We’ve been telling this story wrong.
Ask most Christians who first recognized Jesus as the Messiah, and the answer comes quickly: Peter. “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16). It’s the confession that launched a church, the rock on which a tradition was built. Sunday school lessons, seminary lectures, papal theology all hark back to Peter’s moment at Caesarea Philippi.
But here’s what we don’t talk about: Peter’s confession appears in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. It does not appear in John. And John’s gospel is most preoccupied with the question of who Jesus is. And it is also the one where three women reveal Jesus’ messiahship in three different ways.
The four gospels are not a single harmonized account, and we should be careful about flattening them into one. But within John’s gospel, which is where the question of Jesus’s identity receives its most sustained theological treatment, it is women who recognize him, name him, and anoint him. They deserve to be named, too.
“I Believe That You Are the Christ”
Before the anointing, before Palm Sunday, before the Passion, there is a moment in the eleventh chapter of John’s gospel that should stop us cold.
Lazarus is dead. A woman runs out to meet Jesus on the road. And in the middle of her grief, she says this: “I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is to come into the world” (John 11:27).
New Testament scholars have long noted that it parallels Peter’s confession in Matthew 16. It has the same formula, the same weight, the same pivot-point function in its narrative. But unlike Peter’s confession, which he follows with a recoil from the cross that requires a rebuke from Jesus, her confession shows faith and understanding. She makes it while Lazarus still lies in the tomb, before she has witnessed a resurrection.
Your Bible almost certainly attributes that confession to Martha.
Mary Hiding in Plain Sight
But here’s what Elizabeth Schrader Polczer, now Assistant Professor of New Testament at Villanova University, discovered when she examined Papyrus 66, the oldest surviving copy of the Gospel of John: someone changed the manuscripts. In five consecutive verses in John 11, Papyrus 66 shows textual instabilities around the name Martha. In one verse, a scribe changed the name “Maria” (the Greek iota was scratched out and replaced) to produce “Martha.” In another verse, a single woman appears to have been split into two: the scribe first wrote a singular construction, then corrected it to read “the sisters,” pluralizing one named woman into two unnamed ones.
Schrader Polczer published her initial findings in the Harvard Theological Review in 2017, and has since expanded them in the Journal of Biblical Literature, TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism, and Biblical Archaeology Review. Her data amazes me: approximately one in five Greek witnesses and one in three Old Latin manuscripts display an inconsistency around Martha in the Lazarus narrative. By compiling real readings from just three of the world’s weightiest gospel manuscripts, the text of John 11:1-5 can be fully and sensibly reconstructed without Martha. (Duke Today’s 2019 profile of her research points to the specifics; Marg Mowczko’s detailed analysis gives the best lay-level walkthrough of the manuscript evidence.)
Schrader Polczer’s hypothesis: scribes borrowed the character of Martha from a separate story in Luke’s gospel, where she and Mary appear without Lazarus and nowhere near Bethany (the famous story of Mary sitting at Jesus feet while Martha complains). Then, a copyist inserted it into John’s Gospel in the second century to obscure the identity of the woman who made the Christological confession. The original woman in John 11, she argues, was a single Mary with no Martha. In fact, she says that several of the earliest interpreters of John’s Gospel agreed that the John 11 Mary is Mary Magdalene: Tertullian in the second century, Hippolytus of Rome in the third century, the Manichaeans in the third century, and St. Ambrose in the fourth century.
Why would someone do this? Schrader Polczer’s answers clearly: if John’s Christological confessor is also the first person the risen Jesus appears to, she could have become a competitor to Peter’s authority. If Mary Magdalene (who is the first witness of the resurrection in John 20) is also the woman who makes the central Christological confession of John’s Gospel, then she is not just a supporting character, she is the star of the show.
In Schrader Polczer’s own words: “I believe this was done to distort the Gospel of John’s presentation of Mary Magdalene. If Lazarus’s sister Mary is Mary Magdalene, then she becomes a far more authoritative figure in the Gospel of John.”
Schrader Polczer is careful to hold her thesis with appropriate scholarly humility. She uses words like “may” and “if,” and acknowledges that textual instability can have mundane explanations like scribal error. Her findings remain actively debated among textual critics. But she has presented her work at Duke, Princeton, Vanderbilt, Yale, and Pepperdine, and may be cited in future editions of the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament, the standard scholarly text used by translators worldwide.
Whatever one concludes about the identity of the confessor, this much is undeniable: the confession in John 11:27 is the Gospel of John’s Christological climax, and a woman speaks it: “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.” If Schrader Polczer is right, it was Mary Magdalene. But–it could also have been Mary of Bethany if she were a separate person, which scholars have argued about for a long time.
The Prophet Who Anointed the King: Mary of Bethany
The word Messiah means, literally, the anointed one. In the Hebrew Bible, anointing was not ceremonial or devotional. It was the act that made a king a king. By prophets, by priests, by the hand of God’s chosen agent. For example, Samuel anointed David. The ritual transferred authority. It was a public, embodied declaration of identity.
The gospels contain three anointing stories, and untangling them is itself an exercise in understanding how women’s roles have been obscured. In Mark 14:3-9 and Matthew 26:6-13, an unnamed woman anoints Jesus’s head at the house of Simon the Leper in Bethany, two days before Passover. The disciples are indignant at the waste. Jesus defends her and declares that what she has done will be remembered wherever the gospel is preached. In John 12:1-8, Mary of Bethany (named explicitly, the sister of Lazarus) anoints Jesus’s feet with nard at a dinner six days before Passover, and Judas objects. In Luke 7:36-50, an unnamed sinful woman anoints Jesus’s feet much earlier in his ministry, at the house of a Pharisee, in a different city entirely.
Whether these are the same event told differently by each evangelist, or two or three separate events, is one of the most debated questions in gospel studies. What is not debated is that it was Pope Gregory’s Homily 33 that collapsed all three women into a single composite penitent, which is how the tradition of Mary Magdalene as a reformed prostitute was born and why it persisted for over a millennium.
The theological weight of the Markan account is independent of how one resolves that question. In Mark, the unnamed woman anoints Jesus’s head, not his feet. This is not an accident. In the Hebrew Bible, anointing the head is how you make a king. Recent scholarship has argued that Mark has deliberately constructed this as a royal messianic anointing, placed structurally between the plotting of the chief priests and the betrayal agreement of Judas as a counter-narrative. This woman is the one who understands who Jesus is, even as the men around her are arranging his death.
John’s account, meanwhile, names her as Mary of Bethany and frames the act as preparation for burial, connecting the anointing to the resurrection of her brother Lazarus just one chapter earlier.
Whether we follow Mark’s unnamed woman anointing his head or John’s woman named Mary anointing his feet, the meaning Jesus himself draws out is the same. In Mark he says: “She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for the burial. And truly I say to you, wherever the gospel is preached in the whole world, what this woman has done will also be told in memory of her” (Mark 14:8-9).
Wherever the gospel is preached. Jesus tied her act to the gospel proclamation itself. He said this would be remembered. And then, for centuries, we forgot.
The male disciples in the room miss it entirely. They see waste and stupidity. They see a year’s wages poured on a floor. They are indignant. But they do not see the meaning. The disciples who will later argue about who is greatest cannot recognize the woman who is already, in this moment, performing the defining prophetic act of the entire Passion narrative.
She understands that Jesus is Messiah. She understands what Messiahship costs. The disciples do not.
The First Evangelist: Photini at the Well
Long before before Bethany, a conversation takes place in Samaria that changes everything. Most of Western Christianity has managed to reduce it to a morality tale about sexual sin.
John chapter four records the longest conversation Jesus has with any individual in the entirety of the New Testament. His interlocutor is a Samaritan woman. She is sharp, theologically literate, and entirely unintimidated. The woman engages Jesus on the nature of worship, the distinction between Jewish and Samaritan religion, and the coming of the Messiah. She is not Jesus’s passive listener to strengthen His platform. She is a sparring partner. But indeed, she is actively listening, which leads to belief.
And then Jesus says something he says nowhere else in John’s gospel so directly: ‘I who speak to you am he’ (John 4:26) — an unguarded declaration of Messianic identity, offered not to a crowd or to his disciples, but to one Samaritan woman at a well.
I am the Messiah. To her. To a Samaritan woman at the sixth hour of the day, while the disciples are in town buying bread. To the person who, by every social calculus of the first century, should have been the last to receive such a revelation.
The Orthodox Christian tradition has not forgotten her. They know her name: Photini, the luminous one, the name given to her at her baptism at Pentecost. They honor her as Equal-to-the-Apostles, a title shared by Mary Magdalene and Helena. But most of us do not know the title was carried by this maligned Samaritan woman who ran back to her city crying, “Come and see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Christ?”
The contrast is almost too sharp to bear. Peter, given a revelation by the Father himself, in confusion tries to redirect Jesus away from the cross (“this must never happen to you”). This unnamed Samaritan woman, given a revelation by Jesus himself, with great understanding immediately becomes an evangelist to a city. She leaves her water jar, abandons the task that brought her there, and goes. John tells us that many Samaritans believed because of her witness (John 4:39). She is the first person in this gospel to successfully share the good news of the Messiah.
Western Christianity spent over a millennium fixating on how many husbands she’d had. Yet, acknowledging Photini’s true power and mission, the Eastern and Catholic churches gave her a feast day. March 20 is her Feast Day in the Catholic church; it’s a good time to revisit this misunderstood heroine of the faith. Not only Photini, but also Mary and Martha of Bethany and Mary Magdalene are well known as missionaries in the stories that followed them.
What Happened After: Women Who Went to the Nations
These women, according to the ancient traditions of both Eastern and Western Christianity, went on to live extraordinary missionary lives, something almost undiscussed in Protestant and evangelical circles.
Photini Sent
Photini’s story after the well is told through hagiographic tradition rather than historical record, but that tradition is rich with memories that were passed down and live even today.
According to those traditions, which likely began as oral story telling, she received baptism at Pentecost and set out on a missionary journey that took her to Carthage in North Africa, where she preached the gospel fearlessly. Her sons became missionaries too. Eventually her activity drew the attention of the Emperor Nero, who summoned her to Rome to answer for her preaching.
The accounts grow vivid and surreal: Nero sent his daughter, Domnina, to persuade the Christian women to renounce their faith, but the plan backfired — Photini catechized Domnina and her hundred slave girls and baptized them all. Photini later endures torture without relenting. She dies a martyr by being thrown into a dry well (the cruel symmetry is unmistakable).
The Orthodox Church honors her as a Great Martyr and Equal-to-the-Apostles. In Greek homilies from the fourth through the fourteenth centuries, she is called “apostle” and “evangelist” and is frequently compared to the male disciples, and found to surpass them. Her feast is celebrated on the Sunday of the Samaritan Woman, the fifth Sunday after Pascha, a liturgical landmark that Peter, for all his prominence, does not hold in his own name.
What Mary and Martha of Bethany Did
Mary and Martha of Bethany have their own tradition of journeying to the nations. According to the Orthodox tradition, when persecution broke out against the Jerusalem church after the martyrdom of Stephen, Lazarus was cast out of the city. His sisters went with him, assisting in the proclamation of the gospel across various lands. The Cyprian stories holds that all three ended their lives in Cyprus, where Lazarus became the first Bishop of Kition (present-day Larnaca). The Western church describes a different but equally striking trajectory: that Mary, Martha, and Lazarus were set adrift in a boat without oars or sail, and carried by the sea to the coast of Provence in southern France, where they became among the first to bring Christianity to Gaul.
Martha’s name is still connected to the town of Tarascon-sur-Rhône. Believers venerate Mary at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. Whether one reads these stories as history, legend, or sanctified memory, they are witnesses to an early church that remembered these women as missionaries to the ends of the earth, women who heard the gospel first and carried it furthest.
Mary Magdalene Went, Too
The traditions about Mary Magdalene’s later life split sharply along East-West lines, and the split is itself theologically significant.
The Eastern tradition, supported by the sixth-century historian Gregory of Tours, holds that Mary Magdalene went to Ephesus with the Virgin Mary, where she assisted the Apostle John in his missionary work and died in peace. Her relics were later translated to Constantinople during the reign of Emperor Leo VI. This is the tradition the Orthodox Church recognizes, and it is consistent with the Eastern church’s portrait of Mary Magdalene as a faithful disciple and apostle, never the penitent sinner of Western imagination.
The Western tradition tells a different story: that Mary (conflated into Mary of Bethany and Mary Magdalene), Martha, and Lazarus were set adrift in a boat without oars or sail and carried by the sea to the coast of Provence in southern France, where they became among the first to bring Christianity to Gaul. In this tradition, Mary spent her last thirty years in solitary contemplation in an Alpine cave, fed by angels. Martha’s name is connected to the town of Tarascon-sur-Rhône and Mary is venerated at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. Scholars trace this Western cult no earlier than the mid-eleventh century, and the Orthodox Church explicitly rejects it as medieval invention.
What the two traditions share is more important than what divides them: both remember Mary Magdalene as someone who kept moving after the resurrection, who carried the good news somewhere, who mattered enough to be argued over across continents and centuries. The Eastern church also preserves a striking additional tradition — that before leaving for Ephesus, Mary gained an audience with the Emperor Tiberius, held up a plain egg, and declared “Christ is risen.” Tiberius laughed, saying the dead rising was as likely as the egg turning red. The egg turned red before he finished speaking. It is the origin of the Orthodox tradition of red Easter eggs, and it is, whatever else one makes of it, a story about a woman who walked into the imperial court and proclaimed the resurrection without flinching.
What We Lose When We Lose This
The instinct to center Peter in the story of Messianic recognition is not simply an innocent mistake. It is a choice, and choices have consequences.
When we tell the story of who understood Jesus, we shape who gets to teach about Jesus. When we tell the story of who carried the gospel to the nations, we shape who gets respect for and acknowledgement for carrying it now. The women who first received the Messianic revelation, who recognized, announced, and went, have been consistently moved to the margins of a tradition they helped to found.
Martha’s (now understood as possibly Mary’s) confession gets quoted less often than Peter’s, though they are structurally equivalent. Mary’s anointing of Jesus is preached as devotion rather than prophetic authority, though Jesus himself called it a gospel act to be remembered forever. Photini’s name is unknown to most Western Christians, though the conversation she had with Jesus is one of the longest and most theologically rich in the entire New Testament.
The recovery of these women is a return to the text, and a respect of the traditions that have read the texts well.
Jesus chose, at pivotal moments, to reveal himself to women. He told a Samaritan woman he was the Messiah before he told almost anyone else. He accepted a woman’s anointing as the defining prophetic act of his Passion. He received a woman’s confession as the theological climax of John’s central miracle. And he sent those women out, which the Eastern church remembered and took seriously.
They went. They preached. They were martyred. They were remembered.
It is long past time for the rest of us to remember them too.
Sources and further reading: Elizabeth Schrader Polczer, “Was Martha of Bethany Added to the Fourth Gospel in the Second Century?” Harvard Theological Review 110.3 (2017); Schrader Polczer and Joan Taylor, “The Meaning of Magdalene,” Journal of Biblical Literature 140.4 (2021); Duke Today interview with Elizabeth Schrader (2019); Marg Mowczko, “Is Martha Missing from the Oldest Surviving Text of John 11?”; Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “In Memory of Her” (1983); Diana Butler Bass, “Mary the Tower,” sermon at Wild Goose Festival (2022); the feast of Saint Photini, Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America; The Junia Project on the anointing at Bethany.
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