by Michael Haag
Nor was the role of complicit bystander at the stoning of Stephen enough for Paul, who now ‘made havoc of the church, entering into every house, and haling men and women committed them to prison’ (Acts 8:3). Yet the way the story is told, the impression is given of a man driving himself towards fanaticism lest something within him gives way: Paul ‘breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went unto the high priest, and desired of him letters to Damascus to the synagogues, that if he found any of this way, whether they were men or women, he might bring them bound unto Jerusalem’ (this and the following from Acts 9:1-25).
‘And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven: and he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest.’ Paul rose from the ground blinded by the vision and had to be led to a house in town, where for three days he neither saw nor ate nor drank. But on the third day a Jewish follower of Jesus called Ananias put his hands upon Paul, ‘And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales: and he received sight forthwith, and arose, and was baptised’. At once Paul rushed round the synagogues of Damascus preaching the very blasphemy that Jesus’s followers in Jerusalem had hesitated to embrace, that Jesus was the living Son of God.
Paul himself however makes no mention of a vision on the road to Damascus; his epistle to the Galatians 1:11-16 says only that ‘God revealed his Son to me’.
But I certify you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached of me is not after man. For I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ. For ye have heard of my conversation in time past in the Jews’ religion, how that beyond measure I persecuted the church of God, and wasted it: And profited in the Jews’ religion above many my equals in mine own nation, being more exceedingly zealous of the traditions of my fathers. But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother’s womb, and called me by his grace, To reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the heathen; immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood.
Note that Paul says that ‘I conferred not with flesh and blood’. ‘Not after man’ did Paul learn about Jesus; no teaching brought him to an understanding of the kingdom of God; he did not come to Jesus like the disciples, like Mary Magdalene, by knowing the man; Paul received his authority directly and exclusively from his vision of a divinised Jesus, from the Christ.
In the instantaneousness of Paul’s conversion, he dispensed with the doubts, the hesitations, the halfway houses that accompany argument and reflection, and became free to find radical solutions to the constraints of the Jesus cult. The very divinity of Jesus, the idea that a man could be a god, while utterly alien to Judaism, was in keeping with Hellenistic culture, even if the more sophisticated looked at it askance. As Paul himself said when he preached the divinity of Jesus: ‘For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness’ (1 Corinthians, 1:22-23).
Nevertheless to the gentiles of that Hellenistic culture Paul directed his mission, bypassing Jesus’ followers in Jerusalem. They had known Jesus in his lifetime, as a Galilean, as a Jew, as a teacher who had tried to work within the particularity of his environment. But Paul’s authority was his claim to have known Jesus through that vision on the road to Damascus according to Acts, to have known him as divine, as boundless and universal. Abandoning such Jewish shibboleths as dietary restrictions and circumcision, objectionable to the gentiles, while presenting his doctrines in the concepts and terms of Greek language and thought he had known at Tarsus, Paul embarked on a series of proselytising journeys that took him from Palestine to Asia Minor, Cyprus, Greece and ultimately to Rome itself, where according to tradition he was martyred in about AD 65.
Paul’s vision of Jesus on the way to Damascus led him to proclaim that he was a personal witness to the resurrection. Jesus was first seen by Peter, said Paul, ‘And last of all he was seen of me also’. But Paul never mentioned Mary Magdalene. Engraving in the Nuremberg Chronicle, German, 1493.
Paul’s conversion in the Nuremberg Chronicles. Wikimedia Commons.
Five years later, in AD 70, during the Jewish uprising against the Romans both Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed. Josephus describes the scene.
The slaughter within was even more dreadful than the spectacle from without. Men and women, old and young, insurgents and priests, those who fought and those who entreated mercy, were hewn down in indiscriminate carnage. The number of the slain exceeded that of the slayers. The legionaries had to clamber over heaps of dead to carry on the work of extermination.
The city, said Josephus, was ‘so thoroughly laid even with the ground by those that dug it up to the foundation, that there was left nothing to make those that came thither believe it had ever been inhabited’. Great numbers of Jews fled throughout the Mediterranean. The Jesus movement in Jerusalem was dead.
The Disappearance of Mary Magdalene
What happened to Mary Magdalene in these years is a mystery. What is sometimes overlooked is that Paul’s epistles and the Acts of the Apostles are the earliest Christian documents we have, yet she is missing from these; the gospels come much later and it is only in the gospels that we at last meet Mary Magdalene.
This relief on the Arch of Titus in Rome celebrates the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70. Legionaries triumphantly return home from the Jewish Revolt carrying a golden menorah and other sacred objects from the Temple.
The Arch of Titus. Wikimedia.
The New Testament presents us with an order of events. First are the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, which in their various ways describe the life of Jesus. Then comes the Acts of the Apostles which tells us of the early years of the Jesus movement. The remainder of the New Testament is largely taken up with the letters of Paul with their message that the death and resurrection of Jesus is the means to salvation. Epistles by other figures follow and finally the New Testament concludes with an apocalyptic work, Revelation.
But the order of composition of the New Testament was different. Before there were the gospels, before there was anything written about Jesus or Mary Magdalene, there was Paul. The letters of Paul, written in the AD 40s and 50s, are the earliest Christian works. The gospels follow quite a few years after, with Mark, the oldest, said to have been composed around AD 70 and John not earlier than AD 100. The Acts of the Apostles came almost last, after Revelation.
Therefore in a sense it is wrong to say that Mary Magdalene disappears from the New Testament after the gospels. The truth is that she is not there at the beginning; she is not there in the letters of Paul who specifically mentions meeting James and Peter and John in Jerusalem but makes no mention of Mary Magdalene. For example in his epistle to the Galatians 1:18-19 Paul writes that three years after his conversion he finally ‘went up to Jerusalem to see Peter, and abode with him fifteen days. But other of the apostles saw I none, save James the Lord’s brother’. Then in Galatians 2:9 he writes how fourteen years later he again went to Jerusalem where he met James, Cephas [Peter], and John, who seemed to be pillars’. But of Mary Magdalene Paul has nothing to say.
Paul has a reputation for misogyny but would this be enough for his failure to mention Mary Magdalene? At times he thinks women should sit still and keep quiet, ‘Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church’ (1 Corinthians 14:34-35). As for relations between men and women, ‘It is good for a man not to touch a woman . . . But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.’ (1 Corinthians 7:1, 9). On the other hand Paul is entirely comfortable with women playing significant roles in
the early movement; Priscilla, for example, who hosted congregations in her home; Phoebe, whom Paul describes as his patron; and Junia, the woman who may have been Joanna, the wife of Chuza, whom he calls ‘of note among the apostles’ (Romans 16:1-7).
It scarcely seems possible that during his visits to Jerusalem Paul did not meet Mary Magdalene or at least hear of her. James and Peter and John would have spoken of her. They would have told Peter how she was the first to discover the empty tomb.
And yet Paul says nothing about Mary Magdalene. But he makes no mention of Mary the mother of Jesus either. For that matter Paul has nothing to say about the living Jesus, nothing beyond two commonplace remarks, that he was ‘made of a woman, made under the law’ (Galatians 4:4) and was ‘made of the seed of David according to the flesh’ (Romans 1:3). Otherwise throughout all his letters Paul says nothing about the ministry of Jesus; nothing of his parables, nothing of his sermons, nothing of his healing, nothing of his teachings. For Paul Jesus exists simply as a crucified sacrifice; ‘Christ died for our sins’ (1 Corinthians 15:3) and to ‘deliver us from this present evil world’ (Galatians 1:4). Jesus was wasting his breath when delivering his Sermon on the Mount; Paul is not interested in what the living Jesus did or said, only that he gave his life to atone for our sins and was resurrected to free us from what Paul called this world of evil.
Only in the gospels, written generations after the events they describe, do we hear about the living Jesus and Mary Magdalene.
Peter and Paul etched into the wall of a fourth-century Roman catacomb. The two were said to have founded the first church in Rome and, according to legend, Peter became the first pope.
Peter and Paul in a Roman catacomb. Wikimedia Commons.
Paul Hijacks Jesus
In writing the Acts of the Apostles Luke creates a narrative bridge between the gospels, which relate Jesus’ mission to his fellow Jews, and the rest of the New Testament, much of it taken up with the letters of Paul, which describe his journeys among the gentiles. In doing so, Acts makes it seem that Paul is an extension of the gospels – even the arrangement of the New Testament has Paul’s epistles immediately following Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Acts opens with Peter at Pentecost and the descent of the Holy Spirit, but a third of the way through its focus changes and it devotes itself overwhelmingly to Paul. Paul never knew Jesus and only came to Jerusalem after his crucifixion where he turned to persecuting Christians. Yet Paul is mentioned 155 times in Acts, while Peter, a prominent disciple of Jesus in all four gospels, is mentioned only fifty-six times. The entire final two-thirds of Acts is a narrative about Paul.
Nor is that the end of it. Paul has been credited with writing a large part of the New Testament; of its twenty-seven books fourteen have traditionally been assigned to Paul, though the authenticity of several is disputed by biblical scholars, with some thought to be pseudographia, that is written by followers in his name. There is general scholarly agreement, however, that Paul was the author of seven epistles – Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon – and that these are authentic in whole. Whatever their authorship, all these books were seen fit to join the New Testament canon, and from the beginning of Acts to the end of Revelation, the last book of the New Testament, the ratio holds: Paul is mentioned three times as often as Peter. Apart from the gospels, the New Testament is essentially by and about Paul.
The faith preached by Paul was founded absolutely on the resurrection. ‘And if Christ be not risen’, Paul told the Corinthians, ‘then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain’ (1 Corinthians 15:14). ‘I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures’ – the scriptures being prophetic verses in the Old Testament such as Isaiah 53:5. Paul goes on to explain his own special place in the scheme of things. ‘And that he [Jesus] 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, as of one born out of due time.’
So according to Paul the first person to see the risen Jesus is Peter, though that is not attested by any gospel. Then Jesus shows himself to the twelve disciples and appears to five hundred of the faithful before appearing before his brother James and all the other followers. And last of all he was seen of me also’ (1 Corinthians 15:3-8), says Paul of his vision on the road to Damascus.
But Paul says nothing about the empty tomb and nothing about Mary Magdalene.
Paul’s Journeys in the Footsteps of the Great Goddess
On his last journey, when Paul was sailing from Malta to Italy to stand trial in Rome, we are told in Acts 28:11 that he travelled with divine protection: ‘And after three months we departed in a ship of Alexandria, which had wintered in the isle, whose sign was Castor and Pollux’. Known as the Dioscuri, ‘sons of God’, Castor and Pollux were the twin sons of Zeus, the god of thunder in the Greek pantheon.
The cult of the Dioscuri as saviour gods of sailors at sea was associated with the worship of Isis. Originally Egyptian but then Hellenised and universalised, Isis was the greatest of the pagan deities; the goddess of countless names, the all-embracing goddess.
The goddess in all her manifestations was no stranger to Paul. He would have heard, for it happened within living memory of his parents’ generation, of Cleopatra’s visit to Tarsus to meet Mark Antony; Cleopatra who in pharaonic tradition was the living incarnation of Isis, the saviour goddess of the ancient world, and Antony her Osiris. The people of Tarsus were long familiar with the religion of Isis whose image even appeared on their coinage. Now even as Paul was sailing to Rome the goddess travelled with him.
The reverse of this silver tetradrachm minted in Alexandria in the early first century AD shows Isis sailing towards the Pharos lighthouse. As Isis Pelagia she was the protector of sailors and the goddess of the sea, and as Isis Pharia she was goddess of lighthouses everywhere.
Tetradrachm showing Isis Pharia. Bibliotheca Alexandrina.
A temple of Isis stood at the base of the Pharos, the great lighthouse at Alexandria, one of the seven wonders of the world. An annual procession in the city celebrated the cult of Isis Pharia, that is Isis of the Pharos lighthouse, and the overflowing of the Nile which sent Isis out of Egypt to roam the shores of the Mediterranean. As Isis Pelagia, that is Isis of the Sea, she was the protector of sailors and the goddess of the sea, and as Isis Pharia she was goddess of lighthouses everywhere.
A first-century AD litany to Isis found on a papyrus at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt declares that her worship held sway all along the coasts of Palestine and Syria. She was worshipped at Caesarea, refounded as a great port along Hellenistic lines by Herod the Great in about 25 to 15 BC, where the cult temple to the goddess was associated with the lighthouse.
Isis was the sister-wife of the murdered Osiris whom she brought back to life long enough to get her with child; this was Horus with whom she is depicted seated on a throne, nursing the infant in her arms. She was the goddess of resurrection and new beginnings. The litany tells us that she made her son Horus the lord of the whole world; she created every day for joy; and she is the glory and the tender love of the female sex and has made ‘the power of women equal to that of men’.
Her cult was in the ascendant during the lifetime of Jesus and Mary Magdalene in the first century AD. But long before then the influence of Hellenism had pressed inland from the coast and could be felt in the countryside and the villages, towns and cities all round the Sea of Galilee. The fishermen who ventured upon the waters of the lake at night were thankful for the towering beacons of Isis, the lighthouses that guided them safely back to their harbours in the hours before dawn – fishermen like those two disciples on whom Jesus bestows the name of Boanerg
es in the gospel of Mark 3:17: ‘James the son of Zebedee, and John the brother of James; and he surnamed them Boanerges, which is, The sons of thunder’.
Many of Mark’s readers or listeners, reading his gospel in its original Greek, would have associated ‘sons of thunder’ with the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, the twin sons of the thunder god Zeus. Just as readers of the gospels would know that one of the powers Jesus conferred on his disciples was to calm the storms in the Sea of Galilee, so they would know that the Dioscuri were the protecting gods of sailors and were invoked in times of storm when a sacrifice of white lambs was offered on the prow of a ship. The towering Pharos lighthouse at Alexandria, home of the cult of Isis Pharia, was dedicated to Castor and Pollux and bore the inscription: ‘To the Saviour Gods: for sailors’.
During Paul’s first missionary journey he had met with antagonism from Jews when he attempted to preach the word of Jesus; he had done better at Antioch in Syria and at Salamis and Paphos in Cyprus, three places mentioned in consecutive lines of the Oxyrhynchus Litany as centres of Isis worship, and this resolved him to devote himself to spreading his doctrine of salvation among gentiles instead. Therefore on his second missionary journey he visited Tarsus, the Troad, Neapolis, Philippi, Amphipolis, Apollonia, Athens, Corinth and Ephesus, all known centres of Isis worship where Paul was preaching to pagans well familiar with sermons from priests on the saving powers of the goddess. Again he followed in the footsteps of Isis on his third missionary journey when he revisited many of the cities in Greece and Asia Minor that he had been to before.
Long before Paul was travelling round the Mediterranean, Isis had assimilated the worship and the stories of all the female goddesses of Egypt and also of Greece and Rome. Herodotus, the fifth-century BC Greek historian who travelled extensively in Egypt, said that Isis was the Greek goddess Demeter, that Osiris was Dionysus, that their children were the Greek gods Artemis and Apollo, and that Apollo was the Egyptian Horus. A century and a half later, after Alexander the Great conquered Egypt from the Persians and Alexander’s successor Ptolemy I Soter initiated the Hellenisation of Egyptian culture, Isis became identified with goddesses from all round the Mediterranean, not only with Demeter, but with Persephone, Astarte, Aphrodite and with Artemis whom Herodotus had said was her daughter and also with Tyche, the Greek goddess of fortune, the Roman Fortuna.