We have come to the third and concluding part of Elizabeth Schrader's guest post concerning the presence or absence of Martha and Mary in John 11:1–12:2. The previous two parts are here and here. I am glad that I did not have to delete any comments to the previous part, and I look forward to following the final round.THE ONE-SISTER TEXTFORM IN JOHN 11
Some have suggested that I am collecting many various phenomena and positing one grand theory for basically anything aberrant I have found in John 11. For those who have gotten this impression of my work, I hope they might consider examining the cogent one-sister text form of John 11:1-5, which can be reconstructed using real readings found in just three weighty manuscripts (A*, P66*, and VL 6):
1 There was a certain sick man, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary his sister.
2 Now this was the Mary who anointed the Lord with ointment and wiped his feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was sick.
3 Therefore Mary sent to him, saying, “Lord, behold, the one you love is sick.”
4 But when Jesus heard he said to her, “The sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, so that the Son may be glorified through it.”
5 Now Jesus loved Lazarus and his sister.
I posit that this text form (found on page 381 of my Harvard Theological Review article, and justified by the analysis in the article’s preceding pages) may be both a plausible and defensible recovery of five verses of John 11, and is potentially representative of the “initial text.” I believe that all of the phenomena discussed in the previous post can be explained by an interpolation of Martha to the one-sister text form above (and its natural continuation). Although our tendency as a text-critical guild is sometimes to apply more and more complicated methodologies, none of us doubt that all manuscripts of John trace back to the initial circulating text. Thus it is not impossible that different portions of the initial text could have been preserved in different corners of the textual tradition. Since a coherent one-sister text form of considerable length can already be reconstructed (which lessens the likelihood of the variants’ randomness), I believe it is worthwhile to simply begin thinking through the exegetical implications of a “Lazarus and Mary” version of John 11-12, and any potential objections that might have arisen to such a text in antiquity.
Of course this does not mean that we should overlook the information that sophisticated methodologies can provide. The Coherence-Based Genealogical Method will hopefully shed additional light on the problems in John 11. I suggest that those working with the CBGM consider looking not just at relationships between individual variation units, but also at how the five problematic criteria I have isolated (see post #1) show up in related witnesses. As one particularly clear example, 157, 1344, 579, and 2680 are all closely related genealogically overall in John. However, these witnesses might variously display any of the five criteria that suggest Martha’s absence: 157 drops “Martha” in John 11:1 (Criterion 1), 1344 changes “Maria” to “Martha” in John 11:20 (Criterion 2), 579 uses two unexpected singular verbs and one unexpected singular pronoun at 11:3, 12:2, and 11:39 (Criterion 4), while 2680 simultaneously lists Mary first in John 11:5, omits Martha’s name completely from the same verse, and uses a singular pronoun at 11:19 (Criteria 1, 3, 4, and 5). Thus when we use the CBGM to look at this problem in John 11, let us note when several witnesses in the same genealogical group display problematic criteria in different ways. If a high concentration of different Maria/Martha problems occur in related witnesses, this could suggest that the phenomena originate with a one-sister text form, rather than that the phenomena are random scribal errors occurring independently of one another.
My hope is that the increased interest in this topic will lead to additional research on all of the abovementioned topics, so we can better understand the various textual phenomena appearing in the Lazarus story. I look forward to engaging with the responses of my colleagues.