Mary Magdalene
Bruce Chilton
Prologue
MARGUERITE
IS anyone there? Is there anyone there?“ Marguerite called out loudly.
“Yes, right beside you,” I replied, trying to reassure her. People who are dying sometimes wonder whether they are still alive and with people they know. As their priest, I have heard this question a number of times during visits with terminally ill patients. But Marguerite repeated her question despite my response: She wasn’t calling to me at all, and it took me a moment to realize that.
I had found Marguerite in bed, on oxygen, and far from her normal, alert self. She was one of my favorites among the congregation of the small Episcopalian church that I serve in Barrytown, New York. She proved to be the best critic of sermons I have ever met. A formidable professional, she had been a social worker in Manhattan and possessed a passion for children’s rights that did not wane with her retirement. After she passed the age of ninety, congestive heart failure gradually sapped life from her. She couldn’t travel to church any longer, but we made it a point to meet at her home late in the afternoon once or twice a month to talk politics, gardening, and religion, drink gin and tonics, and pray together.
As months passed and Marguerite weakened, I started to bring her the bread and wine of the Eucharist. She would haltingly say the Lord’s Prayer with me just before we shared this sacred food of Christianity’s holiest rite, which she could follow even when her mind became fogged. She had called out her question partway through our little service of the Eucharist.
Later, she told me that she had been in a different place when she had asked, “Is anyone there?” She had wanted to know whether there was anyone there for her on the other side of death. Who was there like her, to accept her into the presence of God? Where were the women in the transcendent realm?
Marguerite was an educated and committed Episcopalian. She was familiar with Catholicism, but no saint in that tradition had the same spiritual meaning for her as did the women in the Bible. In some ways, Marguerite was downright anti-Catholic, and that contributed to her problem. She did not pray to Mary, the mother of Jesus, as many of her Catholic friends did and still do. She looked with Protestant suspicion on the devotion to Mary that emerged during the Middle Ages, with its lucrative rewards for the clergy, who received donations in Mary’s name and imposed penances on people to win her favor, the proceeds benefiting the Church. All that seemed to Marguerite rooted more in the desire of the medieval papacy to win prestige and profit from its favorite holy patroness than in the text of the New Testament. Marguerite knew a great deal; I really didn’t have anything to tell her about women in the Bible or Christendom’s female saints. She was after something different and more profound, and she had come up against an obstacle that lay across the path of her faith.
In its formative years, Christianity developed a deep ambivalence toward women at its core. Ancient Christians acknowledged women’s vital role from the first days of Jesus’ movement and yet systematically diminished their authority in relation to men. References to women in the New Testament and other ancient Christian writings are fleeting, occasionally dismissive, and lead to understandable confusions. As a result, today people sometimes conflate Mary Magdalene, Jesus’ most prominent female disciple, with Mary, the mother of Jesus, or with other women in the Gospels (several of whom are also called “Mary”). That confusion is easily sorted out, although the fact that it occurs at all points to an underlying problem: Women in the Gospels and Christian tradition often have the look of ornaments or afterthoughts.
Retelling biblical stories about women in the traditional way could not answer Marguerite’s plea. She wanted to know where women were built into the fabric of revelation, where—at the end of the day, at the end of a life—they were welcomed into the presence of God as more than ancillary support staff for whom men had condescended to make a place.
Having developed close contact with progressive religious groups in Manhattan during her working life, Marguerite was familiar with what she considered contemporary theology’s wishful thinking. She knew that commentators had spun legends about heroic women from biblical references that were often no more than a mere mention of a name. She had listened to speaker after speaker at fashionable Protestant churches as they tried to make Christianity palatable by constructing a picture of Mary Magdalene that seemed truer to modern feminism than to the texts of the New Testament.
Marguerite was well familiar with the “hypothesis” that Mary was the true Holy Grail, the wife of Jesus, mother of his child, a Jewish princess from the house of Benjamin and an emigree to France, an embodiment of the pagan earth mother, whom the Catholic Church for thousands of years has sought to marginalize and suppress. This Mary becomes the great untold story of Western culture, a figure who has been both reviled and revered, a goddess who has taken many forms—witch, heretic, tarot priestess, holy whore, the incarnation of the eternal feminine, her womb the chalice that bears God’s child.
Marguerite had no patience with this program. No feverish myth justified by a conspiracy theory, no vague assurance that God has his feminine side or that early believers looked to the leadership of “strong” women satisfied her. I had no direct response to her question—and neither did modern theology. But her question haunted me. I turned it over and over in my mind, and her appeal—as well as the prompting of friends every bit as insistent as Marguerite—eventually led me to analyze the evidence regarding Mary Magdalene and to write this book.
In the years since Marguerite’s death, there has been an increased awareness that major teachers in the New Testament—Paul, Barnabas, Peter, and James—were not just empty vessels filled with Jesus’ message, but powerful sages in their own right. Their teachings shaped the Gospels and crafted the practices and beliefs that made Christianity into a world religion.
My study of Mary Magdalene has convinced me that she belongs on this list of the creators of Christianity. Writing this biography led me to a new reading of the Gospels. I argue that Mary provided the source of the Gospels’ exorcism stories and influenced much of what early Christians believed about how to treat demonic possession. For that reason, she should be recognized as one of the principal shapers of Christianity’s wisdom as it concerns dealing with the world of spirits.
Mary’s method of exorcism was intimately linked to the ancient Judaic practice of anointing, and she emerges in the Gospels as a model of that practice, as well. Oil served to consecrate people for ritual purposes, to signal celebration, and as a medium for communing with the divine. We shall see that exorcism and anointing involved mastering the ebb and flow of spiritual energy—and, in this arena, Mary was one of Jesus’ most gifted adepts and, in turn, a significant influence upon him.
Her mastery of Jesus’ wisdom included a profound understanding of what it means for a person to be raised from the dead. Jesus himself bluntly denied—as we will see in detail—that Resurrection involves a simple continuation of physical life on this earth. He said that in heaven people are not married to the spouses they had when they were alive, but become “like angels” (Mark 12:25). Angels no more have mates than they have aunts and uncles. This spiritual view set Jesus apart from other Jewish teachers of his time, many of whom saw the afterlife in a materialistic way, and aligned him with Judaism’s spiritual masters.
Mary Magdalene was the disciple who best appreciated Jesus’ visionary teaching of Resurrection, and without her, Christianity would have been entirely different. It is not even clear that its core faith in Jesus’ victory over the grave could have emerged at all without Mary. That is why she has been known as “the apostle to the apostles” since the second century: It was from her that the apostles first learn
ed that Jesus had been raised from the dead.
By the time the Gospels were written, more than forty years after Jesus’ death, Christianity had declared the allegedly “natural” authority of men over women, to this extent conforming to its surrounding society. An increasingly male clergy tightly controlled exorcism and anointing; a literally physical view of Resurrection began to prevail. It is not surprising that after her death Mary Magdalene was nearly written out of the record of Christian memory.
The Gospels in aggregate relate that she was called “Magdalene,” indicating where she came from, and that until Jesus healed her, she had been possessed by seven demons. She followed Jesus in Galilee and helped to support him (Luke 8:2-3). She prepared Jesus’ corpse for burial in Jerusalem, and on the way to anoint his body, she and her companions were the first to learn of his Resurrection (Mark 15:42-16:8). All four Gospels agree that she had a role in Jesus’ interment and that she came to know that he was raised from the dead, but each goes its own way in depicting those scenes. That is what the Gospels have to say directly about Mary Magdalene by name, although in this book we will find her implicated in several other passages, as well. Had Jesus not insisted that “wherever the message is proclaimed in the whole world, what she did will also be spoken of in memory of her” (Mark 14:9), this effacement might well have been complete.
Christianity’s ambivalence about women lies at the source of this near erasure of Mary. We shall explore the repression of women’s leadership in the early Church, which sets the stage for reading what Gnostic teachers had to say about Mary from the second through fourth centuries. The Gnostic portrayal of Mary was tragically conflicted: It venerated her visionary power while denigrating her because she was a woman. Gnosticism provides fascinating insights into how images of Mary shaped attitudes regarding leadership of women in the Church, feminine identity in the godhead, and the nature of revelation.
Modern study of Mary Magdalene has inherited the Christian and Gnostic ambivalence toward women and sexuality. As a result, even when an attempt is made to assert Mary’s importance, it often comes at the cost of her historical identity. She has become sexualized in popular culture, the consort of Jesus, a tantric adept or holy vessel for his seed, and thus her true influence is marginalized, distorted, or ignored because her whole importance is limited to the argument over whether she had sex with Jesus. She often becomes the figurehead of neopagan theology—the embattled earth mother, a goddess doomed to exile by a malevolent patriarchy, more a generalization than a person. Even such exaggerated claims have their value, but they need to be sifted through the analysis of history to avoid burying Mary Magdalene under the rubble of the twentieth century’s broken dreams.
I wish my friend Marguerite were still with us. The silence of the Gospels, the increasing patriarchy of the early Church, the Gnostic schizophrenia toward women, Marguerite’s own anti-Catholicism, and the tendency of scholars, even some feminist scholars, to treat women in the Bible more as victims than visionaries stood between my dying friend and what she wanted to see. Powerful forces reaching deep into history, stronger and more complicated than a simple conspiracy theory of male dominance, have veiled Mary’s vision of the divine. They veiled her from me and from Marguerite and, for a moment in prayer together, shook our confidence in heaven.
But Mary Magdalene is more powerful than that veil. Her methods of reaching into the divine world shaped the practices of women and men for generations, and they can be uncovered. Anointing, exorcism, and vision persisted through the period of the New Testament, the early Church, and beyond, in ways that are central to the religious identity of all those interested in the life of Spirit.
Christianity has often appreciated the power of Mary’s spiritual practices, but church after church has distorted their meaning by alienating them from Mary herself. They have become the sole preserve of clergy, alleged experts, or a few illuminati, instead of being the sustaining rituals of discipleship they were intended to be.
Inferring Mary’s influence within Jesus’ movement is not an exercise in filling in blanks with the images of her one prefers. Since the second century, as we shall see, Mary has been the target of projections. She has been portrayed as the Shulamit, the dark lover of the Song of Songs, whose physical passion symbolized holy ardor. During the sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great wove that symbolism into a narrative in which Mary Magdalene became a converted prostitute; by the Middle Ages, it became fashionable to depict her as a naked penitent meditating in a cave, and religious houses for converted prostitutes were routinely named after “the Magdalene.” From the thirteenth century, some people said Mary was really Christ’s concubine, and early efforts at photography in Victorian England included posing adolescent girls as partially clad “Magdalenes.” Christianity’s efforts to engage issues of human sexuality have been perennially undermined by caricatures of women as goddesses and vixens, and Mary Magdalene has been cast in both roles.
Swamped with a myriad of Magdalene legends, it is tempting for professionals in the study of the New Testament simply to debunk both the traditions of the Church and modern revisionism. I think that is unwise. We need to use the texts to get behind them, into the rich tapestry of meaning in which Mary Magdalene played a pivotal role in Jesus’ ministry. The legends of later times, and even of our day, frequently reflect the underlying power of Mary’s influence, even when they seem distorted by the mirrors of wishful thinking.
By attending to the texts that Mary Magdalene influenced, and keeping an eye on how that influence played out in later legends, we see a person come into focus. The details of Mary’s life are often obscure, but the power of a religious personality is unmistakable. I know now that there is someone there for Marguerite—a woman of Spirit, prepared to transmit that Spirit bodily into the lives of all those who long to lift the veils that prevent us from seeing the divine vision, which is also the truth of who we are.
Chapter One
POSSESSED
And there were some women who had been healed from evil spirits and ailments—Mary who was called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, Khuza’s wife (Herod’s commissioner), and Susanna and many others who provided for them from their belongings.
mary appears for the first time in the chronology of Jesus’ life in this brief passage from Luke’s Gospel (8:2—3). Luke indicates when she entered Jesus’ life and why she sought him out. Jesus’ reputation must have drawn her the ten hard miles from her home in Magdala to Capernaum, which is where he lived from 24 C.E. until the early part of 27 C.E. She probably came to him alone, on foot, over rock roads and rough paths, possessed by demons, her clothing in tatters. By my estimate, she sought him out in 25 C.E., after Jesus had become known in Galilee as a rabbi who opened his arms to people considered sinful and did battle with the demons that afflicted them. Jesus and Mary might conceivably have met when Jesus visited Magdala prior to 25 C.E., but there is no reference to that.
If she had begun her journey from Magdala with a woolen cloak—coveted by travelers for shelter at night as well as covering in rain and cold—that and any leather sandals she wore might well have been stolen. Cloaks and sandals, however, were not within reach of every family: The poor had to make their way barefoot, warmed only by the thick flax of their tunics. We can only imagine the toughness of these Galilean peasants, by day outdoors, even in the cold winter rains and occasional snow of the region.
Luke does not present Mary as the wealthy, elegant seductress of medieval legend and modern fantasy. In one vivid tale, frequently retold and embellished in the city of Ephesus in Asia Minor from the sixth century on, Mary was so wealthy that she was invited after Jesus’ death to a dinner with Tiberius Caesar in Rome. She took the opportunity to preach of Jesus’ Resurrection, only to be met with imperial derision. God would no more raise the dead, the emperor said, than he would turn the egg in Mary’s hand from white to red. The egg immediately turned red. Orthodox Christians still recount t
his story at Easter, and Mary and her egg appear in the icons of Eastern Orthodoxy.
Some modern scholarship has attempted to buttress the picture of Mary’s wealth by playing on her association with Joanna in Luke’s Gospel, since Joanna had married into the prominent household of Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee. In one recent reconstruction, Mary and the influential Joanna were friends and colleagues in business; Mary exploited Joanna’s contacts and used her own wealth to host dinner parties at which she employed Jesus as a comic. Revisionist readings, like medieval legends, can divert and refresh our imaginations, but they also show us how much the Western religious imagination still wants a rich and powerful Mary to protect the poor, defenseless Jesus.
But Luke’s Gospel simply does not say Mary shared Joanna’s status: It contrasts the two women. Among the women Luke mentions, Joanna, married to a government official, is aristocratic, perhaps wealthy, and well connected. Mary, on the other hand, doesn’t have Joanna’s status or connections. What she has are demons; no ancient text (nor any reasonable speculation) suggests that Jesus ever moved to Magdala or that Mary owned property there that she put at Jesus’ disposal.
Luke does not indicate how old Mary was when she met Jesus, but she was most likely in her twenties, slightly older than he, mature enough to have developed a complicated case of possession (intimated by the reference to “seven demons”). The Gospels say nothing about her family. She was evidently unmarried at an age when one would expect a woman to have settled and produced children.
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