Was the Gospel of John Changed to Suppress Mary Magdalene?

Mary Magdalene is both very famous and very misunderstood she's a woman that appears throughout the Gospel story as a companion to Jesus a woman that was both present at his crucifixion and his resurrection a lot of these misunderstandings have been fueled by pop culture so for example the speculation that she was Jesus's wife fuelled by The Da Vinci Code and Jesus Christ Superstar but it's not all conspiracy theories actual New Testament scholars are arguing that there may have been efforts in the earliest decades of Christianity to diminish the role of Mary Magdalene in the Gospel story this is according to Duke University doctoral student Elizabeth Schrader who I interviewed earlier this year I'll cut two parts of that interview throughout this video but you can find the full cut on my second channel Schrader basically argues that by comparing variations in our earliest manuscripts of the Gospel of John we can infer that Mary Magdalene had a much bigger role than what she has in our modern Bibles there's a story in the Gospel of John about a friend of Jesus named Lazarus and his two sisters Mary and Martha according to the text they live in the town of Bethany outside of Jerusalem long story short Lazarus dies Jesus goes back to Bethany has a few intense conversations with Mary and Martha and then raises Lazarus from the dead it's one of the more famous stories in the New Testament and if you read the story in your modern Bible it seems that Mary the sister of Lazarus is not Mary Magdalene but I'm not so much focusing on the story in this video I want to focus on the manuscripts of the story what do I mean by manuscripts when you pick up a modern Bible it seems like a unified text it's one book it's numbered from page one two thousand something but the texts that you read in a modern Bible is the result of biblical scholars piecing together the text from manuscripts some of these manuscripts contain nearly complete versions of biblical texts like the Codex Sinaiticus a 4th century manuscript that contains the entire old and New Testaments other manuscripts are literally just tiny scraps of papyrus with only a few verses on them so scholars compare all of these manuscripts to come up with the definitive version that you have before you today but all of these manuscripts have variations a changed letter here a different word they're usually these vary are not a big deal and don't change the meaning of the text but sometimes they do and when it comes to the Lazarus story something really wonky is going on with the manuscripts especially when we look at what's probably our earliest version of this story papyrus 66 now the thing about papyrus 66 is that the scribe is wonkey the scribe has made that's the technical term yes very lucky the scribe has made four hundred and fifty changes to the text of the Gospel of John now most Christians don't know that that the oldest copy that exists of the Gospel of John has had four hundred and fifty changes made to it but that's a fact four hundred fifty changes now like Strader says most of these changes are very minor but it seems that in two places the scribe added Martha okay I'll summarize the situation in p66 version of John 11:1 the original text read a certain man was ill Lazarus of Bethany the village of Mary and of marry his sister but scholars have noticed that the scribe changed the second Mary to the name Martha with one little letter changing the yota and Maria to a theta creating the name Martha and the scribe does something similar a few verses later John 11 3 the verse originally reads Mary sent to him saying Lord he whom you love is ill but the scribe scratched out Maria and wrote the sisters the sisters sent to him saying so what originally had one woman acting alone has become two women but I had read somewhere that you know sometimes people think that Lazarus is sister Mary Mary of Bethany some people think that that's Mary Magdalene she anoints Jesus but there's we're not sure if it's Mary Magdalene so I'm like well let me just check there too and so I went back to chapter 11 and I see that the name Mary has been crossed out twice and papyrus 66 and I was like whoa and physically crossed out by some scribe correct okay and we can look at a picture of it if you like the first time the name it's Maria in Greek the first time the name Maria was changed to the name Martha and it's literally just one letters difference in Greek the the I which is in Yoda was changed to a theta so if theta is one letter in Greek so Maria is changed tomorrow and it's very clear that that's what's happened there and that you know that could be seen as just a scribal mistake click the scribe got confused except that just a couple of verses later a woman's name has been scratched out very obviously and it looks really bad in the papyrus and it has changed to say hi Adelphi the sisters hmm not only that but all the verbs in that verse are changed from singular to plural and I was like wait a second it looks like they're changing Mary into Mary and Martha and this is the oldest copy we have of the Gospel of John in the Lazarus story now this isn't necessarily some nefarious plot or conspiracy Schrader's theorizes that the scribe was sitting in front of two copies of the Gospel of John one copy that didn't have Martha and one copy that did and the scribe made the conscious decision to correct the version in front of him to the more authoritative version the version with two sisters his decision was possibly influenced by the Gospel of Luke where we get another famous story with two sisters Mary and Martha but in the Gospel of Luke these sisters are not the sisters of Lazarus what's weird here though is that p66 is not alone in fact 18% of our Greek manuscripts of John 11 have an issue around the sister Martha so we can reconstruct a situation where the scribe was sitting in front of two different versions one version that has both sisters Martha's saying a lot more and then changing the one in front of him to match that one so that's kind of a hypothetical situation I believe that papyrus 66 that this scribe one of the exemplars had Martha and the other one didn't and at a certain point I believe it's in the middle of John 11 verse 5 the scribe makes the decision you know what I'm gonna copy the version that has Martha because that's the verse after that verse everything is stable around Martha for the rest of the Pyrus 66 but before that there's all these problems and you can see the scribe trying to reconcile them and in fact most of these problems from John 11 verse 1 to 5 can be explained as described knowing both versions and trying to find a way to make it work without you know what will honoring both exemplars and it just doesn't work and so the scribe I think gives up and gentle Evan v it says okay we're gonna do the one with Martha yeah an echo of an earlier text without Martha now of course this is completely hypothetical we can't prove it for certain but it does show that there was an unstable process in copying the Gospel of John where Martha kind of phases in and out of the story remember this is before the printing press this was before the copying and pasting and microsoft word scribes had to copy biblical text by hand and they not only made mistakes but they were also making conscious choices to correct the text in front of them correcting the texts is something that they viewed was more authoritative there's also evidence outside of the Bible that points toward the instability around the character Martha so for example in John 11 in a modern Bible Martha says a super-famous statement proclaiming that Jesus is the Messiah the Son of God but Tertullian a third century church father says that Mary proclaimed this famous confession so we can hypothesize that he was familiar with a version of the Lazarus story that swamps this very important role between Martha and Mary in fact he possibly was familiar with a story that lacked Martha entirely and Tertullian was alive only 100 years after the Gospel of John went into circulation so why is this important well without Martha we have a much more consistent character of Mary throughout the entire Gospel of John we have Mary Magdalene in the beginning of the Gospel of John this Mary of Bethany character in the middle of John and Mary Magdalene in the end of John so elizabeth Schrader argues that the original author was intending that this Mary was Mary Magdalene so remember that in John 11 Mary the sister of Lazarus is never called Mary of Bethany she's simply called Mary and a lot of early Christians made this inference assuming that Mary a Bethany was also Mary Magdalene in 591 C II Pope Gregory popularized this interpretation for centuries to come so the hypothesis that Mary Lazarus his sister and Mary MA dalinar the same person is actually a very ancient theory a New Testament scholar mark Goodacre describes why this was an easy inference to make mary magdalene and mary bethany are never seen in the same room at the same time and they share similar traits like weeping at a tomb before a resurrection although Mary of Magdala has become a scholarly commonplace is worth remembering that she has never described this way in the Synoptics or John where she has always Mary Magdalene or just Mary so to summarize Schrader argues that without Martha you have a consistent Mary character throughout the Gospel of John and that the audience was intended to make the inference that Mary the sister of Lazarus was Mary Magdalene and that this change happens sometime in the 2nd century CE II she further argues that this was consciously done to deflect attention away from Mary Magdalene because otherwise she would have been way too prominent in the Gospel of John and would have possibly been a threatening figure a figure drawing too much attention away from the male 12 apostles of Jesus so I sat down with Elisabeth Schrader to go deep into this research and I bring up a few possible rebuttals so for example how can we as scholars excavate the intention behind an editor's choice sure we have the hard evidence that somebody was changing these stories to make Martha more prominent but can we really make an argument about what that scribe was thinking as he made those changes but I'll let you be the judge of that I encourage you to head on over to the second channel the link is in the description below and watch the full interview and as always thanks so much for watching and I'll see you next time it's major it's a big change people don't want to think about this they don't want to think about I mean obviously the people who make the critic critical editions have to think about it but a lot of people don't want to think that their Bible could have been changed in such a major way

Channel: ReligionForBreakfast

Views: 517,756

Keywords: Elizabeth Schrader, Mary Magdalene, Harvard Theological Review, Libbie Schrader, Mary of Bethany, Lazarus, Gospel of John, Jesus wife, wife of Jesus, textual criticism, Duke University, Mark Goodacre, New Testament, Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Alexandrinus, Papyrus 66, P66

Id: rfy6oiB_U-A

Length: 10min 39sec (639 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 22 2019