The Quest for Mary Magdalene

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The Quest for Mary Magdalene Page 27

by Michael Haag


  Whatever the Catholic Church or other churches decide, the future of Mary Magdalene looks secure in the public imagination, more secure than Mary the mother of Jesus. That is how it was in the gospels and that is how it is now; in the beginning was Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

  And if and when the Church should pass away, when formalised Christianity itself should pass, what then of Mary Magdalene? I prefer to believe there really was a Mary Magdalene. The reality seems stronger than everything ever written by Paul. She is the authentic figure. Jesus ends in her and in those who have listened in the silence of the empty tomb.

  Further Reading

  BIBLES

  King James Bible

  http://www.kingJamesbibleonline.org The King James Version of the Bible is used throughout this book. It can be accessed and searched online at the dedicated website King James Bible Online.

  Bible Hub

  http://biblehub.com/

  You can read and search different English translations of the Bible, – KingJames, New International Version, Douay-Rheims, etc – at this website. It also has Bibles in various languages and provides Greek and Hebrew interlinears of English-language Bibles so that you can read verses of the Old and New Testaments in their original languages.

  Scripture 4 All

  http://www.scripture4all.org/

  A dedicated website for Hebrew and Greek interlinears of English, German and Dutch Bibles.

  MARY MAGDALENE

  Mary Magdalene: A Biography by Bruce Chilton, Doubleday, New York 2005. Chilton, a professor of religion and a priest in New York state, sees Mary Magdalene as an anointer and healer; he identifies her with Mary of Bethany.

  Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend by Bart D. Ehrman, Oxford University Press, New York 2006. A highly readable general book by a New Testament scholar.

  Mary Magdalene, The First Apostle: The Struggle for Authority, by Ann Graham Brock, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2003. Apostolic succession and the marginalisation of Mary Magdalene.

  The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages by Katherine Ludwig Jansen, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2000. The development of Mary Magdalene as sinner and a penitent leading to her cult at Sainte-Baume.

  The Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine, translated by William Granger Ryan, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2012. The medieval bestseller on the lives of the saints, including Mary Magdalene.

  Mary Magdalene: Iconograpic Studies from the Middle Ages to the Baroque edited by Michelle A. Erhardt and Amy M. Morris, Brill, Leiden and Boston 2012. The continuous reinvention of Mary Magdalene’s image in art to suit the needs of the Church and of private patrons.

  The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene: Legends, Apocrypha, and the Christian Testament by Jane Schaberg, Continuum, New York and London 2002. Considered a landmark work in feminist studies, Schaberg attempts to theologically resurrect Mary Magdalene, interweaving her story with that of Virginia Woolf.

  ‘Missing Magdala and the Name of “Mary Magdalene”’ by Joan E. Taylor in the Palestine Exploration Quarterly, 146, 3 (2014), 205–223, explains there was no Magdala; Mary was named ‘tower’.

  Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor by Susan Haskins, Harper Collins, London 1993. Only the first chapter, less than thirty pages, deals with Mary Magdalene of the gospels; the rest is an exhaustive account of her legendary afterlife up to modern times.

  Searching for Mary Magdalene: A Journey through Art and Literature by Jane Lahr, Welcome Books, New York and San Francisco 2006. A beautifully produced coffee table book.

  Mary Magdalene, or Salvation in Fires by Marguerite Yourcenar, translated by Dori Katz, Aidan Ellis, London 1982. Yourcenar tells the story attributed to Jerome in the fourth century of Mary Magdalene being jilted by John the Evangelist at the marriage of Cana, falling into prostitution, and finally devoting herself to Jesus.

  JESUS

  Jesus: Nativity, Passion, Resurrection by Geza Vermes, Penguin Books, London 2010. The gospels carefully described, tested and analysed by the leading Jesus scholar of recent times.

  Jesus: An Historian’s Review of the Gospels by Michael Grant, Macmillan, London 1977. Grant, an outstanding classical historian, admits the extreme difficulty of drawing historical accounts from the gospels but manages a well-judged and readable account.

  Jesus by A.N. Wilson, Sinclair-Stevenson, London 1992. A somewhat iconoclastic biography of Jesus which dismisses the story of his birth in Bethlehem, his life as a carpenter, his betrayal by Judas, and takes Paul to task for inventing a Jesus cult. This book was written when Wilson, now a Catholic, was an atheist.

  How Jesus Became Christian by Barrie Wilson, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 2008. Barrie Wilson, a professor of religious studies in Canada, shows by examining the gospels that Jesus was never anything other than an observant Jew but who was turned into a god by Paul. Which explains much about Mary Magdalene too.

  MARY, MOTHER OF JESUS

  Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary by Marina Warner, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1976. Warner’s outstanding book traces the historical development of Mary as Virgin, Bride, Mother, Queen of Heaven and Intercessor, and how these aspects have affected and been depicted in literature and art, as well as their influence on the lives of both men and women. She is also ample in her treatment of Mary Magdalene and the ‘muddle of Marys’ in the gospels.

  Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture, by Jaroslav Pelikan, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 1996. The other important account of Mary the Mother of Jesus. Pelikan describes the developed traditions and then traces them back to their biblical and doctrinal sources, seeking what he calls the ‘eternal feminine’ at the heart of all that is holy. He also ventures into Black Madonnas and Mary the Mother of Jesus in Islam.

  THE GOSPELS

  Jesus and the Eyewitnesses by Richard Bauckham, William B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Cambridge, England 2006. Bauckham argues the case that the gospels are largely based on reliable eyewitness accounts.

  Gospel Women: Studies of the Named Women in the Gospels by Richard Bauckham, William B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Cambridge, England 2002. An examination of women’s lives in Palestine, the credibility of their stories in the gospels, in particular a valuable look at Joanna the wife of Chuza, and also a consideration of The Secret Gospel of Mark.

  Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark by Morton Smith, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1973. The full-blown academic study by Smith of the Secret Gospel.

  The Secret Gospel: The Discovery and Interpretation of the Secret Gospel According to Mark by Morton Smith, Victor Gollancz, London 1974. Smith’s popular history of the Secret Gospel.

  PALESTINE AT THE TIME OF JESUS

  The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land edited by Thomas E. Levy, Leicester University Press, London 1998. Good on the Hellenisation and Romanisation of Palestine, and field towers such as that at Migdal Eder.

  THE WORLD OF EARLY CHRISTIANITY

  Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew by Bart D. Ehrman, Oxford University Press, New York 2003. A great variety of Christianities flourished when the new religion began; eventually this diversity was replaced by orthodoxy and dissent was persecuted as heretical.

  Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament by Bart D. Ehrman, Oxford University Press, New York 2003. Provides readers with all the relevant apocryphal and gnostic gospels of the lost Christianities.

  Early Egyptian Christianity: From its Origins to 451 CE by C. Wilfred Griggs, Brill, Leiden 1990. This academic work is one of the very few books about the poorly documented and elusive subject of early Christianity in Egypt.

  Contested Issues in Christian Origins and the New Testament by Luke Timothy Johnson, Brill, Leiden 2013. Johnson, an historian of relig
ion and a Catholic who takes issue with several teachings of the Church, examines in these essays the Jewish and Graeco-Roman contexts of early Christianity, gnosticism, Marcion, Paul and the quest for the historical Jesus.

  Introduction to the New Testament, volumes 1 and 2, by Helmut Koester, Walter de Gruyter, New York and Berlin 1987. This is regarded as the standard reference work on the New Testament. Koester suggests that in the earliest version of the story only Mary Magdalene discovered the empty tomb; the account was later diluted by the gospel writers who added the names of other women.

  Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth to Nicaea, AD 30-325 by Geza Vermes, Penguin Books, London 2013. This book relates how there were many streams of Christianity in the early centuries and they only began to be channelled into one great instrument of faith and state under the Roman emperor Constantine at the Council of Nicaea.

  Christ’s Resurrection in Early Christianity and the Making of the New Testament by Markus Vinzent, Ashgate, Farnham, Surrey 2011. Vinzent, a professor at King’s College London, argues that the resurrection was unknown or of no interest to the earliest Christians and only became so when Marcion revived the letters of Paul in the 130s; he also says that the gospels were written at about that same time.

  On the True Doctrine: A Discourse against the Christians by Celsus, translated by R. Joseph Hoffmann, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York 1987. The famous attack on Christianity by a second century Greek philosopher.

  Jews and Christians: Graeco-Roman Views by Molly Whittaker, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1984. Judaism and mystery religions; the environment in which Christianity took shape.

  Isis in the Ancient World by R.E. Witt, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London 1997. Witt stresses the influence of Isis worship on Christian thinking, practice and iconography.

  GNOSTICISM, CATHARS AND DUALISM

  The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle by Karen King, Polebridge Press, Salem, Oregon 2003. Translated and elucidated by professor Karen King, Mary’s gospel rejects Jesus’ suffering and death as a path to eternal life and replaces that with the inner spiritual knowledge possessed by Mary Magdalene.

  Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village 1294-1324 by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth 1980. The classic account of the Cathars in their own words, drawn from their testimony to the inquisition.

  The Gnostics by Jacques Lecarrière, Peter Owen, London 1977. A beautiful and poetic book about the gnostics with an introduction by Lawrence Durrell.

  The Woman Jesus Loved: Mary Magdalene in the Nag Hammadi Library and Related Documents by Antti Marjanen, Brill, Leiden 1996. Among other things, this treats with how the anointing episodes in the gospels were run together by the early Church as the acts of one woman, with the effect that Mary Magdalene became one and the same as the sinner woman at the house of Simon the Pharisee and so was identified as a prostitute, and later became a penitent, rather than the apostle to the apostles and how this narrative has been contradicted by the discovery of the gnostic gospels.

  The War on Heresy: Faith and Power in Medieval Europe by R.I. Moore, Profile Books, London 2012. The Cathars were persecuted and destroyed, says Moore, not because of their beliefs but because of the needs and ambitions of their persecutors.

  The Perfect Heresy: The Life and the Death of the Cathars by Stephen O’Shea, Profile Books, London 2000. A good popular history, including the place of Mary Magdalene in Cathar beliefs.

  The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1980. The first and still one of the best popular but scholarly presentations of the Nag Hammadi gnostic gospels.

  The Other God: Dualist Religions from Antiquity to the Cathar Heresy by Yuri Stoyanov, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 2000. A sweeping account of the recurring struggle between the one god and the periodically dying and rising other god.

  Index

  The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific entry, please use your e-book readerʼs search tools.

  Page references for illustrations are given in italics

  A

  Acton, William 287–8

  Acts of the Apostles 140, 158, 159, 165, 166, 168, 184, 197

  Antioch 71

  Egypt 184

  Jesus’ followers 140

  Mary Magdalene 112–13, 158, 164

  Mary, mother of Jesus 3, 4, 6, 224

  Paul 112, 160, 161–2, 164, 168, 169

  Peter 159, 168

  Stephen 161

  Adonis 175, 176

  agape feasts 200, 201

  Aix-en-Provence 243, 246, 248

  al-Samman, Muhammad 191

  Albani Psalter 5

  Albi 257

  Albigensian Crusade 257–60

  Albright, William F 18, 19

  Alexander the Great 21, 59, 172

  Alexandria 54, 59

  Carpocratians 200

  Catechetical School 218, 226, 228, 231

  Christianity 182, 184, 185, 187–8

  gospels 220

  lighthouse 56, 170, 170, 171–2

  Phibionites 200

  Alone of All Her Sex (Warner) 293

  Alphonse, count of Toulouse 258

  Ambrose 235

  Ammonius Saccas 228

  Amphipolis 172

  Andrew 32, 47, 209

  Andronicus 72, 73

  see also Chuza

  Angelico, Fra 2, 97, 98, 100, 270

  ankhs 230, 231

  Annas 104, 150

  anointing

  at Bethany 88–92, 89, 102, 112, 113, 138, 153, 177, 233

  at Capernaum 89–90, 112, 233

  of Jesus’ body 91–2, 131, 132–3

  Antioch 59, 70–1, 172

  Aphrodite 172, 175, 176

  Apollo 172

  Apollonia 172

  Apollos 184

  apostles 72–3, 126

  see also disciples

  Apostolikon 179, 180

  Apuleius 176

  Arabia 183

  Aramaic 13–14, 17, 21, 54–5, 159

  Archelaos 77

  Artemis 172

  Asia Minor 34, 53, 54, 59, 232

  Askew, Anthony 211

  Astarte 172

  Asterius 176

  Athanasius of Alexandria 192

  Athena 172

  Athens 172

  Attis 175, 176

  Augustine, St 235, 266, 270, 276, 285

  Augustus 174, 186

  B

  Babylon 184–7

  Badilo, St 246

  Baigent, Michael 295–6

  baptism 26–8, 145, 178, 283

  Bar Kokhba revolt 179, 189, 218, 220

  Barabbas 110

  Barnabas 71

  Bartholomew 47

  Bauckham, Richard 296

  Bélibaste, Guillaume 254, 260, 263

  Ben-Gurion, David 139

  Benedict XII, Pope 253, 260, 263

  Benedict XVI, Pope 139

  Bernadette 290

  Bethany 82–3, 83, 91, 102, 140–1, 148, 149, 149, 152

  anointing of Jesus 88–92, 89, 102, 112, 113, 138, 153, 177, 233

  raising of Lazarus 91, 92–3, 92, 148–9, 152–4

  resurrection ritual 144–7

  Bethlehem 4, 14, 16, 20, 21, 36

  Helena’s visit 14

  Jerome 36

  Jesus’ birth 4

  massacre of the innocents 20–1

  towers 15–16, 15

  Bethsaida 46, 63, 64, 65, 76

  Béziers 257–9

  Bible

  language 54, 56

  see also New Testament; Old Testament

  Bida, André 128

  bios 176

  Blake, William 102

  Boccaccio, Giovanni 266, 275, 277

  Bogomils 250

  Botticelli, Sandro 277, 281

  Brock, Ann Graham 296

  B
rown, Dan xi, 100, 213, 293–6

  C

  Caesarea 22, 85, 171, 231

  Caiaphas 93, 103, 104, 106, 107, 108, 150

  Cairo 185

  Caligula 175

  Calvacanti, Guido 275

  Cana 4–5, 34–7, 35, 37, 74, 76, 138

  Canzonieri (Petrarch) 266, 267, 269, 270–1

  Capernaum 25, 34, 46, 47, 49

  anointing of Jesus 89–90, 112, 233

  Carcassone 259

  Carpocratians 141, 143, 147, 200, 201

  Castor 169, 171–2

  Cathars xi, 216, 247, 250–4, 251, 255, 257–62, 258, 298

  Cavalca, Domenico 36

  Celsus 217, 218–19, 220–3, 224, 238, 290

  Cenacle 96

  Chanson de la Croisade Albigeoise 259

  Charles, King of Anjou 248, 255, 263

  Chaucer, Geoffrey 266

  Chilton, Bruce 296

  Chnoubis 215

  Chora Church, Istanbul 180

  Christianity

  attacks on 217–20

  Cathars 250–4, 255, 257–62

  Egypt 181–2, 184–94, 185, 226–32

  and evil 197–8

  gnosticism 188–90, 192–202, 250–4

  and Judaism 179

  Marcion 179, 181

  relics 244–5

  spread 14, 183–4

  Chuza 8, 30, 51, 60, 69–70, 72

  Cicero 115, 116, 265

  circumcision 28, 33, 160, 164

  Ciseri, Antonio 109

  Claudius 175

  Clement of Alexandria 141, 143–8, 176, 187, 200, 218, 220, 226, 228, 231

  Cleopatra 170, 174

  codices 188–9

  Nag Hammadi Library 190–2, 193

  Collins, Wilkie 291

  Colonna, Cardinal Giovanni 265

  Communion of the Apostles, The (Fra Angelico) 97, 98, 270

  Compostela 245, 246

  Constantine the Great 14

  Constantinople 232, 236, 243, 274, 276, 294

  Contagious Diseases Acts 289

  Copts 185, 186, 188, 190–2, 207

 

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