Is it impossible for us to recover the actual speech and practice of women such as Mary Magdalene? Feminist theology and textual scholarship have proven a vital force in showing that history is flexible, a work of inferential imagination rather than deduction from scientifically ascertainable data. That correction has become standard in the study of the humanities since the middle of the twentieth century, although it has been slow in being applied within scholarship on Christian origins. I doubt this crucial corner would have been turned at all in the study of the New Testament without the contributions of committed feminist writers.
Nonetheless, the inferences of history need to be distinguished from interpreters’ projections. Otherwise, any reconstruction could be dismissed as wishful thinking and therefore would never prove durable enough to stand up to debate. Having freed ourselves from the program of marginalizing Mary Magdalene out of deference to male constructs of authority, it would be a shame to fall into the habit of inventing her in the image of contemporary aspirations for women.
Some feminist theology has suffered a failure of nerve in the face of history, and that has resulted in a setback for interpretation as a whole, as several scholars in the movement have argued. A major movement of correction is currently under way, and deserves critical support. Feminist interpretation came into its own during the seventies and eighties of the last century and with some notable exceptions favored literary techniques, rather than historical analysis. The vogue of “the final form of the text” had a profound impact upon thinking about the Bible, both in academic and in popular circles. In focusing on the literary shape of biblical books and their relationships, this approach resisted the analysis of sources within the Gospels.
This fashion had its merits, because it heightened sensitivity to literary patterns running through texts. But enthusiasts for “the final form” can flatten the texts out as much as Conservative Evangelicals do, and so impede historical insight. Each Gospel becomes an author’s literarily consistent story, much as in Fundamentalism each Gospel is flattened into literal proof of Protestant doctrine. Indeed, one leader among feminist biblical scholars has called for a rejection of the approach to “the bible as ‘fact.” “ As a result, when feminist theologians speak of possible ”voices“ in texts, they sometimes mean not what Mary Magdalene and other women taught, but their own views of how Christianity could or should be practiced. Both feminist and Fundamentalist interpreters, albeit for different reasons, can prove insensitive to how the Gospels were generated over time from the multiple meanings of the sources that fed into them. The one approach can be two-dimensionally ideological, the other two-dimensionally literary; neither gets at the depth and historical texture of the Gospels or at the reality of Mary Magdalene.
If we look at the Gospels not as monoliths but as the sources that emerged out of diverse streams of tradition that interacted with one another, then we can identify not only their methods of erasing women but also those women themselves as living, historical influences, not ventures in wishful deconstruction.
Even when feminist theology might seem exaggerated in some of its methods and approaches, it has also left an enduring legacy in pressing upon critical readers inescapable truths about the New Testament that traditional—that is, male-dominated— scholarship has obscured. For example: The Gospel According to Mark effaces women. Almost every female—even Jesus’ mother—is deprived of her name. She is regularly called Jesus’ “mother” (except when Jesus is identified by his contemporaries as “Mary’s son”), although Mark goes on to name Jesus’ four brothers and tell us in the same passage that Jesus had sisters (6:3) without telling us how many or who they were.
The mother-in-law of Peter, also deprived of a name, features as a feminine ideal in Mark. She is feverish when Jesus enters her house in Capernaum. He cures her, and she then serves him and his disciples (1:30-31): “But Simon’s mother-in-law was recumbent, fevered, and at once they talk to him about her. He came forward, raised her— grasping the hand. And the fever left her, and she was providing for them.” Where it concerns women, disciples just want to have lunch. Service emerges as the dominant feminine role in Mark. This Gospel names Mary Magdalene and her companions at its close only from necessity, in order to identify who went to Jesus’ tomb according to the oral tradition available. So it admits belatedly that they had been part of the action from a much earlier stage in Galilee (15:40-41).
The erasure of Mary Magdalene in Mark’s Gospel results from its apologeticpurpose.Writtenduring the formativeyears of the Church, Mark’s Gospel (as well as the other Gospels) embraced key aspects of the value system of the Roman Empire that oppressed Christians. Although that may seem paradoxical, Christians were neither the first persecuted group nor the last to endorse and amplify the values of their oppressors. Saint Paul’s infamous mandate, “the women in the churches will keep silence, because it is not appropriate for them to speak” (i Corinthians 14:34), reflects more than personal male chauvinism. Men in antiquity generally agreed with him.
In the Rome of Mark’s Gospel in 73 C.E., Christians were under intense pressure to make their faith look as little like a threat to conventional Roman virtues as possible. Christians were accused of atheism because they would not call the emperor “God’s Son” or honor the gods of Rome. To prove they were no threat to the Roman Empire, Christians tried to make themselves appear, at least in one respect, more Roman than the emperor, his agents, and the Roman aristocracy as a whole. Therefore, they upheld the traditional Roman values of a quiet family life in a stable household. Because the Imperial family honored these values more in breach than in observance, it was easy for even low-class Christians to make a good impression. A well-ordered household became an emblem of Christianity’s family values, especially from the end of the first century and onward. Teachers who prepared people for baptism downplayed sharp edges in Jesus’ perspective on family and sidelined women who had been prominent among Jesus’ disciples. That process and its consequences prove central to understanding Mary Magdalene.
The irony of this development of ancient Christian “family values” is that Jesus had demanded the renunciation of family for the sake of his message (see Matthew 19:27-30; Mark 10:28-31; Luke 18:28-30). But by the second century, some of Jesus’ teachings had been quietly forgotten or reinterpreted. The Shepherd of Hernias, written in Rome almost a hundred years after Mark’s Gospel, set aside Jesus’ rejection of family ties. The family became the sphere of first recourse in working out the behavior that God required, a haven from persecution, and the prudent conduct of its members was a recommendation of Christianity to the overlords of the Roman Empire.
Hermas, a recently freed slave with a rich visionary life, is told by an angel in his vision that keeping women in check within the domestic household is a principal Christian duty, crucial for salvation {The Shepherd of Hermas I.1-II.4):
But make these words known to all your children and to your wife, who shall in future be to you as a sister. For she also does not refrain her tongue, with which she does evil; but when she has heard these words she will refrain it, and will obtain mercy. After you have made known these words to them, which the master commanded me to be revealed to you, all the sins which they have formerly committed shall be forgiven them, and they shall be forgiven to all the saints who have sinned up to this day, if they repent with their whole heart, and put aside double-mindedness from their heart. For the master has sworn to his elect by his glory that if there still be sin after this day has been fixed, they shall have no salvation; for repentance for the just has a limit; the days of repentance have been fulfilled for all the saints, but for the nations repentance is open until the last day.
A man, even a low-class man in control of his household, will win salvation despite sin, and that means he needs to keep his wife and children within the circle of forgiveness that obedience establishes.
Demands for mastery of one’s family became a rhetorical strong-arm tactic of Christians
, despite their weak political and social position. Everyone in the Roman Empire complained of the debauchery of the elite, and Christians could join in that critique, holding themselves above such practices even during periods when they were persecuted. The servility of women became an emblem of the harmony that derived from following Jesus as one’s true lord and master. It is not at all hard to see how Mary Magdalene came to be silenced.
Mark’s Gospel was written early enough that Mary’s effacement is incomplete. But in the later Gospels, women became more and more ancillary. Likewise, Mary’s vision at the mouth of the tomb appeared as purely provisional in the Gospels that followed Mark’s. As we are about to see, women were even deprived of the role of going to the tomb to anoint Jesus’ corpse.
Chapter Ten
EXPURGATING THE MAGDALENE
YOU could not reasonably claim that the presentation of women in the Gospels that came after Mark—Matthew and Luke especially—was subtle. Even at pivotal moments, women are treated as interchangeable. Matthew has Mary Magdalene go to the tomb with “the other Mary” (28:1), for example. No one can say for sure whether this is supposed to be the same person as Mark’s “Mary of James” (16:1), and Matthew somehow loses all track of Salome, although Mark names her as one of the visionaries at the tomb. These are indications that this key story was reshaped as it was passed on by word of mouth prior to the writing of the Gospels—and that reshaping came at a cost to the memory of women.
A well-respected theory, developed in Germany during the nineteenth century and still repeated in standard New Testament textbooks, has it that Matthew is simply an updated edition of Mark, a direct copy of the original Gospel with additions. But wide variations between these two Gospels in wording, style, order, and content make me suspicious of this theory. In my opinion, the differences go far beyond slips of a copyist’s stylus. We can better account for disparities such as changing the names of the women at the tomb by supposing that each Gospel is a product of interacting oral and written traditions.
Mary Magdalene survives Matthew’s erasure, but barely. Matthew ignores her whole purpose in going to the tomb. She and the “other” Mary go there not to anoint Jesus but only to see his grave. That change breaks the link with the woman who broke her alabaster jar in order to anoint Jesus. (At least Matthew preserves this narrative [26:6-13]; Luke omits it completely.) The delicate poetics of Mark are discarded: Mary is marginalized, and her deep connection with anointing is submerged.
This break in the link between Mary’s ritual anointing and Jesus’ Resurrection attenuates her role, but an even deeper reduction in her importance in Matthew, as compared to Mark, follows. Matthew undermines the women’s vision at the tomb. Before we read about Mary’s experience with her colleagues, Matthew refers to an earthquake that signals Jesus’ triumph over death—a legendary event that appears in Matthew alone among the Gospels without leaving a trace in any historical source from the period. It represents a literally seismic shift to a physical rather than visionary belief in Jesus’ Resurrection.
Matthew makes the young man at the tomb described in Mark into an agent of this physical event (28:2—4): “And look there happened a great quake, because a messenger [anggelos in Greek] of the Lord came down from heaven, came forward, rolled away the stone and sat over it. But his appearance was as lightning and his clothing white as snow. Yet from fear of him those guarding were shaken, and became as dead.” The scene in Matthew is no longer purely visionary as in Mark, but a supernatural intervention into the physical world with tangible consequences. The women are completely passive, as if they were “as dead,” like the guards.
For all their similarities, each Gospel is unique and develops a poetics all its own. Matthew was composed in Damascus, more than a thousand miles and a cultural world away from Mark’s Rome, in a city that—despite its non-Jewish character—Israel’s prophets had long associated with the power of God’s Spirit. Elisha had healed the Syrian general who came from Damascus (2 Kings 5:1-14), and the Essenes who produced the Dead Sea Scrolls spoke of the city as the place where their teachers had developed their vision of an alternative Israel, brought to earth by an army of angels.
After Jesus’ crucifixion and the visions that convinced many of his disciples that he had overcome death, Jesus’ Galilean followers faced opposition from the same priestly authorities who had encouraged his execution in response to Jesus’ attempt to force a change in Temple worship. Disciples with enough commercial contacts or skills to be mobile settled out of harm’s way in cities near Israel, such as Damascus. Damascus was a big pluralistic city with a thriving quarter of Jewish merchants. Ananias, who baptized Paul under prompting by his own visionary experience of Jesus (Acts 9:1-19), had gravitated there in 32 C.E., along with dozens of disciples like him, convinced that visions of Jesus alive and elevated to his Father’s Throne fulfilled God’s promises to Israel. They didn’t think of themselves as “Christians” yet. That word had not yet even been coined. They persistently called the teaching of their resurrected rabbi “the way” (hodos in Greek; Acts 9:2; 19:9, 23; 22:4; 24:14, 22), the equivalent of the Rabbinic term halakhah (literally, how God commands Israel to “go”). In the years before there was any formal division between Judaism and Christianity, Jesus’ followers saw their master as the fulfillment of Israel’s destiny, and most of them worked out their peculiar vision in peace with their Jewish neighbors.
By the time Matthew’s Gospel was written around 80 C.E., the leaders of the churches in Damascus clearly saw themselves as separate from the synagogues there, and they stopped using the designation “rabbi” altogether (Matthew 23:7—8), but Matthew also shows that the importance of vision had in no way diminished. This is the only Gospel, for example, that speaks of Jesus coming back to earth with his angels to judge all the nations, dividing them up into sheep and goats according to how people had behaved toward one another during their lives (Matthew 25:31-46). Depicted many times in Christian art, it is the classic scene of apocalyptic judgment: eternal punishment for the goats, eternal reward for the sheep. Matthew’s poetics pivot on the impact of apocalypse on the material world, just as Mark’s poetics pivot on the silent amazement that revelation brings.
It has taken me years to develop a taste for Matthew. Its hard-edged judgment and condemnation of the synagogue leaders of Damascus, together with its insistence that there is no hope for the “goats,” lead to Matthew’s vilification of “all the people” of Israel, who are portrayed as demanding Jesus’ execution from Pilate and saying, “His blood is upon us and upon our children” (Matthew 27:25). Yet with all its anachronism, this Gospel also conveys a sense of vision that is so powerful that it overtakes physical reality and transforms the world. Judgment and trenchant curses heaped on those who do not accept the message of Jesus are part and parcel of Matthew’s apocalyptic message. Jesus’ Resurrection becomes the model of how all the just will be raised at the end of time. This conception is overtly material in Matthew. Like some Pharisees of the same epoch, the Christian community in Damascus hoped for a physical resuscitation of the dead, not the purely spiritual Resurrection that Jesus, Paul, and Mary Magdalene had taught. The earthquake in Matthew symbolizes how the faithful, starting with Jesus, will be raised from the dead in the same body they had when they were alive: the dogma that Fundamentalists today say is the only correct teaching.
Matthew’s materialism derives from the belief that the apocalypse of Jesus, wherever and whenever it occurs, changes physical reality. Vision remains the gateway to revelation, but what counts most for Matthew is the material change in reality that revelation brings. Paul had said that only a “fool” would teach resuscitation of the material body after death (1 Corinthians 15:35-44), insisting that Resurrection needed to be understood spiritually. But Paul finds no place in Matthew’s conceptual universe, and Mary Magdalene’s vision appears in the deep shadow of physical apocalypse.
Despite sidelining Mary Magdalene’s vision, Matthew does not co
mpletely erase her, any more than Mark did. This incomplete erasure underscores her pivotal role as the prime herald of Jesus’ Resurrection. Matthew even admits what Mark only implies: after her angelic vision, Mary actually encounters the risen Jesus (Matthew 28:9-10). Matthew’s women not only see the angel; they meet Jesus himself as they depart from the mouth of the tomb. Matthew spells out what Mark implies—that the story of the women at the mouth of the tomb points toward a later encounter with Jesus himself.
Luke takes a different tack from that of Matthew, with poetics that have a literary ring about them. The Gospel opens by acknowledging the oral preachers who provided the sources for the text (Luke 1:1-4). Written around 90 CE. in Antioch, a more diverse and thoroughly pagan city than Damascus, Luke’s Gospel deliberately casts a wider net for these sources than Mark and Matthew do. The purpose of Luke (and its companion piece, the book of Acts, dedicated to the same patron, Theophilus; Acts 1:1; Luke 1:3) was to insist that, despite variety and controversy within Jesus’ movement, a single unifying movement of Spirit motivated everything that had happened since the time of John the Baptist’s preaching.
Jerusalem symbolizes Christian unity in Spirit for Luke; accordingly, this Gospel portrays the Resurrection in its own way, placing all Jesus’ Resurrection appearances in Jerusalem and ignoring any appearances in Galilee. Although Luke does make room for visionary appearances to disciples—preeminently Paul—far from Jerusalem, the dominant conception of Resurrection here is every bit as materialist as Matthew’s, but for a different reason. Luke localizes revelation, and the authority revelation brings, in Jerusalem, which is depicted as the unique locus of Jesus’ physical presence after his Resurrection.
Mary Magdalene Page 11
