New Research on Mary and Martha and Lazarus

For years, I, like much of the church world, thought that Mary and Martha and Lazarus were siblings.  You may remember Lazarus as being raised from the dead or Mary and Martha as siblings with different ideas of how to treat Jesus when he comes to visit.  But what if we've gotten it all wrong?

In the closing sermon at this year's Wild Goose festival, Diana Butler Bass presented the work of Elizabeth Schrader, a PhD student at Duke.  She did research on the Lazarus text and noticed that the word Mary had been changed to Martha.  Why would someone do this?  And how can we be sure?  

Happily, Diana Butler Bass published her sermon here.  It's worth the read.  She makes the case that it was likely a 4th century change, a change to disempower Mary Magdalene.

But more important, she makes the case for why we should care.  Imagine how Christianity might have been different if we had seen Mary Magdalene as an important pillar of the church, just like Peter:  "The word magdala in Aramaic means tower. And so now you get the full picture. In the Synoptics, Jesus and Peter have a discussion. In that discussion, Peter utters the Christological confession. As a result of the Christological confession, Jesus says, "You are Peter the Rock." In the gospel of John, Mary and Jesus have a conversation, and Mary utters the Christological confession. And she comes to be known as Mary the Tower."

Would we have a better world today if we had prioritized Mary as much as we did Peter?  I would say yes.   I envision a more egalitarian world, of course.  I'd also like to see a world where we realize that we can contribute to the Kingdom of God in a wide variety of ways.  

If we had seen Mary and other women as important and vital, we'd have seen that there are other ways of being a disciple.  But it's not too late, of course.  If we see the Bible with fresh eyes, maybe we can move to that more egalitarian vision, so many centuries after the death of Jesus.