Peter was especially involved with preparing converts for baptism, and it makes good sense to see him as the source of passages in the Gospels that name him explicitly or that directly concern his baptismal agenda. When scholars tie together a disciple’s name with the ritual agenda of that disciple and the oral source he developed, they establish what amounts to that disciple’s signature within the source. In the case of Peter, he is named repeatedly within passages that were crucial to preparing converts for baptism, so it is widely agreed he had a profound influence on the formation of the Gospels.
If we apply the same logic and refer to the same kind of evidence that has been applied to Peter, Mary Magdalene also emerges as the author of a source of stories that bear her oral signature. She was the single most important conduit of stories concerning Jesus’ exorcisms.
Simply by following Jesus, the Magdalene evidenced the purifying presence of Spirit; her experience and her standing put her in an ideal position to craft the detailed exorcism stories we read in the Gospels. Read in order, these three stories amount to a manual of how to cope with unclean spirits (Mark 1:21-28; 5:1-17; 9:14-29): by identifying them, confronting them with divine Spirit, and proclaiming their defeat. They also reflect a progressive development as Jesus honed his craft to deal with increasingly difficult cases of possession.
The first story in the Magdalene source comes from near the beginning of Jesus’ time in Capernaum, after 24 C.E. (Mark 1:21-28); the second reflects the period starting with his flight from Herod An-tipas in 27 C.E. (Mark 5:1-17); the third appears after Jesus’ Transfiguration in 30 C.E. (Mark 9:14-29). Once we recognize these three stories of exorcism as the mainstream of Mary’s source, other stories naturally find their place as tributaries.
The first exorcism story, set in the Capernaum synagogue, depicts unclean spirits whose threat dissolves once they are confronted with purity (Mark 1:21-28). Read in detail, this account clearly reveals Mary Magdalene’s oral signature. Her perspective governs the presentation of the story, reflecting an insider’s knowledge of the deep inner struggle that exorcism involved for a person who was possessed.
Capernaum was a wealthy enough town that its Jewish population could afford to build an actual structure for its “synagogue,” a designation that referred in the first century to a congregation of Israelites, with or without a building. This first public act of Jesus in the Gospel According to Mark therefore unfolds in a comparatively dignified space, a small building fitted with benches, where the assembly could comfortably settle local disputes, hear and discuss Scripture, delegate the priestly duties that local Levites fulfilled in Jerusalem, arrange for the collection and transfer of taxes to the Temple, and participate in rituals such as circumcision and burial.
In Mary’s story, however, any such routine is derailed when an unclean spirit accosts Jesus. The demon “speaks,” but the people in the synagogue hear only inarticulate shrieks. Jesus alone understands the meaning of the sounds. The demon identifies itself with all unclean demons of the spirit world in a fascinating switch of pronouns in the text (here italicized; Mark 1:24): “We have nothing for you, Nazarene Jesus! Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the holy one of God!”
The slip back and forth between plural and singular has surprised many readers of Mark’s text. Multiple demons—like Mary’s seven and the demon who found seven colleagues to repossess a person in Jesus’ saying (Luke 11:24-26; Matthew 12:43-45)—signaled the resistance of the demonic world as a whole. Like a military commander who claims that acts by insurgents only prove they are desperate, Jesus viewed the violence of demons as part of the impending defeat of their regime. In addition to its identification with unclean spirits as a whole, the demon in the synagogue also specifies the purpose of Jesus’ exorcisms: not simple banishment, but their definitive removal from power. That is what the demon fears on behalf of the whole realm of unclean spirits: regime change instigated by Jesus as the agent of God’s Kingdom, the kind of demonic retreat Mary Magdalene had experienced.
Fearing destruction, the unclean spirits act before Jesus speaks, initiating a preemptive strike by naming him. The word exorcise (ex-orkjzo in Mark’s Greek) means to adjure or “to bind with an oath” (which is the aim of an exorcism). The oath was a formula that exorcists usually used to invoke divine power and force demons to obey their commands. Such spells were more effective when they identified a demon by name. In this case, however, the demon jumps in with a spell and a naming of its own. In effect, it is exorcising the exorcist, a notable departure from the well-documented form of exorcism stories in the ancient world.
Mary’s source describes this as a very noisy event. The demon “cried out” (Mark 1:23). Jesus shouted back in the rough language of the street, “Shut up, and get out from him!” (v. 25). The demon’s obedience came under protest; it “convulsed” its nameless victim and departed with a scream (v. 26).
These acute observations all point toward a storyteller with keen knowledge of the deep combat with evil that Jesus’ exorcisms involved, their raucous quality, and the danger that the exorcist would be defeated. Moreover, the storyteller knew how Jesus interpreted the demons’ wordless shout (Mark 1:34), as an admission of ultimate defeat. Whoever conveyed this story had to have known both what went on and what Jesus thought about it. Mary Magdalene best fits the description of that storyteller.
By taking Mary’s influence into account, we can understand why, unlike most ancient stories of exorcism, Mark’s narratives depict the demons’ violent resistance to Jesus instead of portraying him as a self-confident exorcist. This comes out most vividly in the second story from the Magdalene source, which is set in Decapolis, just on the other side of the Sea of Galilee from Magdala.
There, Jesus confronts a horde of demons that have taken up residence in a man who inhabits a cemetery because of his affliction (Mark 5:1-17; Luke 8:26-37; Matthew 8:28-34). When Jesus demands to know the demons’ names (a standard feature in exorcisms of the time), they say they are “legion,” the designation for a six-thousand-man Roman military unit. The story is related in the same simple, vigorous, abrupt voice of the Capernaum exorcism (Mark 5:1-13), although the action is more complicated:
And they came to the opposite side of the Sea, into the area of the Gerasenes. He got out from the boat, and at once there met him from the tombs a person with an unclean spirit. He had the habitation among the tombs, and no one was any longer able—even with a chain—to bind him. (For many times he had been bound with fetters and chains, and the chains were torn apart by him, and the fetters smashed, and no one was capable of subduing him. And all night and day he was among the tombs and in the hills, shouting and wounding himself with stones.) He saw Jesus from a distance, and ran and worshipped him, and shouting with a big sound he says, I have nothing for you, Jesus Son of the highest God! I adjure you by God, do not torment me! Because he had been saying to him, Unclean spirit, get out from the person! And he interrogated him, What is your name? And it says to him, Legion is my name, because we are many. And they summoned him a lot, so that he would not dispatch them outside of the area. Yet there was there by the hill a big herd of pigs grazing. They summoned him and said, Send us into the pigs, so that we may enter into them. And he permitted them. The unclean spirits got out and entered into the pigs, and the herd rushed over the cliff into the sea, about two thousand, and they were choked in the sea.
Several stark images (the victim’s habitation in a cemetery, his habit of wounding himself to the point of bleeding, his residence in Gentile territory) indicate that this exorcism targets uncleanness as the evil Jesus addressed in all his exorcisms. The possessed man embodies everything unholy and is named “legion” just in case a hearer or reader might miss the point of where the contagion came from. When Rabbi Jesus drove demons out of people, he acted on behalf of those possessed, but we can clearly see that he was also acting against the source of impurity—Rome and Rome’s collaborator, Herod Antipas. Mary Magdalene, whos
e town lay adjacent to Antipas’s new capital, knew the reality of this uncleanness. With equal clarity, the narrative drives home the theme of the struggle involved in this exorcism. The demons were numerous, talked back to Jesus, and did not obey a direct command.
It was unusual in the ancient world to insist that the demons formed a violent, coordinated front of impurity, and bizarre to depict them as dictating how an exorcist should handle them. The legion story deliberately engages in exaggeration, to the point that no commentator has been able to draw the line between the story’s symbolic meaning and the literal event it depicts. Still, the symbolic meaning remains clear no matter how literally we take the details: As the divine Kingdom takes root, Rome will be dislodged. Roman demons are no more threatening than panicked pigs; they will neutralize themselves in God’s encompassing purity, which is as deep as the sea.
Definitive exorcism signaled an ultimate change in humanity within Jesus’ vision and in Mary’s experience. In her narrative, the man who had been possessed with a legion of demons went on to become the first messenger of Jesus in Gentile territory (Mark 5:18-20). After his return from Decapolis to Galilee (in 29 C.E.), Jesus sent out twelve of his disciples. They acted on his behalf, announcing the Kingdom, healing people, cleansing them of impurity, throwing out their demons. When they did so, Jesus said (in a passage I do not assign to the Magdalene source) that he saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven, robbed of his old power (Luke 10:18). Removing impurity by naming it made Satan fall, and other teachings of Jesus unconnected with the stories Mary told confirm this perspective.
The Gospels insist on the violence of the confrontation between Jesus and unclean spirits precisely because it demonstrates the cosmic significance of his actions. As Jesus pressed home the significance of removing demons from people, he evolved as a religious persona. He became increasingly prophetic—his words and deeds took on the character of signs, indicating how God was acting or about to act in the world. Jesus and Mary Magdalene explained why demons shouted at Jesus, and he back at them: They resisted him, crying out his name and spiritual identity, because their encounter with him was a war of worlds.
Mary told the story of the legion of demons from the sympathetic perspective of someone who could speak from firsthand experience of being exorcised. A legion consisted of some six thousand soldiers, and auxiliary troops co-opted by the legion could equal that number. Although Mary’s seven demons were by no means literally legion, she could tell this story because she knew the real depth of the cosmic antagonism involved in Jesus’ exorcism and had felt that antagonism in her own body.
Immediately before the third principal exorcism story in the Magdalene source, Jesus—transformed in divine glory and talking with Moses and Elijah (Mark 9:2—8)—appears to Peter, James, and John. Just as he manifested himself to his disciples in the visionary experience of the Transfiguration as a master comparable to Elijah and Moses, so the story in Mary’s source (Mark 9:14-29) expresses Jesus’ vehement insistence on the power of Spirit in contrast to the tentative quality of the efforts of his disciples, who had been unable to deal with the demon at hand. Jesus explained to them (Mark 9:29): “This sort can go out by nothing except by prayer.” By this time, he was heading toward his final days in Jerusalem, and Jesus had become a master exorcist, locked in cosmic struggle with Satan in a way that was beyond his followers’ capacity to emulate and sometimes even to understand.
As his own spirituality evolved, Jesus had found ways to magnify awareness that all impurity dissolves in the holiness of Spirit, and Mary Magdalene was there to trace that development. She knew Jesus’ method in this domain inside and out, and exorcism stories from her source reflect this knowledge. In the first story, set in Capernaum’s synagogue, the demon defeated itself by acknowledging the purity it confronted in Jesus, “the holy one of God,” and Jesus’ technique could involve—as in the case of the “legion”—giving unclean spirits what they said they wanted to speed their departure.
In the third principal story, which involves a grievously possessed child, Jesus explains to the distraught father that “everything is possible to one who believes” (Mark 9:23). Faith established the setting of successful therapy, and Mary’s faithful discipleship, evidenced by her following Jesus from Capernaum to Jerusalem, symbolized the environment of effective treatment.
Scholars have not yet examined Mary’s influence on the Gospels with the same vigor that they have investigated Peter’s, Paul’s, James’s, or Barnabas’s. They have had access to the relevant information in the Gospels, and they have honed their analytic tools where other disciples and their sources are concerned. But they have ignored or downplayed Mary’s explicit connection with Jesus’ exorcisms and disregarded evidence that it was Mary who shaped and conveyed the stories of Jesus’ exorcisms in the Gospels. Mary Magdalene’s voice has echoed anonymously in the Gospels for nearly two millennia. Now it is time to identify the speaker and appreciate her words.
Listening to Mary Magdalene’s source can help us to understand not only Mary herself but also a deeply charismatic and prophetic strand of Christianity. Rooted in Jesus’ practice, this impulse adamantly confronts the forces of uncleanness with the power of God’s Spirit.
Not all his followers embraced the violence of Jesus’ exorcisms all the time. We learn of this not from the Magdalene source but from another run of material that spells out Jesus’ exorcistic theory in his own words and represents his conflict with those around him. This teaching confirms, from Jesus’ point of view, exactly the sense of cosmic struggle and resistance that the Magdalene source narrates.
Mark’s Gospel indicates that once Jesus’ family tried to seize him physically; he seemed to them “beside himself” (3:21). If you did not share Jesus’ vision, he could easily seem to be out of his mind. Rabbis of this period also characterized another mystic, Simon ben Zoma, as “beside himself” because he was prone to ecstasy in the midst of daily life.
His family’s well-meaning, conventional concern for Jesus only stoked his insistence on confrontation with Satan (Mark 3:22—27). He wasn’t crazy or possessed by Beelzebul at all, he insisted. Rather, he battled directly in his exorcisms with “the strong man,” the honcho of all demons. Rabbi Jesus said, “No one, however, can enter the home of the strong man to rob his vessels unless he first binds the strong man, and then he will rob his home” (v. 27). Once he was bound, Jesus could pillage his goods! Jesus didn’t want to leave a possessed person’s body open for unclean spirits to return to with ever more impure companions; instead, he would sweep Satan out of house and home.
He was convinced that Satan’s defeat completed the Kingdom’s arrival; one implied the other, and the Spirit of God effected them both. When the Spirit—conceived of as female in Jesus’ theology— moves in this world, she displaces demons and installs divine justice. That is why, speaking about his exorcisms, Jesus said that denying the Holy Spirit was the one sin that would not be pardoned (Mark 3:28-30): “Everything will be forgiven people, sins and curses (as much as they curse), but whoever curses the Holy Spirit will never ever have release but is liable for a perpetual sin.” The unpardonable sin is to deny the Holy Spirit as she transforms the world by dissolving evil. The consistency of Jesus’ thinking about exorcism is striking, and echoes the Magdalene source.
Luke’s naming of Mary in personal connection with repeated exorcism enables us to say that Mary Magdalene told stories about Jesus—especially the detailed stories of his exorcisms—that we can read today in the Gospels. She then takes her place beside apostles who also influenced how the message about Jesus was preached and taught. The exorcism stories in the Gospels bear her signature. One of the most vital and enduring teachings of Jesus she helped craft concerned how the power from God could dissolve evil by letting it name itself for what it was, and she showed how he put that teaching into practice. Medieval legend conveyed its awareness of Mary’s importance within this field in its own way. Gherardesca da Pisa, who died
in 1269, spoke of Mary as intervening in her own bloody battle with a demon, then as helping her care for her wounds.
Mary knew that the demons’ most fearsome weapon, deployed to resist Jesus’ exorcism, was their unique knowledge of his identity. Up until the point of the first exorcism story in Mark, no one in the Gospel has called Jesus “the holy one of God.” No one will ever call him that again. The demons express insight into Jesus’ mysterious identity, what scholars for more than a century have called “the messianic secret.” By telling this story and stories like it, Mary indicated that she knew this secret. The nameless man in Capernaum’s synagogue alone named Jesus as “the holy one of God”; the man with the legion of demons uniquely called Jesus “Son of highest God” (Mark 5:7). Mary Magdalene, Jesus’ companion in exorcism, understood the secret that his struggle with the demons involved.
These inarticulate demonic cries beg a question: If the demons uniquely knew Jesus’ spiritual identity, and he alone understood what they said, to whom did he disclose this knowledge? Once again, Mary Magdalene’s oral signature leads the way to an answer. The first exorcism in Mark uniquely identifies Jesus as “the holy one of God,” and then defines what the phrase means. The demon, as elsewhere in the Gospels, is an “unclean spirit.” As we’ve seen, in Jesus’ analysis, un-cleanness resides within a human being, rather than in exterior objects. That which defiles comes from within and moves out, rather than the reverse. That conception is crucial to this story. Possession in Rabbi Jesus’ view happened only with a person’s tacit consent or inadvertence, so that uncleanness could be removed by conscious intention.
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