Series: Lectionary Notes
tl;dr: This week's readings gives me an excuse to talk about one of the most fascinating current theories in biblical scholarship around Mary The Tower.
With all due respect to the other texts and the themes of resurrection and life and death and the flesh, I found myself really wanting to use this as a chance to talk about the most fascinating bit of biblical scholarship I've encountered in years because it's about this story in John 11. I'm going to get very nerdy for a few minutes.
I learned about this through Diana Butler Bass talking to Elizabeth Schrader who has been leading the scholarly charge on this. Here's a long video of Diana and Elizabeth breaking it all down:
If you have the time to watch that, do it, as I'm sure the conversation there is going to be more valuable than my summary. Otherwise, I will do my best.
Mary and Martha and Lazarus
In the version we typically see in Bibles today, the family of John 11 consists of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. The presence of Martha makes you think that these are the same two sisters as in Luke 10, with Mary and Martha. There's no question they are both there in that Luke story. There's nothing about this scholarship impacting that story in Luke, just whether this is the same Mary and Martha in John. There are a lot of Mary's, but there aren't going to be that many Mary and Martha sister combinations, so if John 11 really does have a Mary and a Martha, odds are that they were meant to be seen as the same people.
There is no hint in that other story, though, that Mary and Martha have a brother, and they seem to be in Galilee or Samaria, which is far from Bethany where John 11 takes place. Maybe Lazarus was out of town that day. Maybe Mary and Martha had some reason they needed to travel. It absolutely could be the same sisters. But it also might not be.
Or No Martha At All
Here's the big scholarly revelation: in the earliest manuscript fragment we have, Papyrus 66 from about 200 CE, there's a version of the story where Lazarus only has one sister, Mary, and it is visibly corrected to add Martha.
Also, there is another early source Tertullian who says that "Mary" (doesn't specify which one) gives a Christological confession. But in the John 11 text as we normally see it today, it is Martha who gives that confession. What do we do with that?
Elizabeth's theory is that there were originally two versions of this text. One contained Martha and seems to tie this family to the same one from Luke 10. One only contained a Mary, and Tertullian had this version. The version with Martha won out instead.
Mary Magdalene
If it was just one Mary, and not the one who was the sister of Martha in Luke, that opens up other questions. The text doesn't give us anything else about this Mary beyond being from Bethany and a sister of Lazarus.
There are thematic parallels, though, between the Mary in John 11 and Mary Magdalene. In both stories about a resurrection, Mary is the first at the tomb, who expresses faith in Jesus and in resurrection, cries, has an "if" statement for Jesus (if you had been here, he wouldn't have died; if you have taken him away, please tell me), and a stone gets rolled away. The Mary in John 20 is clearly named as Magdalene, so some other commentators believed that this Mary in John 11 is also Mary Magdalene. That makes sense in terms of storytelling, with John doing some intentional foreshadowing with the Lazarus story.
It could be another Mary, and John is still doing the foreshadowing with the rest of the story, but it also makes a lot of sense it would be Magdalene.
Who Cares?
Why does this matter? Currently Martha is the one to make the Christological confession in 11:27. In the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke), Simon gets that confession and Jesus responds by naming him Peter (The Rock) who the church will be built on. Everyone remembers Peter, first among the disciples and commonly treated as the first Pope with the whole line of authority coming down from him. Usually we don't even call him Simon; we just call him by the new name he was given because of his Christological confession. Here Martha gets that confession, and John does not give Simon Peter a similar confession at all. Everybody forgets about Martha because the only other story she is associated with is that one in Luke (plus because she's a woman, of course). She's not a significant character in the story so it's easy to gloss over her confession entirely.
But what if we went with the visibly replaced version instead, and what if the Mary in that version is Mary Magdalene?
If we just stick with John, that was Mary Magdalene who got the Christological confession, Mary Magdalene who was the first at the tomb, and Mary Magdalene who appears in a lot of other stories. Suddenly we realize that she was a much more important character in John's eyes. She might even be more important than Simon Peter.
The Tower
Here's one more fun fact. One common claim is that the "Magdalene" of her name meant "of a place called Magdala" which would conflict with this John 11 theory where the Mary there is named as being from Bethany. In Aramaic, the word Magdalene means "Tower-ess" which might mean that she comes from a town called "Tower" or might mean that she was a Tower. There are early church sources who seem to believe both.
I'm a little inclined toward the idea that she is The Tower, if only because it's not very common elsewhere in the Gospels to identify people by their place of origin most of the time that they are named. Maybe their place of origin comes up occasionally when it is relevant, but I don't see it as relevant in the resurrection account. But Mary Magdalene is often referred to as Magdalene, not just Mary, with this story in John 11 being a possible exception.
If that's the case, we're saying that Mary Magdalene was Mary The Tower in the same way that Simon Peter was Simon The Rock. With Simon, we know he got that title in response to his Christological confession. If in John 11 it was really Mary Magdalene who has the Christological confession, it make senses that she also gets a similar title.
Questions of Authority
Now we're starting to get into questions of authority in the early Church. This ties into one of my other favourite little things about John. In the resurrection account in the Synoptic Gospels, it is clear that after the women tell the disciples Jesus isn't in the tomb anymore, Peter is the first to go in. But John, writing later and probably with at least some of the others to work with, makes the point that "the beloved disciple" outran Peter and got there first. They waited for Peter, then Peter went in.
Side note: the "beloved disciple" is commonly assumed to be John himself, and that does generally make sense, but it is also never stated directly. It might be someone else. Maybe there's some way it is also Mary Magdalene, which would align with some language of the much later Gnostic text the Gospel of Thomas that point at Mary as "beloved." But to do that, you'd have to also change other parts of John, like in 20:2 when Mary goes to Peter and to the beloved disciple, and there's no obvious reason why John would sometimes call her by name and sometimes call her the beloved disciple. That it is John himself still makes the most sense to me.
If this theory is right about Mary Magdalene, it feels entirely in line with John that he would be eager to diminish Peter a little, and declare himself a little bit more aligned with Mary. Mary gets the Christological confession. Mary is the first to the tomb. When Mary tells the beloved disciple, the beloved disciple gets there before Peter. While the Synoptics are clearly on Team Peter, John is clearly on Team Beloved Disciple and, if this theory about John 11 is true, also Team Mary. To me it comes across a lot more like pettiness than genuine power struggle, one of those friendly rivalries who do respect each other but take the occasional shot to make sure they don't get too full of themselves, but I think it's fair to believe there was some tension in those communities as there are in any other community.
Of course, there are some big assumptions here that we don't really know. Maybe Elizabeth's theory is wrong and Martha was almost always there, and the version that Papyrus 66 was talking about was a fluke anomaly quickly corrected. Maybe the story was just one Mary but it was a different Mary. Maybe Magdalene did just mean being from a place and it was not a title acknowledging her importance.
But, if this theory is true, it says some fascinating things. We do know from some other sources that the earliest church did have a lot of women in leadership, at least at the local level. It remains true that the majority if not entirety of those writing the authoritative texts of our biblical canon were written by men (some people believe a woman wrote Hebrews). So maybe it was the case that Peter/James/John were clear overall movement leaders among Jews, plus Paul as the apostle to the Gentiles, and Mary never had much influence, but with lots of women leading locally. Or maybe Mary The Tower was initially meant to be seen as a leader at a similar level to Simon The Rock.
Understanding the Bible
If this is all true, we are acknowledging that the editing of the text lowered itself to our human patriarchal assumptions by diminishing Mary Magdalene over time, as church leadership slowly stopped having as many women in it until they were effectively gone by about 300 CE. Perhaps around 200, as the culture was really stopping them from having women in leadership, and as the movement growing led to needing more layers of structure to be sustainable, that the scribes doing the copying concluded that it just wouldn't be viable to treat Mary as that important. It was just too extreme to treat women as equal at that high of a level. But now we are ready to face that reality, with biblical scholarship finding it at a time when we are more receptive to it. It's also possible that even if the two versions of the story theory is true, that it was much more innocent or subconscious, simply blurring the lines between two families over time.
What does that mean for how we understand the Bible?
If your concept of the Bible is that every transcript and every translation is perfectly inerrant and obvious to understand correctly, this would be a crisis event, but to be blunt, so is a lot else about the Bible once you start really looking into it.
For those of us who have a more open and accommodating view of God, this is completely in line with my expectations. This is a God who (as most embodied as Jesus) would be willing to sink to our level in order to communicate their love to us, no matter how much we get wrong and inflict suffering on God and on each other. In this same text, this God takes the time to cry alongside his friends and even some strangers, when in theory he could have snapped his fingers and raised Lazarus without even acknowledging those human emotions. The text can be affected by its culture in negative ways, because our understanding of God is one who bends down to meet us where we are, and then keeps pulling us forward toward a world of greater justice for those being marginalized by society, including women. Maybe this is the exact right time to re-discover that God has always been lifting up women like Mary the Tower, even when we humans push them down.
I think my reaction to this John 11 text is a good representation for how I read the Bible in general and why I still think it is valuable 2000 years later in my postmodern and mostly post-Christian context. Yes, I do find it interesting from perspectives like history and linguistics. Most of all, though, I care about the Bible because I believe it is a tradition that can help us understand humanity and our relationship to God better. It is one thing for me to say "I think women should be treated as equals" and it is a much more powerful thing to see this wrestling unfold through history. Maybe there is human pettiness and power structures and the impacts of patriarchy and other oppressive human hierarchies. But there is also a God at work, calling us toward liberation even as we sometimes go kicking and screaming and changing our texts to resist it.
The Bible is messy, because humans are messy. This is not a flaw. We don't need to rush to try to wipe away that mess. We need to be honest about it and look for how God is working through it.
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