The Center for Leadership Excellence, in partnership with COSROW, is pleased to lift up the voices of women in ministry encouraging fellow women in ministry. Please enjoy this month’s Encouragement from Claire Clyburn, pastor at First UMC in Graham, NC. Anyone can sign up to receive these monthly emails here.
It was the final day of the Wild Goose Festival, an event I have attended every summer since its beginning in 2010. The final worship service this year included a riveting sermon by Diana Butler Bass (watch here or read the transcript). Though I would not normally advocate beginning a sermon with news of ongoing New Testament research, this message rocked the house at the festival. I heard several people saying “this changes my dissertation focus.”
Here’s the gist of what Bass related to us: By studying the digitized copy of Papyrus 66, the oldest and most complete copy of the gospel of John, dating to about 200, a graduate student, Libbie Schrader, noticed something no one had ever noticed before. She noticed that in John 11, the story of Mary and Martha and their brother Lazarus, someone had made a change. The name Mary in Greek is spelled M-A-R-I-A. The I is the Greek letter iota. Iota looks like a short line with a dot, like our lower-case i. Libbie noticed that that letter iota had actually been written over with a new letter, theta, which looks like a circle with a line in the middle of it. Theta is TH. Someone changed Mary to Martha in John 11. The English Bible says, “Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister, Martha.” But the Greek text, the oldest Greek text in the world doesn’t say that.
Read: John 11:1 (according to Papyrus 66, before the scribal edit)
“Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, at the village of Mary and his sister, Mary.”
Reflect: There are two Marys in this verse!
Before you go any further, Martha, busy Martha, is not going anywhere. She’s still in Luke, fixing dinner. All our sermons about being Marys in a Martha world can still be preached! But in John’s gospel, we see something else. We are seeing textual evidence from an ancient papyrus that in the early church, Mary Magdalene had a greater role than history has remembered. We don’t know why the ancient editor changed the letter, but it could point to a desire to lessen Mary’s influence in the life of the early church.
Here’s why this matters. In the early church, we have two confessions of Jesus as the Christ. Peter makes his confession “you are the Christ” and is called Peter the Rock. In John 11, Mary (not Martha) makes her confession – you are the Messiah. The word “Magdala” in Aramaic means “tower.” Mary the Tower offers the same confession as Peter the Rock.
Mary Magdalene – Mary the Tower. How might your ministry be strengthened, how might you be encouraged, by this news? When clergywomen are still struggling in places for their gifts and ministry to be affirmed and received, how might Mary the Tower give you needed strength?
Take Action: It turns out that the feast day of Mary Magdalene is my birthday. This year, that had special meaning for me, as Mary the Tower invited me to stand a little taller and straighter as I do what I have done for almost 40 years, proclaim the resurrection. Sisters, this month I invite you to do the same. Let us together stand up with Mary the Tower to give witness to the resurrection of our Lord!
If you are curious to learn more about the dissertation Diana’s sermon references, check out this article in Duke Today: “Mary or Martha: A Duke Student’s Research Finds Mary Magdalene Downplayed by New Testament Scribes.”
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