The Gospel of Mary Magdalene
Page 17
5 Marjanen, The Woman Jesus Loved: Mary Magdalene in the Nag Hammadi Library & Related Documents, and Haskins, Mary Magdalene: Myth and Metaphor, summarize the work of many authors, including the Jesus Seminar and the researchers on the lost “Q” gospel. Marjanen dates the Gospel of Mary to the middle of the second century (The Woman Jesus Loved, 97–98).
6 Haskins, Mary Magdalene: Myth and Metaphor, 93.
7 Anne Catherine Emmerich’s four volumes of writings, The Life of Jesus Christ and Biblical Revelations, fill out the picture of the healings through the years of Jesus’ ministry.
8 There are over three hundred uses of the word seven in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. Many of them speak about time or a number of offspring. Some speak in ways that can only be understood symbolically, such as the seven pillars of wisdom (Proverbs 9), the seven cleansings in the river Jordan (2 Kings 5), the seven circuits of the trumpets around the city of Jericho ( Joshua 6), the seven eyes of God in the stone (an amazing picture of the chakras in the human body, in Zechariah 3 and 4), and the many references in Daniel. The tradition of Kabbalah interprets all of these, including the references to time, as veiled references to deep secrets about human and divine energy.
9 Barbara Brennan, a highly trained scientist who worked for NASA, has systematized the chakra system in her practical method of healing, Hands of Light (New York: Pleiades, 1987).
10 The Rosicrucians imagined that pride found its elevation in humility, lust in brotherly/sisterly love, envy in love for knowledge, anger in self-controlled directed will, covetousness in poverty or independence, gluttony in both steadfastness and silence in the inner search, and sloth in love for all of life. Thus Magdalene had all the seven virtues plus the important virtue of having known the seven vices, an experience that leads to compassion for others.
11 Pistis Sophia, 271, a most beautiful image of cleansed and renewed energy centers. The Pistis Sophia has been criticized as a highly edited third-century (at the earliest) version of an earlier Questions of Mary, unfortunately lost. We can find in its writings, however, wonderful hints about Mary’s reputation.
12 The resurrection body as a “pure and ideal image” is explained best of all by Rudolf Steiner in The Fifth Gospel (New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1974).
13 For example, from the Pistis Sophia, 193: “Where I shall be, there will be also my twelve ministers. But Mary Magdalene, John, and the Virgin will tower over all my disciples and over all men who shall receive the mysteries in the Ineffable. And they will be on my right and on my left. And I am they, and they are I.”
14 Rudolf Steiner and Robert Powell make these links most persuasively.
15 A favorite theme of Solomon’s Song of Songs, as well as a theme that is emerging today in many places.
INTRODUCTION
1 See Introduction, Translation, and Commentary in Jean-Yves Leloup, L’Evangile de Thomas (Paris: Albin Michel,1986).
[Several of the English versions available are included in: James M. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library, rev. ed. (San Francisco: HarperSan Francisco, 1990); Kloppenborg, ed., Marvin Meyer, trans., The Q-Thomas Reader (Polebridge Press, 1994), a bilingual Coptic/English edition with rich notes and commentary; and Funk, Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels (New York: Scribner, 1993). Each of the latter two books includes a textual comparison of the Gospel of Thomas with each of the four canonical Gospels, as well as with the lost, hypothetical “Q” source of the sayings of Jesus.
It is not certain that the Thomas who preached in India and the author of the Gospel of Thomas are the same person. Today’s so-called Thomas Christians of India reject this scripture and have long been allied with the Church of Rome.
To complicate things further, there are a number of other scriptures attributed to this apostle that are definitely not from the same source, nor of the same quality, as the Gospel of Thomas. This has led to a surprising amount of confusion. For example, even A. N. Wilson, author of the bestselling book Jesus (New York: Harper Collins Flamingo, 1993, 82–84), completely mistakes the Gospel of Thomas for the very different Infancy Gospel of Thomas, an unrelated writing of vastly lower quality.—Trans.]
2 See Jn 20. All translations agree on this point.
3 See W. Beltz, Katalog der koptishen Handschriften, 97.
[Curiously, no translation of the Gospel of Mary was made available to the public at large until some years after the independent discoveries at Nag Hammadi and Qumran—Trans.]
4 See W. C. Till, Die gnostischen Schriften des koptischen Papyrus Berolinensis 8502 (Tu 60) (Berlin, 1955); 2d edition: H. M. Schenke (Berlin, 1972); H. M. Schenke, Bemerkungen zum koptischen Papyrus Berolinensis 8502, 315–22.
5 The average size of the leaves is 13.5 cm. x 10.5 cm. The pages are numbered at the top.
6 See C. H. Roberts, Catalogue of the Greek and Latin Papyrus, p. 20. Bibliography and translation in A. de Santos, Los Evangelios apocrifos, 100–01.
[According to the Jesus Seminar (see note 1 above, The Five Gospels, 128), the Gospel of Mary was written even earlier in the second century, during the same period as the last redactions of the Gospel of John. This would support the author’s thesis that it influenced early Christian writings in spite of the fact that it was later suppressed by the emergent orthodoxy.—Trans.]
7 [It is important to bear in mind that the author uses the word anthropology (anthropologie, in French) throughout this book in a non-standard way. He means it in its original, pre-modern sense of a comprehensive philosophy of human nature and its place in the cosmos. Thus there are many possible anthropologies.—Trans.]
8 The Panarion, XXVI, 8:1 and 2 (French translation), in Tel Quel,no. 88, pp.70–71, 85–86.
9 The Panarion, XXVI, 12:1–4 (French translation), in Tel Quel, no. 88, p. 75, 88.
10 French translation by E. Amelineau (Arché-Milan, 1975). In English, see also G. R. S. Mead, The Pistis Sophia: A Gnostic Gospel (Kessinger, 1997).
11 [The London manuscript is now referred to as the Pistis Sophia. In it the role of Mary is eclipsed.—Trans.]
12 Long quotation from J. M. Tardieu, Codex de Berlin (Editions du Cerf, 1984), 24.
13 See the Gospel of Philip 59:9.
14 Simon Ben Schorim, Mon frère Jésus (Editions du Seuil); also A. Abecassis and Josy Eisenberg, À Bible ouverte, vol. 1 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1978), 125.
15 See also Josephus, History of the Jews, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).
16 Mt. 26:39; Mk 14:32; Lk 22:40-46
17 [The exact words of Jesus in Mary 10:16 (see text of the Gospel of Mary, here) are: “There where is the nous, lies the treasure.”
The notion of Jesus using Greek philosophical language is not as strange as it might appear to some. The familiar stereotype of Jesus as a simple carpenter who preached only in Aramaic is a popular notion for which there is no plausible evidence. Quite the contrary. It is already improbable that any literate resident of multicultural, polyglot first-century Galilee would speak only Aramaic; but the notion that a Jewish spiritual teacher of the extraordinary intelligence and erudition of Jesus would be ignorant of Greek, and speak and teach exclusively in Aramaic, is due more to deeply rooted populist images of Jesus than to scholarship.—Trans.]
18 [It is important to remember that the author uses the words soul and spirit in something close to their original senses, which are significantly different from modern usages (see note 7 above on anthropology). In antiquity, the Greek word psyche (like the Hebrew word nephesh) did not have the same elevated status that the word soul assumed in later Christianity, nor was it confused with spirit (pneuma in Greek, ruah in Hebrew) the way it later came to be, and still is in current usage. For the ancients, the soul included aspects of the mortal body, mind, and emotions, as well as something transcending them. It was an intermediary reality between the physical and the spiritual. In a further refinement of this intermediation, the nous appears here as that part of spirit that is cl
osest to psyche. The highest part of spirit (pneuma) is equated by the author with the Holy Spirit, and is usually capitalized as Pneuma.
There is also the problem of the ambiguity of the word esprit in French: sometimes it means “spirit,” other times “mind.” We have mostly translated Leloup’s esprit (nous) as “spirit,” but there are contexts when “mind” has seemed more appropriate.—Trans.]
19 Or the mundus imaginalis. See Henry Corbin, The Voyage and the Messenger (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1998), 117–134.
20 Cf. The Gospel of Thomas, logion 22. See the author’s book-length translation and exegesis, Jean- Yves Leloup, L’Evangile de Thomas (Paris: Albin Michel, 1986).
21 I prefer the term openness here.
22 Christian Jambet, La Logique des Orientaux (Editions du Seuil, 1983), 45.
23 Ibid., 45.
24 Ibn Arabi, quoted in Henry Corbin, La topographie spirituelle de l’Islam iranien (La Différence, 1990).
25 Anne Pasquier, L’Evangile de Marie (Québec: Presses de l’Université de Laval, 1983); Michel Tardieu, L’Evangile de Marie (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1984).
26 Principally with Jacques Ménard, a member of the team that directed the publication of the Nag Hammadi Coptic Library in cooperation with the University of Laval in Canada and E. J. Brill Editions at Leiden in Holland.
27 Ibid.
28 From the French translation of J. E. Ménard, L’Evangile selon Philippe: Introduction, texte, traduction et commentaire (Strasbourg, 1967).
[The above version is my translation of the French excerpt quoted by Leloup. However, Wesley Isenberg’s English translation of this same passage in The Nag Hammadi Library differs, with the last sentence reading: “His sister and his mother and his companion were each a Mary.” But that reading leaves us with two puzzles: a pair of sisters having the same name, Mary; and Jesus’s aunt Mary being strangely referred to as his sister. By making use of the original Hebrew name Miriam, so as to distinguish the Magdalene from the other Marys, the French translation skillfully circumvents this reference, interpreting the final sentence as referring only to the Magdalene, and thereby alluding to her multifaceted role in Jesus’s life. Yet the persistent oddity of two sisters named Mary also occurs in Jn 19:25. Ménard mentions this in his commentary, and identifies Jesus’ maternal aunt as Mary-Salomé, wife of Cleophas. However this may be, there seems to be no real scholarly consensus about the confusion of the Marys in the canonical Gospels, and the Gospel of Philip does little to clear it up. For an English translation of the latter, see Robinson, The Nag Hammadi Library. —Trans.]
29 See The Nag Hammadi Library. See also the following Internet sites for this and many other related online texts in English:
The Gospel of Mary and other gnostic texts online: www.gnosis.org
Gnostic Society Virtual Library: home.online.no/~noetic/libe.htm
Gospel of Thomas homepage: www.epix.net/~miser17/Thomas.html
Online gnostic texts: members.xoom.com/_XMCM/book_archive/01/indx.html.
PART 1: THE GOSPEL OF MARY MAGDELENE
30 [Anthropos is the original Greek word used. Leloup’s inclusion of this word here is to indicate that our impoverished modern word human (humains, in French) cannot be an adequate translation.—Trans.]
PART 2: TEXT WITH COMMENTARY
31 [This also applies to the sense of the Kingdom in the Gospel of Thomas 113: His disciples said to him, “When will the kingdom come?”
“It will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, ‘Behold, here!’ or ‘Behold, there!’
Rather, the Father’s kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it.”—Trans.]
32 A sweeping eschatological interpretation is also possible for verses 7–10. Just as Matthew tells us that not “one stone upon another” will remain of the material edifice of the Temple, since “all shall be dissolved” (kataluthéstai, in Greek—Mt. 24:2) from roof to foundation, so these lines could be interpreted as saying that the elements of the entire material universe “shall be dissolved” (euna bôl ebol).
33 [A term sometimes used in Heideggerian discourse, being-for-death refers to the way of living and being that makes an individual a prisoner of linear, chronological, passing time, thus blocking him from experiencing life as more than a linear sequence with a terminus or outcome that is death.—Trans.]
34 Mt 7:3; Lk 6:41; the Gospel of Thomas 26.
35 Again, in its original Greek sense of hamartia, “missing the mark.”
36 Cf., Jn 1:14. The metaphor of Mother could just as well be used for the Source.
37 None can “see” or “know” in the subject-object sense, that is.
38 Cf., Mt 7:1; Lk 6:37.
39 Rom 7:19.
40 Latin passio, from Greek pathos, “suffering”; also the root of our word pathology.
41 Mt 5:23–25.
42 Mt 5:43–48.
43 Lk 6:27, 28, 32–36. It is interesting to note that while Matthew speaks of perfection, Luke speaks of mercy. What did Yeshua say? Neither one, to be sure, or both together! For what is perfection without mercy or mercy without perfection?
44 Or comparing yourself favorably with those who are even more unbalanced: “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed is king.”
45 Col 1:15. As manifestation of wisdom, Yeshua is the reflection of God (Wisdom 7:26) prior to all creatures (Prv 8:27–30), who leads human beings to God (Prv 8:31–36).
46 Pasquier, L’Evangile de Marie, 57–58. See also W. C. Till and H. M. Schenke, Die gnostischen Schriften, 64–65, and R. Mcl. Wilson, “The New Testament in the Gnostic Gospel of Mary,” in Robinson, The Nag Hammadi Library, 242–43.
47 See the parables of the sowing of the seeds: Mt 13:3; Mk 4:3; Lk 8:9.
48 [An ancient story, versions of which are found in many oral traditions.—Trans.]
49 Well known in the Middle East, the story of the Sufi fool-sage Mullah Nasruddin.
50 Lk 17:21 and the Gospel of Thomas 3. On the theme of the Kingdom within and its parallels, see Puech, En quête de gnose, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard), 270–79.
51 Gitta Mallasz, Dialogue avec l’ange (Aubier, 1996). For a complete English translation, see Gitta Mallasz, Talking with Angels (Continuum Books, 1998).
52 Patrice Van Eersel, La source blanche (Paris: Grasset, 1996).
53 Soloviev, Leçons sur la théandricité (St. Petersburg, 1957); and A Solviev Anthology, 2001.
54 Cf. Mt 7:8, Lk 11:10, and the Gospel of Thomas 2 and 92.
55 See Mt 4:23 and 9:35; Lk 4:43 and 81; Acts 8:12.
56 [See André Chouraqui, trans., La Bible (Desclée de Brouwer, 1989) for a renowned translation of these famous words of Jesus in Mt 5, known as the Beatitudes. Chouraqui’s translation of the Bible is an important reference in France because it makes minimal concession to literary readability so as to stay very close to the original, literal sense of the Hebrew (OT) and Greek (NT), while also making use of Aramaic and Syriac sources. Sometimes his translations are strikingly different from all familiar ones. An example is the phrase normally rendered as “Blessed are . . .,” which begins each of the beatitudes in all conventional translations. Chouraqui renders this as “En marche!” (or “Walk forth!”). This is a radical departure from the usual translation not only in meaning, but also in mood, which in “Walk forth!” becomes imperative—in other words, a command to action. The words usually translated as “poor in spirit” are also rendered with radical literalism, so that the first beatitude now begins as: “Walk forth, the humiliated of breath!” (“En marche, les humiliés du souffle!”) As in Greek, the word for spirit in Semitic langauages derives from that for breath.
Other passages from Mt 5 given in quotation marks in the text above are our literal English translations of Chouraqui’s French. He almost always prefers to use the Hebrew word Elohim instead of God. Leloup’s paraphrases of Chouraqui are given without quotation marks.—Trans.]
57 [In this passage Chouraqui uses the word
matriciels, whereas Leloup uses the customary misericordieux (merciful). Matriciel is strange enough in French, and has no exact English equivalent, but the image is that of the womb, of being endowed with a womblike or maternal quality. The intent is to preserve the image conveyed in Semitic languages, where womb is the etymological root of all words for “compassion,” “mercy,” and so forth.—Trans.]
58 [Of course, this interpretation would imply a date much beyond the lifetimes of Jesus or Mary for the writing of this passage. More literal (English) translations of this passage are somewhat different: “Do not lay down any rules beyond what I have shown you, and do not give a law like the lawgiver, lest you be constrained by it.”—Trans.]
59 Tardieu, Codex de Berlin, 229.
60 See Jn 7:19: “Has not Moses given you the law? Yet not one of you keeps the law! Why are you trying to kill me?” For more explicit anti-Semitism, see 1 Thes 2:14–16.
61 “Those who belong to Christ are no longer subject to the law.” See Gal 5:22–25.
62 Mt 5:17.
63 Nm 12:3.
64 Ex 20, for this and following passages. Chouraqui translates this passage as “I am Adonai-YHWH, your Elohim . . .”
65 [This and succeeding passages are not intended to be accurate translations of the commandments of Ex 20, but rather Leloup’s exegesis of those passages in the light of Yeshua’s teaching about not adding more laws. He systematically substitutes “you may,” “you can,” or “you are free to ”for the Bible’s “you shall” or “you must,” so as to illustrate his thesis about living the law rather than merely following it.—Trans.]
66 To “rest” or “stop” is the etymological root of the Hebrew word Shabbat (Sabbath).
67 Cf. Mt 10:37; Mk 10:7 and 10:19.
68 Mk 10:9.
69 For more on this question, see the publication Evidences paradoxales, interview with Jean-Yves Leloup by M. de Solemne (Editions du Fennec, 1996).