Mary Magdalene

by Bruce Chilton

  The unclean spirit in the synagogue—a source of impurity— designated Jesus as a source of purity, “the holy one of God.” That is why Jesus’ presence was a threat to that demon, and the demonic world as a whole. The unspecified number of demons in the synagogue, the “legion” in the cemetery, the demon who resisted Jesus’ disciples, the “seven” who departed from Mary Magdalene—all in their different ways signal the demonic axis as a whole. The spiritual combat between Jesus and the forces of impurity was resolved because the unclean spirits recognized purity when they experienced it. Violent though their rebellion seemed, the demons ultimately recognized their own nonexistence. Their only power was denial. They could rebel against God’s pure purpose, but only with the empty complaint of their own impotence. Finally, the demons had no power at all. They drowned in their own knowledge as surely as the legion did once they revealed themselves in the pigs. In Mary’s telling, Rome itself headed toward the same fate.

  The Gospels present only three detailed stories of the exorcisms of Jesus. In each of them, the emphasis on Jesus’ assertion of the purity of Spirit, the resistance of the demonic world, impurity, struggle, and the possessed person’s breakthrough to integrity come to vivid, precise expression. This oral source, which shines through the tightly coordinated but different versions in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, is the nearest approach there is to Jesus’ actual technique of meeting the challenge of uncleanness and evil. Not only in cases of exorcism, which have a long history in the West, but also in Christian approaches to the miseries of addiction, compulsion, aimless violence, and purposeful wrongdoing by people and nations, the basic faith that evil named is evil removed has animated the conduct of millions of people who have read the Gospels. Mary Magdalene, anonymously but effectively, has instructed them all.

  The perspective from which the detailed stories of exorcism in the Gospels are told reveals Mary Magdalene’s own experience. She had known the violent contention within her own body between the demons and Jesus’ desire to expel them from her forever. The opening demonic scream, “We have nothing for you,” is echoed in the story of the man with a legion of demons. The tortured man cries out, “I have nothing for you” (Mark 5:7), and soon it is clear that “I” conceals a demonic multitude. Within her body and mind, contrary and convulsive forces had once put Mary at odds with herself, so that she was controlled by impulses not her own. When one is confronted by the knowledge of purity, however, what seems threatening in impurity simply dissolves. Obsessions stop, replaced by conscious choice among the desires a person might or might not assent to. Purity within means bodily integrity and cleanness in action. That is the wisdom behind Jesus’ exorcisms. It was wisdom hard won by Mary from her own experience. The truth of it made her proudly bear the nickname “the Magdalene.”

  Mary’s role in the development of the Gospels has been passed over. The time has come to put that right, and to understand that she was a principal source in understanding Jesus’ legacy. Marguerite would have been intrigued by the Magdalene’s crucial contribution to the way people in the first century understood Jesus’ teaching about confronting evil in this world with the Spirit that heralds the Kingdom of God. Mary’s influence on how the founders of Christianity saw Spirit moving in the world would have assured Marguerite that someone was indeed there for her, both on the other side of heaven’s gate and in the daily struggle of being alive.

  Chapter Five

  NAMELESS ANOINTER

  By virtue of what she did, what she taught, and who she was, Mary Magdalene emerged as the most influential woman in Rabbi Jesus’ movement. She also proved his persistent partner during the most fraught period of his life.

  In 27 C.E., Jesus was forced to flee from Capernaum under threat of death from Herod Antipas. He began four years of wandering and flight, experimenting at first with forays into Gentile territory east of Galilee (around Decapolis) and later to the west (near Tyre and Sidon). As the story of the man with the “legion” of demons shows, however, Rabbi Jesus did not get along well—to say the least—with the impurity of Gentile living. By the end of that story, the damage he caused to a herd of swine resulted in the local people asking him to leave (Mark 5:17). The same kind of incompatibility emerged when he met a Gentile woman near Tyre and Sidon. When she asked him for healing on behalf of her daughter, he rebuffed her at first, saying, “It is not fair to take the bread of the children and throw it to the dogs” (Mark 7:27). Although the nameless woman got the better of Rabbi Jesus’ hostility to foreigners on that particular occasion, his practice and temperament proved incompatible with sustained residence among non-Israelites. He returned to Galilee, whatever the risks involved.

  During this period, Mary must have traveled with Jesus—she witnessed his exorcism in Decapolis, for example. But the extent of her travel was limited by her vulnerability as a woman.

  Jesus coordinated his movements with his other disciples, the dozens who were not included among the Twelve but who nonetheless had mastered his teaching and practice. They lived in the towns and villages of Galilee, healing in the way Jesus had taught them, casting out demons, announcing the Kingdom of God, and meditating on the presence of God’s Spirit in their midst as they prayed and shared meals together. Mary was part of this group. Most of Jesus’ movement kept undercover; the peasant countryside of Galilee camouflaged them, while the twelve apostles and Jesus kept up a hectic pace of movement, diversion, challenge, and flight in order to avoid Herod Antipas.

  Mary probably remained around Magdala while the Twelve fanned out through Galilee from the year 29. But in 31 C.E., Rabbi Jesus changed strategy. The opposition of Herod Antipas had only strengthened Jesus’ appeal to Galilee’s disenfranchised Jews, some of whom wanted the charismatic rabbi to head a violent onslaught against Antipas and his Roman protectors. The story of Jesus’ Temptations, when Satan lured him with the promise of ruling “all the kingdoms of the world” (Matthew 4:8; Luke 4:5), encapsulates Jesus’ visionary experience at this time. Jesus rejected the satanic offer. Instead of an army, he led a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the Feast of Tabernacles, and Mary Magdalene was among the pilgrims. Jesus’ target was not a Roman installation, but the Temple in Jerusalem, where he believed he and his followers could change the world and welcome God’s Kingdom into the land of Israel by offering sacrifice on Mount Zion in the way that the God of Israel desired. Following the prophecy of Zechariah (chapter 14), Rabbi Jesus believed that true sacrifice would bring both the end of Israel’s oppression and the opening of the Temple to all humanity, both Jews and non-Jews.

  Mary Magdalene was with him when Jesus arrived in Jerusalem, galvanizing the festal crowds during the feast of Sukkot (or Tabernacles) in the autumn of 31 C.E. She saw his reaction when he learned that Caiaphas, the high priest of the time, had authorized trading in the Temple, instead of maintaining the ancient practice—and Zechariah’s prophecy—that Israelites offer the work of their own hands there. She would have observed the planning in Bethany for Jesus’ onslaught on the Temple, when a small army of disciples and enthusiasts, some 150 or 200 men, joined Jesus one morning to drive out the vendors and the animals Caiaphas had allowed in the Temple’s twenty-five-acre southern outer court. She would have been aware of Jesus’ reaction when he discovered that one of his sympathizers in Jerusalem, a thug named Barabbas, had committed murder during the Temple raid.

  During the whole of this tumultuous period, from Jesus’ early success in Capernaum until his last days in Jerusalem, Mary Magdalene was much more than a skilled practitioner of exorcism. She was also an adept of other spiritual practices. Jesus, Mary, and the other disciples practiced anointing, which was associated with exorcism and healing. When Jesus sent out the twelve apostles to heal, there is reference to anointing, as if it were self-evident that this was part of their standard practices (Mark 6:13). It was exactly that during this period in Judaism, and there is excellent evidence that oiling skin was a routine ritual in Jesus’ movement, and that Mary Magdalene
was its preeminent practitioner.

  Over the course of his last weeks in Jerusalem, Jesus designated Mary as his movement’s paradigmatic anointer. Christianity in its modern form has all but forgotten this sacrament of unction as well as its indissoluble link with Mary Magdalene. But the Gospels still preserve her connection with a pivotal sacramental moment in Jesus’ life. Mark’s Gospel provides the earliest, most richly textured account of this ritual event, in an anointing set in Bethany, the base of Jesus’ movement during the last months of his life (14:3-9):

  He was in Bethany in the home of Simon the scabby [not really a “leper,” as in the traditional translation], recumbent, and there came a woman who had an alabaster of genuine, expensive nard ointment. Smashing the alabaster, she poured over his head. But there were some angry among themselves. Why has this waste of the ointment happened? Because this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarü and given to the poor! And they were upbraiding her. But Jesus said, Leave her: why are you making problems for her? She has done a fine deed with me. Because you always have the poor with yourselves, and whenever you want, you can do them good, but me you do not always have. She acted with what she had; she undertook to oil my body for burial. Amen I say to you, wherever the message is proclaimed in the whole world, what she did will also be spoken of in memory of her.

  “What she did will also be spoken of in memory of her.” Jesus obliges us to remember the woman’s gesture, but at the same time Mark’s Gospel withholds her actual identity. This blatant ambivalence is crucial to understanding the text. Does the text in some way let us know who she is, or does it make Jesus’ command impossible to fulfill? Mark’s Gospel puts the integrity of Jesus’ message on the line. By Jesus’ own words in Mark, the first known text to bear the name “Gospel,” the woman belongs in his announcement of God’s Kingdom, Jesus’ oral gospel. He calls those who hear him to believe in this gospel (Mark 1:15). The term euangelion in Greek reflects the Aramaic word besora, a message of triumph of the victory of God’s Kingdom. Hence Jesus’ clarion preaching as Mark recounts it (1:15): “Time has been fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has approached: repent and believe in the gospel.” By Jesus’ specific command, that message includes reference to the woman who carried her alabaster to Jesus.

  The woman’s identity evidently did not remain a secret to those who first heard Mark’s Gospel. Her name and personality were hidden only temporarily, until Mark’s hearers could become acquainted not only with the Gospel as recited to them, and which we know in its written form, but also with the now-lost oral gospel that enriched their instruction. Baptism, the goal that drew the people who heard the Gospel, opened wide the doors of recognition that the written text had only pushed ajar. In the communities where each Gospel was written (Rome in the case of Mark), master teachers, some of them personally acquainted with Peter, Mary Magdalene, and other disciples, filled in the instruction available in written form with oral memories.

  Trace references to these oral memories surface in the Gospel According to Mark. Relying on Mark alone, we would not know that Jesus taught his disciples the Lord’s Prayer, that he personally appeared to them alive after his death, or that there was a controversy about his birth. This Gospel contains no overt mention of these topics. Yet, as written, Mark’s Gospel also assumes that people prepared for baptism will know how to pray, understand that Jesus’ disciples experienced his living presence after his death, and appreciate that Jesus was not an ordinary child who grew up in a conventional family. Primitive Christianity was an oral movement, not a book club, and therefore some of its deepest truths were not committed to writing. The identity of the nameless anointer is a case of Mark intimating more than is literally said.

  Mark’s Gospel displays a mastery of the rhetoric of the unspoken.

  It is a finely balanced text, a hybrid of oral wisdom and literary naivete that relies on inference. One such inference is that Mary Magdalene is the nameless anointer, which Eastern Orthodox and medieval interpreters correctly surmised—unlike many of their modern counterparts. She is not named, but the clear implication of the Gospel overall when it is read from beginning to end (as it would have been recited to those who prepared for baptism) is that she anointed Jesus prior to his death, and that he wanted her name remembered.

  The key to her identity appears later in Mark’s text (which we look at in more detail later). What’s important to understand at this point is that Mark identifies Mary Magdalene as the principal figure among the women at the mouth of Jesus’ tomb after his Crucifixion, and that she undertakes a key ritual action associated with interment— anointing (Mark 16:1): “And when Sabbath elapsed, Mary Magdalene and Mary of James and Salome purchased spices so they could go anoint him.” Among these three women, Mary Magdalene foremost had observed where Jesus had been interred by Joseph of Arimathea (Mark 15:47). Mary is the indispensable character in Mark’s account of the Resurrection, the pivot of the action around whom the final events turn. She, by name and by action, embodies the connection between Jesus’ interment and the angelic announcement to the same Mary Magdalene (16:6-7) that Jesus has been raised from the dead. She connects his death and Resurrection, not only by who she is but also by what she does: Mary Magdalene established the place of anointing as a central ritual in Christianity, recollecting Jesus’ death and pointing forward to his Resurrection.

  In this way, Mark implies, rather than states, Mary’s identity as the woman with the ointment, so our inference is not a deductive certainty. An implication is just that and shouldn’t be confused with proof: It leaves traces for the audience of the Gospel to infer its meaning. But read without this inference, Mark breaks Jesus’ promise that “wherever the message is proclaimed in the whole world, what she did will also be spoken of in memory of her” (Mark 14:9). By permitting ourselves this inference, we allow the Gospel not to contradict the very saying of Jesus that it takes pains to convey.

  Before we turn our attention to the vitally important scene of the women present at the mouth of Jesus’ tomb, to which Mary Magdalene’s anointing points, we need to appreciate the sense of ritual anointing as practiced within Jesus’ movement. It is to an examination of this practice, and its impact on how legend would look at Mary, that we now turn.

  Chapter Six

  “THY NAME IS AS OIL POURED FORTH”

  Olive oil was the universal solvent of antiquity, a pervasive and valued commodity throughout the Mediterranean basin. Lye soap was for beating into dirty clothes (on those occasions when clothing was washed thoroughly), and did human skin no good. Oil was a prized substance to cleanse and treat skin, to dress wounds, to serve as a base for differing scents, and to condition hair and beards, as well as for preparing and cooking food.

  Anointing expressed the lush enjoyment of life; oil running down a man’s beard all the way to the “skirts of his garments” (Psalms 133:2) celebrated physical well-being and the pleasure of God’s blessing. The king from the house of David was rubbed with oil in a special rite to designate him as sole monarch of Israel, and the high priest enjoyed a similar ritual designed for him alone. Prophets sometimes anointed their successors, and the dead were anointed at burial, an expression of the care and attention by those who mourned their passing. Healers and magi throughout the ancient world knew how to convey their particular techniques of curing disease by their distinctive practices of unction.

  Women featured prominently among practitioners of anointing in ancient Judaism. They ran their households, and their domestic arts included unction as a medium of healing. Experienced healers recited therapeutic formulae as they applied oil to relatives or friends. The Talmud of Jerusalem, a Rabbinic commentary on the Mishnah finalized during the fourth century C.E., is an especially rich source for appreciating these traditional practices. The cases involved were sometimes life-threatening, but anointing also dealt with benign conditions. A person with pain in the lower body (Talmud of Jerusalem, Shabbat 14:3, 4) could have the ache
treated with oil without fear of breaking the prohibition against work on the Sabbath.

  Luke’s Gospel says that Mary Magdalene and other women “served” or “ministered to” Jesus and his disciples (8:3). In the Greek of this Gospel—and the Hellenistic mentality it represents—this service included financial support, lodging, work with one’s hands for the immediate needs of the fellowship, and labor for the divine Kingdom. The needs of both practical support and evangelical action were met by Mary’s anointing, a form of provision at least as valuable as money.

  Household practices of anointing led some rabbis to charge women in general with practicing magic. Why did the Law of Moses say that one should not permit a witch to live (Exodus 22:18), rather than any sorcerer, whether male or female? The answer to that question was obvious enough (Talmud of Jerusalem, Sanhedrin 7:13): “Torah has taught you how things really are, for the vast majority who practice sorcery are women.”