The Quest for Mary Magdalene

by Michael Haag

  Victorian women were expected to fulfill the ideals of chastity and submissivness. Yet prostitutes made an independent living by violating both, and furthermore did so in the most public and provocative way. Victorian society depended on knowing one’s place, but prostitutes made a highly visible point of being morally, socially and financially out of place. In defying the rules of a world regulated by men, prostitutes demonstrated the possibility of turning society on its head.

  Approachable Mary Magdalene

  The Victorians’ preoccupation with prostitutes was expressed by artists and writers who during the second half of the nineteenth century turned to Mary Magdalene as they questioned the relationship between women and men and society. This took place against a backdrop of the Vatican’s renewed assertion of its authority. Britain was a Protestant country and there was no shortage of people who looked askance at the declaration by the pope in 1854 of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, finally settling an issue that Origen had argued against Celsus more than one thousand six hundred years before, that the Virgin Mary, far from herself having been a fallen woman, was unique among all people in having been born free of Original Sin. Conveniently the Virgin Mary herself appeared at Lourdes in 1858, telling Bernadette that ‘I am the Immaculate Conception’. Seventy-five years later Bernadette was made a saint, and meanwhile Mary the mother of Jesus, passive, pliable and pure, was being used by the Catholic Church in its reassertion of dogma over humanist and Enlightenment reason. As if to underline the point, in 1870 the dogma of papal infallibility was declared, a direct if belated rejection of the charge made by Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples and Martin Luther that authority did not lie in the pope but in the gospels.

  This new prominence given to Mary the mother of Jesus contrasted with the image of Mary Magdalene, imperfect perhaps but a woman active and strong, and faithful among the faithless when she followed Jesus to the cross, a model for womanhood which the ever more perfect Virgin Mary could never be.

  Just as Hanway had done, many Protestants, including numbers who were trying to alleviate the problem of prostitution, were saying that Mary Magdalene was not the same woman as the sinner in Luke. But many artists and writers adopted her especially in that role. In the guise of penitent she served to explore the position of fallen women, and women downtrodden, dependant or marginalised.

  Numerous popular nineteenth-century novels in one way or another used her story or her name; they are mostly forgotten now, but there are two by the incomparable Wilkie Collins, author of the first thriller, The Moonstone, and also The Woman in White, and who also wrote The New Magdalen about a fallen woman who, conventionally, is rescued by a clergyman and then, unconventionally, marries him, and No Name which deals with the issue of illegitimacy and in which the heroine is a courageous, lively and independently-minded young woman called Magdalen.

  The most famous images of Mary Magdalene, fallen but definitely a new woman, are those by the Pre-Raphaelites, in particular by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In his Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee, drawn in 1858, we see an extraordinary coup de fou, the sudden emotional and spiritual recognition by Mary Magdalene of Jesus. She has been revelling in the streets but as she passes the house of the Pharisee she catches a glimpse of Jesus and is transfixed; breaking free of her lover and tearing the roses from her hair, she presses her way within, telling her lover to let her loose, that she is drawn, as Rossetti says in his accompanying sonnet, to her ‘bridegroom’s face’. She is a beautiful woman, confident and sensual and powerfully built, and she knows what she wants.

  Oh loose me! Seest thou not my Bridegroom’s face

  That draws me to Him? For His feet my kiss,

  My hair, my tears He craves to-day:—and oh!

  What words can tell what other day and place

  Shall see me clasp those blood-stain’d feet of His?

  He needs me, calls me, loves me: let me go!

  Mary Magdalene at the House of Simon the Pharisee by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She is casting off her lover, tearing the roses from her hair, and is about to throw herself at the feet of the man she has instantly recognised as her bridegroom.

  Mary Magdalene at the House of Simon the Pharisee. The Rossetti Archive.

  The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene

  Mary Magdalene moves with the times, or rather the times call upon Mary Magdalene. The Great Social Evil in the nineteenth century had less to do with prostitutes than it had to do with the position of women in society generally. To the extent that their challenge was reflected in writing and the arts, Mary Magdalene was the almost unconscious choice of expression. Her strength of character is there in the gospels and perhaps an undercurrent of sensuality is too, and though she has still not shaken off her false reputation as a sinner, it lends itself to her humanity.

  In contrast Mary the mother of Jesus, a minor figure in the gospels, has been reinvented by the Church outside the pages of the Bible and stripped of the most basic human qualities. She is a perpetual virgin immaculately conceived, nothing less than the mother of God, in all ways perfect – entirely inhuman and completely unreal. Her idealised unreality allows the Church to maintain its cult of virginity and its ban on contraception; also the notion that women are subordinate to men and can never be part of the priesthood. Social developments have moved beyond the Virgin Mary; she has inspired in an abstract way but she cannot be a model for women today. In Alone of All Her Sex, her biographer Maria Warner believes that the Virgin Mary is beyond engaging with the modern world and will recede into legend, an empty relic of another age.

  But that is not true of Mary Magdalene who is rising again to the forefront of peoples’s minds when they think of the mystery and meaning of Jesus’ teachings.

  The Da Vinci Code

  It is almost certain that Dan Brown had no idea that his book The Da Vinci Code, published in 2003, would provoke such a worldwide reaction. After all, the plot of his previous book, Angels and Demons, published three years earlier, included the murder of a pope who had had an illegitimate child, the murder of his four nominated successors, and a bomb placed on the tomb of St Peter that was set to blow up the entire Vatican and probably most of Rome as well. But that book had only modest sales until the extraordinary success of The Da Vinci Code – which by comparison has a rather sedate plot; there is an intriguing murder in the Louvre and a lot of driving around Paris, but mostly it is talk.

  The talk, however, is extraordinary, and the more so in that it focuses largely on theology. It is about everything written since the gospels, and about the writing of the gospels themselves, and how much of it can we trust; and it is about the two figures who stand at the centre of the Christian story, Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and what became of them. The novel touches on something that turns out to be terribly important to people, that is the nature of Christianity, which stands at the heart of Western civilisation and influences everyone regardless of our individual beliefs.

  Industrious academics have written thousands of monographs about these things; in fact people have been writing about these things for the last two thousand years. But when expressed within the pages of a novel it seems to become immediate, tangible, personal. The Da Vinci Code readers found themselves talking about the nature of Christ, the resurrection, Constantine, the gnostic gospels. It was reminiscent of Gregory of Nyssa’s observation on the intensity of theological interest in the nature of Christ in fourth-century Constantinople:

  The city is full of mechanics and slaves who are all of them profound theologians, and they preach in the shops and the streets. If you desire a man to change a piece of silver, he informs you wherein the Son differs from the Father; if you ask the price of a loaf you are told by way of reply that the Son is inferior to the Father; if you inquire whether the bath is ready, the answer is that the Son was begotten out of nothing.

  The Sacred Feminine

  Arguably the most interesting discussions in The Da Vinci Code concern the ‘sacred fem
inine’. As the novel’s characters point out, seeing God in solely masculine terms misrepresents and limits the divine – which is precisely what happens in Christianity with its vocabulary of Jesus the Son of God the Father. That is the starting point of those who argue for recognition of the sacred feminine and what they see as the restoration of spiritual balance to the world. True, the Virgin Mary as Mother of God brings something of the feminine to the Christian godhead, but it is not a full partnership and entirely lacks that element of Eros in which the feminine and the masculine most intimately meet.

  The argument for recovering the sacred feminine finds a tradition of sacred union in ancient cultures in which the feminine and masculine were celebrated as intimate and equal partners; examples include Isis and Osiris, Astarte and Tammuz, Cybele and Attis, and Aphrodite and Adonis. In these sacred pairings there is the theme of death and new life, with the female playing an active and restoring role, raising her dead lover or bringing forth new life by bearing his child. Yet this role of the sacred feminine is missing from Christianity, and there are those who in searching for Christianity’s ‘lost bride’ find her in the figure of Mary Magdalene, and who say the time has come to listen to her story.

  Pseudo-Histories

  Dan Brown did not pull his ideas out of a hat. Just about everything he has to say about Leonardo da Vinci comes from The Templar Revelation by the London-based writers Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince. It is in this book, a thriller really, that we learn of ‘the secret code of Leonardo da Vinci’ found throughout his works, and particularly in The Last Supper, and which links him to the Templars, the Freemasons and the Priory of Sion. So when Dan Brown writes about The Last Supper and asserts that the figure of John is really that of Mary Magdalene, that this figure and Jesus are ‘joined at the hip’, that together they describe the shape of the letter M, that there is a disembodied hand holding a dagger – all this and more comes from The Templar Revelation.

  In The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by the British trio Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, Dan Brown read about the great secret, hidden supposedly in code, that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, who after his crucifixion escaped to the South of France where she gave birth to their child and propagated his bloodline – the Merovingian dynasty of kings. This is the explosive secret that Sophie Neveu, a leading character in The Da Vinci Code, claims would ‘crumble up the Church’.

  A work of pseudo-history and a careless one at that, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail introduced the Priory of Sion, a shadowy secret society promulgating the holy bloodline, and the mystery of Rennes-le-Château, a church in Languedoc. Rennes-le-Château, the book claims, was lavishly endowed by a nineteenth-century priest on the proceeds of hush money from the Vatican to hide his evidence of the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The mundane reality is that the priest. Bérenger Saunière, had been selling masses on an industrial scale. Canon law permits three to be said a day and donations for them accepted, but Saunière accepted money for thousands of masses which were never performed.

  As for the Priory of Sion, in 1993 Pierre Plantard, a draughtsman and fabulator with a background in far-right politics, admitted inventing the evidence supporting its existence and planting it in the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris as part of a hoax to advance his claim as the king of France. But the real success of the hoax was that it worked on Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln, and through them on Dan Brown and millions of people who read his book and believe what he wrote on the opening page of The Da Vinci Code, that the Priory of Sion was a ‘fact’.

  Jesus’Wife

  If all this nuttiness reminds you of something, it might be the stories cranked out by the monks at Vézelay, and the Dominicans at Sainte-Baume. But more lies behind The Da Vinci Code than The Templar Revelation and The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and several other ‘alternative’ works that Dan Brown has cited, even if the material has reached popular writers indirectly, almost by osmosis one might say.

  A fundamental source of the ideas behind the reappraisal of Mary Magdalene is located in the religious studies departments of several of the world’s most prestigious universities, where a circle of scholars – among them Elaine Pagels, Jane Schaberg, Richard Bauckham, Bruce Chilton, Karen King and Ann Graham Brock – have shed new light on the feminine in the New Testament. Their writings have percolated down, probably much to their chagrin, into the New Age writings of people like Margaret Starbird and finally into popular thrillers.

  A spur to the new scholarly interest in Mary Magdalene and the feminine was the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices in 1945 which presented an alternative Christian tradition, one that was opposed to the proto-orthodoxy that eventually became dominant and formed the institutional hierarchy of the Church – a hierarchy that was and has remained overwhelmingly male. To some writers, especially those with a feminist perspective, scenes of Peter’s anger or jealousy towards Mary Magdalene in these gnostic Gospels are taken as proof of an early sex war. Peter may be the rock upon whom the Church is built, but Mary Magdalene is the one whom Jesus kisses. Jesus has been betrayed by the Christian Church.

  But there are other ways of looking at this. The argument presented by the gnostic gospels between Peter and Mary Magdalene was about how to attain knowledge of the authentic spirit. Peter seems to be arguing that authority is passed down through a hierarchy, as in apostolic succession, whereas Mary Magdalene has been inspired directly by Jesus. That is clear from the fact that Jesus appears to her in a vision and not to the apostles, and it is also clear from the kisses he would give her, the kisses of inspiration, of divine breath, before his crucifixion. Whether the argument was primarily over how to attain the authentic spirit or how to build the Church into a durable institution, the sex of Jesus’ apostles might have been secondary.

  To say that the depreciation of Mary Magdalene has been caused by a conspiracy of men against women might be missing the point. Rather Mary Magdalene has fallen foul of a profound argument over the apprehension of the divine, in which the established, ritualised and hierarchical Church requires that God be mediated through itself, whereas everything about Mary Magdalene suggests a more immediate and personal experience of the divine. The alternative is to do without the hierarchy; there was no hierarchy when Mary Magdalene was alone in the empty tomb.

  But the suggestion that Jesus, together with Mary Magdalene, had other ideas about life and the spirit than those put about by Christian churches does not go away.

  ‘Jesus said to them, “My wife . . .”’ Those are the words written in Coptic, the language of ancient and Christian Egypt, on a small piece of papyrus that was placed in the hands of professor Karen King of Harvard University. King herself named the papyrus fragment The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife and when she announced its discovery in September 2012 it had a sensational impact round the world. The fragment raised the possibility that Jesus was married, which would prompt a radical reconsideration of the New Testament and of biblical scholarship.

  There were some sceptical voices and so a series of tests were run in 2014 and published by Harvard University on their Gospel of Jesus’ Wife website, seemingly authenticating the ink and the papyrus itself. However, the information posted on the website raised new questions and within days numerous authorities in Coptic and early Christianity were saying that King’s papyrus was a forgery, that it had come from the same hand, using the same ink and the same writing instrument as a supposed Gospel of John fragment that is widely considered to have been copied from a papyrus fragment published by University College London in 1924.

  Professor Karen King of Harvard holds up a fragment of sixth to ninth-century papyrus bearing in Coptic text the words ‘Jesus said to them, “My wife. . .”’. This is not proof, as King points out, that Jesus was married, only that whoever wrote the text apparently thought that he was.

  Karen King with Gospel of Jesus’ Wife fragment. Screenshot of Harvard film on YouTube.

  Faced with the charge that
the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife is a forgery, both King and Harvard went mute. Professor King failed to come forward with everything she knows about the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, including the full circumstances under which it was bought and sold several times before it came into her possession, and its shady history in Communist East Germany. Quite possibly Professor King knows nothing, for the papyrus fragment was apparently put into her hands without any proof of its provenance, and she never seemed to think that mattered.

  But if the papyrus fragment and the writing upon it are genuine then it would appear that there were people in ninth-century Egypt who thought Jesus had a wife.

  It would tell us nothing more, however.

  The Future of Mary Magdalene

  What is to become of Mary Magdalene? In 1969 the Roman Catholic Church ceased to recognise a composite Mary Magdalene; the Vatican decided that she and Mary of Bethany and the sinner woman were separate people in the gospels. But at the same time it decreed that Mary Magdalene would be venerated only as a disciple. The Church has corrected one error by no longer associating her with the sinner woman, and has possibly committed another error by dissociating her from a plausible identification with Mary of Bethany, and it has confirmed the decision at the Council of Trent that she is not the apostle to the apostles. Not that separating her from the sinner woman has removed the association zealously cultivated by the Church for over fifteen hundred years; there is considerable popular pleasure in relating to Mary Magdalene as a penitent.

  Also persistent in the popular mind is the notion that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married. Forget about The Da Vinci Code. It is there in professor Karen King’s fragment of papyrus, in Rossetti’s poem about Mary Magdalene at the door of Simon the Pharisee, and it is there among the Cathars, and there have been suggestions about it going back to the gospels themselves.