INNER CIRCLE: Erasing Mary Magdalene?

INNER CIRCLE: Erasing Mary Magdalene? January 31, 2025

 

Imagine being a musician who stumbles upon a mystery hidden in the text of the Gospel of John—a mystery so profound that it could rewrite our understanding of Mary Magdalene’s role in early Christianity. That’s exactly what happened to Elizabeth Schrader, a singer-songwriter turned biblical scholar.

Schrader’s journey began in the most unexpected way. While living in New York and frequenting a Catholic church with a garden dedicated to the Virgin Mary, she had a profound moment of inspiration as the phrase, “Maybe you should talk to Mary Magdalene about that,” popped into her head while praying. Inspired by this, she penned a song about Mary Magdalene, not realizing it would change the course of her life forever.

Curiosity about Mary Magdalene led her to the Brooklyn Public Library, where she began studying all that she could about this mysterious woman. What started as an effort to better understand the subject of her song turned into an obsession that propelled her into the world of biblical scholarship. “It was like falling down the world’s deepest rabbit hole,” she said. Soon, she was poring over ancient manuscripts, diving into textual criticism, and asking bold questions.

The Mystery of Martha’s Addition

In her quest to find answers about the life and character of Mary Magdalene, she turned to Papyrus 66, one of the oldest substantial copies of the Gospel of John, dating back to around 200 CE. What she found was shocking: in John, chapter 11, where the story of Lazarus unfolds, the text showed clear signs of alteration. Mary’s name had been crossed out and replaced with Martha in several key verses. Even the verbs were altered to change singular references to plural, suggesting the addition of a second sister. “It looked like someone had split one woman into two,” Schrader explained. In fact, the changes were so awkward and clumsy that they hinted at an editor grappling with conflicting source texts. Scholars had noticed these edits as far back as the 1960s, but no one had delved deeply into their implications. Elizabeth decided to change that.

A Competitive Hypothesis

Elizabeth’s research uncovered a plausible hypothesis: originally, the Gospel of John might have featured just two siblings—Lazarus and Mary—with Mary playing a prominent role. “There’s no reason to think Martha from Luke’s Gospel has anything to do with this story,” she argued. After all, Luke’s Martha and Mary live in a different location, lack a brother, and appear in a completely unrelated context.

What’s more, early church fathers like Tertullian and Hippolytus seemed to remember a version of John’s Gospel where Mary—not Martha—was the central figure. This Mary was the one who made a pivotal confession of Jesus as the Christ, a role similar to Peter’s confession in Matthew’s Gospel. Yet, over time, Martha appears to have been added to the text, diluting Mary’s prominence.

Why Was Mary Magdalene Erased?

So why would anyone tamper with Mary’s role? Elizabeth points to a potential power struggle in early Christianity. “The Gospel of John makes deliberate parallels between Mary’s role in raising Lazarus and her encounter with Jesus at the empty tomb,” she said. “It suggests that Mary Magdalene could have been as central to the movement as Peter.” However, this posed a problem for a patriarchal church structure that favored Peter’s authority.

Adding Martha served a purpose. It diminished Mary’s unique role by spreading her actions across multiple characters. Suddenly, the confession of Jesus as the Christ belonged to a minor character, not the woman who stood at the cross, visited the empty tomb, and received the first apostolic commission from the risen Christ.

Bringing the Research to Light

Schrader’s groundbreaking work didn’t stop with her discoveries in Papyrus 66. She broadened her research to include over a hundred manuscripts and found similar patterns. Her findings culminated in a peer-reviewed article published in the Harvard Theological Review, an achievement that shocked even her. “I was just a songwriter,” she said. “Now I’m presenting my work to the top biblical scholars in the world.”

Today, her work has sparked conversations about the need for diversity in biblical scholarship. “If everyone studying these texts comes from the same background, we’re bound to miss things,” she noted. Her fresh perspective as a woman and a layperson allowed her to ask questions others hadn’t.

A Legacy of Inclusion

Schrader’s research reminds us of something crucial: the voices of women in early Christianity were significant, even if history tried to silence them. “The Gospel of John subtly suggests that Mary Magdalene is as foundational to the faith as Peter,” she said. “That’s a narrative worth recovering.”

As Schrader continues her studies, she’s determined to make her findings accessible. “This isn’t just for scholars,” she insists. “Every Christian has the right to know there’s a major textual problem in John 11. That’s a fact.”

Her work challenges us to revisit the stories we’ve inherited, to ask hard questions, and to embrace the richness of a faith that includes all voices—especially those that have been marginalized.

Documenting the Crime

In Schrader’s paper called “Was Martha of Bethany Added to the Fourth Gospel in the Second Century?” published in the Harvard Theological Review in 2017, she documents several scribal edits made to the oldest copy of John Chapter 11 – Papyrus 66 – referring to Martha in the story of the raising of Lazarus. She also documents over 200 other changes made to this same chapter in other ancient texts which all prove there were a suspicious amount of edits made to this text. What all of this means is that Martha might not have been present in the original text.

Based on her research, Schrader suggests a more coherent reconstruction of the text based on readings from several early manuscripts which show that Martha doesn’t need to be in the story for it to make sense. In fact, reading the story without Martha makes everything much more coherent.

As Schrader says:

“Mary Magdalene’s original role in the Fourth Gospel has been divvied up, so that she now appears as three women in John. I’m not arguing that Martha didn’t exist – she definitely belongs in the Gospel of Luke. But I do not believe she belongs in the Gospel of John. There’s too much manuscript evidence, where problems appear around Martha in nearly every scene in John in which she appears. You have to look at over 200 manuscripts at once to see this trend; only recently have hundreds of transcriptions of the Gospel of John been made available simultaneously online. I believe that’s why this evidence was overlooked previously…The name ‘Mary’ has been changed to ‘Martha’ at John 11:21…in Papyrus 66, the oldest copy of the Gospel of John we have, there are problems with Martha in five verses straight. One verse has a ‘Maria’ changed to ‘Martha,’ and in another, it appears that the name ‘Maria’ is changed to ‘the sisters,’ altering one named woman into two unnamed women.”[9]

Multiple Mary’s

Schrader has also noted that several important phrases are repeated in both John Chapter 11 and John Chapter 20 regarding Mary of Bethany and Mary Magdalene, for example:

“crying,” 11:31, 11:33, 20:11; “where have you laid him” / “where you have laid him,” 11:34, 20:15; “tomb,” 11:38, 20:11; “stone,” 11:38, 20:1; “handkerchief,” 11:44, 20:7; and “my brother” / “my brothers,” 11:21, 20:17). Deirdre Good notes that “both [Marys] weep over a dead man at a tomb; both are consoled (11:31, 33; 20:11, 15); both accrue followers (11:32, 45; 20:18); both experience resurrection (11:43, 45; 20:16).” Mary of Bethany is also associated with Jesus’s burial (12:7), as is Mary Magdalene (20:1).”

As she concludes, “These repeated themes demonstrate an obvious parallelism between the chapters, a parallelism that would certainly be amplified in Martha’s absence…

Uncovering the Motives

So, all of this begs the question: Why would anyone go to the trouble of adding Martha to the Gospel of John?

Well, as Schrader points out in her scholarship, in the story of the raising of Lazarus in John’s Gospel, Martha is recorded as making a Christological confession:

“I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, who is to come into the world.” [John 11:27]

In John’s Gospel, it is Martha who is the first person to realize and emphatically proclaim that Jesus is the Messiah, which is repeated once again at the end of John’s Gospel:

“These things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” [John 20:31]

We read these types of Christological confessions in the Synoptic Gospels but, in those texts, it is Peter who makes the declaration, and in the Gospel of Matthew Jesus responds to Peter’s confession this way:

“Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven, and I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” [Matthew 16:13 – 19]

So, why does any of this matter? Because if Martha was added to the text in John Chapter 11, then it wasn’t Martha who made this Christological Confession. It was Mary, and if this was the same Mary who was also present at the tomb, and who was the first one sent out by Jesus – literally as an Apostle [sent one] to the Apostles – to proclaim the Good News of the Resurrection – then that could have posed a very large problem to the male leaders of the early Christian church.

Early Christian Testimony

We might ask, is there any reason to think that this was Mary Magdalene who made this Christological confession? Well, in the third century, Tertullian certainly thought so, and he was certainly no fan of women having much authority in the church.

All of this suggests the very real possibility that Mary, the sister of Lazarus was not “from Magdala” but was, in fact, Mary the Tower who, like Peter in the other Gospels, made the Christological confession that Jesus was the Messiah and became the Apostle to the Apostles.

The rivalry between Mary and Peter is quite well-attested in the early Christian lexicon. If Mary Magdalene [the Tower] began to threaten the authority of the Apostle Peter [the Rock], it would make perfect sense for Christian scribes to go back and erase Mary Magdalene from the Gospel of John and put this confession in the mouth of Martha – thereby conflating and confusing Mary and Martha of Bethany with Mary Magdalene and forever obscuring her place of prominence with the Christian story.

As Schrader says in her conclusion to the paper “Was Martha of Bethany Added to the Fourth Gospel in the Second Century?”:

“I conclude that the entire Greek and Vetus Latina text transmission reflects significant instability around the figure of Martha in the Fourth Gospel. Of all the Greek witnesses, our most ancient witness, P66, most clearly suggests Martha’s absence, because it contains a cluster of verses (John 11:1–5) where both her presence and presentation are uncertain…Throughout the transmission, traces of only one sister are most persistent in John 11:3, appearing all the way until the first printed edition of the King James Bible. The verse with the most unstable content is John 11:5.”

It is clear that an early tradition circulated where Mary, the sister of Lazarus in the Fourth Gospel, was identified with Mary, the sister of Martha in the Third Gospel. Although there is no mention of a brother or a resurrection scene in Luke 10, and the Lukan story suggests a more likely Samaritan or Galilean context, the pair “Mary and Martha” seems to have been accepted into the Fourth Gospel regardless of these contextual inconsistencies.

“…However if Martha were not present in the text of John 11, it must be pointed out that there would be no real reason to connect the Lazarus story to Luke 10. In fact, with only Mary present I believe readers would be far more likely to connect John 11 to John 20:11– 17, where one woman named Mary also cries and speaks with Jesus at another tomb.

“…Consequently, this study yields an interesting exegetical result: a Johannine text form without Martha would create a strong textual implication that Mary of Bethany was Mary Magdalene

I believe the changes around Martha in P66 cannot simply be dismissed as scribal mechanical errors, because there are so many strange variants around Martha throughout the text transmission of the Fourth Gospel, as well as in patristic quotations and ancient extracanonical texts. I believe we can still see a literary prehistory reflected in P66, giving us a window into a predecessor circulating text form with only Mary and Lazarus present, now overlaid with secondary interpolations of the figure of Martha. It seems likely that there was an early harmonization of the Johannine Lazarus story to the Lukan story of Mary and Martha. The larger questions are: Who exactly added Martha to this story, and why?

Scholars such as Mark Goodacre also point out an important detail about Mary of Bethany from Luke’s Gospel and Mary Magdalene from John’s Gospel:

“The term “Mary of Bethany” is a scholarly convenience, used to distinguish her from other women of the same name…Mary Magdalene and Mary of 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 (John 11, John 20). Although Mary “of Magdala” has become a scholarly commonplace, it is worth remembering that she is never described this way in the Synoptics or John, where she is always “Mary Magdalene” or just “Mary.””

So, it seems very clear, according to the most recent scholarship, that attempts were made to erase Mary Magdalene from the text of John’s Gospel and to diminish her importance in the minds of early Christians as a way of resolving the ongoing rivalry between her and the Apostle Peter.

**

The newest book from Keith Giles, “The Quantum Sayings of Jesus: Decoding the Lost Gospel of Thomas” is available now on Amazon. Order HERE>

Keith Giles is the best-selling author of the Jesus Un series. He has appeared on CNN, USA Today, BuzzFeed, and John Fugelsang’s “Tell Me Everything.”

He co-hosts The Heretic Happy Hour Podcast and his solo podcast, Second Cup With Keith which are both available on Spotify, Amazon, Apple, Podbean or wherever you find your podcast fix.

 

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