To say they had to “go” (elthousai) for that purpose suggests they walked a distance; one ancient manuscript of the New Testament (the Codex Bezae) says they “proceeded” (poreutheisai), implying an even longer journey. This choice of words embarrassed later copyists, who eliminated any reference to the women’s travel because it contradicted the tradition that Jesus was buried in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, one of Christianity’s greatest pilgrimage (and hence tourist) sites since the fourth century. Modern archaeology has discredited the notion that this church is the site of Jesus’ grave.
Mary Magdalene and her companions found Jesus’ tomb in a recognized cemetery well outside the city—a place where prominent people, such as Joseph of Arimathea, purchased caves for family burial. The archaeological evidence for the existence of such sites is now secure. In 1990, on a hill dotted with natural caves in the Arab hamlet of Abu Tor, a mile and a half south of the Temple, the ossuary of Caiaphas, the high priest at the time of Jesus’ execution, was discovered. There is little doubt whose ossuary this is: The limestone box was found in situ, with Caiaphas’s name written on it twice. A coin discovered in the same cave bears the imprint of Herod Agrippa I, which shows that burial took place in the mid-forties of the first century. The carving on the box picks up the symbolism of the Temple, signaling Caiaphas’s status as high priest.
Was it in this cemetery that Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the same council to which the high priest belonged (the Sanhedrin; Mark 15:43), interred the corpse of Jesus? Certainty escapes us, but it is clear that the women as described in Mark went to a private and remote place, much more like Abu Tor than the site of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher inside the city.
Taking place well outside the city, far from earshot or the prying eyes of opponents, the experience at the mouth of the tomb was the women’s alone. The three women met there privately with Jesus, just as three men—Peter, James, and John—did on the mountain of the Transfiguration (Mark 9:2—8). In the experience of both female and male disciples, revelation came as a communal vision that intensified each individual’s insight. Vision crystallized the women’s conviction that Jesus was alive, a vibrant spiritual presence despite his shameful death. It was their Transfiguration. Ancient Judaism conceived of visionary reality as an experience that could be shared—and it was this Transfiguration at the mouth of the tomb that emerged as the force that ultimately turned Jesus’ movement into a new religion.
The Transfiguration and Jesus’ Resurrection provoked astonishment and awe. Mark’s Gospel intentionally highlights the mystical qualities of these encounters with the divine. When Mark describes the impact of the exorcism Jesus performed in Capernaum’s synagogue, he says of the people there that “all were astonished” (1:27). That scene, from the Magdalene source, establishes a clear pattern in the Gospel.
Astonishment and awe provided a litmus test of revelation. The peasants of Galilee ached for transformation into the Kingdom of God, which some rabbis of the time called ha-olam haba, “the age to come,” when the power of God’s eternal Throne would transcend all divisions, heal all ills, and overpower the petty tyrannies of a broken world. Any experience or sign that offered a glimpse into this ultimate reality provoked awestruck joy.
Visionary prophets such as Ezekiel, and mystical practitioners of Judaism after him, conceived of this divine power as “the Chariot.” The divine Chariot was nothing other than the Throne of God, which Moses and his companions—Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, and seventy elders of Israel—saw in its sapphire glory (Exodus 24:9-11). Like the Resurrection of Jesus, the Chariot was open to communal vision and could unveil itself anywhere, anytime.
Jewish texts from before, during, and after the first century—the books of Enoch and Jubilees, “The Angelic Liturgy” from Qumran, the Rabbinic tractates called “Chagigah” in the Mishnah, the Tosefta, and the two Talmuds—show that rabbis practiced the unveiling of the Chariot in this world by means of disciplined meditation. Visions were not just spontaneous experiences that burst in on passive recipients; adepts could realize the Chariot through their dedicated practice.
Rabbi Jesus trained his disciples—including Mary Magdalene, from the time she met him in Galilee through the period of his final pilgrimage to Jerusalem—in the tradition of the Merkavah, the Chariot. They attuned themselves to the divine Chariot, helped by Scriptures they memorized, disciplines they handed on by word of mouth, and examples of their master’s teaching and practice that they emulated. Astonishment in God’s presence became their way of life.
This astonishment strikes Peter, James, and John during the Transfiguration, when Jesus is transformed before them into a gleaming white figure. They see him speaking with Moses and Elijah, the two most powerful prophets of Israel’s Scriptures (Matthew 17:1-9; Mark 9:2-13; Luke 9:27-36). Jesus’ visions began as his own personal revelations, but years of communal meditation made his experiences transparent to his disciples. On the mountain of his Transfiguration, Jesus followed in the footsteps of Moses, who took three of his followers (Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu) up Mount Sinai (Exodus 24:1-11), where they sacrificed and banqueted to celebrate their vision of the God of Israel on his sapphire Throne.
But unlike what happened on Sinai, Jesus’ disciples, covered by a shining cloud of glory, also heard a voice: “This is my Son, the beloved, in whom I take pleasure: hear him.” When the cloud passed, Moses and Elijah had disappeared. Jesus stood alone as God’s Son. Divine “Son” was the designation that Jesus had heard when, as an adolescent, encamped on the River Jordon with his rabbi, John the Baptist, he had practiced mystical ascension; now his own disciples saw and heard the truth of his personal vision. Jesus’ true genius lay in the transparency of his visionary experience.
When Jesus immersed in accordance with John the Baptist’s teaching, the voice that came from heaven did not speak in the exclusive language of the later doctrine of the Trinity, which made Jesus into the only (and only possible) “Son of God.” Rather, Jesus’ immersion in Spirit enabled him to initiate others into that experience. Likewise, the voice from the luminous cloud in the Transfiguration signaled that the divine Spirit, which had animated Moses and Elijah, was present in Jesus and that Jesus could pass on that Spirit to his followers, each of whom could also become a child, or “Son,” of God. The whole Gospel According to Mark is designed as a program to train its hearers and readers for the moment of baptism, when they, too, will experience the Spirit within them and call upon God as their Abba, their father and true source.
According to Mark, when Jesus came down from the place of the Transfiguration, all who saw him “were completely astonished” (9:15). That confusion again signals a divine disclosure. It is a confusion that is part of revelation, where one is jolted out of ordinary experience into a different reality.
Confusion overwhelms Jesus himself in Mark. Immediately prior to his arrest in Gethsemane, Jesus searches inside himself for his deepest understanding of God, seeking to discover whether he truly has to drink the cup of suffering and death—which he prays will pass him by. When he learns that this suffering is necessary (Mark 14:33), Jesus, too, is “completely astonished.”
The presentation of Jesus in the Gospels is much more robust than the pale teachings of modern theology. There is no embarrassment about Jesus weeping and praying to avoid death. Luke even portrays him as sweating blood at this point (22:44). (Predictably, some Greek manuscripts omit the verse.) Jesus’ humanity was no scandal to Christian faith at its primitive stage. He was not omniscient or cut off from normal human doubt, emotion, and sensation. Jesus’ purpose was to tear the veil that separates people from God and obscures the ultimate reality of our lives.
Jesus knew that everyone’s perceptions, including his own, had to change and adjust to this transcendent vision. As God’s own Son, he was as confused as every Son who would ever follow the path he marked, taking up a cross and crossing over into the world of glory.
This pattern of confusion in the face of revel
ation climaxes in Jesus’ Resurrection. This experience manifested what theologians often refer to as the “presence” of God in this world, although the word presence scarcely conveys the inexhaustible dynamism of the Chariot, which welded human consciousness to God’s as he founded the universe, maintained its precarious existence moment by moment, and was poised to sweep it all away at will.
Christianity became highly philosophical and often abstract from the second century onward, but Jesus and his Judaic contemporaries did not share the abstractions that have become common currency in the language of the divine world. For Rabbi Jesus, the word God conveyed not a philosophical idea but the ultimate reality—beautiful and fearsome and overpowering. At the mouth of the tomb, Mary Magdalene and her companions were taught definitively by Jesus that God was the only, ultimate truth—the omnipotent, swirling vortex of creation.
Chapter Eight
ECSTATIC VISION
Although the Transfiguration itself and the vision of the women at the mouth of the tomb obviously reflect different experiences, both revealed Jesus’ divine identity and thoroughly unnerved his disciples. Fear silenced the apostles on Mount Hebron (Mark 9:6), as though they were caught in a dream, unable to speak. Their silence prefigures the silence of the three women at the mouth of the tomb (Mark 16:8; see also the description of the disciples in Gethsemane, 15:32-42). In these cases, the disciples’ astonishment signals a vision of the heavenly court, where the Chariot Throne of God is clouded in awe and radiates divine power. Mark indicates that the women left our world and fearfully entered this realm.
Both the Transfiguration and Mary’s vision intimately connect Jesus to the Throne of God. In the Transfiguration, he appears in an altered form, shining in brilliance with Moses and Elijah, prophets who, it was understood in the first century, had “not tasted death,” a turn of phrase shared among Jewish, Christian, and Gnostic texts. The phrase does not refer to escaping physical death, but to transcending its consequences. Vision gave access to a world where death no longer had dominion. Instead, dying marked an entry into God’s presence. This is what the angelic youth at the mouth of the tomb announced: Jesus’ victory over death, his permanent transformation to the stature of Moses and Elijah in Israel’s divine panoply.
When the women lifted their eyes at the mouth of the tomb, they “perceived that the stone had been rolled off (Mark 16:4). The verb perceive represents a precise choice of words. Theoreo in Greek (from which our English word theory, the equivalent of theoria, is derived) refers to the women’s deliberate perception, a moment filled with both anxiety and hope. The women had just posed the desolate question, ”Who will roll the stone away from the opening of the tomb for us?“ (Mark 16:3). A bleak description of the rock follows: ”… it was exceedingly big“ (Mark 16:4). Caught between their own despair and the size of the rock, they lifted their eyes and ”perceived.“ This moment of extraordinary perception opened them to the announcement of Jesus’ Resurrection, and their vision became the vessel of Christian hope.
Precisely because it represents the core of Christianity’s message, the Resurrection of Jesus continues to touch off controversy and misunderstanding. What the texts say about the events concerned is persistently distorted—as much by the exaggerations of those who impose their own wishes for afterlife onto Jesus as by the dismissal of those who resent the influence of Christianity in the modern world. The result is that treatments of Jesus’ Resurrection conform either to the doctrines of a church or to the secular denial of any life after death. Either way, modern presuppositions torment the meanings of ancient texts to the point that even scholars find it difficult to specify what the documents say. In no other question have modern dogmas, both ecclesiastical and secularist, so obscured ancient wisdom.
Mary Magdalene’s experience in Mark’s Gospel gives us access to her encounter with the risen Jesus, an account independent of our presuppositions, whether pious or skeptical. Before there was any religion called Christianity to believe in or not believe in, before there was any question of influencing theological opinion, the beliefs that people adhere to, or their views regarding life after death, Mary’s vision and voice sounded true and clear, waiting to be heard in their own terms.
The distortion of Mary’s vision—sometimes willful, sometimes inadvertent—has plagued the interpretation of the New Testament. Her experience conflicts with a later belief widely assumed to be part and parcel of Christianity—the belief in Jesus’ physical resuscitation from his grave. Because her experience came first, those who came after her manipulated what she said in her source to accord with their own views. In this case as in others, when a teacher sets in motion a powerful idea or tradition—which the Resurrection of Jesus undoubtedly is—the bitter price of this primacy is often paid in the form of the misinterpretations that come later. At long last, let us step beyond this manipulation, hear a clear voice, and watch the unfolding of a pristine vision.
By the word choice oitheoreo, rather than homo (the verb for physical seeing), the women’s visionary discernment literally becomes a matter of deep perception rather than ordinary vision. Mark’s awareness that the women’s insight was supernatural shines through several elements in the account of what happened at the tomb. The women’s apprehension of heaven was so important to them that physical circumstance no longer mattered. Mark says that they moved in the direction of Jesus’ corpse. But did they advance “to” the tomb or “toward” the tomb? Or might it be “up to” the tomb or “into” the tomb? The preposition eis, the word chosen by Mark in the native language of the Gospel, Greek, might bear any of those meanings, because it refers to direction without exactly specifying extent (Mark 16:5). An author who wanted to specify the physical proximity of the women to the exact place where Jesus’ corpse had been deposited would have to say more, as actually happens in the other Gospels (as we shall see). Instead, Mark chooses succinct ambiguity.
Mark places the women at the mouth of the tomb when their vision transfixes them. The Gospel does not concern itself with telling us how far the women go into the tomb. It does not say whether the giant rock they “perceived” to have been rolled away had been literally removed or not. We might want to know whether these visionary events happened in the material world, but for Mark, exterior facts of that sort do not matter. Rather, the women’s experience pivots on their apprehension of the angel who speaks to them (Mark 16:5): “a young man sitting on the right appareled in a white robe.” The women leave the corporeal realm when Mark says that “they were completely astonished.”
What causes their astonishment? It is not, as is expressed by a tiresome and inaccurate convention, “the empty tomb.” “The empty tomb” is a bad heading for this passage, although it is the designation frequently provided in printed Bibles. For the simplest of reasons, we have to let that heading go: In Mark’s Gospel, the women do not actually enter or inspect the tomb. They or their replacements do so in later Gospels (which also reduce Mary’s importance, as we shall see), but not here. At the tomb’s mouth, Mary Magdalene and her companions see an angelic “young man.” That is what astonishes them.
In their astonishment, they do not say (and might very well not have known) whether they were in the door, beside it, or inside the tomb. Visions often occluded a sense of ordinary circumstances. Once, Saint Paul referred to a visionary experience when he was “taken up into the third heaven.” He said he could not even tell whether he was “in the body or outside the body,” a phrase that derives from Jewish mystical practice. So it was with Mary and her colleagues: The force of vision was upon them, and they don’t say whether they went into the tomb or searched for Jesus’ corpse.
The youth they perceived was no ordinary adolescent, but “a young man sitting on the right appareled in a white robe,” clothing reminiscent of Jesus’ Transfiguration (Mark 16:5). This young man is the antithesis of another anonymous youth (a neaniskps in Greek), who at the time of Jesus’ arrest (Mark 14.51-52) left his linen garment behind
when he fled naked from the contingent that had come to seize his rabbi. This is a case of liturgical practice resonating within the Gospel. The hearers who prepared themselves for baptism, following the example of Jesus at the outset of Mark, encounter an image of what it is to be baptized—stripped, laid bare in one’s fearfulness, and then re-clothed in angelic garments at the Gospel’s close.
The symbolic resonance of this youth with baptism complements his central place in the announcement of Jesus’ Resurrection. He is key to the experience of the women. What he said convinced them that Jesus was alive despite his death, and their vision—the beginning of the message that God had raised his Son and wanted to raise all his children—set in motion a sequence of visions among the disciples, encounters with the risen Jesus that are reported in the other Gospels after the story of what the women saw and heard at the mouth of the tomb.
Commentators have frequently said that Mary Magdalene was the first person to encounter the resurrected Jesus. As a reading of Mark (and not only Mark, as we shall see), that is not quite right. The women do not encounter their rabbi himself, but a messenger who announces that Jesus has been raised. That is both more and less than an encounter with Jesus: less because Jesus himself does not appear, as he does in visions presented in the other Gospels; more because the experience explains what the Resurrection means better than do Jesus’ own appearances in those later Gospels.
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