The Jesus Discovery

by James D. Tabor

  The brilliant 4th century church father Augustine of Hippo carried forward Paul’s perspectives and pressed their implications to the limit. He faced sexual temptations his entire life, even fathering a child with his lover, but he sought to suppress his lust by choosing a rigorously ascetic life. His famous dictim inter faeces et uriname nascimur—“We are born between feces and urine”—yet with an immortal soul, lay at the root of his attraction and aversion to women. Perhaps the most notorious example of this unfortunate development in Christianity was the 5th century Latin theologian Jerome, the most learned of the church fathers. His savage condemnation of women and human sexuality was matched only by his disparagement of the “Old Testament” law and those Jews who did not respond to Jesus. He connected the two by arguing that the Old Testament was “carnal,” of the flesh, whereas Christ was spiritual and pure, from above. The virginal Christ, removed from the filth of sex, showed humankind the way to escape their fleshly bonds and achieve heavenly perfection. He even went so far as to state that a husband can best show his love of his wife by abstaining from sexual intercourse. He opposed bathing, makeup, and female adornment, and saw sex, symbolized by the female temptress, as fit for pigs and dogs. Jerome wrote openly about his bouts with sexual temptations.30

  Given this dualistic orientation toward the heavenly world and denigration of sex and birth—and therefore women as the vehicle of both—one can readily see how Mary Magdalene, Jesus, Mary the mother of Jesus, and even Joseph her husband had to be cast as living nonsexual lives. This obsession with virginity is firmly grounded in 2nd and 3rd century CE asceticism, not in Jesus’ own life and times.

  MARY MAGDALENE AS SINNER AND WHORE

  It is an easy step from this stream of dualistic misogynist thinking, the core of emerging 4th and 5th century Christianity, to recasting the New Testament figure of Mary Magdalene as a sinner and even a whore. None of eleven New Testament texts that mention her presents her in any negative light. On the contrary, as we have seen, she seems to be the leader of the band of faithful Galilean women who stand by Jesus at the cross. Even when the men have fled in fear, she prepares spices and perfumed oils in order to complete the Jewish rites of burial, and she becomes a first witness to the empty tomb and Jesus’ resurrection. She enters and exits the scene in the space of a few pages of our texts—never to appear again in any New Testament text.

  There are three scenes in Mark, Luke, and John respectively that recount how Jesus was anointed with a flask of costly scented oil by a woman. As they now stand in our texts they are not the same narrative, yet their core elements are so similar that they appear to be three versions of the “same” story, a woman anointing Jesus.

  In the gospel of Mark the scene takes place in Bethany, a small village on the Mount of Olives just east of the city of Jerusalem, two days before Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion (Mark 14:3–9).31 Jesus is dining as a guest in the house of one called Simon the leper, otherwise unknown. A woman arrives with a flask of pure nard ointment, breaks it, and pours it over Jesus’ head. Some at the dinner protest that such a costly ointment has been wasted and could have been sold and given to the poor for three hundred denarii—which would be a year’s wages for a day laborer. Jesus defends the unnamed woman’s action, saying, “You always have the poor with you. She has done a beautiful thing.” He then declares: “She has done what she could. She has anointed my body for burying. And truly, I say to you, wherever the gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her” (Mark 14:8–9).

  The gospel of John seems to know a very similar story (John 12:1–8; 11:1–3). Again the scene is in Bethany, but six days before the crucifixion, and at dinner in the house of the two sisters, Mary and Martha, and their brother Lazarus, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. Martha is serving but Mary took costly ointment of pure nard and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped them with her hair. Judas Iscariot, who was to betray Jesus, objected that the ointment could have been sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor. The text points out that he did this out of greed, not care for the poor, for he served as bursar of the group and used to pilfer the funds. Jesus replied: “Let her alone, let her keep it for the day of my burial. The poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me” (John 12:7–8).

  In both texts the woman has a prophetic role—anointing Jesus’ body beforehand as if he were already dead; she is commended for her actions, as if she somehow “knows” more than the others, perhaps without even realizing it herself, while the others miss the point of her actions entirely. In John the woman is named—Mary of Bethany, and her family has already been introduced (John 11). In Mark she is unidentified, with the irony that her story will be told perpetually “in memory of her.” John’s account is more shocking, since the anointing of the feet, and especially the wiping of the feet with her hair, either implies a shockingly inappropriate intimacy or a familial bond, since men and women who are not married would never touch in this way. The hair of a woman was considered sexually provocative and was to be covered, as in conservative Middle Eastern societies today, both Jewish and Muslim.32 In that sense the story is scandalous, foreshadowing the attempt of Mary Magdalene to prepare spices and anoint the corpse of Jesus when he is dead. The problem is, Mary of Bethany is not Mary Magdalene—or is she? Mark had emphasized that Mary Magdalene and her entourage came from Galilee, whereas John introduces her at the crucifixion scene as an intimate family member, standing with Jesus’ mother.

  It is impossible to reconcile these differences. Mark and John clearly have the same story, but their details are different. The strong implication in John is that Mary of Bethany is otherwise known as Mary Magdalene, and that she is either married to Jesus or otherwise considered like a sister, a part of the family. Mark knows nothing of this and never mentions Mary of Bethany.

  Luke’s story recasts everything (Luke 7:36–50). The setting is Galilee, not Jerusalem, weeks if not months before Jesus’ death. Jesus is dining at the house of a man named Simon, though it is not said he is a leper. A woman comes in off the street, unnamed, uninvited, and unannounced, but known to the village as a “sinner,” which implies she was a whore. The diners are reclining, in Greco-Roman banquet style, and she stands behind Jesus at his feet and begins to weep, wetting his feet with her tears, kissing them, and anointing them with oil. Nothing is said about the cost of the oil and the objection is not the waste but that Jesus would permit himself to be touched by a sexually promiscuous woman and not realize, were he a prophet, her sinful status. Simon objects and Jesus rebukes him, commending the woman for her uninvited hospitality in welcoming him, washing his feet, and loving him. He declares: “Therefore I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little.” He then turns to the woman and says to her, “Your sins are forgiven.” The dinner guests were even more scandalized that he could claim the right to forgive sins.

  Some have doubted that the parallel accounts in Mark and John are related to this one, but most scholars, knowing that Luke is using Mark as his narrative source, are convinced he is deliberately recasting the scene. He drops the anointing scene entirely from the last days of Jesus’ life, moves it to Galilee, and puts it much earlier. Why would he do this?

  The answer is most likely that he wants to disparage Mary Magdalene. Immediately following his anointing story he introduces her by name but presents her as a terribly deranged woman, possessed of seven demons that Jesus had cast out! (Luke 8:2). Later, when he introduces the women from Galilee who stood by at Jesus’ crucifixion, he does not mention their names or put Mary Magdalene at their head. He records no appearance of Jesus to Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb, as do Matthew and John. Knowing how deeply embedded she is in early Christian tradition, Luke cannot write her out of the story completely, so he minimizes her role. Later in his narrative, as a further way of distancing himself from the anointing story in the gospel of John, he presents
two sisters, Mary and Martha, but has them living far outside of Jerusalem, somewhere in Galilee to the north (Luke 13:22).

  The Gospel of Peter, discovered in fragments in Egypt in the 1890s, adopts and further appropriates Luke’s marginalization of Mary Magdalene. In this text Peter is prominent, narrating the events surrounding Jesus’ empty tomb, but no women are mentioned at Jesus’ crucifixion scene, standing faithfully while the men fled. Although Mary Magdalene is mentioned, and even called a mathetria—a female disciple of Jesus, who comes early Sunday morning with her friends to mourn inside the tomb, most significantly Jesus never appears to the women and they receive no commission to go and spread the good news of the resurrection to the male disciples (Gospel of Peter 12:50).

  Luke’s strategy had a lasting effect. Readers of the gospels later found it easy to conflate the stories. First, it became common and accepted to identify Mary Magdalene with Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and brother of Lazarus. As early as the late 2nd century, Tertullian had already described Mary Magdalene as the “woman who was a sinner.”33 This salacious identification stuck. The image of Jesus as the all-forgiving one—the friend of prostitutes and sinners—was sexually provocative. The idea of the sinful woman, like Eve, seduced by the Devil, but now redeemed, could serve as the story of all women.34 It was Pope Gregory the Great (540–604 CE) who sealed her fate. He conflated John’s story of Mary of Bethany with the sinful woman who anoints Jesus in Luke, and declared both women were Mary Magdalene. He waxed on as to how Mary the whore, who once perfumed herself to seduce men, flirted with her eyes, arranged her hair, and made use of her lips, now turned all those elements in chaste service to the Lord—anointing him, weeping and wiping the tears with her hair, and kissing his feet.35

  In the Middle Ages Mary Magdalene became wildly popular, with legends growing up regarding her missionary travels to Europe. She became the model of the hopeless sinner, transformed from a sexually fallen woman to a chaste and forgiven saint. All over Europe there are hundreds of shrines and churches dedicated to her with her supposed relics. Her feast days are among the most popular on the church calendar. It was not until the late 1970s that the Roman Catholic Church officially repudiated the connection between Luke’s sinful woman and Mary Magdalene. Ironically, on a more popular level, the myth continues and most people still think of Mary Magdalene as the deranged whore whom Jesus redeemed. This view has been spurred on by films, plays, and books such as Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (based on Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel), and of course Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar. It’s an image too hard to resist—and yet if the Talpiot tomb is the tomb of the Jesus family and Mariamene can be identified with the historical Mary Magdalene, then the alternative, untold story is perhaps even more compelling.

  MARY MAGDALENE AS THE APOSTLE OF THE APOSTLES

  We have seen how Mary Magdalene, and in some cases her female entourage, are portrayed as “first witness” to Jesus’ empty tomb and given the commission to tell the male disciples he is risen in the New Testament gospels. In Mark the women flee from the tomb and say nothing to anyone (Mark 16:8). In Luke they report to the eleven remaining apostles but their testimony is considered an “idle tale” (Luke 24:11). In Matthew, as the women flee the tomb they meet Jesus, grab hold of his feet, and worship him, and he directs them to tell the male apostles he will meet them in Galilee (Matthew 28:9–10). Finally, in John, Mary Magdalene goes alone to the tomb and has her personal encounter and exchange with Jesus, thus becoming the first witness to Jesus raised from the dead and ascending to heaven (John 20:11–18).

  In addition to the Gospel of Peter there are a dozen or so ancient texts, most of them discovered in the last hundred years, that present an alternative “lost” portrait of Mary Magdalene and her role as Jesus’ female apostle extraordinaire—quite literally the apostle of the apostles and the successor to Jesus. Five of them were discovered in Egypt in 1945, buried in a jar in a field outside a village called Nag Hammadi. These texts are The Gospel of Thomas, The Dialogue of the Savior, The First Apocalypse of James, The Gospel of Philip, and The Sophia of Jesus Christ. Others, including Pistis Sophia, The Gospel of Mary, and the Acts of Philip, have turned up in various places, whether on the antiquities market, an archaeological dig, or lost or forgotten in ancient libraries. In these texts Mary Magdalene is Jesus’ intimate confidante and companion, one who possesses unparalleled spiritual insights that she received directly from him. She is praised, but also at times opposed—especially by Peter, leader of the male apostles, who is threatened by her position and status based on her special relationship with Jesus. These texts originate outside the mainstream, that is, the male-dominated form of orthodox Christianity that began to take hold and triumph down to the time of Constantine, the first Christian emperor (circa 325 CE). The canonical New Testament, with its twenty-seven approved documents, was increasingly regarded as the only authorized text, inspired by God, while these other texts were marginalized, declared heretical, and eventually lost and forgotten. They are witness to the diverse mix of “Christianities” that were developing in the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE before a more singular orthodoxy, backed by Christian councils and creeds, took center stage.

  Jane Schaberg has constructed a working profile of Mary Magdalene from these texts, isolating the major elements. Mary Magdalene is prominent among the followers of Jesus, she speaks boldly and is often in open conflict with the male disciples, she is an intimate companion of Jesus, and he praises her for her superior spiritual understanding and defends her.36

  Each of these texts contains an assortment of these elements but one in particular, The Gospel of Mary, has them all. This is an extraordinary text. This is the only gospel of a woman, and not just any woman, Mary Magdalene. A fragmentary copy of The Gospel of Mary was purchased in Cairo in 1896. It is written in Coptic but was likely translated from a Greek original. It dates to the early 2nd century.37 In this text Mary Magdalene is a beloved disciple of Jesus, taking center stage in leading the apostles and encouraging them. Peter is jealous of her, but admits her status as one closer to Jesus than anyone else, and more important, as one who received revelations that the male disciples were not privy to:

  Peter said to Mary: “Sister we know the savior loved you more than any other woman. Tell us the words of the savior that you remember, which you know but we do not, because we have not heard them.” Mary answered and said, “What is hidden from you I shall reveal to you” (Gospel of Mary 10).38

  As she begins to recount her visionary message both Peter and his brother Andrew express doubts about her veracity and question her authority. Peter objects: “Did he really speak with a woman in private without our knowledge? Should we all turn and listen to her? Did he prefer her to us?” (Gospel of Mary 18). Levi, who is better known as Matthew in the New Testament, defends her and rebukes Peter: “If the savior made her worthy, who are you to reject her? Surely the savior knows her well. That is why he has loved her more than us” (Gospel of Mary 18). The message Mary reveals, in this and many of these other texts, has been characterized as Gnostic, but most scholars consider the term to be problematic. It tends to lump them together as a monolithic whole.39 In our analysis of these texts we are not so much interested in the theological content as the framework of the profile of Mary Magdalene and her prominent status alongside Jesus.

  The Gospel of Philip is a beautifully written “gnostic” sermon by the followers of the brilliant 2nd century early Christian mystic and teacher Valentinus. Some have even suggested he is the author of the text. It refers to Mary Magdalene only twice, but both passages are noteworthy:

  Three women walked with the master: Mary his mother, [his] sister, and Mary Magdalene, who is called his companion. For “Mary” is the name of his sister, his mother, and his companion. (Gospel of Philip 59:6–10)

  The companion of the [savior] is Mary Magdalene. The [savior loved] her more than [all] the disciples, [and he] kissed
her often on her [mouth]. The other [disciples] said to him, Why do you love her more than all of us? (Gospel of Philip 63:32–64, 9)

  Translated, the word “companion” means his partner or consort. There is a worm hole in the papyrus right at the point where it says Jesus used to kiss Mary often on the . . . ? Most scholars have restored this to “mouth.” Scholars have debated whether this relationship between the two involved sexual intimacy, but it most likely did. It was considered a “sacred union,” but it was nonetheless physical.40

  Pistis Sophia contains a series of questions asked of Jesus, and Mary Magdalene has the most prominent role among the disciples. She asks thirty-nine of the forty-six questions and offers elegant teachings about the nature of life in the world. Jesus extravagantly praises her: “Blessed Mary, you whom I shall complete with all the mysteries on high, speak openly, for you are one whose heart is set on heaven’s kingdom more than all your brothers” (Pistis Sophia 18). Peter complains about her, telling Jesus “we cannot endure this woman,” but Jesus praises her pure spiritual insights and declares her the most blessed of all women.

  Scholars of these texts generally do not view them as historical accounts. However, they do generally agree that because she is the vehicle for alternative forms of emerging Christianity, her special role in the life of the historical Jesus, more muted in the New Testament gospels, reflects real history. Many of these documents come from the 2nd century CE and are accordingly not so far removed from the earlier Christian oral tradition and the canonical gospels.

  MARY MAGDALENE AND THE TALPIOT TOMBS