Mary Magdalene

by Bruce Chilton

  The “less” of the women’s vision helps explain an oddity in what Paul says about Jesus’ Resurrection in the earliest written reference to that event, which appears in his First Letter to the Corinthians (written around 56 C.E.). In his list of those by whom the risen Jesus “was seen” (1 Corinthians 15:3-8), Paul makes no mention at all of the women at the tomb. In this letter, he had just insisted that women keep silent in the churches (1 Corinthians 14:33-34), and this list does effectively silence them. Because the women did not encounter the risen Jesus (as did the apostles and others whom Paul mentions), but instead saw an angel who announced Jesus was risen, Paul could rationalize his omission. He excluded any reference to Mary Magdalene, despite her pivotal role in provoking the experiences of the disciples whom Paul does mention.

  Alongside the “less” of Mary’s experience and its exploitation by Paul, the “more” also echoes through the texts of the New Testament. Although the women did not see Jesus, they understood without equivocation—instructed by the youth in their vision—that Jesus had been raised from the dead. In every other Resurrection account in the Gospels, those who encounter Jesus express confusion about his identity or the truth of his resurrected existence. These two kinds of doubt are often knitted together in stories of the risen Jesus. Only the women, on the basis of what they directly “perceived,” knew the significance of what they saw, and they knew it immediately. That is the “more” of their account.

  The visionary youth tells the secret that is the core of their special knowledge. Even before he speaks, the women are “completely astonished,” as Mark says and then underscores (16:5-6). The repetition is deliberate—modern translators are wrong to try to soften it. This is the same verb (thambeomai) that has modeled human response to revelation from the beginning of the Gospel, and it is repeated here to mark the apogee of its meaning. The exorcism in Capernaum (Mark 1:27), the Transfiguration (Mark 9:15), and Gethsemane (Mark 14:33) all echo through the astonishment of the women, because the revelation of the Gospel culminates in their experience. No less than Jesus in Gethsemane, they are silenced in fear and ecstasy. What is unveiled through the medium of the women for the hearer or reader of Mark expresses Mary’s insight into the ultimate significance of who her rabbi was and what his life and death truly mean.

  In the written text of Mark, all this is powerfully conveyed. Yet any information concerning Mary’s eventual meeting with the risen Jesus is sealed in the women’s silence. This Gospel is intended as instruction for noninitiates prior to baptism. Once initiated (into the experience of embracing and being embraced by Spirit, which is never forgotten during the recitation of Mark), those baptized were promised deeper instruction, in a protected, oral form, hidden from the eyes and ears of those in the Roman world who wished them ill. Knowledge of Jesus’ Resurrection implicitly followed baptism in Mark’s presentation: The hearer was promised a wisdom that is not written in the text.

  Mary Magdalene’s vision is the key to the Gospel as written—and, at the same time, it extends the promise of an esoteric truth. Clues to her secrets emerge when one considers why the later Gospels marginalize her. By getting at what they wanted to suppress, the topic of the next chapter, my hope is that Mary can finally be recognized as the woman whom Marguerite called out for on her deathbed. I want to show that Mary was one of the prime catalysts and shaping forces of Christianity—the role for her that Mark’s text intimates.

  Mary’s concealed significance in the past, however, does not justify the many projections that have been foisted onto her. Several of these are unmistakably male fantasies. In The Last Temptation of Christ, Martin Scorsese pictured Mary Magdalene servicing large numbers of clients in her one-woman Galilean brothel, the kind of establishment that could never have survived in a small Jewish enclave. More recently, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code constructed an elaborate fictional—and anti-Catholic—conspiracy around the cover-up of the alleged fact that Mary bore Jesus’ child and raised her in Provence. Brown conveniently disregards the legendary basis of this story: a mysterious boat without helmsman or rudder that supposedly conducted Mary and her companions to the shores of Europe. Medieval legend provided this mode of transport to other saints as well, such as James of Compostela and Andrew. They had probably died in the land of Israel, but their devotees, wanting them and their relics near, insisted that they had been carried to the West by miraculous ships and angelic choirs. If we want to get at the truth about Mary, we need to examine what we know, not invent what we don’t know, and refrain from dressing up yesterday’s piety as today’s revisionism.

  The surest truth about Mary Magdalene remains her vision at the mouth of Jesus’ tomb, recounted in all the Gospels, starting with Mark. Her vision marks the separation of Jesus from his flesh and his entry into a resurrected existence “like angels” (as Jesus himself described it; Mark 12:18-27; Matthew 22:23-33; Luke 20:27-38), not the reanimated corpse on which resuscitation literalists have insisted.

  Mary Magdalene’s vision, precisely because it was a vision and not the inspection of an empty tomb, placed Jesus in the realm of heaven with the angels, not in the company of people who had been resuscitated, such as Jairus’s daughter and Lazarus. Consequently, after their vision, the women showed no interest in the flesh of Jesus’ corpse; only later embellishments on this story have the women or their male colleagues search the tomb. From a material perspective, that poses an inevitable question: What happened to the physical body of Jesus?

  Once that question is posed, two answers typically follow: Either Jesus’ corpse was resuscitated or somebody took it. The Gospel According to Matthew (27:51-53; 28:11-15) represents both those views, each dependent on the assumption that Jesus’ physical corpse and his risen body were one and the same. The two theories, of resuscitation and of a theft, share the same conception of Resurrection. But in the vision of the women, Jesus was no longer there at all, but in Galilee. That is where the young man directed them, and when the women turned away from the tomb, as they were told to do by the young man, they left the question of Jesus’ physical body behind them, unanswered. It is conceivable his corpse remained where it lay, although that interpretation can claim no more evidence than the others.

  The women’s vision implied that the encounter with Jesus in Galilee would also be visionary. In the later Gospels, the variety of accounts of meetings with Jesus shows that the conception of how he was raised from the dead differed strongly from vision to vision. A materialist conception arose by the time of Luke’s Gospel and the book of Acts (the companion volume to Luke), according to which Jesus inhabited his own flesh and bone again, and liked to eat (Luke 24:36-43); he physically ascended into heaven at the end of his appearances among his disciples (Acts 1:9-11). But Luke also acknowledged other, clearly visionary encounters (Luke 24:13-35), and told a different story of Jesus’ ascension, one in which he disappeared (Luke 24:50-53), his form dissolving as he merged with heaven. In that way, Jesus’ continued, spiritual presence in heaven could be conceived.

  Saint Paul also taught a spiritual conception of the Resurrection. Human beings are sown, he said, in flesh and bone, and animated by souls, but that existence is transitory. Only spirit can endure death. That is why Paul contrasted the first person, Adam, who became a living soul, to the last person, Christ, who became life-giving spirit (1 Corinthians 15:45). Only a fool, Paul said, could suppose that the corpse sown in the earth was identical to the risen body (1 Corinthians 15:36). Sown in dishonor, it is raised in honor; sown in weakness, it is raised in power: Resurrection gave Jesus “a spiritual body” (1 Corinthians 15:43-44), not his old, physical body. With his own philosophical language and trenchant logic, Paul expressed exactly the visionary conception of the Resurrection conveyed by Mary Magdalene’s vision.

  After her experience at the mouth of the tomb, Mary probably pursued her visionary practices, her anointing, and exorcisms in Magdala, where she must have returned. Galilee harbored many of Jesus’ followers at this time
; the young man at the mouth of the tomb had directed them back to their native land. But we learn of these disciples indirectly, because Jerusalem takes up the bulk of attention in the pages of the New Testament. The Magdalene source of stories within the Gospels, in addition to conveying Mary’s characteristic practices of exorcism, anointing, and vision, refers to the region around the Sea of Galilee with firsthand familiarity, sometimes with a local knowledge of hamlets scholars can’t locate anymore. Compared to the difficulties Jesus’ disciples faced in Jerusalem, where first Peter and then James (Jesus’ brother) drew many followers, Magdala offered a relatively tranquil environment to Mary and those who followed her practice of Judaism in the manner of Jesus.

  The tranquility of Galilee did not last, however. Growing nationalism in Jerusalem broke out into violence during the sixties of the first century. James, Jesus’ brother and the most prominent leader of Christianity at the time, was executed by stoning at the instigation of the high priest Ananus in 62 C.E. Violence and opposition to Rome mounted steadily from that point on, and in 66 C.E., the manager of the Temple, Eleazar, refused to accept offerings from Gentiles, the Roman emperor included. Nero—always shrewd and ruthless, even in his most profligate moments—understood that this was tantamount to an Israelite declaration of independence. He dispatched Vespasian and the Legio X Fretensis. The Roman army triumphed. But the fighting was ferocious, and not only in Jerusalem.

  Indeed, Vespasian’s initial campaign took him and his son Titus through Galilee. Tiberias, near to Magdala, was an inevitable center of fighting, the site of many internecine battles among the Jewish rebels, attacks on the administrative centers of the Romans, and seesaw battles among the would-be leaders of the insurgency. Josephus, a leading participant in the revolt, who defected to the Roman cause after his capture and became a valuable eyewitness chronicler of events, described the occupation of Magdala by the rabble from the surrounding area (Jewish War 3.462—542). They made use of rough ramparts, which Josephus himself had installed around the city, and a ramshackle fleet of fishing boats, terrorizing the local residents during their occupation.

  Despite their desperate preparations and ruthless tactics, the insurgents were hacked apart on land and on the Sea of Galilee by the professional, well-equipped Romans. But when the battle became pitched, Titus’s frenzy was so great that his troops made no distinction between the rebels, who had taken over the city, and the residents, who had opposed war with Rome in the first place. According to Josephus’s description, by the time Titus stopped the massacre, the Sea of Galilee near Magdala had turned red with blood, corpses bloated with decay on land and sea, and the air was foul with the stench of rotting flesh. Vespasian joined his son to enjoy the famous victory and to deal with the culprits, and summary execution of the elderly and enslavement of the young was the order of the day.

  Mary Magdalene—an unattached woman who belonged to a marginal Jewish sect—was at the mercy of the militants when they occupied the city, and of the Romans when they invaded. Anyone interested in collaborating with the power of the day could have denounced her to the occupier as guilty of the lese majeste of the hour. By Magdala’s definitive capture in 67 C.E., Mary was nearing seventy, an attainable but advanced age by the standards of the time. Because she would have been of no use at all to the great forces of the moment, there is a good chance she died in the anonymity of her native land.

  Some followers of Jesus escaped from Jerusalem prior to its fiery destruction by Vespasian’s son Titus in 70 C.E. They fled to Pella, on the eastern side of the Jordan River (Eusebius History of the Church 3.5.4). Pella became a center of Jesus’ movement at this time, and a magnet for any remnants of Mary Magdalene’s entourage, as well. There her source was preserved, and it ultimately influenced the Gospels as we read them today. But the woman herself was barely remembered, despite the fact that her importance among Jesus’ disciples was universally acknowledged. Forces were at work that would silence Mary even more effectively than the merciless legions of Rome had.

  Chapter Nine

  THE SCAR

  The Gospels provide only scraps of information concerning Mary Magdalene, but by now I hope to have shown that by sifting through the scant texts available to us and placing Mary in the context of first-century Judaism in Galilee, we can discern vital clues about who Mary was and what she did. The time has come to ask why Mary was very nearly expunged from the Gospels—the very texts she helped shape.

  Mary’s erasure from the Gospels forms a scar in the historical flesh of Christianity. The excisions that cut Mary out of the texts have removed or damaged vital tissue in the Church’s faith and practice— key rituals of exorcism, anointing, and vision. This scar reaches deeper than a blemish: A badly healed wound prevents Christians from moving in ways that are natural to their discipleship.

  Mary, the women with her, and the women after her who put her sacramental program into action have been marginalized, limited to strictly ancillary roles within ecclesiastical life. That obscures the power of the rituals Mary pioneered. Women have been sequestered in a male-dominated hierarchy, and that has gradually paralyzed the Magdalene’s sacramental program of expelling demons, healing with oil, and realizing the presence of the risen Jesus.

  Yet the cuts that might have excised Mary Magdalene from the Gospels altogether did not actually achieve that result. Her pivotal connection with exorcism, anointing, and vision proved too durable to be erased. By seeing why she was pushed aside, and how that marginalization did not quite come off, we can better understand the influence that she once exerted. Then we can perceive why she was important in her own terms, identify the threat she posed to those who resisted her influence, and tap the continuing power of the rituals she developed.

  At the end of the Gospel According to Mark, the women at the mouth of the tomb are silent, but we know that they eventually did relate what had happened to them, because their experience is articulated and forms the climax of Mark’s narrative. Within the text of Mark, the sources of the Magdalene and Peter are woven together with other oral sources into a single narrative. The Magdalene source must have been considerably compressed during that process, but it lived on in oral form. In Mark’s Christian community in Rome during the early seventies of the Common Era, people who had been baptized had access to teachers who spoke on the basis of oral sources of how Mary Magdalene and other disciples experienced the Resurrection. Some of these experiences actually made it into the written texts of Matthew, Luke, and John, but Mark preferred to leave detailed explanation of encounters with the risen Jesus to the personal, oral instruction that followed baptismal immersion.

  The Gospels were composed in communities where there was still an oral memory of Jesus. That enabled the written texts to remain succinct, and it resulted in their being very different from one another in content and style. Luke’s Gospel puts the existence of sources that circulated before it was written beyond any real doubt. In a preface to the book, we learn about “eyewitnesses” and “assistants of the word” who provided the material this Gospel weaves into a narrative (Luke 1:1-4):

  Many have attempted to order a narrative afresh concerning the events consummated among us, just as those who were eyewitnesses from the outset and became assistants of the word delivered them over to us. Accordingly, it seemed to me that I—one who followed after—should also write anew, in everything accurately, in sequence, so that you can recognize the certainty—Theophilus, your Excellency—concerning the things in which you have been instructed.

  The basic picture Luke paints is that people who personally experienced events conveyed their experiences orally to those who taught about Jesus, until those teachings were edited in written form. Each Gospel emphasized its own version of Jesus’ story and left a wealth of other material for oral instruction.

  Christian teachers had to become skilled in holding back from their story any material that might inflame local opinion against them. As the book of Acts shows, charges of tre
ason against the Roman empire dogged the efforts of those who proclaimed the Kingdom of God, rather than Caesar’s kingdom. Nero had unleashed a violent pogrom against followers of Jesus in Rome in 64 C.E. Both Paul and Peter had died in the riot, a combination of mob violence and official torture. Mark’s Gospel ends on a note of silence partially because silence was often the best policy in dealing with the Romans; silencing women came to some extent as part of that agenda.

  We are at a deep disadvantage compared to ancient readers and hearers of the Gospels when it comes to understanding Jesus and his movement. We have no access to the oral sources that once supplemented the written texts, and as a result it is common to misconstrue the whole purpose of the Gospels by mistaking them for attempts at comprehensive, literal history. No Gospel was written as a biography of Jesus. That is one reason why they differ, why times and places do not correspond from Gospel to Gospel, and why gaps in the story of Jesus’ life have been filled in with improbable legends. The Gospels were designed to convey the experience of rebirth by baptism in Jesus’ name, not primarily to convey historical information.

  Mark’s Gospel in particular invited its hearers to make connections beyond the text—between Mary Magdalene and the woman who anointed Jesus, for example. Mark also pointed to further sources of guidance regarding Jesus—for instance, to the truth beyond the silence of the women at the Gospel’s close. If we focus only on what was written and insist that the Gospels are only history and that the only information about Jesus is in the Gospels, we ignore the promise of resources beyond the text and thus miss what is actually part of the Gospels’ message.