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July 22, 2018
Martha Martha Martha
"In a peer-reviewed article published in the journal Harvard Theological Review, Duke doctoral student and text critic Elizabeth Schrader argues that Mary Magdalene’s role in the Jesus story was deliberately obscured by those who copied out the Bible in order to dilute the importance of Mary Magdalene."
To make her case, Schrader turned to the earliest surviving manuscripts of the New Testament and initially looked at the story of the raising of Lazarus told in the Gospel of John 11:1-44. According to the version in our Bibles, Lazarus had two sisters named Mary (Maria) and Martha and, throughout the centuries it has been debated whether this Mary is the same Mary as Mary Magdalene.
When Schrader looked at P66, a papyrus codex (book) traditionally dated to the second century which is also the oldest existing manuscript of the story, she noticed something odd. In John 11:1, someone had scratched out the Greek iota (the “I” in Mary) and replaced it with a “th” changing the name of a second Mary to read “Martha.” Then, two verses later, Schrader told me, “the copyist actually splits a woman in two—one woman's name has been scratched out and corrected to say ‘the sisters,’ and the verbs describing the woman are changed from singular to plural.”
When Schrader looked at P66, a papyrus codex (book) traditionally dated to the second century which is also the oldest existing manuscript of the story, she noticed something odd. In John 11:1, someone had scratched out the Greek iota (the “I” in Mary) and replaced it with a “th” changing the name of a second Mary to read “Martha.” Then, two verses later, Schrader told me, “the copyist actually splits a woman in two—one woman's name has been scratched out and corrected to say ‘the sisters,’ and the verbs describing the woman are changed from singular to plural.”
Posted by Ghost of a flea at July 22, 2018 07:48 AM