Overlooked Ancient Echoes of a Longer Lazarus Story?

 In her Ancient Jew Review essay “Art as Text: When Mary Was Lazarus’s Sole Sister,” Ally Kateusz makes a striking claim: if you look carefully at the earliest visual tradition, very early Christian art usually shows only one sister with Lazarus, not two, and that recurring pattern may reflect a text-form in which “Mary” appears without “Martha.” She surveys third–fourth-century depictions of the raising of Lazarus and finds that fifty-nine of sixty-one securely identified scenes portray a single sister. On top of that, she highlights two third-century catacomb paintings where Lazarus emerges from the tomb nude or nearly nude under a sheer cloth, and she sets this iconography alongside literary moments where “Martha” looks suspiciously like a later insertion, sometimes introduced in ways that blunt or demote a Mary (often Mary Magdalene). Parallel textual work on John 11–12, especially around P66 and early Greek/Vetus Latina witnesses, is brought in to argue that Martha’s presence in the Lazarus story shows real instability, and that an earlier Johannine form circulating in the second century may have had Mary there alone.

The EarlyWritings discussion takes Kateusz’s article and the textual study on Martha as a springboard to ask how far any of this bears on the longer Lazarus-like excerpt in the Letter to Theodore. One line of response treats the AJR data as “ambient” confirmation: if third–fourth-century Christians largely pictured one sister at the tomb, and if some art shows Lazarus as a naked or nearly naked youth stepping from the grave, then the Secret Mark scene—a single grieving woman and a linen-clad youth emerging from the tomb at night for instruction—no longer feels like a twentieth-century fantasy. Instead, it sits comfortably within a wider ancient memory-environment in which “one sister” is normal and the imagery of a vulnerable, newly raised body is liturgically and artistically thinkable. The textual article’s documentation of instability around Martha strengthens this ambience: if scribes and editors really did promote “Martha” at Mary’s expense in some strands, then a pre-Martha Lazarus tradition is at least a live possibility.

The more cautious voices push back on the inferential leaps. Artists simplify scenes, compress figures, and tailor compositions to cramped spaces; “one sister in the picture” does not automatically equal “one sister in the text.” The key Johannine crux in John 11:39 is not simply “Martha or no Martha” but the precise wording of the appositive phrase (“the sister of the dead man”) in a set of witnesses, and that fine-grained philology cannot be settled by catacomb wall-paintings. Even the nude or near-nude Lazarus motifs admit multiple explanations: baptismal symbolism, generic resurrection iconography, or local workshop conventions, none of which require a longer Markan Lazarus episode to make sense. Skepticism is also expressed toward the idea that twentieth-century art historians were subconsciously reshaping their readings under the influence of Secret Mark; that kind of retroactive contamination scenario is judged a bridge too far without direct evidence.

Summary: weighed on their own terms, Kateusz’s art-historical observations are solid as description and genuinely interesting as a possible window onto how late antique viewers remembered and visualized the Lazarus story. “Art as Text: When Mary Was Lazarus’s Sole Sister” offers hard counts, early exemplars, and literary analogies where “Martha” is elevated at Mary’s expense, together making it plausible that “one sister at the tomb” was an early, widespread way of picturing the scene and that later redaction sometimes foregrounded Martha in ways that cut against John’s usual privileging of Mary Magdalene. The separate textual study on Martha’s instability in John adds substance: over a hundred early Greek and Vetus Latina witnesses are analyzed, and the pattern of variation is real, even if its precise explanation remains debated. However, moving from “this is how artists often depicted it” and “there is textual wobble around Martha” to “therefore there once existed a longer Markan Lazarus pericope like the one in the Mar Saba letter” is a long inferential jump. The critical replies are right to insist that iconography can hint at, but not prove, textual pre-history, and that the most helpful textual questions still live at the level of individual variants and their trajectories in John’s Gospel.

Implications for the Secret Mark debate: if early Christian art overwhelmingly shows a lone sister with Lazarus, and if some textual trajectories really do diminish Mary by grafting in or promoting Martha, then the longer Markan excerpt’s configuration—a single bereaved woman and a youth emerging from the tomb—does not require a modern imagination to invent it; it is at home in an ancient landscape of memory, devotion, and visual shorthand. Likewise, the catacomb and sarcophagus images of a naked or nearly naked youth stepping from the tomb under a cloth undercut claims that the night-time instruction of a linen-clad youth is intrinsically lurid or anachronistic. Still, the bridge from compatibility to confirmation is long. Kateusz’s essay and the Martha-variant study can make the Secret Mark scene easier to imagine inside antiquity, and they chip away at arguments that rest on alleged anachronism or iconographic impossibility. They do not, and cannot, resolve the core evidentiary issues: the late manuscript witness, the paleography of the Mar Saba hand, the internal voice of the Clementine letter, and the absence or presence of independent textual echoes. What “Art as Text” and its cousins really do is shift a bit of weight from personality-driven suspicions toward comparative cultural context: if forgery arguments are to stand, they need to stand on hard paleographical and source-critical grounds, not on the assumption that no ancient Christian ever pictured a scene remotely like the one described in the Mar Saba pages.