Luke is the first Gospel to have Mary and her companions (whose names change yet again) search the tomb and find it empty (24:2—4): “But they found the stone had been rolled away from the memorial, and entering did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. And it happened while they were at a loss concerning this, and look: two men stood opposite them in gleaming apparel.”
Luke produces a certifiably empty tomb, because the women go in and inspect it. Likewise, Luke has the risen Jesus insist on his own physical reality: only in this Gospel does Jesus explicitly say (24:39—43), “See my hands and my feet, that I am myself. Feel me and see, because a spirit does not have flesh and bone just as you perceive I have.” Jesus even eats some fish to make his point—and Luke’s: the Resurrection is substantial and material, more physical than in any of the other Gospels.
But what is Luke to do with the women’s vision, which is never described as anything but a vision, rather than a physical encounter? In this Gospel, Mary’s erasure becomes a brutal suppression. Mary Magdalene’s whole orientation subverted Luke’s materialism. Luke (that is, all those teachers who produced this Gospel, whether as oral teachers or literary editors) reacted fiercely.
The women in Luke don’t take part in Jesus’ interment, not even implicitly. They only watch and wait through the Sabbath with the ointment they have bought (Luke 23:55—56). But the significance of their ointment—and Mary’s connection to the anointing ritual—is lost in Luke, because the entire story about Mary’s anointing of Jesus prior to his death, the pivot of the Magdalene source, is excised.
Luke ruptures the connection between Mary’s ritual anointing during Jesus’ life and her visit to his tomb. The power of an ancient memory nonetheless makes Luke name Mary Magdalene first among the women at the mouth of the tomb. Badly erased, she still is not totally expunged.
Yet for all that Mary’s vision remains in Luke, Mary and her companions do not succeed in convincing the other disciples that their vision was authentic; the men reject their testimony as “nonsense” (leros, 24:9-12), idle tales from women. Apart from tangible—that is, physical—substance, Luke dismisses vision and women’s testimony with a single word.
For Luke’s Gospel, only Jesus personally, raised from the dead in flesh and bone (24:39), can explain his resurrected presence among his disciples. The book of Acts (1:3) sets aside a period of forty days, during which the risen Jesus teaches his followers in and around Jerusalem, not Galilee, and no mention of Mary Magdalene appears in this context.
In the midst of notorious disputes among Christians in Antioch (described in Acts 15 and Galatians 2)—between those who practiced circumcision and those who did not, those who avoided meat that had been sacrificed to Gentile idols and those who did not—Luke and Acts insisted that policy could be set only by the apostles in Jerusalem, on the basis of their experience of the Resurrection.
But couldn’t that apostolic company have included Mary and her companions? Weren’t such women recognized as apostles? Those are realistic possibilities, given what we know about Jesus’ movement in its early decades. After all, Paul refers to a woman named Junia as an apostle (Romans 16:7). Why wouldn’t someone like Mary Magdalene have had the same status?
Whatever the case in other communities, Luke shuts the door on any such suggestion. Neither Luke nor Acts ever speaks of women apostles; neither relates a personal encounter between Mary and the risen Jesus.
When Luke’s male apostles who see the risen Jesus write off Mary’s vision, that is no idle dismissal. It is astonishing that this occurs just before another visionary appearance of Jesus, one that Luke does accept. Men, and only men, speak of this appearance. A stranger joins two disciples (one named Kleopas) when they are on the way to Emmaus from Jerusalem after the crucifixion. (Recent suggestions that Kleopas’s companion might have been a woman stumble on the pattern of male dominance that Luke manifests.) At first, they do not recognize him, but he reveals himself to them as Jesus during a meal—and then becomes invisible (Luke 24:13-35). In Luke, this male-only account completely supersedes the story about Mary and the other women at the tomb.
By including this story, Luke endorsed vision as a partial experience of Jesus’ Resurrection, despite the Gospel’s materialist bias. That was vital to the plan of Luke and Acts, because all of Paul’s three encounters with the risen Jesus were strictly visionary (Acts 9:1-19; 22:6-16; 26:12-18; compare Galatians 1:15-17). Provided these visions were accepted by the apostles in Jerusalem, Luke was also willing to accept them.
But Luke had no use for the visionary precedent that came from Mary Magdalene and her colleagues; it had to be Kleopas and his companion who set the stage for Paul. There is no angelic commission in Luke for Mary and her companions to tell the apostles what they saw. Heavenly messengers simply remind the women of what Jesus himself had already told them when he was alive (Luke 24:6—7): “He is not here, but is raised. Remember how he spoke to you when he was still in Galilee, saying it was necessary for the one like the person to be delivered over into the hands of sinful people and to be crucified and on the third day to arise.” Kleopas sets apostolic faith in motion, while Mary is bracketed in parentheses, serving only to hold the place of what Jesus had said earlier, long before her vision.
Luke’s Gospel alludes to Mary’s intimate knowledge of Jesus’ practice of exorcism (8:2), as we have seen. But that obviously doesn’t make this Gospel feminist, because referring to women is not at all the same thing as including them as agents in Jesus’ ministry and Resurrection. Luke used sources that evidently did convey women’s perspectives, but this Gospel’s own view is quite different, focused on the unique authority of the male apostles in Jerusalem.
When Luke presents a woman named Mary as choosing “the good part” of a disciple by sitting at Jesus’ feet rather than serving him, the Gospel is careful to specify that this is Mary, Martha’s sister, not Mary Magdalene (10:38-42). In that way, sitting at Jesus’ feet or not, the woman would not be associated with any tradition or source that could compete with apostolic authority in Jerusalem. She does not even speak. But then Jesus’ mother, addressed by the angel Gabriel, identifies herself as “the slave of the Lord” (1:38). Luke’s dedication to the hierarchy of the Jerusalem apostles, together with a view of the Resurrection that in its own way is as materialist as Matthew’s, forced a marginalization of the Magdalene, her vision, her source, and her practice of anointing.
Mark, Matthew, and Luke constitute the best available sources concerning Mary Magdalene; they are nearest in time and ethos to the source Mary crafted. Scholars call these Gospels “Synoptic” because they are so similar, they can be printed out in columns and compared with one another. That sets them apart from John’s Gospel (to which we shall soon turn) and shows how close they all are to sources such as Mary’s. But they also illustrate a program of suppressing Mary’s influence. The Synoptic Gospels silence Mary in deference to Christianity’s emergent family values, and to prevent her view of Jesus’ Resurrection from interfering with their own. They give short shrift to Mary’s role in ritual anointing, and they all but wipe out explicit reference to her association with Jesus’ exorcisms.
The same Gospels that prove the Magdalene’s influence resent her memory and seek to displace it. That ambivalence infected texts that came later, both Christian and Gnostic, and has infected the scholarly and popular evaluation of Mary Magdalene to this day.
Chapter Eleven
ORTHODOX AMBIVALENCE AND THE GNOSTIC QUEST
Ambivalence shrouds Mary Magdalene in Mark, Matthew, and Luke. She threatened the growing conviction among those practicing Christianity that women’s authority had to be suppressed, yet Mary’s spiritual disciplines of exorcism, anointing, and vision were indispensable to Christian practice. A strained, sporadically broken silence was the result.
Mary moves in the oral shadows of written Gospels, ritually powerful yet muted. As Christianity spread throughout the Greco-Roman world, the strains on this silence
increased. Appeals to the tranquility of a male-ordered household became more and more insistent in Christian literature, but in that same literature women emerged in roles of religious leadership.
This tension crackles through the First Letter to Timothy, which is attributed to Paul but was in fact written some thirty years after his death. This counterfeit letter had several aims, largely related to church organization. It confines women to the role of bearing and rearing children (1 Timothy 2:13-15): “Because Adam was first fashioned, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the misled woman came into transgression. But she will be saved through childbearing, if they remain in faith and love and sanctification with prudence.” This is neither the teaching of Genesis nor the theology of Paul, but the party line of the up-and-coming Christian hierarchy that wanted to make sure that, as in a well-run Roman household, men were firmly in positions of leadership throughout the Church and that women did not abandon the roles of wives and mothers.
Yet the same 1 Timothy that stakes out this new doctrine of male dominance also admits that women can undertake the key role of being an “elder” (a presbuteros in Greek, from zaken in Hebrew). Within Judaism, this term designated a local synagogue leader, but its resonance goes well beyond Jewish custom alone. To this day in several cultures, the gathering of an extended family for a major event such as a wedding includes the designation of a senior relative as the elder of the proceedings. The elder does not personally direct the proceedings, but his presence assures that the event unfolds as it should.
In antiquity, an elder exercised a similar function in a synagogue or a church. The Greek word for elder is masculine in gender, and is applied normally to men, but the fact is that 1 Timothy (5:1-2) refers both to the “elderman” (presbuteros) and to the “elderwoman” (presbutera) leading a congregation.
The earliest known visual image of Christians celebrating a Eucharist, the meal that celebrated Christ’s sacrifice and his abiding presence with believers, is the fresco in the Saint Priscilla catacomb in Rome called Fractio Panis (The Breaking of Bread). Those who take part in the meal, including the person who is breaking and distributing the bread, are women. In this case, the presbutera is acting as a priest would act today, and that is no coincidence: The word priest in English is a contraction of the term presbuteros. In addition to the practices of exorcism and anointing that the Gospels associated with Mary Magdalene, the power of her vision of Jesus risen from the dead made women after her natural leaders of the Eucharist, the celebration of Jesus’ heavenly enthronement.
Two conflicting forces lie at the heart of the early Church’s fierce ambivalence about women, and they went beyond the scope of usual prejudices in the Greco-Roman world. As we’ve observed, Christians wanted to appear more Roman than the Romans in the control they exercised over their households. At the same time, they wrestled with the meaning of Paul’s principle of an overriding human unity—“There is not a single Jew or Greek, not a single slave or freedman, not a single male or female, because you are all one in Jesus Christ” (Galatians 3:28)—as well as with the simple fact that Jesus had included women such as Mary Magdalene among his closest disciples.
Unknown to the general public and often ignored even in scholarship, the women presbuterai exerted a deep influence in the Church until the fourth century of the Common Era. They continued the inheritance of women from the Scriptures of Israel. They led worship, as did another Miriam, the psalmist and sister of Moses who celebrated the exodus from Egypt (Exodus 15:20-21). Like Deborah, prophetess and judge (Judges 4—5), a presbutera could guide small communities that were torn apart by persecution and strife. The memory of Huldah, the prophetess in Jerusalem during the seventh century B.C.E., also resonated with the example of leadership that Mary Magdalene set. When King Josiah found a book of the Torah, he confirmed it was indeed the Law of Moses by consulting Huldah (2 Kings 22:8-20) rather than any male prophet. Similarly, Mary Magdalene became the prime herald of the resurrected Jesus as a living spiritual principle and personality.
Mary exerted such authority as the herald of Jesus’ Resurrection that some of Christianity’s earliest teachers called her “apostle of the apostles.” Her role as an ur-apostle in this sense was recognized from the second century. Her role aligns with that of women in the early sources of Rabbinic Judaism; figures such as Imma Shalom and Beruria demonstrate that there was a Judaic tradition of women as authoritative teachers, experts on halakhah, and guides to divine Wisdom.
Feminine ministry in its complexity and breadth, authorized by the memory of the Magdalene, surfaces in even the most dogmatic texts of Catholic Christianity during the ancient period. Hippolytus, a famously conservative priest of third-century Rome, designated Mary as the ur-apostle in his commentary on the Song of Songs, a treatise that features the powerful effect of the oil of anointing. Mary Magdalene, the Holy Spirit, and the practice of anointing all converged in ancient Christian practice.
An order of church worship and regulation called the Didascalia of the Twelve Apostles—compiled in Syria during the third century on the basis of earlier traditions—explicitly commands, “You shall revere the deaconess in the place of the Holy Spirit” (9.26.6). Women in the ordained role of deaconess actually represented the Spirit in divine worship as far as the ancient Syriac community that produced the Didascalia was concerned. The primordial Semitic association between the Spirit of creation and divine Wisdom, both feminine, survived and flourished where Jesus’ own patterns of thought and practice were remembered.
Holy Scripture mandated the role of deaconesses according to this source, and Mary Magdalene provided the premier example (Didascalia 16.12.4, referring to Matthew 27:55-6): “We have said that the service of a woman deaconess is above all obligatory and necessary, because our Lord and Savior was served by women deaconesses, who are: Mary Magdalene, Mary the daughter of James, and the mother of Joses, and the mother of the sons of Zebedee with other women.”
The Didascalia stresses this role of women’s ministry, even though its dedication to Hellenistic patriarchy caused its authors to stipulate that deaconesses must anoint but cannot teach (Didascalia 15.6.2): “If the women were intended to teach, our Master would have commanded them to teach with us.”
Saying that Jesus’ “deaconesses” ministered to him implied physical contact. Despite this implication of anointing across the line of gender in Jesus’ time, the Didascalia advocated none of that during its own period. It guarded against this possibility by insisting that women should be in physical contact only with other women (16.12.2): “First of all, when women go down in the water for baptism, it is obligatory that those who go down in the water should be anointed with the oil of unction by the deaconess.” The practice of baptism involved sexual apartheid because people entered the water naked, and the deacons or the deaconesses anointed their bodies.
Unction was not only the dab of oil on the forehead and hands at the time of death that it has become in modern Christianity. It involved a full-body application of oil, and the ritual was repeated, both for healing and for sanctification. Prior to baptism, the candidate received “the oil of exorcism,” to expel the evil of that person’s former life. After baptism came “the oil of thanksgiving,” celebrating the Holy Spirit, which inhabited the individual’s whole body.
No wonder the Didascalia wanted to hold on to the role of the deaconess and insist that she alone represented the Holy Spirit where anointing women was concerned, notwithstanding its desire to exclude women from positions of power and influence. A policy of separating the sexes resulted, gathering force over time. Once Christianity had become a state-sponsored and thus widely accessible institution during the fourth century, the intimacy of esoteric groups in which men might anoint women and women might anoint men was lost. The character of the Church changed dramatically during the fourth century, after Constantine’s conversion. The small, sometimes clandestine meetings of Christians liable to persecution, willing in their ecstatic worship to c
hallenge conventional expectations, became large, officially sanctioned liturgical services in basilicas, where the participants consciously shaped their behavior to serve as a model for the Roman Empire. Public decency demanded the sexual apartheid in baptism that quickly became the rule.
Eventually, a distrust of human bodies as such would go beyond sexual apartheid and greatly restrict the practice of anointing—in the extent of flesh that could be touched, the frequency of the rite, and in the clergy authorized to administer it. By the Middle Ages, “extreme unction”—as it came to be called, the term itself indicating the rite’s marginalization—had become one of the “Seven Sacraments.” Only people at the point of death would receive it, by having their foreheads and hands anointed by an all-male priesthood. (Interestingly, some sacramental manuals called for priests to anoint the area of the kidneys of men [only, of course] when administering extreme unction. That seems to recall the ancient memory of anointing a person’s body as a whole.) Women no longer served as clergy, and the repeated full-body application of oil in the ancient church was supplanted by a practice that could only conceive of human bodies as sacred above the eyebrows and on the hands, provided the latter were pure.
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