Spotlight on John 11 (Again) - BAR's Alliance With Silliness

            Since the editors of Biblical Archeological Review have decided to spread Elizabeth Schrader's (now Schrader Polczer, Assistant Professor of New Testament at Villanova University) wild ideas about the text of John 11 (already debunked in 2019) in the article The Mystery of Mary and Martha, I decided to revisit the subject today.  The idea that the original text of John 11 is no longer extant is simply ridiculous.  Even a novice textual critic should be intelligent enough to realize that that what she claimed to be a demonstration that "one in five Greek witnesses and one in three Old Latin manuscripts display some sort of inconsistency" pertaining to Martha are not meaningful inconsistencies at all, but merely a collection of ordinary and unremarkable scribal errors. 

          Papyrus 66 (shown here) was corrected to amend the scribe's initial error (repeating Mary's name twice) and the reason why Schrader noted that "perhaps this was just a mistake" is because it WAS a mistake; the fact that other scribes of other manuscripts made other mistakes will not make it anything else.  Having noticed a parableptic error in Codex Alexandrinus, the sensible thing to do would be to acknowledge it for what it is and move on undisturbed.  Every scribe, generally speaking, makes such errors if they write enough.  Nevertheless Schrader chose to consider Codex A's scribe (or the scribe of its ancestor) "apparently uncertain" about whether one or two women were present in John's narrative in 11:1 - as if scribes in the early fifth century, after the story had circulated in churches for over 300 years, would be clueless on the subject.

            Nobody should imagine that the scribe of Alexandrinus or the scribe of any of its its ancestors harbored the doubts that Schrader has attributed to him (or her).  What Schrader was looking at had already been analyzed correctly by B. H. Cowper in 1840.  In most copies of the Gospel of John the text of 11:1 is Ἦν δέ τις ἀσθενῶν Λάζαρος ἀπὸ Βηθανίας, ἐκ τῆς κώμης Μαρίας καὶ Μάρθας τῆς ἀδελφῆς αὐτῆς – “Now a certain man was sick, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha.”  In 02, though, besides shifting from αυτης to αυτου (and thus causing the text to refer to “his sister Martha”), the copyist skipped the two words καὶ Μάρθας.  Perceiving that this could be salvaged, the scribe erased the word κώμης and rewrote it in small letters at the end of the previous line.  Following that, the scribe filled in the newly blank space was filled with the words Μαρίας καὶ Μάρθας. 

There is nothing here that even remotely suggests an agenda in the early church to diminish the influence of Mary by adding an extra character (Martha) to John's narrative, and the editors of BAR only make themselves look like fools publishing this sort of sensationalized nonsense to sell more copies.  You just need to realize that a scholar who has testified that Mary Magdalene spoke to her – in other words, that she somehow engaged in necromancy – might not be the best source for serious analysis of the text.

            BAR personnel Nathan Steinmeyer and C. Moyer are invited to pay attention.