The Mystery of Mary and Martha

SONIA HALLIDAY PHOTO LIBRARY / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

The story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead (John 11) is one of the most memorable in all the New Testament. Critical to the story are Lazarus’s sisters, Mary and Martha, who send for Jesus to heal their sick brother and, after his death, bear witness to Lazarus emerging from his tomb. Intriguingly, however, some early copies of John’s Gospel suggest that only Mary—sometimes thought to be Mary Magdalene—was part of the original story, while Martha was added later. Here, we review the evidence and explore why some early Christians may have felt Lazarus needed a second sister.

Papyrus 66, the oldest surviving codex of the Gospel of John, is usually dated to approximately 200 CE. The Greek text was first discovered and published in the 1950s and is considered to be one of the world’s most important manuscripts for reconstructing the text of John. In my own research, I stumbled across some odd scribal activity in Papyrus 66 that had not been fully explored; I’ve since looked at transcriptions of nearly 300 additional copies of John in Greek, Latin, Coptic, Syriac, and Ge‘ez. My conclusion is that there are unusual textual issues around the character Martha of Bethany in dozens of manuscripts of John 11 and 12. I highlight a handful of examples in the accompanying sidebar (see “The Secret Text of John 11”, examples A–E).¹

Let’s begin with what is happening in Papyrus 66. At John 11:1, the scribe wrote a nonsensical reading: “There was a certain sick man, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and of Mary his sister.” Oddly, Mary’s name (“Maria” in Greek) appears twice. But the scribe corrected the text to read “the village of Mary and of Martha her sister” (italics mine).

Perhaps this was just a mistake; scribes often accidentally wrote the same word twice. But Papyrus 66 is not the only ancient manuscript with strange changes around Mary and Martha in John 11. In Codex Alexandrinus, copied in the fifth century, the scribe was apparently uncertain whether there were one or two women in John 11:1. The first version of the verse was copied sensibly: “There was a certain sick man, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary his sister.” But the scribe corrected the text to add a second woman (notably, the masculine pronoun “his” remains uncorrected): “There was a certain sick man, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and of Martha his sister” (italics mine).

In both of these crucial manuscripts of John 11:1, the scribes originally wrote the words “Mary his sister,” and Martha was added by way of correction. Also in both cases, the name “Maria” was changed to say “Martha” by the simple alteration of an iota to a theta (see examples A and B).

Again, these could be explained as simple mistakes. But something far more unusual is happening at John 11:3 in Papyrus 66. The first transcription had only one woman in this verse, but she was then split into two. The scribe first wrote, “Therefore, Mar[?]a sent (singular) to him saying (singular)…” But then the scribe awkwardly scratched out the woman’s name (presumably “Maria,” though it is impossible to tell), and changed all of the verbs from singular to plural (see example C). The story now matches what is found in modern Bibles: “Therefore, the sisters sent (plural) to him saying (plural)…”

Papyrus 66 and Codex Alexandrinus are two of the most important copies of John in the world, and both correct the text to add Martha in these verses. Could these scribes’ independent decisions to add a second sister reflect awareness of a different version of the Lazarus story?

Manuscripts in Latin attest similar peculiarities. Codex Corbiensis, an Old Latin manuscript copied in the fifth century, also has an unexpected change, this time at John 11:5. The scribe originally wrote, “Jesus loved Lazarus and Mary and his/her sister” (the possessive pronoun eius is gender-neutral), but a corrector from several centuries later added Martha’s name (see example D): “Jesus loved Lazarus and Mary and his/her sister Martha.”

Meanwhile, Codex Colbertinus, an Old Latin manuscript dating from the 12th century but believed to retain a fourth-century text, has its own unique version of John 11:5 (see example E): “Now Jesus loved Lazarus and his sister.”

Similar changes are found throughout dozens of manuscripts of the Gospel of John: sometimes “Maria” is changed to “Martha”; sometimes only one sister is mentioned where modern Bibles mention two; sometimes Mary does something that Martha is “supposed” to do. Several later Greek manuscripts (10th–12th centuries) even state that Mary served the supper in John 12:2.

Papyrus 66 clearly shows the most striking textual problems around Martha, but my study demonstrates that approximately one in five Greek witnesses and one in three Old Latin manuscripts display some sort of inconsistency around her. Perhaps the most significant finding of the study is that by compiling real readings from just three of the world’s weightiest gospel manuscripts, the text of John 11:1–5 can be fully and sensibly reconstructed without Martha:

¹ There was a certain sick man, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary his sister. (Codex Alexandrinus before correction)

² Now this was the Mary who anointed the Lord with ointment and wiped his feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was sick.

³ Therefore Mary sent to him, saying, “Lord, behold, the one you love is sick.” (Papyrus 66 before correction)

⁴ But when Jesus heard he said to her, “The sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, so that the Son may be glorified through it.” (Papyrus 66 before correction)

⁵ Now Jesus loved Lazarus and his sister. (Codex Colbertinus, uncorrected)

MARTIN BODMER FOUNDATION, GENEVA

The manuscript record is not the only place where Martha’s presence is uneven. Several strange references to John 11 are also found in writings from ancient church commentators. In Tertullian’s treatise Against Praxeas (c. 210), when referencing Martha’s Christological confession in John 11:27, he wrote: “Mary, confessing him to be the Son of God…”² The fourth-century archbishop John Chrysostom also seemed to have access to a different version of John 11, since he states in On the Gospel of John and the Resurrection of Lazarus that only Mary responded to Jesus in John 11:34–35: “‘Where have you laid him?’ And Mary said, ‘Come and see, Lord.’ And Jesus wept” (GCS 1 2:224, previously attributed to Hippolytus; my translation).

Another witness to inconsistency around Martha’s presence is ancient artwork. The standard ancient iconography of the Lazarus story depicts only one woman, who falls at Jesus’s feet (cf. John 11:32). This one-sister iconography is seen on the vast majority of early Christian sarcophagi, as well as reliquaries and gospel books.

The obvious question to ask is, why would an early editor want to add Martha to John’s Gospel? It could be related to the fact that many ancient readers understood Lazarus’s sister Mary to be Mary Magdalene. Several of the earliest interpreters of John’s Gospel said so: This was the view of Hippolytus of Rome (third century), the Manichaeans (third century), and St. Ambrose (fourth century). Perhaps this was due to the obvious parallels between the story of Lazarus being raised from the dead and the story of Jesus’s resurrection in John 20: both describe a woman named Mary weeping at a tomb, who sees someone she loves rising from the dead. The question Jesus asks in John 11 is actually mirrored by Mary Magdalene in John 20: “Where have you laid him?” (John 11:34; 20:15).

© RMN-GRAND PALAIS / ART RESOURCE, NY

But these parallels are far less noticeable with Martha in the scene; once Martha is there, the reader is unwittingly drawn to a different gospel story written by a different author: Luke 10:38–42. In that scene, Martha and Mary seem to be in either Galilee or Samaria, and they have no brother. They aren’t anywhere near Bethany at all (which was just outside Jerusalem). In other words, if Martha were not there in John’s Gospel, there would be no real reason to connect these sisters in Luke 10 with the Bethany siblings of John 11. Could Martha and Mary from Luke’s Gospel be an entirely different family from Lazarus and Mary in John’s Gospel?

It’s striking that in Bibles today, Martha utters the central Christological confession in John: “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world” (John 11:27). But if some early readers of John thought that Mary—perhaps Mary Magdalene—gave that central confession, she might have been seen as a rival to Peter. Peter gives a similar confession in Matthew 16:16: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Even though John still gives the Christological confession to a woman, it might have been less controversial for a minor character to utter these words. Perhaps Martha, a character sourced from Luke, was inserted into John for a very good reason: to ensure that Mary was not too prominent a character in this Gospel.

There is one last point worth underlining here: The word “Magdalene” does not necessarily indicate that Mary came from a place called Magdala. Joan Taylor and I have shown that “Magdalene” could just as well be an honorific title indicating Mary’s status as the “toweress.”^a3 So, was Mary “the Tower” the original Christological confessor of John’s Gospel? If so, the Fourth Gospel’s text may have been changed to ensure that the first person to confess Jesus as the Christ was not also the first person to whom the risen Jesus appeared. The change would have ensured that Mary Magdalene could not be seen as a rival to Peter’s authority.

Of course, this is just one scholar’s theory; but the converging evidence around the Lazarus story in manuscripts, church commentators, and ancient artwork makes it a tantalizing one.

The story of Jesus’s raising of Lazarus (John 11) is one of the most memorable in the Gospels. Integral to the narrative are Lazarus’s two sisters, Mary and Martha, who petition Jesus for healing and then bear witness to their brother’s resurrection. But there is manuscript evidence that an early version of the story included just one sister, Mary, possibly Mary Magdalene. Was Martha a later addition to the story?