Mary Magdalene

by Bruce Chilton

  131 When Jesus says to Mary, “Do not touch me”: The command has been understood as a theological statement that underscores, in Raymond Brown’s words, “the permanent nature of his presence in the Spirit”; see The Gospel According to John (XIII-XXI), p. 1015. We can think of the same idea in simpler terms borrowed from Paul that speak of the “spiritual body” of the risen Jesus. That accords better with the visionary nature of Mary’s experiences in all the Gospels and with Jesus’ teaching in the Synoptic Gospels concerning those raised from the dead and the angels.

  131 John (12:1-8) explicidy names Mary of Bethany: I have argued that the resuscitation of Lazarus in John’s Gospel is historical, and Jesus’ intimacy with Mary and Martha has caused me to infer they were related to him; see Rabbi Jesus, pp. 24-25, 234-247.

  131 Because prostitutes were believed to give men leprosy: Katherine Ludwig Jansen, The Maying of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 149—167, 174. As Professor Jansen also observes (p. 176), this belief rationalized the treatment of Jews, who were segregated in much the same way prostitutes and lepers were in medieval Europe, because prostitution and money lending were held to go together. Just as John’s Lazarus and Luke’s were mixed up, so the Mary of Luke 10:38—42 has been identified with Mary Magdalene since the Middle Ages. As I have indicated, medieval legend might be quite right in the last case.

  133 In Thomas, the “Living Jesus”: The document begins, “These are the secret sayings that the Living Jesus said, and the Twin, Judas Thomas, wrote them.” My special thanks are due to Professor J. M. Plumley of Cambridge University, who taught me Coptic in 1974 and permitted me to work from photographs of the original manuscripts from Nag Hammadi. The Coptic manuscripts of the work come from the fourth century, but fragments in Greek establish that the work was written during the second century. Its reliance on all the canonical Gospels shows that Thomas must have been composed after the first century; see Chilton, “The Gospel According to Thomas as a Source of Jesus’ Teaching,” Gospel Perspectives 5 (1985): 155-175. For a good version of the Coptic text, and a translation with notes and a good bibliography, see Marvin Meyer, The Gospel of Thomas: The Hidden Sayings of Jesus (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1992). Further references are available in Meyer’s Secret Gospels: Essays on Thomas and the Secret Gospel of Mary (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2003), and in Stephen J. Patterson, The Gospel of Thomas and Jesus (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge, 1993).

  Thomas promises to convey the reality of Resurrection to the attentive Gnostic: Richard Valantasis, The Gospel of Thomas (London: Routledge, 1997); Stevan Davies, The Gospel of Thomas: Annotated and Explained (Woodstock, VT: SkyLight Paths, 2002).

  That antagonism may well reflect tension between the increasingly patriarchal hierarchy of Christians who called themselves Catholic: Throughout the ancient period, the term kfitholikos derived from the phrase kath holes, which means, “across the whole.” Catholic teachers tried to define a literally wholistic Christianity that all civilized people could embrace. The patriarchalization of ordained ministry, an imitation of the hierarchies of Roman power, was a byproduct of the attempt to make the Church as respectable and unified as possible.

  Peter appears in the Nag Hammadi Library more often than Mary does: A document called the Apocalypse of Peter even has Peter complain about those “who name themselves bishop and also deacons, as if they have received their authority from God… These people are dry canals” (Apocalypse of Peter VII. 79.24-30). Far from being a symbol of opponents in the Church, the Peter of Gnosticism could protest against ecclesiastical power.

  Bhagwan Rajneesh, the guru of Poona: Bhagwan Rajneesh, with Amrit Pathik and Satya Deva, The Mustard Seed: Discourses on the Sayings of Jesus Takfn from the Gospel According to Thomas (New York: HarperCollins, 1978). See the article by Gail Hinich Sutherland in American National Biography 18 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 85—86.

  Primeval androgyny: Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty and Mircea Eliade, “Androgynes,” in The Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 1, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 276-281; Mircea Eliade, Mephistopheles and the Androgyne: Studies in Religious Myth and Symbol, trans. J. M. Cohen (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1965), pp. 103-124.

  But whether you take the language physiologically or spiritually: There is evidently a strong aspect of symbolic meaning here, as in the First Apocalypse of James from Nag Hammadi (V.41.15—19): “The perishable has gone up to the imperishable, and the element of femaleness has attained to the element of this maleness.” The Gospel According to Thomas earlier indicates the purpose of Mary’s sex change—however conceived—and teaches how the change is accomplished. The risen Jesus’ entire aim involves becoming one with the heavenly counterpart that people are searching for in their lives (saying 22):

  When you make the two one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make an eye in the place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter the kingdom.

  Divine androgyny is more male-looking than female-looking, as the close of this Gospel shows, but its final result is nonetheless androgyny, because “the male will not be male nor the female be female.” The whole process occurs within a total reconciliation with one’s heavenly image, the divine template from which humanity was created. Marvin Meyer makes a game effort at saving Thomas from its own words in “Making Mary Male: The Categories ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in the Gospel of Thomas,” New Testament Studies 31 (1985): 554—570. But after all his labors, even he has to admit, in a classic understatement, “the specific use of gender categories may be shocking to modern sensitivities” (The Gospel of Thomas, p. 109). For a full account of Meyer’s position, see Secret Gospels, pp. 76-106.

  13.THE GODDESS AND THE VIXEN

  The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine shows how medieval devotion: Christopher Stace and Richard Hamer, Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Selections (London: Penguin, 1998), pp. 165-172; William Granger Ryan, Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 374—383. For discussion of the motifs mentioned here, see Katherine Ludwig Jansen, The Maying of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 36-46, 298—299.

  “I am the whore and the holy one, I am the wife and the virgin”: The Thunder, Perfect Mind VI.2.13.13-14, in The Nag Hammadi Library in English, ed. James M. Robinson (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978).

  139 “Anointing is superior to baptism”: Elsewhere, Christ’s whole purpose is to anoint with an ointment that is described as “the mercy of the father who will have mercy on them” (The Gospel of Truth I.3.36.15-25), and anointing also conveys Holy Spirit, much as we have seen already in the Didascalia (The Apoc-ryphon of John II. 1.6.25-30). Similarly, the First Letter of John in the New Testament (1 John 2:20, 27) speaks of anointing as the source of sanctity and wisdom for all believers. The Gospel of the Egyptians III.2.44.24—25 includes a similar statement.

  140 The briefest of statements about her in this Gospel has spawned a diverse progeny of interpretations: Hans-Martin Schenke, Das Philippus-Evan-glium (Nag-Hammadi-Codex II, 3) (Berlin: Akademie, 1997), p. 270; Wesley W. Isenberg, “The Gospel According to Philip,” in The Nag Hammadi Library in English, ed. J. M. Robinson (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978), pp. 131—151; Martha Lee Turner, The Gospel According to Philip: The Sources and Coherence of an Early Christian Collection (Leiden: Brill, 1996); R. McL. Wilson, The Gospel of Philip: Translated from the Coptic Text, with an Introduction and Commentary (London: Mowbray, 1962); Jacques E. Menard, L‘ Evangile selon Philippe (Paris: Letouzey & Ane, 1967).

  Jesus and Mary were married,
or everything but married, and their offspring grew up in France and fed the French royal line: There are many versions of this legend, none of which is sufficiently cogent or grounded in evidence to merit being called a theory. For those who wish to pursue what can be said in this vein, the best single volume, in my opinion, is Lynn Picknett and Clive Thomas, The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ (New York: Touchstone, 1997), although other books of this genre have already been mentioned here.

  The confusion between kissing and intercourse is not his problem or The Gospel According to Philip’s: Elaine Pagels has described the significance and context of the kiss; see “Ritual in the Gospel of Philip,” in The Nag Hammadi Library After Fifty Years: Proceedings of the 1995 Society of Biblical Literature Commemoration, eds. John D. Turner and Anne McGuire (Leiden: Brill, 1997), pp. 280-291, 282: And although we cannot say what precise ritual form Philip may have in mind, he does mention divestiture of clothing (75.20—26), descent into water (64.24; 72.30-73.1; 77.1-10), and immersion as the threefold name (“father, son, and holy spirit”) is pronounced over the candidate (67.20-22) apparently followed by chrismation (69.5-14; 67.4-9), and the kiss of peace (59.1—6), and concluded by participation in the eucharist.

  Pagels goes on to say, “Nothing in Philip’s allusive and poetic references to these ritual elements is incompatible with the ritual that Hippolytus, describing what is probably a conservative form of Roman practice some 70 to 80 years later, relates in detail.” Although this dating places Philip too early, the conclusion is sound.

  The grace-conceiving kiss was mouth-to-mouth, as in the old Galilean custom of greeting: Rabbi Jesus, pp. 43, 82, 104, 133-134, 182, 259.

  The holy kiss was, in fact, prevalent throughout the practice of Catholic and Orthodox Christianity: Hippolytus of Rome, who also wrote during the third century, sets out the practice of the kiss as part of the traditional liturgy; Paul Bradshaw and Carol Babawi, The Canons of Hippolytus (Bramcote, Nottinghamshire: Grove, 1987), Canon 18 (forbidding women to kiss men, in a restriction of the practice, a regulation that grew over time).

  142 Both Gnostics and Catholics were accused by their opponents of promiscuity: Stephen Benko, Pagan Rome and the Early Christians (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 54—78.

  Hippolytus, the third-century Roman liturgist, reserved the kiss solely for those already baptized: Burton Scott Easton, The Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934), vol. 2, pp. 17—18.

  The most infamous accusation comes from Epiphanius: See Philip R. Amidon, The “Panarion” of St. Epiphanius, Bishop of Salamis: Selected Passages (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), translating Panarion 26.1.1— 26.17.9. Epiphanius refers to a lost document he calls Greater Questions of Mary. For an assessment of the plausibility of the charges, see Silke Petersen, “Zerstort die Wer’te der Weiblichl{eit!” Maria Magdalen, Salome und andere Jüngerinnen Jesu in christlich-gnostischen Schriften (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 127—131; Jeffrey Kripal, “The Apocryphon of the Beloved,” in Homosexuality and Religion, Part III: Christianity and Comparative Reactions, ed. K. C. Serota (Annandale, NY: Bard College, 2004), pp. 1-30; Anneti Marjanen, The Woman Jesus Loved: Mary Magdalene in the Nag Hammadi Library and Related Documents (Leiden: Brill, 1996), p. 191.

  in the sixth century, Pope Gregory could easily make Mary Magdalene the emblem of sexual penitence in the city of Rome: In chapter 6,1 discussed the brilliant sermon in which Gregory connected this imagery to his interpretation of the Song of Songs and the longing for God in the monastic life. In developing his theme, Gregory seems to assume that his basic portrayal of Mary is already a matter of tradition; his innovation lies in his specifically exegetical connections. See Dom David Hurst, Gregory the Great: Forty Gospel Homilies Translated from the Latin (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1990), pp. 187, 198 (Homily 25).

  “Mary, blessed one, whom I will complete in all the mysteries of the height”: Carl Schmidt, ed., Pistis Sophia, translation and notes by Violet Mac-Dermot (Leiden: Brill, 1978), vol. 1, pp. 17—21, 24—27, 30—32, 33-34.

  In the influential sermon of Gregory the Great: Hurst, Gregory the Great, Homily 25, pp. 187, 198. As sources, Hurst cites the Maurist text of Migne’s Pa-trologia Latina, ms. 69 at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge (eighth century), ms. 12 in the Archivo Capitular de la Catedral de Barcelona (eighth century), and ms. 12254 in the Bibliotheque Nationale (ninth century).

  By the thirteenth century, a late form of Gnosticism flourished in the West: Malcolm Lambert, The Cathars (Oxford: Black well, 1998); Rene Weis, The Yellow Cross: The Story of the Last Cathars’ Rebellion Against the Inquisition, 1290-1329 (New York: Vintage, 2002); Rene Nelli, Ecritures Cathares, ed. Anne Brenon (Monaco: Rocher, 1995); Malcolm Barber, The Cathars: Dualistic Heretics in Languedoc in the High Middle Ages (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 2000); Roelof van den Broek, Studies in Gnosticism and Alexandrian Christianity (Leiden: Brill, 1996), pp. 157-177 (“The Cathars: Medieval Gnostics?”).

  From there, it was a short step to make her into Jesus’ concubine: This motif has been discussed in chapter 2 and is documented in a contemporary source; see Pierre des Vaux-de-Cernay, The History of the Albigensian Crusade: Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay’s Historia Albigensis, trans. W. A. Sibly and M. D. Sibly (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 1998), p. 51.

  (Despite speculative claims to the contrary, the Templars were a completely separate organization): Helen Nicholson, The Knights Templar: A New History (Phoenix Mill, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2001), pp. 240-244; J. M. Upton-Ward, The Rule of the Templars: The French Text of the Rule of the Order of the Knights Templar (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 1992).

  three centuries after their Crusade began, Martin Luther continued to countenance the idea that Jesus had a sexual relationship with Mary Magdalene:/). Martin Luthers Werke, kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimar: Bohlau, 1893), vol. 2, no. 1472, April 7-May 1, 1532, p. 33, a remark best taken as a reflection on how people viewed Jesus, rather than as a categorical assertion. But the idea has a life of its own; see Margaret George, Mary, Called Magdalene (New York: Viking, 2002).

  the woman taken in adultery, whose stoning Jesus prevented: This is a late addition to John’s text, not a part of the original Gospel. Scribes were so uncertain where it belonged that some added it at different places in John (or to Luke!); see Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Gree’t New Testament (Stuttgart: United Bible Societies, 1971), pp. 219—222. The crime of condoning adultery was alleged by one of the Crusaders, a cardinal named Raynaldus, in his thirteenth-century Annales Ecclesiastici; see S. R. Mait-land, History of the Albigenses and Waldenses (London: Rivington, 1832), pp. 392-394-

  149 By the time the thirteenth century had closed, Franciscan preachers were exploring exacdy the same theme: Jansen, The Maying of the Magdalen, p. 148, citing a sermon by Luca da Padova.

  AFTERWARD: relics of the magdalene

  151 Mary Magdalene, the converted sinner and sister of Lazarus the leper:

  This picture of Mary is a hybrid of biblical passages, as I indicated in chapter 12. It conflates Mary Magdalene with Mary of Bethany, who had a brother named Lazarus (John 11:1—12:8), and then conflates him with the sore-ridden Lazarus who appears in Luke (16:19-31). His sores, in turn, are taken to make him a leper. From the point of view of historical study, this sort of free association is not convincing, but it illustrates the power of medieval imagination to use biblical passages to express its conviction about the transformative power of God’s Spirit. “The sweet friend of God” is Petrarch’s phrase, discussed in chapter 3; see Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalene: Myth and Metaphor (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1993), pp. 192, 196-197.

  ordered an excavation of the church crypt: Varying assessments of Charles’s dig, along with documentation, can be found in Victor Saxer, Le culte de Marie Madeleine en Occident (Paris: Clavreuil, 1959), pp. 218—219; Haskins, Mary Magdalen, p. 108; Katherine Ludwig Jansen, The Maying of the Magdalen: Preach
ing and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 36-115, 308-315. Jansen suggests Charles might have been inspired by legends, perhaps taught him by his mother, Beatrice of Provence.

  Relics of saints amounted to metaphysical data, not just historical curiosities: See B. D. Chilton and Jacob Neusner, Trading Places: The Intersecting Histories of Judaism and Christianity (Cleveland: Pilgrim, 1996), pp. 203-209. Augustine refers to Saint Stephen’s healings in City of God 22.8.

  Precious as those nails were, Constantine had some melted down and added to the metal of his helmet: Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, 1.17, who noted that some of the precious metal was also added to the bridle of the emperor’s horse.

  Mary Magdalene’s wealth and promiscuity prior to her conversion were equally legendary: Marjorie M. Malvern, Venus in Sackcloth: The Magdalen’s Origins and Metamorphoses (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1975); Ingrid Maisch, Maria Magdalena, Zwischen Verachtung und Verehrung: Das Bild einer Frau im Spiegel der Jahrhunderte (Freiberg: Herder, 1996).