The Gospel of Mary Magdalene

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The Gospel of Mary Magdalene Page 3

by Jean-Yves Leloup


  This role as intermediary between Jesus and the other disciples is supported by a belief in Mary Magdalene as the companion of Jesus during his lifetime and as the first witness of the Resurrection. It seems only natural that she who has followed Jesus everywhere and is there on Easter morning has been accorded special revelations. In the common belief of Jesus’ followers, the post-Resurrection time is one of decisive revelations, which include his communication of the mission given the disciples before his final departure. Because she is the first to have “seen the Lord” ( Jn 20:18), her presence among the disciples listening to her report of his last words is an imposing theme, and one that is important for the gospels of the post-Resurrection.

  Some later authors were led to elaborate this theme in the form of a sort of erotic-mystical novel: Mary Magdalene is the confidante of Jesus because she is his sexual partner (Questions of Mary). This is the origin of the Encratite reaction, which shows up in the exegetical and theological London manuscript (Pistis Sophia), where Mary Magdalene is only one of the protagonists in the general discussion that takes place between Jesus and the disciples.11

  It is possible that the editor of Codex B (the Berlin Codex), by selecting precisely this gospel to bear the name of Mary, intended to take a stance in this debate and to counter the excesses of the Questions of Mary. But the authorship of the gospel is not important to the debate. The woman who is in the spotlight is the Mary Magdalene of the New Testament. The poetic details that are supplied (reports of visions, the jealousy of the disciples, her tears) change nothing of the essential personality whom Syrian-Palestinian Christianity credited as the ultimate confidante of Jesus, and the revealer of the logia of the Master.12

  But perhaps we could be more simple and direct than this, and join with the Gospel of John (11:5) in saying that the Lord loved her as he loved her sister Martha, her brother Lazarus, and the other men and women who followed him, including Judas.

  Yeshua did not love John or Peter more than he loved Judas, but rather he loved each differently. He loved them all with a universal and unconditional love and each of them in a unique and particular fashion. With regard to the unique and particular nature of his relationship with Mary Magdalene, the Gospel of Philip insists, for example, that Mary is the special companion of Jesus (koinonos).

  Yeshua invites us to experience our capacity for a divine love that includes all beings, even our enemies. But human love includes preferences—in other words, affinities, resonances, and intimacies that are not possible with everyone.

  The Lord loved Mary more than all the disciples, and often used to kiss her on the mouth. When the others saw how he loved Mary, they said “Why do you love her more than you love us?” The Savior answered them in this way: “How can it be that I do not love you as much as I love her?” 13

  Those who are unaware of the founding texts of early Christianity are still shocked by the first sentence of this passage from the Gospel of Philip. It is not my intention to take sides in the polemics around this subject. Some partisans in this debate maintain that Jesus had an obligation to be married because he taught in synagogues; Jewish tradition considers an unmarried man to be either incomplete or disobedient toward God, and he is therefore not allowed to teach in synagogues. Even less could an unmarried man be a priest who is allowed to enter the holiest parts of the Temple.14 But others retort that Yeshua also kept company with John the Baptist and the Essenes, and that we know from the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls (not to be confused with the Nag Hammadi texts) found at Qumran that these Essenes were not only unmarried, but rejected “women, sinners, and the weak.”15 If we stick to the familiar gospels, there is no indication that Yeshua was married (at least, not in any formal sense of the word). Nevertheless, it is abundantly clear that he did not reject, but loved and welcomed women, sinners, and the weak. This in itself would have been a scandal not only for Essenes, but also for Pharisees, Sadducees, and Zealots, as well as for other sects of that era.

  The real question is not whether Yeshua was married (again, in the formal sense of the word), for why should that be so important? The interesting question is this: Was Yeshua fully human, with a normal human sexuality that was capable of intimacy and preference?

  As the ancient proverb says: “That which is not lived is not redeemed.” If Yeshua, considered as the Messiah and the Christ (from Greek christos, a rendering of the Hebrew mashiah), did not live his sexuality, then sexuality would be unredeemed. In that case, he could not be a Savior in the full sense of the word. This eventually led to the institution of a logic in Christianity that was more oriented to death than to life. This was especially the case in Western Roman Christianity:

  Jesus Christ did not live his sexuality; therefore sexuality is unredeemed;

  therefore sexuality is essentially a bad thing; therefore living your sexuality can be degrading

  and can make you guilty.

  This kind of guilt-ridden sexuality can make us truly ill. Thus the very origin of our life, in its physical sense—“in the image of the Creator”—is logically transformed into an instrument of death. Could it be that we Westerners, driven by our collective unconscious guilt, are still suffering the consequences of this logic today?

  The Gospel of Mary, like the Gospels of John and of Philip, reminds us that Yeshua was capable of intimacy with a woman. This intimacy was not merely of the flesh, it was also emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. What is at stake here is total salvation, the liberation of a human being in his or her entirety through the imbuing of all dimensions of this being with consciousness and love. By invoking the realism of Yeshua’s humanity in its sexual dimension, the Gospel of Mary in no way detracts from his spiritual and divine nature, the dimension of Pneuma [Holy Spirit—Ed.].

  Mark and Matthew devote more attention to his tears at the plight of Jerusalem, and even his anguish and doubts when faced with death.16 This is yet another version of Yeshua’s humanity, reflecting the belief that it is through such humanity that God is revealed.

  The Gospel of Mary, like the canonical Gospels, invites us to free ourselves from the dualisms that tear us apart and render us “demonic.” But rather than denying the body or matter, it is by not allowing ourselves to become identified with (and thus enslaved by) any of these partial aspects of the Real that they become sanctified and transfigured. We learn through our creative imagination to bring love to those regions where it is lacking—the blocked and stunted areas of our desire and intelligence—just as Miriam of Magdala did, in following her Beloved.

  If we wish to experience in our own lives the meaning of the wedding feast at Cana, we must imagine our mutual ignorance transformed through the unexpected Word into a loving friendship that is sweeter and better tasting than the passion of infatuation. The gray waters of the everyday are changed into the spirituous wine of divine love.

  We ourselves must live the love-filled, waking dream of the Magdalene, where death is met, passed through, and finally understood within the space of the Resurrection.

  “THOSE WHO HAVE EARS, LET THEM HEAR”

  Not only was Miriam of Magdala a woman, she was a woman who had access to sacred knowledge. Given the era in which she lived, this is enough to have rendered her an outcast or a sinner in many eyes. She was outside the laws of a society where such knowledge is strictly the affair of men, where women were prohibited from studying the secrets of the Torah, or even from learning to read its script.

  In her gospel her way of speaking to the disciples is bound to irritate them—Who does she think she is? As if her special status as Yeshua’s beloved is not enough, she goes so far as to appropriate his teaching, acting like some sort of initiate. She even uses the same words he had resorted to when faced with somewhat narrow and unprepared minds that can only recognize reality within the small field of their own perceptions: “Those who have ears, let them hear!”

  But while these words amount to an annoyance to the disciples, reminding them of the limits of their
understanding, the Gospel of Mary goes much deeper. It is witness to an altogether different mode of understanding that the masculine mind typically overlooks: a domain of prophetic or visionary knowledge that, though certainly not exclusive to women, definitely partakes of the feminine principle, and is sometimes known as the angelic or Eastern dimension of human knowledge.

  The Teacher is questioned on this subject by Miriam of Magdala: What is the organ of true vision? With what eyes is she able to behold the Resurrection? The Teacher’s answer to this is clear. The Resurrection can be seen neither with the eyes of the flesh, nor with the eyes of the soul (psyche). This vision is no hallucination, nor is it any sort of fantasy linked to sensory, psychic, or mental stimulation. Furthermore, this gospel tells us that the Resurrection is not to be categorized as a purely spiritual (pneumatic) vision either. Rather, it is a vision of the nous17—a dimension often forgotten in our anthropologies. In the ancient world, the nous was seen as “the finest point of the soul”; or as some might say today, the “angel of the soul.”18 It gives us access to that intermediate realm between the purely sensory and the purely spiritual, which Henry Corbin so eloquently names as the imaginal.19

  Following Corbin further, we could say that in the Gospel of Mary we are freed from the reductionist dilemma of thought versus extension (Descartes), as well as from a cosmology and epistemology limited to either empirical observation or intellectual understanding. Between these two lies a vast intermediate realm of image and representation that is just as ontologically real as the worlds of sense and intellect. But this world requires a faculty of perception that is peculiar to it alone. This faculty has a cognitive function and a noetic value that are just as real and true as those pertaining to the worlds of sense perception and intellectual intuition. It is none other than the power of the creative imagination—yet we must beware of confusing this faculty with the imagination as the word is ordinarily used. As Corbin says, the so-called modern mind has reduced this word to the realm of fantasy, a world of merely subjective beings and things.

  When Ernest Renan says that “all of Christianity was born from the imagination of a woman,” he is mistaken, for he is using the word imagination in its pejorative, modern sense of something illusory. His thought is conditioned by an anthropology that is ignorant of the categories of the creative imagination in which ancient texts, including sacred scriptures, were conceived and written down.

  A living deity who wants to communicate thus necessitates an intermediate realm between God and human, between the invisible and the visible, between the world of immaterial spirits and material bodies. It is in this intermediary imaginal realm that Miriam has her meetings with the resurrected Christ. As with the ancient prophets, God activates the necessary visionary, imaginal forms in her, so as to bring her to the Divine. It is only in this sense that Christianity can indeed be said to be born from the imagination of a woman.

  “Lord, I see you now in this vision.”

  And the Lord answered :

  “You are blessed, for the sight of me does not disturb you.”

  (Mary 10:12–15)

  Here, we have gone beyond any metaphysical opposition of subject vs. object (there can be no object without a subject who conceives and represents it, and there can be no subject who is not reacting to an object or environment perceived as external or “other”). We are in the presence of a metaphysics of openness—a place of meeting, confrontation, and merging of subject and object known in their interdependence. Reality is neither objective nor subjective; it is an inclusive third state where the two imaginally become one.20

  This reveals a field that has been little explored by contemporary philosophies, which still oscillate between the metaphysics of Being (Heidegger) and of Otherness (Lévinas). The task of the next century will surely be one of engagement with this philosophy of openness, or the in-between realm. Philosophy will no longer seek its missing links in Greek or Semitic thought, but in this oriented synthesis—heretofore rejected by both sides—which begins to reveal itself in these early Christian texts. A true renewal of thinking about the source of New Testament writings must pass through a regeneration of the creative imagination, as Christian Jambet suggests in the following:

  For the creative imagination is not so named with some metaphorical intent, nor in a spirit of fiction, but in the full sense of the term: The imagination creates, and is universal creation itself. Every reality is imaginal, because it is able to present itself as a reality. To speak of the imaginal world is nothing less than to contemplate a metaphysics of Being21 where subject and object are born together in the same creative act of transcendental imagination.22

  Rather than speaking of the creative thought, we must henceforth speak of the creative imagination—those who desire to understand nature and world events must learn to dream before learning to think. The language of sacred scriptures is one of images and symbols that belongs to dreams more than to the concepts of the sciences. Christian Jambet goes on to say that,

  Reality is nature ordered by laws. This is what scientific discourse tells us, and this is the operation of the imagination which creates that discourse.

  We can see that the mundus imaginalis should be approached with the same method, in the same perspective. It is a mode of interlinking, of constructing a meaning, of interpreting that world. But it is far from being an attempt to “say it all”—on the contrary, what is constantly occurring is a saying of the One, but only on condition that it “cannot be all.” For the One is impossible to say. What is revealed is the failure of any reality to satisfy the desire for the One. The mundus imaginalis is the place where what is said is never the “All,” but the lack of it, the yearning for it. It is precisely here that desire becomes imagination.23

  To this, I would also add transfiguration and resurrection.

  It is this realization and incarnation of her desire that Miriam of Magdala is trying to share with us. It is the creative imagination that this gospel wants to awaken in us, while not avoiding a confrontation with the reservations and objections of a philosophy of sense and reason, as represented by Peter and Andrew.

  The ethical consequences of such a practice of desire and imagination are clear, and cannot fail to shock Yeshua’s other disciples. “There is no sin,” it tells us. It is we who continually create sin with our sickly imagination, and then invent laws to make it more comfortable. It is our imagination that needs to be healed. We are responsible for the world in which we live, since it is we who create it. Our lack of enlightened imagination encloses that faculty in a death-orientation and imposes limits upon it wherein our feeling and intelligence have become arrested.

  These questions will be further explored in the commentary in the second part of this book. Let us note here that in this gospel attributed to Miriam of Magdala, the creative imagination to which she bears witness is the meeting place where the sensible and the supersensible Divine descend together in a single dwelling. The imagination is the sympathetic resonance of the invisible and the visible, of the spiritual and the physical.

  The motivation behind Miriam’s imagination is obviously more than just her personal desire and love. She loves a being whom she has known in the world of sense perception, and in whom she has seen the manifestation of the divine Beloved. Through the power of the imaginal, she has spiritualized this being in raising it from its sensory form to its incorruptible image.

  As with the disciples at Mount Tabor, the confrontation with Yeshua opens her eyes to his essential Reality, to the archetype that informs him. Her creative imagination imbues all this with such a powerful presence that she can never leave it nor lose it; thus she creates the true Beloved, which constantly accompanies her and illumines her. This Reality is not any sort of psychological illusion, compensation, nor sublimation. It is an awakening to this intermediate world, an experience and a knowledge in which the Christ is offered as contemplation, as the archetype of synthesis that the soul of desire seeks to embrace
:

  The divine lover is spirit without body; The physical lover is body without spirit; The spiritual lover possesses spirit and body. 24

  The apparition that manifests itself to Miriam of Magdala (both inwardly and outwardly) is spirit and body. It is this manifestation that makes Miriam an anthropos, a whole human being, an incarnation that responds to the Incarnation of the common Logos informing both body and spirit.

  THE TRANSLATION

  In addition to the task of imagining the theological, philosophical, and ethical import of this text of early Christianity, we must also recall its historical interest, for it contains precious information about the first Christian communities. Their deliberations and conflicts give us a sad foretaste of the exclusion of the feminine that was later to triumph, and thereby offer us a glimpse of the different modes and practices that inspired these first Christians.

  Later Christianity was often reduced to a path of ethical action—although it engaged itself in a positive transformation of the world toward greater justice and integrity, it risked forgetting the transfiguration of this world into a dimension of greater meaning. It overlooked the need to introduce a lightness into the world’s density, an imagination that would open it to new possibilities and make it more bearable.

  The translation of the Gospel of Mary has also to answer to the call of the creative imagination, without which its text might appear as utterly hermetic, and perhaps insignificant. The two previous French translations of this text are difficult to read, and sometimes contradictory.25 Yet this is no reflection of any lack of skill, patience, or courage on the part of those scholars who worked with it. Their considerable labors have provided important references for this translation, which nevertheless is quite different from theirs. My own approach, which may be described as both rigorous and free, is a further development of my earlier work at the University of Strasbourg on the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Truth ( Jung Codex).26

 

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