Hello! I’m afraid I can’t provide any specific answer to your query about Papyrus 66, and I will defer to any comments you receive from subject specialists; however, I did do my Honours undergraduate in Theology and have some thoughts you may find useful to consider in parallel to your study on Papyrus 66 and the role of women in the early church. I’m writing this first bit after my full response and warn you that I got a bit carried away on writing about things that don’t answer your question, but I hope it’s of interest!

What I can say for sure, though, is that I would have had a very difficult task were I to try and convince my professors that a potential mistranslation or deliberate scribal insertion are grounds to label centuries of textual exegesis and application as misdirected. I think the canon as we know it would look significantly different were it possible for us identify and exclude every instance where scribes had used a degree of creative licence to consolidate differing textual traditions or to improve (perhaps subjectively) the “readability” of texts they’ve inherited.

I encountered something similar when writing my final thesis on the authority of certain priestly families in the Qumran community behind the Dead Sea Scrolls. There are various different versions of the Rule of the Community (Serekh ha-yahad) which is a foundational text that governed the community, each sharing an obvious tradition while also differing in their surviving texts. What caused the differences? Which version was valued most by the community? What’s the implication of having different versions? What audiences where the scribes writing for? Are some scribes reliable or unreliable, was a good scribe having a bad day, are contentious spellings or omissions a simple product of reading fatigue or parablepsis? We can make and argue our own suppositions until the cows come home, but we must do so with the understanding that the scribes were engaging with texts from one or more traditions with a view to pass them on in a manner that was meaningful to their own audiences.

I haven’t studied at a seminary (although there was one attached to my faculty) so I’m not sure how significant the overlap is between academic theology and ministry, but you may at some point study the “Synoptic Problem” which looks at the shared textual development of the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke. This is also approached via the Two Source Documentary Hypothesis (sometimes called the Four Source…). “Synoptic” can literally translate as “seen together” and when you do place the texts of Mark, Matthew, and Luke alongside each other it’s obvious why they are known as the Synoptic Gospels. Almost the entirety of Mark is contained within Matthew and Luke, who themselves differ in places but share a significant amount of common text to require us to suppose they shared another source – commonly called the Q source. This could have been a textual or oral source, but, unfortunately, we know nothing about it beyond the it’s surfacing in Matthew and Luke. If you’re interested in this subject I’d recommend “Studying the Synoptic Gospels” by E.P Sanders and Margaret Davies (bibliography at the bottom).

The above is a fairly circuitous way of saying that trying to track or reverse engineer the textual development and transmission of biblical documents is incredibly difficult. These texts have gone through centuries of change and trying to label anyone of them as the definitive authoritative version is fraught with difficulties; indeed some changes to scripture are fairly recent. My faculty taught using the New Revised Standard Version, however your denomination will likely have a different standard; but as an exercise, have a look through some Gospel or Pauline epistle passages and compare against older texts passages that talk about “men and women” or “brothers and sisters” – in almost all cases you will find that the feminine nouns are insertions (e.g. Mark 3:32, 1 Cor 11:33 “brothers and sisters” the Greek is “brothers” only) or gender neutral wording is used (e.g. Mat 23:8 where the Greek used for “your are all students” actually translates as “brothers”; see also Mat 18:15-20 where “member” is more rightly translated as “brother”). Even in the case of Schrader’s thesis that you attached, while Papyrus 66 is possibly the earliest version of John 11-12 it is dated to around 200CE which puts it more than one-and-a-half centuries after the events it documents – that’s three or four lifetimes in which earlier oral sources or proto-John’s evolved and developed. Even if we could objectively state that Papyrus 66 was undeniably the earliest codified witness of John 11-12, to what extent could we say it is truly authoritative given the gulf of time between the text and the events it is concerned with? I won’t dive into it, but there’s a tangentially related question around how religious traditions codify and adopt their definitive canon of texts. There’s an awful lot to say on the subject, but a definite observation is that religious groups will collect, preserve, and perpetuate those texts that meaningfully align to the beliefs and identity of their groups. Is it possible for us to say that the canonical version(s) of John 11-12 that we have today is simply the outcome of two millennia-worth of Christian groups (with access to alternate contemporaneous or proto-/deutero- versions) treating this version as meaningful and authoritative to them?

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(Cont)

Hello! I'm an MA in New Testament and had some thoughts to share, but u/Vops_ has done a wonderful job describing the challenges of working with Biblical source documents. I'll just add, to your question about further study of Papyrus 66, that while other scholars (particularly womanists) may be intrigued by the finding and the possibilities for new perspectives, they are likely to move slowly before adopting new intepretations. As u/Vops_ pointed out, Papyrus 66 is the oldest written version of the story we have, but we don't know what preceded it. This particular scribe may have had good reasons for changing "Mary" to "Martha." There could have been an older oral tradition, or even a written source that is lost to us now, that also named Mary and Martha, but prior to P 66 some textual instability happened. This scribe may have restored an older tradition; we just don't know based on the documents we have now. Even if more ancient papyri of John are discovered, they'll undergo a long, critical analysis to verify their authenticity. New Testament scholarship has had some disappointments when seemingly groundbreaking discoveries have turned out to be unverifiable at best, fraudulent at worst (the Secret Gospel of Mark, the Gospel of Jesus' Wife). Not to suggest that P 66 or the "Martha" changes are fraudulent - just that the scholarly community will likely react conservatively to this theory about the changes until more research is done.

Meanwhile, if you haven't read it yet, I would recommend In Memory of Her by Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1994). It is the foundational reconstruction of Mary Magdalene's story.