2024.11.03 | Unbinding
“Unbinding”
Rev. Brenda Loreman
Designated Term Associate Minister
Eden United Church of Christ, Hayward, California
All Saints Sunday,
November 3, 2024
John 11:1-6, 17-27, 38-44
Today we are celebrating All Saints Day, a solemn rite of the Christian Church, whose history goes all the way back to the fourth century, when the early church began to designate a day to commemorate the Christian martyrs of the faith. By the middle ages, the day became one of celebrating all the saints, not just the martyrs or those officially canonized by the church, but all saints known and unknown. Also in the middle ages, the church settled on the date of November 1 for the observance, probably because, like a lot of other Christian holidays, the church decided to align All Saints Day with the pagan celebrations that were happening at the same time. In the cultures of northern Europe, especially the Celtic cultures of Britain, Scotland and Ireland, the celebration of Samhain was a day when the Celts honored the dead. In fact, most of our secular Halloween traditions are descended from the Celtic rituals of Samhain: dressing in costumes, going door-to-door and asking for treats, playing tricks on people, and carving pumpkins – although the Celts used to carve turnips.
Many other cultures in the Northern Hemisphere and beyond have set aside a day for honoring the dead, so the idea of All Saints Day or Halloween or Dia de los Muertos seems to be following a basic human need: to remember our ancestors, to invite them back into our lives for a time, and then to let them go again.
The gospel reading that the Revised Common Lectionary designates for All Saints this year is the story of the raising of Lazarus from the Gospel according to John. The story of Lazarus reminds us of the promise of resurrection, and the hope that Jesus offers for new life. The story is also of course, dramatic foreshadowing for Jesus‘s own resurrection that happens a half dozen chapters after this one, but when I sat down to read this story again, the passage that lingered for me was when Jesus says, “unbind him and let him go.” Somehow, the story is not just about resurrection, but it’s also about freedom and how Jesus calls us to freedom, calls us to unbind the dead, unbind ourselves, and unbind the stories of our ancestors and allow them to speak again.
One of the ways that this story from the gospel of John has been unbound for me is through the work of a young New Testament scholar named Elizabeth Schrader Polczer. Several years ago, Polczer was pursuing a Master’s degree at General Theological Seminary in New York. She went to seminary because she had a particular interest in the figure of Mary Magdalene, and so she focused on the Gospel of John and the ways Mary Magdalene appears in that text.
One of the really wonderful things about doing a degree in New Testament studies these days as opposed to, say 20 or 30 years ago, or 50, or 100, is that all of the most important ancient texts—all of the papyri and the codices and the books that contain our oldest copies of the New Testament texts—are all now digitized. It used to be that in order to study the original sources you would have to go to far flung places around the world to find them in libraries and museums and academic collections. But you don’t have to do that anymore. Polczer sat down with the oldest and most complete text of the gospel of John in existence. It’s called Papyrus 66, and it’s dated around the year 200. And she discovered something rather stunning about the text that has changed the way I read the Gospel according to John—and it might just change the way everyone else reads it, too.
Now, before I tell you what that discovery is, I want to remind us that there are some significant differences between the story of Mary and Martha in Luke Chapter 10 and the story in John Chapter 11. Here is how the story begins in Luke 10: “Now as they went on their way, [Jesus] entered a certain village where a woman named Martha welcomed him. She had a sister named Mary, who sat at Jesus’s feet and listened to what he was saying.” Notice that the village is not named, and the sisters do not have a brother. This is a very different story from the one that’s told in John 11.
When Polczer sat down to read Papyrus 66, she read the first line of Chapter 11 in John’s Gospel, and she read this: “Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and his sister Mary.” And Polczer thought, “Wait a minute, that's not what my English Bible says!” If you remember what Allie read for us in the Gospel of John a little earlier, you heard, “Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha.” But Papyrus 66, the oldest Greek text of John’s gospel in the world doesn’t say that. The first line of Papyrus 66 is a very awkward sentence that makes it sound like there are two Marys and no Martha. And as Polczer continued reading, she noticed something else. She noticed that there were several places in the text where the name Mary (or Maria in Greek) has been changed to the name Martha (a brief video of Polczer explaining how the change was made can be found in this article from Duke University).
In addition to the changing of the name Maria into Martha, there were several other changes as well. Every pronoun is changed. Every singular “sister” had been changed to the plural “sisters.” Essentially, what Libbie Polczer discovered was that originally there was no Martha in this story from the gospel of John, Chapters 11 and 12. Martha is a character from the Gospel according to Luke. The story in John is supposed to be about Lazarus and his sister, Mary. Polczer went on to examine hundreds of different early manuscripts, and found that “roughly one in five ancient Greek manuscripts and one in three Old Latin manuscripts have ‘something strange happening around Martha.’ All of this suggests, [Polczer] says, that Martha was added to the Lazarus story by later editors and copyists of the New Testament.” (2)
Polczer dug deeper, and found that the earliest scriptural commentary, such as one from the third-century theologian Tertullian, referred to only Mary in this story. This discovery about the textual inconsistencies in John’s gospel is so significant, that Polczer traveled to Germany to meet with the “editors of the Nestle-Aland New Testament, the edition of the Greek text used by most scholars, students, and translators today. She discussed her findings about the changes made in the text of John’s Gospel and said the editors may consider adding a footnote to that effect in upcoming editions.” (3)
Polczer argues that this Mary in Chapter 11, who recognizes Jesus as the Messiah, and who will later anoint Jesus’ feet, is none other than Mary Magdalene. And she suggests that “‘at a very early stage, there was an editorial decision made to “copy” Martha from Luke and “paste” her into John.’ The purpose of this conflation is to distract the reader away from the parallels between Mary Magdalene who witnesses the resurrection in John 20 and Mary at the tomb of Lazarus in Chapter 11. As Polczer puts it “With Martha in the Gospel of John, Lazarus’ sister Mary isn’t Mary Magdalene anymore—instead she is the lady who sat quietly at Jesus' feet in Luke 10.” (4)
So if, in the gospel of John, Mary Magdalene is not only the one who comes to the tomb to see the risen Christ and is then the first apostle, but she is also the disciple who anoints Jesus, and the disciple who recognizes that he is truly the Messiah, in the words given to Martha in John 11:27, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world,” then she must have been a powerful and important disciple among the followers of Jesus.
And there is evidence that Mary Magdalene was considered important to certain communities of Jesus followers in the early years of Christianity. One piece of evidence is an early text known as the Gospel of Mary, discovered in Egypt in the year 1896. It was purchased by a German scholar, who took it back to Germany and began working on a translation. For a variety of reasons, including two world wars, the gospel was not translated into English until the 1970s. Unfortunately, the first six pages are missing, and a large section in the middle is also missing, and even though two other fragments of the gospel have been discovered, none of them contain the missing pages. But the fact that these copies have been found, in both Greek and Coptic, makes it clear that this gospel of Mary circulated widely and was written in different languages for different communities.
The gospel tells of a resurrection appearance of Jesus to the grieving disciples. He tells them to be wary of others, to not create new laws, lest they be bound to them, and he urges them to seek the peace of the Christ—the child of humanity—which lies within them. When Jesus departs from them, the disciples are frightened and in fear for their lives. Mary addresses them, and tells them not to be afraid, that the strength of Christ will be with them and the grace of Christ will shelter them; she then turns their hearts to the Good, and she reminds them that Jesus came to teach them how to be fully human.
This is a powerful and uplifting gospel. Nowhere in this gospel is the message that we are sinful people. Instead, the gospel urges us to find the peace of Christ within us, and to become more fully and truly human in the image of Jesus.
I can’t help but wonder what would’ve happened in the last 2000 years if Mary’s gospel had been one that we all read. It is apparent that there was a community of believers who read this gospel and believed that Mary Magdalene was a powerful and important disciple. There were also communities who read the Gospel according to John and knew about Mary Magdalene in Chapters 11 and 12 and understood her importance to Jesus and his ministry. What happened?
Constantine happened. When the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in 311, he wanted the faith to conform to the Roman way, and to the type of faith practiced by the soldiers in his army. As New Testament scholars Helen Bond and Joan Taylor put it:
One of the most striking things about Christianity through to the early fourth century was its diversity, with different groups in different contexts living out their faith in a variety of ways. Christian diversity, however, was not a good thing for the Emperor, and when he took charge of the church, he made it his mission to stamp out variants. Constantine presided over a council in Nicaea in 325 designed to systematize the churches in line with the type of Christianity that the army (and he) followed. It will come as no surprise to hear that this was not particularly women friendly. Leadership roles were now exclusively the preserve of men; other rules and regulations, such as divorce laws, favored men; and women’s earlier roles were diminished or forgotten. [...] As a result of Constantine’s measures, books not approved of by imperial standards (like the Gospel of Mary) were burnt. Heretics were excommunicated. And the whole library of Antioch was burnt by order of Emperor Jovian in 364 CE. (5)
Can you imagine what must have been in that library?
Despite the pressure from the empire, some of those diverse communities continued to practice their faith and read their gospels. But when the authorities got too close, and when the persecution became too severe, they buried the books that they still possessed in clay jars in the desert, hidden for centuries. Some, like the Gospel of Mary, were found and preserved. Some have disappeared for eternity—buried in desert tombs, and turned into dust.
It saddens me to think of all that was lost, and that the imperial quest for uniformity stamped out the flourishing diversity of the early church. There are many who claim that Christianity would likely have died out if it weren’t for Constantine’s imperative to push the church to unify. And they’re probably right. But so much was lost in the unification.
So it falls to us now to unbind the church, to reclaim the diversity, and, along with scholars like Elizabeth Shrader Polczer, unbind the resurrected stories and set them free again.
Notes:
I am grateful to the work of Diana Butler Bass for bringing the story of Elizabeth Schrader Polczer and her research to my attention, particularly through the sermon she preached at the Wild Goose Festival on July 17, 2022. The text of her sermon can be found here: https://dianabutlerbass.substack.com/p/mary-the-tower.
Candida Moss, “A Conspiracy to Suppress Mary Magdalene? No Longer Just a Dan Brown Plotline,” Daily Beast, July 18, 2018. https://www.thedailybeast.com/a-conspiracy-to-suppress-mary-magdalene-no-longer-just-a-dan-brown-plotline?ref=scroll Accessed July 20, 2022.
Yonat Shimron, “Scribes tried to blot her out. Now a scholar is trying to recover the real Mary Magdalene,” Religion News Service, July 19, 2019. https://religionnews.com/2019/07/19/scribes-tried-to-blot-her-out-now-a-scholar-is-trying-to-recover-the-real-mary-magdalene/ Accessed July 20, 2022.
Moss, ibid.
Helen Bond and Joan Taylor, Women Remembered: Jesus’ Female Disciples (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2022), 178-180