Mary Magdalene

by Bruce Chilton

  Paul shared Mary’s conception of a transforming heart/mind as the key to human existence, but this conception was Mary’s before it was Paul’s. Knowledge of God for Mary and Paul (as for the Gnostics) could only be spiritual, derived from divine revelation. Just as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15 that Resurrection is not achieved by flesh or even by soul, but only by Spirit, so he also insists that “the man by soul [psykhikos in Greek] does not receive the things of the Spirit, for they are foolishness to him and he can’t know, because they are discerned spiritually” (1 Corinthians 2:14). Quoting Isaiah again, Paul specifies the “mind” [nous again] as the organ that perceives Spirit (1 Corinthians 2:16): “For who knows the Lord’s mind that will advise him? But we have Christ’s mind.”

  For some reason, a simple fact has been passed over in previous scholarship: Paul’s conception here agrees with the Magdalene’s as expressed in The Gospel According to Mary. Paul and Mary agree on “mind” as the locus of revelation, and their agreement is completely coherent with their shared conception of how Jesus was raised from the dead. Mary is the teacher who most likely influenced Peter in the practice of vision, and she also provided Paul (no doubt indirectly) with a visionary theory that he developed in explaining how people come to know God.

  Just as Mary’s teaching lies silently behind Paul’s where Resurrection is concerned, so the centrality of heart or mind represents her contribution to Paul’s anthropology of revelation. Mind for Paul discloses Spirit. Mind was also the visionary organ that powered the Magdalene’s recognition of the risen Jesus (John 20:16, discussed below). The importance of The Gospel According to Mary only emerges when we read it not in isolation but in its connection with the thought and practice of ancient Christianity as a whole. That principle, too often neglected in the study of Gnostic texts, permits us to perceive the power and continuing force of Mary’s vision.

  Linking Mary’s conception of the vision of the mind with her teaching of the spiritual nature of the risen state yields a final insight. The person she sees with her mind’s eye raised from the dead is no longer “flesh” or even “soul,” but pure spirit. Jesus no longer corresponds to the categories of this world, but is apprehended as we apprehend God—spiritually. Again, Paul puts Mary’s vision into words and into policy (Galatians 3:28): “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.”

  Paul said that all who believe in Jesus, Jews as well as Gentiles, become children of Abraham, a new “Israel.” Jesus was no longer flesh, so that no category of the flesh—not even circumcision as mandated in the Torah—could be used to limit one’s understanding of who could benefit from his teaching. Jesus had become a new, spiritual being, a “last Adam” in Paul’s words (1 Corinthians 15:45), who poured out the power of Spirit on others, no matter what the conventions of this world might say. What was an intellectual premise for Paul (however deeply felt) was for Mary a direct experience of her rabbi raised from the dead. As the androgynous Mary said in the language of later Gnosticism {The Gospel According to Mary 9.19-20), this “has prepared us and made us into men,” a new humanity, one in which distinctions of gender and race and religion no longer had any validity.

  The crossover of ideas and traditions between Christianity and Gnosticism alone explains how Mary Magdalene has been understood in the West. During the second century, the Gospel According to John and The Gospel According to Thomas had already articulated two crucial ideas that The Gospel According to Mary expressed with incomparable clarity during the third century: the nature of Resurrection vision and the Magdalene’s androgyny. Taken together, John’s Gospel, The Gospel According to Thomas, and The Gospel According to Mary bring to open expression some of the principal insights and themes of Christian gnosis.

  By the time the Gospel According to John was produced, around 100 C.E. in Ephesus, the confluence of Christianity and Gnosticism was thriving. John offers the possibility of a new, spiritual birth by being begotten from the “word” of God, rather than from flesh (1:12, 13). Rebirth from water and Spirit happens for John at the moment of baptism (3:3-8). John alone among the Gospels explicitly identifies Satan, the spiritual antagonist who resists this transformation, as “the ruler of this world” (12:31), the realm of flesh. The Gnostic Jesus of John’s Gospel triumphs over this enemy by his death: “Courage: I have overcome the world” (16:33).

  John’s Ephesian audience regarded itself as more philosophical than the well-educated rabbi Nicodemus, who in a scene of almost comic misunderstanding shows himself too literalistic to understand Jesus’ teaching about being born again (John 3:1-15). Rabbi Jesus tells him that a person must be born anew to see the kingdom of God. The Greek word used for anew can also be understood as “from above” or “again.” (This Greek word, anothen, corresponds to the English expression of taking a piece of music “from the top.”) But poor Nicodemus’s imagination is so limited, he finds himself asking how an old man could enter his mother’s womb a second time (John 3:4). In John’s caricature this “ruler of the Jews” struggles to understand what the baptized Christians for whom this Gospel is designed had long appreciated.

  Ephesus was a jewel of Greek culture on the western shore of Asia Minor. This commercially vibrant center with an active port hosted religious traditions from all over the Mediterranean, as well as innovative movements such as Christianity and Gnosticism and cults of Mystery. Traders transported goods and ideas overland toward the East and by ship south into the Mediterranean from the Aegean Sea, where they bartered for local produce and encountered local primordial traditions of worship and fertility. Ephesus boasted several synagogues, philosophical schools, lecture halls and theaters, temples for Hellenistic deities, a famous brothel, splendid baths and houses, giant tenements, and, by early in the second century, a spectacular library.

  John’s Jesus—unlike the Synoptics‘—“makes” water into wine like the god Dionysos (4:40), whose cult in Ephesus was a powerful influence. Jesus even offers his personal flesh to be eaten and his blood for drinking (6:52—59), much as in the Dionysian Mysteries— but unlike the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke. John also opens with a poem on the “word” of God (the logos; 1:1-18) that echoes Stoic and Platonic ideas at the same time that it resonates with themes at the opening of the book of Genesis. Taken as a whole, this Gospel is a hymn to the cosmic Christ by the Gnostic Church for those with the inner knowledge of how to be reborn in Spirit rather than flesh.

  Mary Magdalene’s vision of the risen Christ is central to the Gnostic rebirth that John’s Gospel offers. Mary is the first person to see Jesus, and in John, she sees Jesus himself, although she is hysterical and doesn’t recognize him at first (20:11-18). Only when he speaks her name does she realize that she is speaking to her rabbi, and so she cries out in Aramaic, “Rabbouni” (which is to say, “Teacher”) (20:16). She must have reached out to Jesus, because he says (v. 17), “Do not touch me, because I have not yet ascended to the father. But proceed to my brothers and say to them, I ascend to my father and your father, my God and your God.” Mary departs and is the first person to say, “I have seen the Lord” (John 20:18). It is her experience that ultimately teaches the other disciples how to see Jesus as well.

  This is by far the most detailed account of Mary’s vision in the New Testament, and it disrupts the pattern of her growing marginalization in the Synoptic Gospels. John does undercut the impact of Mary’s vision by interrupting the narrative with the race of Peter and his companion to the tomb and their inspection of the site (20:1-10). But this Gospel admits—contrary to what Paul says, and in agreement with what Mark implies and Matthew admits in broad strokes—that Mary Magdalene was the first to see the risen Jesus, and that this experience was part and parcel of her angelic vision.

  When Jesus says to Mary, “Do not touch me,” it is because his body is now spiritual, no longer to be touched or anointed. But in John, she shouldn’t touch him even prior to the R
esurrection. The physical separation of Jesus from Mary runs through the entire Gospel—expressing a fierce Gnostic ambivalence toward Mary and feminine sexuality.

  In the crucial scene of Jesus’ anointing prior to his death, John (12:1-8) explicitly names Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, as the anointer who is presented anonymously in Mark and Matthew. Having Jesus anointed by a woman whose relatives were present, including a male protector (Lazarus), removes any hint of impropriety from the scene and continues the pattern of the Magdalene’s marginalization. John does more than suppress the anointer’s identity (as happens in the Synoptics). This Gospel actually switches her identity, making sure that the hands of an unattached woman don’t sully Jesus.

  In the same way, only Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus anoint Jesus’ corpse (19:38-42). Mary takes no part whatever in preparing his body for burial, any more than her anointing portends his death. The policy is strictly “hands off all the way through the Gospel.

  Medieval interpretation exploited John’s conflation of Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany in the interests of a rich legendary elaboration. In this collapsing of two people into one, Mary Magdalene became the sister of Lazarus, and a further conflation made him the “leper” named Lazarus in Luke 16:20. Because prostitutes were believed to give men leprosy during the Middle Ages, it made sense that a single family, blessed by Jesus, should show the way to be relieved of two related ailments.

  John alienates rites of unction from Mary because contact with human flesh, even the flesh of Jesus, does not offer the hope of rebirth into the realm of Spirit. (When Jesus’ flesh is said to impart eternal life, that is only in the Eucharist, where his flesh is compared to the bread that God gave to Israel in the wilderness by means of Moses; John 6:25-59.) Mary’s significance turns on vision alone, and that vision is detailed with exceptional care. Nothing competes with it—not anointing or exorcism. No exorcisms whatever are included in John. That should not surprise us, given all the other Gnostic elements in John that we have seen. If contact with the flesh cannot be trusted enough to have Mary Magdalene anoint Jesus, why should the demons of this world have any place in the story of Jesus?

  In John’s universe, the world, the flesh, and the devil have no place at all next to the Son of God and those who can perceive him risen from the dead. Consequently, Mary Magdalene’s role is both truncated and enhanced. She emerges as a Gnostic visionary, and she continued in that role in the Gnostic tradition as the guardian of the vision of Christ raised from the dead. But her anointing is repressed. We have to put Gnostic and Catholic sources together to understand the whole picture that each side partially obscures: The Catholics wanted Mary anointing in silence; the Gnostics wanted Mary teaching with her hands behind her back. Historically, both sides were wrong. Yet in practice, both preserved vital traces of Mary Magdalene’s impact and continuing importance.

  Mary Magdalene’s distinctive, visionary witness to the Resurrection also comes through in The Gospel According to Thomas—but with a new perspective, one that explains her androgynous portrayal in The Gospel According to Mary. Thomas is an anthology of aphorisms and parables originally from the second century. It was first compiled in the Syriac language in the ancient city of Edessa in Syria, a counterpart of Ephesus in terms of its cultural patterns and vibrant intellectual life. But Gnosticism was an international movement, and Thomas was also embraced in Egypt eventually and translated into Coptic, continuing the living legacy of the language of the hieroglyphics.

  In Thomas, the “Living Jesus”—the eternal personality whom death could not contain—speaks wisdom that promises immortality. The Coptic text includes material presented in the canonical Gospels as well as teaching culled from oral traditions. Thomas focuses so completely on the wisdom spoken by the Living Jesus in response to questions from his disciples that it does not include any stories about Jesus. As the Living Jesus responds to his disciples’ problems, doubts, and entreaties, his epigrammatic wisdom becomes a rich rhythmic chant—a guide for Gnostic meditation complete with oral cues.

  The Gnostics who lived near Nag Hammadi, in Egypt, away from cities in their rural enclaves, used The Gospel According to Thomas as well as other texts deposited there to deepen their gnosis. Thomas clearly states its purpose, and the aim of Gnosticism as a whole: “The one who finds the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death” (saying i). Thomas promises to convey the reality of Resurrection to the attentive Gnostic, whose goal is to cheat death itself.

  Mary Magdalene plays a crucial role in bringing the meaning of mystical communion with the Living Jesus to expression, and Thomas ratchets up the ambivalence toward her that we have already seen in John’s Gospel. Her visionary insight reaches its height just as she is denigrated for being a woman.

  At the close of Thomas, Simon Peter declares that Mary should go away from the disciples altogether (saying 114): “Let Mary depart from us.” His sexism becomes absolute as he goes on to say, “Females are not worthy of the life,” referring to resurrected, spiritual life. Peter’s declaration would mean that Mary—and women in general— could not be involved in interpreting Jesus’ words. They would not even be included among the disciples who remembered and treasured Jesus’ teaching. But Peter’s exclusion of women in saying 114 conveys an even deeper, more disturbing sense. The right interpretation of what the Living Jesus says brings life, and the promise never to “taste death,” so that all who are not “worthy of the life” are disqualified as teachers. Only men could teach, because only men could be “worthy of the life.” Peter’s judgment in The Gospel According to Thomas implies that men alone could read, understand, and benefit from Jesus’ wisdom, and that Resurrection was for men only; as far as Peter was concerned, the state of being female rooted a person in this corrupt world to such an extent that Gnostic escape was impossible.

  Peter appears persistently in Gnostic literature as Mary’s antagonist. That antagonism may well reflect tension between the increasingly patriarchal hierarchy of Christians who called themselves Catholic and the attempt of many Gnostic Christians to maintain Mary’s leading role among disciples as a teacher of vision. Because Peter had been a foundational apostle in great cities such as Jerusalem, Antioch, and Rome, he was a natural symbol of male leadership in Catholic Christianity. The contrast with Mary Magdalene was inevitable, and Peter’s contradiction of Mary emerges as a trope in Gnostic sources.

  That dispute between the types of authority each represented emerged most clearly between the second and the fourth centuries; no first-century source represents Peter and Mary at the kind of constant loggerheads typical in some Gnostic literature. More than the actual teaching of the fisherman from Bethsaida, Peter in The Gospel According to Thomas sometimes represents what many Gnostics thought of their Catholic counterparts.

  But it would be superficial to claim that Simon Peter’s intervention, “Let Mary depart from us,” and the trenchant, antifemale attitude it articulates reflect only disagreement between Thomas’s community and the emerging hierarchy of Catholic Christianity. Peter appears in the Nag Hammadi Library more often than Mary does, and in an unequivocally positive light as a hero of the Gnostic quest. He is much more than a straw man to represent Catholic authoritarianism. Gnostic Christians were not about to cede the rich inheritance of Peter to their Catholic counterparts.

  In The Gospel According to Thomas, Jesus rebukes Peter’s rejection of Mary, but in terms that are the antithesis of some fashionable readings of the text, and which are all the more dramatic for being the book’s last words: “Every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven” (saying 114). The Coptic text of Thomas leaves no doubt about the meaning of these words, because female and male are the particular words for sexual difference, as in English. Mary is to become a guy. Whenever I read this passage in front of an educated audience, I anticipate an audible gasp. It sounds as though, if Mary wants to enter the kingdom, she needs to grow a penis.

  Wh
en an audience gasps at these words, they are expressing the perfectly natural revulsion of modern listeners to what seems to be a distorted and perverse view of human sexuality. But there is another reason for their shock. For decades, Thomas has been marketed in the United States as if it represented a kinder and gentler Christianity: less hierarchical, more concerned with nature, open to women, anti-authoritarian. One major publisher even sold a “commentary” on Thomas written by Bhagwan Rajneesh, the guru of Poona, who for more than a decade espoused a lucrative gospel of Tantric sex and encounter-group psychology with a dash of the Gnostic Jesus mixed in. After he was jailed and deported from the United States, his publisher found another commentator, but the New Age Thomas has been a proven seller nonetheless.

  This marketing campaign is designed to sell a Gnosticism that never existed, as any open-eyed reading of Thomas shows. If you believe, as the community of The Gospel According to Thomas did, that “the heaven and the earth came into being” for the sake of James, Jesus’ brother (saying 12), that is no less hierarchical than the veneration of Peter as it developed in Rome and elsewhere. If you say, as the “Living Jesus” does (saying 10), that not only earth but also heaven and the heaven above the heavens will be destroyed, that is no less apocalyptic—no less dismissive of the present world and its environment—than what Jewish and Christian seers of the same period said. If you accuse people who want to fast and pray and give alms of committing sin (saying 14), what is that but authoritarian? And finally, telling a woman to grow a penis (however metaphorically) cannot be construed as feminist except by active deception. The soft, liberal, New Age Thomas is an artifact of fuzzy analysis and false advertising. This Gospel will reveal its secrets only when it is read in its ancient context, not as part of a modern “progressive” agenda.