Episode 245: Elizabeth Schrader Polczer - Resurrecting Mary the Tower
Everything you thought you knew about Mary Magdalene is questioned in this episode of The Bible for Normal People, in which Elizabeth Schrader Polczer joins Pete and Jared to discuss textual criticism, the meaning of Magdalene, and why John 11 might not be as straightforward as we think. Join them as they explore the following questions:
What’s happening in John 11?
Is Lazarus’s sister Mary the same person as Mary Magdalene?
What evidence does Elizabeth have for saying that Martha doesn’t belong in John 11?
What is textual criticism and why did it begin?
How does Papyrus 66, the oldest version we have of the Gospel of John, portray Mary and Martha?
What motivated scribes to change Mary’s name to Martha in the manuscripts?
What is a critical edition and why does it matter to John 11?
Why is Mary Magdalene incorrectly assumed to have been a prostitute?
What motivation would the church have had for discrediting Mary as the Christological confessor?
What does the name Magdalene mean? Is it even an accurate name for the Mary we’re talking about?
How does all this textual transmission information influence what Elizabeth thinks the Bible is?
Tweetables
Pithy, shareable, sometimes-less-than-280-character statements from the episode you can share.
Because they were copied by hand, no two [manuscripts] were exactly alike. And there is a possibility, always, of error and changes being made to the text. — @libbieschrader
There's tons of problems in the old Latin manuscripts. You see Mary changed to Martha. You see Martha totally absent. You see names switched around, you see Mary appearing where usually Martha does. Basically, Martha's presence is uneven. — @libbieschrader
We know that people thought Mary of Bethany was the same person as Mary Magdalene. The question then becomes, if you had a text without Martha, and people thought that Lazarus's sister Mary was Mary Magdalene, what is the danger in a text like that? Why would somebody want to add Martha to a text like that? — @libbieschrader
One of the biggest findings is that you can actually reconstruct the opening five verses of John—in fact, if not most of the chapter—without Martha, using real manuscripts. — @libbieschrader
People don't necessarily think that it's a committee of modern scholars that have determined the Greek text that gets translated into your Bibles. These are modern decisions. — @libbieschrader
[People are] holding their Bibles saying, "This is what the Bible says." And that comes from manuscripts, right? But who adjudicated which readings from which manuscripts made it into your Bible? — @libbieschrader
One in five Greek manuscripts has a problem around Martha, and one in three old Latin manuscripts has a problem around Martha. So it's really happening throughout the entire textual transmission. — @libbieschrader
Over and over, independently attested, in different documents from different centuries, there seems to be this theme of Mary being close to Jesus and Peter having a problem with it. So we know that Mary Magdalene is a controversial character. — @libbieschrader
Mary Magdalene seems to have been controversial in second, third, fourth century circles, but not for being a prostitute. It was more that she was challenging Peter, or maybe other disciples, or people who thought that women weren't worthy to lead or speak. — @libbieschrader
There's something about the gospel that is inherently about multiplicity. It's never about a singular text, or a singular perspective, or a singular story. Each person has their own perspective and sometimes that affects the text. — @libbieschrader
If you insist on one single way of doing things, that's actually contrary to the spirit of the gospel. — @libbieschrader
Mentioned in This Episode
Connect with Elizabeth Schrader Polczer:
Article with Joan Taylor:“The Meaning of ‘Magdalene’: A Review of Literary Evidence”
Join: The Society of Normal People community
Support: www.thebiblefornormalpeople.com/give
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Pete
You're listening to the Bible for Normal People, the only God-ordained podcast on the internet. I'm Pete Enns.
Jared
And I'm Jared Byas.
Intro
[Intro music begins]
Jared
Welcome everyone! On today's episode, we're talking about Resurrecting Mary the Tower with Elizabeth Schrader Polczer.
Pete
Yeah. And Elizabeth is an assistant professor of New Testament at Villanova University, and she's really big on something called textual criticism—stay tuned. That's what we're talking about—not to mention Mary, formerly known as Magdalene.
Jared
Right.
Pete
And also just the Gospel of John. So let's get into this episode. It was a lot of fun.
Intro
[Music begins again signaling the preview of the episode]
Elizabeth
[Teaser clip of Elizabeth speaking plays over music] “We've always had multiplicity, we've had Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And I'm saying you can drill down even further and embrace textual variants. You can look at the same story in different manuscripts of the same gospel and embrace the multiple stories there. And there's something about that higher perspective on the multiplicity that gives us insight into the nature of the gospel.”
Intro
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Pete
Alright, well, Elizabeth, thank you for being on our podcast. It's great to have you.
Elizabeth
It's so great to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me.
Pete
Absolutely. Well, we're gonna talk about a very interesting, yet nerdy topic. And it all revolves around, mainly, John 11. So let's begin by just, talk to us about chapter 11. And what's happening in there to get the context so we can all get on board.
Elizabeth
Sure. So at this point, Jesus is sort of in danger of being killed by the Jews and yet he hears that his friend Lazarus is sick. And he waits a couple of days, he doesn't do anything at first. And then a couple of days later, he decides that he's going to go down to where Lazarus is, which is in Bethany, and the disciples say, like, "Why are you doing this? Like weren't the Jews just trying to kill you?" And Jesus basically says, you know, "If you're walking in the daylight, you don't need to worry about such things."
But basically, Lazarus has died. And his sisters send a message to Jesus saying, "Lord, the one you love is ill." And then Jesus delays, then he does come. And then he talks with the sisters, according to your Bible, then basically, there is a confession of faith by Martha, today in your Bible. And where there's this very famous confession, she says- Well, Jesus says, "I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me will never die." That's a very well known quote from the Gospel of John.
Then Martha would say, in your Bible, "Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one coming into the world." And then Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. And so this is the miracle that precipitates Jesus's betrayal and arrest and then you know, so it basically inaugurates the Passion narrative in John's gospel, and it's sort of the closing of what Raymond Brown will call “The Book of Signs” in the Gospel of John, there's a bunch of signs that Jesus performs, and then it ends with the Lazarus narrative. And that's when it transitions to “The Book of Glory” that goes into Jesus's passion.
So this is sort of the culminating sign. Jesus has done lots of cool things in the Gospel of John, he turned water into wine, he walked on the water, he walked on the Sea of Galilee, but now he actually raises somebody from the dead. And so this is like the miracle that precipitates his passion, according to the Gospel of John.
Pete
And I want to make sure I get this straight, you argue—and we'll have to get into the story—but you argue that Martha's name was added by scribes to replace the name of Mary Magdalene, sort of?
Elizabeth
Basically, you know, it's hard to say whether it was a scribe or an editor in the early transmission of the text.
Pete
Something happened.
Elizabeth
Yeah. And whether Lazarus's sister Mary is Mary Magdalene is a point of contention. I'm basically saying maybe Martha doesn't belong in John 11.
Pete
Maybe Martha doesn't belong in John 11. Okay, that's the main point.
Elizabeth
It's based on the world's oldest copy of the Gospel of John, and I've listened to your podcast and you guys talk about how everything has been sort of picked over in biblical scholarship. But if you want to find something new, you got to get it from the ground. And this papyrus 66 was discovered in probably 1956, published in 1958. And scholars did talk about it in the 1960s, people like Gordon Fee, and Maria [last name], text critics, and they're like, "Hey, the name Mary's been crossed out a couple times here. Hey, look at that. Oh, all the verbs have been changed from singular to plural. Look at that, Martha's getting added." And nobody did anything about it.
So I didn't actually discover these changes. It's just that people made, scholars made notes, "Oh, look, the name Martha is getting added to the story in Papyrus 66," and just, nobody followed up on it. So to me, this study probably should have been done maybe 50 years ago, but when I saw that I was like, "Oh, I'm gonna do a study of the Gospel of John,” so Papyrus 66, which is the world's oldest copy of the story of Lazarus being raised from the dead. Copied around the turn of the third century. It's because of that manuscript that I did a study. And when you look at hundreds of manuscripts of the Gospel of John, you see that Martha is blinking in and out of the story, not just in that manuscript, but in dozens that I've cataloged and probably hundreds of manuscripts of John's gospel, Martha's presence is unstable in the text. So the question is like, what's that all about?
Jared
Yeah, well, what is that all about? Because I think for people that sounds maybe abstract, if they're not used to dealing with textual criticism, and the transmission of texts—what does that mean, practically?
Elizabeth
Yeah, so Textual Criticism is where you get your Bible from. People don't usually think about this. They're like, "Well, this is the Bible and this is what it says." And people maybe, on some abstract level, they know, okay, the Bible comes from manuscripts, but they don't necessarily always think about the fact that manuscripts, because they were copied by hand, no two were exactly alike. And that means that there's also the possibility since there was no printing press for the first 15 centuries of the Bible's transmission—or of the New Testament’s transmission, I should say—there is no way to make it uniform. And there is a possibility, always, of error and changes being made to the text. So, it was actually the creation of the printing press that created the discipline of textual criticism, because people decided, you know, we want to print the right thing. But all these manuscripts say different things. And so it's the job of text critics to compare, like, basically, first of all, to find the best manuscripts, and to compare them with one another, and basically come up with theories for which readings are earlier or later, and which ones might have been created by those in the course of transmission, and which ones they think they can attribute to the author. And it's a pretty difficult task. And some would say impossible, because as far back as the manuscripts go, there is multiplicity.
Pete
[Hums]
Elizabeth
There's no single narrative. And so it's the job of text critics to sort of adjudicate between different readings. So what was interesting to me is that these really important text critics in the 1960s, we had this new Papyrus of the Gospel of John, I mean, it was a big deal. It's a big deal to find a manuscript of the Gospel of John in the 20th century, it was nearly complete. Part of the reason we know it's the oldest copy is because it wasn't bound up with any other gospels. There's manuscripts like Papyrus 75, or Papyrus 45, or Codex Vaticanus or Codex Sinaiticus, where gospels are all sort of bound together in groups, but Papyrus 66 was just on its own, it's just a codex of John. So that tells you that it's old enough that as before gospels were being bound up with one another.
So, people have dated it to about 200 AD. But this manuscript was copying from other manuscripts that we no longer have access to. And so my theory is that this scribe—I don't blame this scribe—I think that the scribe had access—well, actually, other people before me had argued that this scribe had access to different copies of John, to at least two copies that are now lost to us. And my theory is that one of those copies had just Lazarus and Mary, and the other one had Lazarus, Mary and Martha. And the scribe is comparing the two and trying to figure out what to do.
Pete
Mhmm.
Elizabeth
And so, you can see the scribe is sort of uncertain about whether Martha belongs for a solid five verses from John 11:1 through John 11:5. You see the name Mary getting changed to Martha, you see singular verbs getting changed to plural, you see a woman's name just really awkwardly scratched out, and change to say, "oi adelfés," the sisters. You can see that Mary seems to be getting added, like the scribe wrote something and then changed it. And then at verse five the scribe seems to say, "You know what, I'm going to copy the version with Martha." And Martha is present in Papyrus 66, from John 11:5 onward, but for those first four verses, there's a lot of instability that is reflected in other manuscripts as well.
Jared
So we see, not just with Papyrus 66, but others, the same wrestling with, "Wait, is it just Mary? Or is it Mary and Martha?"
Elizabeth
Yeah, Codex Alexandrinus, you see the same thing. That's a fifth century manuscript, but again, one of our most important manuscripts of the Gospels. And you again, see the scribe first wrote, in John 11, the opening verse, the scribe wrote, "There was a certain sick man, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary, his sister."
Pete
Hmm. No Martha.
Elizabeth
No Martha, but the scribe crosses out the name Mary, changes it to Martha, and switches some things around to make room for Martha in John 11:1. So, when you see similar activity in two of our most important manuscripts, you're like, "Hmm, what's going on here?" And then when you look at the old Latin manuscripts, there's tons of problems in the old Latin manuscripts. You see Mary's changed to Martha's. You see Martha totally absent. You see names switched around, you see Mary appearing where usually Martha does. Basically, Martha's presence is uneven.
Pete
How old are these old Latin manuscripts that you're talking about?
Elizabeth
Fourth, fifth century.
Jared
So, what did I hear you saying with Papyrus 66 and others, is they had a decision, because there was already a manuscript that had Martha present. So what motivated the scribes to make that change in the beginning?
Elizabeth
Well, this is something that we can't know with certainty, right? And so that's where you know, it's theoretical, and where it's basically building an argument. I'm just building a scholarly argument. We do know that people thought that Lazarus's sister Mary was Mary Magdalene. This is something that goes back as, certainly, as far back as the third century, if not earlier. We know that Hippolytus of Rome, and the Manicheans in the third century seem to think that Lazarus's sister Mary is the same person as Mary Magdalene. St. Ambrose said so as well. Also, if you look at the Gospel of Mary, there seems to be sort of a conflation of like Mary who's crying and the Mary who has seen the Lord. So that sounds again, kind of like maybe Mary of Bethany, maybe, who Jesus loves and then Jesus loves the Bethany siblings in John 11.
And so it seems as though there might be some sort of second century idea, and third century. We know that people thought that Mary of Bethany was the same person as Mary Magdalene. And so the question then becomes, if you had a text without Martha, and people thought that Lazarus's sister Mary was Mary Magdalene, what is the danger in a text like that? Like, why would somebody want to add Martha to a text like that? And I should also mention, it's not just Papyrus 66, as I said, it's Codex Alexandrinus, and some old Latin copies. And one of the biggest findings is that you can actually reconstruct the opening five verses of John—in fact, if not most of the chapter—without Martha, using real manuscripts.
And what people don't necessarily know, when they're like, holding their Bible. They're saying, "This is what the Bible says." And that comes from manuscripts right? But who adjudicated which readings from which manuscripts made it into your Bible? And those decisions are actually made by committees who make critical editions, usually in Europe. They'll make a critical edition. And it's called an "eclectic text," where basically, they, instead of just taking the reading of one manuscript and just printing what one manuscript says, they'll look at as many manuscripts as possible and usually pick the best ones. And they'll say, "Okay, Codex Sinaiticus says this, Codex Vaticanus says this, Papyrus 66 says this," and then they'll make a decision by committee and then they'll say, "Okay, this is our best guess as to what John wrote". So, that's not necessarily a reading found in any one particular manuscript. It's an eclectic—eclectic, meaning it's brought a lot of different manuscripts together to create a base text, and this is in Greek. I really want to emphasize that this is not about translation. Folks will be like, "Oh, the Bible's been mistranslated. And I'm saying, "I'm talking about the Greek."
Pete
It's worse than that. It's not just that it's been translated weird.
Elizabeth
It's been transmitted weird. Yeah. So these critical editions are working not with a translation, they are working with the Greek text, Greek text of Greek manuscripts. And what I wanted to emphasize is that you can also, by choosing different readings, create an alternate eclectic text of John 11, where Martha is not there. This is by combining readings, crossed out readings, from Codex Alexandrinus, Papyrus 66, and Codex Colbertinus. When you put the three of them together, you can get the opening five verses of John—and I have them memorized, I'll just share them [Chuckles]—"There was a certain sick man Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary, his sister. This was the Mary who anointed the Lord with ointment, who wiped His feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was sick. Therefore, Mary sent to him saying, 'Lord, behold, the one you love is sick.' When Jesus heard he said to her, 'The illness is not unto death, but it is for the glory of God to glorify the Son through it.' Now Jesus loved Lazarus and his sister." That's a different version of John 11 than your Bible, because Martha's not there. But these are real readings found in real manuscripts. So, it's still an eclectic text. It's made—Like I basically like put them together in the article, I'm like, "Look at this! You could just have a different version of John if you pick different manuscripts." Which are just as important as the manuscripts behind the critical edition, by the way, that critical edition is what gets translated into your Bible. People don't necessarily think that it's a committee of modern scholars that have determined the Greek text that gets translated into your Bibles. These are modern decisions.
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Pete
Well, I think one of the, you know, an eye opener learning Greek and Hebrew too, you know, in seminary is that, "Oh, look at the critical apparatus, look at all these footnotes that we ignore." Because it's like “they already made decisions for us, we're not going to worry about this stuff” but a lot of work went into this and... Would it be accurate or helpful to say that text critical scholars who are doing this, there's a learned intuition? Because you can't be certain, you debate things and you argue, but people who have been around manuscripts for their whole lives, like, you know, you mentioned Ep, you know, after a while, they just have a feel for things, and they can pick up on things that are like, "This just doesn't feel right." I say that positively. Because you know, these are learned people. But at the end of the day, we can't trace these things back to the original words of John, we just can't do that. It's impossible.
Elizabeth
If you pick any 10 manuscripts—like there's thousands of manuscripts of John in the world—and what I'm saying to you is that if you pick 10 of them, at least one or two will have a problem around Martha, because one in five Greek manuscripts has a problem around Martha, and one in three old Latin manuscripts has a problem around Martha. So it's really happening throughout the entire textual transmission. I had published that article before I came to Duke and Duke has manuscripts. And I wanted to look at the manuscripts in Duke's collection. Guess what? The fifth manuscript I looked at had a Mary changed to Martha, because anywhere you go, you're going to find problems around Martha and the textual transmission.
Jared
So let's dig down a little bit further—Again, my question still is, what would account for that?
Elizabeth
Yeah, sorry, [Laughing] I keep getting distracted.
Jared
No, it's good! We're going on very, very important and helpful rabbit trails, but I do want to maybe talk about that.
Elizabeth
Yeah. So we do know that people thought that Lazarus's sister Mary was Mary Magdalene, we have people thinking that from as far back as we can trace interpretation of John's gospel. And the reason that that matters is because of that confession that I was talking about earlier. This is a really pivotal chapter in the Gospel of John, where Jesus says, "I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me will never die. Do you believe this?" Everybody remembers that quote from Jesus, but everybody forgets who he's talking to. Because the person he's talking to is a forgettable character. Martha has this conversation with Jesus in John's gospel, and she runs and gets married, and then she's gone. She doesn't have anything else to do with this gospel. And we know another place where Martha shows up in the New Testament. That's in Luke's gospel. Luke chapter 10, verses 38-42. Jesus goes to the home of two sisters named Martha and Mary. And what I want to point out, I don't have any problem with that chapter in Luke's gospel, Martha and Mary belong there, Martha's good in Luke's gospel, but they don't have a brother in that story. And they seem to be in the north, they're in Galilee or Samaria. So, it doesn't actually make sense for Martha and Mary to be in Bethany if you read it from Luke's gospel, and they don't have a brother, did they not—Did Luke just not think to mention that they had a brother? Or that he got raised from the dead? You know? [Laughs] Does that not matter to Luke?
Pete
[Chuckling]
Elizabeth
So, I'm saying that it's possible that someone who was reading John's gospel—and it would have to be in the second century, what I'm talking about, this activity that I'm talking about, because Origen of Alexandria in the third century definitely has Martha in his text, he writes a commentary on John and he's got Martha, so this would have to be second century—that someone maybe is reading John, and they're noticing that Lazarus's sister Mary is very similar to Mary Magdalene, if they're reading through the gospel. Okay, so her name is Mary, in both the story of Lazarus being raised from the dead and in John chapter 20, where Mary Magdalene encounters the risen Jesus in the garden.
So both times it's a woman named Mary, at a tomb with a stone, and both of them see someone that they love dearly rise from the dead. There's also some more subtle things like Jesus says, in John 11, "Where have you laid him?" to Mary and the other onlookers. Whereas in John chapter 20, Mary Magdalene says to Jesus, when she thinks he's the gardener, she says, "I do not know where you have laid him." And it's the exact same verbs and pronouns. So it's like a mirror question Jesus asked Mary, Mary asks Jesus. The evangelists crafted that on purpose.
There's also more subtle things like this word, sudarium, which means handkerchief, it's kind of a rare Latin lone word. They take the handkerchief off of Lazarus, and then in John chapter 20, the handkerchief is rolled up inside the tomb. And then also in John 12, Mary anoints Jesus, and Judas complains about her and Jesus says, "Let her keep the ointment for the day of my burial." But there's only one woman named Mary at Jesus's tomb in John's gospel. So if someone is reading John over and over, like maybe not the first time, but maybe the second or the third time, I'm not saying the evangelist identifies Lazarus’s sister Mary as Mary Magdalene. But the evangelist absolutely puts the question in your mind.
Pete
[Hums]
Elizabeth
Because there's so many similarities between Lazarus's sister Mary and Mary Magdalene, especially when Jesus says that she's saving it for his burial. Like why—So is this Mary who is associated with Jesus's burial in John 12? Is she the one at his tomb? That question is going to be in your mind if you've read John a few times.
Pete
Mhmm.
Elizabeth
But for someone who maybe didn't like the Gospel of John, where Mary—who might be Mary Magdalene—gives this central Christological confession. By the way, the church father Tertullian, in his treatise “Against Praxeas”—which is written like 208 AD—he says that Mary gave the Christological confession. In Tertullian’s, like, turn of the third century copy of John, Mary is the Christological confessor. So, let's say that you have a Gospel of John where Mary is the Christological confessor and you think she's maybe Mary Magdalene—that would make her a central character in John because she confesses Jesus is the Christ. She anoints Jesus, she stands by him at the cross, she goes to the tomb by herself, she gets the first appearance of the risen Jesus, and the first commission to preach the gospel, which makes her a central character in the Gospel of John. So—now, again, this is theoretical [Laughing]. We don't have any copies of John where Martha is totally gone. And I want to emphasize that, I haven't proven that Martha was added to the Gospel of John. But there's a lot of smoke around the character of Martha, and you're like, was there a fire at one point?
Elizabeth
-Where Martha wasn't there. And I'm saying, well, we also have a motive, and we have a source for Martha! Right? So the motive is that we know that Mary Magdalene was very controversial at this time. We've got independent attestation from the Gospel of Mary, as I mentioned earlier, the Pistis Sophia, the Gospel of Thomas, and the Gospel of Philip, which are different texts. The gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip are in the same codex, but the other two are in totally different places copied at totally different times. And they all say that Peter has a problem with Mary Magdalene. There's something about Mary Magdalene that Peter does not like, whether it's because she's a woman, and she's not worthy, or because she's talking too much, or because Jesus loved her more than them.
Over and over, independently attested, in different documents from different centuries, there seems to be this theme of Mary being close to Jesus and Peter having a problem with it. So we know that Mary Magdalene is a controversial character. And we also know—and this is in the second, third, fourth centuries around the exact same time that our earliest copies survived from, right—and at the same time, we know a place where Martha could have come from. Luke's Gospel. This other story with two sisters who don't have a brother. And it's really, there's only one letter’s difference in Greek between Mary and Martha. It's Maria in Greek. And then the Iota- M-A-R-I-A, the "I" is like an Iota, you can change it to a Theta, which is like a "th." Maria gets changed to Martha. And I can show you many manuscripts where that exact change happens. The Mary gets changed to Martha. So it's not that hard of a change. [Laughs]
Pete
[Laughing] Right? I mean, text critics do that all the time, changing little words to make things fit better. But so—when did it start happening? I mean, I've heard of Mary being assumed to be a prostitute.
Elizabeth
[Hums]
Pete
And does that factor into this as well? Like, "Let's get her—We can't have her confessing this great confession" in verse 27.
Elizabeth
I think it's maybe the other way around, because Pope Gregory is the first to say that Mary Magdalene should be identified as “the sinner from the city,” which is a totally different story in Luke's gospel. It's an anonymous woman, in Luke chapter seven, who does anoint Jesus, but it's not in Bethany and it's not anywhere near Jesus's Passion. So it's definitely a different story in a different time. It's also near Na'an. So it's not anywhere near Bethany. And in Matthew, Mark, and John, the anointing at Bethany inaugurates Jesus's Passion narrative. Whereas, in Luke's gospel, it has nothing to do with it. It's just some random story where Jesus is forgiving a sinful woman.
So, what happened is—is that in 591, Pope Gregory the Great decided to throw all the anointings together. He had inherited this idea that Mary of Bethany was Mary Magdalene, because that had been going on for centuries. People had been arguing that or assuming that since probably the second century, definitely the third century. And what he did, the innovation that Pope Gregory did at the end of the sixth century, was to stick this sinner from the city from Luke's gospel—who is definitely a different person than Mary Magdalene in Luke's gospel because Mary Magdalene is named, and this anointing woman is anonymous. So there's a clear distinction between—there's no reason if you were to read Luke to think that they were the same woman. Gregory has thrown them all together, because of the earlier interpretive move that Mary of Bethany was Mary Magdalene—which I'm actually giving the thumbs up to. I'm saying, people were thinking that for a reason, because John encourages the reader to think that Mary of Bethany was Mary Magdalene.
But then Pope Gregory brings in this other story from Luke's gospel, and rolls them all together, and says, "Oh, yes, Mary Magdalene is the one who anoints Jesus, and she's the sinner from the city, and we know that like, what were her sins, but you know, those of the flesh. She perfumed her flesh in like, unspeakable acts." I mean, it doesn't say that in the Bible. But Pope Gregory was a very influential Pope. And that created the belief that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute, which, by the way, never was—Eastern Christianity never thought that because there's no reason to think so in the Bible, there's nothing to say that.
So, I would say that Mary Magdalene seems to have been controversial in second, third, fourth century circles, but not for being a prostitute. It was more that she was challenging Peter, or maybe other disciples, or people who thought that women shouldn't—weren't worthy to lead, or speak. That's what she was controversial for in the opening centuries of Christianity. It wasn't until the sixth century that it became about her being a prostitute. And maybe that was a way of, you know, people were probably still reading the Gospel of Mary at that point, we have a copy of the gospel of Mary from the fifth century, maybe Pope Gregory is like, “let's just call her a prostitute and maybe that will bring a stop to all of this.”
Pete
[Laughs]
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Jared
I have a thought experiment to maybe help people understand the process of textual transmission and how these get put into our Bibles. And that is to say—Okay, let's say this catches on, we find other reasons for this reading where Martha is absent and it should just be Mary. What would it take for that to get changed in the critical edition, which then would be the backing for English translations? Like, what might that look like?
Elizabeth
I'll just say, it might already be getting changed in the footnotes of critical editions.
Jared
So what does that, what does that mean, for someone who doesn't know, who hasn't ever looked at these critical editions? What does that mean?
Elizabeth
That means—so a critical edition of the New Testament has basically two parts to it. There's sort of a block of text in Greek, that's written sort of in the main body of the page. And then in smaller print at the bottom of the page are footnotes, which reference manuscript variants. Variations in the manuscripts. And I should mention that the change in Papyrus 66, where the woman's name has been crossed out and changed to say "the sisters" is already there. That has been in critical editions, because it's a really egregious change. And so that has been ever since the publication of Papyrus 66. It's already there, in your footnotes.
Jared
But it would be in the footnotes, but in the body of it, it would still have Mary and Martha and it would just have a little, you know, asterisk, we might say, and at the bottom, it would say, "Hey, just so you know, in Papyrus 66 this is actually…"
Elizabeth
That's already there, yes, absolutely. And what I would say is for it to be changed in the main body of the text...I don't think that people should change it in the main body of the text yet. And the reason why is because every single of the thousands of manuscripts with John that we have, Martha is there. So again, as I said, it's theoretical. And it's possible that the interpolation was so early that it permeated the entire textual transmission. That's absolutely possible. I guess, as someone who is a Christian, I would think that if something that egregious was changed, that maybe somewhere whether it's in a jar, or I don't know, in the Vatican basement, or like in some grave or something, I don't know—that somewhere…There's a copy where Martha's not there at all, a copy of John where Martha's not there at all. I guess, I would hope that there would be something providential on that.
But again, right now, the current state of the conversation is just that Martha's problematic, she's blinking in and out. And I have made a competitively plausible hypothesis as to why Martha might be blinking in and out, because people thought Lazarus's sister Mary was Mary Magdalene. And because Mary Magdalene was too controversial of a character to give this Christological confession, because that would make her sort of a competitor to Peter.
Pete
Right.
Elizabeth
Who gives the Christological confession in the other gospels, right. But in order to change the actual text, you would need to find a manuscript like that—that I'm talking about, and that would cause a massive shift. And that would be very troubling [Laughs] for a lot of people and that's not where we are right now. Right now, it's just a scholarly theory. But what I think might be possible is that in your study Bibles, there are footnotes, and some of those footnotes might get updated, especially if the critical edition gets a few more footnotes added about these manuscripts—which I think we might be able to do—then it will start to become reflected in your Bibles: "Hey, in some manuscripts, Martha's not there."
Pete
Hmm.
Elizabeth
You'll get that in a footnote. And that's kind of the state of the conversation right now. But I want to make sure your listeners know what the stakes are.
Jared
Yeah. I mean, I have a theory. I think it was Peter, and he was just being petty. Maybe the Peter disciples were like, "Hey, come on, this is a competition to our guy."
Pete
Well, I mean, it makes sense too because they both have a confession. And it's like-
Jared
Right, yeah.
Pete
You can't have that.
Jared
Exactly. Yeah.
Pete
It makes perfect sense to me. So, anyway.
Elizabeth
And another thing is that in John, that would mean that the person who confesses, "Jesus is the Christ" also gets the first appearance of the risen Jesus.
Pete
Ahh.
Elizabeth
And that would make her maybe even more authoritative, because it's kind of you know, there's no narration of Jesus appearing to Peter first. Luke kind of says, "Oh, the road to Emmaus, he appeared to Peter," or to Caiaphas, and it doesn't quite say that Jesus- like it doesn't like fully narrate it. Whereas we have several narrations of Jesus specifically appearing to Mary Magdalene in multiple gospels. So if she's that confessor, and she gets the first appearance of the risen Jesus, that makes her threatening, and it also is a good justification for women to hold leadership positions in the church. Whereas if you just got like a bunch of random ladies or a bunch of ladies doing lots of different things, then there's no one woman who has that much authority. It's just like, oh, this woman did this nice thing. And this woman did this nice thing. And this woman did this nice thing. It's a bunch of women, as opposed to one authoritative woman.
Pete
Well, we also need to talk about something else here, which is very much related to this, but just the name "Magdalene," and you've done a lot of thinking about that as well. Can you help us understand? Because you don't think it's like a place-name or anything like that? Right? What, how do you understand her name?
Elizabeth
Yeah, well, it's the word "Magdalene," it's unclear what the word means because there's been differing interpretations of the word throughout history. So, of course, if Mary's from Bethany, she can't be from Magdala, right? Like there's a place- If you go to the Holy Land, you can go to this nice church by the Sea of Galilee, like, "Oh, everybody loves Mary Magdalene. Oh, there's a synagogue, there's a cool synagogue with a cool stone like, this is where Mary Magdalene worshiped! She came to the synagogue, like oh my gosh!"
Pete
[Chuckling]
Elizabeth
Like so for people who love Mary Magdalene, it's fun to go there and say, like, "Ah, I'm worshiping the same place she did with her family." But basically, I wrote an article with Joan Taylor, in the Journal of Biblical Literature in 2021, where we're basically looking at the interpretation history of the word Magdalene. And throughout the early church, there was always a difference of opinion on what the word meant. We kind of start out by focusing on Luke. Luke has a special way of designating Mary Magdalene. Everybody else calls her Maria de Magdalena, Mary the Magdalene and Luke has a funny way of referencing her. He says, "Maria hē kaloumenē Magdalene," Mary the one called Magdalene. Okay, so why is he doing this funny nickname "called Magdalene"?
And if you go through Luke, he does this "kaloumenē" verb throughout, I mean over and over—not just in Luke but in the book of Acts—because Luke and Acts were authored by the same individual probably—and "kaloumenē" invariably references like a nickname. It never references where someone comes from. Like it says that Elizabeth is "she who is called barren," "kaloumenē." “Elizabeth called barren.” I mean, she's not from a town called barren, it's, people were calling Elizabeth barren. Or Martha had a sister, "kaloumenē Mary." Right? In Luke's Gospel Martha has a sister called Mary.
Or there's "Simon called Peter." These are nicknames. Whereas when Luke wants to reference a location that someone is from, he uses totally different descriptions, like, "Joseph is from a town called Arimathea," or even "Jesus the Nazarene." But never "kaloumenos," which is the masculine version of "kaloumenē." Those are not referencing places. So Luke himself seems to think that her name has a nickname. In the same vein as "Simon called Peter," or "Elizabeth called barren." It's, he uses this designation for Mary in the same way.
And then you get to the church fathers, and they all have differences of opinion. Origen thinks that maybe it is a place that she's from, he calls it Magdala. But he has no idea where it is. And the reason that's strange is because at the time he was writing, he was walking distance from what is today called Magdala by the Sea of Galilee, and he doesn't know that place and he doesn't reference it. There's a bunch of places called migdal this, migdal that. Like migdal-gad or migdal-el, it just—the word migdal in Hebrew or "Magdala" in Aramaic just means "tower." It just means tower. That's what the word means.
So the question is, does Mary come from a town called tower? Or is Mary herself a tower? And that's what Jerome thought. St. Jerome, who was tasked with translating the entire Bible, from both Hebrew and Greek into Latin. So he knew all these languages, he says Mary did not come from a place called Magdala. He says she was given this title because of her faith: Mary the toweress. And we basically in the article, we go through all the different interpretations, and we show that there has never been a consensus on what her name meant. Some people thought it was a place-name, some people thought that it was designated a title for her in some way. And we also look at the Aramaic underlying it and the word just basically means: Magdala means tower. And η is like a Greek ending that makes something feminine. So it's just toweress, or possibly Mary the Magnified One.
So basically, what we were doing in that article was saying, if you say Mary of Magdala, you are making an interpretive decision in your translation that can't be justified. Because there's always been disagreement about what that word means. And we can't be certain what it means. And if you say Mary of Magdala, it eliminates the possibility that it's a title that Jesus gave to her, where it's absolutely possible that you know—James and John were the sons of thunder. Peter was the rock. Mary was the tower. It's absolutely possible that it was a title given to her as one of Jesus's closest disciples. Again, we can't be certain, but it's within the realm of possibility. And of course where I take that is, it's possible that Lazarus's sister Mary, who confessed Jesus is the Christ, received the name Mary the Tower.
Pete
Yeah. Well, Elizabeth, we need to bring this unfortunately to a close. I do have one final question. Maybe we can, some practical implications, I guess. Because how does all this textual transmission business that you live in, how does that inform what you think the Bible is?
Elizabeth
Well, you know, I guess... Where it brought me, where I landed—and the conclusion of my dissertation—it's called, by the way, my dissertation is called: Those Who Love Me Will Keep My Word.
Pete
[Chuckling]
Elizabeth
Will people keep the word as they transmit it? No, they don't. People like—I give dozens of examples of textual instability that actually changes the story in our oldest manuscripts. I don't look at any manuscripts past the fifth century in this study—And what that tells me is that there's something about the gospel that is inherently about multiplicity. It's never about a singular text, or a singular perspective, or a singular story. Jared, I hope you'll forgive me for looking you up and your book and your emphasis on "umwelt."
Jared
Mhmm. Yep!
Elizabeth
Yeah, so that's exactly what it's about, that each person has their own perspective and sometimes that affects the text. Or if you're looking at the elephant, and you've got the tail, and the trunk and the leg, you know, the perspective of God is to know that it's an elephant, but each one only has their own individual perspective. And so what I'm basically landing on is that there's something about the gospel that is not meant to be a singular story or a singular text. That's why we preserve four gospels, right? We've always had multiplicity, we've had Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and I'm saying you can drill down even further and embrace textual variants in the same way that you can embrace Matthew's perspective versus Mark's perspective versus Luke's perspective in the Synoptic Gospels. You can look at the same story in different manuscripts of the same gospel, and embrace the multiple stories there. And there's something about that higher perspective on the multiplicity that gives us insight into the nature of the gospel.
And that it's never just if you insist on one single way of doing things, that's actually contrary to the spirit of the gospel. There's multiple perspectives, and yeah, maybe sometimes people changed it. Guess what? Matthew probably changed Mark's gospel. Does that mean we don't exegete Matthew? Of course not. These are early Christian perspectives that meant something to people, and you can look at them side by side and say, what does that tell us about the church? What does that tell us about the Word and whether people could receive it or not? And even in people's inability—or ability—to receive the Word, there's something theological in whether the Word is received or not. And if we can look at that with humility, that gives us a bigger picture on how the gospel, I think, always has worked in Christianity.
Pete
Mhmm. Well, that's wonderful. Elizabeth. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us. This was a lot of fun.
Elizabeth
Thank you so much for inviting me!
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Jared
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You've just made it through another episode of the Bible for Normal People! Don't forget you can also catch the latest episode of our other show, Faith for Normal People, wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People podcast team: Brittany Prescott, Savannah Locke, Stephanie Speight, Natalie Weyand, Stephen Henning, Tessa Stultz, Haley Warren, Nick Striegel, and Jessica Shao.
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