Mary Magdalene

by Bruce Chilton

  108 notorious disputes among Christians in Antioch: Rabbi Paul, pp. 100—170.

  108 Paul refers to a woman named Junia as an apostle: Ibid., pp. 3, 272.

  Neither Luke nor Acts ever speaks of women apostles: Barnabas, like Paul, does make it onto the list of those called “apostles” in Acts (Acts 14:4, 14), and a named woman is called “disciple” in Acts 9:36.

  all of Paul’s three encounters with the risen Jesus were strictly visionary: Rabbi Paul, pp. 48—71.

  109 Heavenly messengers simply remind the women of what Jesus himself had already told them: It is interesting that there are two heavenly emissaries now, and that they are called not “youths” or “angels,” which would have accorded with Mark and Matthew, but andres, the term for adult males.

  109 referring to women is not at all the same thing as including them as agents: The confusion between the topic of women and the perspective of women is elegantly developed by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza in Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation (New York: Continuum, 2000), reviewed in Anglican Theological Review 83, no. 4 (2001): 886—887. A particularly effective critique of previous scholarship on Luke is available in the work of Ann Graham Brock, Mary Magdalene, the First Apostle: The Struggle for Authority (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 36—40.

  110 the Gospel is careful to specify that this is Mary, Martha’s sister: Chilton, “Opening the Book: Biblical Warrants for the Ordination of Women,” Modern Churchman 20 (1977): 32-35. It is interesting that Luke does not name the place involved as Bethany, and that may hint at change introduced editorially into the tradition presented here. Originally, Mary Magdalene might conceivably have been at issue.

  110 They give short shrift to Mary’s role in ritual anointing: If anointing was pleasing to Jesus and a regular practice within his movement, as we have seen, why is the memory of anointing so sparsely represented in the New Testament? James, the brother of Jesus and leader of his movement in Jerusalem, was described by the first Christian historian, Hegesippus, as refusing the use of oil; see Eusebius History of the Church 2.23. Like the Essenes, with whom James shared several interests, he evidently regarded oil as polluting. The letter attributed to James (5:14-16) sets out a practice of laying hands on people who are ill and anointing them, but it restricts this practice to “elders” (presbuteroi in Greek, from which the English word priest derives). When ordinary Christians pray for healing, no oil is to be involved.

  James was a powerful man in earliest Christianity, its single most influential authority during his lifetime; see B. D. Chilton and J. N. Neusner, eds., The Brother of Jesus: James the Just and His Mission (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001). Because he generally avoided the use of oil, it was natural that believers thought of Jesus as being similarly ascetic, although—as we have seen— some references to oil and anointing do remain in the Gospels. Mary’s effacement in the Gospels and the downplaying of her anointing is not explicable on the basis of simple sexism. She also represented practices that did not accord with other teachings in primitive Christianity. The seesaw influences of Mary and James lie at the root of Christianity’s ambivalent attitudes toward oil over the centuries.

  This ambivalence nearly submerged Mary Magdalene and her anointing, and almost erased the evidence of Jesus’ dedication to the practice, as well. Her anointing was his also: focusing the Holy Spirit on the body of the person anointed. From this perspective, anointing was the opposite of polluting—contrary to what the Essenes and James taught. Paul also insisted, in terms reminiscent of Mary’s teaching, on the connection of anointing, Spirit, and Resurrection (Romans 1:3—4; 2 Corinthians 1:22).

  II.ORTHODOX AMBIVALENCE AND THE GNOSTIC QUEST

  First Letter to Timothy: Timothy helped Paul write some of his letters and also gathered correspondence together after the apostle’s death. That opened the door for later writers (after 90 C.E.) to take up the Pauline cause, as they conceived it, by writing letters in Paul’s name to Timothy (and to Titus), which are known collectively as the Pastoral Epistles. These issues are addressed in Rabbi Paul, pp. 246—266.

  Those who take part in the meal: See Dorothy Irvin, “The Ministry of Women in the Early Church: The Archaeological Evidence,” Duffe Divinity School Review 45, no. 2 (1980): 76—86; Damien Casey, “The ‘Fractio Panis’ and the Eucharist as Eschatological Banquet,” Theology @ Mcauley: An E-Joumal of Theology 2 (2002). When the fresco was first uncovered during the nineteenth century, scholars assumed that all the participants in the depiction must have been male. When Irvin showed that could not be the case, some scholars denied that a Eucharist was at issue. As Casey points out, the challenge of Irvin’s contribution is that it uncovers anachronisms in thinking about liturgy as well as women’s ministry. Whether all the figures in the fresco are women remains a matter of debate, to a large extent owing to the condition of the work.

  Christians wanted to appear more Roman than the Romans: This policy is summed up in the rhetorical question, “But if anyone does not know how to lead one’s own house, how shall he care for God’s church?” (1 Timothy 3:5), an attitude that contradicts Paul’s own theology; see Rabbi Paul, pp. 90, 119, 190.

  women in the early sources of Rabbinic Judaism: See Tallan, Mine & Yours Are Hers: Retrieving Women’s History from Rabbinic Literature (Leiden: Brill, 1997).

  114 Hippolytus, a famously conservative priest: See Ann Graham Brock, Mary Magdalene, the First Apostle: The Struggle for Authority (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003) pp. 2, 15. The reference in Hippolytus (Song of Songs 24—26) speaks of the women at the tomb as all being female apostles sent to the male apostles, and over time this characterization was applied to Mary in particular, as most prominent among the women. In this case, Hippolytus probably reflects and supports a second-century motif.

  114 An order of church worship and regulation called the Didascalia of the Twelve Apostles: F. Nau, La Didascalie des douze Apotres (Paris: Lethielleux, 1912); R. Hugh Connolly, Didascalia Apostolorum (Oxford: Clarendon, 1929). For a succinct description of the relationship among the various orders of the ancient church, see W. Jardine Grisbrooke, The Liturgical Portions of the Apostolic Constitutions: A Text for Students (Brancote, Nottinghamshire: Grove, 1990).

  115 Unction was not only the dab of oil on the forehead and hands at the time of death: Paul Bradshaw and Carol Bebawi, The Canons of Hippolytus (Bramcote, Nottinghamshire: Grove, 1987), Canon 19, and Burton Scott Eas-ton, The Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus (New York: Macmillan, 1934), vol. 1, p. 5; vol. 2, pp. 21—22.

  117 This is what made her “the special friend of the Son of God and his first servant”: David Mycoff, The Life of Saint Mary Magdalene and of Her Sister Saint Martha (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1989), lines 240-251, 876—903, 1959-1961.

  12.THE BREAKOUT

  Gnostics wanted direct contact with the divine: Riemer Roukema, Gnosis and Faith in Early Christianity: An Introduction to Gnosticism, trans. John Bow-den (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1999); F. Stanley Jones, Which Mary? The Marys of the Early Christian Tradition (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2002); Karen L. King, What Is Gnosticism? (Cambridge: Belknap, 2003).

  These initiation rites were expensive and flamboyant: Although this field of study is in considerable ferment today, the classic work remains Franz Cumont, The Mysteries ofMithra, trans. T. S. McCormack (New York: Dover, 1956). For a sensible guide through the thicket, see David Ulansey, The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries: Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

  123 The Mary in the tide refers to the Magdalene: In fact, a couple of recent scholars have inserted Magdalene—or (worse still) the Aramaic Magdala—into the title of this Coptic work, apparently trying to capitalize on the spike in modern interest in the Magdalene. Occasionally, such ploys are part of a fashion to date The Gospel According to Mary much earlier than scholarship has established, and to treat it as if it were somehow a primitive Aramai
c source, although remains have been found only in Coptic and Greek. Among many useful treatments, see Jean-Yves LeLoup, The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, trans. Joseph Rowe (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2002); Karen L. King, The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle (Santa Rosa: Pole-bridge, 2003); Anne Pasquier, L’Evangile selon Marie: Texte etabli et presente (Quebec: Universite Laval, 1983), a book that merits an edition in English. Although the insertion of Magdalene or Magdala into the title of this Gospel is inaccurate and perhaps opportunistic, it is more a minor annoyance than a serious deception. After all, in this Gospel, Mary engages her risen teacher on the precise topic of how the vision of him raised from the dead is possible, so it is pretty obvious that she must be the same pivotal figure of all the Resurrection accounts in the canonical Gospels—Mary Magdalene. That inference is sound, even though it does not warrant changing the ancient title of the Gospel.

  124 Peter is a key figure in The Gospel According to Mary, as he is in the book of Acts: To that extent, Mary and Acts agree, and their common portrayal of Peter—not Paul—as the true starting point of a deliberate extension of Jesus’ message to Gentiles is historically accurate. See Acts 10:9—48, 11:5—17, 15:7—11; Rabbi Paul, pp. 94—99.

  In Acts, Peter’s reluctance to consort with Gentiles comes from his concern for purity. When he is offered unclean food in a vision, Peter responds that nothing unclean has ever entered his mouth (Acts 10:14). In The Gospel According to Mary, personal fear disturbs Peter; he shares the anguish of the apostles as a whole that the Gentiles will treat them no better than they did Jesus.

  These two sources disagree even more profoundly over the degree of Peter’s competence in the domain of vision. His personal apparition in Acts resolves the issue of how he and believers generally should behave toward non-Israelites. As he sees unclean animals lowered from heaven in a linen sheet of cosmic dimensions, a voice tells him that what God has purified, he should not treat as unclean. Consequently, he agrees to visit the house of a Gentile, the Roman centurion named Cornelius. In The Gospel According to Mary, Peter is bereft of personal vision; it apparently assumes that Peter’s vision in Joppa came later, portraying Mary Magdalene as his spiritual guide prior to his apparition.

  126 A woman had experienced a visionary breakthrough that permitted her to see Jesus’ desire to reach out to Gentiles before Peter himself did: Yet by the time Peter himself later had a vision in the city of Joppa—the vision Acts relates, of all the four-footed beasts of the planet, the reptiles of the earth, and the birds of the air in a surreal image, derived from the book of Ezekiel (Acts 10:12—14)—ne had learned from Mary that he was seeing with his mind, not his eyes. He knew the vision did not concern literal animals, but contact with people who were non-Israelites. That pivotal moment, when Peter authorized contact with Gentiles, was the culmination of a visionary path Mary Magdalene had set him on. The same woman who helped Peter see the risen Jesus in the first place guided him to the visualization of what this Resurrection meant in terms of letting it be known to non-Israelites. The Gospel According to Mary is of deep historical value in permitting us to see that Peter’s vision was not spontaneous, contrary to what Acts implies, but arose as a result of apostolic controversy over contact with Gentiles and Mary Magdalene’s guidance.

  As theologians became increasingly materialistic in their conception of how Jesus rose from the dead: During this period, Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons (in today’s France)—having inherited the millenarian theology of his teachers in Asia Minor—preached a physical Resurrection of the flesh; see Against Heresies 2.29; 4.18; 5.7-16, 36. Despite what Paul had clearly said in 1 Corinthians 15, Irenaeus called anyone who did not go along with this millenarian literalism a heretic. The Catholic Church of this period largely defined itself by its opposition to Gnosticism, and therefore by a stubborn assertion of the value of the flesh, even if that meant contradicting Saint Paul.

  the liwa was the locus of insight as well as of emotions and sensations: For example, Job conceives of his own death as climaxing in a moment of insight. When his flesh is stripped away, he shall nonetheless see God—as his redeemer. The removal of the flesh—even by the painful steady drip of mortal suffering—brings Job to the moment he can perceive God with all that he has left of his being, his “heart” (see Job 8:10; 19:23—27). For Job and for the Prophets—in fact, for Hebrew and Aramaic speakers generally in the ancient world—the heart was what a person thought and felt with. Modern English still preserves a bit of this conception; we speak of loving with one’s whole heart (no doubt influenced by Deuteronomy 6:5), and the feeling of love is often experienced in one’s chest and gut, whatever we may claim to know of psychology and physiology.

  This is a case where Paul’s familiarity with the world of Aramaic Judaism, as well as the Hellenism he was born into, makes him a reliable guide when it comes to mapping the overlap between Hellenistic and Semitic conceptions. Paul spelled out how he saw Spirit at work in relation to “heart” in Aramaic and “mind” in Greek (1 Corinthians 2). If one asks how we can know what God has prepared for us, Paul says, the answer is that Spirit alone is able to convey divine purposes, but that mind alone decodes that truth.

  Paul develops his position in detail by quoting a passage from Isaiah (Isaiah 64:4, cited verbatim in 1 Corinthians 2:9) that speaks of truths beyond human understanding that God has readied for those who love him. Paul goes on to say (2:10-11): “God has revealed them to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God. For who among men knows the things of man except the spirit of man which is in him? So also no one has known the things of God except the Spirit of God.” As Paul sees human relations, one person can know what another thinks and feels only on the basis of their shared “spirit.” Spirit is the name for what links one person with another, and by means of that link, we can also know what God thinks, what the divine feels. The Spirit at issue in knowing God, Paul goes on to say, is not “the spirit of the world,” but “the Spirit which is of God” (i Corinthians 2:12). The human spirit that is the medium of ordinary human exchange becomes the vehicle of divine revelation as soon as God is involved.

  127Just as Mary’s teaching lies silently behind Paul’s where Resurrection is concerned: The Nag Hammadi Library, the principal source of ancient Gnostic writings, actually begins with The Prayer of the Apostle Paul, which addresses Christ by saying, “You are my mind: bring me forth! You are my treasure: open for me!” (1.1.6—7). This agrees with The Gospel According to Mary. There are also echoes of Mary’s conception in The Sophia of Jesus Christ (III.4.98.9—22); The Dialogue of the Savior (III. 126.16-23; HI.134-20—135.5); The Thunder, Perfect Mind (VI.2.18.9—10); The Paraphrase ofShem (VII.1.5—15); The Second Treatise of the Great Seth (VII.2.64.9); The Teachings of Silvanus (VII.4.103.1—10). Wherever possible, I have followed the system of citation presented in James M. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library in English (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978). This is the most widely used translation of the ancient library of Gnostic books discovered in Egypt in 1945, and it also includes The Gospel According to Mary.

  not even circumcision as mandated in the Torah: Rabbi Paul, pp. 173-196.

  By the time the Gospel According to John was produced: Ernst Kase-mann, The Testament of Jesus: A Study of the Gospel of John in the Light of Chapter 17, trans. Gerhard Krodel (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978). More recently, April D. De Conick has pursued these ideas further in “ ‘Blessed Are Those Who Have Not Seen’ (Jn 20:29): Johannine Dramatization of an Early Christian Discourse,” in The Nag Hammadi Library After Fifty Years: Proceedings of the 7995 Society of Biblical Literature Commemoration, eds. John D. Turner and Anne McGuire (Leiden: Brill, 1997), pp. 381—398. See also Kasemann’s article “The Structure and Purpose of the Prologue to John’s Gospel,” in New Testament Questions of Today, trans. W. J. Montague (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979), pp. 138-167, which similarly finds a sequel in Chilton, “Typologies of Memra and the Fourth Gospel,
” Targum Studies 1 (1992): 89—100.

  Ephesus was a jewel of Greek culture on the western shore of Asia Minor: An earthquake in 23 C.E. makes the population estimate of 100,000 hazardous, but there is no doubting the importance of the city; see L. Michael White, “Urban Development and Social Change in Imperial Ephesos,” in Eph-esos, Metropolis of Asia: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Its Archeology, Religion, and Culture, ed. Helmut Koester (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1995), pp. 27-79, 46-47-

  John’s Jesus—unlike the Synoptics‘—“makes” water into wine like the god Dionysos: The story itself (2:1—11) doesn’t claim Jesus “makes” the water into wine; only the Johannine flashback does that. The story itself is a parable of purification, in which people celebrate with water as they would with wine; see Brooke Foss Westcott, The Gospel According to St. John, vol. 2 (London: Murray, 1908), pp. 333-347; Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John (XIII-XXI) (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), pp. 979-1017; Charles H. Talbert, Reading John: A Literary and Theological Commentary on the Fourth Gospel and the Johannine Epistles (New York: Crossroad, 1992), pp. 248-264; Rabbi Jesus, pp. 182-185.