The Blessing of the Magdalene

So, you know, oftentimes people will hold up the Bible and say, the Bible is clear, or the Bible says this. And people who do that are not always thinking about where the Bible comes from. I think on some level they do know that it comes from manuscripts, and they probably know that there are thousands of manuscripts. But what they might not know is not every single manuscript was exactly alike. And finding the ones that are closer to the source, oftentimes those are the oldest manuscripts, even the best manuscripts. And in fact, several text critics have pointed out that the further back you go, the more variation you get, which is not what you would expect if there was this word of God that was carefully preserved. You would expect that, like, oh, down the line, some people snuck some things in. But if you go to the very beginnings, you see a lot of textual variation.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we try to increase the public’s access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and confront the spread of misinformation about the same. I am very excited today to have Dr. Elizabeth Schrader Polczer with us. How are you doing today, Elizabeth?

I’m doing great. It’s a beautiful day here.

Good to hear. And where are you located at the moment?

I am in Durham, North Carolina, for the next few weeks and then I’ll be moving to Philadelphia shortly.

All right, well, that’s. I’m trying to think about the difference in weather there. Fewer mountains probably, but yeah, it’s a.

Little more humid here. But we got both beach and mountain. Like three hours west is mountains, three hours east is beach. So.

Yeah, all good. Okay. Well, we are very excited to be talking to you. Well, I am very excited to be talking to you today. That’s longtime viewers, the whole, what, two months that we’ve been around will recognize that we are one Dan Short. And Dan Beecher, alas, indeed is unfortunately down with a touch of the COVID down with the sickness, as the great poet once said. And so he’s not feeling up to. He’s not, let’s say I used to say this to my 14 year old all the time and now I’ve forgotten the words that I use. Something about being on camera, I always get a little. A little glitchy. But he’s not, he’s not dressed to receive, let’s just put it that way.

Alas. Send him my regards. I was looking forward to chatting with him, but some other time, perhaps.

Definitely some other time. Now, right before we got started here, you mentioned that you are this is your second career, and I want to get started into talking about Mary with the fact that you wrote a song about Mary as a singer songwriter, as your part of your previous career. And did that actually play a direct role in your becoming interested in academically studying Mary Magdalene?

It. It was. I. I always describe it as like a wormhole to another life. I had been doing the music business for a very long time. Um, I was in a band and we toured with people like Jewel and Poe and we opened for, like, Rusted Root. We did a lot of fun things. And. And I was on an episode of the Gilmore Girls. There was like, I did. I did a lot of stuff in the music business.did a lot of stuff in the music business. And I kind of found that over time there were diminishing returns in the music business, which, because it’s a very… If anybody’s noticed, it’s a very youth-oriented culture. And so sort of, as time went on and I gained more and more experience, it was like, less and less successful, which to me was very irksome because I knew I was getting better and better at my craft.

Interesting.

And so at a certain point, I was just feeling very frustrated. And it was around that time that I was. I’ve always been a very spiritual person. I know, I know not everybody on this podcast is a spiritual person, but I have always been a spiritual person. And I was in a garden dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and I was sort of praying, and I actually heard words in response to my prayer. And they were, “Maybe you should talk to Mary Magdalene about that.” And I was like, that’s. That’s not what I was expecting. And also, I don’t, like, hear words in response to prayers usually. So I thought that was very strange. And so I walked. I marched right over to the Brooklyn Public Library. I was living in Brooklyn, New York at this time, and I checked out the Complete Idiot’s Guide to Mary Magdalene.

Okay, that’s a good start.

Yeah, well, I mean, it was actually. It was a great. It was a great introduction. And then I just started becoming interested in Mary Magdalene. But also I. As I left the garden, I had this sort of lyric in my head that said, that was. I went to the garden of the Holy Virgin and I asked for the blessing of the Magdalene. And I. And I was like, oh, that’s kind of cute. That’s a cute lyric. So I went home and I kind of wrote this song much more quickly than usual. It only took me a couple of days to write the song and I recorded it. And so then it was. I released a record called Magdalene. And that just caused me to say, oh, you know, I can’t release a record about Mary Magdalene without knowing something about her. Little did I know that I was stumbling upon what is, in fact, the world’s deepest rabbit hole. And now I am a Mary Magdalene scholar and it is now my profession, and I am now like a professor of New Testament, which is very weird because I remember very clearly that I was a singer songwriter in Brooklyn not so long ago.

Yeah. Wow. That’s quite a different life. But hopefully that. That colors your research and the contributions that you can make to research in. In a helpful way. There are a lot of. Once you get to know a lot of biblical scholars, it’s interesting how many other hobbies and other lives there are out there that we don’t see on the. On the pages of the articles and the books that we read.

Yeah, everybody’s got a reason for getting into it. Sometimes they’ll tell you and sometimes they won’t. But mine is very public. You can go watch the Magdalene video. And it was released before I ever started graduate work, so it’s easy to find.d.

Well, I’ll definitely have to do that. And yeah, Rusted Root, that’s a… That’s a pretty distinct sound. When I’ve got Pandora, I can tell if a Rusted Root song has come on.

Yeah, they were great. It was at the Warfield in San Francisco. We did some fun stuff when I was in that band.

I bet. And I seem to recall music kind of changing a little bit. Was this around, like, 20 years ago? Early, early 2000s?

Yeah, around.

That’s kind of when, for me, music shifted a little bit. I think it got more… It got slicker. The production took over a lot of the…

That’s true, that’s true. Got more digital.

Yeah, it did. Well, I don’t want to get too bogged down in the… In the weeds of… Of your backstory, but thank you for sharing that with me. I did not come across that in the research. That…

That’s good. That means that my scholarship is standing on its own. So that I’m… I’m glad to hear that.

Good. Well, I wanted to get started talking, starting with about a 40,000 foot view and kind of zooming in on… On Mary Magdalene. But you… You published in the… Was it HTR? Yeah, Harvard Theological Review research about Martha of Bethany and her relationship to Mary. But I want to talk a little bit about textual criticism, because this is a question of textual criticism and something that I run across an awful lot in social media is that a lot of people don’t realize just how much their New Testament, their translation of the New Testament, relies on scholars making judgment calls about text-critical questions in cobbling together the source text that we use for the New Testament. In fact, a lot of people, if they hear me say, and we have an eclectic source text, they don’t even know what that means. A lot of your work has to do directly with textual criticism.

Maybe you can talk a little bit about why it would be helpful for readers of the Bible to understand more about what goes into the production of their Bible.

Sure.

Speaking about textual criticism specifically.

So, you know, oftentimes people will hold up the Bible and say, the Bible is clear, or the Bible says this. And people who do that are not always thinking about where the Bible comes from. I think on some level, they do know that it comes from manuscripts. And they probably know that there are thousands of manuscripts. But what they might not know is how the… Like, they… They probably also suspect that because everything was copied by hand before the advent of the printing press, not every single manuscript was exactly alike. But maybe that’s where they stopped thinking about it. And they’re like, somebody has already figured this out. And this version in front of me, hopefully not the King James, but maybe it is the King James. They’re like this… This is, you know, the word of God. And what… Textual criticism is important because it’s basically looking at… At as many manuscripts as possible and finding the ones that are closer to the source.0.670] Elizabeth Schrader Polczer: Oftentimes those are the oldest manuscripts, and oftentimes those manuscripts are in Greek.

If we’re talking about the New Testament, because the New Testament was written in Greek. I’m a New Testament textual critic. Of course, Hebrew manuscripts would be… Sorry, Old Testament would be in Hebrew.

Yeah.

So for New Testament scholarship, they find sort of what they consider to be the best manuscripts. And then when you’re looking at the different manuscripts, sometimes they don’t all say the same thing, even the best manuscripts. And in fact, several text critics have pointed out that the further back you go, the more variation you get, which is not what you would expect if there was this Word of God that was carefully preserved. You would expect that, like, oh, down the line, some people snuck some things in and that happened too. But if you go to the very beginnings, you see a lot of textual variation. And so it’s the job of modern scholars. People don’t think about this. It’s literally the job of scholars, often in Germany, a committee of excellent European text critics who compare all of these different versions and they sort of adjudicate between them and say, well, you know what?

I think that this manuscript has the correct reading, and it’s almost like a legal case has to be made for each variant, because somebody could say, oh, well, the reason that the variant is this way, the reason that we’re getting variation is because we know that there was this early Christian controversy. I’ll give you a simple one. So in some manuscripts of Luke’s Gospel, when Jesus is in the temple and, you know, Mary and Joseph go and look for Jesus because he stayed behind and they’re like, oh, where did he go? I think it’s in Luke 2 . So they go back and some manuscripts… So some manuscripts say when his parents went back to look for him. Some other manuscripts say when his mother and Joseph went back to look for him. Right? Yeah. And so what’s going on there? There’s textual variation. And at first you might just be like, why? Why is there textual variation? But for people who understand what’s going on in early Christianity, they know that it would have been controversial to say that Joseph fathered Jesus.

Right. Mary was supposed to be a virgin at the time of conception. So to say his parents is a controversial reading. And you can see then why a scribe might want, or an editor might want to change the text to say his mother and Joseph.

Is it Luke, where we have the genealogy that talks about Joseph as who is supposed to have been his father or who was? Is that the Luke genealogy?

You know, that’s either Luke or Matthew. One of them says that it’s… Yeah, one of them says that it’s supposedly his father. But basically in Luke, it says the different manuscripts say different things. Sometimes it says his mother and Joseph, and sometimes it says his parents. And so the question that a text critic then has is you have to sort of make a legal argument which one of these is the right one. And you say, you know what?[00:12:39.280] Elizabeth Schrader Polczer: I think the one that says his parents is what Luke actually wrote. Because it’s the more difficult reading. Yeah, that’s the one that somebody would change. And that’s. So that’s how a lot of text-critical judgments are made based on what the more difficult reading is. But somebody might argue it a different way, you know, and so you can make different legal arguments. Not legal, but like text-critical arguments.

Right.

And then you land on one, and that’s what gets printed in your Bible.

And I think a lot of people who have some familiarity with textual criticism might hear about lectio difficilior, or the more difficult reading is usually… Or lectio brevior, or the shorter reading is usually… And. And think, oh, that’s a… That’s a hard and fast rule. That means that is determinative about this given reading. But they’re more. They’re more probabilities and likelihoods. And so sometimes you have to weigh one against another.

That’s right. Sometimes the shorter reading is… Or sometimes a longer reading is the more difficult reading.

Yeah.

So. So basically, it’s always a balance of probabilities. It’s often said that textual criticism is an art, not a science. And so what that’s sort of cloaked from you when you’re in… When you’re looking at your Bible because it looks like the text is clear, but in fact, dozens if not hundreds of readings have been adjudicated. And sometimes different scholars might come to different conclusions, and that’s actually reflected in different translations, because sometimes a different translation will choose a different Greek variant. People say, oh, it’s been mistranslated. I’m not talking about the translation. I’m talking about the underlying Greek text. Yeah, there’s different Greek manuscripts that say different things, and different committees might choose one over the other for different reasons.

I know one that comes up a lot in the scholarship that I work with is John 1:18 , which is a variant that comes… Right, right. So it’s either the only son or the only God. And the earliest… And so you have this… There’s the earlier reading, I believe is son. And this matches what you have every other time this phrase occurs in John. However, you have some very early readings that also say God. And so the question then becomes, a lot of people leverage this lectio difficilior. It’s more likely the change would go from God to son than it would go from son to God in this argument. And so I think even within Metzger’s New Testament textual commentary, he says that he kind of advocates for the God reading. But then the editor is like, has a little spot at the bottom saying, “Not really.

Probably not what the author originally wrote."

Well, right. Yeah. And so people, I guess what I highlighted in what I just defended in my dissertation, and one of the things that I highlight is that text critics have differing judgments. One text critic might come to this conclusion and another one might come to that conclusion. And that’s a place where literally what the author wrote.ere literally what the author wrote. We don’t know. We can’t be certain what the author wrote, you can only argue with differing levels of persuasion for one variant over the other. And there’s dozens, if not hundreds of places like that in the New Testament. And that is kind of masked from the average reader. Study Bibles are clearer about it because it’ll say at the bottom of your study Bible, it’ll say like, oh, some ancient authorities read this other thing, or some ancient authorities lack this. And they’re really talking about some ancient manuscripts say something different.

Yeah. And that’s when we have textual attestation to a reading. However, there are some reconstructions that are hypothesized rather than. Or conjectural according to the. To the parlance of our times. Yes. Where we. Something is fishy and we think we have an idea what it probably originally looked like. But we don’t have any manuscript that definitively points to that reading. And that’s more closely related to the research that you published in Harvard Theological Review with Martha of Bethany. To some degree. I know there are. There are variations in the manuscripts, but I think you’re advocating for a conjectural emendation to some degree. Correct.

That’s an interesting thought. I mean, part of my reconstruction is an eclectic text. You were talking earlier about eclectic texts, which is when you take. There’s no one manuscript that says exactly what you provide, the Greek text that you provide. And this is the same thing for a critical edition. A Greek critical edition is when a committee of scholars gets together and they look at all the best manuscripts and they put all the best readings together, like they kind of cobble them together. And there’s no one manuscript that reads exactly this, but it’s their best guess for what the author wrote based on their arguments. Right. So I’ve actually, I have actually constructed an eclectic text with real readings from real manuscripts of John 11:1 through 5. That is just Lazarus and Mary. So we’re talking about John 11 here. This is the story of Lazarus being raised from the dead. And in the world’s oldest copy of John 11 , which is Papyrus 66, which is usually dated to the turn of the third century, though it’s paleographically dated, so we can’t be certain.

But it’s. It is probably our oldest copy of Mary.

So somewhere around 200 CE.

Yes. You can see in that manuscript that the name Mary has been crossed out twice. First, the name Mary is changed to Martha in John 11 , verse 1. And in John 11 , verse 3, a woman’s name is awkwardly scratched out and changed to say, hai adelphai. The sisters. And all the verbs are changed from singular to plural. So a woman is actually split in two by the scribe. And then there’s another change in John 11:4 in Papyrus 66 that sort of cloaks that Jesus could be speaking with one woman. And so there’s a lot of instability around Martha’s presence at the opening of John 11 in Papyrus 66. If you look at Codex Alexandrinus, which is another really important gospel manuscript, again, you see the name Mary getting changed to Martha.. And you see in John 11 , verse 1, Martha wasn’t there in the first transcription. And then there’s another old Latin manuscript that in John 11 , 5, only Lazarus and his sister singular are listed. So if you cobble all these together, you get a different text form of John 11 that introduces Lazarus and his one sister, Mary.

Yeah, and so this was, this was influencing manuscripts as late as the 4th slash 5th century.

Oh, I mean, no, you, you actually get it throughout the entire textual transmission. 1 in 5 Greek manuscripts has a problem around Martha. So I’ve looked at about 280 manuscripts of the Gospel of John now, and you get it in every language. I just looked at some Geez manuscripts the other week, which is Ethiopic, and you see that even some 14th century manuscripts, the names Mary and Martha are switched, or the name Mary appears where you would expect, expect only, well, either Mary and Martha or just Martha. So you see that there’s textual instability. It happens in Greek, in Latin, in Syriac, in Coptic, in Geez, and so the fact that it’s happening throughout the entire textual transmission is a clue that something might have been changed here.

Well, and it sounds like if it’s not been standardized, if it’s not been smoothed out over that long a period of time, there must have been some kind of disagreement. There must have been. There was some reason for that to keep coming up. There was some reason for that question to not go away. Have you, have you talked about that?

Well, yeah, I mean, it’s. I’m basically saying that it’s possible that a character. The character I’m talking about is Luke. Sorry, not Luke. It’s Martha from Luke’s Gospel. So in Luke chapter 10, there’s these two sisters, Martha and Mary, that Jesus visits. They don’t have a brother in that story, which is really interesting. And everybody knows this story. Martha’s just busy and distracted. Mary’s sitting at Jesus’s feet. Martha complains about Mary. And Jesus says, Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted with many things, but Mary has chosen the better part. It won’t be taken from her. So I’m saying that someone who had read that story in Luke’s gospel might have sort of imported the character Martha and stuck her into this story of Lazarus and Mary in John’s Gospel. And I’m saying that it’s possible that as Luke wrote his gospel, there was just Martha and Mary, no brother. And as John wrote his gospel, it’s just Lazarus and Mary, one sister. And so it’s only because someone had.

Read Luke, conflated these Marys.

Yeah, exactly. And they stuck Martha in. But that’s actually a huge change to the text. You’re adding a character over the course of an entire chapter. And so I’m saying that that kind of a massive change to the text is going to have echoes and reverberations throughout the entire textual transmission, which, in fact, it does. Also the artistic record and the patristic record. When you see church fathers talking about it, like Tertullian says, oh, when Mary confessed Jesus is the Christ, you’re like, what? Martha confesses Jesus is the Christ, but Tertullian, who wrote in about 208 AD, he says that Mary confessed Jesus is the Christ.[00:22:19.310] Elizabeth Schrader Polczer: You see the sort of uneven presentation of Martha and Mary literally in every place that you look to do with the Lazarus story in antiquity.

So that. And it sounds like this is a product of trying to harmonize these two different gospels and trying to take what are ultimately two anonymous—not anonymous, but we don’t know precisely who they are, but they seem to be separate characters—and try to mash them together to make things fit. And this would fit what we know about a lot of the changes that have only recently been kind of removed from a lot of more recent translations of the Bible. There are little over a dozen passages that are found in the Textus Receptus, the much later manuscript tradition that now many translations just omit altogether, which is causing all kinds of heartache on social media when people stumble across this.

Like the angel at the pool, the angel at the pool in John 5 , or also. There’s also the Pericope of the Adulteress. There’s the sweat, the bloody sweat in Luke 22 . Actually, that one’s in brackets, usually the endings of Mark.

Yeah, there are a bunch of examples of these. The one that I always see on social media that somebody stumbles across and thinks they’ve discovered. Either CERN has altered reality and we’re in a parallel universe where Matthew, what is it, 17:21 doesn’t exist, or somebody is doing something in the Bibles. But that’s an instance where we have a passage from Mark where Luke is talking, or not Luke, Jesus is talking about why the disciples weren’t able to cast out certain demons. And he says this. This kind doesn’t come out except with fasting and prayer. And that gets written into the. The margin of Sinaiticus, I think. And then later manuscripts, it’s. It’s incorporated right into the verse. And so.

So this kind of glosses like somebody, somebody. Because it’s all copied by hand at this time. It’s such a different mindset. It’s kind of very foreign to people who live in a print culture. Like this text says this, but if you’re copying something by hand, what if somebody’s reading it and they put a little note in the margin and then some later person sees it and they don’t. They’re not familiar with the text and they’re like, oh, was something left out? Oh, I should put this in. It’s called a gloss. And so then you get this extra piece of the story that gets incorporated into the broader manuscript transmission. And so then sometimes the text sort of expands. But then if you go to these older copies, copies like Papyrus 66 or Codex Sinaiticus or Vaticanus, these parts are just not there because they haven’t been added to the text yet. It’s only the 2nd, 3rd, 4th century, they haven’t added that part yet.

And John has a handful of literary scenes where it seems like there’s something going on for which we may not really have much evidence. For instance, there’s. During the Last Supper, Jesus is like, all right, everybody, let’s. Let’s get up and get out of here. And then you have three chapters of sermonizing. Yeah. And then. And. And then the next chapter goes. So they got up and got out of there. And.

And it comes like two chapters later.

Yeah. And then there’s another. He’s in Jerusalem.salem. And it’s like they crossed over to the other side of the Sea of Galilee. And how did they do that?

Yeah, yeah. And that one’s interesting because that’s more about source criticism. Because people who are studying John, they say this doesn’t make sense. Like, was whoever wrote this Gospel? Did they get their pages mixed up? Did they like, lose a folio? Or did like, did somebody mix something up? But that’s not a text critical issue, because every single manuscript of John, he does go straight to the Sea of Galilee and he does say, you know, let’s go. And then he talks for two more chapters. So that one is more source criticism. It’s more like, hey, we’re intelligent people. We can see the story doesn’t make sense here. Something happened here in whoever was creating the narrative. That’s different than when the different manuscripts say different things.

Right, Right.

And what’s funny is that source critics actually already theorized that Martha was added to the text. This is really funny. John P. Meier in A Marginal Jew, he says the first story of the… Of Lazarus, he only had… Only Mary was there, and he didn’t know anything about the… These manuscript variations that I’m talking about. The reason he said that is because Martha and Mary say a duplicate quote in John 11 . They say, Lord, if you’d been here, my brother would not have died. And so for a source critic, that’s a clue that something was doubled. But John P. Meier would have thought that it was the evangelist that doubled the sister. There’s other people like Robert Fortna and Urban von Walde that work on these sorts of source critical questions in John, and they’re like, the evangelist had a source that they changed. I’m saying, was it the evangelist or was it a later copyist? And the way that you can tell whether the evangelist inherited a story that the evangelist changed versus whether someone interfered in the textual transmission is whether there are discrepancies in the manuscripts.

There’s no discrepancies on when Jesus says, come on, let’s go. And then he keeps talking. That happens in every manuscript. But this thing with one or two sisters being there, there are problems around Mary and Martha and transmission, which suggests that it’s not what the evangelist wanted, it’s what a later copyist wanted.

And we’ve… We’ve also got a bit of a black hole between the composition of these texts.

And I always call it a black hole.

Call it… I call it a gap or a black hole and that’s it.

Or I call it a black box. I call it a black box.

Okay. Yeah, that’s… I, Peter Gurry and I got into it on Twitter the other day.

I saw that. I stayed out of it because Peter and I have very, very different views on religion and doctrine. But he’s a good text critic. And I don’t recommend getting into Twitter fights with Peter Gurry about textual criticism, because he does know his stuff. But I think he and I, a healthy mutual respect.I think he and I have a healthy mutual respect. We. We come to different conclusions about the data, but we both are well aware of what the evidence is.

Yeah, he’s. I—I appreciated that he didn’t get too upset because sometimes people can get upset when we get into it on social media. But I’m sure he’s used to these kinds of disagreements with folks.

Yeah, yeah.

So I wanted to pivot a little bit and talk a little bit more about Mary Magdalene’s origins, because we talked a little bit about John 11 and how—

But we should also talk about why it has to do with Mary Magdalene, because everybody’s like, “What? You’re talking about Mary of Bethany.” Yeah, that’s not.

I just skipped over that, didn’t I? Okay, so we should probably talk about it. So for the whole discussion that I skipped over, what is the relationship between Martha/Mary of Bethany and Mary Magdalene?

Well, so the natural question, if I’ve made this argument: Okay, somebody read Luke’s gospel, they imported the character Martha from Luke 10 , stuck her into John 11 . Why would somebody do that? Like, other than just that we’re harmonizing—somebody named Mary and we’re just trying to like, have fun and be creative with our gospel stories. Why would somebody do that? And so what I theorized—and of course this is just one possibility for why there’s problems around Martha in the textual transmission— I said, well, we know that very early Christians, going back as far as the third or possibly even the second century, thought that Mary of Bethany was Mary Magdalene. We have that on record from Hippolytus of Rome, who is a third-century commentator, and from the Manichaean Psalm Book. And the Manichaeans were, again, in like the third century. And also from St. Ambrose, who’s fourth century—all of these people identify Mary Magdalene as Mary of Bethany. So that’s, that’s interesting. Why did people think that Mary Magdalene was Mary of Bethany?

It might even go back to the second century. Because the Gospel of Mary—the character Mary in this, it doesn’t say Magdalene anywhere or Bethany anywhere in that text, at least in the surviving text. But it does. There are character traits of both Mary of Bethany and Mary Magdalene that are found in this character Mary of the Gospel of Mary. So some people have said, you know, maybe as far back as the second century, people identified Mary of Bethany with Mary Magdalene. And so I’m saying, why would you add Martha to the Lazarus story? And so one possibility that I put out there is, well, what if the text was what Tertullian said: that Mary confessed Jesus as the Christ. “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.” That happens to be the central thesis statement of the Gospel of John , and it’s called the Christological confession. And in every single gospel except John, it is on somebody else’s lips. That person is Peter.

Peter gets to be the Christological confessor in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And in Matthew’s Gospel, that gives him sort of the title: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” “I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven.” So because Peter is the Christological confessor, it gives him this huge authority. And so I’m suggesting, okay, well, what if John—y, well, what if John. Most people think John had access to some version of Mark’s Gospel. What if John had read Mark and knew that Peter was. Was being identified as the christological confessor, and John wanted to give a different narrative, and John wanted to give it to Mary Magdalene that Mary Magdalene is the christological confessor. But perhaps knowing that this was controversial because Mary Magdalene does seem to have a lot of controversy around her. Again, as far back as we can trace the record.

So John just calls her Mary and makes her extremely similar to Mary Magdalene. There’s something like seven or eight exact textual parallels between John 11 and John 20 . There’s a woman named Mary. She’s crying at a tomb. She sees somebody that she loves dearly rise from the dead. Jesus says to her in John 11 , where have you laid him? And then in John 20 , Mary says, I do not know where you have laid him. It’s sort of like this exact same in Greek, the words are the same where Jesus asked Mary something in John 11 , Mary asked Jesus something when she thinks he’s the gardener. Mary Magdalene in John, chapter 20. And of course, Mary of Bethany anoints Jesus in John 12 . And Judas gets mad and Jesus says, you know, leave her alone. She’s done a beautiful thing. Let her save it for the day of my burial. And there’s only one Mary at his tomb in John, and that is Mary Magdalene. So there’s a lot of suggestions.

I’m not saying that the author of John identifies Lazarus’s sister Mary as Mary Magdalene, but I absolutely think that the author of John has put the question in the reader’s mind. And is Mary of Bethany Mary Magdalene? And on two or three reads of the Gospel, you might notice how very similar Lazarus’s sister Mary is with Mary Magdalene. And that may be why people as far back as perhaps the Gospel of Mary, but definitely Hippolytus of Rome, the Manicheans and Ambrose, third, fourth centuries think that Mary of Bethany is Mary Magdalene. But then if she’s the one who confesses Jesus as the Christ. That means that the person who gets the central christological confession also gets the first appearance of the risen Jesus. That’s a problem because it gives her a lot of authority. It means that she confesses him as the Christ, anoints him, stands by him at the cross, goes alone to the tomb, gets the first appearance of the risen Jesus and gets the first apostolic commission. And that would just make her a central character and an authority figure in early Christianity. That might have been just a bit too much for this.

Do you think the author of John was kind of censoring himself a little bit and just trying to kind of put it out there without, you know, I didn’t actually say that, but I.

Think John was trying to make it, make the information accessible to the sensitive reader. That’s, that’s something that John does a lot. In fact, that’s something that John is well known for. People often say, oh, John is a, is a gospel that a child can, can, can wade in or an elephant can swim in because it has all these levels of meaning. And I think, I mean, it’s, you can just clearly identify. And in my Harvard Theological Review article, I do, these are the exact textual parallels between John 11 and John 20 . And, and so because of those parallels, some people.eople. It’s not going to be forced upon you, but if you want to think that Mary of Bethany is Mary Magdalene, you’re invited to think so. And maybe it’s said delicately, knowing that if the christological confessor is explicitly identified as Mary Magdalene, that this gospel is not going to be received, that that might have been problematic. And in fact, the Gospel of Mary was not at all received. Nobody even talks about it. So if you put Mary as too prominent of a character, it’s not something that. This is of course, theoretical. This is like if there is a copy of John circulating with only Lazarus and Mary, why would somebody add Martha?

I’m saying, well, maybe because people thought it was Mary Magdalene and that was.

Too much, so they were trying to shore it up a little bit more than the author originally did.

Just a theory.

Well, it’s a good theory, a good hypothesis, and hopefully there are future manuscript discoveries that can help us find some more data that might help us test that hypothesis. Just to remind me, when Mary comes to the tomb, is she coming to prepare the body? Does she have that?

Actually, no. It’s a very important point that you raised there because the body has already been prepared in John 19 with Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea. In the Synoptics, it is Mary, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, if it’s Matthew or. Actually, different manuscripts say different things. In Mark and in Luke, anyway, Mary Magdalene is always at the tomb. But again, John is writing for people who have read Mark. This is something that is well accepted in scholarship. Some people think that John was sort of supplementing Mark, maybe even Matthew. So John is writing for people who know that Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb.

And we have at the end of John, we have Jesus’s “feed my sheep” to Peter. So it’s not going so far as to supplant Peter’s role in the church, is it?

Well, that’s another long question that we could get into because source critics. Source critics think that John 21 was added later because John 20 , verse 31 seems to draw the Gospel to a close. These things are written so that you will believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing, you may have life in his name, which is kind of the same thing that today Martha says in John 11 . But. And then it goes on. It’s like, oh, and then Jesus appeared again. So people wonder if John 21 was added later.

Well, we have in John 21 also the. The statement, these are the words of the disciple whom he loved, and we know that they are true. So somebody. There’s definitely a later literary layer there. And yeah, maybe the question is how. How far into John does. Does this. stretch?

Yeah. And again, that’s the question of, you know, was it the evangelist that wrote that? Was it a later member of the Johannine community? If you believe in the Johannine community, did they do that? Is it something that was written in the second century, and we just don’t have any manuscripts that old, so it’s hard to know. But also, John 21 is even a little bit cagey about Peter’s authority, if you look at the Greek.k. Because what Jesus asks Peter to do, Peter is unable to do. Jesus says, do you agapas me? Do you love me? And Peter answers, yes, Lord, you know that I philo you. So the verb actually changes. So Jesus asks Peter to agapao, which is one verb for love. And Peter always responds with a different verb. Yes, I philo you. And then Jesus asks again, agapas, Peter says, yes, I philo you. The third time, Jesus changes his position, Jesus says, do you phileis me? Do you? It’s a different word for love, right?

And then Peter’s hurt. Now everybody thinks that Peter’s hurt because Jesus is asking three times. But it is absolutely possible that Peter is hurt because the verb changed, even.

Though, even though he’s the one who’s kind of pulling it back a little bit. That there’s something similar in Spanish. You hear jokes every now and then where somebody will say te amo. And the other person says te quiero, which is. Which is a very. It’s a related verb, but it’s not as strong.

And yes, that is, you know, that’s the best analogy that I’ve heard. I love that. That’s. And, and the thing is, it’s totally masked in your English translation because just love, love, love. Do you love me? Do you love me? Yes, I love you. Do you love me? Yes, I love you. It sounds like Peter has proven himself. But if you look at the Greek, Peter hasn’t proven himself. The thing that Jesus asked him to do, he cannot do. So Jesus actually changes to meet Peter where he is at, that he says, do you phileis me? And Peter says, you know, everything. I philo you. That’s all that Peter can do. He can only phileo Jesus. He cannot agapao Jesus. So that’s. But then some people say, oh, they’re cognates. They mean exactly the same thing. And that’s another scholarly debate. But you could argue that Peter is not 100% reconciled even in John 21 .

Okay, well, that hopefully brings us back around to a little bit more about Mary and her origins. I’m leaving on tomorrow to go to Israel, so jealous. I’m gonna be leading a tour and one of the places we’re going to be stopping is Magdala, to which I have been before. A lovely area, phenomenal buildings that we have there and, and particularly the synagogue with the, the stone with the temple imagery on there. I’m looking forward to that. But Magdala is always introduced as Mary Magdalene’s hometown. But if Mary is of Bethany, then can Mary also be of Magdala?

What a fantastic question. Well, first of all, I did co-write another article which you kindly highlighted on your platform with Joan Taylor in 2021 in the Journal of Biblical Literature, where we basically pointed out that not a single person ever said that Mary Magdalene came from that place where you’re going to visit until the 6th century. to visit until the 6th century. The 6th century is the earliest attestation of anyone saying that Mary Magdalene came from that place by the Sea of Galilee. And we also. Joan Taylor is more. She understands the archaeological stuff more than I do. But basically that site, which is a beautiful, incredible archaeological site with absolutely first-century synagogues—a very important archaeological site—that was more likely the town of Tarichaea, which was known at that time. It was discussed by Pliny and Josephus. It was well known. It was a big city on the Sea of Galilee.

And no one ever said that that place is where Mary Magdalene is from. No one ever said that until the 6th century. Rather, there were lots of towns at that time called Migdal—this Migdal. There was Migdal Gad, Migdal Eder, Migdal El. It just means tower—tower of this, tower of that. Right. And so there. Because there were towers all over ancient Palestine. And there were. And there was eventually, I think it’s in later rabbinic sources, there’s a place called Migdal Nunaya, which means tower of the fishes, that was close to Tarichaea. But later, really, it gained momentum sort of in the 19th and 20th centuries to say that Migdal Nunaya was Mary Magdalene’s hometown. And there were various reasons for that, but one of them being that there was sort of a noble desire to separate Mary Magdalene from the sinful anointing woman in Luke chapter 7.

So basically, in the 6th century, Gregory the Great said, following in the lineage of Ambrose and Hippolytus and everybody else, that Mary of Bethany was Mary Magdalene. Gregory said that in the 6th century. But he added an innovation. He said, and she is that woman who. Who. The sinful woman who anointed Jesus in Luke 7 . He didn’t say Luke 7 , but he said, you know, surely like all of her sins, like that Mary has seven demons. In Luke’s Gospel, he says, what were these seven demons other than the sins of the flesh? And this. This perfumed ointment was like, you know, it was used in unspeakable acts. And he’s just kind of making it all up. Basically, what he’s done is he has collapsed all of the anointing events together. And my position, and I want to make this really clear, I’m saying that the Bethany anointing described in John’s Gospel as taking place by Mary—Mary anointing Jesus—I’m saying that may well be Mary Magdalene who anointed Jesus in Bethany.

That is not the same story as Luke’s anointing, which first of all takes place in the north, close to a town called Nain. Second of all, it’s much earlier in Jesus’s ministry. It does not inaugurate the Passion narrative as it does in Matthew, Mark, and John. Matthew, Mark, and John. The anointing takes place in Bethany, and it inaugurates the Passion.

And this is right before the final week, correct?

Yes. Whereas in Luke’s, it’s kind of. It’s in Luke 7 , it’s early in Jesus’s ministry, and it’s nowhere near Bethany. And it’s just that Jesus is in the house of a man named Simon and that this. This woman, that sinner from the city, comes in. comes in. Basically, what I’m saying is that. And it’s also very clear in Luke’s gospel that that is not Mary Magdalene. Because in Luke’s gospel, it’s an anonymous person.

Yeah.

And Mary Magdalene is clearly identified in Luke’s gospel. So basically, what Gregory did is he was collapsing all of the anointing scenes into one, which caused Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany, who I think that John kind of suggests that they are the same woman and that some commentators already were thinking was the same woman. It collapses her because there is an anointing event associated with Mary of Bethany. He draws the other anointing from Luke into that story, even though it takes place at a totally different time, is a totally different location and has a totally different narrative around it. So Gregory collapses all these anointings into one. And so that’s when Mary Magdalene becomes a prostitute or like a sinful woman from the city starting in the sixth century. So coming back to. Why would somebody want to say that Mary Magdalene comes from Magdala or that this is. This is sort of a location that she’s from? It has to do with sort of a noble and sometimes feminist scholarship as well, has desired to separate Mary Magdalene from any anointing event.

Strategically, if you say she’s from Magdala, it means that she can’t have anything to do with the anointing. She can’t be Mary of Bethany. She can’t have anointed Jesus because she’s from Magdala. But the problem with that position is that there’s literally no evidence that she came from that place before the 6th century, first of all. And second of all, you don’t have to separate Mary Magdalene from the anointing in Bethany to say, to sort of redeem her from this false portrait that Gregory painted. You can just say there’s more. Luke’s anointing is not the same as the Bethany anointing.

It kind of throws the baby out with the bathwater.

Exactly.

When you have two that can be identified, and then you have an undesirable association that gets identified. And so you want to just throw the whole thing.

Exactly. And so I would say it’s partly been strategic. On the part of. Like, for instance, Karen King has a book called the Gospel of Mary of Magdala, which is a misnomer in several ways. First of all, because the Gospel of Mary never says the word Magdalene or Magdala anywhere in it. It just refers to a Mary. Second of all, she. When you say Mary of Magdala, you are interpreting for the reader in your translation. The word Magdalene literally just means Toweress. That’s all that it means. Magdala in Aramaic means Tower. Ene is a Greek ending for a female person. Toweress. That’s literally the literal meaning of it. So if you’re trying to say that she comes. So the question is, does Mary come from a town called Tower? One of these many towers? Migdal Gad, Migdal Eder. Migdal El, Migdal Nunaya. There’s so many of them. Are you saying that she comes from a town called Tower, or are you saying that Mary herself is the Tower?? Kind of how Peter is the rock. And what our Journal of Biblical Literature article showed, in addition to that place being called Taricheae in the first century, is that there was no consensus on the meaning of her name for centuries.

There never was. Luke seems to think that it’s a nickname. He doesn’t think it’s a place that she’s from. The way that Luke refers to her, Maria he kaloumene Magdalene, Mary, the one called Magdalene. That word called is always in reference to people with names or nicknames, like Simon called Peter or Elizabeth called barren.

Or you have Josephus, Jesus, the one called Christ.

Well, I kind of checked that in Josephus. Does he use kaloumenos for Jesus?

I’m pretty. I’m pretty sure in the. Yeah, I’m almost positive he does, because. And it gets. I think that’s where it gets manipulated a little bit where the. The reading of Josephus as we have it now is like. And he was more than a human. He was the Christ. But I think the. The other reference where it talks about James, the brother of Jesus, who is called Christ, it’s a way to not.

Oh, interesting.

Not endorse the name, but just mention that it is.

That’s great. I should look that up in Josephus. I mean, in. In our article, we were just looking at Luke’s usage in Luke and Acts and how he uses the word kaloumene, ho kaloumenos, kaloumene. And that happens to be nicknames, basically. So Luke seems to think it’s a nickname, not where she’s from. Eusebius. It’s really funny. Eusebius knows a place called Magdala and he doesn’t associate her with it at all. And he thinks that the Magdala that everybody knows is in the south. He thinks it’s in Judea. So that one actually completely, yeah. So Eusebius’s Onomasticon says, we know Magdala. It’s this one right here in Judea, Migdal Gad. And it’s in the south. And that completely blows this idea out of the water that we know where Mary Magdalene was from. And that just the fact that she’s Magdalene means she’s from that place by the Sea of Galilee. Eusebius lived in the Holy Land. And the purpose of the Onomasticon was to clarify who was associated with which places and which locations in his day matched what the Bible was.

He never once says that Taricheae is the same thing as Magdala, which is the same place Mary Magdalene was from. Not at all. He says that there is a Magdala that he knows and she is not associated with it. And it’s in the south. It’s not the one by the Sea of Galilee that you’re going to go to. So apologies to the people in Magdala. I know they like their pilgrimage site.

There’s. And wasn’t there another site, Magadan or something like that?

Oh, that’s interesting, actually. So, yeah, there is a place in Matthew 15 where Jesus crosses the Sea of Galilee and he lands in the shores of Magadan. And that’s what most Bibles today would say at Matthew 15:39 .9. But if you go to a King James Bible, it’ll say he landed in the shores of Magdala. So someone who’s reading the King James says, hey, wait a second, there is a place called Magdala by the Sea of Galilee. In the first century, it says it right here in my Bible. And I would again say, what manuscript does that come from? Because King James comes from 11th or 12th century manuscripts. And literally all of the oldest manuscripts of Matthew 15 have the word Magadan there. And it is later, in the fifth or sixth century that the reading starts to change. And some manuscripts say Magdala. And Professor Taylor and I theorized that this might have been around the time that people started to find a pilgrimage site for Mary Magdalene.

So in the west, people thought that Mary of Bethany was Mary Magdalene as in Hippolytus of Rome and Gregory the Great. This is a Western tradition that Mary of Bethany is Mary Magdalene.

Yeah.

In the east, they don’t think that Mary of Bethany is Mary Magdalene, but they still want a pilgrimage site. Right. Everybody wants a pilgrimage site to venerate Mary Magdalene. So we suggested that it’s possible that this, in the 6th century, when people start to say this is where she came from, that there was a little update in the manuscripts. Like you’re copying Matthew’s gospel and all you have to do is change two letters and Magadan becomes Magdala. And now you’ve got your place by the Sea of Galilee where you can have a pilgrimage site for Mary Magdalene. And that’s where you’re gonna go when you’re in Israel. It does go back to the 6th century. It’s very old, but not 1st century.

And it wouldn’t be the first time that the King James Version has misinterpreted something, a name particularly. And there seem to be a couple other places around the Sea of Galilee where the names don’t always line up. The miracle of the swine, for instance, you have, I think the manuscripts have three different versions of that name.

Gadarenes and the Gergesenes and the.

Yeah, and then there’s another one. Gerasenes. Yeah.

There’s Bethesda and Bethsaida. And different manuscripts say different things. Yeah, yeah.

So it’s always exciting that if, you know, a lot of people retreat to the old, “if the King James Version was good enough for Paul or Jesus.”

That’s funny.

Now can you, is the controversy around Mary Magdalene in this early period the reasons why there might have been some apprehension about her leadership? Does this come down just to simple misogyny? Is it about getting in the way of Peter? Do you have thoughts on why Mary Magdalene is a target in the earlier periods?

That’s a great question. And if, you know, you could argue that there’s controversy around her from the very beginning. Certainly the Gospel of Mary presents her as a controversial character. I’m not saying the Gospel of Mary was written by her, definitely not. It’s probably a second century text, but it does show.

And there it’s Peter. Peter is the one who’s like Peter and Andrew.nd Andrew.

Yeah. Peter and Andrew are kind of attacking her and Levi defends her, which is interesting. But the fact, the very fact that she, like her sort of, her perspective is presented as controversial and that it makes Peter and Andrew angry. And they say, you know, did he speak with a woman? Did he prefer her to us? You know, the, the very fact that she’s kind. Causing this consternation on the part of these sort of more orthodox disciples, Andrew and Peter is telling us that from a very early stage, there’s something about Mary, in this case probably Mary Magdalene, that is threatening. And you don’t just see it in the Gospel of Mary. Also in the Gospel of Thomas, at the very end of the Gospel of Thomas, the very last saying of the Gospel of Thomas, Simon Peter says, let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life. And then Jesus stands up for her and says that she can stay. But also the Gospel of Philip, it says that the disciples are jealous of Mary because Jesus loves her more than them.

She’s like a soul mate for Jesus in the Gospel of Philip, isn’t she?

Yes. There’s actually two words for it in the Coptic. One is koinonos, which is a Greco-Coptic word. It’s like a loan word from Greek which basically means partner. And Paul uses that word sometimes, like my koinonos. But there’s also a word which basically is more likely to mean twin or even consort. What’s interesting is that in the Gospel of Philip, both the words koinonos and hotre are. They’re both translated as companion, as though they were the same word. And I’m like, no, koinonos means one thing. Hotre means something else. So I would say, anyway, yes, the Gospel of Philip presents her as some sort of companion or twin or consort to Christ in just this one document, the Gospel of Philip. And the disciples get really jealous of her in that document. And then there’s the Pistis Sophia, where Mary Magdalene is the star pupil and she answers more questions than anybody else. And at a certain point, Jesus says, sorry, they’re dialoguing with Jesus on the Mount of Olives.

And at a certain point, Peter gets mad and he’s like, let’s let this woman stop talking because she’s taking all the opportunities away from us. And again, Jesus says, no, if she gets the. You know, anybody who gets the right answer can come forward. And then Peter says, I’m sorry. Then Mary Magdalene says, Lord, I am scared of Peter because he hates our race, probably our race of women, or possibly like our spiritual race, depending upon how you interpret it. But these are four different documents. The Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip are in the same codex. But the Gospel of Mary and the Pistis Sophia are in totally different codices, copied in totally different places in different centuries. The fact that you have this independent attestation of Peter’s hostility toward Mary in several documents over the course of many centuries suggests that it was kind of widely known that Mary, whether because she was close to Peter, whether because she was a woman, whether because she talked too much, Peter did not like her.

And these, you know, Gospel of Mary is probably second century. Gospel of Philip is maybe second century.0.240] Elizabeth Schrader Polczer: Pistis Sophia is third or fourth century. These are old conversations. And it always irks me when people are like, oh, this feminist agenda of, like, women’s voices. And I’m like, this is second century, second, third century. This is a conversation that’s been going on from the very beginning. And Mary seems to represent something controversial. And it’s hard to know exactly what the problem was with her. It could be that she was close to Jesus or smarter than the other ones, and, you know, that made people mad. Maybe Peter gave her the title Mary the Tower, similar to Peter the Rock. Maybe when she confessed him as the Christ, she became Mary the Tower. And that caused jealousy or a desire to, like, you know, elbow her out of the way. Peter’s like, I’m the one who’s the important one, not you. I mean, it’s hard to know what exactly the issue was. Some people could say that it– it might even go back to the first century, because Luke doesn’t seem to like Mary Magdalene particularly, which is odd.

Because Luke kind of stands up for women and others in his– in his Gospel.

It’s like– it’s almost like he presents the Virgin Mary as, like, be this kind of a woman, right? You’re like, you can talk, but in private, at home with your family members. And you can be very valued and venerated for being obedient and doing what you’re supposed to do and for supporting the men, like, financially, as, you know, Lydia does. And even Mary Magdalene does, like, it sort of. Luke presents women in a positive light and pays a lot of attention to them, but for doing specific roles. And it’s really interesting about Mary Magdalene because most women he does present positively, but he’s the only one who calls her a demoniac, and he’s the only one who takes her away from the scene at the cross. Luke knows that Mary Magdalene is at the cross because Luke is basing his narrative on Mark’s Gospel. And he removes the women’s names from the cross, and he also removes the women’s names from the empty tomb.

When the– I think– I think it’s angels in Luke that show up, and they are not– their names are not revealed until they go. And then they tell the male apostles. Once the women tell the men, then Luke says, okay, it was Mary Magdalene and Mary of James and Joanna and some others. But he– he hesitates. He doesn’t identify them at the cross or at the empty tomb like Matthew, Mark and John do. So he seems to sort of have something about Mary Magdalene that he– he doesn’t like. And especially he doesn’t allow her a vision of the risen Jesus. If you read your gospels and people say, oh, who did the risen Jesus appear to first? People say, oh, I know it’s Mary Magdalene. Not if you’re reading Luke.

Yeah.

Mary Magdalene does not get a vision of the risen Jesus in Luke’s gospel. So Luke seems to maybe be uncomfortable with her. And that’s interesting what you said about Josephus saying, oh, the one called the Christ.the one called the Christ. And it’s funny that Luke says, oh, she’s the one called Magdalene.

It’s this big deal.

Yeah, I mean, it’s. It’s possible that the controversy around her even goes back to the first century and is reflected in Luke’s gospel, but it’s hard to know. It’s hard to know what the source of it is.

Yeah, we know. We know Peter and Paul didn’t get along so great, but we also have Paul’s writings, and so we have more of an idea of what’s going on there.

There.

Now we hear about other women who are in positions of prominence, positions of leadership within early Christianity. Now, I understand a lot of them are financially backing the church, providing their homes for meetings and things like that. And people say, well, that’s not really leadership. That’s. That’s something.

Who says that? That’s different. Well, that’s not very nice.

No, it’s. No, it’s not. But we’ve heard some research in recent years indicating there are inscriptions that date fourth, fifth, maybe even the sixth century that are still referring to women in positions of leadership within Christian congregations. And then we have Phoebe and Junia and others in the New Testament. Was women’s leadership in early Christianity as big or maybe even bigger a deal back then than it is today? Are they the complementarians that so many people seem to make them out to be, or is it a third thing where whatever that relationship was like, it’s unknown to us. We can’t really reconstruct it. What are your thoughts on that?

It’s probably the latter. It is unknown to us and we can’t ever be certain. I would say that there was diversity of opinion at the very beginning. Some would say that Jesus was quite egalitarian, although he does definitely seem to designate 12 men. For one role. But the question is whether women had a similar function. There’s an interesting apocryphal book called the Sophia of Jesus Christ that just refers offhandedly to the 12 men and the seven women. And you’re like, what? Like, wait, what? So. So maybe there were the 12 men and the seven women. We only heard about the 12. That’s the only tradition that got passed on to us. But Jesus did seem to make some sort of designation, like some difference between men and women, because there were the 12 men. But at the same time, it does seem to be somewhat more like, certainly more acknowledging of women’s possible roles. Well, and also, even in the Gospels, you get difference of opinion.

I think, as I was saying, I think Luke presents women in a positive but very specific light. This is the right kind of woman to be, right? Whereas John actually, with the Samaritan woman who goes and spreads the word to the Samaritans, and. And with Mary Magdalene going and sharing news of the resurrection with the apostles, it seems that John is open to women having more prominent leadership roles even than the other gospels. So there’s sort of a diversity of opinion from gospel to gospel. And in the letters of Paul, of course, Galatians says, there is no male or female, there is no slave or free, there is no Jew nor Greek.eth Schrader Polczer: We’re all one in Christ Jesus. Whereas later letters of Paul and certainly the Pastoral Epistles make a really clear distinction between what women and what men can do. So some would say that there’s— Some have argued for sort of a narrative of decline where it starts out as more egalitarian and Jesus is focusing on, like, women and men having full humanity and full leadership equality.

And then as time goes on, in the context of the patriarchal Roman Empire, and like with certain misogynistic members of the church, women’s roles eventually get effaced and erased and taken away. And I do, I would say, believe in some sort of a decline narrative. It does seem to me that there was more possibility for women’s leadership at the beginning. That was erased eventually along the way. And that’s part of what my work on John 11 is about. I’m saying it’s possible that John presented Mary as a central character and that later copyists who found that role too threatening, diminished her by importing Martha and splitting— Splitting Mary Magdalene up into three different women, that makes her less authoritative. This woman does this. This woman does this thing. This woman does this thing. This woman does this thing.

As opposed to one authority.

Correct. Exactly. So I mean, I would argue for that there is some sort of a decline narrative, and that seems kind of—

Inevitable in what was a very patriarchal society at the time. As Christianity is spreading into the broader Greco-Roman world, there’s a lot of patriarchy there. So there’s— But it seems to me that would be a difficult thing for them to fight against and maintain over the centuries.

Yeah. And you can— I mean, you could even say, I don’t know, about, like, slavery. You know, same sort of thing with slavery. Like, at first, maybe, you know, maybe Jesus didn’t want people to have slaves, but then as time goes on, like, eventually they accommodate. You know, who knows? That’s the kind of thing. As I said, it’s impossible to be certain. But I think you can make a reasonable case that there was perhaps in Jesus’s time, some more authority given to the women that does slowly get taken away over time and then eventually forgotten. And that’s why we’re so surprised when we find that there was a Gospel of Mary. What? You know, like, no church father even mentioned that it existed. Until it was published in the 1950s, scholars were completely unaware that there had ever been a gospel written in a woman’s name. It was a shock. And it’s not that there wasn’t. There was. It’s just that it was, you could say, suppressed or forgotten or not acknowledged.

And I think they’ve also found, you know, lots of mosaics with women in sort of leadership positions. And people are like, what is this? What is this depicting? And it’s like, okay, well, maybe there were women in leadership positions. And for whatever reason, through forgetting, through people disagreeing with it, it just eventually got forgotten or maybe suppressed over time.0] Dan McClellan: And I think, unfortunately, that makes it harder for people today who are retrojecting their conditioning regarding what Christianity looks like into the past to accept some of those arguments.

And particularly, for instance, well, your case for Mary of Bethany being Mary Magdalene, I imagine there is some pushback among certain segments of the scholarly community from folks who are a little more comfortable with the Church working in a way that serves their interests.

You know, it’s interesting, though, the textual critics are more open to it than you would have thought because you’ve got, as I mentioned, it’s happening throughout the entire textual transmission. It’s a real problem. And so, like, in the textual transmission, any text critic worth their salt will acknowledge, okay, there’s something going on with Martha. The question is why? And I would say what’s interesting, I get emails from professors in surprising places sometimes at Christian universities saying, “Would you come talk to my class?” because… And they privately say to me, “This is causing a lot of people to think.” I mean, I’ve gotten invitations from Southern Methodist University, Pepperdine University, Wheaton, which is… Which is a Christian school. These are places that are considered like traditional and conservative and they’re the ones who are most interested in this. So I would say there’s not as much pushback as you would think. I think people are interested in this possibility. And the question is: the way the church turned out, is that the way that Jesus wanted it or is that the way that Peter wanted it?

That’s the real question that’s being asked here.

Yeah. And who… So who… Whose side are we advocating for today when we look at and when we try to negotiate what the church is supposed to look like today?

Exactly.

Interesting. Well, thank you so much for your time. I’ve enjoyed it immensely. I’ve been left a little bit out to dry without my co-host, but hopefully I didn’t do too… We’ll make sure of that. But hopefully I didn’t do too awfully.

Oh, you did great. You know a lot of stuff that I didn’t know. That thing about Josephus is great. And now I need to use that Spanish analogy. I’m going to use that all the time now. That’s great.

I’m glad I could help in some way. If I can help screw everything up in a couple of ways, then I’m happy. So again, thank you so much, Dr. Elizabeth Schrader Polczer, for your time. Congratulations.

It’s great to connect with you.

It’s great to connect with you too. I look forward to more work from you and digging into more. Are you working towards publishing your dissertation?

Yes, putting the book proposal together right now.

Excellent. And that’s a fun time.

Yeah.

And stressful, but fun. It is.

Yeah. And people can follow me and any updates for that on Twitter @libbyschrader, L-I-B-B-I-E S-C-H-R-A-D-E-R.

And do you have any other social media presences beyond Twitter or is that your main outlet?

I mean, I have Facebook, but that’s just for friends. I have Facebook, which is just for friends. I mean I have my website, elizabethschrader.com, and there’s links to the peer-reviewed publications there. If you want to read the Harvard Theological Review article or the Journal of Biblical Literature article, there’s links to it there. And also to my upcoming presentations like at SBL or local churches. I present a lot if people want to find out.

That’s.

That’s where you can go.

Excellent. All right, everybody, you know where to go. You can go check out those papers. And I guess I will see you in San Antonio then.

Yeah, see you then.

Yeah. It’s not the best venue for a lot of folks these days, but. But I’m looking forward to it.

It’s a place to just see your friends.

Yeah. Yeah, I’m looking forward to that a great deal. Well, thank you everybody for tuning in. I hope you’ve enjoyed this. I hope you’ve learned something new and hopefully been entertained to some degree at the same time. Check out Dr. Schrader Polczer’s song as well.

Yes.

If you can find it. Is it on YouTube?

It’s on elizabethschrader.com; just click on the Music tab. Click on the Music tab.

All right. Click on the Music tab. And as usual, if you would like to help us here at the Data Over Dogma podcast continue to make the Data Over Dogma podcast. You can find us at patreon.com/dataoverdogma and if you have any questions, comments, concerns, and since we did some Spanish earlier, chistes or chismes, you can reach out to us at contact@dataoverdogmapod.com. Hope you all are having a wonderful week and we will see you next time.