If you attend a church that follows the lectionary you just came through the story of Lazarus. You heard how the wandering prophet Jesus resurrected him after he was in the tomb four days, and of course the two grief-stricken sisters.

Or was it one sister?

Elizabeth Schrader is a relative newcomer to biblical studies. Recently, she was reading Papyrus 66, an early parchment that dates back to 200 A.D. and also happens to contain the Lazarus story. It is the oldest and best preserved of around 5800 texts that New Testament scholars and translators work from. What her fresh eyes noticed as she read the Lazarus story has been making waves ever since:

Papyrus 66 doesn’t mention Martha in John 11.

Naturally, what Schrader did next was read the later texts that include Martha and try to piece together why they were there. Here is her current hypothesis: an editor, aware of the legitimate story of Mary and Martha in Luke 10, assumed that John intended to write about the same Mary and Martha in the story of Lazarus. In Greek the names Mary and Martha are extremely similar, as in down to an iota, and it was plausible to think that one iota was missing. The editor, or perhaps editors, decided to help John out. They inserted plural pronouns and verb forms as well as, most notably, Martha.

The New Testament contains two Christological confessions. One of them is by Peter and the other is contained here in the John 11 passage in verse 27: by Martha, according to post-Gutenberg, mass-produced Bibles. However, both Tertullian and Egeria, writing relatively soon after Papyrus 66 (in 208 and 386 respectively), say that it was Mary who made the confession. Originally, so the theory goes, no Martha appeared in John 11.

Furthermore, Schrader points to the nearly unmistakable literary elements connecting the Mary in John 11 with the Mary Magdalene at Jesus’ resurrection in John 20 and proposes that John is tying the stories together with common themes like loss, weeping, and resurrection. With two different Mary’s this wouldn’t work.

So what are the implications of this? As was alluded to above, Schrader believes the Mary in John 11, instead of being the sister of Martha, is Mary Magdalene. The term Magdalene may refer not to a town name as many have thought, but to a title meaning something like tower in the Aramaic. Thus: Peter the Rock and Mary the Tower. Upon these confessions I will build my church. In short, Schrader’s theory gives Mary Magdalene a more prominent role in the story of the Gospels.

Some might suspect Schrader of advancing a Dan Brown-esque feminist agenda. Yet Tertullian could hardly be called a bastion of feminist theology. Also, she speaks about her findings in multiple interviews online, and she does not come across as arrogant or dogmatic. She states clearly that her findings are not yet conclusive. Nevertheless her case is growing. The best New Testament scholars are lending their ears, including the unrivaled Nestle Aland committee, whose expertise all recent English Bible translations have drawn on.

Schrader’s hypothesis, besides being a fascinating discovery, reminds us that the Bible is a living text and that the best hermeneutic is a community hermeneutic. Everyone, not just academics or organised religion or gatekeepers of doctrine, can help bring it to life.