by Michael Haag
When Jesus went to the garden of Gethsemane he asked his disciples to ‘Sit ye here, while I shall pray’. But going deeper into the garden he ‘taketh with him Peter and James and John’, saying ‘My soul is exceeding sorrowful unto death: tarry ye here, and watch’. Watch what? If Jesus was not resisting his fate what was the purpose in standing guard? Had the disciples gathered in the garden of Gethsemane for a nighttime resurrection ritual enacted by Lazarus? Were Peter, James and John meant to be inducted? But the way the canonical version of Mark tells it, Peter, James and John are presumably meant to watch out for any approach by the Temple militia; instead they fall asleep and suddenly the garden is overrun by ‘a great multitude with swords and staves, from the chief priests and the scribes and the elders’ (Mark 14:34, 43). The disciples immediately run away. ‘And they all forsook him, and fled’.
The disciples fled but one man remained, ‘a certain young man, having a linen cloth cast about his naked body’. The militia laid hold of him, but the young man ‘left the linen cloth, and fled from them naked’ (Mark 14:50-52). Having already let the other disciples flee, Jesus alone would be handed over to the Romans. The attempt to grab Lazarus seems to have been half-hearted, possibly because his wealth and also perhaps connections with aristocratic and priestly families of the city dissuaded them from condemning him. (The name Lazarus, Eleizar in Hebrew, was very common in first-century AD Palestine, but it should be noted that it occurs in the lineage of the Gurion family and also in that of the family of the high priest Annas, father in law of Caiaphas. Some such connection with the elite might explain the identity of ‘that disciple [who] was known unto the high priest, and went in with Jesus into the palace of the high priest’ (John 18:15); a now fully clothed Lazarus might have witnessed the trial of Jesus before the Sanhedrin.)
The disciples understood nothing of what was going on; only after the empty tomb did they begin to make sense of things; the ritual or actual rebirth of Lazarus from the dead, the anointing by Mary Magdalene of Jesus, finding the mysterious ass’ colt, the triumphant entry into Jerusalem. ‘These things understood not his disciples at the first: but when Jesus was glorified’ – that is after his resurrection – ‘then remembered they that these things were written of him’ (John 12:16). While the disciples remained in ignorance, Jesus and his inner circle of followers, the ones with whom he had shared the mystery of death and rebirth, among them Lazarus and Mary Magdalene, had been arranging things over the Mount of Olives at Bethany – Jesus the magus and Mary Magdalene the sorceress.
Raising the Dead
On three occasions in the gospels Jesus seemingly raises someone from the dead. Jairus was the head of a synagogue in Galilee whose daughter falls ill; he begs Jesus to see what he can do, but as Jesus approaches the house onlookers pronounce that the girl has now died. The story is told in Mark 5:38-42, Matthew 9:23-25 and Luke 8:52-55, but in each of these gospel accounts Jesus announces that the daughter of Jairus is not really dead, only sleeping. As Mark tells it, Jesus takes the girl by the hand and in Aramaic says Talitha cumi, which means ‘Damsel, I say unto thee, arise’, and straightaway she arises and walks.
The second story is found only in the gospel of Luke and tells of the son of the widow of Nain whom Luke himself describes as dead. Jesus takes pity on the widow; as the body is being carried for burial outside the gate of the city Jesus touches the bier, ‘And he said, Young man, I say unto thee, Arise. And he that was dead sat up, and began to speak’ (Luke 7:14-15). Sceptics might easily have said that just as the daughter of Jairus was not really dead, so neither was the son of the widow of Nain; the haste to bury the dead before the setting of the sun could lead to mistakes.
The entrance to the tomb of Lazarus at Bethany, photographed in 1906.
The tomb of Lazarus. Library of Congress.
But the gospel of John, the last of the gospels to be written, intends to leave no doubt; over and over throughout chapter 11 it drives home the point that Lazarus really is dead.
Mary and Martha send word from Bethany to Jesus who is beyond the Jordan river that ‘he whom thou lovest is sick’, but Jesus does nothing and stays where he is for two days. After first telling his disciples that ‘Our friend Lazarus sleepeth; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep’, suddenly his manner changes. ‘Then said Jesus unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead’.
Only now does Jesus make the several days’ journey to Bethany where he meets Martha waiting for him on the road and learns that Lazarus ‘had lain in the grave four days already’. She says if only Jesus had come sooner her brother would not have died. ‘Thy brother shall rise again’, he says, ‘I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die’.
Then Mary came and joined them, followed by mourners from the house, and the verses become more emphatic that Lazarus is dead. Mary reproaches Jesus as Martha had done. ‘She fell down at his feet, saying unto him, Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died.’ But here something strange happens; instead of telling Mary as he did Martha that he is the resurrection and the life, Jesus weeps. To Martha he must explain his divinity; to Mary he does not need to explain; she understands; he is free to be a man and to weep for his friend.
‘Where have ye laid him?’, he says, and being shown the tomb he asks the men to remove the stone. Martha protests. ‘By this time he stinketh’, she says. But Jesus ‘cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus saith unto them, Loose him, and let him go’.
Unlike the daughter of Jairus and the son of the widow of Nain, and unlike the young man in Secret Mark who, though buried in the tomb, let out ‘a great cry’, this Lazarus in the gospel of John had been four days in the tomb, stinking and dead. Nor was there any doubt that this was a bodily resurrection; Jesus said come forth and the dead man came forth, and Jesus said loose him from his graveclothes and let him go. Later this same Lazarus would sit at the table as Martha served and Mary anointed Jesus ‘against the day of my burying’ (John 12:7).
Yet though the raising of Lazarus was a bodily resurrection, nowhere in the synoptic gospels does Jesus give any indication that he believes in the resurrection of the body. For example the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke all tell the story about the Sadducees, who did not believe in any kind of resurrection, confronting Jesus at the Temple, giving him the example of the woman who according to Jewish law married the brother of her deceased husband, but after his death married in turn the next brother and so on until she had married seven brothers in all – so to whom was she married come the resurrection?
This is how Mark tells the story. ‘Then come unto him the Sadducees, which say there is no resurrection; and they asked him, saying, . . . . In the resurrection therefore, when they shall rise, whose wife shall she be of them? for the seven had her to wife’ (Mark 12:18, 23). To which Jesus answers in Mark 12:25, ‘when they shall rise from the dead, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven’. In Matthew 22:30 Jesus says the same thing, they ‘are as the angels of God in heaven’. And similarly in Luke 20:36, ‘they are equal unto the angels’. These are not bodily resurrections; these ‘angels’ lack the needs and functions of flesh and blood. In the same way that the synoptic gospels present this as the view of Jesus so they are likely to have been the view of the generality of Jews in the first century AD.
But now, according to John’s gospel, Jesus raises Lazarus bodily and he and his sisters all sit down and have dinner together at Bethany. ‘In the beginning was the word’; this is how the gospel of John begins; ‘and the word was God. . . . And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us’ (John 1:1, 14) In John there is a different understanding of resurrection at work in which Mary Magdalene must play her part.
Touch Me Not
The first day of the w
eek cometh Mary Magdalene early, when it was yet dark, unto the sepulchre, and seeth the stone taken away from the sepulchre. Then she runneth, and cometh to Simon Peter, and to the other disciple, whom Jesus loved, and saith unto them, They have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him.
This is how the resurrection scene begins in the gospel of John (20:1-2). Immediately Peter and the beloved disciple race to the tomb, but the beloved disciple, presumably being younger, ‘did outrun Peter, and came first to the sepulchre. And he stooping down, and looking in, saw the linen clothes lying; yet went he not in’. Then Peter comes and goes into the sepulchre where he sees the napkin that had been about Jesus’ head and the linen clothes. Now the beloved disciple comes in too ‘and he saw, and believed’ (John 20:4-5, 8). The race is like a contest for precedence; Peter, who enters the tomb first, will become leader of the Jesus movement, even the first pope in Rome; yet the beloved disciple arrived outside the tomb before Peter but he gave way, and when he finally went in he believed; perhaps he did not need to go into the sepulchre to believe; but we do not know if Peter believed. The matter ends anticlimactically: ‘Then the disciples went away again unto their own home’ (John 20:10).
Recognising the risen Jesus in the garden, Mary Magdalene reaches out for the man who has returned to her. But nothing is the same. ‘Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father.’ Noli Me Tangere by Giotto, 1305, in the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua.
Noli Me Tangere by Giotto. Photograph by Michael Haag.
But not for Mary Magdalene who ‘stood without at the sepulchre weeping’. And as she wept she stooped down and looked into the sepulchre and saw ‘two angels in white sitting, the one at the head, and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain. And they say unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? She saith unto them, Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him’ (John 20:11-13).
This is only the second time that Mary Magdalene has spoken in the gospels. In Mark and Matthew and Luke she is given nothing to say. But in John she speaks and what she wants to know is what have ‘they’ done with Jesus’ body. In Mark she does not ask, there is only silence; in Mark she knows all there is to know. But in John mystery is replaced by poetry.
Turning from the tomb, Mary Magdalene sees a man she thinks to be the gardener. ‘Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou?’ And she says to him, ‘Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away’. ‘Mary’, Jesus says to her, and now she recognises him. ‘Rabboni’, she says, using the familiar Aramaic for master, and reaches out for the man who has returned to her. But nothing is the same. ‘Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father.’ (John 20:14-17)
It is a strange thing to say, for eight days later and ten verses on Jesus appears to Doubting Thomas. ‘Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing. And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God’ (John 20:27-28).
So very different from the faith and vision of Mary. ‘Go to my brethren’, Jesus tells her, ‘and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God’. According to John, Mary Magdalene did as she was told. ‘Mary Magdalene came and told the disciples that she had seen the Lord, and that he had spoken these things unto her’ (John 20:17-18).
And that is the last we hear of Mary Magdalene. Two decades or so later, in his first epistle to the Corinthians, Paul the self-appointed apostle to the gentiles told them how ‘Christ died for our sins’ and that ‘he was buried, and that he rose again the third day’, and that ‘he was seen of Cephas [Peter], then of the twelve: After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep. After that, he was seen of James; then of all the apostles. And last of all he was seen of me also’ (1 Corinthians 15:3-8). But nowhere in his list is Mary Magdalene.
Yet Paul explains that those who have seen Jesus preach of his death and resurrection; ‘so we preach, and so ye believed. Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain’ (1 Corinthians 15:11-14). But no Mary Magdalene.
Mary Magdalene called Jesus Rabboni but not my God. Could she have touched him? What did Mary Magdalene believe? Was it as in that sudden ending of the gospel of Mark; 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. Was it that she believed simply in the kingdom of God and the empty tomb?
One thing is certain. Nowhere in the canonical New Testament does anybody ever mention Mary Magdalene again.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Disappearance of Mary Magdalene
MARY MAGDALENE DISAPPEARS FROM the Bible after her appearance at the crucifixion and resurrection in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. She is not named in the Acts of the Apostles which was written by the same person who wrote the gospel of Luke – though perhaps we can assume she is there at Pentecost, seven weeks after the resurrection, where ‘the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus’ are gathered with the disciples and other followers, ‘about an hundred and twenty’ (Acts 1:14-15), in an upper room in Jerusalem where they are visited by the Holy Spirit.
The presence of the Holy Spirit is equivalent to the presence of Jesus himself; though Jesus has ascended to his Father and no longer walks among his followers, the faithful are filled with the Holy Spirit, invisible, inward and enduring, its truth to be spread by the disciples throughout the world.
Among ‘the women’ may have been Mary Magdalene, perhaps she at Bethany who had anointed Jesus with the Divine Spirit; but this is the last glimpse we have of her in the New Testament, anonymous now, lost among the crowd in an upper room.
Instead the Acts of the Apostles concentrates on Peter when it tells the story of the founding of the church in Jerusalem after Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascension and increasingly on Paul when it tells how the new faith was spread throughout the Roman Empire – as intimated by the Holy Spirit which has those gathered in the upper room talking in tongues as though to the whole world.
This is no longer the world of Galilee nor the Jewish world of Palestine; this is the world of Paul, the Hellenised Jew – who will turn his back on the historical Jesus and ignore the existence of Mary Magdalene.
Paul the Hellenised Jew
Paul (which was his Hellenised name; Saul was his Hebrew name) was a Jew from Tarsus in Asia Minor (present-day Turkey). He described himself as ‘a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee’ (Acts 23:6) but his wealthy family had also been granted Roman citizenship. By background, therefore, Paul was a man of several worlds. As well as speaking Aramaic and Hebrew, he also spoke Greek, for Asia Minor was part of the Greek world. The inhabitants of Tarsus were thoroughly Hellenised and Paul would have been familiar with Stoic philosophy of which the city was a great centre, the ‘Athens of Asia Minor’.
Despite being well placed within the Graeco-Roman world, at first Paul chose to be narrowly sectarian. Jesus had already been crucified when Paul came to Jerusalem to study at the rabbinical school where in about AD 34 he approvingly witnessed the stoning of Stephen, the first Christian martyr.
Stephen belonged to a small circle of Jesus’ followers, the Jerusalem church headed by Jesus’ brother James, though it was no more than a Jewish sect, without rituals or holy places or a priesthood of its own. This was a Jewish movement; they faithfully followed the Torah, they observed the dietary prohibitions and they insisted on circumcision. They also went into the Temple and prayed regularly, Luke 24:53 reporting that after Jesus’ ascension his disciples ‘were continually in the temple, praising and blessing God’. In t
ime they might well have been reabsorbed into the mainstream of Judaism. But meanwhile they were observant Jews like Jesus himself who thought that the kingdom of God was at hand. And they spread this news to their fellow Jews.
Stephen proclaimed the divinity of Jesus and was stoned to death on orders of the Sanhedrin. An approving onlooker was Paul. Engraving by Gustave Doré, French, 1867.
The stoning of Stephen by Gustave Doré. Wikimedia Commons.
But when Stephen told the Sanheddrin, ‘Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God’, the Sanhedrin ‘cried out with a loud voice, and stopped their ears, and ran upon him with one accord, and cast him out of the city, and stoned him: and the witnesses laid down their clothes at a young man’s feet, whose name was Saul . . . And Saul was consenting unto his death’ (Acts 7:56-58; 8:1).
As is evident from his Greek name, Stephen was a Helleniser, his background probably not so different from Paul’s. Stephen was born a Jew probably in the diaspora and his native tongue would have been Greek, and he preached to Jews from all over the Greek-speaking world, from Cyrenia in North Africa, and from Alexandria in Egypt, and also from Cilicia in Asia Minor, as told in Acts. Where the Jerusalem sect had stayed within traditional Jewish practice and belief, Stephen had loudly proclaimed the divinity of Jesus. The language of a man-god was intelligible in the Graeco-Roman world, but for the Sanhedrin, and for a man like Paul the Pharisee, Stephen had uttered a blasphemy.