Is Martha an Interpolation into John’s Gospel? Part II

Here we continue with Elizabeth Schrader's guest post in three parts concerning the textual transmission of John 11:1–12:2, specifically the presence (or absence) of the two sisters, Martha and Mary in the story. The first part was posted here and provoked a lot of reactions. I will personally try to stay out of the debate and instead add a few thoughts in a separate post when all parts have been published. In the meantime let's continue the discussion with focus on arguments (I had to delete some comments that did not).

THE MANY DIFFERENT TEXTUAL PHENOMENA IN JOHN 11

Some have already objected to my suggestion that Martha is an interpolation into John’s Gospel. Thus far there have been both public supporters and detractors of the theory, though the case has yet to be settled. I remain open to changing my position if others can present theories that persuasively account for all of the textual phenomena I have isolated in John 11. For example, dissenting responders must explain:

• Why Martha’s name drops out from so many verses in the manuscripts of John, while her name is stable in the manuscript transmission of Luke;
• Why there are five continuous verses of textual instability around Martha in our oldest surviving copy of John 11, Papyrus 66, where in 11:3 the scribe clearly splits one named woman into two unnamed women (a choice that cannot be explained by P66’s scribal habits);
• Why there is such extreme textual instability in both the order of names and who is named in John 11:5, especially in the Vetus Latina (we find an extremely rare phenomenon of the first person in the list being completely unpredictable, and neither sister is named in several important witnesses, including one Greek lemma of a Chrysostom homily);
• Why many ancient patristic quotations attribute actions to Mary that our Bibles now attribute to Martha (e.g. Tertullian giving Mary the Christological confession at John 11:27, or Chrysostom stating that Mary said the tomb stank at John 11:39);
• Why two of our most important manuscripts of John 11:1, P66 and Codex Alexandrinus, make the very similar change of “Maria” to “Martha,” and also use the masculine pronoun to say “his sister”;
• Why the name “Maria” is altered to “Martha” in several witnesses, whereas not a single surveyed manuscript of John ever alters the name “Martha” to “Maria”;
• Why the clearly accented dative feminine singular pronoun frequently pops up throughout the text transmission in John 11:4 (ἀκούσας δὲ ὁ Ἰησοῦς εἶπεν αὐτῆ), a reading that is also seems to be reflected in P66*;
• Why Martha is placed beside Mary Magdalene in second- and third-century documents like the Epistula Apostolorum and Hippolytus’ Commentary on the Song of Songs in ways that seem to diminish Mary’s authority (at the very same time period where documents like the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, and the Gospel of Philip reveal that there were debates around Mary’s authority).

I agree that theories of the marginalization of Martha or scribal incompetence could explain (b), (d), (e), and (g). However I do not believe they adequately explain (a), (c), (f), and (h). Perhaps some scribes did drop Martha’s name at John 11:1 due to inattention; perhaps Tertullian’s (or Chrysostom’s, or Cyril of Jerusalem’s) memories of scripture were faulty when they said that Mary did things that Martha “should” do; perhaps Lazarus was occasionally moved to the top of the list in John 11:5 due to a desire to emphasize the male in the family; perhaps some scribes anticipating the anointing accidentally wrote that Mary served the supper at John 12:2, etc. etc. I realize that there is nearly always an alternate explanation for each of these problems individually; but the trouble is with the weight of these problems collectively.

This theory does not exclude the possibility that multiple phenomena may be occurring in the variations in John 11. For example, we see a bit of instability around Mary’s presence in John 11 (although this happens about five times less frequently than instability around Martha, and may simply be further evidence of a desire to emphasize Martha). Moreover, as Tommy Wasserman and Mary Rose D’Angelo have pointed out, the occasional dropping of the ἣ at Luke 10:39 can be seen as de-emphasizing Martha’s discipleship;[1] it is thus not impossible that there was a kind of “diminishment” of Martha happening at the same time as the early controversies around Mary Magdalene. Since multiple phenomena may indeed be at play in this pericope, we should do comprehensive studies of the various possibilities in each case. It may also be worthwhile to do studies of the individual scribal habits of the manuscripts displaying multiple instances of instability around Martha (beyond P66, these include Codex Alexandrinus, 357, 423, 579, 841, 884, 994, 2680, L17, VL 2, VL 6, VL 8, VL 15, and sa 5). It might be worthwhile to investigate the textual character of Chrysostom’s lemmas in Gr. Ms. 320 in St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mt. Sinai, the only extant Greek witness to name Lazarus first in John 11:5. However, since so many manuscripts display problems around Martha, we cannot chalk it all up to individual scribal habits. At a certain point we must ask whether the collective weight of all of the evidence might be related to the woman getting split in two in Papyrus 66 at John 11:3.

Moreover, the early interpolation of Martha can answer several questions that biblical scholars have been asking for generations, such as:

• why do Martha and Mary seem to live in Galilee or Samaria in Luke’s Gospel? (because they did not live in Bethany!)
• why don’t Martha and Mary have a brother in Luke 10? (Because Lazarus isn’t their brother!)
• why do Martha and Mary say the very same thing, first at John 11:21 and then again at 11:32? (because one woman was doubled!)
• why did so many early Christians, going all the way back to the third century, identify Mary of Bethany as Mary Magdalene? (because circulating texts of the Fourth Gospel encouraged them to do so in light of obvious parallels between John 11 and John 20!)

Therefore, due to both external and internal evidence, as of now I believe that the interpolation of Martha remains the simplest thesis for explaining the combined weight of these phenomena.

Notes
[1] See Tommy Wasserman, “Bringing Sisters Back Together: Another Look at Luke 10:41–42,” JBL 137:2 (2018): 439-61, at 457; Mary Rose D’Angelo, “Women Partners in the New Testament,” JFSR 6 (1990): 65-86, at 78-79.