Libbie Schrader

And I'm not normally very confrontational when I was a little bit scared.

So at the same time as when I was working on this, one of my other colleagues in the States called Libby Schrader also had the same idea.

And we published articles arguing this at very similar times.

The kind of apocryphal gospel community has basically said, yeah, maybe.

actual New Testament scholars are arguing that there may have been efforts in the earliest decades of Christianity to diminish the role of Mary Magdalene in the gospel story.

This is according to Duke University doctoral student Elizabeth Schrader, who I interviewed earlier this year.

I'll cut to parts of that interview throughout this video, but you can find the full cut on my second channel.

Schrader basically argues that by comparing variations in our earliest manuscripts of the Gospel of John, we can infer that Mary Magdalene had a much bigger role than what she has in our modern Bibles.

So why is this important? Well, without Martha, we have a much more consistent character of Mary throughout the entire Gospel of John.

We have Mary Magdalene in the beginning of the Gospel of John, this Mary of Bethany character in the middle of John, and Mary Magdalene in the end of John.

So Elizabeth Schrader argues that the original author was intending that this Mary was Mary Magdalene.

So remember that in John 11, Mary, the sister of Lazarus, is never called Mary of Bethany.

And when people were looking at the pictures, I remember when they first started showing up on social media, a couple of pretty big journalists said, is this for real? Or is this AI generated? because it looks like, guess what the word was they used? It looks like the apocalypse.

So congratulations, JD Vance, you and your friends have personally helped to cause an apocalypse already.

So you do not have to wait to see whether you're going to be in heaven or you're going to be in hell or if the world's going to end or whatever.

It already ended for thousands of pilgrims in Nepal who were in that location because that's a sacred location in Buddhism and also for Hindus.

Right.

Because if they're close, they're going to be all these efforts to subvert the results.

So vote early and we're going to have to vote big and get all of your friends and family out to vote.

It is like I really am seeing this midterm election as one of the last clear exit ramps.