The Quest for Mary Magdalene

by Michael Haag

  The Christian Threat

  The imperial government and many citizens were anxious about Christianity, seeing it as a danger to social cohesion. Romans owed an allegiance to the state and to the emperor and occasionally performed rituals which involved offering a sacrifice, but Christians refused to participate, saying it was idolatry and the worship of a false god. This Christian refusal seemed all the more threatening after the Bar Kokhba revolt against Roman rule in Judaea in the 130s which was a rejection of any authority other than the Jewish God. But as Celsus remarked, Christians were a threat in another way; they were so divided into rival sects, denouncing one another, that simply the instability of their faith could prove harmful to social harmony and the Roman state.

  Very little is known about Celsus who was probably a Greek and probably an Alexandrian. Nothing remains of his original writings and we know about The True Word only because Origen, an early Christian theologian and Clement’s successor as head of Alexandria’s Catechetical School, responded to its arguments with his own work, Against Celsus, written in 248. Origen so completely quotes Celsus in his refutation that it has been possible to reconstruct The True Word in almost its entirety.

  The number of Christians in the latter half of the second century was still very small but Celsus’ attack is testimony to how seriously the danger from Christianity was taken, while Origen’s exhaustive rebuttal is testimony to how seriously Celsus’ arguments against Christianity were taken by the Church.

  Celsus compared Christians to members of other cults, to the noisy followers of the Phrygian sky god Sabazius; the acolytes of the bull-killing god Mithras; the begging priests of the fertility goddess Cybele; and to travelling rogues who called up apparitions of demons or of the triple-bodied Hecate, a goddess associated with sorcery.

  Moreover, Celsus declared, ‘Jesus went about with his disciples, and obtained his livelihood in a disgraceful and importunate manner’, meaning sponging off Mary Magdalene and the other women. And, as for the Christians’ story that when Jesus was dead ‘he rose again and displayed the marks of his punishment and showed how his hands had been pierced by nails, who saw this? A frantic woman’, again meaning Mary Magdalene, ‘and perhaps one other person, both deluded by sorcery’. Celsus was as much against the gnostics as he was against other Christians; elsewhere in his text he mentions followers of Mary Magdalene, and knowing that she was the gnostics’ visionary he attacks them by reducing her to a delusionary female. (The phrase ‘gyne paroistros’ in Greek is variously translated as a frantic or fevered or hysterical woman.)

  Interestingly, Celsus mentions only Mary Magdalene and possibly one other person as witnesses to the risen Jesus, which suggests that the gospels in circulation in Egypt in the mid-second century were an early form of Mark and a version of John to which the final chapter 21 had not yet been added (the Church Father Tertullian writing in about 200 knew nothing about it), a late addendum which serves Rome and the purpose of apostolic succession by having Jesus appearing before the disciples and declaring Peter his leading apostle. That Celsus does not mention Matthew or Luke seems to confirm other literary sources and the archaeological record which show that while versions of John and Thomas and Mark were circulating widely in Egypt in the early second century the gospels of Matthew and Luke appear not to have circulated until the end of the century, meaning that versions of gospels carrying verses justifying apostolic succession were largely unknown in Egypt. Also as Matthew and Luke are the only two gospels that include stories of the nativity and describe Mary the mother of Jesus as a virgin, their written accounts were unknown too. So when Celsus attacks the Christian belief that Jesus was born of a virgin, and when Origen defends that belief, they might both be arguing from oral tradition, not from infancy narratives attached to the gospels of Matthew and Luke.

  Geza Vermes, the leading Jesus scholar, is not alone in regarding the infancy narratives as pious fictions. The infancy narratives, he says in his Jesus, are ‘late additions’ to the main accounts in Matthew and Luke. He notes that Matthew and Luke contradict one another (the former taking Jesus off to Egypt, for example, while the latter has him go to Jerusalem and Nazareth) and are unsupported by history (such an egregious event as Herod slaughtering the infants is not remarked upon by any source other than Matthew; not even by Luke). Moreover, as Vermes observes, the idea of a virgin birth is in direct contradiction with Jewish-Christian tradition. It is unlikely therefore to have been set down before the Bar Kokhba revolt, its audience Hellenised gentiles rather than Jews. Clement of Alexandria does mention that both gospels were read in Alexandria in the late second century but we do not know their contents; the earliest known copies of Matthew and Luke discovered in Egypt date only to the third century and these are so damaged and incomplete that they tell us nothing about the infancy narratives. Not until the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus, both dating to the fourth century, do we have the complete gospels of Matthew and Luke as we know them today.

  Jesus a Bastard, His Mother Mary an Adulteress

  The reality, writes Celsus, is that Jesus was a sorcerer and his mother Mary was an adulteress who had deceived her husband Joseph and conceived her child by a Roman soldier called Pantera. ‘He invented his birth from a virgin. His mother was a poor woman of the country who was thrown out of her home by her husband, a carpenter by trade, because she was convicted of adultery; and after being driven away by her husband and wandering about for a time she disgracefully gave birth to Jesus, an illegitmate child, who having hired himself out as a servant in Egypt on account of his poverty, and having acquired there some magical powers on which the Egyptians pride themselves, returned to his own country where his sorcery won him a great following, by means of which he proclaimed himself a god’.

  There are indeed hints in the gospels that stories were going round in the lifetimes of Jesus and of Mary his mother saying that he was a bastard and she was an adulteress. ‘Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and of Juda, and Simon? and are not his sisters here with us?’, says Mark 6:3. In Judaism a son would be identified by naming his father even if Joseph had been dead for a long while, but Mark, who mentions every other member of the family, leaves Jesus’ father unknown. Nor does Mark mention Joseph in any other part of his gospel. And in John 8:41 during a confrontation at the Temple the Pharisees say to Jesus, ‘We be not born of fornication’, insinuating that he was.

  In The Illegitimacy of Jesus, scholar Jane Schaberg argues that Matthew and Luke knew a tradition that Jesus was conceived by a rape rather than by a virginal conception and did what they could to erase the truth in their gospels, Matthew by concentrating on Joseph’s dilemma and both Matthew and Luke by attributing the conception to the Holy Spirit. Schaberg, however, has simply made up the rape; as a Catholic and a feminist it seems that she prefers Mary to have been a man’s victim rather than a willing adulteress. At any rate Celsus knew the story of Jesus’ illegitimacy which was in general circulation among Jews, Greeks and others.

  Origen in his Against Celsus replies to this charge of illegitimacy by writing, ‘Is it at all agreeable to reason, that he who dared to do so much for the human race . . . should not have had a miraculous birth, but one the vilest and most disgraceful of all?’. From ‘an act of adultery between Pantera and the Virgin’, from ‘such unhallowed intercourse there must rather have been brought forth some fool to do injury to mankind, a teacher of licentiousness and wickedness and other evils; and not of temperance and righteousness and the other virtues’. Celsus would not have been impressed by Origen’s circular reasoning, that because Jesus is the saviour of mankind then of course he would not have been the child of an adulterous relationship. But for Origen there were two kinds of faith, that of simple people (simpliciores) who take scripture literally, and a more profound understanding which requires allegorical interpretation of the spiritual mysteries. The virgin birth was one such mystery.

  Is this the lover of Mar
y and the father of Jesus? Celsus was repeating a well-known story about Mary becoming pregnant by Pantera, a Roman soldier. In the nineteenth century this tombstone was unearthed in Germany. Its inscription reads: Tiberius Iulius Abdes Pantera from Sidon, aged 62 years served 40 years, former standard bearer of the first cohort of archers lies here. Mark, Matthew and Luke all mention Jesus going to Sidon on the coast of Lebanon from Galilee; Abdes is a semitic name, possibly Jewish; his unit the Cohors I Sagittariorum was stationed in Judaea at the right time for him to have had an affair with Mary; later it was transferred to Bingen in Germany. But Pantera, which means panther, was not an uncommon name among soldiers, and most scholars think the chances of this being the Pantera of the story are extremely remote; and anyway they prefer to accept that Mary was a virgin.

  Pantera. Wikimedia Commons.

  Mary the Mother of God

  Origen understood that a vital defence against the charge that Jesus was a sorcerer and a bastard was to insist that Mary his mother was a virgin. Origen further shored up the reputation of Mary the mother of Jesus by being the first to call her Theotokos, literally God-bearer in Greek, but mistranslated in the West as the Mother of God. As no original copy has survived of Origen’s Commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans written in 246 in which Socrates of Constantinople, a fourth-century Byzantine historian, said Origen had used the term, some have questioned the authenticity of the claim. But the term was certainly in use just a few years later, in about 250, when it was used by Dionysius, the patriarch of Alexandria, in an epistle to Paul of Samosata. In about the same year Theotokos appeared in a Christian hymn in Egypt, preserved in a papyrus written in Greek and known in the West by its Latin title Sub Tuum Praesidium, literally Under Your Protection. One of the oldest Christian hymns and certainly the oldest to Mary the mother of Jesus, it is used in the Coptic and Eastern Orthodox liturgies to this day as well as by Catholics, Anglicans and Lutherans, and it has been rendered in Byzantine and Gregorian chants and in Mozart’s K198 Offertorio.

  We fly to thy protection, O holy Mother of God; despise not our petitions in our necessities, but deliver us always from all dangers, O glorious and blessed Virgin.

  The hymn states the theological doctrine that Mary the mother of Jesus is a virgin and the mother (or bearer) of the divine as chosen (blessed) by God.

  Over the next century or so the use of Theotokos, or Mother of God, became widespread throughout the Church, East and West, and in 431 at the Council of Ephesus the matter was enforced: Mary the mother of Jesus was declared the Mother of God and those who disagreed were anathematised.

  Mary’s elevation to Mother of God was a remarkable transition for a woman who is close to being a nonentity in the gospels. The gospel of Mark mentions her only twice, once by name (6:3), the second time as the mother of Jesus without naming her (3:31). The gospel of Matthew mentions her name five times, on four occasions in the infancy narrative (1:16,18,20; 2:11) but otherwise only once and by name (13:55). The gospel of Luke mentions Mary twelve times by name but only within the infancy narrative (1:27,30,34,38,39,41,46,56; 2:5,16,19,34); otherwise Luke has nothing to say about Mary the mother of Jesus. The gospel of John twice mentions Mary as the mother of Jesus, first at the marriage at Cana (2:1-12), which is the only time anywhere in the gospels that Jesus has a conversation with his mother, and a rather testy one at that; and on the second occasion at the foot of the cross (19:25) in the company of Mary Magdalene, Mary the wife of Cleophas, and the beloved disciple; but on neither occasion does he mention her name. Finally in Acts Mary is mentioned once and by name.

  Strip away the infancy narratives and Mary the mother of Jesus is mentioned in the New Testament only six times and only three times by name. Had the infancy narratives been there from the beginning, as part of the original composition, one would expect more mentions of Mary in the later parts of the gospels. As Geza Vermes says in Jesus, ‘The ultimate proof that the birth story is not a natural introductory section of a biography is the absence of continuity between it and the rest of the Gospel’.

  In short we are left with the real possibility that the setting down of the infancy narratives with their claims of the virgin birth were a reaction to widespread criticisms and doubts as expressed by Celsus and others and also a response to the eclecticism of Christianity in Egypt. In particular it was a reaction to gnosticism which spoke of the secret message that Jesus had to bring and which valued Mary Magdalene for her vision but was not interested in the crucifixion nor in apostolic succession nor in the virgin birth which gnostics regarded at best as naive misunderstandings, the delusions of this world of the demiurge from which gnostics wanted to escape.

  Mary as the Theotokos, the Mother of God, with Jesus on her lap and flanked by saints Theodore and George while angels glance heavenwards. The icon is at the Monastery of St Catherine in Sinai and dates from the end of the sixth century.

  Mary as the Theotokos. Wikimedia Commons.

  But not only was Mary a virgin, she was a perpetual virgin, which Origen also argued early on. Not that this is stated anywhere in the New Testament; indeed it is contradicted by the gospels themselves which mention four brothers by name, James, Joses, Judas and Simon, and at least two sisters (Matthew 13:55-56; Mark 6:3). Moreover Matthew 1:25 says of Mary that Joseph ‘knew her not till she had brought forth her firstborn son’, with its implication that after ‘till’, that is after the birth of Jesus, Joseph and Mary had conjugal relations and that she bore six more children. But Origen explained these verses away by claiming that the children were Joseph’s from a previous marriage. That Joseph should not have to lead a chaste life with his virginal wife the fiction was invented that he was an old man who died early on, though again the gospels say absolutely nothing about his age; all we know is that Joseph does not appear after about Jesus’ twelfth year by when he could have fathered all Jesus’ sisters and brothers.

  In these arguments put forward by Origen in Egypt more than reason and even more than faith were at work; the arguments were driven by necessity, the need to establish conformity and authority within the Church in order to counter the heterodox nature of Egyptian Christianity. By the fourth century Mary’s virginity, before, during and after the birth of Jesus, was almost universally accepted as was her status as the God-bearer, the Mother of God.

  The Battle for Authority

  The Catechetical School of which Origen was the head was inspired by Alexandria’s Museum and Library as a place to educate Christians in the faith. His predecessors were Pantaenus who is thought to have been from Sicily, part of Magna Graecia, meaning Greater Greece, which included much of southern Italy where the Greeks had established colonies as early as the eighth century BC; and Clement of Alexandria who was originally from Athens. Both men were from that part of the Christian world that looked to Rome, a world they began to impose on Alexandria through their instruction of priests and theologians at the Catechetical School. Pantaenus, who had been a Stoic philosopher before converting to Christianity, was an early and strong opponent of gnosticism while Clement, also a Stoic philosopher and influenced by gnosticism in his youth, decided in his later years that faith, not the secret knowledge of the gnostics, was required for salvation.

  Isis suckles her infant son Horus in the third-century BC temple of Isis at Philae in Upper Egypt. Here, as elsewhere in the temple, her face has been hacked out by early Christians but the figure of Horus is usually left untouched, possibly because early Christians identified Horus with Jesus but saw the Isis cult as a rival.

  Isis suckles Horus. Photograph by Michael Haag.

  Origen, on the other hand, was a native Egyptian (his name derives from Horus, the son of Isis and Osiris). He was born to Christian parents and so intense was his commitment to the faith that when his father was martyred in 202 the seventeen-year-old Origen was only prevented from rushing out to join him by his mother hiding his clothes. The story comes from Eusebius writing a century later, who adds, with whatever degree
of reliability, that Origen so sought the ascetic and spiritual life that he sold all his possessions and castrated himself in obedience to his interpretation of Jesus’ words in Matthew 19:12: ‘For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it’.

  The same persecution that led to the death of Origen’s father also caused Clement to flee Alexandria. The following year, though still only eighteen, Origen revived the Catechetical School and became its new head. Origen was well versed in philosophy, having studied under Ammonius Saccas in Alexandria who also taught the great Neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus. Building on the work of Pantaenus and Clement, he countered heterodoxy and in particular gnosticism by teaching the Christian faith to new converts and to those at a more advanced level using the scriptures acceptable to Rome, especially the gospels of Matthew, Luke and John, the Acts of the Apostles and the epistles of Paul.

  The man who appointed Origen as head of the Catechetical School was Demetrius, who from 189 to his death in 232 was bishop of Alexandria and patriarch of the See of St Mark. The Catechetical School provided the teachings and the canonical texts but Demetrius applied the muscle. A native Egyptian who became patriarch in 189, Demetrius was the first ecclesiastical leader in Egypt to enforce episcopal authority, that authority granted to him by apostolic succession. Determined to destroy gnosticism, he became frustrated with the patient intellectual debate of the Catechetical School and found himself increasingly at odds with Origen, who eventually decamped to Caesarea in Palestine – which is where he wrote Against Celsus.

  This fourth-century gravestone of a mother and her child from the Fayum in Egypt is an early example of the Christian appropriation of the imagery of the Isis story. Popular familiarity with the story probably contributed to Mary the mother of Jesus eventually being depicted in this form as the Theotokos.