Anointing for Jesus and Mary conveyed divine selection, the celebration of life, and the transition that made death into the doorway of living. Above all, unction suffused a person with Spirit as effectively as it carried the scent of perfume, symbolizing an inner, intimate transformation that included a person’s entire body. The Song of Songs makes scented oil the emblem of the sensuality it celebrates (1:2-3), and—although this is often overlooked—Pope Gregory in his famous sermon invoked this passage in the Song of Songs to speak of Mary’s relationship with Jesus from Mary’s point of view:
He shall kiss me with the kisses of his mouth;
For thy caresses are better than wine. Because of the aroma of thy fine unctions,
Thy name is as oil poured forth,
Therefore maidens love thee.
Love, wine, aroma—anointing includes them all, especially when a woman practiced unction on the lavish scale that Mary Magdalene did. The Song of Songs conveys that sensual range with an intimate precision of language that I have attempted to put in English here.
The Song of Songs ran into resistance among Jewish and Christian theologians when it came time to list formally which books belonged in the canon of the Bible. It is a frankly erotic poem, and its association with Solomon—notorious for his seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines (i Kings 11:3)—only underscores that. An allegorical subterfuge saved the poem for us; the rabbis of the second century declared that the Song of Songs spoke of God’s love for Israel, while the Fathers of the Church saw it as a reflection of Christ’s love for his Church and Protestants later interpreted the imagery in terms of Christ’s love for the individual soul. Those who heard the book read, and who loved anointing as well as the sensuality it represented, didn’t let the clouds of allegory obscure its direct meaning.
Just as the woman who speaks at the beginning of the poem praises her lover’s unction, so he responds with a detailed descant of what he smells on her body, and where (Song of Songs 4:9-15):
Thou hast given me heart, my sister, bride, Thou hast given me heart with one of thine eyes,
With one chain of thy neck. How beautiful thy caresses, my sister, bride, How much better thy caresses than wine,
And the smell of thy unctions than all spices. Thy lips, bride, drip—honeycomb!
Honey and milk are under thy tongue, and
The smell of thy clothing is like the smell of Lebanon. A locked garden is my sister, bride, A locked spring, a fountain sealed.
Thy plants are a paradise of pomegranates,
with choice fruit; hennas with nards. Nard and saffron; calamus and cinnamon,
With all trees of incense;
Myrrh and aloes with all the main spices. A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters,
And streams from Lebanon.
The Song of Songs catalogs the fragrances of love in their rich variety.
The lover is invited finally to enjoy the garden he has surveyed. His lover replies to him (Song of Songs 4:16):
Awake, north wind, and come, south wind, And blow upon my garden, that its spices may flow out. My beloved shall come into his garden, and eat its choice fruit.
By pouring expensive oil all over her rabbi—perfumed with nard, as in the Song of Songs—Mary Magdalene treated him like Solomon, and invited people to see her as his lover, whatever the exact circumstances of their relationship, playing out the erotic anointing of Israel’s greatest love poem.
The other disciples objected to her action on the grounds of propriety, and because of the waste involved. Their reaction goes hand in hand with the strong tendency of the Gospels to deemphasize the importance of anointing in the exorcisms and healings that Jesus and his followers performed. Mary Magdalene knew better. She had been anointed at his hands, and had anointed him with her own hands. That by no means proves that they replayed the Song of Songs whenever they were in private, but the poem does illustrate the deeply physical pleasure that anointing involved. In Jesus’ practice, and therefore in Mary Magdalene’s, that pleasure signaled the presence of Spirit, expelling the impurities of a bodily system gone wrong.
Mary Magdalene brought the wisdom of faithful touching into the teaching of the primitive Church, and the Gospels acknowledge her spiritual practice. They dampen it down, to be sure. The physical conveyance of Jesus’ power, sensuous and direct, fed into the charge by his opponents that he consorted with promiscuous women, and Mary’s own gesture with the alabaster jar must have looked to some like flagrant eroticism. Unction is inherently sensuous, and the Church in many periods has found it essential to control or repress the practice.
By anointing Jesus prior to his burial, Mary prepared and prefigured his death and the suffering that was going to accomplish his Resurrection in the form of an angel. She celebrated that accomplishment with the unction that had been her trademark since her days with Jesus in Galilee.
Natural curiosity makes us ask this question: Did their mutual and sensuous recognition of Spirit tip into erotic relations between them? Neither the Gospels nor their sources tell us, although they do suggest that people at the time asked that same question.
If Jesus were to have had a sexual partner, Mary remains the best candidate. But the frequently repeated argument that as a Jewish man, and above all a rabbi, Jesus must have been married misses the mark. Jewish law required a man to support his wife near her own original family. The earliest compilation of Rabbinic law, the Mish-nah (Ketuvoth 13:10), explicitly states that a husband should not move his wife from Galilee to Judea, or from Judea to Galilee, or from city to country, or country to city, or from a rich to a poor setting. More often than not, within the context of rural Galilee, this meant a husband lived with his wife’s parents. There is no indication that Jesus did anything of the sort. His constant travel, irregular birth, and unstable economic status made him nobody’s ideal husband or son-in-law.
But our inability to specify how intimate Mary and Jesus were in sexual terms should not distract us from the intimacy the sources do make powerfully evident: Anointing was a principal means in Jesus’ movement of conveying Spirit and removing impurity. Jesus confirmed the practice of that touching as a sign of faith, and he praised the active contact initiated by Mary and the woman with the flow of blood, as well as by the anonymous anointer in Luke 7.
Many teachers in the early Church were wary about oil and touching. The practice, when recounted in relation to Jesus and Mary, inevitably awakened suspicion that their relations might have been sexual as well as ritually intimate. Since neither of them was married, the accusation of adultery was moot, but by the end of the first century, Christian teachers condemned all sexual relations outside marriage as fornication. Although the Church relaxed the kosher laws when food was at issue, illicit sexuality emerged as the primary form of uncleanness in Christian literature from the time of the New Testament and remained so long after.
Mary and Jesus had both borne the stigma of impurity—Jesus by his birth as a mamzer and Mary by her demonic possession—so it became crucial for early Christian teachers to insist that any criticism directed against Jesus or Mary derived from false understandings of uncleanness, not from any fault in them or in their relationship. (This is also one reason the doctrine of the Virgin Birth developed, and why the Magdalene’s private contact with Jesus is never specified in the Gospels.) But the simple fact is that the mores and expectations of the Church at the end of the first century and later differed from those of first-century Judaism in Galilee. Even Mary’s sevenfold possession must have seemed scandalous in retrospect, a case comparable to that of the woman in the book of Tobit (6:13-17) who was said to have killed each of seven husbands on the night of the marriage. That is a world early Christianity wished to distance Mary from.
A relationship that once would have seemed irregular but understandable became unthinkable, and a considerable tendency emerged to write Mary Magdalene out of the memory of the Church. To this extent, later legends and theories that make Mary
Jesus’ lover have some basis in the best available evidence, although their baroque complications undercut their basic plausibility. Nonetheless, even the most extreme theories along these lines at least open the door to an investigation of Mary’s influence and teaching. That is a service to critical inquiry, because when it comes to Mary’s teaching of the Resurrection, as we shall see, the Church’s early theologians found all the more reason to sideline Mary Magdalene. She challenged their entire view of how God would save the world.
Chapter Seven
TRANSFIGURATION AT THE TOMB
Jesus’ Resurrection occurred before anyone could grasp its significance: That is the unequivocal message of Mark, the earliest Gospel, in its original form. The Gospel’s climax presents a visionary experience, which Mark evokes with its spare poetry. Three women, led by Mary Magdalene, saw a vision and heard angelic words. Mark conveys their bewilderment in the face of revelation (16:1-8):
And when Sabbath elapsed, Mary the Magdalene and Mary of James and Salome purchased spices so they could go anoint him. And very early on the first of the Sabbaths they came upon the tomb when the sun dawned. And they were saying to one another, Who will roll the stone away from the opening of the tomb for us? They looked up and perceived that the stone had been rolled off (because it was exceedingly big). They went towards the tomb and saw a young man sitting on the right appareled in a white robe, and they were completely astonished. But he says to them, Do not be completely astonished. You see’t Jesus the crucified Nazarene. He is raised; he is not here. Look—the place where they laid him. But depart, tell his students and Peter that he goes before you into Galilee; you will see him there, just as he said to you. They went out and fled from the tomb, because trembling and frenzy had them. And they said nothing to any one; they were afraid, because—
This abrupt ending climaxes the primitive but effective art of Mark, signaling how hard and disruptive it was, even for those intimate with Jesus, to grapple with the vision that signaled he had overcome death.
From a prosaic point of view, this truncated finale makes the Gospel seem defective. How could anyone end a story by saying “they were afraid, because—”? In later manuscripts of Mark, this apparent gap was dutifully filled in with now-familiar stories culled from the other Gospels of the risen Jesus appearing to his disciples. Pious scribes frequently harmonized the texts of the Gospels, making them look alike. These additions are transparent, and Mark’s stark, primitive ending, the apogee of its art of revelation, stands out because of its powerful originality.
In the Gospel’s original form, the three women are the first to know that Jesus had been raised from the dead. Mark names Mary Magdalene first in this account and her cognomen, “the Magdalene,” resonates, as I mentioned in chapter 2, with Jesus‘—“the Nazarene.” Mary is on her way with Mary of James and Salome to anoint Jesus’ corpse, and that reinforces the point made in chapter 5—that the Magdalene had been the nameless anointer who prepared Jesus before his death for burial.
Mary’s every action and response are crucial to an understanding of her realization that God had raised Jesus from the dead. It was customary, as well as a commandment of the Torah, that Israelites attend to the corpses of relatives and friends, even victims of crucifixion. A first-century ossuary, discovered outside Jerusalem in 1968, contains the bones of a young man named Yochanan. An iron spike with an attached piece of wood is embedded in his right heel. Properly tending to the dead was incumbent on every Israelite, and any Roman official would court rebellion by deliberately flouting that imperative. The Jerusalem prefect must have released Yochanan’s broken body for burial; his ossuary indicates that the Romans honored Israelite tradition.
Following ancient practice, those who received Yochanan’s crucified corpse bathed and anointed it, wrapping the body in linen and placing it in a funerary cave. According to usual burial practice, they deposited the bones in a limestone box after a year and carved Yochanan’s name on the ossurary’s side.
This discovery directly contradicts the claim, fashionable for more than a century, that Jesus’ body was tossed to the dogs after his execution. Foundational texts of Judaism give precise instructions for dealing with corpses after crucifixion (see Deuteronomy 21:22-23; the document from the Dead Sea Scrolls known as 11(564:11-13; Josephus Life 421; Mishnah Sanhedrin 6:5—6); a dead body that was exposed was a source of impurity and offended God. Mary and her companions returned to Jesus’ tomb in order to fulfill the Torah’s commandment, having waited until sundown on the Sabbath so that they could buy materials for anointing Jesus’ corpse. Modern readers often express disgust and incredulity at the thought of returning to a corpse that had already been interred for some thirty-six hours. But mourners in antiquity were not squeamish: Death had not yet been banished to the mortician’s ghetto and anointing featured importantly in customs of burial in the ancient Near East. Death’s impurity had to be dealt with, and people accepted the temporary uncleanness of handling the corpse in order to ensure the purity of the land and the community of Israel.
The Talmud describes not only practices of cleaning, anointing, and wrapping the dead but also the custom of visiting the tomb each day for three days after a burial to make certain that the deceased was truly dead, not simply unconscious. The Talmud in question is the Babylonian Talmud (also called the Bavli), which is later than the Talmud of Jerusalem but nonetheless constitutes the pivotal text of Rabbinic Judaism. The story of the resuscitation of Lazarus in John 11:1-44 presupposes that custom. The Talmud speaks of people going on to lead healthy lives, as Lazarus did, when dedicated relatives and friends discovered they had, in fact, been interred alive.
The moment of natural death can seem strangely uncertain, as anyone who has visited the terminally ill and their families knows. A woman once asked me to come to her home, unsure of whether cancer had at last claimed her husband’s life. That kind of doubt is natural; the recovery of the supposedly dead sometimes defies medical technology. I gave the man last rites but stayed with his family until a medical practitioner could confirm his death. Until then, the family lived through the same limbo that ancient Jewish mourners endured for three days—more in the case of Lazarus. This concern—to be sure a living person is not treated as dead—stems from a deep regard for life. In the ancient Israelite ethos, caring for a person extended to taking care of his body until the transition from life to death was complete.
Crucifixion at the hands of the Romans left virtually no room for uncertainty over the fact of death and required the treatment of a badly damaged corpse. Puncture wounds leaked blood and lymphatic fluid, and bits of broken bone extruded; victims who had been flogged prior to crucifixion were covered with deep gashes. In Jesus’ case, a javelin had also been thrust into his body. The Roman Empire was in the business of death, using crucifixion as the supreme punishment to terrorize recalcitrant subjects in its dominions between Spain and Syria. They had learned this technique of state terror from the Persian Empire, then went on to master and monopolize it. Crucifixion was a punishment that only the Roman authorities themselves— rather than their client kings or other petty rulers—could inflict. These executioners knew what they were doing, and theories that Jesus somehow physically survived the cross represent a combination of fantasy, revisionism, and half-baked science.
The women did not go to the tomb to confirm that Jesus was dead, but to anoint and care for what they knew all too well was a corpse. The women had joined Joseph of Arimathea, a sympathetic rabbi who offered his own family’s burial cave to be used for Jesus’ interment (Mark 15:42-46). But the observance of the Sabbath (which arrived at sunset) prevented them from purchasing or preparing anointment at the time Jesus was buried. Their delay was therefore natural, calibrated to the rhythm of observant Judaism.
To complete the dutiful care of their dead rabbi, Mary and the women made their way to the tomb. Perfumed oil for rubbing on the dead was scented with the resin of myrrh and the leaves of aloe (John 19:38-39
). The astringent properties of the aloe helped to seal skin made porous by death. The smell of myrrh was associated in the mind of any dedicated Israelite with the aroma of the Temple. Both these scents were also used in the luxurious perfume that a lover might enjoy on the body of the beloved (Song of Songs 4:14). Suspensions of myrrh and aloe were delicate mixtures, produced by seething them in oil and aging the unction in stone containers. In the case of Jesus, a rabbi named Nicodemus saw to the expense so that Mary Magdalene and her companions could purchase the salve from a sympathetic vendor in Jerusalem, who was willing to make the sale as soon as the setting sun brought an end to the Sabbath. They bought their oil and spices so that they “could go anoint” (elthousai aleipsosin; Mark 16:1) the body of Jesus.
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