The Quest for Mary Magdalene

by Michael Haag

  Dedication

  Pour Dasha derrière ces mots

  Map

  Contents

  Map

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Prologue: Jesus and Mary Magdalene

  Chapter 1: The Woman Called Magdalene

  Chapter 2: The Kingdom of God

  Chapter 3: On the Road with Jesus

  Chapter 4: The Abomination of Desolation

  Chapter 5: Strange Days at Bethany

  Chapter 6: The Trial and Death of Jesus

  Chapter 7: The Empty Tomb

  Chapter 8: The Disappearance of Mary Magdalene

  Chapter 9: The Gnostic Magdalene

  Chapter 10: Changing Roles: The Virgin and the Whore

  Chapter 11: The Bride of Christ: Magdalene of the Cathars

  Chapter 12: The Escape from the Cave: Renaissance Magdalene

  Chapter 13: Modern Mary Magdalene

  Further Reading

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Michael Haag

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Spikenard and myrrh – the anointing oils

  Introduction

  IN 1969 DURING THE PAPACY of Paul VI the Vatican made some discreet alterations to the Latin mass. Until then the reading for the feast day of Mary Magdalene on 22 July was from chapter 7 of the gospel of Luke in which an unnamed woman enters a house where Jesus is a dinner guest and abases herself to him.

  And, behold, a woman in the city, which was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster box of ointment, And stood at his feet behind him weeping, and began to wash his feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment. . . . And he said unto her, Thy sins are forgiven.

  This story was replaced in 1969 by a very different reading, this time from chapter 20 of the gospel of John in which a woman identified as Mary Magdalene commands attention not because of her supposed sins but because Jesus first reveals himself to her at the resurrection.

  Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away. Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master.

  Without making an unmistakeable public apology the Vatican was in effect saying that it had got it wrong about Mary Magdalene for one thousand four hundred years, ever since 591 when Pope Gregory the Great delivered his homily which declared that Mary Magdalene was a whore.

  Not that anyone was listening to the Vatican’s retraction in 1969, or perhaps they simply preferred the whore to the woman who witnessed the resurrection, the event that stands at the centre of the religion that has shaped the history and culture of the greater part of the world for the last two thousand years. Whatever the reason, in 1970, just a year after the Catholic Church changed its mind about Mary Magdalene, she scored a worldwide hit in the Jesus Christ Superstar album (followed by the stage musical in 1971 and the film in 1973) when in the person of Yvonne Elliman she sang a torch song, ‘I Don’t Know How to Love Him’, about her passion for Jesus:

  I don’t see why he moves me.

  He’s a man. He’s just a man.

  And I’ve had so many men before,

  In very many ways,

  He’s just one more.

  Since then Mary Magdalene’s reputation as a prostitute has grown as film after film presents her as a whore. In Martin Scorsese’s 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ Mary Magdalene is the woman taken in adultery in John 8 but is defended from stoning by Jesus; her repentance is made a driving theme in the film. Even Mel Gibson’s 2004 Passion of the Christ, though it is set entirely within the week leading up to the crucifixion, feels compelled to include a flashback falsely alluding to Mary Magdalene as the woman taken in adultery.

  The public appetite for Mary Magdalene the whore is matched only by that for Mary Magdalene the wife of Jesus and even as the mother of his child. Witness to this is the huge media attention given to Harvard University’s professor Karen King’s announcement in 2012 of the discovery of an ancient papyrus fragment bearing the words ‘Jesus said unto them, “my wife”’ – not to mention the vast popularity of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code in which Mary Magdalene flees the Holy Land with her child by Jesus and founds the Merovingian dynasty of French kings.

  Certainly in the Middle Ages the Cathars in France saw Mary Magdalene as the wife of Jesus in the divine world and as his concubine in the world of illusion, the world that they believed we inhabit in our everyday lives; while in the early centuries of the Christian era the gnostic gospels portray Mary Magdalene as the ‘companion’, ‘consort’ and even ‘wife’ of Jesus, as the woman he loved more than all the other disciples, their relationship often described in erotic terms. For that matter there are incidents even in the canonical gospels of the New Testament that have suggested to scholars that Mary Magdalene was indeed the wife of Jesus. For some the argument is not whether it was true but why the truth was edited out.

  This touches on the larger question of Mary Magdalene’s vision, the vision she shared with Jesus – and how much of that was suppressed or lost in the controversies that shaped the new religion which some have described not as Christianity but as Churchianity, an institution utterly alien to the vision of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

  Mary Magdalene is a larger figure than any text, larger than the Bible or the Church; she has taken on a life of her own. In medieval times she was called ‘the light-bearer’, recalling her gnostic epithet ‘inheritor of light’ in her search for the truth. She is the mediator of the divine mystery and she has remained a potent and mysterious figure ever since. In the manner of a quest this book follows Mary Magdalene through the centuries, explores how she has been reinterpreted for every age and examines what she herself reveals about woman and man and the divine.

  PROLOGUE

  Jesus and Mary Magdalene

  MARY MAGDALENE WAS WITH Jesus in Galilee where he preached the kingdom of God to people in their thousands and healed the sick and lame. And she accompanied Jesus as he journeyed to Jerusalem and entered the holy city in accordance with the prophecy, ‘humble and mounted on a donkey’ (Zechariah 9:9), but a challenge all the same, and where multitudes greeted him, waving palm branches and casting their garments before him and calling out hosanna. ‘Hosanna to the son of David: Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord: Hosanna in the highest.’ When he came into Jerusalem, and ‘all the city was moved’, Mary Magdalene was there (Matthew 21:10).

  When the Romans nailed Jesus to the cross, abandoned by his disciples, and he cried out, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’, Mary Magdalene was there. And when it was finished, Mary Magdalene followed as they carried his body to the tomb and she watched as the stone was rolled into place.

  On the third day Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and found that it was empty. ‘Mary’, said a voice, and she turned and saw that it was Jesus. ‘Rabboni’, she said, using the familiar Aramaic word for master, and reached out to touch him. ‘Touch me not’, Jesus said to Mary Magdalene, she who had touched him many times before. ‘Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God’ (John 12:17).

  ‘Touch me not,’ Jesus says to Mary Magdalene in the garden of the resurrection, she who had touched him so many times before. Noli Me Tangere by Fra Angelico, Convent of San Marco, Florence, 1442.

  Noli Me Tangere b
y Fra Angelico, Convent of San Marco, Florence, 1442. Wikimedia Commons.

  Passionately and spiritually, Mary Magdalene understood, and following Jesus’ command she faithfully carried his message to the disciples, his apostle to the apostles; Mary Magdalene, witness to the resurrection.

  Yet Mary Magdalene is mentioned by name only fourteen times in the Bible – and only in the four gospels, never in Acts or anywhere else in the New Testament. But as little as that seems, it compares favourably to mentions of Mary the mother of Jesus. Apart from the accounts of the nativity and a few stories of Jesus’ childhood, Mary the mother of Jesus hardly figures at all – only seven times, and that includes occasions when she is unnamed. ‘The reader of the gospels’, says The Catholic Encylopaedia, referring to the mother of Jesus, ‘is at first surprised to find so little about Mary’.

  As Jesus grows up, the role of his mother sharply decreases. She is mentioned in passing as he travels round Galilee where he is dismissive towards her (Matthew 12:47-49 and John 2:1-4), and again at the crucifixion though only in the gospel of John, and once more in Acts in the story of the Pentecost. And that is it for Mary the mother of Jesus. Her fame and the cult that surrounds her, her perpetual virginity, the reports of her Assumption, her title Mother of God, these and much more arose centuries later and are not found in the Bible at all.

  Mary Magdalene, on the other hand, though she is mentioned only fourteen times, and though the gospels repeat themselves, telling and retelling their stories so that really she appears only on four distinct occasions – nevertheless, each of those occasions in which Mary Magdalene appears is crucial.

  Mary Magdalene is at the crucifixion, she is at the burial, and she is at the resurrection, and before that she is with Jesus throughout his ministry in Galilee. As a woman and companion of Jesus she is the only person close to him at the critical moments that define his purpose, that describe his fate, and that will give rise to a new religion; she helps support Jesus in his works, she is utterly fearless, and she is a woman of vision. Her character holds the secret of her name. At the beginning there is Jesus and Mary called Magdalene.

  Mary Magdalene and Mary the Mother of Jesus

  Mary the mother of Jesus appears primarily in chapters 1 and 2 of the gospels of Matthew and Luke which tell the story of the nativity and the infancy of Jesus – the virgin birth in a Bethlehem manger, the shepherds in the field, the star in the east, the worshipping magi – a story entirely ignored by the gospels of Mark and John which begin with the baptism of Jesus the man by John the Baptist.

  Various scholars, among them Geza Vermes, a leading authority on Jesus, consider the birth narratives as legendary and say they were added to Luke and Matthew at a later date. These nativity stories, which in any case contradict one another (for example Matthew has the Holy Family, fearful for Jesus’ life, fleeing Bethlehem to Egypt, while Luke has them returning to Nazareth after spending forty days peacefully in Bethlehem and Jerusalem), are unsupported by the other two gospels. Mark and John say Jesus came ‘out of Galilee’; Mark makes no mention of Bethlehem while John does not contradict the assertion of the Pharisees that Jesus was born in Galilee, not Bethlehem (John 7:41-42). Apart from these birth and infancy chapters of Matthew and Luke, Mary appears in the gospels only seven times, five of those times described as the mother of Jesus but otherwise unnamed, and once in Acts.

  Three of the references to Jesus’ unnamed mother relate to one event which is described in Mark 3:31-35, Matthew 12:46-50 and Luke 8:19-21. Jesus has been healing and preaching and driving out devils and has attracted crowds of people up and down Galilee, but his friends and family fear that he is deranged and possessed by Beelzebub and they come for him. Instead he dismissively waves his mother and brothers away, saying his true mother and brothers are those who do the will of God.

  The fourth time when the mother of Jesus is mentioned but not named is at the marriage of Cana where again she makes a nuisance of herself and Jesus turns on her and says, ‘Woman, what have I to do with thee?’ (John 2:4). For other reasons the marriage at Cana (whose marriage is it?) is an important event and will be mentioned later.

  Mary Magdalene addressing the disciples – the apostle to the apostles. From the Albani Psalter, c.1100.

  Mary Magdalene addressing the disciples, from the Albani Psalter, c.1100. Wikimedia Commons.

  When she appears at the crucifixion in John 19:25 she is likewise not named, only identified as the mother of Jesus. John is the only gospel which has Mary at the crucifixion of Jesus; she is not at the burial or the resurrection at all.

  Mary the mother of Jesus is, however, named in the gospels of Mark and Matthew when villagers in Galilee are irate that Jesus should be preaching at their synagogue. They believe him to be a carpenter, or the son of a carpenter, from Nazareth and do not realise that he is a rabbi: ‘Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and of Juda, and Simon? and are not his sisters here with us?’ (Mark 6:3). Matthew 13:55 also mentions Mary and her sons by name but makes no mention of her daughters.

  And finally Mary the mother of Jesus is mentioned by name in Acts 1:14 at Pentecost where after the resurrection the Holy Spirit descends upon those in the Upper Room.

  Mary has the distinction of being the mother of Jesus, but there is nothing in their relationship to suggest that she had any understanding of what he was about. In the end there was a reconciliation of sorts when according to the gospel of John, though no one else, Mary came to see Jesus hanging on the cross and he acknowledged her with his dying breath, saying ‘Woman, behold thy son!’ (John 19:26).

  In contrast, Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ constant companion throughout his ministry in Galilee and helped organise and finance the scores of people involved in his mission to heal and bring salvation to the sick and the poor (Luke 8:1-3). She came with Jesus to Jerusalem, witnessed his crucifixion (Matthew 27:56; Mark 15:40; John 20:1), watched to see where his body was laid (Matthew 27:61; Mark 15:47), returned to anoint him on the third day and witnessed his resurrection from the dead (Matthew 28:1; Mark 16:1, 16:9; Luke 24:1; John 20:1, 20:11, 20:16, 20:18) – fourteen mentions of Mary Magdalene by name, as well as other mentions, as when she is included among ‘the women from Galilee’.

  Readers will be familiar with the notions of Mary the mother of Jesus as a perpetual virgin, the perfect mother and the Theotokos, ‘the mother of God’, of having been conceived immaculately, of ascending into heaven, of being an intercessor between God and man, the one who knows the deepest human suffering, the woman always gentle and obedient to God’s will. But nothing of this model of the ‘perfect’ woman is found in the Bible where she is a somewhat irritating woman who has no comprehension of what her son is about; instead she is an invention who belongs entirely to later centuries, a relatively minor biblical figure who was transformed into a major cult – while Mary Magdalene, the woman who knew Jesus, was turned into a whore.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Woman Called Magdalene

  MARY MAGDALENE FIRST APPEARS in the chronology of Jesus’ life in Galilee where she is travelling with Jesus as he proclaims the kingdom of God. ‘And the twelve were with him’, writes Luke in his gospel, ‘and certain women, which had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities’. Among these women three are mentioned by name, and the first is Mary Magdalene, ‘out of whom went seven devils’.

  We are told more, for Jesus and the twelve disciples have to be fed and cared for as they travel round Galilee, and it is Mary Magdalene who provides the means, along with Joanna the wife of Chuza, steward of Herod Antipas who is ruler of Galilee and Perea, and a woman called Susanna, and many other women who go unnamed.

  This is how the Gospel of Luke 8:1-3 describes Mary Magdalene as she travels with Jesus round Galilee.

  And it came to pass afterward, that he went throughout every city and village, preaching and shewing the glad tidings of the kingdom of God: and the twelve were with him, and certain women, which
had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities, Mary called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils, and Joanna the wife of Chuza Herod’s steward, and Susanna, and many others, which ministered unto him of their substance.

  This account of Luke’s is all we have of Mary Magdalene in any of the gospels until we encounter her again at the crucifixion in Jerusalem. But though Luke is very brief, what he tells us of Mary Magdalene with Jesus in Galilee is full of clues and revelations about her life – her character, her wealth, her social and political connections, her mental and emotional and spiritual state, her origins and the nature of her relationship with Jesus and his circle – and it is full of mysteries too.

  A Place Called Magdala

  In the quest for Mary Magdalene we should begin with her name. In the original Greek of the gospels she is never ‘Mary Magdalene’. When she travels with Jesus round Galilee, Luke describes her as ‘Mary called Magdalene’. Later, at the resurrection, the original Greek of Luke describes her as ‘the Magdalene Mary’. In Matthew, Mark and John the Greek is ‘Mary the Magdalene’. She wears the name Magdalene as though it has been conferred on her like a title.

  View of the Sea of Galilee looking south from Safed, 19th century.

  View of the Sea of Galilee looking south from Safed, 19th century. From Picturesque Palestine, Sinai and Egypt by Sir Charles William Wilson and Stanley Lane-Poole. London 1881-84.

  Though the New Testament never describes Mary Magdalene as from or of anywhere, the usual assumption is that Mary Magdalene means Mary from Magdala.

  Magdala, ‘the birthplace of Mary Magdalene’, was a ‘miserable village’ according to the 1912 edition of Baedeker’s Guide to Palestine and Syria. Galilee had suffered centuries of neglect and desolation under the Ottoman Empire, and under the Mamelukes before them. Mejdal, as Magdala was called in Arabic, was frequently described by travellers as impoverished and barely inhabited; it might have been entirely abandoned had it not been resettled in the nineteenth century by Egyptian fellahin. And even then, as Mark Twain wrote in Innocents Abroad, his book about his travels in the Holy Land published in 1867, Magdala was ‘thoroughly ugly, and cramped, squalid, uncomfortable, and filthy’, and the shores of the Sea of Galilee, whose ancient name, Genneret, meant a garden of riches, had become ‘a silent wilderness’. Nor did much change at Mejdal throughout the twentieth century; if anything the scene became more desolate and depressing; all there was to see at Magdala were chickens scratching up what was left of ancient mosaics.