Given Mary’s demonic possession, there is little mystery about her being single. Possession carried the stigma of impurity, not the natural impurity of childbirth (for example), but the contagion of an unclean spirit. She had no doubt been ostracized in Magdala in view of her many demons. The Jews of Galilee defined themselves, in contrast to the Gentiles around them, by their devotion to stringent laws of purity that were commanded by the Torah, the Law of Moses that was written in Hebrew and passed on in oral form in the Aramaic language. What they ate, whom they could eat and associate with, how they farmed, whom they could touch or not touch, the people they could marry, the kind of sex they had and when they had it—all this and more was determined by this Torah. The Galileans’ purity was their identity, more precious and delightful in their minds than prosperity under the Romans or even survival. They resorted to violent resistance sporadically during the first century to expunge the impurity the Romans had brought to their land, even when that resistance proved suicidal.
“Unclean spirits,” as Jesus and his followers often called demons, inhabited Mary. These demons were considered contagious, moving from person to person and place to place, transmitted by people like Mary who were known to be possessed. In the Hellenistic world, an invisible contagion of this kind was called a daimon, the origin of the word demon. But a daimon needn’t be harmful in the sources of Greco-Roman thought. Daimones hovered in the space between the terrestrial world and the realm of the gods. When Socrates was asked how he knew how to act when he faced an ethical dilemma, he said that he listened to his daimonion ti, a nameless “little daimon” that guided him.
Judaism during this period referred to the same kind of forces, using the language of spirit and distinguishing between good spirits (such as angels and the Holy Spirit that God breathed over the world) and bad spirits. Jesus called harmful spiritual influences “unclean” or “evil” spirits, and the word daimon has been used in this sense within both Judaism and Christianity. After all, even a “good” daimon from the Hellenistic world was associated with idolatry, and that is why the term demon is used in a pejorative sense in modern languages influenced by Church practices.
Everyone in the ancient world, Jewish or not, agreed that daimonia could do harm, invading people, animals, and objects, inhabiting and possessing them. While daimonia are in some ways comparable to psychological complexes, they are also analogous to our bacteria, viruses, and microbes. People protected themselves from invisible daimonia with the care we devote to hygiene, and ancient experts listed them the way we catalog diseases and their alleged causes. Such lists have survived on fragments of papyrus that record the ancient craft of exorcism. The fact that these experts disagreed did not undermine belief in daimonia any more than changing health advice today makes people skeptical of science. Then, as now, conflict among experts only heightened belief in the vital importance of the subject.
Some scholars have argued that women in early Greece were thought more susceptible of possession than men, on the dubious grounds that their vaginas made their bodies vulnerable to entry. Ancient thought was usually subtler than that, and demons do not seem to have required many apertures or much room for maneuver. A person’s eyes, ears, and nose were much more likely to expose him to their influences than any orifice below the waist.
However Mary came by her daimonia, they rendered her unclean within the society of Jewish Galilee. She was probably very much alone when she arrived in Capernaum.
In antiquity, women without families were vulnerable in ways that we can scarcely imagine. The Gospels typically identify a woman as a sister, wife, or mother of some man. That link was her protection. As happens in many cultures, a wife who was alone with any man but her husband in a private place became liable to the charge of adultery (Sotah 1:1-7 Mishnah, the tradition of Rabbinic teaching that put the Law of Moses into practice). Similarly, a man who stayed in his future father-in-law’s house could not complain later that his wife was not a virgin, on the grounds that he might well have deflowered her, given half a chance. Women without men did not make themselves available; rather, men availed themselves of them.
From the custody of her father, a woman at puberty (around the age of thirteen) passed by marriage to the custody of a husband. Weddings were arranged between families that sought the advantage to both sides of increasing their families, the fields they farmed, the herds they tended, the labor force they could count on, and the contacts for trade that they could exploit. Marriage was a binding contract, sealed by a written record in literate communities, or by witnesses in illiterate peasant environments. A young woman remained in her father’s home for a year or so after the marriage contract was agreed upon. Even with this delay of sexual relations, however, pregnant fourteen- and fifteen-year-old women must have been a relatively common sight.
This whole arrangement was designed to protect the purity of Israel’s bloodlines by managing a woman’s transition from puberty to childbearing with a husband who knew he had married a virgin. Taking another man’s wife was therefore punishable by death in the Torah (Leviticus 20:10). Relations with a married woman constituted the sin of adultery, while seducing a virgin could be punished more lightly (Leviticus 22:16-17), sometimes only by a fine.
Unmarried women past the age of being virgins had a liminal, uncontrolled status, as troublesome to the families that had failed to marry them off as to the women themselves. Both men and women who had Israelite mothers but whose paternity was in doubt posed a particular problem when it came to marriage, because they could not marry most other Israelites. Like Jesus, Mary Magdalene might conceivably have been a mamzer, an Israelite whose paternity was doubtful and who was therefore restricted when it came to prospects for marriage.
Modern scholarship continues to parry the medieval tradition of portraying Mary as a prostitute at the time she encountered Jesus. But encouraging one’s daughter to become a prostitute was prohibited, even if she was a financial burden. The punishment for promoting or allowing prostitution is not specified (Leviticus 19:29), and the fact is that prostitution did exist in and around Israel. But the practice was blamed for blighting the land. The whole concept behind the rules of purity was that Israel had been given a land to manage with attention and care so that it would continue to be fruitful. Sinful behavior produced impurity and pushed Israel toward annihilation: If Israelites stopped practicing the laws of purity, God threatened that the land itself would vomit them out (Leviticus 18:3-30).
Had Mary turned to prostitution before she met Jesus? Had she been raped or exploited during her journey from Magdala? Those are good questions, although no text or reasonable inference from a text answers them. To affirm or deny these possibilities takes us beyond the available evidence. But we can say that in Mary Magdalene’s time and place—as in ours—likely victims of sin were often portrayed as being sinners themselves.
Luke’s reference to Mary’s seven demons encouraged the Western tradition that depicts her as a prostitute. Typical paintings portray her in lavish dress, arranging herself in front of a mirror, or abased in shame at Jesus’ feet. Medieval piety associated vanity with prostitution, on the grounds that women sold themselves only because they enjoyed whoring, and pastoral theologians saw self-abasement, including flagellation on many occasions, as the best cure for this sin. Vanity and lust were kissing cousins within Mary’s demonic menagerie prior to her exorcism, which was portrayed in the West as a conversion.
Mary Magdalene became popular as the patron saint of flagellants by the fourteenth century, and devotion to her and to the practice of self-inflicted pain was widespread. In one story of her life, she clawed at her skin until she bled, scored her breasts with stones, and tore out her hair, all as acts of penance for her self-indulgence. She long remained the ideal icon of mortification among the lay and clerical groups that encouraged similar penances. In 1375, an Italian fraternity of flagellants carried a banner during their processions as they whipped themselves; it depicts a gia
nt enthroned Mary Magdalene. Her head reaches into the heavens and angels surround her. At her feet kneel four white-hooded figures, whose robes leave a gap at the back for ritual scourging.
Where did people in the medieval world find the material to produce such an image? Certainly not from the New Testament or from early traditions concerning Mary Magdalene. The woman whom the flagellants venerated was a combination of two different Marys: Mary Magdalene and Mary of Egypt. Mary of Egypt is herself a classic figure of Christian folklore, the whore turned ascetic. In stories that began to circulate during the sixth century, Mary of Egypt, for the sake of Christ, gave up her practice of prostitution during a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the fourth century and lived in a cave for the rest of her life. This story was spliced into Mary Magdalene’s biography.
According to this expanded tale, most famous in the thirteenth-century form in which it appears in The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, Mary traveled to France fourteen years after the Resurrection, founding churches and removing idols. In this lush legend, Mary Magdalene is confused with a completely different person in the Gospels, Mary of Bethany. This confusion provides her with a sister she never had (Martha of Bethany) as well as with a brother she never had (Lazarus). She could count on help in her missionary work from her brother Lazarus and her sister Martha, along with the aid of a boatload of Christians who had come with her and her siblings to Marseilles. Then she retreated for thirty anorexic years to an isolated cave in Provence, where she was fed miraculously during her times of prayer and meditation, when angels lifted her up to heaven.
The deep ambivalence about sexuality held by those within monastic culture did not, however, quite allow them to give up thinking about how desirable this former prostitute must have been after her conversion. She is often depicted as nude in the craggy rocks of La Sainte-Baume. Her long and lustrous hair, covering the parts of her body that modesty conventionally requires to be covered, is a staple of iconography in the West to this day, making Mary Magdalene the Lady Godiva of Christian spirituality.
Mary Magdalene approached the right rabbi when she sought out Jesus. He reveled in his reputation for consorting with allegedly loose women (the word loose being applicable to any woman who did not bear her husband’s or her father’s name, or some other token of male protection). There were many unattached women among Jesus’ disciples; when people called him “the friend of customs-agents and sinners” (Matthew 11:19), mat was not a compliment, and Jesus’ critics ranked these female disciples among the “sinners.”
Rabbi Jesus didn’t mind damning his opponents in his defense of his female followers: “Amen I say to you, that customs-agents and whores precede you into the kingdom of God!” (Matthew 21:31). That is obviously not a general endorsement of tax collection and prostitution as methods of salvation, but a tough rejoinder to people who despised his followers and called his female disciples “whores.”
Mary Magdalene’s persistent reputation for promiscuity in medieval legend and in many modern novels rests on the mistake of presuming that women with demons were necessarily promiscuous. Exorcism in the ancient world was not only about sex, although scholars sometimes assume that describing a person as possessed denigrates that person, even after the cure. This was not the case: Ancient thinkers knew how to distinguish a person from his or her afflictions in a way their modern counterparts might learn from.
When Mary first met him, Jesus had moved from Nazareth to Capernaum after a near stoning (Luke 4:16-30) convinced him that the parochial hamlet he had known from his childhood would never accept him as a rabbi. In Capernaum, he hit his stride. This fishing town of a couple thousand people provided him with a secure haven, and his reputation as an exorcist grew.
Jesus settled in with two brothers named Simon and Andrew, who had originally come from Bethsaida (John 1:44) and had married into a fishing family in Capernaum. Following a custom in Galilee, they moved in with their in-laws, so Simon’s mother-in-law was an important member of a large extended family (Mark 1:29-31). The sturdy basalt houses of Capernaum were small and packed with people. Most were one-story dwellings, although there were occasional two-story houses, as well. Few had courtyards, and since some people kept livestock, animals joined them from time to time in their cramped homes.
Accommodating Rabbi Jesus was not a routine act of hospitality. His own needs were modest enough for a prosperous family to support, although he admitted himself (Luke 7:34; Matthew 11:19) that he did have the reputation of eating and drinking a great deal. The strain came more from the eager crowds that thronged around him. Venues where Jesus practiced exorcism and healing could become so crowded that people were unable to move. The Gospels describe a scene in a house that was so crowded that four men had to break a hole through the roof and lower their paralyzed friend to Jesus on a litter to be healed (Matthew 9:1-8; Mark 2:1-12; Luke 5:17-26). That scene suggests the environment in which Mary Magdalene first met the young rabbi. Capernaum was abuzz with Jesus’ reputation—you had to fight your way in to see him.
Time and again in the Gospels, people with unclean spirits and diseases are portrayed as taking the initiative and demanding Jesus’ attention, often shouting out to him and pushing through crowds to touch him.
Jesus exorcised and healed by the flow of Spirit that, he said, burst forth from him and tossed out demons for the sake of God’s Kingdom (Matthew 12:28; Luke 11:20). These two forces—the Spirit and God’s Kingdom—were central to his practice, and they were doubtless the two energies uppermost in his mind when he treated Mary Magdalene.
God’s Kingdom was a new social order that, in the mind of Jesus and his followers, was already beginning to emerge and overthrow the rule of Rome and its dominance in the territory that it came to call Provincia Syria Palaestina. Rome’s rule through its local underlings seemed to break every promise God had made to Israel. The chosen people were supposed to be secure in the Promised Land; the Gentiles, Isaiah had prophesied (Isaiah 25:6-12), would make pilgrimage to Mount Zion as supplicants, not victors.
In the midst of Jewish disappointment at the advent of Roman hegemony, Jesus announced this new, divine supremacy that the Aramaic Scriptures had promised: the malkhuta delahah, “the Kingdom of God.” Jesus had memorized many of these texts (which differed in significant ways from Hebrew Scripture) when he was a child, embracing the complex, rich oral tradition that was the foundation of peasant life in first-century Syria Palaestina.
Like many other rabbis of his time, Jesus could not read or write. His learning came through oral traditions, and his peculiar genius found expression in his poetry of the divine Kingdom. He gave people like Mary the inner experience of God’s power, which they felt was beginning to displace the demons, impurity, poverty, and brutish Roman rule that plagued their land. Jesus taught that God’s Kingdom was the revolutionary principle behind the whole cosmos: One day all of life would shimmer with divine fullness and energy. Caesar’s might would dissolve and the Kingdom would push past any resistance with a force as natural and mysterious as a sprouting seed, as inexorable as rivers in flood.
People loved to hear Jesus’ vision of a new age, a complete transformation of the world as they knew it. They felt themselves transformed by the many parables he wove to take them into the world where divine justice and mercy would reign supreme and transform all humanity. In his exorcisms and healings, Jesus put this vision of the transformative Kingdom into action.
Mary joined these gatherings and participated in festive meals in houses in and around Capernaum, where Jesus talked about God’s extraordinary secret malkhuta. Rabbi Jesus must have been especially voluble while he drank wine and ate sheep or goat and fresh vegetables provided by accommodating hosts, tracing visions of how God would change everything someday soon and the Israelites who were eating together would banquet with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, risen from the dead. If you knew the Kingdom was at hand, you could celebrate its arrival, lying back on a couch of straw (or a real couch, if your hos
t was wealthy), even while Caesar still ruled.
It is easy to imagine how Mary, an outsider who herself had been marginalized and ostracized, without a place in the social web of Galilee, might have responded to these parables of vindication and the vanquishing of Israel’s oppressors. She may have had to push her way through crowds to see Jesus, but once she got his attention, he attended to her, as is clear from Luke’s Gospel. We don’t know what that first meeting would have been like, but it proved auspicious, for both the rabbi and the possessed woman in rags, very much alone, who was destined to become one of his most important disciples.
Chapter Two
THE MAGDALENE
MAGDALENE.
The name has reverberated—with overtones of sensuality, penitence, and devotion—for nearly two millennia. It echoes today in the cloisters and churches of Vezelay in Burgundy and Saint-Maximin in Provence.
Thousands of pilgrims and tourists still throng up winding roads to Vezelay’s lush hilltop, where its Romanesque basilica—simple, welcoming, austere—houses what the Benedictine monks who lived there during the eleventh century and later said were the Magdalene’s earthly remains. All that is left of what is supposed to be Mary’s body is a bit of bone in a glass cylinder, framed by metallic angels and cherubim, in a darkened underground chapel. While researching this book, I made my own pilgrimage to Vezelay; the Romanesque crypt draws the quiet curiosity of tourists as well as the devoted prayer of worshipers. The sense of devotion seems to vibrate in resonance to the elegant architecture of the site. But a little written notice beside Mary’s relics adds nothing new to her story, except for a complaint about the Reformation and the French Revolution disrupting her remains. That is a leitmotif of antimodernist devotion to the Magdalene in France.
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