BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

Manuscript Mystery

Mary, Martha, and Mary Magdalene in the Gospel of John

Sebastiano del Piombo, The Raising of Lazarus (16th century). From Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain.

Among the most memorable accounts in the Gospels is that of Jesus’s raising of Lazarus from the dead in John 11. We learn little, however, about the character of Lazarus himself; more prominent are the sisters of Lazarus, Mary and Martha, who initially request that Jesus heal their sick brother and, after his death, bear witness to his resurrection. In her article entitled “The Mystery of Mary and Martha” in the Winter 2024 issue of BAR, Elizabeth Schrader Polczer points out that some early copies of John’s Gospel exhibit unusual treatments of the sisters of Lazarus, which together suggest that an early version circulated in which there was only one sister, Mary—sometimes thought to be Mary Magdalene—while Martha was added later.

Schrader Polczer treats a number of early manuscripts, most notably Papyrus 66, the oldest surviving codex of John’s Gospel (it is dated to approximately 200 CE). Beginning with this manuscript and then moving on to others, she highlights several places where peculiarities in the text appear to revolve closely around Mary and Martha. She begins by citing John 11:1 in Papyrus 66, where the scribe wrote a nonsensical reading: “There was a certain sick man, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and of Mary his sister.” Oddly, Mary’s name appears twice here; but the scribe then corrected the text, making small adjustments so that it now read “the village of Mary and of Martha her sister.”

This might seem a simple error that was later corrected. However, other manuscripts exhibit similarly strange changes around Mary and Martha. In Codex Alexandrinus (fifth century CE), another crucial early witness to the text of John, the scribe’s initial rendering was clear: “There was a certain sick man, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary his sister.” But a correction was introduced to add a second woman (though, notably, the masculine pronoun “his” remains uncorrected): “There was a certain sick man, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and of Martha his sister.” Thus, in both manuscripts, the scribes originally wrote the phrase “Mary his sister,” and then corrected their respective texts to include Martha. In both cases, moreover, the name “Maria” (Mary) is changed to “Martha” by simply changing the Greek letter iota to a theta.

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Again, these instances might plausibly be seen as simple errors. Returning to Papyrus 66, however, it is clear that something even more peculiar is going on in John 11:3. In this manuscript, the verse was originally copied with just a single woman in mind, so that the verse reads, “Therefore, Mary sent (singular) to him saying (singular)…” Here, the Greek verbs are in the singular, meaning that their subject is a single individual. But in correcting the manuscript, the scribe scratched out the name and replaced it (in very limited space!) with the words “the sisters,” and then proceeded to change the two verbs “sent” and “saying” to the plural (in both cases, this requires changing only a single letter).

Some Latin manuscripts attest similar peculiarities. Both the fifth-century Codex Corbiensis and the 12th-century Codex Colbertinus (which is believed to retain a fourth-century text) evince changes in John 11:5. In Codex Corbiensis, for instance, alongside the statement “Jesus loved Lazarus and Mary and his/her sister” (the pronoun eius is gender-neutral), the name Martha is added in the margin. Meanwhile, Codex Colbertinus has its own unusual version of this verse, which omits either of the sisters’ names: “Jesus loved Lazarus and his sister.”

Schrader Polczer’s research reveals that this nexus of textual problems around Mary and Martha, the sisters of Lazarus, extends across numerous ancient textual witnesses: She estimates that approximately one in five Greek sources and one in three Latin sources exhibit inconsistencies around these women. But why would an early editor want to add Martha to John’s Gospel? The answer may be connected to the widespread understanding among ancient readers that Lazarus’s sister Mary was in fact Mary Magdalene, a view attested in the works of numerous Christian writers as early as the third century. This may relate to the clear parallels between the Lazarus account in John 11 and the story of the resurrection of Jesus in John 20: In both accounts, a woman named Mary is weeping at a tomb, and then sees someone she loves rising from the dead. Jesus’s question in John 11:34—“Where have you laid him?”—is echoed by Mary Magdalene in John 20:15.

These parallels are obscured significantly by the introduction of Martha into the story. As a result, one is left wondering: Why might there be an interest in diminishing the significance of these women—and of Mary Magdalene in particular—in this account? It is noteworthy that in John 11:27, Martha utters the central Christological confession of John’s Gospel: “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.” Is it possible that some early readers, who believed that Mary—perhaps Mary Magdalene—uttered these words, might have seen this prominent figure as a rival to Peter’s authority? Schrader Polczer acknowledges that this is just one theory, but her article demonstrates that it is a tantalizing one.

For more on the peculiarities in early textual witnesses around the figures of Mary and Martha and what they might mean, read the article by Elizabeth Schrader Polczer entitled “The Mystery of Mary and Martha,” published in the Winter 2024 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

Subscribers: Read the full article, “The Mystery of Mary and Martha,” by Elizabeth Schrader Polczer, in the Winter 2024 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

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The Mystery of Mary and Martha

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