Mary Magdalene

by Bruce Chilton

  The epithet “Nazarene,” repeated in Mark’s Gospel and echoed in the name “Magdalene,” is a constant reminder of the disconcerting sanctity that challenges the whole realm of unclean spirits and at the same time reveals Jesus’ identity.

  Just as Jesus’ contemporaries are “astonished” when the demons in Capernaum shudder in the presence of his purity, the Magdalene and her companions are “completely astonished” by a vision of a young man who tells them Jesus “the Nazarene” has risen from the dead (Mark 16:1-8). Here, too, revelation perplexes those it comes to, and that disturbance echoes through the names Nazarene and Magdalene.

  To Jesus’ mind, Mary was the Magdalene, the woman who had embodied the impurity to which Herod had subjected Magdala. To Mary, Jesus was the Nazarene, the force of Galilean rural purity that could vanquish her demons. Together, these names invoke the way Jesus and Mary became joined, the enduring link between them, and the disturbing thought that the force of the holy cannot be contained by the ordinary conventions of this world.

  Chapter Three

  SECRET EXORCISM

  Luke’s Gospel says that Jesus exorcised Mary of “seven demons” (8:2). That number invited hagiographers during the Middle Ages to imagine Mary being afflicted with all seven Deadly Sins when she first met Jesus. In The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, the compendium of stories of saints compiled during the thirteenth century, Mary was so wealthy that she owned the towns of Magdala and Bethany, near Jerusalem. But her wealth, beauty, and youth brought temptations, and she descended to living as a common prostitute, following a path of degradation that medieval teachers feared for all women.

  The number seven resonates with a symbolism broader than the medieval fascination with sin and sexuality: In ancient Hebrew, Babylonian, and Persian numerology, seven represented totality— the eternally reverberating rhythm in Genesis of creation and repose. Israelite fascination with the number represented a version of Babylonian wisdom, rooted in the observation of the heavens. In the lunar calendars of the ancient Near East, the seven-day week marked the phases of the moon: four quarters waxing and waning during the month. Israel embraced this calendar, and Genesis embeds the seven-day week in the structure of nature itself (Genesis 1:3-2:3).

  Seven is the symbolic number of totality and fullness, which is why medieval Catholicism conceived of seven Cardinal Virtues to balance the seven Deadly Sins. The seven chakras of Hinduism similarly represent the points at which spiritual energy connects with our physical bodies. Mary’s “seven” demons should be viewed in this light. The inherent symbolism of seven in the ancient mind was so strong that the reference to seven demons in Luke’s text need not be taken literally.

  The multiple exorcisms that Mary underwent probably took about a year, and it was through this process that she emerged as one of Jesus’ key disciples. Unlike other exorcists of his time, Jesus freely admitted the difficulty and danger of dealing with unclean spirits. We don’t know how many times Jesus met with her, and Luke and the other Gospels are silent about what went on during these sessions. Elsewhere in the New Testament (as in many other ancient literatures), narrators relished tales of demonic possession. The possessed shriek, shred their clothing, and rip their flesh—displays storytellers found hard to resist. Evidently, Mary Magdalene’s exorcism did not involve this kind of public drama. Jesus apparently treated her privately.

  During this prolonged cure, Jesus initiated Mary into his particular understanding of exorcism. Exorcism is a window into how Rabbi Jesus understood the role of divine Spirit in the world. He called demons “unclean spirits,” an unusual way of referring to them picked up by later Christian writers. For Jesus, people taken on their own were as clean as God had made Adam and Eve. If a person became unclean or impure, that was not merely because of contact with exterior objects. Instead, impurity was a disturbance in that person’s own spirit, the “unclean spirit,” which made him or her want to be impure. To his mind, uncleanness did not arrive from material contagion at all, but from the disturbed desire people conceived to pollute and do harm to themselves.

  Uncleanness had to be dealt with in the inward, spiritual personality of those afflicted. “There is nothing outside the person proceeding into one that can defile one, but what proceeds out of the person is what defiles the person” (Mark 7:15). That was why contact with people considered sinners and impure did not bother Jesus, an attitude that scandalized conventional Pharisaic teachers.

  Jesus believed that God’s Spirit was a far more vital force than the unclean spirits that disturbed humanity. Against demonic infection, a greater force, or countercontagion, could prevail, the positive energy of God’s purity. Defilement was an interior force of uncleanness, which needed to be identified and banished by the energy of Spirit.

  When Jesus taught his disciples about the practice of exorcism, he specifically recognized the problem of serial possession in a way that mirrors Mary’s experience. In Luke’s Gospel, this teaching appears shortly after the reference to Mary’s possession (11:24-26; see also Matthew 12:43-45): “When the unclean spirit goes out from the person, it passes through waterless places seeking repose, and finding none, then it says, I will return to my house, whence I went out. It goes and finds it swept and adorned. Then it proceeds and takes along other spirits more evil than itself—seven!—and entering dwells there. And the endings of that person become worse than the beginnings.”

  Rabbi Jesus the exorcist speaks in this passage on the basis of a practitioner’s familiarity with demonic behavior. He knows that an unclean spirit, once out of a person, will try to find someplace to go (“seeking repose”), and perhaps will decide to return to the person it came from (“my house”). An exorcist was hardly a success if a person was left like a clean furnished house with open doors and windows waiting for a squatter. That just invited demonic repossession.

  Jesus pulls back from any sweeping claim of instantly effective exorcistic power and disparages the results of quick-fix exorcisms. In contrast, the Gospels sporadically make general statements to the effect that Jesus effortlessly exorcised demons. His own words belie that claim. His reference to the demon joining up with “other spirits more evil than itself—seven!” echoes the description of Mary’s possession. We can’t conclude that Jesus had Mary in mind here; after all, she was possessed by a total of seven demons in Luke’s description, while Jesus spoke of seven additional demons. But her case exemplified his concern: a possession that an incautious exorcist might make repeatedly worse.

  Wiping out that spiral of possession, Jesus taught, involved installing divine Spirit where demons had been. Mary herself must have been aware both of how desperate she had once been and of the triumph her cure involved. She needed intelligence, insight, and sympathy to follow Jesus’ long treatment through to successful completion. The Magdalene felt herself healed by an inner seismic shift that was literally cosmic in its consequences, because it signaled the world’s transformation by the arrival of God’s Kingdom according to Rabbi Jesus’ teaching.

  Jesus was not always a gentle therapist. He and his followers insisted on ultimate combat with each and every demon, because each unclean spirit represented them all. Mary became the living, breathing embodiment of the ascendance and power of Spirit. And for all the twists and turns of Christian legend, she has always stood for personal victory over evil.

  In the stark portrayal of the evil she had overcome, Mary sometimes seems to be the mirror image of Jesus. The Golden Legend, which has been mentioned previously, says Christ “embraced her in all his life” and emphasizes that she became his intimate friend, his constant companion, and a source of help on his journeys. Petrarch called her “the sweet friend of God” (“dulcis arnica dei”). Here legend develops in a way that helps us see better what is already implicit in the most ancient sources: a bond between Jesus and Mary that was close and lasting.

  The link between Mary and her rabbi even factored into the way Jesus’ opponents responded to him. M
ary was said to be possessed by multiple demons; similarly, her rabbi was charged with wielding power that came to him by invoking “Beelzebul,” known in Galilee as the prince of all spirits and anglicized as “Beelzebub.” In other words, the opposition charged that Jesus was too intimate with the powers of darkness: His practices put him in league with them. That, they said, is why devils did his bidding.

  In origin, Beelzebub’s name reaches back into the deep pagan past of the Middle East. Beelzebul, god of the underworld, was invoked in spells and sorcery during the period when Jesus lived to drive away demons of disease. In the context of exorcism in first-century Galilee, this accusation against Jesus by his Jewish opponents amounted to a charge of black magic.

  Rabbi Jesus responded with a characteristic flash of temper and disregard for logic. He insisted that his exorcisms were beneficial, just like those of the Pharisees who opposed him (see the reference to “your sons” in the passage cited below). He then said that his exorcisms were unique because they signaled the nearness of God’s Kingdom, which would overturn Satan’s dominion (Matthew 12:24-28):

  The Pharisees heard and said, He does not throw out demons except by Beelzebul, ruler of the demons! He knew their thoughts and said to them, Every kingdom divided against itself is wasted, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand. And if Satan throws out Satan, he is divided against himself. So how will his kingdom stand? And if I by Beelzebul throw out demons, by whom do your sons throw them out? For this, they themselves will be your judges. But if I throw out demons by God’s Spirit, then the kingdom of God has arrived upon you!

  As far as Jesus and his followers were concerned, sensitivity to the world of the spirits, clean and unclean, did not disqualify Mary Magdalene as a disciple, any more than her rabbi’s reputation for tackling demons with Beelzebul’s authorization disqualified him as an exorcist. In fact, Jesus taught that engaging impure spirits, for all the danger involved, was what dislodged Satan from preeminence in the world, as God’s Spirit ushered in God’s Kingdom. Contact with the divine in Jesus’ teaching transformed unclean spirits with God’s Spirit and removed their impure influence. Mary became a living symbol in Jesus’ movement of the Spirit by which Jesus removed unclean spirits and brought the divine Kingdom into the human world.

  During the twelfth century, a commentator noted that Mary’s companionship with Jesus would not have been permitted in the Church of the commentator’s own day. He explained that “among the Jews,” women were allowed “to go about with religious men,” showing that he understood Judaism better than some modern interpreters have. Although the study of history has advanced in many ways since the Middle Ages, in this case there has been a backward movement in the understanding of the place of women and of the feminine within Judaism. Modern Christians still repeat the false claim that women had no place within the leadership of Jewish worship and learning, although that has been disproved again and again.

  Mary’s gender presented no obstacle to her growing influence among Jesus’ disciples. In fact, being a woman was consonant with her emerging power and authority as an expert on exorcism. Rabbi Jesus conceived of divine Spirit, the force that dissolved unclean spirits, as feminine.

  From the time of the book of Proverbs (that is, the sixth century B.C.E.), Spirit had a firm place in Israelite theology as Yahweh’s female partner. The force of Spirit that rushed out from God at the beginning of the cosmos and filled the entire universe was feminine both in the noun’s gender (ruach in Hebrew) and in the life-giving creativity with which Spirit endowed creation. This divine feminine was closely identified with Wisdom, the eternal consort of Yahweh (Proverbs 8:22-31):

  Yahweh possessed me in the beginning of his way,

  Before his works of old. From everlasting I was established,

  From the beginning, before the earth… When he established the heavens, I was there,

  When he drew a circle on the face of the deep. When he made firm the skies above,

  When the fountains of the deep grew strong, When he placed the boundary of the sea,

  And waters did not transgress his command,

  When he marked the foundations of the earth, I was beside him as an architect, and I was daily his delight,

  Pleasuring him in every time, Pleasuring the expanse of the earth,

  and my delight was with the sons of men.

  The intimacy between Wisdom and Yahweh was so deep and enjoyable that it could be described in erotic terms, and the human delight in Wisdom also promised a life of deep, rewarding pleasure. Just as God might appear by means of the three men who visited Abraham and Sarah at Mamre (Genesis 18:1-15), so divine Spirit conveyed herself with a woman’s traits. God’s majesty was inconceivably great and varied, and it incorporated feminine as well as masculine identity.

  Jesus said he spoke on behalf of Wisdom (Sophia in the Greek text of Luke), and counted himself among her envoys to the world (Luke 11:49): “For this reason also the Wisdom of God said, I myself will delegate to them prophets and apostles.” Just as Jesus sent his delegates into Galilee, so he believed Wisdom had delegated him to repair a broken world. In Rabbi Jesus’ mind, his whole movement amounted to an apostolic message from Spirit, and therefore from Wisdom.

  Western Christianity’s fixation since the Middle Ages on an exclusively masculine deity tragically departs from Jesus’ conception of God. Even the term for Spirit, which is feminine in Hebrew, becomes neuter in Greek and masculine in Latin, as if the process of translation itself conspired against his thought. Yet at the wellspring of his movement, male and female together reflected the reality of the divine image (Genesis 1:27), and God’s Spirit conveyed the full feminine force of divinity.

  Chapter Four

  mary’s signature

  We have seen that during the year or so it took Jesus to exorcise Mary Magdalene, she came to know his techniques of exorcism better than anyone else. She emerged as one of his key disciples; in the art of dealing with unclean spirits she was an authority who embodied Jesus’ bold claim (Matthew 12:28): “If I throw out demons by God’s Spirit, then the kingdom of God has arrived upon you!” That gave Mary a privileged position among his disciples; she symbolized the arrival of God’s Kingdom, yet Mary’s role as a teacher who related Jesus’ exorcisms and their significance remains unacknowledged in the Gospels and in scholarship.

  In other cases in the Gospels, when a prominent disciple, say Peter, has this kind of close connection to Jesus in relation to stories about him or teachings he crafted and passed on to his followers, scholars identify a source within the Gospels that they attribute to Peter. For example, Peter heads the list of the three premier apostles who were present at the Transfiguration and saw their rabbi transformed with heavenly light and speaking with Moses and Elijah (Mark 9:2—8). Peter was evidently the principal source of this story, the teacher within Jesus’ movement who passed it on and shaped its meaning within Christianity’s oral tradition until it made its way to the written Gospels.

  The Gospels do not identify their authors. Each is simply called “According to Mark,” “According to Matthew,” “According to Luke,” and “According to John,” without any indication of who Mark, Matthew, Luke, or John were. How the Gospels were produced, by whom, and in what communities of early Christians has to be inferred from the texts themselves.

  Despite the uncertainties involved, thoughtful readers from the start of the second century onward have recognized that the Gospels are not simply books written by individual authors working in isolation. Rather, they are composite editions of differing sources that different communities put together in the generations after Jesus’ death.

  The Gospels emerged a generation after Jesus’ death in the major centers of Christianity. Although certainty eludes any attempt to specify when and where the Gospels were composed, a consensus of scholars agrees that Mark was produced in Rome around 73 C.E.; Matthew in Damascus around 80 C.E.; Luke in Antioch on the Orontes around 90 C.E.;
and John in Ephesus around 100 C.E. Both to get at the best evidence about Jesus and to understand how the Gospels developed as literature, it’s vital that we identify and analyze the Gospel sources.

  Peter provided one of these crucial sources. He and his circle of followers prepared people for baptism by reciting an oral narrative of what God had accomplished with Jesus. Preparing would-be converts to Christianity involved a complex and potentially dangerous process in the Greco-Roman world, unlike the routine baptism of infants in much contemporary practice. The worship of Jesus was, at best, barely tolerated during the first century; sometimes civic-minded enthusiasm burst out against the strange new Christian “superstition” (as the Romans categorized Jesus’ movement) in the form of violent local pogroms. Because Christianity was perceived as a strange form of Judaism, Christians could also be swept up in outbursts of violence against Jews. A person who claimed to want to be baptized in Jesus’ name might, in fact, be an informer for the magistrate of a city or, worse still, for a gang of narrow-minded thugs.

  A good year of probation usually awaited converts, not only to test their sincerity before they learned the identities of everyone in the congregation and joined fully in services of worship but also to ensure that they had learned the congregation’s patterns of behavior and ritual and prayer, had refused idolatry and trusted single-mindedly in the one God, and had dedicated themselves to the life of the Spirit and therefore resisted the lures of the material world. All those things had become part and parcel of the Christian message. Each Gospel sets forth that message for its community on the basis of oral sources of evangelism from earlier times.