The Quest for Mary Magdalene

by Michael Haag

  Mother and child gravestone from Faiyum. Tran Tam Tinh, V. 1973. Isis lactans. Corpus des monuments gréco-romains d’Isis allaitant Harpocrate. Brill, Leiden.

  Ankhs incised in the wall of Ramses III’s twelfth-century BC funerary temple at Medinet Habu across the Nile from Luxor; for ancient Egyptians the ankh was the breath of eternal life and in this case they are taking on human form.

  Anthropomorphic ankhs at Ramses III’s funerary temple at Medinet Habu.

  This Egyptian Christian relief of the third to fourth centuries has crosses based on the ankh, again in human form.

  Christians depicted as anthropomorphic ankhs. Photographs by Michael Haag.

  Pantaenus and Clement had introduced a measure of Roman orthodoxy to Christianity in Alexandria; thereafter the task of eliminating eclecticism in Egypt was taken on entirely by native Egyptians like Origen and Demetrius and their successors. In place of Origen, Demetrius appointed Heraclas as head of the Catechetical School, and when Demetrius died Heraclas in turn became patriarch. The pattern continued with Dionysus, called the Great, a pagan who converted to Christianity. He studied under both Origen and Heraclas at the Catechetical School, eventually became its head and then succeeded Heraclas as patriarch. The interplay between the Catechetical School and the patriarch helped spread orthodoxy in Egypt, emphasising apostolic authority and circulating the canonical four gospels, especially Matthew and Luke with their infancy and resurrection narratives.

  As the Church proselytised for converts among pagan Egyptians who still worshipped the old gods and as the battle against gnosticism spread deeper into the country, traditional and ancient beliefs and imagery came into play. The crucifixion and the cross were a direct challenge to the gnostics who did not accept that Jesus died for the salvation of man, but every Egyptian recognised the symbolism of the ankh, the cross-shaped pharaonic sign of life. Soon it was appearing on Christian gravestones as a symbol of resurrection; or it was made to resemble people at prayer, their arms upraised, their heads encircled by the loop of the ankh in the form of a halo – again a strike against the gnostics who offered no prayers to the demiurge but instead possessed the secret to release themselves from his evil world. Mary the mother of Jesus appeared on the throne of Isis holding Jesus as Isis held Horus, but this was Isis (whose title in ancient Egyptian was mwt ntr, meaning divine mother) transformed into the the exalted Theotokos, powerfully evocative, promoting popular devotion yet promoting also the passive role of women in imitation of the passivity of the Madonna. This was now Isis controlled and used by the Church, no longer the independent woman, the leader and the seer, the figure with whom the gnostics had identified Mary Magdalene.

  These were the weapons used to impose conformity on Egyptian Christianity and to wipe out gnosticism; they also transformed Egypt into a dominating force within the wider Church, with Alexandria contesting supremacy with Rome. From Egypt many of these same images and symbols and ideas spread throughout the Christian world.

  Meanwhile the monks at Pbow continued reading their holy scriptures, their gospels reminding them of the greatness of Mary Magdalene, until there came the day when they thought it best to put their gospels in a jar and bury them at Nag Hammadi.

  Mary Magdalene the Whore

  Gnosticism arose in precisely those places that were home to the great mysteries of the goddess and the death and rebirth of her lover – in Syria, Lebanon, Asia Minor, and even in Greece, but above all in Egypt. In Egypt the worship of Isis, already thousands of years old, would survive until AD 543 when the emperor Justinian closed her temple in the Nile at Philae, imprisoned the priests and had the cult statues carried off to Constantinople. Ten years later the temple was turned into a church, commemorated by a contemporary inscription in Greek: ‘This good work was done by the well-beloved of God, the Abbot-Bishop Theodore. The Cross has conquered and will ever conquer’. It was no coincidence that less than forty years later, and with Isis appropriated by the Theotokos – who was now described as the ‘sister and spouse of God, the sister of Christ’, ‘the lofty Pharos of light’, ‘our haven and anchorage on the sea of our troubles’ – that Pope Gregory I, ‘the Great’, could safely pronounce Mary Magdalene a whore.

  She whom Luke calls the sinful woman, whom John calls Mary, we believe to be the Mary from whom seven devils were ejected according to Mark. And what did these seven devils signify, if not all the vices? . . . It is clear, brothers, that the woman previously used the unguent to perfume her flesh in forbidden acts. What she therefore displayed more scandalously, she was now offering to God in a more praiseworthy manner. She had coveted with earthly eyes, but now through penitence these are consumed with tears. She displayed her hair to set off her face, but now her hair dries her tears. She had spoken proud things with her mouth, but in kissing the Lord’s feet, she now planted her mouth on the Redeemer’s feet. For every delight, therefore, she had had in herself, she now immolated herself. She turned the mass of her crimes to virtues, in order to serve God entirely in penance, for as much as she had held God in contempt.

  In these few words of his Thirty-third Homily, delivered on an autumn day in 591 at the basilica of St Clement in Rome, Gregory fixed the identity of Mary Magdalene in the ecclesiastical and popular mind for the next one thousand four hundred years. Combining several gospel verses he created Mary Magdalene the penitent prostitute. He starts with ‘the sinful woman’ of Luke 7:37-50 who came into Simon the Pharisee’s house at Capernaum and washed Jesus’ feet with her tears and anointed them with ointment. To her he adds the woman ‘whom John calls Mary’, that is Mary of Bethany who is described in John as anointing the feet of Jesus (John 12:3). But Mary of Bethany, says Gregory, is the same person as ‘the Mary from whom seven devils were ejected according to Mark’ (16:9), that is Mary Magdalene.

  Gregory then goes on to say that the seven devils that were driven out of Mary Magdalene were seven vices, the seven deadly sins which he had named the previous year as lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, anger, envy and pride. But of these, as Gregory makes clear when he says that she had ‘previously used the unguent to perfume her flesh in forbidden acts’, her greatest sin was lust.

  After Gregory’s homily identifying Mary Magdalene as a prostitute she was commonly portrayed in an attitude of abject submission and repentance, as in this twelfth-century relief on the west front of the abbey church of St Gilles-en-Gard in Languedoc-Roussillon.

  Magdalene relief at St Gilles-en-Gard. Wikimedia Commons.

  But there is nothing at all sexual about Mary Magdalene’s affliction as mentioned in the late addition to Mark and which was taken from Luke 8:2. The word used in the original Greek of Mark and Luke is daimonia, which is usually translated as devils or demons. Throughout the gospels a devil or a demon refers to some serious illness or affliction like blindness or deafness, as in this example from Matthew 12.22: ‘Then was brought unto him one possessed with a devil, blind, and dumb: and he healed him, insomuch that the blind and dumb both spake and saw’. Or it can refer to a psychological illness, as in Luke 7.33 where Jesus describes how John the Baptist’s abstinence leads people to think he is crazy: ‘For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine; and ye say, He hath a devil’. Nowhere in the New Testament do devils signify a person possessed by lust or other sinfulness.

  But Gregory continues. To redeem herself Mary Magdalene does penance for her sins; her unguents, once used for lust, ‘she was now offering to God’; once she had ‘spoken proud things with her mouth’, but ‘she now planted her mouth on the Redeemer’s feet’. Gregory’s Mary Magdalene completely abases herself.

  There had been some earlier confusion and questioning about the relationship between the various women in the gospels. Already in the late second century Tertullian, in his work Against Marcion, described the scene in John’s gospel of the encounter in the garden where Mary Magdalene, ‘the woman who was a sinner’, reaches out to touch Jesus. Ambrose in his fourth-century commentary on Luke 10
thought it possible that Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany were the same woman, but he also wondered, ‘Were there Mary, the sister of Lazarus, and Mary Magdalene, or more people?’. Also in the fourth century Ephrem the Syrian was writing commentaries and hymns in which he regularly had Mary the mother of Jesus appropriate the role of Mary Magdalene, as in the garden scene after the resurrection. And Augustine in The Harmony of the Gospels toyed with the idea that Mary of Bethany might be the sinner woman though he never entertained the possibility that the sinner woman was Mary Magdalene.

  At one time or another a commentator might identify one Mary of the gospels with another and sometimes with the sinner woman but there was never anything like a settled view, and for the most part Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany and the sinner woman were regarded as distinct persons. Certainly that was true in the East where it remains true in the Orthodox Church to this day. But in sixth-century Rome Gregory the Great assembled these three women into one composite figure and through his authority he imposed his creation on the Western imagination.

  Waiting for the Barbarians

  Throughout much of the sixth century and the century before, Italy had endured barbarian invasions, and plague and famine and war. The population had declined by a third. The Roman Empire, which was divided in half in 395, had collapsed in the West; it survived in the East with an emperor enthroned at Constantinople but in the chaotic conditions of Italy the task of bringing order to society was taken up by the papacy which now established the beginnings of an anxious and ascetic temporal power.

  The Church’s response to gnosticism did much to shape Catholic theology and the role it gave to Mary Magdalene. The gnostics identified Mary Magdalene with Wisdom, called Sophia. But while the gnostics saw Sophia as a link between themselves and the primal god, it was also true that in her passion to create independently of her divine father Sophia gave birth to an abortion, the defective world of evil and sorrow in which we live. In the story of her cosmic calamity Sophia stood in contrast with Mary the mother of Jesus, the humble woman chosen by God to bear his son and bring salvation into the world.

  For Gregory his reign as pope and the salvation of Rome from plague began with the Virgin Mary, the antithesis of Mary Magdalene. Early in 590 the river Tiber overflowed its banks and washed away many houses in the city; according to the ancient accounts it also cast up serpents and a huge dragon which were left rotting and gave rise to a great plague. Pope Pelagius, Gregory’s predecessor, was the first to be stricken and died within hours; thousands more perished as the plague swept through the city, leaving many houses standing empty and silent. Gregory was a monk known for his holiness who preferred a life in the cloisters, but the people insisted he lead them and elected him pope by acclamation. He immediately launched a procession round Rome offering prayers and begging God for mercy, yet even as they marched ninety men died. Still Gregory urged them on; the plague was a chastisement from God and the people must repent of the sins and pray for their salvation; and walking at the head of the procession he held aloft an image of the Blessed Mary Ever Virgin, supposedly painted by St Luke. Now as the procession advanced the voices of angels were heard round the image, singing ‘Queen of Heaven, rejoice, allelluia, because he whom thou didst bear, alleluia, has risen as he said, alleluia’, and the poisonous air fled before the image of the Virgin and a wonderful serenity and purity filled the city. ‘Pray for us, we beg God’, cried Gregory to the Virgin, ‘alleluia!’, and when the pope saw an angel sheathing his sword above the city he knew that the plague was over.

  In 590 Pope Gregory the Great, bearing a painting of the Virgin, led a procession round Rome imploring her to stem the plague. A year after his success, Gregory turned against Mary Magdalene whom he identified with Mary of Bethany and the sinner woman in Luke, who in the eyes of the Church all became one woman who was a whore. The painting was commissioned for an altarpiece in Spain about 1500; the artist is unknown.

  Pope Gregory the Great with a painting of the Virgin Mary. Wikimedia Commons.

  That was the immediate circumstance preceeding Gregory’s Thirty-third Homily delivered the following year in which he denounced Mary Magdalene as a whore. The other Mary, the one who according to Celsus had conceived Jesus in an adulterous affair, was now the ever virgin whose powers cleansed Rome’s very atmosphere of death and evil. For the gnostics the soul possesses the divine spark and can learn the secret of returning to its divine origin. But the developing Western theology said that we have fallen through original sin and must rely on virgin-born Jesus and his apostolic Church for salvation.

  Order and salvation lay with the perpetual virginity of the Blessed Mary and the perpetual penitence of Mary Magdalene the whore.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Bride of Christ: Magdalene of the Cathars

  THE LEGENDA AUREA – the Golden Legend – was the most widely circulated manuscript in the late Middle Ages. Written in 1275 by Jacobus de Voragine, a Dominican and the bishop of Genoa, it gathers together the traditions about all the saints venerated at the time, their lives, their miracles and martyrdoms and the worship of their relics. Alongside the well known stories in the gospels, from the nativity and the massacre of the innocents to the crucifixion and the ascension, the Golden Legend also tells about Anastasia being burnt at the stake, John the Evangelist in the pot of boiling oil, Hippolytus drawn between two horses, Margaret emerging from the dragon’s back, Ursula and the eleven thousand decapitated virgins, and so on. Easy to read in simple Latin and accompanied by brightly coloured illuminations depicting one horror after another, the Golden Legend was enormously popular; and it serves today to give us a fair impression of the beliefs inhabiting the medieval mind.

  Mary Magdalene in the Golden Legend

  Voragine’s entry for Mary Magdalene is extensive, longer than that of Peter and nearly as long as that of Paul, though none are as long as the account of Mary ‘the mother of God’ whose death and ascension, unknown in the New Testament, is here a grand affair with all the apostles in attendance, including Peter, the ‘most noble and sovereign of theologians’, and also ‘James, brother of God’. For her part Mary Magdalene conforms to the identity set out for her by Pope Gregory the Great; she is the sinner at the home of Simon the Pharisee as described in Luke and her life is one of guilt and repentance.

  Yet Voragine draws on another tradition, one still alive in the Europe of the Middle Ages and suggested in the New Testament canonical gospels and celebrated by the gnostics, when he indulges in the medieval fashion of using analogy and association to interpret the meaning of her name. Playing with the sounds of words rather than their tracing their origin, he decides that Mary or Maria can be interpreted as amarum mare, Latin for bitter sea, the bitterness being the penances Mary Magdalene has endured. But also playing with the sound of amarum mare he interprets this as meaning illuminator or illuminated. And so her penances have led her to inward contemplation: ‘She is called enlightener because in contemplation she drew draughts of light so deep that in turn she poured out light in abundance; in contemplation she received the light with which she afterwards enlightened others’. And she is illuminated because ‘she is now enlightend by the light of perfect knowledge in her mind and will be illumined by the light of glory in her body’. And so via Isis and the Pharos at Alexandria we have travelled back to those forgotten lighthouses that once shone their beacons to fishermen at night on the Sea of Galilee.

  Mary Magdalene, says Voragine, was of noble stock and her parents were descended from kings. With her brother Lazarus and her sister Martha she had inherited a considerable part of Jerusalem as well as land in Bethany and Galilee which they had divided among themselves. Lazarus held the property in Jerusalem, Martha kept the property in Bethany and Mary Magdalene owned the walled town of Magdala, but as Lazarus was devoted to the military and Mary Magdalene had given herself ‘totally to the pleasures of the flesh’, the estates were managed by the prudent Martha. Abundant in riches and famous for
her beauty, Mary Magdalene so completely ‘submitted her body to delight’ that her name was forgotten and she was simply called ‘the sinner’.

  Voragine mentions the tradition that John the Evangelist had taken Mary Magdalene as his wife when Jesus called him away from their marriage feast and that for consolation she had thrown herself ‘to all delight’. The story goes on to explain that because they lost the carnal pleasures of their marriage bed Jesus compensated them, honouring John with special affection and filling Mary Magdalene, after her plea for forgiveness, with intense spiritual delight. But Voragine dismisses these tales as ‘false and frivolous’.

  What Voragine does say is that after Mary Magdalene threw herself at Jesus’ feet at the house of Simon the Pharisee, and after Jesus forgave her sins and drove the seven devils from her, he set her afire with love for him. She travelled by his side and looked after his needs at all times. She stood by him at the foot of the cross and at his resurrection he appeared to her and made her the ‘apostle to the apostles’.

  Mary Magdalene in France

  Fourteen years after the crucifixion, continues Voragine’s account, and long after Stephen had been stoned and the disciples had been driven from Judaea by the Jewish authorities and had begun to spread the word of Jesus throughout the nations, the unbelievers put Mary Magdalene and many other Christians, among them Lazarus and Martha, and Maximin, who we are told was one of Jesus’ early followers in Galilee, in a boat without rudder or sail or provisions and sent them out to sea so that they should drown or perish from exposure and starvation – but by the will of God they landed safely at Marseilles.