The Quest for Mary Magdalene

by Michael Haag

  Doubts About the Resurrection

  The late addition to Mark which extends the text of that gospel beyond the discovery of the empty tomb goes on to promote the idea of a resurrected Jesus in the teeth of considerable doubt from the disciples themselves. The same is true in the gospels of Matthew, Luke and John. Each was written later than Mark, perhaps not much later but just enough to record the developing belief of a physically resurrected Jesus despite considerable doubts among those to whom the gospels were addressed, the early members of the Jesus movement.

  Led by Mary Magdalene, the women go to the tomb on the third day. An engraving by Alexandre Bida, French, 1870s.

  The women go to the tomb. Illustrations of the Life of Christ by Alexandre Bida, New York 1874.

  What we see in the gospels is a debate among early followers of Jesus over the credibility of the resurrection and also whether resurrection was supposed to take place physically – a raising of bodies – or spiritually. More fundamentally, for many followers of Jesus what mattered were his teachings of the Kingdom of God; notions of sin, resurrection and salvation were alien to them.

  The Pharisees believed in the resurrection of the righteous with the coming of the messiah, but exactly in what form seems to have been evolving; for example Josephus in his earliest writings gives the impression that the Pharisees believed only in a spiritual resurrection, though later he is clear that the righteous who observe the Torah will enjoy bodily resurrection. But that was at the end of days; and the Pharisees neither believed that Jesus was the messiah nor in his immediate physical resurrection. Instead, as the following episode in the gospel of Matthew tells us, it was ‘commonly reported among the Jews until this day’, in other words decades after the crucifixion, that the empty tomb had more to do with bribery than resurrection.

  Matthew reports that some members of the Sanhedrin anticipated that persons close to Jesus would steal the body to make it seem that he was raised from the dead, so they went to Pontius Pilate asking him to set a guard at the tomb. ‘The chief priests and Pharisees came together unto Pilate, Saying, Sir, we remember that that deceiver said, while he was yet alive, After three days I will rise again. Command therefore that the sepulchre be made sure until the third day, lest his disciples come by night, and steal him away, and say unto the people, He is risen from the dead’ (Matthew 27:62-64). Pilate had already satisfied himself that Jesus was dead; if the Jews were worried that some among them might think otherwise if the body disappeared, they should deal with the problem themselves, not with Roman soldiers but with the Temple’s own militia. ‘Pilate said unto them, Ye have a watch: go your way, make it as sure as ye can. So they went, and made the sepulchre sure, sealing the stone, and setting a watch’ (Matthew 27:65-66). (Some commentators mistakenly assume that the guards were Roman soldiers, but as Geza Vermes writes in his Jesus, when the Sanhedrin delegation asked Pilate to keep the tomb under military observation, ‘“Do it yourselves” seems to have been the governor’s sharp reply’.)

  But to no avail. ‘In the end of the sabbath’, continues the gospel of Matthew, ‘as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulchre. And, behold, there was a great earthquake: for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it. His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow: And for fear of him the keepers did shake, and became as dead men.’

  Matthew attempts to counter scepticism about a resurrection with his story of a spectacular supernatural event, an earthquake and, instead of ‘a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment’ as in Mark 16:5, an angel from on high which so terrifies the Jewish soldiers who had been keeping watch that they pass out on the spot. When they recover they go into the city and tell the chief priests what has happened. The chief priests then meet with the elders and decide to give ‘large money unto the soldiers, Saying, Say ye, His disciples came by night, and stole him away while we slept. And if this come to the governor’s ears, we will persuade him, and secure you. So they took the money, and did as they were taught: and this saying is commonly reported among the Jews until this day’ (Matthew 28:13-15).

  For Mary Magdalene, in Matthew as in Mark, the empty tomb was sufficient, and she ‘departed quickly from the sepulchre with fear and great joy; and did run to bring his disciples word’ (Matthew 28:8). But now Matthew goes beyond Mark and has Mary Magdalene running into the risen Jesus and holding him by the feet and worshipping him – a very physical encounter intended by Matthew to leave no doubt about a bodily resurrection. Jesus tells Mary Magdalene and her companion to ‘go tell my brethren that they go into Galilee, and there shall they see me. Then the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, into a mountain where Jesus had appointed them. And when they saw him, they worshipped him: but some doubted’ (Matthew 28:15-17) – face to face with Jesus on a mountain in Galilee, yet still some of his disciples did not believe in his resurrection.

  On the third day Mary Magdalene went to the tomb to anoint the body of a naked man, something that no woman could do unless she was a very close relative. Nuptials of God by Eric Gill, woodcut, 1922.

  Nuptials of God by Eric Gill. The Engravings, by Eric Gill, edited by Christopher Skelton, London 1990.

  The gospel of Luke tells the same story about the empty tomb and of doubt about the resurrection. ‘Now upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came unto the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared, and certain others with them. And they found the stone rolled away from the sepulchre. And they entered in, and found not the body of the Lord Jesus’ (Luke 24:1-3).

  But Luke goes out of his way to avoid mentioning Mary Magdalene; instead he tells of ‘the women’; for example on the evening of the crucifixion ‘the women also, which came with him from Galilee, followed after, and beheld the sepulchre, and how his body was laid’ (Luke 23:55); and now after the sabbath ‘they’ have returned to anoint the body.

  This is the same Luke who says nothing of Jesus being anointed at Bethany but instead tells a story of a sinner woman wiping his feet at the home of a man called Simon in Capernaum.

  Only after the women leave the sepulchre and tell the eleven disciples what they have seen does Luke trouble to tell us their names. ‘It was Mary Magdalene and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other women that were with them, which told these things unto the apostles. And their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not’ (Luke 24:10-11).

  Neither Mary Magdalene nor the women ever do see the risen Jesus in Luke’s gospel. Instead later in Luke the disciples announce that ‘The Lord is risen indeed, and hath appeared to Simon [Peter]’ (Luke 24:34), though we are not told where or when.

  Mary Magdalene and the Tradition of Visiting Family Tombs

  Mary Magedalene, when she went to the tomb on the third day, was following an ancient Jewish tradition. The custom was for relatives of the deceased to visit the tomb in the first three days. This was to make sure that the body in the sepulchre was really dead. The practice of hurriedly entombing a person before sundown on the day of their death carried the risk of making a mistake through haste; there was the danger of burying people alive. Relatives came to see if the dead had come to life.

  Also, according to the gospels of Mark and Luke, Mary Magdalene was there to anoint Jesus’ body. The burial had been so rushed that there had not been time to wash and anoint his torn and bloody body on the first day, and the following day was the sabbath when nothing could be done.

  Mary Magdalene is at the tomb in all four gospels. In Mark she is there with ‘Mary the mother of James, and Salome’. In Matthew she is there with ‘the other Mary’. In Luke she is there with ‘Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other women’. Only in John is Mary Magdalene there alone but her experience of the resurrection is intimate and emphatic. The other women variously come and go; indeed their presenc
e may have been invented to make the event more credible, taking into account the Torah’s requirement for two or three witnesses: ‘at the mouth of two witnesses, or at the mouth of three witnesses, shall the matter be established’ (Deuteronomy 19:15). But Mary Magdalene is always there – which suggests that Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb was an event well known to followers of Jesus and to the earliest Christians; she was central to the story, though the truth of the story was obscured or lost, that Mary Magdalene and Mary Magdalene alone has a special relationship with Jesus.

  On the third day Mary Magdalene went to the tomb to anoint the body of a naked man, something that no woman could do unless she was a very close relative. She also followed the tradition, practised by relatives of the deceased, of going to the tomb to ensure that Jesus was dead.

  Jesus had a mother, he had sisters, he had other relatives, any of whom could have carried out these family duties. Yet it was Mary Magdalene who went to the tomb on the third day.

  The Missing Body

  In the gospel of John Mary Magdalene comes alone to the tomb early in the morning long before dawn. ‘The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene early, when it was yet dark, unto the sepulchre, and seeth the stone taken away from the sepulchre.’ She runs to Peter and to the beloved disciple and says, ‘They have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him’.

  Who does Mary Magdalene mean by ‘they’? Did she mean the Sanhedrin? But according to Matthew the Sanhedrin posted guards to make sure Jesus’ body was not taken from the tomb. Or did she mean the disciples, the people the Sanhedrin feared would take the body to make it seem that Jesus had risen? Yet the very first people she runs to are the disciples. Quite possibly Mary Magdalene had no one in mind at all. But those most likely to have removed Jesus from the tomb were those who put him there in the late afternoon of the crucifixion, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, who instead of burying Jesus might have used their great bulk of spices and the means needed to transport it to the tomb as a cover; instead of burying Jesus they could have taken him away. Or they came later and bribed the guards.

  But that is not the Christian story which proclaims that Jesus was raised bodily from the dead, appeared to his disciples, and ascended to heaven to sit on the right hand of God, from where he will return in the end times to judge the living and the dead. But that Christian story took a long time to evolve. On the day Mary Magdalene went to the empty tomb it was not the story she knew.

  Nicodemus and Jesus

  We know that Nicodemus was a member of the Sanhedrin and a Pharisee. And we know he had got wind that Caiaphas was conspiring to arrest Jesus and he warned the Sanhedrin against condemning Jesus without hearing what he had to say. Nicodemus probably tipped off Jesus about his imminent arrest, leading to the agony at Gethsemane.

  Nicodemus showed an interest in Jesus’ teachings and came to him for discussions at night, that is after sunset. There was nothing secret about these meetings; there is no sense of secrecy in the gospel account; on the contrary, Nicodemus probably brought along his own disciples, including them in his use of the plural when he says to Jesus, ‘Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God’ (John 3:2). Jesus and Nicodemus had been teaching at the Temple during the day and now they have made the time to converse about spiritual rebirth in the coolness of the evening. Certainly Nicodemus did nothing to hide his sympathies on the day of the crucifixion when still in broad daylight he brought to the sepulchre a vast quantity of spices, enough to bury a king.

  In those evening talks Jesus says to Nicodemus, ‘I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God’, to which Nicodemus replies, ‘How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born?’ There is something playful about this conversation; Nicodemus is a rabbi and he knows perfectly well about being born again; the theme of rebirth runs throughout the Old Testament, as in Ezekiel 36:25-26: ‘Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you. A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh’. The preachings of Jesus and others in the New Testament are a selective reworking of teachings in the Hebrew Bible. So Nicodemus, instead of being ignorant or naive, is drawing Jesus out, inviting him to expand and testing him, perhaps seeing if Jesus claims to be the messiah, for the Pharisees believed in the resurrection of the righteous at the coming of the messiah. When Nicodemus asks how a man can be reborn when he is old he is not saying that he himself is old; he is pressing Jesus to explain how anyone already born can be born again.

  Nicodemus with Jesus. Drawing attributed to Rembrandt, Dutch, 17th century.

  Nicodemus with Jesus by Rembrandt. Wikimedia Commons.

  The Nicodemus Family of Jerusalem and Galilee

  We do not know how old Nicodemus was but he might have been as young as Jesus, that is in his early thirties. Members of the Sanhedrin were highly educated in the Torah and in languages, mathematics and science, and therefore usually of a mature age, sufficient to reach the required level of accomplishment. But there was certainly room in the Sanhedrin for people of exceptional ability or standing in the community of any age from as young as eighteen. There is no need to assume that Nicodemus was more than about forty.

  Nicodemus belonged to the Gurion dynasty, one of the very wealthy and well-known Pharisee families who comprised the Jewish governing elite in the period before the destruction of the Temple in AD 70. Nicodemus Ben Gurion is mentioned in the Talmud for famously securing Jerusalem’s water supply when tens of thousands of pilgrims in the city were threatened with drought. His prayers to God were answered by a downpour which refilled twelve cisterns, earning him a reputation as a popular saint with miraculous powers.

  During the First Jewish-Roman War, the rebellion of Jews in Judaea against Roman rule which broke out in AD 66, Nicodemus Ben Gurion was the wealthiest and most respected member of the peace party. He opposed the Zealots who were leading the revolt and he sought talks with the emperor Vespasian’s son Titus, the general who was prosecuting the war. At the same time Nicodemus and his associates promised to supply Jerusalem for twenty-one years with all necessary provisions against a siege. The Zealots, however, burned all the provisions to force the people to fight to the death against the Romans; to which the historian Josephus adds that they also put to death Nicodemus’ son who had been agitating for peace. In the event the Romans crushed the rebellion; in AD 70 Jerusalem fell and the Temple was destroyed.

  Nicodemus’ role in these events did nothing to harm his reputation in the rabbinic traditions where he is remembered entirely favourably and his charity and piety are praised. Nevertheless stories were told of the profligacy of Nicodemus’ daughter Mary who was given a fabulous dowry of a million gold dinars and complained when she was allowed only four hundred dinars for unguents and perfumes on a particular day. But with the fall of Jerusalem, goes a story in the Talmud, Nicodemus lost all his wealth and his daughter was reduced to picking out barley corns from cattle dung.

  As it happens there were two members of the Gurion family around this time called Nicodemus, an uncle and a nephew; so is this latter Nicodemus still the Nicodemus mentioned in the gospel of John? If he was young enough in the time of Jesus then it is possible that the Nicodemus who buried Jesus also witnessed the destruction of the Temple nearly forty years later. Or possibly the Nicodemus of AD 70 was the nephew of the first; in a sense it hardly matters; both were members of the powerful and rich Gurion dynasty of Pharisees whose religious, business and political affairs were centred on Jerusalem and whose lands were at Ruma, six miles north of Nazareth in Galilee. These were the Gurions known to Mary Magdalene.

  Luke introduces us to Mary Magdalene in Galilee where she is travelling through the towns and villages with Jesus and supporting him and
his mission from her own resources. But otherwise nothing necessarily attaches her exclusively to Galilee, least of all her name, for there was no such place as Magdala in Galilee. The synoptic gospels describe Mary Magdalene at the crucifixion and the burial as one of those women who had ministered to Jesus in Galilee which is not the same thing as her life being confined to Galilee, and the gospel of John does not connect her to Galilee at all. Nicodemus was very much a man of Jerusalem but his family lands were in Galilee. Perhaps the same was true of Mary Magdalene, a woman with connections to the court of Herod Antipas at Tiberias and to the aristocracy of Jerusalem. That Mary Magdalene was a woman associated with Jerusalem is suggested by her name, perhaps the name given her by Jesus; Migdal Eder was the tower of the flock spoken of, as noted earlier, in Micah 4:8.

  And thou, O tower of the flock, the strong hold of the daughter of Zion, unto thee shall it come, even the first dominion; the kingdom shall come to the daughter of Jerusalem.

  Anointing and Burial

  In the gospel of John the extravagance of the anointing at Bethany is repeated, as in no other gospel, by the extraordinary cost of the spices brought to the sepulchre by Nicodemus. The pound of nard with which Mary annointed Jesus at Bethany cost the equivalent of a man’s wages for a year, and while a pound of myrrh was about half the price of a pound of the finest nard, a hundred pounds of myrrh would nevertheless have paid the wages of fifty men for a year. Using the spices as a measure, the house of Mary in Bethany was wealthy, a wealth of which we are reminded by the remarkable quantity of myrrh and aloes brought to the sepulchre by Nicodemus, a wealth in both cases set ‘against the day of my burying’ (John 12:7), as Jesus said of Mary at Bethany.