Mary Magdalene, The Unknown

by Rev. Carol E. Parrish

As we begin our exploration of Mary Magdalene, let’s start by remembering that traditions are built. They evolve. And right now the Christian tradition is struggling to evolve. We would recall that the early Christians had no New Testament, no Apostles Creed, no church authorities, no buildings and no single understanding of Jesus. Early Christians debated all the basic issues of the time and how to apply what they had heard Jesus say in his teachings: the nature of salvation, the value of prophetic authority, the role of women and slaves and the vision of a community.

We know now from recent discoveries of the Nag Hammadi Scrolls and other “new” books (today we have at least forty-six different books we did not have before). All of these pieces of information are revealing new perspectives on the early aspects of our tradition. They reveal a diversity that if we grew up in a specific denomination we probably did not get.

We need to be reminded of several facts:

1) That both the New Testament and the Nicene Creed were put together by debates and disputes that led to compromise and all the “voters” did not believe all that was agreed to.

2) Remember the Creed did not have anything about Jesus’ teachings in it.

3) It was written to protect the new body of leaders from ideas, the leaders believed to be wrong….to be in the club, you had to believe like them.

4) Remember women were not in high favor socially at that time, so to keep them out of the spotlight seemed “natural” at the time.

5) Now we have some new books, we can say “gospels”, the term meaning “good tiding”, that place Mary Magdalene in a role that proper Jewish Society of the time could not endorse.

6) In reviewing historical data, we can see that painting her as a prostitute served the establishment. By making her a repentant prostitute, her leadership was undermined both as a woman, but also the early ideas of the “need for a deep personal inner life” that had been encouraged by those who did not embrace structured church authority were weakened.

7) The Winners of the disputes wrote the history as well as the rules…all too often this is easily forgotten.

In the Gospel of Mary, Peter is portrayed as a hot-head who refuses to believe Jesus could have possibly given Mary any special teachings. We then have to deal with the concept that the group following Peter may have felt the same way. In 1 Timothy women are encourage to be silent and to bear children to seek salvation. Does this not sound like Cultural Practice more than new religious breakthrough?

We might recall as well that the issue of Women’s leadership has not gone away, nor has the issue of “inner wisdom” or “inner authority”. Since most of our religious training is based on the Bible and outer authority, they are large-as-life issues, especially for the “esoteric” community.

Let us proceed with all that understanding as we study the New Testament. Here we meet the stories of women who loved Jesus and some who became quite deeply involved with establishing the first house churches. The homes were the territories of the women and we read so often of Jesus speaking or teaching in the home of this person or that.

Mary Magdalene, a strong and spirited woman, was a leader among the Galilean women who were disciples of Jesus. Some of the men found it difficult to share status with a woman. Others envied her privileged position. Peter and his brother Andrew complained that Jesus seemed to favor her, for he would tell her things he did not share with them.

One of the women once said to Peter, “Why are you so hostile to her? She is not an adversary. If Jesus finds her worthy, who are you to reject her?” The female disciples respected Mary for her competence and her wisdom. A circle formed around her of women who ministered to other women with compassion and empathy.

Today [July 22, Magdalene's Feastday] we review the life of Mary of Magdala, a woman who has suffered discrimination through the centuries and perhaps we can gain a new insight to her story. Let us hear with new ears of the first witness of Jesus’ resurrection…the story of Mary of Magdala, or as she is also known, “the Apostle to the Apostles”.

When we use the word “apostle” we usually are speaking of more than just the twelve disciples; this name includes those of the circle close around Jesus and the disciples...usually considered to be about seventy in number.

There is no Biblical evidence that Mary of Magdala was either a prostitute or a public sinner. There is ample evidence however that she was a strong leader, a close companion of Jesus and the first to witness the resurrection. We can think of her as an early role model of partnership ministry in spreading the good news of Jesus’ transformative message of love and healing.

If Mary of Magdala was so significant to the early apostles why would we not have heard of her strong discipleship role during Jesus’ lifetime and her prominent leadership role in the infant church?

There are several possible explanations. One is a common misreading of Luke’s gospel which tells us that “seven demons had gone out of her” (Luke 8:1-3). To first century ears, this meant only that Mary had been cured of a serious illness, not that she was sinful. The number seven symbolized only that her illness had either been very severe or recurred frequently.

Others have suggested she had seven personality traits that needed to be healed before she could open to higher consciousness. Some commentators suggest the term “demons” indicates a nervous disorder or mental illness, perhaps epilepsy. Others have suggested she may have simply been arrogant, selfish, angry, or judgmental, perhaps prejudiced or perhaps hidden fear made her appear uncaring.

The specifics of her illness are not made clear. Frank S. Mead in his Who’s Who in the Bible says,”at most she was neurotic”. While the seven demons could have been human traits, what is most clear is that as healing came, Mary of Magdala accepted Jesus as her teacher. She became a most loyal and supportive follower who in the end stood with Mary, mother of Jesus and the other women at the cross.

In Luke 7:36-50 just prior to Luke 8 where Mary of Magdala is healed, there is a story of a “sinful woman who loved much”. Perhaps this led to the association of Mary Magdala with this woman “of bad reputation” and the story of she who washes Jesus’ feet with her tears, and dries them with her hair. However there are those that reference that [anointing] act as one of intimacy with Jesus, because otherwise, most women of the time would not touch a male from another family in such a manner.

This negative connection regarding Mary Magdalene developed in the third, fourth and fifth centuries and was officially affirmed by Pope Gregory (540- 604) when he identified her as a public repentant sinner. She then was identified as a sinful woman and the message of Jesus who uses that occasion to teach his host Simon about the nature of forgiveness. Simon notes that Jesus did not know who the woman was. Since the story of Luke (8:13) appears immediately after this vignette, Mary Magdalene could have been mistakenly associated with the repentant woman.

Another possible explanation is that by the third and fourth centuries, male Church leaders were successfully suppressing women disciples’ co-equal leadership. The Christian community was caught in a cultural conflict as it moved from worship in house churches, where women’s leadership was accepted and felt to be appropriate, to worship in public places where such leadership was deemed inappropriate and shameful. The Montanist and Valentinian Churches, both orthodox-bishop led groups, with both male and female leaders eventually suppressed, not because their teachings were heretical, but because women as well as men were permitted coequal leadership.

Gregory’s identification of Mary as a repentant sexual sinner appealed to the popular imagination and led to an effort to reconstruct her history from scriptures. As knowledge of Jesus’ many women friends faded from historical memory, the stories associated with them were combined. It is all the more significant when women such as Mary of Bethany, her sister Martha, or Mary Magdala are specifically named. It is a sign of just how vital a place they still occupied in the church’s living memory. Mary Magdalene, in particular, was firmly associated with two vital facts: she was a witness to the crucifixion and she was the first witness to the Risen Jesus.

From cultural condemnation Mary of Magdala came to be known not as the strong woman leader who loved Jesus through a fearsome death, first witnessed his Resurrection and proclaimed the Risen Savior in the early church, but as a wanton woman in need of repentance. Mary of Magdala is perhaps the most maligned and poorly understood figure in early Christianity. While there is no biblical evidence that Mary was either a prostitute or public sinner, all four Gospels do name her a close companion of Jesus and the first to whom Jesus appears at the resurrection.

Mary Magdalene has been romanticized, allegorized, and mythologized beyond recognition. Paintings throughout history, some little more than pious pornography, have represented her as the epitome of both sensuality and spirituality. The net effect has been in most cases to reinforce the unfortunate notion that sexuality, especially female sexuality, is shameful, sinful and cause for repentance. The actual biblical account paints a far different portrait than that of the bare-breasted reformed harlot of Renaissance art.

It has been suggested that humanity needed a repentant prostitute among the saints. With all its sexual taboos and emphasis on sin and ritual purity, the Judeo-Christian tradition exiled sensuality to the darkest recesses of our consciousness, as it did the “divine feminine”. The formal church needed Mary Magdalene to be a prostitute because she could then offer hope for humanity’s own unruly shadow energy. Making her a prostitute trivialized her true sexuality and made her different from the hoard of sexless virgin-saints who swell the female ranks of Christian heaven. While making her different and even offensive to some, her questionable reputation may give us hope for our own repentance. Indeed, I believe making Mary Magdalene acceptable grants to each of us acceptance with our own imperfections.

Contemporary scholarship is restoring Mary of Magdala to become the inspiring role model for twenty-first century disciples just as she was for those when she witnessed to the Risen Christ in the stories of Christianity’s origins. July 22 is Mary of Magdala’s special feast day and the celebration is designed to make the public aware that Mary was not a prostitute but, also to provide recognition of her as the “Apostle to the Apostles” as she was known in the early church.

In the East her story is considerably brighter than in the West. After the resurrection, Mary who had patrician (high social) rank is said to have gained an audience in Rome with the emperor and denounced Pilate for his handling of Jesus’ trial. She then began to talk with Caesar about Jesus’ resurrection and picked up a hen’s egg from the dinner table to illustrate her point. Caesar was unmoved and replied that there was as much chance of a human being returning to life as there was for the egg in her hand to turn red. The egg turned red of course, which is why Orthodox Christians exchange red eggs at Easter.

I think of our pilgrimage to St. Catherine’s monastery at Mount Sinai where we were presented red eggs by the Greek orthodox priests on a glorious orthodox Easter morning in 2000.

After this demonstration of higher power, Mary is said to have spent the rest of her life courageously preaching throughout the Mediterranean, until her death as a martyr. We do not have the details of her death.

In the most well-known of contemporary Icons Mary is a woman of authority, dressed in Martyr’s red and preaching her gospel. The text at the bottom of the icon is her name in Aramaic, the language spoken by her and Jesus. She holds an egg, which is a supremely sexual image—harmless enough when you ascribe it to bunnies, but ticklish when you start talking about ovaries. Mary Magdala speaks to us of the cycle of life and rebirth to an incarnated humanity or a spiritual rebirth deep within.

More Eastern Orthodox legendry adds detail to these references to her. She is said to have gone to Ephesus with Mary, Jesus’ mother, and John the Evangelist. She lived and died there and her tomb was shown to pilgrims until the eighth century. Other legends [Catholic] claim she traveled to southern Gaul where she eventually retired to a hermitage in the Alps and died in southern France.

Of great importance is the intimacy between Jesus and Mary of Magdala. A topic of great significance in Gnostic literature, some believe it was apparently more often understood as a special friendship more than a sexual relationship. This may be why so many later saints have felt such a close bond to Mary Magdalene.

Many experiences of close friendships between living persons and saints are common. An extreme version of this friendship is perhaps Catherine of Siena: her close friendship with Mary of Magdala led, Catherine reported, to Christ and his mother inviting Mary of Magdala to ”adopt” Catherine as her daughter; after this visionary experience, Catherine could always call upon Mary Magdalene for advice and support.

Because of the close friendship between Jesus and Mary of Magdala it was used by the Gnostics in defense of women’s ministry and some traditions go even further, explicitly suggesting Mary and Jesus were lovers.

We know at least that she is honored in these writings as the “woman” of special value to Jesus and the stories also say she was the Mother of His Child. This tradition has caught the imagination of modern writers and researchers and we have yet to see where it will lead.

The truth is Mary of Magdala is rapidly becoming a heroine and feminist role model for women who want a greater role in the modern Christian Church. What we biblically know is that she was one of the faithful women who kept vigil near the cross and, was the first witness to the resurrection of Jesus. Infuriatingly, Mary of Magdala remains recalled more as a redeemed harlot than a leader of apostles until now. Rapidly the question is asked whether or not she was Jesus’ wife. This now becomes an issue.

The good news is that throughout the world today her story is being told and celebrated for her courage, love and witness. She is indeed an apostle of the modern resurrection of respect for feminine contribution to the story of Jesus and the early church. It is a matter of justice as well as a means of affirming an ascending role for women in the modern church. Mary Magdalene has become an example of the loss of power for all women and as she returns to power so does the power of the divine feminine re-emerge for all of us, male and female.

The goal in light of new understanding is not only to erase errors attributed to a particular person, but also to welcome women as equals once again into the leadership of the churches. Many scholars today believe Mary Magdalene was deliberately cast as a prostitute in order to suppress women who were serving in leadership roles in the early church. (So says Chris Schenk, executive director of the Cincinnati –based Future Church which is affirming new roles for women in the church of today.)

In early Christianity there was no priesthood as we know it today. Christian worship evolved from Jewish table fellowship held in house churches, including the homes of women. Worship was prophetic and charismatic in style allowing both women and men to take leadership roles.

While Jesus did not ordain, the word “apostle” meant a commissioned messenger. He called both women and men to discipleship. Luke’s gospel reports that Mary Magdalene, Johanna, and Susanna traveled with Jesus and supported his ministry with their own resources.

Mary of Magdalena figured prominently in all four Resurrection accounts. She is specifically mentioned by name fourteen times; in eight of these passages her name heads the list. The name Magdala comes from the town from which she came. It is located on the plain near the lake of Galilee. From the scriptures it is easy to infer that she was one of the influential women of her town, who gave of her substance as well as herself to Jesus’ ministry.

We are reminded women disciples were the last to see Jesus at his death, and the first to see the Risen Jesus. The fact that some women are listed by name in the Bible is very significant because women were not mentioned in writings of that period unless they had significant wealth or had achieved great social prominence. Therefore these women undoubtedly played important roles in the early church for them to be remembered in the scriptures.

Let’s spend a minute looking at this Bible narrative in esoteric symbology. Early in the morning of a new day, the first day of a new cycle, Mary, representative of the divine feminine goes to the garden, to anoint the body. A tomb is the body, an enclosure within matter. The stone is rolled away. Here is the awakening experience; the incarnated human flame is freed. She greets the transformed one. Others can not see what she does but the one lifted into higher awareness calls her by her name. He knows her in spirit; they are one...

This is quite profound. We are as we are; the awakening comes; we are made new. The soul (the divine feminine) who is watching over her charge acknowledges recognition of the new consciousness within us. She is the first witness to our awakening and the Soul says acknowledges to us, especially to the personality itself, “he is risen.”

We now know Mary of Magdala as one of the most distinguished women involved with the life of the Lord Jesus. Still a mysterious and controversial figure, we celebrate her as a leader of our faith and the courageous first witness. Down through the ages she has demonstrated spiritual maturity for all of us.

Scriptures:

Mark 16:9-11
9) Now he rose early on the first day of the week, and appeared first to Mary of Magdala, from whom he had cast seven demons. 10) And she went and brought glad tidings to those who were with him, who now were mourning and weeping. 11) And when they heard them saying that he was alive, and had appeared to them, they did not believe them.

Luke 8:1-3
1) And it came to pass afterwards, that he went throughout every city and village, preaching and showing the glad tidings of the kingdom of God: and the twelve were with him, 2) And certain women, who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities, Mary called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils, 3) And Joanna, the wife of Chuza Herod’s steward, and Susanna, and many others, which ministered unto him of their substance. 4) and when much people were gathered together, and were come to him out of every city, he spoke a parable.

John 19:25
25) Now there stood by the cross of Jesus his mother and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Cle-o-phas, and Mary Magdalene.

John 20:11-18
11) But Mary stood without at the sepulcher weeping: and as she wept, she stooped down, and looked into the sepulcher, 12) And sees two angels in white sitting, the one at the head, and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain. 13) And they say unto her, Woman, why weep thou? She saith unto them, Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him. 14) And when she had thus said, she turned herself back, and saw Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus. 15) Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weep thou? Who seek thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away. 16) Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabboni, which is to say, Master. 17) Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God. 18) Mary Magdalene came and told the disciples that she had seen the Lord, and that he had spoken these things unto her.

Copyright © Carol E. Parrish

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