Elizabeth Schrader Polczer | |
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Born | Elizabeth Brooke Schrader September 14, 1979 |
Other names | Libbie Schrader |
Occupation(s) | Biblical Scholar, Singer/Songwriter |
Spouse | Hínár György Schrader Polczer |
Awards | Pantene Pro-Voice competition, 2001 |
Academic background | |
Education |
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Academic work | |
Discipline | Gospel Studies |
Sub-discipline | Mary Magdalene |
Website | https://www.elizabethschrader.com/ |
Elizabeth Schrader Polczer, better known as Elizabeth Schrader, is an American biblical scholar who concentrates on textual studies concerning Mary Magdalene,the Gospel of John,and the Nag Hammadi corpus. [1] She currently teaches as an assistant professor of theology at Villanova University. Before transitioning to her academic focus,she was a singer/songwriter professionally known as Libbie Schrader. [2] [3]
Schrader grew up in Portland,Oregon and moved to California to attend Pomona College,from which she graduated in 2001. She moved to New York in 2008.
Schrader's involvement with religious scholarship began after a long and successful career as a singer-songwriter. In 2010 she launched a fan-funded campaign to record her album Magdalene. The album's title track led to Schrader doing research into Mary Magdalene in the Gospel of John,to two master's degrees in theology from General Theological Seminary,and to her current doctoral studies in Early Christianity and New Testament at Duke University. She currently teaches as an assistant professor of theology at Villanova University.
Schrader is a textual critic who studies discrepancies between the earliest manuscripts of the gospels. She is particularly concerned with the many textual variants around the name Maria in manuscripts of John’s Gospel,and argues that such textual instabilities might be connected to controversies around Mary Magdalene in early Christianity. In her peer-reviewed articles Was Martha of Bethany Added to the Fourth Gospel in the Second Century? and ’Rabbouni,’which means Lord:Narrative Variants in John 20:16, she suggests that the earliest extant manuscripts of John’s Gospel may contain evidence of editorial attempts to minimize Mary Magdalene’s role in that gospel. In her peer-reviewed article The Meaning of ‘Magdalene’:A Review of Literary Evidence (co-written with Joan Taylor),Schrader and Taylor argue that the word “Magdalene”could be an honorific title,not necessarily referencing Mary’s hometown (which,Schrader argues,could be Bethany).
In 2022,Schrader presented the Carpenter Program Women’s History Month Lecture at Vanderbilt University,and she has made academic presentations at the Duke Divinity School and other universities. [4]
Schrader was the first winner of the Pantene Pro-Voice competition in 2001, after a performance opening for Jewel at SummerStage in New York's Central Park. That same year, Schrader's group, The Wash, won the inaugural Pantene Pro-Voice Competition. [2] In 2002, Schrader's group, known then as Think of England [5] was chosen to be a part of Jewel's Soul City Café program, and opened three shows on her This Way tour. [6] She also opened for other artists as diverse as India.Arie, Michelle Branch, Ray LeMontagne, and Rusted Root. [1]
After Schrader went solo, she was a featured artist on MySpace in early 2006 and appeared in the Gilmore Girls episode Partings later that year. [7]
A 2017 article in The Oregonian noted that despite her recent involvement biblical scholarship, Schrader's songs still "...focus on secular themes of love and loss, desire and real-life events, both serious and light-hearted." [3]
Mary Magdalene was a woman who, according to the four canonical gospels, traveled with Jesus as one of his followers and was a witness to his crucifixion and resurrection. She is mentioned by name twelve times in the canonical gospels, more than most of the apostles and more than any other woman in the gospels, other than Jesus's family. Mary's epithet Magdalene may be a toponymic surname, meaning that she came from the town of Magdala, a fishing town on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee in Roman Judea.
Mary of Bethany is a biblical figure mentioned by name in the Gospel of John and probably the Gospel of Luke in the Christian New Testament. Together with her siblings Lazarus and Martha, she is described as living in the village of Bethany, a small village in Judaea to the south of the Mount of Olives near Jerusalem.
Martha is a biblical figure described in the Gospels of Luke and John. Together with her siblings Lazarus and Mary of Bethany, she is described as living in the village of Bethany near Jerusalem. She was witness to Jesus resurrecting her brother, Lazarus.
Mark 16 is the final chapter of the Gospel of Mark in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. Christopher Tuckett refers to it as a "sequel to the story of Jesus' death and burial". The chapter begins after the sabbath has ended, with Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome purchasing spices to bring to the tomb next morning to anoint Jesus' body. There they encounter the stone rolled away, the tomb open, and a young man dressed in white who announces the resurrection of Jesus. The two oldest manuscripts of Mark 16 conclude with verse 8, which ends with the women fleeing from the empty tomb, and saying "nothing to anyone, because they were too frightened".
In the New Testament, Salome was a follower of Jesus who appears briefly in the canonical gospels and in apocryphal writings. She is named by Mark as present at the crucifixion and as one of the Myrrhbearers, the women who found Jesus's empty tomb. Interpretation has further identified her with other women who are mentioned but not named in the canonical gospels. In particular, she is often identified as the wife of Zebedee, the mother of James and John, two of the Twelve apostles. In medieval tradition Salome was counted as one of the Three Marys who were daughters of Saint Anne, so making her the sister or half-sister of Mary, mother of Jesus.
The Gospel of Mary is a non-canonical text discovered in 1896 in a fifth-century papyrus codex written in Sahidic Coptic. This Berlin Codex was purchased in Cairo by German diplomat Carl Reinhardt.
John 20 is the twentieth chapter of the Gospel of John in the New Testament. It relates the story of Jesus' resurrection. It relates how Mary Magdalene went to the tomb of Jesus and found it empty. Jesus appears to her and speaks of his resurrection and dispatches Mary to tell the news to the disciples. Jesus then appears to his disciples. The events related in John 20 are described somewhat differently in Matthew 28, Mark 16, and Luke 24.
John 20:16 is the sixteenth verse in the twentieth chapter of the Gospel of John in the New Testament of the Bible. The verse describes the moment that Mary Magdalene realizes that Jesus has returned from the dead, when she recognizes his voice calling her name.
Joanna, the wife of Chuza, is a woman mentioned in the gospels who was healed by Jesus and later supported him and his disciples in their travels. She is one of the women recorded in the Gospel of Luke as accompanying Jesus and the twelve apostles and as a witness to Jesus' resurrection. Her husband was Chuza, who managed the household of Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee; this is the origin of the distinguishing epithet commonly attached to her name, differentiating her from other figures named Joanna or Joanne.
The traditional understanding of Christian churches and theologians is that Jesus did not marry and remained celibate until his death. That has not prevented speculation about alternative and fringe theories of his sexuality. The Gospels and the New Testament reveal little on the subject.
John 11 is the eleventh chapter of the Gospel of John in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. It records the raising of Lazarus from the dead, a miracle of Jesus Christ, and the subsequent development of the chief priests' and Pharisees' plot against Jesus. The author of the book containing this chapter is anonymous, but early Christian tradition uniformly affirmed that John composed this Gospel.
John 12 is the twelfth chapter of the Gospel of John in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. It narrates an anointing of Jesus' feet, attributed to Mary of Bethany, as well as an account of the triumphal entry of Jesus Christ into Jerusalem. The author of the book containing this chapter is anonymous, but early Christian tradition uniformly affirmed that John composed this Gospel.
The anointings of Jesus’s head or feet are events recorded in the four gospels. The account in Matthew 26, Mark 14, takes place on Holy Wednesday, while the account in John 12 takes place 6 days before Passover at the house of Simon the Leper in Bethany, a village in Judaea on the southeastern slope of the Mount of Olives. In Matthew and Mark, he is anointed by an unnamed woman. In John, the woman is identified as Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus of Bethany. The event in Luke features an unnamed sinful woman, and is in the northern region, as Luke 7 indicates Jesus was ministering in the northern regions of Nain and Capernaum. The honorific anointing with perfume is an action frequently mentioned in other literature from the time; however, using long hair to dry Jesus's feet, as in John and Luke, is not recorded elsewhere, and should be regarded as an exceptional gesture. Considerable debate has discussed the identity of the woman, the location, timing, and the message.
The Jesus bloodline refers to the proposition that a lineal sequence of the historical Jesus has persisted, possibly to the present time. The claims frequently describe Jesus as having married, often to Mary Magdalene, and as having descendants living in Europe, especially France but also the UK. Differing and contradictory Jesus progeny scenarios, as well as more limited claims that Jesus married and had children, have been proposed in numerous modern books. Some such claims have suggested that Jesus survived the crucifixion and went to another location such as France, India or Japan.
Matthew 27:55–56 are the fifty-sixth and fifty-seventh verses of the twenty-seventh chapter of the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament. The crucifixion and death of Jesus have just occurred, and these verses make note of a group of women who were present at that event.
The Three Marys are women mentioned in the canonical gospels' narratives of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. Mary was the most common name for Jewish women of the period.
In Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition the Myrrhbearers are the individuals mentioned in the New Testament who were directly involved in the burial or who discovered the empty tomb following the resurrection of Jesus. The term traditionally refers to the women who came with myrrh to the tomb of Christ early in the morning to find it empty. Also included are Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, who took the body of Jesus down from the cross, anointed it with myrrh and aloes, wrapped it in clean linen, and placed it in a new tomb. In Western Christianity, the women at the tomb, the Three Marys or other variants are the terms normally used.
Jesus's interactions with women are an important element in the theological debate about Christianity and women. Women are prominent in the story of Jesus. According to the resurrection story, the resurrected Jesus was first seen by women.
Jesus at the home of Martha and Mary refers to a Biblical episode in the life of Jesus in the New Testament which appears only in Luke's Gospel, immediately after the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Luke's account reads:
The name Mary, appears 54 times in the New Testament, in 49 verses. It was the single most popular female name among Jews of the Roman province of Judaea at the time, borne by about one in four women, and most of the New Testament references to Mary provide only the barest identifying information. Scholars and traditions therefore differ as to how many distinct women these references represent and which of them refer to the same person.