Mary and Martha are Biblical Favorites, but Who Were They?

In his earliest known painting, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, Jan Vermeer recasts the biblical sisters of Lazarus as two sturdy young Dutch women. Good Martha, all bustle and industry, is just setting down a woven basket containing a perfect round loaf of golden bread in front of Jesus.

Sitting at Jesus's feet, sister Mary is a picture of repose, one hand propping up her head in a traditional thinker's pose, taking in Jesus's teachings. Above her, Martha and Jesus are locked in a gaze. One can imagine that Martha, hot from the kitchen and exhausted from cooking and cleaning—what must it take to host the Son of God?—has just finished delivering perhaps the most famous sibling whine of all time. "Lord, don't you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!"

Jesus responds, maybe a bit sharply, "Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed." And here comes the zinger: "Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her."

Painted sometime in the 1650s, Vermeer's version of events reflects what New Testament scholars believed about Mary and Martha for centuries: two sisters in a deep rivalry—one self-righteously busy with women's work and the other in calm discipleship with the Lord. The tale has often been interpreted as a model for two kinds of Christian devotion—a quiet solitary life of contemplation, in the tradition of monkhood, or a life of active secular engagement, as a member of the clergy. As two of the few named women in the New Testament, Mary and Martha have also been beloved by women readers. Even if Jesus might appear to denigrate Martha's domestic work, he also praises Mary for her discipleship—affirming the importance of women taking active personal roles in devotion.

However, new scholarship points toward entirely different layers of meaning hidden within the tired bickering of Mary and Martha. Scholars are questioning just who these sisters were, why Jesus came to their home, and not the house next door, whether they were sisters at all, and why, for two millenniums, Martha has been forever stuck in the kitchen, while Mary sits at Jesus's feet.

"The story has often been read in a very domesticated way," says Warren Carter, professor at the St. Paul School of Theology. "People have often thought that Martha is serving dinner. She's distracted by her many tasks, but these are not the tasks of what vegetables to cook." In fact, Martha's "tasks," translated from the Greek diakonia, related to the verb diakonein, are used throughout the New Testament to refer to both domestic service and Christian ministry—the word deacon is derived from the same noun. Patriarchal association of women with the domestic meant that scholars routinely missed this important detail. This double meaning opens up a new vantage point where readers can view Mary and Martha.

"It seems likely to me these were two women who were famous among early Christians, perhaps as missionaries, but certainly as leaders," says Mary Rose D'Angelo, associate professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame. In Luke 10:38, Jesus and his disciples "came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him." The language suggests that Martha owned the house—not unlikely as women did own property in ancient times. D'Angelo takes the interpretation a step further: "Early Christians didn't have churches; most seem to have gathered in private houses, and perhaps Martha was the host of a house church."

Far from being bickering sisters, Mary and Martha were a pair of missionary leaders. This theory gained support with the advent of the women's movement, when the role of women in church leadership and the question of ordination became important to the changing church. "The church has a very bad history in terms of treatment of women, and I imagine this story has continued to be very significant in our own time because it's a rediscovery of a part of the heritage," says Carter.

In fact, the New Testament points toward extensive female leadership in the early Christian movement. For instance, in the last chapter of Romans, Paul commends 27 people for their missionary tasks—one third of these are women, including the female pair Tryphena and Tryphosa. Missionaries tended to be named in pairs, and male-female pairs are assumed to be married couples. This assumption has led to some speculation on the nature of Mary and Martha's relationship. In translation, they are called sisters, but in the original Greek, the language is less exact—sisters could mean sisters in Christ, siblings, or possibly even a same-sex erotic partnership. The idea of a same-sex relationship has been bandied about in recent scholarship, but the text lacks support.

Whatever the exact nature of their relationship, the story of Mary and Martha does not end in the book of Luke. The sisters reappear once more in the Gospel of John. Here, they have a brother that the writer of Luke doesn't mention—the famous Lazarus. When Jesus comes to the town of Bethany, Lazarus has already been dead for four days, and Mary and Martha are in deep mourning. Mary stays home, and Martha, again the more active sister, greets Jesus in town and makes the astonishing statement in John 11:27: "I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world."

Margaret Guenther, associate rector at St. Columba Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., and a former seminary professor, says that Martha's profession of faith is an underappreciated moment in the Bible. "It's a bold proclamation, and she made it before many of the men did," says Guenther. "We have a special day in January where we celebrate Peter's recognition of Jesus as the Messiah, but Martha doesn't quite make it into the book."

Far from their apparent rivalry in the Gospel of Luke, the Mary and Martha of the Gospel of John work in concert. After Lazarus is raised from the dead, Jesus again comes to their house for dinner. Here, Mary commits an act of great devotion and significance—she washes Jesus's feet with "a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume" that Judas says is worth a year of wages. With this poetic act wherein "the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume," Mary powerfully presages Jesus's death—the oil was saved for the day of his burial. She also provides a model of Christian service and devotion. Christ later echoes her act when he washes the feet of his disciples.

The appearance of Lazarus only in the Gospel of John might raise doubt that the Mary and Martha of Luke are the same as the pair in John. Scholars point out that there seemed to be relatively few personal names in biblical times, and the authors of the Gospels may have recycled the same names for different stories. If so, did these women exist at all? "That there were a significant pair of leaders called Mary and Martha who were well known, I don't see any reason to doubt," says Carter. And to a lay reader, Mary and Martha have always been the same sisters.

What becomes of these women? Popular folklore traces Martha's path from her house in Bethany to the South of France where she supposedly traveled as an evangelist. Some even say that she tamed a dragon along the way. And to this day, several churches in France claim to be the site of Martha's tomb. "It's folk piety," says Guenther. "People want to know more about these women, so somebody makes up these terrific stories, and they grow and grow."

Mary and Martha need not tame dragons to engage the modern reader. Whether one imagines the sisters in a dusty biblical town, in Vermeer's 17th-century Holland, or even as contemporary women, they have much to offer beyond their imagined rivalry. In Vermeer's painting, Jesus points toward Mary, not as a rebuke to Martha but as a gentle reminder that leadership demands both the ability to listen and the ability to act. Finally, Mary and Martha are not at odds but form two parts of a whole.