In 2016 Elizabeth Schrader brought some curious textual variants (mainly in Papyrus 66) in John 11:1-5; 12:2 to our attention. She argued that Martha was originally absent from the whole of John's gospel. This theory has been presented numerous times on the internet, but has insurmountable problems.
Others have suggested that the textual variants are just random errors, but the disruption is simply too great and too themed.
A third view is that the variants were caused by a tendency to reduce the status of women relative to men. This view is now presented in a Journal article here: Richard G. Fellows, "Early Textual Variants that Downplay the Roles of Women in the Bethany Account," TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism (2023). Thanks to those, including Schrader-Polczer, who engaged in discussion of the data.
There are two important implications of this research. Firstly, it provides further evidence that sexist textual variants predate our earliest manuscripts, and probably occurred in the time period when the (sexist) pseudo-Pauline "letters" were written. Secondly, it shows that NA28 and the NRSV translation have the wrong pronoun in Mark 6:22: it was Herodias's daughter, not Herod's daughter, who danced.
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ReplyDeleteOne minor point needs to be corrected. I had thought that there might have been a sexist reluctance to correct the omission of Persis in Rom 16:12, since codex Alexandrinus and other manuscripts omit her, but include all the men in the chapter. However, I now see that copyists would be more likely to accidentally omit Persis than the men. The word ἀσπάσασθε occurs 16 times in Rom 16:3-16, making it possible for a copyist's eye to skip from one occurrence to the next, causing an omission. However, the ἀσπάσασθε that occurs both before and after Persis is preceded by εν κω (in the Lord) from the previous sentence. Thus, the string εν κω ἀσπάσασθε is repeated, so the accidental omission of Persis is more likely. Thus, the speculation about a sexist tendency to omit (or fail to correct omission of) women is weak. Therefore, my first explanation for the absence of Martha in John 11:1 in Alexandrinus is likely the correct one. After the change to the masculine pronoun, the ancestor of Alexandrinus would have read "the village of Mary and of Martha his sister". This implies that Mary was not Lazarus's sister, which contradicts 11:2. The deletion of Martha seems designed to remove this tension.
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