Will The Real Mary Please Stand Up?

I love the story of Mary and Martha in the book of Luke. The text tells us that Jesus entered a certain village, and came to the house of a woman named Martha. As she’s running around preparing a feast to accommodate the sudden arrival of Jesus and his posse of bro’s, she notices that her sister Mary is not in the kitchen.  A quick tour of the premises reveals that Mary, rather than relegating herself to the realm of the domestic, has had the audacity to sit at the feet of Jesus and listen to him teach.

How dare she.

I mean really

Martha’s hot, and she makes her frustration known.

“Jesus!” he exclaims, “why are you sitting there letting my lazy sister do jack squat while I’m running around like a chicken with my head cut off!? Tell her to get off her butt and help me!” (I’m paraphrasing).

The Lord says, “Martha, Martha. You are worried and concerned over many things, but only one is required. Mary has chosen the better part, and it will not be taken from her” (that’s straight red letter).

Now I’ve got a lot to say about that particular story not the least of which is the value of Jesus in that moment refusing to put a woman in her place but instead allowing her to participate in the intellectual and spiritual discussion that was so often reserved for men in antiquity. But unfortunately, that is not the Mary that I’ve come here to discuss.

No, the Mary that I came here to tell you all about is the Mary from John chapter 11. The one who the evangelist (the author of John) identifies as “the one who wipes the Lord's’ feet with her hair”, a foreshadowing of what’s to come in chapter 12. The one who’s Lazarus’s sister.

“Now you hold on just a cotton picken’ minute” you might be saying, “they’re the same gals!  Jesus visits Lazarus house in Luke, where his sisters Martha and Mary make him that big dinner, then comes back LATER in John to the SAME house, to perform the miracle of raising Lazarus from the dead!”

“Are you sure about that?” I might ask in return. “How can you be so sure?”

“It’s right there in the text!” you might reply, “both stories say the sisters, Martha and Mary. You tellin’ me there are TWO sets of sisters in the Jesus story, and BOTH sets of sisters just so happen to have the same name!? Come on!”

If it were, in fact, the case that both the Lucan and Johannine stories contained a set of sisters named Martha and Mary I might be persuaded to see your point. But as we discuss in the latest episode of my podcast our very oldest copy of John (P66) reveals that Chapter 11 originally told the story of one woman, Mary, and her one brother Lazarus, and that the scribe responsible for the manuscript might very well have made the SAME mistake that you (dearest reader) have just made.

You see the story in Luke makes no mention of Lazarus, nor does it reference the city of Bethany. And as my lovely friend Ryan pointed out in the show, if the Martha and Mary referenced in the gospel of Luke had indeed HAD a brother, guess what folks? It would have been HIS house, not Martha's. The gospel of Luke likewise does not even contain the story of Lazarus being raised from the dead, and in fact, the entire Bethany saga is totally removed from that gospel. So what gives?

Now I don't want to spoil a great episode of the podcast, but here's a fun tidbit. This exact conundrum was discovered by New Testament scholar Dr. Elizabeth Schrader Polczer in 2017 when she read P66 for herself and noticed that the scribe copying the text had gone back through and made some creative edits to the story. What originally read Bethany, the town of Mary and of Mary Lazarus sister was corrected to say Martha and of HER sister Mary. Now that's just the tip of the iceberg because once old boy had started to mess with the text he had to CONTINUE to mess with the text, changing pronouns and scratching out stuff to make the story work. In essence he said "hey, wait a second. Isn't there another Martha around her somewhere? Maybe that's who the evangelist meant when he wrote this story".

The scribe then proceeded to erase the words of the author of the gospel of John and replace them with his own.

The results did not, in essence, change the story of Jesus. They did not remove or reduce the power of his ministry, his death on the cross, or the miracle of his resurrection. What they DID do, however, was radically change one of the key points in John's gospel, which was to highlight the role of Mary in his ministry. One Mary, whose brother Lazarus was beloved by Jesus. One Mary, who issued the Christological confession when the stone was rolled away and her brother was returned to life. One Mary, who prepared the Lord for his burial.

One Mary. One.

"Ok ok, now you're getting a little weird here. There is another Mary, Mary Magdalene...right?"

I don't know... is there?

Guess you better go listen to the show!!