Mary Magdalene

by Bruce Chilton

  Rabbi Jesus nonetheless endorsed the practice of anointing and provided the ritual with a theory all his own. His anointing with oil carried a precise significance, specifically conveyed in the Gospel According to Luke, and designed to be enacted by his followers. In his native Nazareth during prayers on the Sabbath, he paraphrased a passage from the Book of Isaiah, changing its meaning to apply to his own experience. (In this quotation, I have emphasized terms that he altered in the text from Isaiah.) Here is what he said in the most ancient form of his words (Luke 4:18):

  The Spirit of the Lord is upon you, on account of which he has anointed you to announce triumph to the poor; And he has delegated me to proclaim to the captives release, and to the blind sight —and I will free the broken with release…

  Jesus’ anointing with Spirit moved him to preach, liberate his contemporaries from their unclean spirits, and heal: He himself designated the Spirit as the source of this whole program of revelation.

  In the synagogue, Rabbi Jesus did not quote the familiar words from the Book of Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me…” (61:1). Instead, he insisted on changing the words, implying that he enjoyed a special relationship with God, and that since his time with John the Baptist, the Holy Spirit had anointed him. This provoked a scandal, and the congregation very nearly stoned him. After all, Jesus was a mamzer, an Israelite without a publicly recognized father, and therefore, according to the Torah (Deuteronomy 23:2), without right of entry into the local congregation.

  He barely escaped the violence of the congregation that day, and after that experience he always spoke more discreetly of his spiritual anointing. But with or without this painfully learned discretion, he recognized that Spirit was the engine of his action and teaching, the driving force of his exorcisms in particular.

  The words of Peter, quoted in the book of Acts, similarly identify Jesus as the one whom God “anointed with Holy Spirit and power, who proceeded to do good and heal those oppressed by the devil, because God was with him” (10:38). Mary Magdalene and her companions took up this programmatic activity, as did the more famous apostles. Mark’s Gospel (6:13) reports that when these disciples went out to offer Jesus’ healing therapy in his name, “they threw out many demons and anointed with oil many who were ill, and healed them.” Anointing conveyed Spirit, to Jesus’ mind, and he wanted his followers to anoint people. Even those texts that attempt to reduce or ignore Mary Magdalene’s crucial role among Jesus’ disciples confirm her importance within this crucial ritual.

  Wary of Mary Magdalene’s influence, the Gospel According to Luke ignores her anointing of Jesus prior to his death. A different anointing scene altogether, involving a different woman (7:36-50), takes the place in Luke of Mark’s account of Mary’s anointing. Jesus laced this woman’s act with special significance, and I have no doubt that here Luke gives us an authentic scene from Jesus’ life, although the decision to repress Mary Magdalene’s anointing is egregious. Nonetheless, the story helpfully illustrates that women other than Mary Magdalene practiced anointing within Jesus’ movement.

  In Luke’s anointing story, a Pharisee named Simon hosts a meal for Jesus in Capernaum (Luke 7:36-50). The whole scene runs counter to the bias against Pharisees in the Gospels, proving that not all Pharisees were Jesus’ enemies. Many of them respected him and were curious about his teaching; some even welcomed him into their homes.

  Simon must have been wealthy, perhaps a merchant dealing in olive oil from Galilee, which was treasured by Jews as far away as Syria for its quality and because it was kosher. The Pharisee’s house would have been large and well appointed, but without the decadent Hellenistic opulence of the homes whose ostentatious wealth Rabbi Jesus criticized.

  By inviting Jesus into his home, Simon also opened his doors to Jesus’ disciples, followers, and others who came to listen to the rabbi and eat with him out of simple curiosity. One of the curious was a woman described in Luke as “sinful.” When she saw Jesus and heard him speak, she cast herself at his feet, repenting of her sins. She wept and “began with tears to wet his feet and with the hair of her head she wiped and kissed his feet” (Luke 7:38). Her act doubtless silenced the chattering, rambunctious crowd. His feet would have been filthy from Capernaum’s streets—and the washing of his feet with her hair and tears remains a beautiful, haunting image.

  Legends developed after the time of the New Testament have portrayed her as a prostitute, but there is no evidence of that. The fact that the woman is simply called “sinful,” without explanation, conceivably intimates that somehow she had been known for sexual impropriety. But there are many, many sins that do not involve sex; Peter calls himself “sinful” in Luke 5:8, yet commentators do not accuse him of prostitution. At any rate, even in cases where women were blamed for their sexual conduct, prostitution was often not at issue. Perhaps the woman in Luke had had a series of spouses, as the Samaritan woman had (see John 4:5—42). Another possibility is that she had flouted the rules that sought to govern whether an Israelite from one social group could marry someone from a different group. Given the elegant gesture with her hair, it is more likely she pursued the proscribed profession of a hairdresser, which many rabbis saw as bordering on prostitution, since touching in private or semiprivate was involved. After all, although the Pharisee objects to her touching Jesus, she is not barred from his house, as a truly notorious sinner might have been.

  The Pharisee was offended that Jesus accepted the touch of someone considered a sinner, but Jesus pronounced that her sins had been forgiven, articulating one of his core principles (Luke 7:47): “Her many sins have been released, because she loved much: but to whom little is released, loves little.” Those who are unaware of how much they have been forgiven love only a little. By contrast, those who consciously accept divine forgiveness, which releases them from their self-imposed shackles, are alive to the bounty that comes from God alone and are willing to extend that forgiving power to others by performing generous, spontaneous acts like the hairdresser’s. Her lavish embrace of Jesus was itself an extension of divine compassion, proof that she had been taken up and purified by God’s love.

  Centuries after the New Testament was written, Christian teachers such as Pope Gregory the Great identified this woman as Mary Magdalene and stamped her as a woman of ill repute:

  Mary Magdalene, “who had been a sinner in the city” [Luke 7:37], loved the Truth, and so washed away with her tears the stains of wickedness. Thus was fulfilled the voice of the Truth who said, “Her many sins have been forgiven her, because she loved much” [Luke 7:47]… She had abandoned her wicked ways, and washed away the stains of heart and body with her tears, and touched the feet of her Redeemer.

  That identification, from a sermon preached in 594, fed Mary’s reputation as a prostitute during the Middle Ages.

  In fact, Luke refers to Mary Magdalene by name only after this story, as if she had not been mentioned before. In chapter 8 (v. 2) of this Gospel, Luke introduces Mary Magdalene without any reference back to the story of the woman who anointed Jesus’ feet. Critical scholarship since 1517 has formally refuted the confusion between Mary and the woman in chapter 7 of Luke’s Gospel. They were obviously two different women, although confused in the West for a thousand years (and more, as we shall see).

  Unfortunately, confusions can become dogma. After he proved that the anointer in Capernaum was not Mary Magdalene, Jacques Lefevre d’Etaples saw his teaching banned by the University of Paris, which went on to pursue him as a heretic in 1523. Instead of successfully making the telling but modest point he had in mind, he found his argument taken up as a key point of contention during the sixteenth century; in France critical discussion of Mary attracted nearly as much opprobrium as the works of Martin Luther.

  While marginalizing Mary Magdalene, Luke’s Gospel paradoxically winds up confirming the centrality of unction within Jesus’ movement. (Luke’s desire to erase Mary’s anointing scene reflects a pattern within the Gospels as a whole, as we shal
l see.) Pope Gregory’s sermon was obviously wrong in identifying the nameless woman as Mary, but in the way of many medieval theologians, he showed himself more sensitive to the poetics of the Gospels than some modern commentators. The act of the anonymous anointer in chapter 7 of Luke’s Gospel does take the place of Mary’s unction in Mark’s Gospel; the hair and tears wiping Jesus’ feet represent the anointing he desired and practiced all through his ministry.

  Mary and her nameless colleague in chapter 7 of Luke’s Gospel both show what other ancient documents also demonstrate: Women in Jewish antiquity, particularly within the folk mysticism practiced in Galilee, exercised a prominent role as anointers. Their domain extended far beyond the conventional household, and there is evidence that significant groups of practitioners looked to these women to guide them in their quest to leave this world behind them and experience the divine world.

  A work called The Testament of job, which circulated during the first century, enhances the portrait of the biblical Job and designates his daughters as heirs of his mystical practice. He becomes a model of patience (rather than of the kind of complainer he seems in the Bible) and an expert in the practice of the mystical Chariot of God, the Merkavah that conveyed the swirling energy of divine presence to those who meditated on this master symbol of Judaic mysticism.

  Prior to his death in the Testament of Job, Job is taken up to heaven in his vision and given three sashes that shimmer with the light of the sun. Each of them has a title that corresponds to the wisdom it accesses when a person wears the sash: the “Spirit,” the “Creation of the Heavens,” and “The Paternal Splendor” {Testament of Job 46:1-51:4). Job gives these sashes to his three daughters as an inheritance, enabling them to speak in the language of angels. They became the authors oi Merkavah hymns, much as Enoch is named as a seer of the Merkavah in the first-century book named after him. The Testament of Job completely overturns the modern assumption concerning women’s roles in Judaism, especially in the context of mysticism. (The daughters of Philip in Acts 21:8-9 evidence the continuing role of women prophets in Christianity.) Finally, we come to an intriguing association with Mary: Job’s three daughters are said in Rabbinic literature to have settled and eventually to have died in Magdala.

  Ancient Jewish literature permits us to see that women pioneered the popular practice of the Merkavah, and that Magdala was an important center of that tradition. Along with her vessel for unction, Mary Magdalene carried with her a mystical teaching of the Spirit that her anointing art conveyed.

  When Mary anointed Jesus near the end of his life, the other disciples were angry with her (Mark 14:4). They understood that anointing signaled celebration, a far cry from the somber meals they shared with their rabbi after his failed raid on the Temple. But Jesus himself explained the significance of what Mary Magdalene had done. Anointing the dead was a traditional part of Judaism, and he saw that Mary—by anointing him—connected the spiritual healing of his days in Galilee with the possibility of his execution in Jerusalem. Just as human life could be transformed by the inflowing of Spirit, so death itself could become the vehicle of God’s presence.

  What is recalled “in memory of her” is an essential aspect of Jesus’ entire gospel (Mark 14:9): the insight that suffering can become a medium of divine presence.

  Jesus taught his disciples that they had something to learn from Mary’s unction. That is not at all surprising, because he had already learned from it himself, both when she anointed him in Bethany and long before that.

  When Jesus had crossed back across the Sea of Galilee from Decapolis, a woman came up behind him and touched him, so that a flow a blood that had made her unclean was cured (Mark 5:25—34):

  And a woman who had a flow of blood twelve yean (and had suffered a lot from many physicians and had expended everything that was hers and had not improved, but rather got worse) had heard things concerning Jesus. She came in the crowd from behind, touched his garment. Because she was saying that: If I touch even his garments, I shall be saved. And at once the fountain of her blood dried up, and she knew in the body that she was cured from her plague. Jesus at once recognized in himself the power gone out from him and turned back in the crowd; he was saying, Who touched my garments? And his students were saying to him, Look at the crowd pressing you around, and you say, Who touched me? And he glared around to see the woman who had done this. But the woman was afraid and trembling: she knew what had happened to her. She came and fell before him and said all the truth to him. But he said to her, Daughter, your faith has saved you; depart in peace and be healthy from your plague.

  This story probably comes from the source that Mary Magdalene crafted. It speaks of a woman who lived close to where Mary was brought up, and it specifies her illness as a blood flow—a persistent impurity such as had once afflicted Mary. Indeed, the woman’s touching Jesus exemplifies Mary Magdalene’s own practice.

  Jesus endorsed what the woman did, much as he later endorsed Mary’s anointing of him, despite the confusion all around him, the incomprehension of his own disciples, and his own initial resistance to being touched. Gestures such as the woman’s enacted faith, as he said, displaying trust in the Spirit he conveyed to others.

  Rabbi Jesus’ own practice changed after this encounter, as we can see in two further stories from the Magdalene source. Both of them are set on the eastern side of the Sea of Galilee, the region from which Mary’s story of the legion of demons came. They both date from the year 31 C.E., when Jesus made his way to Jerusalem for the last time with his disciples. One involves a deaf-mute (Mark 7:31-37) and the other a blind man (Mark 8:22—26). Mark’s Gospel alone includes these stories; Matthew and Luke ignored them both. The reason for the repression has been recognized for centuries: Jesus uses his own spit to heal the afflicted organs. This is a record of the magical dimension of his practice, which the later Gospels preferred to repress.

  The Talmud of Jerusalem also speaks of anointing with spit with the intention to heal. Women were typical practitioners of this type of healing. In one case, the woman applies her unction of saliva seven times, much as Jesus had to repeat his therapy to clear up the blind man’s sight (Mark 8:22—26). Matthew and Luke repressed these stories of healing with spit not only because they involved more magic than they were comfortable with but also because Jesus was following a practice of women’s household sorcery that he had learned, in all probability, from his most prominent female disciple—Mary Magdalene.

  By the time Rabbi Jesus signaled the significance of Mary’s anointing during his last weeks in Jerusalem, he had learned from her practice and had made aspects of it his own. It was not simply a ritual of healing, but an assurance of divine presence in the midst of danger. Confronting the tangible danger of death, he saw in Mary’s anointing a persistent contact with God’s Spirit that could transcend his mortal life.

  For Rabbi Jesus, being raised from the dead involved a new, spiritual form of life, not just a prolongation of physical existence. In his mind, the Resurrection God promised his people went beyond survival and meant that they would share his immortality. Cases such as that of Lazarus and Jairus’s daughter are healings, restorations to life that are unlike the Resurrection of humanity as a whole that Jesus described. Being raised from the dead for him was not a literal resuscitation. It did not mean, for example, that one was able to continue one’s marital relationship with a spouse. His teaching in this regard is explicit: “Because when the dead arise they neither marry nor are they given in marriage, but are like angels in the heavens” (Mark 12:25). Life on the other side of death was an existence “like angels,” a complete and spiritual transformation of physical life.

  Near the time of his anointing by Mary Magdalene, Jesus forged another distinctive teaching: that one’s neighbor represents the divine on earth. Jesus quoted two well-known commandments—love of God and love of one’s neighbor—as the primordial foundation of the Law and the Prophets. Jesus innovated when he linked the two commandments, pron
ouncing that the first was “like” the second (Matthew 22:39). While arguing with other teachers in Jerusalem, he had come to the realization that the love one owed the Merkavah was exactly what one owed one’s neighbor (Mark 12:28-34; Matthew 22:34-40; Luke 10:25-28). Love of God (Deuteronomy 6:5) and love of neighbor (Leviticus 19:18) were basic principles embedded in the Torah. Jesus’ innovation lay in the claim that the two were indivisible: Love of God was love of neighbor, and vice versa. Every neighbor belonged within God’s presence. That is the basis of Jesus’ distinctive and challenging ethics of love in the midst of persecution. He linked his ethics to the transformed society that prophets such as Isaiah and Ezekiel and Zechariah had predicted. His words promise that individual suffering can achieve transcendence, provided the “other” is seen not as threat or stranger but as a mirror of the presence of God in the world.

  In Mary Magdalene’s anointing, she lavished on Jesus exactly that love he called for among Israelites, and she poured oil on him that symbolized the Spirit, which promised a Resurrection to a life “like angels.” Resurrection implies that an element of human identity does not disappear at death; for Jesus, this element was comparable to angels who served in the divine presence in heaven. A person who loves another, who incarnates this indestructible element, loves God at the same time. Love of a person and love of God represent the same eternity and flow solely from the divine Spirit. Jesus taught during this same time of his life that in comparison to this Spirit, flowing from God and animating his children eternally, the flesh is weak (Mark 14:38). Carnal weakness can’t be avoided; mortality is a cross to be borne to the end of life at the same time that it celebrates God’s creativity in the physical world. The suffering that comes with separating from the flesh reveals that which one never loses—the Spirit and an existence like angels.