Which, I know, is THE SINGLE MOST EXCITING THING I COULD EVER SAY! Or, perhaps, maybe, it might not be?<\/p>\n
Stick with me.<\/p>\n
It’s worth it. This is a case where a huge break through in Biblical scholarship has pretty big implications for those of us who follow Jesus. I’m well aware they aren’t all like that.<\/p>\n
What I find interesting is that I’ve now read her sermon several times over the course of 10 months, and I can’t seem to retain it. The implications are actually so big and require such an enormous re-framing of how I understand the early Christian story, that my brain keeps erasing it in favor of the familiar.<\/p>\n
If you have spent less time in Gospel commentaries and\/or seminary than I have, I suspect you are going to find it easier to accept these very simple truths than I do. Which is great! This is really awesome stuff, and I’d love for people to hear it, know it, and even retain it.<\/p>\n
Diana Butler Bass tells the story of Elizabeth (Libbie) Schrader who felt moved to study Mary Magdalene, landed at General Theological Seminary in New York to work on a Masters of New Testament, and wrote her final paper on John 11. Her professor encouraged her to look at the newly digitized version of the oldest known text of John, Papyrus 66, from around 200 CE, and find something new in it.<\/p>\n
I’m going to quote Diana Butler Bass here:<\/p>\n
And so Libbie is in the library looking at the text and she sees this first sentence. And it\u2019s in Greek, of course. \u201cNow a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and his sister Mary.\u201d And Libbie said, \u201cWhat? That\u2019s not what my English Bible says. My English Bible says, \u2018Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister, Martha.\u2019\u201d But the Greek text, the oldest Greek text in the world doesn\u2019t say that. The oldest Greek text in the world says, \u201cNow a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, at the village of Mary and his sister, Mary.\u201d There are two Marys in this verse. And Libbie went, \u201cWhat the heck? What is going on here?\u201d And she started digging into the text, zooming in on it to try to see what she could see over the digitized version in the internet. And lo and behold, Libbie noticed something that no New Testament scholar had ever noticed.<\/small><\/p>\n
And that is, in the text where it had those two Marys, the village of Mary and his sister, Mary, and her sister, Mary, the text had actually been changed. In Greek, the word Mary, the name Mary, is basically spelled like Maria in English, M-A-R-I-A. And the I, the Greek letter I, is the letter Iota. And it looks basically like an English I. Libbie could see by doing this textual analysis that the Iota had been changed to the letter TH in Greek, Theta. That somebody at some point in time had gone in over the original handwriting and actually changed the second Mary to Martha. And not only had that person changed the second Mary to Martha, but that person had also changed the way it comes out in English. It says, \u201cThe village of Mary,\u201d that would\u2019ve stayed the same, \u201cand her sister, Martha.\u201d Someone had also changed that \u201chis\u201d to \u201cher\u201d; that \u201cher\u201d was originally a \u201chis,\u201d but they had changed it to a \u201cher.\u201d<\/small><\/p>\n
Admittedly, the original text is a confused and not very good sentence. \u201cNow, a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, at the village of Mary and his sister, Mary,\u201d it\u2019s almost like they\u2019re heightening the fact that Lazarus has this sister, Mary. They lived in this village together, and Mary is Lazarus\u2019 sister. Someone had changed it to read, \u201cMary and her sister, Martha.\u201d<\/small><\/p>\n
Libbie sat in the library with all of this, and it came thundering at her, the realization that sometime in the fourth century, someone had altered the oldest text of the Gospel of John and split the character Mary into two. Mary became Mary <\/i>and Martha.<\/i><\/small><\/p>\n
She went through the whole manuscript of John 11 and John 12, and lo and behold, that editor had gone in at every single place and changed every moment that you read Martha in English, it originally said, \u201cMary.\u201d The editor changed it all.<\/i><\/small><\/p>\n
Now, that’s a pretty big deal, but I imagine that maybe you don’t… umm… I think the words might be \u201cCare that much.\u201d But let me say, \u201cyet.\u201d I haven’t gotten to the part where this MATTERS yet, that was a really important BACKGROUND. It also makes John 11 as we know it really hard to read and make sense of. But that’s OK too.<\/p>\n
So the underlying question in this is \u201cwhy?\u201d Why would someone go through so much trouble to create the character Martha out of what was once Mary? The key may be in the part of John 11 we read last week,<\/p>\n
25Jesus said, \u201cI am the resurrection, and the life: the one that believes in me, though they may die, yet shall they live; 26and the one who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?\u201d 27She said to him, \u201cYes, Lord: I have believed that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one t<\/i>hat comes into the world.<\/small><\/p>\n
In the Bibles I have that \u201cshe\u201d appears to be Martha but if she doesn’t exist, then the she is Mary. And now we’re getting to it. Christianity has long claimed that the first declaration that Jesus was the Messiah comes from Peter, the Rock, who is presented as having done so in Mark, Matthew, and Luke (the \u201cSynoptics\u201d) and that answer kinda worked because Martha was a pretty minor character and even though she says so in John, it is easy enough to ignore because Peter is THE ROCK, and Martha is… well, kinda a nobody.<\/p>\n
Back to Diana Bulter Bass:<\/p>\n
But if it is Mary, the Mary who shows up in John 11 is not an unremembered Mary… This Mary has long been suspected of being the other Mary, Mary Magdalene. Is it really true that the other Christological confession of the New Testament comes from of the voice of Mary Magdalene? <\/i>That the Gospel of John gives the most important statement in the entirety of the New Testament, not to a man, but to a woman, and to a really important woman who will show up later as the first witness to the resurrection.<\/small><\/p>\n
You see how these two stories work together. In John 11, Lazarus is raised from the dead, and who is there but Mary Magdalene? And at that resurrection, she confesses that Jesus is indeed the son of God. And then you go just 10 chapters later and who is the person at the grave? She mistakes him, at first, thinks he\u2019s the gardener. She turns around and he says, \u201cMary,\u201d and she goes, \u201cLord.\u201d It\u2019s Mary Magdalene. It is Mary Magdalene.<\/i><\/small><\/p>\n
Oh, and now I get to place for you the final piece. Do you remember learning that Christ wasn’t Jesus’ last name? I do. Christ is the English version of Christos which was the Greek translation of Messiah, which literally meant \u201csmeared\u201d as in \u201csmeared with oil\u201d as in \u201cannointed as king\u201d because the Greek didn’t have a Messiah concept like Hebrew did. So when we say Jesus Christ, we are actually saying \u201cJesus the Messiah.\u201d<\/p>\n
Well, a lot of people think Mary Magdalene was called that cause she was Mary, from Magdala. Except there was no village called Magdala. Diana Butler Bass summariezes it this way:<\/p>\n
When we call her Magdalene, Mary Magdalene, is not Mary from <\/i>Magdala. Instead, it\u2019s a title.<\/small><\/p>\n
The word magdala <\/i>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, \u201cYou are Peter the Rock.\u201d 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.<\/small><\/p>\n
Between these two confessions, are we looking at an argument in the early church? Peter the Rock or Mary the Tower?<\/small><\/p>\n
But the John account was changed. The John story has been hidden from our view. All those years ago, Mary uttered those words, \u201cYes, Lord, I believe you are the Messiah, the son of God, the one who is coming into the world.\u201d \u2026<\/small><\/p>\n
Mary is indeed the tower of faith. That our faith is the faith of that woman who would become the first person to announce the resurrection. Mary the Witness, Mary the Tower, Mary the Great, and she has been obscured from us. She has been hidden from us and she been taken away from us for nearly 2,000 years. \u2026<\/small><\/p>\n
Or, or perhaps and, you can leave here with a question: What if the other story of Mary hadn\u2019t been hidden? What if Mary in John 11 hadn\u2019t been split into two women? <\/i>What if we\u2019d known about Mary the Tower all along? What kind of Christianity would we have if the faith hadn\u2019t only been based upon, \u201cPeter, you are the Rock and upon this Rock I will build my church\u201d? But what if we\u2019d always known, \u201cMary, you are the Tower, and by this Tower we shall all stand?\u201d<\/i><\/small><\/p>\n OK, that’s it. That’s my big Biblical Studies breakthrough story. Perhaps you might want to laugh with me that the big breakthrough is simply another affirmation that God loves and cares about all people, JUST LIKE THE TEXT FROM DEUTERONOMY said in a lot fewer words.<\/p>\n But, dear ones, what if we’d gotten both stories? And maybe the even more important question: how can we live now that we have both stories? How can we be followers of Jesus who was seen clearly by Peter and by Mary? How can we be people of faith who both follow a leader who is a rock on which we are steadied and a tower who lifts us all up? What if masculine and feminine were allowed to stand together as holy to the deepest core of our faith? What if there is a whole lot of space for both\/and in our tradition!?!?<\/p>\n Someone actually didn’t want that. Someone edited it out, and made Mary smaller. Dear ones, may we commit ourselves to the opposite. May we go out and make God, and each other, and all we meet BIGGER! Tower like, even. Amen<\/p>\n 1<\/a> ALL THE MARYS Wild Goose Festival, Closing Sermon, July 17, 2022 by Diana Butler Bass https:\/\/dianabutlerbass.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/All-the-Marys-Sermon.pdf<\/a><\/p>\n Rev. Sara E. Baron\u00a0 May 21, 2023<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![](\"https:\/\/64.media.tumblr.com\/87f64cfdd73187609f90b03a693bae75\/962e596d8e9feb43-30\/s640x960\/d158cc76e876317b7c3f0bb3e39ab894d8aa9dcd.jpg\")
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