The Quest for Mary Magdalene

by Michael Haag

  The Temple at Jerusalem, enlarged and embellished by Herod the Great in the first century BC, as reconstructed by the painter James Tissot, 1894. A grandiose promoter of Hellenism, Herod employed Greek, Roman and Egyptian architects to build his Temple which became the largest religious complex in the ancient world.

  The Temple at Jerusalem. Wikimedia Commons.

  Herod the Great, who had ruled Judaea from 37 to 4 BC as a Roman client king, was a grandiose promoter of Hellenisation. He built the new port city of Caesarea on the Mediterranean and in Jerusalem he constructed the Temple Mount, a vast platform over a natural hill to give support to his gigantic Temple built in 25-10 BC. Herod’s new Temple was something more than just an enlargement of the Second Temple that had been built centuries earlier on the site of Solomon’s original Temple; planned by Roman, Greek and Egyptian architects all in white marble and in classical style, Herod’s Temple dwarfed the Parthenon and became the largest religious complex in the ancient world.

  At Herod’s death in 4 BC his kingdom was divided between his four sons, though Judaea, the central area extending from Jerusalem in the Judaean highlands to Caesarea on the Mediterranean, soon fell under the direct rule of a Roman prefect. Herod Antipas, the youngest of the sons, was made tetrarch, meaning ruler of a quarter, and was given Galilee in the north and Perea on the east bank of the river Jordan.

  Herod Antipas, like his father, was a great builder; in AD 19 he built Tiberias, his completely new capital on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, its plan and architecture in the Greek and Roman tradition, which he named for his master, the Roman emperor Tiberius.

  But Herod Antipas was not alone in being thoroughly Hellenised and Romanised; significant elements of Jewish society were Hellenised too, especially the Jewish upper class. The Sadducees, the aristocratic Jewish families, dominated affairs; from their number came the Temple priests, including the high priest.

  Power over Jewish religious affairs was vested in the Sanhedrin, a council of leading and learned figures, including Sadducees and their rivals the Pharisees which were socio-political and religious parties or sects. The Sadducees based their authority on the Temple and the written Torah with its depiction of the priesthood, while the Pharisees did not fill Temple positions and gave authority to both the written and the developing oral Torah. While the Sadducees were the old landowning aristocracy and were comfortable with Hellenisation, the Pharisees were scholars and teachers who ran the schools and saw Hellenism, with its lure of assimilation, as threatening the social, moral and religious fabric of the nation.

  But the vast number of Jews were neither Sadducees nor Pharisees. The Roman-Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, himself a Pharisee, says that there were no more than about six thousand Pharisees in Palestine in the AD 60s; the Sadducees were fewer still. Josephus does say, however, that the Pharisees were popular among ordinary Jews. The Essenes, another sect, were ascetics who withdrew from everyday life and lived by the Dead Sea where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered; but though the scrolls were part of their library it is not known if the Essenes were their authors. John the Baptist is sometimes described as having been a member of the Essenes or influenced by them but there is no evidence for this.

  Jesus is often depicted in the gospels as disputing with the Pharisees, who are sometimes presented as his enemies, plotting with the Herodians against him; in fact Jesus and the Pharisees had much in common in that both were popular among the common people, both (unlike the Sadducees) believed in the afterlife, and both upheld the Torah over the Temple. But Jesus, for whom God’s love was paramount, found the Pharisees excessive and rigid in their views on the law and called them hypocrites and flaunted his fellowship with tax collectors and women on the margins of society. This, however, was merely the sort of infighting that occurs between factions who otherwise share very similar values.

  A coin from the reign of Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee in the time of Jesus. Unlike his father Herod the Great and other members of the Herodian dynasty, Antipas publicly observed the Jewish prohibition of images of himself in sculpture and on coins. We therefore have no knowledge of how he looked. This coin is typical in using simple plant motifs. On one side it says, in Greek letters, ‘Tiberias’, the name of Antipas’ new capital city on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, while on the other side it says ‘Herodou Tetrarchou’, Herod the Tetrarch.

  Coin from the reign of Herod Antipas. Jensen, Morten Hørning, Antipas – The Herod Jesus Knew. Biblical Archaeology Review 2012.

  But while Hellenism was having a pervasive effect on local culture, the impress of Roman rule was only lightly felt; though Judaea was under the direct rule of a Roman prefect based at Caesarea, traditional Jewish institutions, legal, educational and religious, were left in local hands, and Rome’s military presence was slight. Generally the Romans went out of their way to respect Jewish sensibilities; the local coinage, for example, was minted without images, and Roman soldiers were advised not to take their image-bearing ensigns with them when entering Jerusalem.

  In Galilee, governed by Herod Antipas who had his own army of Jews and gentile mercenaries, there was not a single Roman fortress nor a Roman soldier. (The famous scene in Matthew 8:5-13 and Luke 7:1-10 of Jesus’ exchange with a centurion in Capernaum says nothing about the officer being a Roman, only a gentile; the Greek word used in the gospels was commonly applied to both Roman and non-Roman officers, and this ‘centurion’ was most likely an officer in the service of Herod Antipas whose father was known to have had Gauls, Germans and Thracians in his bodyguard.)

  Apart from an uprising in AD 6 in reaction to the Roman imposition of a census for tax purposes, Galilee, Jerusalem and the rest of the Jewish lands were calm throughout the whole of Jesus’ life.

  The uprising came as a warning, however, for it had quickly taken on a fundamentalist religious character – its leaders said a census was an offence to God and called for a theocracy, a republic based on Jewish law and recognising only God as king. And though the Romans crushed the revolt, tensions between Hellenistic and Jewish traditions continued to simmer beneath the surface.

  In Galilee Herod Antipas was nervous that religious opinion would be stirred up against his rule, while in Judaea the priestly party, the Sadducees, who controlled the Temple at Jerusalem, shared Herod’s anxieties – as did nearly everyone who was Hellenised and had made an accommodation with the Romans.

  But for all that Hellenisation opened up Palestine to the opportunities and benefits of the larger Mediterranean world, it was also seen by some – and not only by the Pharisees, but perhaps even by those Jews who were Hellenised – as eating away at their very identity. For some Jews there was no question about it, no compromise was possible; Hellenism was an affliction, a contamination that stood in the way of reestablishing purified Judaism in the world and becoming closer to God.

  In barely more than a generation after those days when Mary Magdalene joined Jesus as he preached the kingdom of God across the hills and villages of Galilee, the Jews rose in revolt against Roman rule. The savage Roman-Jewish War began in AD 66 and lasted for seven years; by the time it was over tens of thousands were dead and the Temple at Jerusalem was destroyed.

  Reborn in the River Jordan

  John the Baptist is a thoroughly historical figure. He is mentioned in all four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, which are generally thought to have been written between AD 65 and AD 110. He is also recorded in The Antiquities of the Jews written in about AD 94 by the historian Flavius Josephus who describes John’s practice of baptism as the culmination of living life virtuously. ‘John, that was called the Baptist, . . . was a good man, and commanded the Jews to exercise virtue, both as to righteousness towards one another, and piety towards God, and so to come to baptism.’

  Jesus, who was baptised by John, and who according to Luke 1:36 was John’s cousin, made John’s message fundamental to his own teachings. ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and
with all thy soul, and with all thy mind’, Jesus says in Matthew 22:37-40, echoing the Baptist. ‘This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’

  John was not founding a new religion, but his rite of baptism, the immersion in water, was something wholly new to Judaism. John was saying that descent from Abraham, the founding figure of the Jewish people, was not enough to guarantee salvation. Instead, just as God had called the Jews out of Egypt and led them across the river Jordan into the Promised Land, so Jews now had to become a new people by immersing themselves in the waters of baptism in that same river.

  The Baptism of Christ by Giotto, 1305, in the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua.

  Baptism of Christ by Giotto. Photograph by Michael Haag

  Bypassing the rituals of the Temple in Jerusalem and its priests who were widely seen as substituting religiosity for an authentic relationship with God, baptism meant a new start, a rebirth. Baptism was simple and made salvation accessible to all – the gospels stressing that word, as when Mark 1:5 recounts the vast numbers who journeyed far into the wilderness seeking John, ‘And there went out unto him all the land of Judaea, and they of Jerusalem, and were all baptised of him in the river of Jordan, confessing their sins’. Those who were baptised by John emerged from the waters as newly born, or they were like people who had been dead and buried but had risen, people who had made the journey from death to life.

  In particular, this simple act of immersion made salvation accessible to women who in male-oriented Judaism stood outside the traditional covenant between man and God – because women were not circumcised. Circumcision goes back to the first book of the Old Testament, to Genesis 17:10, where God speaks to Abraham, the founding figure of the Jewish people: ‘This is my covenant, which ye shall keep, between me and you and thy seed after thee; Every man child among you shall be circumcised’. Whether women could therefore be part of the covenant between man and God was a question asked then and is still asked now; at best they enjoy a covenant with God only through men. But John’s baptism rite provided a radical answer and opened the way to direct salvation for everyone, so that he attracted all, as the gospels say.

  The Head of John the Baptist

  Many in those days believed that the moment of judgement was near, and John’s message of salvation stirred excitement and expectation throughout the land. Josephus records how many ‘came in crowds about him, for they were very greatly moved by hearing his words’. The hunger for purity, but innocent of fanaticism and political insurrection, was expressed by those who sought salvation at the hands of John the Baptist in the river Jordan. But Josephus also tells how the appeal of John’s message led directly to his death. ‘Herod, who feared lest the great influence John had over the people might put it into his power and inclination to raise a rebellion, for they seemed ready to do any thing he should advise, thought it best, by putting him to death, to prevent any mischief he might cause.’

  The gospels say more about John the Baptist’s death. Herod Antipas had married his brother Philip’s wife, Herodias, contrary to Leviticus 20:21 which says, ‘If a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing’. As Mark 6:18-24 relates the story, John repeated this to Herod, saying ‘It is not lawful for thee to have thy brother’s wife’, at which Herodias, the wife of the two brothers, flew into a rage and would have killed the Baptist, but Herod, fearing the popular support enjoyed by John, stopped short of taking his life and imprisoned him instead. But then ‘Herod on his birthday made a supper to his lords, high captains, and chief estates of Galilee; And when the daughter of the said Herodias came in, and danced, and pleased Herod and them that sat with him, the king said unto the damsel, Ask of me whatsoever thou wilt, and I will give it thee. And he sware unto her, Whatsoever thou shalt ask of me, I will give it thee, unto the half of my kingdom. And she went forth, and said unto her mother, What shall I ask? And she said, The head of John the Baptist’.

  The dance of Salome at the birthday feast of Herod Antipas as imagined by the French painter Gustave Moreau, 1876. An apparition of John the Baptist’s head hovers before her.

  Dance of Salome by Gustave Moreau. Wikimedia Commons.

  The girl whose dance cost the life of John the Baptist has been famously known as Salome in legend and in music and paintings for nearly two thousand years. The gospels tell the story of the dance but do not name the girl; on the other hand Josephus, who says nothing of the dance, reports that Herodias had a daughter called Salome who married and had three sons. Rightly or wrongly popular imagination has combined the two and has eroticised her dance as the Dance of the Seven Veils so that Salome lives forever as the ultimate femme fatale.

  Dancing girl apart, both Josephus and Mark are telling essentially the same story (and the gospel of Matthew which here parallels Mark); in condemning Herod’s marriage to his brother’s wife, John was accusing him of not being a good Jew, which would have undermined what authority Herod had as a Jew ruling over Jews on behalf of his Roman masters. And then John might have whipped up popular outrage against Herod Antipas, threatening his throne. One way or another Herod might think it would make good sense to eliminate John the Baptist.

  The gospel of Mark provides a revealing detail in its account of the dinner at which Herodias’ daughter danced for Herod and demanded the head of John the Baptist, for Mark tells us that the guests included the ‘lords, high captains, and chief estates of Galilee’. That means Chuza was most likely a witness to the scene, Chuza, the steward of Herod’s estates, mentioned in Luke as the husband of Joanna, Joanna who was the companion of Mary Magdalene. Was Joanna herself at this gruesome dinner?

  Not that John the Baptist’s head was brought to the dinner itself. According to Josephus, the Baptist was imprisoned and executed at the remote rocky hilltop fortress of Machaerus in Parea, that part of Herod Antipas’ tetrarchy that lay in the desert to the east of the Dead Sea. But as the dinner guests were notables of Galilee the famous dance would not have taken place in a fortress difficult of access far away across the Dead Sea but in Herod’s luxurious palace at Tiberias on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. But wherever it happened, the beheading of John the Baptist was a traumatic event, infamous enough for Josephus to write about it, disturbing even to Herod who was never sure he wanted the Baptist dead, and appalling to Joanna and others who sympathised with John’s vision of renewal for the Jewish people.

  The news of the death of John the Baptist came immediately to Jesus. The gospels of Mark and Matthew record that when John’s disciples heard of his death they came and laid his body in a tomb, with Matthew 14:12 adding that ‘his disciples came, and took up the body, and buried it, and went and told Jesus’. In fact John’s arrest, followed by his death, may have been the events that changed the entire nature of Jesus’ calling, for as John 3: 23-24 explains, Jesus had only recently been sharing with John the work of baptising in the river Jordan: ‘After these things came Jesus and his disciples into the land of Judaea; and there he tarried with them, and baptized. And John also was baptizing in Aenon near to Salim, because there was much water there: and they came, and were baptized. For John was not yet cast into prison’. This passage has Jesus baptising away from his familiar ground; he is in the south, in Judaea, close to John who is in Parea on the east bank of the Jordan. It is as though the two cousins were sharing a single mission and a single vision.

  If until now Jesus was content to baptise, the arrest and death of John the Baptist created an urgency, and Jesus threw himself into a campaign which drew a great multitude of people from the villages and cities round the Sea of Galilee, as the multitudes had once come to hear John. So many came from so wide and far that Jesus commanded his disciples to feed them with all they had, five loaves and two fishes that he blessed and multiplied so that they fed five thousand men and numerous more women and children.

  Titus Flavius Josephus, the first
-century AD Jewish Roman historian who mentions among others Herod Antipas, Pontius Pilate, John the Baptist and Jesus in his The Antiquities of the Jews.

  Josephus. Wikimedia Commons.

  The gospel of John 1:35-42 tells how Andrew and another who is unnamed had been followers of John but after his imprisonment they decided to follow Jesus and persuaded Andrew’s brother, Simon Peter, to join them too.

  Those women who Luke says were travelling with Jesus as ‘he went throughout every city and village, preaching and shewing the glad tidings of the kingdom of God’, among them Joanna, wife of Chuza, and Mary Magdalene – in the beginning they too may have been John the Baptist’s followers, drawn to him by his rite of baptism which bypassed the traditional covenant with God expressed by male circumcision and which instead offered salvation to men and women alike, to everyone. But now after Herod’s brutal response to the Baptist’s message of rebirth, Mary Magdalene and her companions understood the danger they all faced, for as Mark 3:6 writes of plots against Jesus, ‘And the Pharisees went forth, and straightway took counsel with the Herodians against him, how they might destroy him.’ But if this was a dangerous time, it was also the end of time; there was no more waiting now, for as Jesus proclaimed, the kingdom of God was at hand.

  Galilee

  In contrast to the desolation described by travellers as recently as the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the lifetime of Mary Magdalene the country round the Sea of Galilee was bountiful and beautiful. Plants as diverse as walnuts and palms, figs and olives, all flourished here; ‘one may call it the ambition of nature’, said Josephus, speaking of the way the rich soil and varied climate ‘forces those plants that are naturally enemies to one another to agree together; it is a happy contention of the seasons, as if every one of them laid claim to this country’.