Since I Was Wrong About This Being Holy Week And This Is Important - You Know What This Is

FROM THAT Wikipedia article you cite, when we're talking "earliest manuscripts" of the Gospels you're not talking about a. a huge number of complete or nearly complete texts, you might be talking as few as four or fewer, which gets us to b. you're not talking about undisputed or even nearly undisputed assignment of age to those manuscripts, c. you're talking about manuscripts, the unknown provenance of their origin, the sources they copied, the possible presence of other lines of transmission which may have included the story of the Woman Found In Adultery, etc. 

While much of history, especially more recent history, much of antiquities can produce a level of reliability and certainty that even the exact sciences have a hard time matching there are enormous ranges of things about the past that can never be known or which can only be known in frustratingly fragmented form.  

Apparently you have not read the article in full, voluntarily fragmenting even the, um, "authority" you cite, because it points out that even some of those who believe the story was inserted into the Gospel of John at a later date believe the story may have described an actual event in the life of Jesus, or, at least, was part of the oral tradition that informed the original author of John. 

I have to say that atheists and haters of Christianity insisting that this, certainly one of the finest claims of mercy found in the literature of one of the most influential and potential forces for good is a fraud leads me to question just how dedicated they are to mercy and the finer aspects of the monotheistic religion, those things which IF THOSE WHO CLAIMED TO BE CHRISTIANS PUT INTO NORMAL AND REGULAR PRACTICE WOULD MAKE CHRISTIANITY AMONG THE MOST RESPECTED AND BELOVED OF HUMAN CATEGORIES.   Why, you'd almost think that seeing the establishment of such mercy, such generosity, such egalitarianism is as nothing to those who, instead of encouraging those who profess Christianity to demonstrate what they claim to believe as compared to their interest in denying the truth of such virtues and mercies.   I do, by the way, have to say that that suspicion never arose in me until I got a load of that from what the loudmouth atheists of the 00's said.  That so many of them were Darwinists, the holders of a pseudo-scientific ideology that holds that anything that impedes the merciless struggle of the survival of the fittest is a terrible thing (DARWIN HIMSELF SAID THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT HE MEANT BY "NATURAL SELECTION") it's no wonder they'd have such contempt for that particular story.  And if they're not full blown Darwinists they hold some other equally depraved ideology.