The Woman of Samaria is a biblical paraphrase of John 4:4–30 with virtually no homiletic content. As a gospel-based retelling, it may be compared with The Passion of Jesus Christ in English (art. 1), but there are strong differences. While Passion recounts a universally understood sequence of events, well known not only from the gospels but also from the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, and its sacred narrative forms the foundation of redemptive theology, The Woman of Samaria selects a passage of the Bible rarely highlighted on its own.

The reason for its inclusion is not apparent. Perhaps it was composed as a reading for a church service or for a specifically female audience. What it adds to the lyric collection in Jesus 29 is a surprising interest in a biblical woman who interacted with Jesus. The Passion concludes with Mary Magdalene’s moving encounter with the resurrected Lord (lines 554–94). In like manner, this paraphrase highlights the Samaritan’s woman’s earnest discourse with Jesus. The manner of telling conveys Jesus’s humility, mercy, and quiet authority, expressed with disarming simplicity and homely intimacy.

The main theological import of the paraphrase is the revelation of Jesus as the Messiah, the woman’s immediate and total faith in this truth, and the lesson Jesus gives her about prayer and salvation (lines 51–54). Jesus’s gentle admonition about the woman’s number of husbands (lines 33–36) is merely paraphrased without comment, and there is none of the misogyny given to the passage by Jerome and defended against by the Wife of Bath (see The Riverside Chaucer, pp. 864–65). Jesus, born of Mary (line 3), unpretentiously speaks alone with a sexualized, foreign woman, and the apostles are astounded (lines 61–62). Yet the key import seems to be that what he said to her he had already said to them (they did not marvel at the content; line 63), and that here the redemptive, merciful Word spreads outward beyond a Jewish, male community.

[Fols. 178v–179v. NIMEV 3704. DIMEV 5874. Muir, MWME, 2:397–98, 546 [44]. Quire: 3. Meter: 77 septenary lines, rhyming mostly in couplets, aa7, with some triplets and quatrains, aaa(a)7. Layout: Long lines with medial and end punctuation. Colored capitals are treated in this edition as indicators of stanza-like groupings (of 4, 6, 7, or 8 lines). Editions: Morris, pp. 84–86; Zupitza, pp. 120–22. Other MSS: None.]