Note: Can I Say This at Church is produced for audio listening. If able, I strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which has inflection, emotion, sarcasm where applicable, and emphasis for points that may not come across well in written word. This transcript is generated using a combination of my ears and software, and may contain errors. Please check the episode for clarity before quoting in print.
Elizabeth Schrader 0:12
There was a change made to the text of the gospel of John, a pretty big one, in the second century, it would have had to be in the second century when this happened. For the purpose of diminishing Mary Magdalene’s role, the Gospel of John.
Seth Price 0:42
Hey there everybody, how are you doing? Welcome to the show. I'm glad you're here. I appreciate you downloading. Now, before we get going, I do need your help. This show is entirely funded by patrons and sometimes by ads. And so I am asking you, if you get anything from the show, consider supporting it, there are many ways to do so. Here in a few weeks, I am releasing a series on some of the Unspoken Sermons of George MacDonald, mostly because I like to do them, but I'm going to put them on Patreon. I don't think they're going to be anywhere else, at least not for the time being. You get access to other things, early access to the shows the videos, some people get books, discounts on merchandise in the store, you get all kinds of things. And so help if you could, or if you are able, and become a producer of the show over at Patreon, you'll find links for that in the show notes.
If you are unable to the other cool thing that you can do is literally in the app that you're listening to this on, just rate and review the show and leave a little note there. It does help in the algorithm world that we live in. But also I read those and I get a kick out of those, and I enjoy it. Even if you hate the show, tell me you do! Hopefully you don't or I would be curious why you download it today. But you know what I mean. I am rambling and I shouldn't be.
So I am very excited. So I want to open the door a bit into my life. So I have two beautiful daughters. And everybody says that their daughters are beautiful, and I get that, but I think they are; either way there are many, many denominations of at least the Protestant church that tell me and tell my daughters, who they are and what they can be. And often that's “less than”, and that's wrong. Now, how does that relate at all to Elizabeth Schrader? Elizabeth has done some work on Martha and Mary in the Gospel of John. And we briefly touched on this, and I'm going to link right here in the transcript, but also in the show notes, to some of the work that she's done on this and some other writings about it. And it is fascinating. And it is honestly, for the 15 year ago me, would have been earth shattering with the way that I viewed the Bible. Luckily, that's not the way that I view the Scriptures today. I really enjoyed this conversation. And so here we go, a conversation about Martha and Mary, gospel of John, and a few other things mixed in with Elizabeth Schrader.
Seth Price 3:29
Elizabeth, welcome to the show late at night. On a…it's Monday. It's Monday, time blends together. I'm glad that you're here. And I am thankful that Keith introduced us. So Keith, I have no idea if you listen to these, I have to assume that he is but thank you, my friend. But welcome.
How are you doing tonight?
Elizabeth Schrader 3:44
I am well, I'm just in between, like a Zoom jam with some friends playing music. And then I'm going to do some Sanskrit. So that's that's what doctoral life is over here. (Chuckles)
Seth Price 3:56
What do you jam with on Zoom? How does that even work with latency?
Elizabeth Schrader 4:00
Good question! Yeah, some friends and I got a fellowship here at Duke. And it turned out that a lot of the people in the in the cohort were musicians. And so we started just like meeting for jams. And we’d like go to each other's houses and play songs around and harmonize with each other and like learn songs together. And then COVID hit and we wanted to keep on doing our jams. So now we just like play songs in the round. I played a Killers song tonight. It was fun.
Seth Price 4:23
Which one?
Elizabeth Schrader 4:24
Everything will be all right.
Seth Price 4:27
I don't know that one. I only know Mr. Brightside.
Elizabeth Schrader 4:30
It is the last one on that record.
Seth Price 4:31
It's got you, well, I don't know that record. I only know that song. And then I enjoyed watching how it was broken. Have you watched Song Exploder on Netflix. Is this the thing that you're aware of?
Elizabeth Schrader 4:41
My friend Kathleen works on that show? So I know about it. But I have not yet watched it.
Seth Price 4:47
It is by far one of my favorite podcast, by far. Like if there's a podcast that I've listened to since I knew the podcasts were a thing. It's that one?
Elizabeth Schrader 4:55
Well, I've heard that it's very good and I should definitely listen to it. In fact, just to support my friend, I should do it. So yes, I know about it! And, I will listen to it.
Seth Price 5:05
You don't have to commit to me, it is very good. But not why I brought you on. So who and why is Elizabeth Schrader? I like to try to ask that question differently each time, but why not? Yeah, who and why?
Elizabeth Schrader 5:20
That's a really deep question.
I would say, and it's changed over the years, there have been, I feel as though I'm in like, life 2.0 right now, because I was a musician for a very long time, as I was just alluding to. Right now, I am a doctoral candidate in early Christianity at Duke University, in North Carolina. And I study manuscripts of the New Testament, and the text in those manuscripts, and variations in the manuscript, because not all the manuscripts say the same thing. And I'm really fascinated with textual variations in the New Testament, I suppose, particularly around the women. (Seth chuckles) Because there's a lot of really interesting textual variations that are not widely discussed. And so I think it's a very fascinating topic. And I'm happy to talk about that with people. I think I do feel something of a vocation to gain expertise and to bring these issues to people's attention.
Seth Price 6:21
Yeah, I want to break apart some of those. And I wanted to start with, what do you want to do when you're done with your PhD stuff? So we'll talk a bit about what you're studying in your PhD work. But I'm really curious, what are you going to do when you're done? Like, are you going to teach? Are you going to write? Are you going to write and you're going to teach, are you going to change careers again? What are you gonna do?
Elizabeth Schrader 6:43
Probably all of that. (On the next career change) I mean I hope not. I don't feel as though this career change was my choice. I feel like it just sort of happened to me. I mean, I was getting a little bit burnt out on the music business. But at the same time, oftentimes new burnout, I mean I was a piano teacher, also, I could have just been piano teacher, that would have been a nice job. It's a great job. But this other thing happened, where I found out that my brain is really good at textual criticism, which is a really random kind of obscure, arcane, field within New Testament scholarship, where you compare variations in manuscripts. And you try to figure out what the author wrote or what the earliest circulating text was. And that's something that I certainly didn't grow up saying, that's what I wanted to do with my life. But I sort of stumbled upon it and found out that my brain works that way.
Which was surprising, because I was a full grown adult when I found that out. And I also learned that not very many women do that. And so it seems as though it would be a valuable contribution for me to do this type of thing, that my brain seems to be good at, especially in a field where women are underrepresented.
Seth Price 7:41
Yeah. You said the word early Christianity, earlier, that's a bad sentence. I don't know how to say it else-wise. What is when is early Christianity like is that the first 50 years the first 1000 years? What is that?
Elizabeth Schrader 7:54
Um, first 500 years, probably.
Seth Price 7:59
Okay.
Elizabeth Schrader 8:00
I mean, kind of my expertise drops off after the Council of Ephesus. Council of Ephesus in the mid fifth century. I know, a lot of stuff up till then basically, you know, pre concentrating and Christianity I'm very interested in because Constantine really affected how things turned out. But there was a lot of different sorts of Christianit”ies” before then. And so I'm interested in exploring what those were. And if there were certain aspects that may have been “suppressed”? And if so we should find them and bring them to light.
Seth Price 8:29
Yeah, absolutely.
And then you said textual variations. I don't know what that means. Like, that's, those aren't sentences that I…I know what those words mean, separately, but I don't know what they mean together.
Elizabeth Schrader 8:42
Okay, so we don't have any of the autographs of the books of the New Testament; that is the copy that the author handed to somebody else to copy. We just have copies of copies of copies. And so we have 1000s, of manuscripts of the New Testament. But of course, there was no printing press for the first 1500 years of the religion. And so people are just copying each other, and no two copies are alike.
Right now we have over 5000 manuscripts of the New Testament. But some of these are obviously more valuable than others. And there's like a whole study within itself of the text and how it developed over time. And it's the job of text critics to try to obtain the earliest texts that we can. We might not be able to find exactly what the author wrote, unfortunately, because the autograph is lost. So, usually, there's at least 100 years in between our oldest copy and the time of authorship.
So there's kind of a little black box in the text transmission that we aren't totally sure what happened in that black box. So the best that we can hope for is to go back to the earliest textual record that we have, but there still might be a gap in between what the author wrote and what we have access to.
Seth Price 9:55
Hmm, I watched a brief video of you talking a bit about some of that and things kept popping up in my brain that so I don't, what do I want to say…? So you'd asked me, we spoke yesterday for those listening, which I enjoyed, I might start doing more of those I did enjoy that. You had asked me whether or not inerrancy is the thing that that matters. It's not really the way that you said it. But for me, it's not. But I know many people that listen, maybe still hold to that, because there's a lot of people that listen to this show. And so I found myself wondering, why does textual variations and criticism matter for a Bible today? Because why should that matter? So if something changed that you'd uncovered would they even reprint the Bibles? Or no, like, what good does it ultimately do for a Christian just sitting in church today?
Elizabeth Schrader 10:46
Oh, well, yeah, they would, in fact, reprint the Bibles and they have. For instance, well, there's two things to keep in mind. There's different Bible printings and translations that make different decisions. So in the 19th century, a couple of manuscripts came to light that had never been studied before. That turned out to be very important Codices Vaticanus and Codices Sinaiticus, which are fourth century copies of the Bible. And they were like the oldest, complete, copies of the Bible that anybody had ever seen. And both of them did not have the last 16 verses of Mark's Gospel, is it 16 verses…the last section of Marks gospel verses 16:8-20. So I guess, the last 12 verses. And they also did not have the story of the woman caught in adultery. And these Bible verses so old, that people have theorized that they were some of the 50 Bibles that Constantine commissioned in the fourth century. He commissioned 50 Bibles to be made with, you know, imperial funds, because these are very deluxe editions on parchment, which means animal skin. You know, hundreds of animals died. Several professional scribes worked on these Bibles. They're very high quality.
And so it's possible, people have theorized we don't, we can't know for sure that could be as Codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, were two of those 50 Bibles. And if so, then that means in the fourth century, there was no story of a woman caught in adultery, there was no ending to Mark's gospel as we know it. So this caused a big shock in the 19th century, when that happened. And a lot of people, it challenged their faith. But if you look at a New Revised Standard translation today, you will see that both of those sections appear in brackets.
And I think there was actually the 1st Revised Standard Version, they put the story of the woman caught in adultery in the footnotes, and everybody got angry. So they put it back, but it's in brackets. So yes, you can cause the text of the Bible to change, it can change.
Seth Price 12:40
So many questions I want to ask on that. But that's not why I brought you on. Yeah. So I want to get to the work that you're doing. So you are writing and doing work around Martha, or Mary, maybe both, maybe I misunderstood. It's probably possible. I try to approach these from as much ignorance as possible, because I find if I can learn something other people probably can, too. So what some of the work that you're doing now, how did that kind of happen? What is that shifted? And then ultimately, where is that leading the work to? And I'm aware that those are massive questions, and we may not even have time to get to all of them.
Elizabeth Schrader 13:15
Well, I'll just start with the last thing you said; where it's leading to. It's really landing on the role of women in the church. That's where this is landing. Because what I've basically theorized, I have not proven but I have made a reasonable scholarly case, that there was a change made to the text of the Gospel of John, a pretty big one, in the second century. It would have had to be in the second century when this happened, for the purpose of diminishing Mary Magdalene, his role in the Gospel of John. And, fortunately, I think your audience is pretty biblically literate, right?
Seth Price 13:47
I hope so.
Elizabeth Schrader 13:49
I think they are.
Seth Price 13:50
I have been told that there's a high, what's the word my wife used at once, there's like a high entry point like you can't just…we just go into the to the level three rapids, there's no…
Elizabeth Schrader 14:01
Level three rapids!
Seth Price 14:02
You should already know how lifeboats work and life jackets work and paddles work. Which is probably bad. I don't know. Maybe it's not, doesn't matter, does it?
Elizabeth Schrader 14:12
Well, that's great. That means I don't have to spend quite as much time talking about some of these things. The way I got into it is I wrote a song about Mary Magdalene and I had read The Complete Idiot's Guide to Mary Magdalene after writing a song about her. And I said to myself, I want to look at the oldest manuscript of the Gospel of John and see if there was anything changed around Mary Magdalene in it, just out of curiosity. And I was a total lay person. I grew up going to church in the Episcopal Church.
I had written a song about Mary Magdalene and I was a professional musician and a piano teacher. I did not know Greek. I did not care about the Da Vinci Code (laughs). I did not have any particular like attachment one way or another. I just wanted to look at the oldest copy. And in the oldest copy of the Gospel of John there was nothing strange in the scene at the cross. Mary Magdalene is, or in John 20, where Jesus encounters Mary Magdalene, the risen Jesus in the garden on Easter morning. But I had read in my Complete Idiot's Guide to Mary Magdalene, that there has always been a question of whether Lazarus’ Sister Mary, often thought of as Mary of Bethany, should be identified as Mary Magdalene. That that's been a question throughout the history of the church.
So the last place that I looked in Papyrus 66 was at John 11. And again, I didn't read Greek, but I was using an interlinear study Bible, sounds like some of your people know what that is. And when I went to John, Chapter 11, I could see very clearly that the name Mary had been crossed out two times. And this is the oldest copy that exists of the Gospel of John. Papyrus 66, was discovered in 1952 and it was first published in 1958. So we haven't had it for that long. But scholars had been studying it, I found this in 2012.
So scholars have been studying it for over 50 years at this point. And when I saw this, I was like, “wait a second”. So the first time the name Maria, was changed to say, Martha. The second time, the name, Maria was changed to say, αι αδελφαι, “the sisters”.
And I didn't really know Greek, but I could see enough that it looked like they were adding Martha to the story. And I knew enough to know that Martha shows up in a different story in a different gospel, in the Gospel of Luke. In Luke 10, there's a story of Mary and Martha. Jesus goes to their house, or this cooking, and Mary is sitting at Jesus's feet. Martha says, tell my sister to help me. And Jesus says, “Martha, Martha, Mary has chosen the better part, and it will not be taken from her”. You notice that they don't have a brother, there's no brother in that story. Nobody is raised from the dead in the Gospel of Luke.
Also, that story happens a long way from Jerusalem. Jesus seems to be in Galilee, or Sameria, in that story at that point. And scholars, I've since learned, have noticed that. That it's a bit weird that Mary and Martha don't have a brother. And they don't seem to be Bethan in Luke's Gospel. So when I saw this thing, and Papyrus 66, with the name Mary getting changed Martha, and Mary getting changed to “the sisters”, I was like, it looks like they're adding Martha. It looks like the scribe is adding Martha to the story. Which is not a thought that would ever have occurred to me, because Mary and Martha go together, there are two peas in a pod. You don't separate Mary and Martha. But just looking at it that's what it looked like the scribe was doing it look like the scribe was adding Martha to the story. And when I discovered this, it was so shocking! And so I went back to the library, to the Brooklyn Public Library, and I started ordering articles on interlibrary loan to see anything that any scholar had said in the last 50 years about these changes.
Basically, everybody said, “Yeah, the name Maria was changed Martha, probably a mistake”. Oh, the name Maria, right after that is changed to the sisters. And all the verbs are changed from singular to plural.
Seth Price 18:02
It's a mistake.
Elizabeth Schrader 18:02
That's very weird. And that's where the scholarship had ended. They just said, that's so strange. This is the weirdest change in the whole papayas. And that was the end of the scholarship on it. And I was like, “What!” you know? This might be Mary Magdalene. People have always wondered if this person was Mary Magdalene. And this is the oldest copy that exists of the Gospel of John, there's one little fragment Papyrus 52, but it's only a couple verses. But Papyrus 66 has fragments of all 21 chapters. It's like a Codex that's still intact. And it's usually dated to about 200 AD, again, over 100 years after the gospel was written.
So that means that the Gospel of Luke has been circulating as well. And so it looks to me as though somebody, the scribe, has what I've since kind of concluded, or what I ended up theorizing is that the scribe had access to two copies of John, that's sort of what the scholarly consensus is on Papyrus 66. Like you’re a scribe, and your job is to copy this gospel. And so you have two copies that you're copying from, one that you're copying, and one that you're correcting against. So this scribe was trying to make a good copy. And it seems to me as though one of the scribes copies had Martha and the other one did not.
And the scribe is sort of trying to reconcile them, changing things here and there, and trying to make a good copy. And then after five verses, Martha becomes stable in the text of Papyrus 66. After John 11:5, Martha is there in Papyrus 66. But for the first five verses, Martha is kind of blinking in and out, the scribe doesn't seem certain of whether she belongs there. And so I realized, like, this might be Mary Magdalene, and maybe Martha doesn't belong there. And nobody's done anything about it.
So I enrolled in a master's program, basically, because I was like, I need to tell everybody. And so what a joy that I'm actually doing that. Look, I'm on your show, and I'm accomplishing that! I'm a singer songwriter in Brooklyn, and I found something weird and I wanted to tell people! Look I’m doing it and that’s great! (Chuckles)
Seth Price 20:04
(Chuckles)
Why does it matter that Martha is inserted into these texts? Like, what purpose does that serve to not invent a character? I wasn't there. So maybe she's real maybe she's not. It doesn't matter.
Elizabeth Schrader 20:15
Well she’s real in Luke, she's definitely real in Luke.
Seth Price 20:17
But why insert her into the other text? Like, what purpose does that possibly serve?
Elizabeth Schrader 20:21
I think that what it comes down to is the confession in the Gospel of John. The central Christological confession in John's Gospel belongs to Martha. Jesus says,
“I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live,”
And he says,
Do you believe this?
And Martha says,
“Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.”
That's generally accepted to be the central confession of the Gospel of John. And right now, it's on the lips of a minor character. Martha is a female, which is interesting, and it's a confession that has, since antiquity, been compared to Peter's confession in Matthew 16:16, where Jesus says, it is at Caesarea Philippi, Jesus says,
Who do you say that I am?
And Peter says,
You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.
And that's how Peter becomes “the rock” that the church is built on. And so I'm saying that in John's Gospel, a woman gets that which is remarkable in itself, but right now, it's a minor character. It's a character who, you know, she has that cooking moment and she has this confession, but she doesn't really have that much else. What's really interesting is that Tertullian who is one of the oldest church fathers that we have, he was writing it in like 210 AD. He had a previous call against practices. Every single manuscript Against Praxeas says that Mary gave the confession.
Seth Price 21:40
Hmm.
Elizabeth Schrader 21:42
Not only that, but going back as far as we have commenters, people think that Mary of Bethany is Mary Magdalene. There's always been division about this people that they would say, “Oh, she's from Magdala not Bethany!”
Seth Price 21:54
Is that a city, is that a title?
Elizabeth Schrader 21:57
There's a lot of towns called Migdal this, Migdal that, in antiquity, it just means “tower.” So there has been a little bit of a debate in scholarship over whether it's a title like Mary the Tower, or whether it thinks she's from the town called tower. Migdal Nunia is where they think she's from, in Galilee. But there's a lot of Migdal’s, and there's like Migdal Gad there's like eight of them or something. But we know that we're all over Palestine. And in fact, Eusebius of Syria who has a church father, right in the fourth century, he thinks that Magdala is in Judea, which is a totally different place where people think Magdala is today. So if there's there's actually no consensus, the word magdal just means tower.
The point is, is that there has been debate over whether Mary of Bethany is Mary Magdalene or not. And I'm saying that when you put Martha into the story, it confuses things. Because if it was just Lazarus and Mary, you would be more likely, as a reader of John's Gospel, if you're reading from beginning to end in John's Gospel, you'll be more likely to notice how very similar the Lazarus story is to the story of Jesus's resurrection from the dead. Obviously, there's a woman named Mary who is crying in both stories. And she sees somebody that she loves dearly raised from the dead and both stories. But there's other more subtle things such as they have the words like, you know, tomb, stone, also handkerchief—sudarium—which is a really unique Latin loanword. It's very rare word, that's found in both stories. Lazarus has the sudarium, and then there's the sudarium in the tomb that Mary sees.
But there's also Jesus says, “Where have you laid him”? “Pou tetheikate auton” (Ποῦ τεθείκατε αὐτόν). And then the same question is asked, Mary asks Jesus when she thinks he's the gardener, “where have you laid him?” “Pou ethēkas auton” (ποῦ ἔθηκας αὐτόν)
So there's a deliberate parallelism created by the fourth evangelist, between the Lazarus story and the John 20 story that is not an accident. Not only that, but Mary goes on to anoint Jesus and she gets criticized. And he says, “Let her save it for the day of my burial”. There's only one woman named Mary who goes to Jesus's tomb in John's Gospel, it's Mary Magdalene.
So I'm suggesting that as the evangelist wrote the Gospel of John, it's not stated explicitly that it's Mary Magdalene, that gives the confession, but it's a woman named Mary, who does all the same things as Mary Magdalene. And there's these insinuations that this Mary who annoys Jesus, who's going to go to his burial, that she's probably Mary Magdalene. But what if you put Martha in the story that is derailed?
Seth Price 24:34
Hmm.
Elizabeth Schrader 24:35
Instead of making a connection with John 20 you're gonna think of Luke 10. You're distracted into the Gospel of Luke. You're not thinking about how similar Lazarus’ sister Mary is to Mary Magdalene anymore. Now you're thinking, (sarcastically) Oh, Mary, Martha, I love those ladies. They're so I love them. They're my favorite Bible characters!
And so you're not even thinking about that story with Jesus and Mary Magdalene anymore. And I'm saying, that's what that accomplishes. It accomplishes three things. It distracts you into the Gospel of Luke. So you don't see the parallelism. Second of all, it changes the identity of Mary. No more is she probably Mary Magdalene. Now she's the woman who sat quietly at Jesus's feet in Luke's Gospel—in Luke's Gospel that's not Mary Magdalene. And third of all, Martha has that all important confession. So I'm saying, imagine a gospel of John where Mary Magdalene, gives the confession, anoints Jesus, goes to the cross, only person at the empty tomb, Jesus appears to her first and she gets an apostolic commission, she's a very important character.
Seth Price 25:41
I don't know how to ask this well. So would this be? I have a couple questions. So is there some scribes sitting there saying, “mmmm…I can't…I don't want to submit to a female being this high up in the church? Because I don't want someone to contest with Peter”? Or is there someone, like are there four scribes that just went together and said, we're going to try to change as many copies as we have? That way, no one else knows the difference. Like, I can't see if someone changed the text that way. And it's circulating, and people are like, I saw a copy a few weeks ago, it didn't say this. That's not what this says, what the heck are you doing? Are those even really valid questions, or they just off-base?
Elizabeth Schrader 26:18
I wish we could go back in time and see what happened? Don't you want to know?
Seth Price 26:22
I do.
Elizabeth Schrader 26:23
I think the idea of a woman being in a similar leadership role to Peter would have been challenging. I mean, it's still challenging today, right? So think about how challenging it would have been in 200 AD, if somebody got that. But as far as what you're talking about, with the scribes, it's more likely to have been an editor than a scribe because scribes just are copying. There's somebody called like a diathortus (I’m sure I’ve misspelt this), who is in charge of like maybe a scriptorium, who is sort of deciding how the copies turnout and checking things. It might have been somebody like that, perhaps in an influential intellectual center, perhaps Alexandria, Papyrus 66, comes from Alexandria in Egypt, that's possible. I'd say that it's more likely that somebody in an early stage may have deliberately made a change like that. But the practice of scribes is to include as much as possible. And that's actually why this is such a clever correction. Because you don't want to miss anything. If this is the Word of God, and potentially the Word of God, you don't want to leave anything out. And that's one of the things we do know about scribal practices in antiquity, better safe than sorry. And so safe is to just include everything. So if you have one copy, where it's just Mary, and one where it's Mary and Martha, you're going to take the safe bet and do the one that has both sisters, because you don't want to miss anything.
So I think it's a very clever move on the editor's part. I should also point out that when I entered my master's program, I thought I was going to do a study of Papyrus 66 but what ended up happening was, I looked at transcriptions of over 100 manuscripts of John's Gospel, and I was able to go through every single verse where Martha shows up. And it turns out that Martha drops in and out of the text transmission throughout the text transmission. One in five manuscripts of the Gospel of John has something problematic around Martha, in fact you can reconstruct almost the entirety of John 11 without Martha. There's no manuscript, that we have, I mean, there's maybe there's one in a jar in Egypt, somewhere in the sands, but there's no manuscript that we have access to where Martha is completely gone. But by cobbling together different verses from different manuscripts, you can get almost the entire story [of] John 11:1 - John 12:7 without Martha, you just have to cobble it together.
Seth Price 28:51
So how does that rest in the academic world? Like when when someone like you comes in and says, this has been here all along what have you people been doing? Like, how does that…
Elizabeth Schrader 29:03
Oh! I don't say it like that.
Seth Price 29:05
That's what I would say, because I'm a sarcastic jerk.
Elizabeth Schrader 29:05
Yes, but I’m just some upstart doctoral student.
Seth Price 29:07
How does that how, does that…like, I can see myself as a professor, whatever in the background being like, “huh”. Like, well, how does that like How was that received? Or people were like, Oh, interesting. Tell me more. Yes. How can I help you? Here's more books like…
Elizabeth Schrader 29:20
It is the latter, fortunately.
Seth Price 29:21
Realy? Good!
Elizabeth Schrader 29:23
Yes. I mean, that's academia. Academia is the study of knowledge. You know, if we were in the business of apologetics, that would be something else. But in academia, you know, I applied to PhD programs, and I got, luckily, one of the best text critics in the world to be my advisor, Jennifer Knust and she also studies the manuscripts of the gospel of John. She studies the story of the woman caught in adultery. And so she knows that story extremely well. She knows the manuscript extremely well.
She has friends in Germany. She's friends with the guys who make the critical edition that all Bibles are translated from the Novum Testamentum Graece and she's friends with the British people who are now working on the Editio Critica Maior of the gospel of John, which is they're taking like every single manuscript, like hundreds of manuscripts, and showing every single reading. There's going to be a massive volume. Anyway, she believed in me, she took me on as her doctoral student. And then in because I got published in the Harvard Theological Review, I should mention that; it's not just that I found this cool thing, it's that I wrote it up. I submitted it to a top tier journal, which is maybe a little presumptuous as a master student for me to do that. But I'm, like….
Seth Price 30:33
It is only presumptuous if they don't publish it. It's only presumptuous, if they don't read it and go, there's something here.
Elizabeth Schrader 30:39
Well you have to write it in the right way. It's not just that I have a picture of the P66. I had to make a good argument. But I found out later that my peer reviewer was Elden Epp who was one of the world's most eminent text critics, which was, I was like, shocked, I like, my jaw hit the floor when I found that out. But he gave it a very positive review and it was published in 2017. And then once it was published, I could mail it to these guys in Germany, they read it and they said, “I was very impressed”. And then I was able to meet with them in Germany.
So I'm not going to say that I persuaded everybody, because I think what would be persuasive is if we found a copy with Martha completely gone, sort of like Codex Sinaiticus and Vaticanus is the story of the woman caught in adultery is gone. The ending of the Gospel of Mark is gone. That's very persuasive. We don't have any copies where Martha's completely gone. We can just create like an eclectic copy by piecing it together. But that's not quite the same thing as a copy where it's completely gone.
I think if a copy like that surfaced, then people would be…I mean, but I've also found a lot of ancient artwork where there's only one sister Actually, my friend, Ally Kateusz , has found a lot of these pieces of artwork; and I found some others as well, depicting the Lazarus story and there's just one sister, ancient, like fourth century sarcophagus. So I would just say it's creating a conversation that's being taken seriously.
Seth Price 32:03
Give me a minute, we'll be right back.
Seth Price 33:34
So what would be the time period for someone to find one from like, year A to year B, where you're like, yeah, if we would find a complete copy of john, from this time period, most likely we would find Martha not there. Like what would be those years?
Elizabeth Schrader 33:48
It would have to be in the second century. Because Origen of Alexandria, who writes in the third century, early third century, in his commentary on John's Gospel, he talks a fair bit about Martha. In fact, he says Martha is condemned. He seems to not have liked Martha, which I thought was kind of interesting, maybe Origen knew of different copies that said different things. But I think but Tertullian seems not to know Martha in John's Gospel at all. And he was writing in 210 AD. So I think you'd have to find a second century copy.
And we don't really have any other than that one fragment, Papyrus 52, that's like this big that has four verses of John 18, we don't have any second century papyrus or copies of the gospels. But you know what? It doesn't have to necessarily be a second century copy. It could be a 10th century copy of a second century copy. Maybe somebody had a second century copy sitting in their church and were “like this is so old, we need to redo this”. Or maybe an eighth century. You know what I mean? Like it's you just, I think that it's possible. I don't know I have a feeling that somewhere on this Earth, there is a copy without Martha and we haven't found yet, but perhaps people need to be ready for when we find it.
Seth Price 35:02
I mean, we find things we find new things all the time. So yeah, one of my favorite websites that I'm often blocked from reading everything is Haaretz they publish things all the time. And I hit the paywall I've had too many articles for the for the month and it bothers me.
Elizabeth Schrader 35:19
I don't know Haaretz or what is that?
Seth Price 35:21
It's, so I talked to you a bit about James McGrath in the past. So he often shares articles from there and I'm like, Oh, that's that's four paragraphs in and now come on!
Elizabeth Schrader 35:30
Ha! James McGrath is the best I saw you interviewed him as well.
Seth Price 35:34
He's been on twice. James is fun. I'd like to have him on, I want to talk to him about the Mandaeans (but I butcher the pronounciation)
Elizabeth Schrader 35:40
He says you're supposed to say “man-Die-ons, (but). I was taught Man-dee-ans until he said that. And now I just don't say it.
Seth Price 35:46
Before he said it. I didn't know that that was a thing. And then I've since dove into it. And I'm like, this is fascinating, really fascinating.
So I have a couple more questions specifically surrounding this. So I am aware or at least I've been told that some of the like, like the Coptic churches that Egyptian and Ethiopian Coptic churches like they have, like, their own subset of texts that they'll often study from? Are their versions of these gospels different than the ones that we're going from? Because I know some of their versions from what I've understood from the internet. So we'll say Wikipedia, tarnished me. Like, is it different in the different sects of the faith? Like the Protestant Bible versus the Catholic Bible versus the apocryphal with it in the Bible? Like, is there any interweaving of Mary and Martha interchanging or playing together throughout all the extra texts that are not in my 66 God ordained books of the Bible*, insert sarcastic asterik right there.
Elizabeth Schrader 36:43
(laugh)
The Coptic Orthodox Church split from the Catholic and the current Orthodox Church in the fifth century, over the nature of Christ. And so they do have like a different doctrine. They have a different doctrine of, I think, their miaphysite, which means they believe Christ only had one nature, instead of both the human and divine nature. So they're different in what they believe. But there are no Coptic copies without Martha. There are some ancient Coptic manuscripts. The thing is that the oldest manuscripts are from before that split. So you might be thinking about a doctrinal split that happened in the fifth century. Also, they have a different canon. They have extra books. Like they have 1st Clement, that's one of their books of their Bible, which is kind of awesome, like, their Bible is different. And I actually have a Coptic Christian friend here in North Carolina, who moved here when he from Egypt when he was 10. And all the evangelicals were trying to convert him. (laughs) Like his church is 1000 years older than the Protestant church. And they're like, what's wrong? Your Bible has an extra book. And it's like, okay, there's more than one kind of Christianity, my friends.
But the thing is that I have not proven that Martha was added to the Gospel of John. But it is a reasonable argument, when looking at the data. And if people want to read my Harvard theological review article, maybe I'll send you a link that you can put in the show notes.
Seth Price 38:07
I have it, I bought it, because I wanted, I wanted I wanted, it's like 20 bucks, 25 bucks, it's not expensive, like you can, you can just buy it. It's not. It's not really expensive. It's worth reading.
Elizabeth Schrader 38:17
So it's cambridge.org/ElizabethSchrader, you can see the Scripture being changed, yeah, by the scribes. And I'm just providing a reasonable motive for why they would do this. We know that Mary Magdalene was a controversial character. We know that from it looks like the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary, and the Gospel of Philip. They didn't make it into the Bible. I'm not saying that those are scripture. I'm not saying that they should be scripture. But they're telling us something about the debates that were happening in the second century, where apparently Mary Magdalene was controversial, especially Peter seemed to have a problem with her. That's what those texts say.
And so we have like a historical motive for why Mary Magdalene might be suppressed. We know that people thought that Lazarus’ sister, Mary, might have been Mary Magdalene. We know that we have people commenting on that in the third century apologists and the Manicheans, and then St. Ambrose, we have people who said that they thought that Lazarus, the sister Mary was Mary Magdalene, and we have this church father saying that Mary had the confession, which is so similar to Peter's confession in Matthew that makes him the rock that the church is built on. So I'm not saying it's a proof. But it's, it's, a reasonable argument. And also, one of the things I'm proudest of in that article on page 381. I do reconstruct the text without Martha using real readings from some of the most important manuscripts in the world. And you can get a chunk of Scripture with just Lazarus and Mary, John 11:1-5. And to me, I feel as though…what was the first question you asked me today who is Elizabeth Schrader, what is she here to do?
Seth Price 39:49
And why? I can't remember.
Elizabeth Schrader 39:53
If I die, and I recovered five verses of scripture to what the evangelists wrote then that's, that's something, that's something I'll be okay like having died and done that with my life if I really did recover five verses of scripture. I should also express that this is a faith based work for me, I was living at the seminary in Manhattan, the General Theological Seminary, I was going to chapel every day, praying every day. It comes from a place of…what I like about your podcast is it seems to be about people who love Jesus, and who love God, and who are trying to discern what God is asking from them. And I really feel that this is my vocation. And this is what I'm here to do.
And the other thing is, if I'm wrong, I'm just some girl who had an idea who got on some podcasts, and got a bunch of YouTube views. And she's some girl with an idea. But if it's true, that the scripture was changed, then nothing can stop it from coming to light, you know? Maybe it takes some time for it to come out. But if it's true, then there's nothing that can stop it. So I'm fine with it being one way or the other, either. I'm some girl with a crazy idea who might have a doctoral dissertation, who's on some library shelf somewhere, or I helped recover something that was lost for 1800 years. One or the other we'll find out?
Seth Price 41:26
Yeah. When do we find out? So how long does that take? A lifetime?
Elizabeth Schrader 41:30
Ask the Lord? (laughs from both)
I don't know. I mean, I would like to think that by talking with you, and others, raising awareness of it, I think makes a big difference and helping people to know about it. And I mean, I certainly don't want…
Seth Price 41:50
Does it require help, like, it's more than you can do alone, like, would it require other people to also begin to study it as well.
Elizabeth Schrader 41:57
I would love it if other people, for instance, I have now looked at about 250 manuscripts of John 11, there's about 5000. I would love for there to be a project, where we started just looking at every single copy in the world of John 11. And seeing what it says, it's possible. I haven't found any copies of the gospel where Mary gives the confession. But maybe there's some copies where like (it is), right now it's just a church father who said she did, a really important church father. But maybe there's some copies where Mary gives the confession. Maybe somewhere in some Greek monastery, there's a John 11, where Martha's totally gone, because it's a 10th century copy of a second century manuscript, you know.
I would like there to be some movement in scholarship. And that would take funding. I mean, if somebody is like I want to fund this project, great! I know a lot of scholars, great text critics who could use the funding, and we could like, for a year or six months or something, look at every single manuscript of John 11 and find out what they all say, or, you know, I don't know, maybe somebody, somebody, has a copy and they're hiding it, I don't know! It's okay, bring it forward!
Seth Price 43:00
This is the technophile, in me, or I don't know if that's the right word, the person that wonders is there not a way to just digitally scan or arbitrarily scan and have AI analyze specific portions of all of these copies and be like, here are the 17 or 170, or whatever, that possibly fit the parameters so that you can narrow down what you're looking for? Is that not a thing that exists?
Elizabeth Schrader 43:25
They have been digitizing images of all the manuscripts of the New Testament, which is very exciting. It's called the New Testament virtual manuscript room. It's awesome. Um, but the problem is the paleography, paleography changes.
Seth Price 43:39
I don’t know what that word means, paleography.
Elizabeth Schrader 43:40
Handwriting.
The writing style is totally different over the course of, you know, Papyrus 66, is written in like big capital letters. And then that kind of switches to the block, majuscule that Codex Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are written in, and then it turns into the miniscule which is really delicate, sort of lowercase,
Seth Price 44:13
So just not consistent.
Elizabeth Schrader 44:16
It's constantly changing. Maybe you could for the miniscule, but I mean, you just need somebody who can read the paleography. And also, sometimes some of the things are so subtle, like, an accent mark can change the meaning. And also the difference between the word Maria and the word Martha is just one letter, an yoda and a theta. It's just one letter. I mean, I don't think computers…computers could digitize but you need human eyes, trained human eyes, to look at the paleography to know what's going on.
Seth Price 44:31
Hmm, you know, have you seen a movie called, oh, man, let's call it Maria. It might actually be called Maria or Gloria or Clara. Clara is what it's called. It's on Amazon Prime. So hearing you describe looking through all of that there is a part where they're looking for something in outer space and they're looking at it by finding the pieces that are missing. So they're looking for like gravity changing light, like bending around planets and stars, where they can kind of and so they're just sitting there calming reams, and reams, and reams. And finally, they boasted like I found it. Here it is, I found it hearing you describe looking through all those manuscripts for some reason, I keep visualizing that in my head. It really does.
Elizabeth Schrader 45:10
That sounds great. I'm getting excited talking about this. I mean, because I don't know, it's just a feeling that I have, I feel that it's out there. I feel that the copy is out there. That there is a copy somewhere with Martha gone, and I want to find it. And maybe I'll find it in my lifetime. First, I have to get my doctorate my advisors like “Libby, you can't just do one thing. You know, you're not here to be a scholar of John 11”. I'm here to be a professor of early Christianity, I've also got to teach on what happened at Ephesus and Constantine and all that, you know, every all the, the Aryans and the, you know, the Diocletian Persecution and I have to know everything. So I can't I you know, it's easy to get obsessed with something like this.
Seth Price 45:50
There are worse hobbies than studying the Bible. There are worse hobbies than that. So final question, what is the divine? Like, what is God? How do you wrap words around that?
Elizabeth Schrader 46:02
Wow; oh, my gosh, come on! Like, that's such a hard core question.
Seth Price 46:06
Right‽ I like to start with existential. Who are you and what are you and why? And we'll end with existential.
Elizabeth Schrader 46:15
I think the divine is a mirror. I think that our life is reflective-but this is so deep, I'm supposed to just be historian on here. I think that the the experiences that we have, and the people that we encounter, are a mirror. And that's what the divine is, it's showing us who we are and what we need to learn. So my seeing you across the screen, and I should also share that for a long time I would do my prayers in the morning, I would say “and whoever is ready to hear this information, please bring it to them”. I used to say that prayer every day for like over a year. And today I was I was going on my walk. And I was just like, “hey, thanks God”, look at that. And there's a little time delay there. But I felt he was like, okay, my prayer that I was praying every day is being answered, you know, I'm I'm able to talk to people. And the thing is, is that not everybody is ready to hear this. So this podcast, I suppose, is a mirror for those of you who might be ready to hear it. I think God is always nudging us one way or the other to see what we're ready for.
Seth Price 47:21
Where do people go, Elizabeth? Normally, there's a book to buy or a website to go to. But that's a little different today. So where do people go to do whatever they should be doing as it relates to the topic,
Elizabeth Schrader 47:34
they can go to my website, Elizabethschrader.com. And in the press, there is if you go to the press page, you can see a bunch of links to like the Religion News Service or Daily Beast article written about it. And the religion News Service article has a link where you can read the Harvard Theological Review paper, you just click right through. If you want a summary of it, you can go to the Religion for Breakfast interview with Andrew Henry, you can see me and you can see pictures of the Papyrus there. And I also have a mailing list.
The thing is, this isn't the only textual problem right around the women. There are others and I'm working on them. And I present, I give presentations at conferences, I'm actually teaching a class at Duke it's called it's like a it's for lifelong learning. It's like a not for credit thing but people can sign up like I have a newsletter and people can find out if I'm teaching if they want to sign up and learn. So just go to my website Elizabethschrader.com.
Seth Price 48:28
To give people a taste of that. So in like 40 seconds, you said there are other issues with women in the Bible or whatever. What are those like high level just bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, what are those?
Elizabeth Schrader 48:40
Okay, well, obviously the story of the woman caught in adultery. That story is sometimes there in the Gospel of John, sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's at the end of the Gospel of John. Sometimes it's in the Gospel of Luke it depends on the manuscript. That story floats around, okay? Some manuscripts, when the Magnificat happens in Luke chapter one, sometimes Elizabeth sings the Magnificat instead of Mary.
Seth Price 49:03
Really?
Elizabeth Schrader 49:05
[In] Some really old manuscripts Elizabeth is the one sitting in the Magnificat. You're like, whoa!
Seth Price 49:09
Yeah, but family, right? It's still family.
Elizabeth Schrader 49:13
But she's saying the Lord has magnified me and has, you know, has raised me up from my I don't have it memorized. But, you know, Elizabeth was the one who is barren. So in some ways, okay, so is Elizabeth talking about her pregnancy with John the Baptist? It depends on the manuscript. There's also some manuscripts of John 20, where there's an extra part when Mary Magdalene encounters Jesus, some of them including including in Codex Sinaiticus, Mary runs to touch Jesus. And some copies [have an] extra half verse, depending upon the copy.
And there's others but these are the things, this is why textual criticism is so much fun. I hope to bring these text critical issues to people's attention and to do it in such a way that people are not scared. But to say the text is alive, and we can learn from it. And the Bible is a living document. And over time people have, people have added and taken away and changed, and we can being good text critics approach-do our best to see what the author wrote. But it's also important to see how the text was received over time. That in itself is also an important enterprise. textual criticism, I think, is just so fun.
Seth Price 50:33
I would agree. But I say that and right behind you is Robert Altars, massive trove of the Hebrew Bible. (Elizabeth looks in her house :) )
No, right behind me…right behind you. Like it's, I would turn this I can turn the screen. So it's right. I can't it's plugged in. It's my wife gets mad. She's like, you needed another copy of the Bible. I, this isn't the whole Bible. This is a portion of the Bible. And this is important.
Elizabeth Schrader 50:57
You've got some nice Greek grammar behind you.
Seth Price 50:59
I don't, I can't, I can't read that. I can't read any good. This has been a blast. I've enjoyed it, Elizabeth. Yeah. And I appreciate the work you're doing. I think it's…I'm hopeful that it changes things, mostly because I have two daughters.
Elizabeth Schrader 51:15
So if women were meant to have the same kind of leadership role as men, that's the Christianity that I want to be a part of.
Seth Price 51:41
talking with Elizabeth makes me wonder, what else possibly are we just overlooking because scholars told us that it was there. I wonder what things we just, if you use a metaphor, I wonder how many parts of Scripture we just walk right past, outside, because we don't recognize them. Because we weren't told to look for them. It's those little things that I continue to try to rip apart, personally, and it makes God so much bigger. And if bigger is a word that somehow makes you feel scared; because I've been told in the past and I get it that a big God, at least in those terms could be scary—grander is a better word. Amazing. I don't have words and I think that's why we just use the word God.
But dig into Elizabeth’s work, it is worth it. I think that you'll get a lot from it as I have and continue to do so. Consider supporting the show. I pray that you're blessed and I will talk to you next week.