Early in the morning he came again to the temple, all the people came to him, and he sat down and taught them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in their midst they said to him, ‘Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. Now, in the law, Moses commanded us to stone such. What do you say about her?’ This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, ‘Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.’ Again he bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. But when they heard this they went away one by one, beginning with the eldest, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus looked up and said to her, ‘Where are they? Is there no one to condemn you?’ She said, ‘No one, Lord.’ And Jesus said, ‘Neither do I condemn you; go, and do not sin again.”

— John 7:53-8:11

The placement of this account in Scripture has endured a long controversy. The story is believed by some Scripture scholars to be an ‘agraphon,’ a source of authentic sayings of Jesus that survived orally, then became part of the written canon of Scripture toward the end of the Apostolic age. Two well known Catholic Scripture scholars — Sulpician Father Raymond Brown and Jesuit Father George W. MacRae (my late uncle) — were among those who defended that this story is both authentic and canonical despite the controversy about where it lands in the text.

The controversy itself is fascinating. It seems that some ancient versions of the Gospel of John did not contain this story, but an early text of the Gospel of Luke did. It was found in an early version of Saint Luke’s Gospel after Luke 21:38 and before Luke, Chapter 22.

“And every day he was teaching in the temple, but at night he went out and lodged on the mount called Olivet. And early in the morning, all the people came to him in the temple to hear him.”

— Luke 21:37-38

In the very next verse (Luke 22:1) the chief priests and the scribes began a conspiracy to kill Jesus. “Then Satan entered into Judas called Iscariot who was of the number of the Twelve; he went away and conferred with the chief priests how he might betray him to them. And they were glad, and engaged to give him money.” (Luke 22:3-5) So it seems that the Gospel accounts of the woman caught in adultery may have originally appeared in Scripture in the Gospel of Luke just prior to Satan entering into Judas and the plot to kill Jesus, which will be the subject of our Holy Week post this year. These accounts go to the very heart of our Catholic understanding of sin, redemption and grace.

For some scholars, the story of the woman caught in adultery may have been originally placed in between these verses. The Lord’s defeat of the nefarious intentions of the Pharisees, and his ability to use their own laws against them, may have been the trigger that set his arrest in motion. But instead this account ended up somehow in the Gospel of John, the last of the Gospel texts to come into written form at the end of the Apostolic age. Outside of Sacred Scripture, the historian, Josephus, mentions the account, but mentions it in reference to the Gospel of Saint Luke. For me, this little side road into the examination of texts and origins does not in itself question whether the text is canonical — that is, an authentic event in the life and sayings of Jesus, and an inspired Scriptural text.

For Fathers Raymond Brown and George W. MacRae (and his nephew), there is simply no reason to doubt this. But I will add one factor that the scholars may not have considered. The very idea that this story may have somehow become separated from one tradition (the Lucan tradition) only to end up in another (the Johannine tradition) is evidence of the importance of the story for the Gospel. It seems a divine determination to ensure that this story comes to us regardless of where it ended up in the Gospel narrative.

The Woman Taken in Adultery, Rembrandt, 1644 (cropped)

The Cast of Characters

The presence of the Pharisees, and their intentions in this story, call to mind a well-known parable from the Gospel of Luke, the Parable of the Good Samaritan (10:25-37). In both that account and the account of the woman caught in adultery in the Gospel of John (John 8), Jesus is confronted by a Pharisee with a question. In both cases, the purpose of the question is not to learn from Jesus, but to entrap him in a corner from which he cannot emerge. In both cases, Jesus turns the table on his questioner in a checkmate.

In the account of the woman caught in adultery above, the Pharisee seems to have laid a more solid trap. “Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. The law of Moses commanded us to stone such. What do you say about her?” Jesus and the Pharisee both know that the Roman Empire has occupied Palestine. One of its many imposed laws is that the death penalty for crimes must be imposed and enforced only under Roman law and not under local custom. The Pharisees, therefore, could not execute the woman as the law of Moses prescribes. It is for this same reason that the High Priest, Caiaphas, had to hand Jesus, accused of blasphemy, over to the Roman governor Pontius Pilate. The prohibition is mentioned later in John:

“Pilate said to them, ‘take him yourselves and judge him by your own law.’ The Jews said to him, ‘It is not lawful for us to put any man to death.’”

— John 18:31

And so part of the trap is laid using both the Law of Moses and the politics of Rome: “This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him.” If Jesus openly concurs with the law of Moses about the penalty for adultery laid down in the Book of Deuteronomy (22:22) then the Pharisees can charge him with sedition for subverting the laws of Rome. If Jesus openly forbids the stoning, the Pharisees can use that to discredit him with his disciples as a false Messiah who contradicts the law of Moses.

The response of Jesus seems very odd. Instead of replying at all, he simply bends down and writes with his finger on the ground (John 8:6). Centuries of Scriptural wrangling have been devoted to what he could have written. What Jesus inscribed on the earth is entirely unknown, but it may well be that the act of writing on the ground — and not the content of the writing — is itself the point. What may be happening here — and some Patristic authors agree — is that Jesus uses the authority of the Prophets to undo the Pharisee’s trap using the authority of the Law. The gesture of writing on the ground may have recalled for them the Prophet Jeremiah:

“Those who turn away from you shall be written in the earth, for they have forsaken the Lord, the fountain of living water.”

— Jeremiah 17:31

Just a few verses earlier in the Gospel (John 7:38), Jesus identified himself as the fountain of living water: “He who believes in me … out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.” Thus Jesus may well have been inscribing into the ground the very names of the Pharisees standing before him. Then Jesus did something equally odd. He stood and said, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her.” It strikes me as immense irony that the only person without sin in that gathering is Jesus himself, the one posing this counter-challenge.

This challenge of Jesus — about who is to cast the first stone at her — also recalls a law these Pharisees would know well. Deuteronomy (17:7) prohibits anyone but a firsthand witness to the crime — and there must be at least two such witnesses — from casting the first stone. So the befuddled Pharisees look at each other, wondering which of them is about to implicate himself in this adulterous offense against the law of Moses, and, if he casts the stone, implicate himself in an offense against the law of Rome.

As Jesus stooped a second time to continue his writing on the ground, the Pharisees left one by one, “beginning with the eldest.” That is another way of saying “beginning with the wisest” among them, for they were the first to catch on that their trap had not only been sprung by Jesus, but actually turned round in a way that entraps them. Once again, Jesus has exposed their duplicity and thoroughly frustrated their plans, a trend that will eventually land him before Pilate.

Thus being the sole person present without sin, and under his own terms the only one qualified to stone her, Jesus assures the woman with an act of Divine Mercy:

“‘Where are they? Has no one condemned you?’ She said, ‘No one, Lord.’ And Jesus said, ‘Neither do I condemn you; go, and do not sin again.’”

— John 8:10-11

It is the perfect Lenten story. Christ is the fountain of living water, the source of the Spirit poured out upon the world, and he is simultaneously the source of mercy poured out for those who come to know and profess the truth about Him — and about ourselves. In the very next verse in the Gospel of John, Jesus spoke to the assembled crowd as the Pharisees were departing: “I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness but will have the light of life.” (John 8:12)

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You might like these three related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

Benedict XVI Faced the Cruelty of a German Inquisition

Stones for Pope Benedict and Rust on the Wheels of Justice

A Subtle Encore from Our Lady of Guadalupe

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An Important Announcement from His Eminence, Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke:

Tap or click the image.

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Qumran: The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Coming Apocalypse

The Angel Michael Binding Satan (“He Cast him into the Bottomless Pit, and Shut him up”), 1805 drawing by William Blake.

The community of believers that left behind the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran awaited an apocalyptic battle between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness.

My annual Holy Week post this year was somewhat unusual. It profiled an announcement from the government of Israel about a new archeological discovery in the general region of Qumran in modern day Jordan. The discovery includes 2,000 year-old remains of the Bar Kochba rebellion against the Roman occupation of Jerusalem about 100 years after the Crucifixion of Jesus. My post was, “The Passion of the Christ in an Age of Outrage.”

It told the story of Bar Kochba and a revolt by residents of Jerusalem against the secular suppression of their religious beliefs by Roman Emperor Hadrian in the Second Century AD. The story has many parallels with current events and especially with the growing “cancel culture” disdain for Catholics, our faith, and our public witness of that faith.

Several readers have since asked me to write about the Dead Sea Scrolls, their place in Salvation History, and their connection to Sacred Scripture. Understanding the mindset of those who created and left behind the Dead Sea Scrolls can inspire and empower our own struggle against forces in our own time seeking to eradicate and silence our religious convictions.

First, a little geography. It’s ironic that I am typing this post on my 68th birthday. In the 16 years Pornchai Moontri was here with me, he organized an annual birthday acknowledgment among prisoners I knew. Part of its ritual was the unveiling of a birthday card by a local inmate-artist. The cards were always insulting, but hilarious. One of them declared, “When Father G was born, the Dead Sea was only sick!” One of the other cards was about Latin being my first language. Hmmph!

Anyway, regarding the Dead Sea, Pornchai was not so far off the mark, but its geography is very interesting. It is the lowest inland body of water on Earth. Its surface is 1,290 feet below sea level, and it reaches a depth of 1,300 feet. It is fed by the Jordan River and several smaller streams. The Biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18) have long been thought to lie under the waters of the Dead Sea’s southern end.

The term, “Dead Sea” is mentioned nowhere in Scripture. It was known as the Salt Sea in Genesis (14:3) and Deuteronomy (3:37). The Prophet Ezekiel called it the Eastern Sea. The Roman historian Josephus called it the Asphalt Sea. Owing to evaporation, its salt concentration is the highest of any body of water on Earth. Neither animal nor plant life can live in it or around it. But in Biblical times in the valley created by the Dead Sea, there were several settlements such as Qumran and Masada.

In 1947, quite by accident, scrolls were discovered in ancient jars in a cave near the Dead Sea by two nomadic Bedouin shepherds who sold them to antiquities dealers. The writings made their way to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. To the amazement of the Judeo-Christian world, the scrolls contained intact Hebrew and Aramaic books of the Bible composed between 250 BC and 70 AD, the latter being the date of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple mentioned in my post linked above.

In 1956, multiple excavations in multiple caves at the site yielded some 800 manuscripts containing complete scrolls and thousands of fragments of virtually every book of the Hebrew Bible. Some ancient apocryphal and Deuterocanonical texts were also discovered and I will write more about these below. A decades-long scholarly translation of the discoveries was set in motion. One of the translators was my late uncle, Jesuit Father George W. MacRae, a renowned Biblical scholar and expert in ancient Semitic languages and texts at Harvard University and the Institute Biblique in Jerusalem.

The Essenes: The Community behind the Scrolls

After decades of excavation and historical analysis, scholars have settled on the identity and origin of the group that created and preserved the scrolls. They arose in the years after the Maccabean Revolt in 167 BC. Hellenism — Greek civilization — spread throughout the Eastern Mediterranean region after the conquests of Alexander the Great. Jerusalem, the center of Jewish thought, culture and religion, experienced a wave similar to the progressive “cancel culture” movement of today. The elite among the aristocracy of Jerusalem fostered a strong movement toward Hellenism, and the replacement of Judaism with Greek traditions.

The majority of the Jews in Jerusalem were conservative and resisted this movement. Most, however, did not have the voice and the influence of the left-leaning liberal elite. Signs of rebellion and civil unrest gave the newly installed king of Syria, Antiochus Epiphanes, the excuse he needed to suppress conservative thought and practices among the Jews. He did this by demoralizing them. In 168 BC, his army plundered the Temple and its treasury. They suppressed Jewish worship and the sacred Books of the Law, the Torah.

The final straw came with the “Abomination of Desolation” as described in the Book of Daniel (9:27). Antiochus took the Temple, removed the Torah, and replaced it with an altar to the mythological Greek god, Zeus. This triggered a revolution by Judas Maccabeas and his family which became the central story of the First Book of Maccabees. In 165 BC, the Maccabees led by Judas forcefully retook the Temple, deposed the statue of Zeus, and restored the sanctuary. They held it for eight days while awaiting reinforcements. This is the origin of the Jewish Festival of Hanukkah.

The two predominant religious sects in Jerusalem at that time, the Pharisees and Sadducees, were both tolerant at best, and at worst accommodating, to the Hellenist conquerors just as they would be to Caesar nearly two centuries later. I wrote of their plot in “The Chief Priests Answered, ‘We Have No King but Caesar’ .”

To those who have been paying attention to recent trends in our own time and culture, this should all have a ring of the familiar. Just as with the revolt of the Maccabees, resistance is not at all futile. So resist — with fidelity as your sword and Divine Mercy as your shield — the Abomination of Desolation that is being handed to us by the “woke” elite around us. Many have the spiritual depth of mud puddles.

Sorry for the editorial. By 150 BC, the accommodations of the Pharisees and Sadducees toward the wave of Hellenistic culture resulted in the emergence of a third religious identity in Israel, that of the mysterious Essenes. Jews returning from exile in Babylon heard of the successful revolt of the Maccabees and were inspired by it. Their communal reaction was to focus on fidelity to the Covenant. They came to be known by history as Essenes — Hebrew for “Pious Ones.”

The Essenes are not mentioned by name in Sacred Scripture. This was possibly due to the quiet and secret nature of their rebellion. The historian, Pliny the Elder, mentions them as having emerged as a community on the Western shore of the Dead Sea at a place that, by his description, could be none other than Khirbet Qumran. Philo and Josephus, two other historians of the period, describe the Essenes in more detail and their descriptions correspond seamlessly to what is now known of the record they left behind: the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The Dead Sea Hosts a Living Faith

The Essenes lived as a structured community believing that over Israel’s entire history, God had prepared for this Community of the New Covenant. The Prophet Habakkuk wrote in this same period that for all those who observe the Law among the Jews, God will deliver from judgment because of their suffering and because of their faith in a Holy One. Habukkuk identifies their time as the final time, but now prolonged according to the mysterious plan of God. This was also a time when expectations of a Messiah and life beyond death became prominent themes in Israel.

In the decades after the Maccabean revolt that restored the Jerusalem Temple after its desecration by Antiochus Epiphanes, the concept of an apocalypse spread widely throughout Judaism. The prophetic witness of the Book of Daniel, composed at about the same time the Essenes formed, was highly influential. This influence continued well into the early Christian era.

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls brought to light the existence of the Essene sect whose way of life was heavily influenced by apocalyptic ideas as a reaction to what they saw as the secular infringement upon their Jewish, and later Jewish-Christian, faith. These ideas included an emphasis on exploration of the heavenly mysteries and a sense of participation in the angelic realm. Their commitment to fidelity and a community of faith was to prepare them for an epic final battle between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness — a battle that raged in both the spiritual realm and the Earthly one.

The Essenes had an influence that reflected far beyond their separatist community hidden for twenty centuries in Qumran on the Western shore of the Dead Sea. Their emphasis on apocalyptic ideas came to be widely accepted. This included a belief in resurrection from the dead and eternal life, a belief that was embraced by the Pharisees and gradually entered the mainstream of Jewish faith by the time of Jesus. The argument could be made that this development was in preparation for the time of Jesus.

It is now widely believed among scholars that the Essenes had a connection with John the Baptist. In the Dead Sea Scrolls about their own community, they described themselves in words identical to those ascribed to John the Baptist in each of the Gospels (see Luke 4:18-19). Both were citing Isaiah 40:3, “The voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”

It also appears that the Essenes had an influence on the Gospel of John, the last of the four to come into written form around 90 AD. It was once believed that this Gospel was heavily influenced by Hellenistic philosophical ideas. The Dead Sea Scrolls made clear that John’s Gospel is solidly rooted in Jewish thought and traditions faithful to the Covenant, the Law and the Prophets.

The apocalyptic traditions of the Essenes were also influenced by the Book of Enoch, a Second Century BC work considered by Jewish scholars as a Deuterocanonical text. “Deuterocanonical” is a Scriptural term derived from Greek meaning “Secondary Canon.” Enoch and some other books considered to be deuterocanonical were accepted in the Jewish Canon of Scripture well into the time of Jesus until about 90 AD. After the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple — a cataclysmic event for Judaism and one predicted by Jesus — the apocalyptic ideas of Enoch diminished.

Michael Contends With the Devil

Other books considered to be outside the Canon of Hebrew Scripture but later accepted in the Catholic Canon were Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, First and Second Maccabees, and the Book of Tobit which was analyzed here recently in “Archangel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri.”

The Book of Enoch is especially interesting because it had a wide influence on the Essenes — and therefore is also prominent among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Enoch also had an influence on some early Christian writings of Jude, Barnabas, and Irenaeus. Among the Christian Patriarchs, Tertullian regarded it as Scripture while Augustine and Jerome saw it as apocryphal, but influential. In the New Testament Letter of Jude (Jude 9) the Apostle refers to a story that appeared nowhere else but the apocryphal book, The Assumption of Moses, and in references in the Book of Enoch. He wrote as though this account was highly familiar to both Jews and Jewish Christians:

“When the Archangel Michael, contending with the devil, disputed about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a reviling judgment upon him [which would have been the purview only of God] but said, ‘The Lord rebuke you.’”

— Jude 9

The Letter of Jude included a reference to this story from an apocryphal book without explanation. This implies that the story was well known among the Jews of this period. In the story, Moses died in the desert without ever entering the Promised Land. Satan tried to take the body of Moses but the Archangel Michael fought him and won. Michael then escorted the physical body of Moses to Heaven. In the Hebrew Scriptures, only one other human being was taken into Heaven for eternity. It was Elijah. It is for this very reason that Moses and Elijah could appear with Jesus in the Gospel account of the Transfiguration (see Luke 9:28ff) where they represent the Law and the Prophets, the two pillars of Jewish tradition.

It is possible that the Essenes latched upon the Book of Enoch to preserve it. Though composed in their time (the Second Century BC) it is named for the Enoch of Genesis, father of Methuselah. Here is the Genesis account of Enoch: At the age of 65,

“Enoch walked with God after the birth of Methuselah three hundred years ... thus all the days of Enoch were three hundred and sixty-five years. Enoch walked with God and he was not, for God took him.”

— Genesis 5:22-24

Enoch appears, by adoption through the line of Joseph, in the genealogy of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke (Luke 3:37).

It was not lost on the writers of the Book of Enoch — or on the Essenes — that the number of his years was also the number of days in a single year. The Book of Enoch explores the Genesis reference to Enoch being taken bodily into heaven for 300 years, and is filled with visions of the cosmos, of angelic tours of the heavenly realm, of the abode of the dead awaiting redemption, and of a pre-existent Son of Man. It is likely that the Essenes sought to preserve it because it was Israel’s first example of a developed apocalyptic faith and the expectation of resurrection.

All of this apocalyptic tradition — and its call to arm for battle in spiritual warfare between light and a growing darkness — entered both Judaism and Christianity as a result of elitist secular values and their infringement upon our lives of faith. The Essenes were short lived. They died out along with the Jerusalem Temple destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. That their legacy emerged into our world by “accident” 2,000 years later is a gift to our time.

And perhaps there is more of this gift to come. The apocalyptic message of Daniel, also influential to the Essenes, hints at books that are shut up until the end of time:

“At that time shall arise Michael, the great prince who has charge of your people. And there shall be a time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation ... but at that time your people shall be delivered, every one whose name shall be found written in the book. And many of those who sleep in the dust of the Earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to everlasting contempt ... But you, Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book until the time of the end.”

— Daniel 12:1-4

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Writing from prison is difficult, and has become even more so in this time of pandemic. I rely on the postal service to mail my weekly post for scanning, and I am unable to make a photocopy so I mail the only copy I have. If there is a delay (there have been two late arrivals in the last four weeks) I have no way to inform readers.

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Please also share this post, and these related posts that appear herein:

The Passion of the Christ in an Age of Outrage

The Chief Priests Answered, ‘We Have No King but Caesar’

Archangel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri

and one I didn’t mention, but should have:

Apocalypse Now: Jesus and the Signs of the Times