The Quest for Mary Magdalene

by Michael Haag

  When Jesus was brought to the hill called Golgotha, the soldiers would have laid Jesus on the cross-piece, stretched out his arms, and then driven nails through his wrists or hands into the wood. The upright had already been set into the ground; now Jesus was hoisted up, the full weight of his body tearing at the nails, until the crosspiece was slotted over the top of the upright shaft. The soles of his feet were nailed flat against the shaft of the cross or nails were driven through his ankles so that his feet were attached to either side of the shaft.

  The image of Jesus upon a high cross, suffering but strangely still and majestic does not accord with reality. The height of the assembled cross would have been about seven and a half feet; Jesus therefore would be suspended not much more than a foot or two above those looking on – almost face to face. Jesus was completely naked, no decorous loin cloth as in the familiar icons and paintings. Crucifixion loosened the bladder and the bowels, and his body would be streaming with sweat and blood. The suspended weight of his body made it difficult to fill his lungs to breathe. Flexing his knees, he raised himself to fill his lungs but his pinioned feet suffered terrible pain. As his body rose and fell his scourged back rubbed against the rough cross adding to his torture.

  Death by crucifixion was deliberately slow, to maximise the agony and draw the greatest crowd. Stripping the man naked, hanging him up in a public place and exposing his mutilated body to jeers and flies was all part of the Romans’ purpose to inflict the greatest possible pain and humiliation on the condemned. Eventually death would come by suffocation or heart failure. Victims could take three days to die; their bodies were then left hanging on the cross until they rotted and fell off or were devoured by birds and scavenging dogs. In every sense, as Cicero said, crucifixion was ‘disgusting’; the point of it was to demonstrate the absolute power of the state and the abject helplessness of the victim, his pain and degradation serving a terrifying public warning. The worst part of it, as one executioner said, was the screaming.

  So it was with Jesus, writhing on the cross, crying out in agony and calling upon God. His executioners busied themselves dividing up his clothes, casting lots for who should get what. Passers-by came up close and jeered at Jesus to his face, for the cross was barely higher than a man. Among his tormentors were the chief priests, and some scribes and elders of the Sanhedrin who said, ‘He trusted in God; let him deliver him now, if he will have him: for he said, I am the Son of God’ (Matthew 27:43).

  According to Mark and Matthew, all the men who had followed Jesus had fled; but watching from afar were women from Galilee, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James the Less and Joses (Joseph), and Salome who was the wife of Zebedee and the mother of his sons the disciples James and John. Towards the end Jesus cried out in Aramaic, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? which is, being interpreted, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ (Mark 15:34) As he raised himself to open his lungs bolts of pain shot through his hands and feet but lowering himself meant slow suffocation; suffering excruciating pain he raised himself again. Mark and Matthew report a final scream. At three in the afternoon Jesus was dead.

  The Romans probably crucified tens of thousands of people over the centuries; after the slave uprising led by Spartacus they crucified 6000 people in a day. Jesus is often depicted high upon a cross as in this illustration, but the reality was more ordinary and sordid. Gustave Doré, French, 1867.

  The Crucifixion by Gustave Doré. Wikimedia Commons.

  Thy Will Be Done

  Onlookers heard Jesus cry from the cross. ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’ Some thought he was calling to Elijah to come down from heaven and release him. To others it might have seemed a cry of pain and despair, that God had abandoned Jesus, that his mission to bring about the kingdom of God had been betrayed by God himself. But Mary Magdalene understood. She knew that Jesus, speaking in the Aramaic vernacular, was bringing the Hebrew of Psalm 22 to the here and now.

  ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?’ So it begins. But the Psalm continues with declarations of God’s reward for the trust placed in him. ‘Our fathers trusted in thee: they trusted, and thou didst deliver them. They cried unto thee, and were delivered: they trusted in thee, and were not confounded.’

  Trust even as the sufferer is jeered like Jesus on the cross. ‘All they that see me laugh me to scorn: they shoot out the lip, they shake the head, saying, He trusted on the Lord that he would deliver him: let him deliver him, seeing he delighted in him.’

  The sufferer in Psalms undergoes pain and humiliation very much like that of the dying Jesus. ‘I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels. My strength is dried up like a potsherd; and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws; and thou hast brought me into the dust of death. For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have inclosed me: they pierced my hands and my feet. I may tell all my bones: they look and stare upon me. They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture.’

  But God intervenes and saves. ‘He hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; neither hath he hid his face from him; but when he cried unto him, he heard.’

  The gospel of John recounts the crucifixion somewhat differently. There Jesus’ final words are ‘It is finished’ (John 19:30). The original Greek word in the gospel is tetelestai and appears only twice, the first time two verses earler. ‘After this, Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the scripture might be fulfilled, saith, I thirst.’ And so his final words mean finished in the sense of accomplished. Dying on the cross was the supreme accomplishment; it was the final great act of trusting in and surrendering himself to the Father, the summation of everything Jesus ever taught in his parables and in his sermons about the kingdom of God – God’s embrace of everyone in his love, as in the parable of the profligate son (Luke 15:11-32), and as in the Sermon on the Mount in which God ‘maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust’ (Matthew 5:45) – so to enter the kingdom of God one had to submit absolutely to God, a God who could be incomprehensible in the seemingly arbitrary and indiscriminate ways he chooses to love.

  Mary Magdalene knew the courage of Jesus, his inextinguishable faith, she knew his love, she knew he was not offering himself as a sacrifice, nor to redeem anyone’s sins – no such notion as original sin ever entered his mind; for Jesus man was good and God was good. She knew that for Jesus his death was a pure act of acceptance and perfection of the Father’s love.

  The message is always the same, in John, in the Psalms, in the Sermon on the Mount, on the cross. ‘Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done.’

  They had destroyed his body but not his love. And not her love.

  The Burial

  Jesus died unusually quickly on the cross, in three hours according to the synoptic gospels, six hours says the gospel of John. More commonly the torment lasted two or three days. Nor even then were the bodies taken down; Roman practice was to leave corpses hanging on the cross until they were devoured as carrion or rotted and fell off. But the scourging given to Jesus must have been especially ferocious, making him die sooner.

  Also the Romans would have been mindful of Jewish burial customs. For the day of Jesus’ crucifixion was a Friday, the eve of the sabbath which would begin at sundown; Jewish custom was for the body to be buried on the day of death but never on Saturday the sabbath; so Jesus would have to be buried that day or be left on the cross, alive or dead, until Sunday.

  To hasten death the crucified victim received a final merciful brutality; his legs were smashed below the knees with something like a sledgehammer. The shock itself might kill but in any case the victim could now no longer use his legs to raise himself; he died of asphyxiation or heart failure within minutes. This was done to the two men crucified on either side of Jesus. ‘Then came the soldiers, and brake the legs of the f
irst, and of the other which was crucified with him. But when they came to Jesus, and saw that he was dead already, they brake not his legs’.

  But the Roman execution squad was taking no chances, and ‘one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water’ (John 19:32-34). The water suggests that Jesus had died of heart failure; the spear released the build-up of water round his heart and then pierced the heart itself.

  The Sanhedrin took charge of the bodies of the two men crucified with Jesus; it maintained cemeteries for Jews who had been executed, then it retrieved their bones after a year and released them to their families in an ossuary. But Jesus received a private burial thanks to the intervention of Joseph of Arimathea, one of the elders of the Sanhedrin. ‘When the even was come, there came a rich man of Arimathea, named Joseph, who also himself was Jesus’ disciple’ (Matthew 27:57). Joseph sought permission from Pontius Pilate to remove Jesus from the cross and place him in his own tomb which had recently been cut from the rock in a garden not far from Golgotha. There before sunset in this April afternoon Joseph of Arimathea hurriedly wrapped the bloody and mangled body in clean linen and laid it to rest until it could be properly washed and anointed after the sabbath.

  In the gospels of Mark and Matthew, Mary Magdalene and ‘the other Mary’, the mother of Joses, watched to see where Jesus’ body was laid. But Luke and John tell it differently.

  Mary Magdalene with Jesus after his body has been lowered from the cross. Detail of The Deposition by Sebastiano del Piombo, Italian, 1516.

  The Deposition by Sebastiano del Piombo. Photograph by Michael Haag.

  Luke talks only of ‘the women’; he mentions no names. ‘And the women also, which came with him from Galilee, followed after, and beheld the sepulchre, and how his body was laid. And they returned, and prepared spices and ointments; and rested the sabbath day according to the commandment’ (Luke 23:55-56). Likewise Luke had earlier avoided identifying those who witnessed the crucifixon, saying only that ‘all his acquaintance, and the women that followed him from Galilee, stood afar off, beholding these things’ (Luke 23:49). Nevertheless the three synoptic gospels are in agreement in having Mary Magdalene, or in Luke’s case ‘the women’, witnessing the crucifixion standing afar off, and likewise the synoptics agree in having Mary Magdalene or ‘the women’ watching to see where Jesus is buried.

  But the gospel of John gives an entirely different account of the witnesses to the crucifixion and also of the burial.

  Instead of standing afar off as in the synoptic gospels, John has the witnesses to the crucifixion standing at the foot of the cross. ‘Now there stood by the cross of Jesus his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene’, and they are joined there by the disciple ‘whom he loved’ (John 19:25-26). The Beloved Disciple appears six times in John’s gospel but in none of the synoptics; he is never named.

  As for the women, Mary Magdalene for once is mentioned last; John’s gospel gives primacy to Mary the mother of Jesus. Her appearance here is her first since the early days of Jesus’ ministry in Galilee when people began to think he was ‘beside himself’ and possessed by the devil. Together with Jesus’ brothers, Mary came along to have a word with him and maybe take him away (Mark 3:31-35, Matthew 12:46-50, Luke 8:19-21). But Jesus dismissed his mother and brothers, saying that only those who do the will of God could count as his family. Now here in the gospel of John, at the foot of the cross, we are presented with a reconciliation. In later centuries the Church would seize on this moment in John’s gospel to promote Mariology, the veneration of Mary as the Mother of God.

  John also differs from the synoptics in his account of Jesus’ burial. Joseph of Arimathea, ‘a disciple of Jesus, but secretly’ (John 19:38), goes to Pilate and obtains permission to take away the body. But with him is Nicodemus, a Pharisee and fellow member of the Sanhedrin, the man who used to come to talk with Jesus by night. Nicodemus brings with him ‘a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about an hundred pound weight. Then took they the body of Jesus, and wound it in linen with the spices’.

  This was not embalming, a practice all but unknown in Judaea, rather the spices were used to remove the odour; nor were coffins used in biblical times, the linen was sufficient. The practice was for the body to be left in the sepulchral chamber until it was reduced to a skeleton, then the bones were collected, wrapped in linen, and interred.

  But the quantity of spices brought by Nicodemus is spectacular. In the version given by the gospel of John there could have been nothing discreet about removing Jesus’ body from the cross, placing it in the sepulchre, and bringing so great a quantity of spices that several servants and perhaps a donkey or a cart must have been required, a small procession to the tomb. And the expense would have been enormous, but then Nicodemus was a very wealthy man, one of the wealthiest in Jerusalem.

  All the gospels say that a great stone was rolled across the entrance to the sepulchre. But unlike the synoptic gospels John says nothing about Mary Magdalene or any other women looking on to see where Jesus was laid; in John there will be no need for Mary Magdalene to anoint Jesus after the sabbath as that service has already been performed by Nicodemus.

  The day was over.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Empty Tomb

  ‘AND VERY EARLY IN the morning the first day of the week, they came unto the sepulchre at the rising of the sun.’ This is Mark’s gospel telling about Mary Magdalene visiting the tomb when the sabbath was past to anoint the body of Jesus. With Mary Magdalene are Mary the mother of James, and Salome. ‘Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre?’ But when they looked they saw that the stone was already rolled away.

  Inside they saw a young man clothed in a long white garment and they were afraid. Do not be frightened, he said, ‘Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him.’ Tell Peter and the disciples, said the young man, that Jesus has gone to Galilee; there you will see him.

  And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid.

  Mary Magdalene discovers that the tomb is empty. The Resurrection, woodcut 1917, by Eric Gill.

  The Resurrection by Eric Gill. The Engravings, by Eric Gill, edited by Christopher Skelton, London 1990.

  And there at Mark 16:8 is where the original version of Mark’s gospel ends. The oldest of the canonical gospels ends with nobody seeing the risen Jesus; Mary Magdalene and her companions see only the empty tomb. That is the amazing and frightening event.

  The Unseen Divine

  But at some point the gospel was extended and twelve verses, Mark 16:9-20, were added; they seem to be borrowed and adapted from verses found towards the end of Matthew, Luke and John so that the ending of Mark would conform to the other gospels. This is the version of Mark found in Bibles today. After Mary Magdalene departs from the empty tomb, Jesus appears to her and she tells the others but they do not believe her; then Jesus appears to two followers along the road but they also are not believed; and finally Jesus shows himself to the eleven male disciples who are sitting at dinner and upbraids them for not having believed news of his resurrection.

  The extended version of the gospel of Mark ends with Jesus telling the disciples to ‘Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned. . . . Then after the Lord had spoken unto them, he was received up into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God’ (Mark 16:15-16, 19).

  This command by the resurrected Jesus to go out and spread the gospel throughout the world is known as the Great Commission; it is the basis for the dispersal of the apostles from Jerusalem to found the apostolic sees and with it the principal of apostolic succession which is the fundamental building block of the hierarchy of the Church.

  But the earliest
Christians would not have found these verses in the original version of Mark nor in the oldest known complete texts of the New Testament, the Codex Sinaiticus and the Codex Vaticanus, both of the early fourth century AD. Although at least some of these additional verses are known to have been circulating as early as the end of the second century AD, the late fourth-century Church Father Jerome attested that verses 16:9-20 were absent from almost all Greek copies of Mark known to him. It is clear that at the time Mark’s gospel was written, which is generally put at around AD 70, Mark himself and many early Christians accepted the empty tomb as a sufficient explanation of events.

  At the resurrection of Jesus the guards posted by the Sanhedrin ‘did shake, and became as dead men’, and afterwards, according to the gospel of Matthew, they were bribed to say that the disciples had taken the body away. Detail, The Resurrection by Meister Francke, German, 1424.

  The Resurrection, detail, by Meister Francke. Wikimedia Commons.

  For Mary Magdalene, in the original version of Mark, the amazement and fear she felt in the empty tomb was the awe one feels in the presence of the divine. The experience was comparable to entering the Holy of Holies of the Temple at Jerusalem, the inner sanctum where only the high priest could go and then only once a year. In every other temple in the ancient world the inner sanctum would contain the image of a god. But at the heart of the Temple in Jerusalem the Holy of Holies was empty – except as home for the unseen divine. And so it was for Mary Magdalene in the empty tomb. No appearance of Jesus, no palpable resurrection, no touching of wounds, no ascension into heaven, no sitting on the right hand of God, no Church hierarchy nor threat of damnation was required. Jesus had said, and Mary Magdalene understood, that the kingdom of God is all round us; it is waiting for us to enter if we know how. ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand’ (Mark 1:15).