Any writings indicating a greater role were buried, burned, or simply abandoned as orthodoxy imposed itself. The gospels we know as the first four books of the New Testament are, as historian Keith Hopkins puts it, "only a small fragment of early Christian history. In their time, they had many competitors, nearly all of them now lost. There were local traditions of teaching and practice, collective memories orally transmitted, written sources such as those the gospel writers themselves used, and the ones they did not use."
But not all were lost. The gnostic gospels discovered in 1945 in Nag Hammadi in Egypt, as well as a number of other early gospels and writings, reveal at least some of the native Middle Eastern traditions suppressed by the establishment of the universal Catholic church in Rome. They are, as it were, alternative gospels, or to use the title of one anthology, "the other Bible." And one of the most striking things about them is the importance they accord the Magdalene.
She is the one they state was closest and dearest to Jesus, the one he loved better than all the other apostles and used to kiss on the mouth. She is his consort, his lover. The gnostic gospel of Mary is her gospel, not Maryam's, and as she passes on the special wisdom Jesus revealed to her, the male apostles can only listen and plead for more.
The gnostics honored the Magdalene as "the apostle to the apostles," since she was the first witness to the resurrection, and so it was she who brought the good news to the others. This makes her, in effect, the first Christian. For resurrection was essential to Christianity. It was the foundation stone. Divinity demanded it, as it was demanded in the immensely popular great mother religions throughout the Middle East.
Again and again, young male gods—Osiris, Tammuz, Attis—had to be sacrificed for the common good. All had to die so that both they and the earth could be born again. And all were given life again by the great female divine who defied human distinctions and was simultaneously virgin, mother, and lover. Simultaneously, that is, both the Nazarene Maryam and the Magdalene.
The two separate women gradually became one. Though the Greek-speaking writers of the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke denied Maryam a presence at the crucifixion and the resurrection, those who wrote other gospels in Aramaic and Coptic and Armenian—the languages of the Middle East—placed her right there. They followed the logic of their hearts, and the spirit of their times. Who better to witness Jesus' resurrection than the woman who gave birth to him the first time? It would be inconceivably cruel to deny her that. Maryam does what they knew she should: she gives birth to her son, and buries her son.
"Mary received Jesus by conception, and saw an angel at his grave," wrote the lyrical fourth-century theologian Ephrem of Syria. An Armenian hymn from the same time was more specific: "It was she who bore the Son and gave him milk from her breast; it was she who sat at his feet and did him service by washing them; at the cross she was beside him, and in the resurrection she saw him."
She even becomes all possible Marys. In The Twentieth Discourse, a Coptic manuscript attributed to Cyril, archbishop of Jerusalem, Mary the virgin mother appears to the writer and declares: "I am Mary Magdalene, because I was born in Magdala. My name is Mary of Cleopas. I am Mary of James, the son of Joseph the carpenter."
And in what is possibly the ultimate melding of Marys, the gospel of Philip, recorded in the third century, says: "There were three who walked with the Lord at all times: Mary his mother and his sister, and Magdalene, whom they called his consort. For Mary was his sister and his mother and his consort."
The modern mind balks at such inclusiveness. "It is notorious that the early Christian world was in a state of inextricable confusion on the subject of the Marys in the gospels," says church scholar Robert Murray. But is it confusion or fusion? A muddle of Marys or a multiplicity of Marys? If we insist on reading the gospels as history, we end up bewildered. But if we can accept that the gospels were written as theology, then meanings emerge far beyond the literal ones.
Anthropologists may have the edge on historians here. Exploring a wide range of mythologies, Claude Levi-Strauss identified a pattern he called "myth-splitting," in which a legendary figure gets divided into mirror images or twins. The same dynamic seems to be built into the structure of conceptual thought. The madonna and the whore, Eros and Thanatos, animus and anima, yin and yang, lightness and darkness, innocence and experience—all are dyads in which each part only gains its full meaning by being paired with its opposite. Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that as Christianity developed, it would obey this dynamic. The maternal would be separated from the sexual, the Nazarene played off against the Magdalene.
Two thousand years later, with their respective legends firmly developed, it may be shocking to even imagine that the mother and the lover could ever have been thought of as the same woman. We have internalized the separation of the maternal and the sexual to such a degree that it seems incredible they could coexist. And yet of course they do. To be a mother does not mean giving up one's sexuality. The maternal and the sexual are not mutually exclusive; they are different aspects of a woman's life.
Should we see the Magdalene as an aspect of Maryam herself or as another manifestation of her? As the complement to Maryam or as the antithesis? There can be no definitive answer, of course, but it seems to me that to even think in such dualities is to belittle both women—in fact, to belittle all women. The gnostics grasped a greater truth: in a very real sense, each and every one of the women at the tomb was Maryam, each one the loving, grieving mother, each one the wise woman gathering up her courage and her resolve, determined that this shall not be the end.
We will never know exactly what happened in the tomb, but we do know one thing for sure: it was the women who were there, and only the women. The male disciples had all fled.
The women placed Jesus in the tomb, kept watch, returned on the third day, and announced the resurrection. They, and only they, knew what had happened. It was their gnosis, their hidden knowledge. They would reveal part of it, at least, to the male disciples, but everyone else has had to accept the resurrection on faith—in faith, that is, and as an article of faith. Or, as some modern commentators have done, try to explain it with what suddenly seem the paltry tools of logic and speculation.
Logic says that the body did not simply disappear. And if not, it must have been taken away. But where to, and by whom?
The Matthew author provides an explanation of sorts. The high priests warn Pilate that since Jesus said he would rise again on the third day, the disciples might "come and steal him away and tell the people 'He has risen from the dead.'" So Pilate orders the tomb sealed and a guard placed over it to preclude this happening. When the resurrection happens nevertheless, the high priests bribe the guards to say that Jesus' followers have indeed stolen the body during the night. The guards keep their side of the deal and, Matthew says, "to this day that is the story among the Jews."
This certainly seems a workable explanation, not the least because it requires no faith, only a realistic sense of how things are in the corruptible human world. Stubborn non-believers such as "the Jews" would be bound to believe it, for what else could one expect of them? Matthew must have known that this explanation was current at the time, and so presents it as a false cover story. Even as he tells it, he makes sure it will not be believed; he forestalls the possibility of its being taken as truth by showing it to be a deliberate lie. And in the process, he makes the disappearance of the body all the more magical—Houdini-like, in fact—by adding the details of the seal and the guard on the tomb.
But the gospel of Mark, which scholars now agree was written earlier than that of Matthew, mentions no guard and no seal. Indeed, it is highly unlikely that Pilate would order such measures. Even if he was aware of Jesus' crucifixion, which is itself unlikely, he would have considered him merely another in a long line of minor nuisances—one more trouble-maker with delusions of grandeur. And we are still left with the puzzling question of why the women would come back to the tomb on the th
ird day.
Mark shows three women—the Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome—bringing spices and oils to the tomb to anoint the body. But they would have done this before laying him there, not three days later, the intervening Sabbath notwithstanding. Later, John ignores the contradiction altogether; he simply states that the body was anointed with spices when it was laid in the shroud, and specifies no reason for the Magdalene coming to the tomb on the third day.
More basic still, why would anyone want to move the body at all? As in Jewish law today, bodies had to be buried the same day as death. The rock tomb donated by Joseph of Arimathea was as solid a resting ground as there could be. The image of Jesus' most devoted followers running around with his body under cover of night is close to desecration at best, grave-robbing at worst.
And yet this is what some of the more sensationalist explicators of the resurrection would have us believe. There seems to be an irresistible temptation for self-styled debunkers to turn historical detectives, coming up with reasoning so far-fetched as to make any self-respecting mystery writer blush. Among other things, we have been asked to believe that the authorities planned to steal the body to prevent any rumor of resurrection, and so the disciples broke in and stole it themselves, then sent the women to the tomb on the third day so that they would "discover" it empty. In various versions, the disciples hired a look-alike to act as the resurrected Jesus, or a total stranger as his messenger, or a fake medium through whom he could speak. One theory even ignores the gruesome horrors of crucifixion to argue that Jesus was not quite dead when placed in the tomb, that the herbs used to anoint him acted as medicine and the shroud as a bandage, and that he recovered.
There is a strong whiff of desperation in such extended reasoning. Certainly it reveals far more about those who make such arguments than about what actually happened. It makes the male disciples into a bunch of connivers, and the women into gullible dupes fooled into believing there has been a resurrection instead of a stolen body. The resurrection is seen at best as a hysterical misunderstanding, at worst as a scam.
This is what happens when we read the gospels as history instead of theology. We diminish the grandeur of metaphor, and find ourselves reduced from ultimate mystery to a poorly plotted detective story.
Of course literal resurrection is a physical impossibility. Therein lies the grandeur of the idea. But to say that it definitely did not happen makes no more sense than to say that it definitely did. For the real point of the resurrection is not literal, but metaphorical. Not physical, that is, but metaphysical.
Jesus' body may conceivably have been spirited away by his followers in the middle of the night. It may even have been taken away by temple guards sent to forestall a martyr's legend. Or it may simply never have disappeared in fact, but only in the telling. All these are possible, and in the end, none are relevant. For those who insist on the facts, there can be no resolution. The resurrection only makes sense on another level of knowledge, one that supersedes the factual and reaches deep into heart and soul.
When Isis sought out all the parts she could find of Osiris' body and brought him back to life, none of her worshippers took this literally. They instinctively grasped the power of metaphor. They took comfort in the idea that there is purpose in death—in the idea of death itself as part of life, part of the ongoing cycle of existence. But above all, they understood the power of grief to keep the dead alive.
As any newly bereaved spouse or parent knows, the absence of the dead person is as potent as their presence, perhaps even more so. The physical person is gone, but the hole he or she left in the world is undeniably there, its gaping emptiness an almost physical presence. And the survivors know that as long as they themselves live, so too will the ones who have died. They live on in the hearts and minds and dreams of those who mourn them. They live on in memory.
Maryam and the Magdalene and the "many other women" knew that the essence of resurrection lay not in the flesh, but in the spirit: the human spirit. "It was love that raised Jesus," declared the great nineteenth-century historian of religion Ernest Renan, and indeed it was. We mourn most deeply those we most deeply love. Whether Maryam's maternal love, the Magdalene's sensual love, or the loving faith of the other women, this was the force that would transform grief into joy, despair into hope, the end into the beginning.
It was not in grief, then, that Maryam and the women around her would resurrect the spirit of her son, but in love. This is how they would lead their lives from now on. This was their wisdom.
X
Maryam never ages in the New Testament gospels. She is never given a chance to age. After the crucifixion, she simply disappears, much as Joseph disappeared before her. There is just the sole point of reference at the end of John: "Woman, behold thy son," the dying Jesus tells Maryam. "Behold thy mother," he says to "the disciple standing by"— presumably John, though we already know that the male disciples have all fled. "And from that hour," the text continues, "the disciple took her into his own home."
The only other post-crucifixion reference to Maryam in the New Testament is a mere cameo appearance in the Acts of the Apostles. The disciples go back to the upper room where the Last Supper was held and pray "together with several women, including Mary the mother of Jesus." That word "including" seems amazingly casual; one would have thought Maryam would be at the center of such a gathering, not merely included as an afterthought.
But if we are not sure what to make of Jesus' last-minute passing off of his mother to John, at least the more traditional reader has the assurance that there is someone to look after her and provide a roof over her head. And indeed, over the next three centuries, one trend in apocryphal writing elaborated on John and his adoptive mother by placing them in Ephesus on the coast of what is now northwestern Turkey. That port city must have seemed a natural choice. It had been the center of worship of the great Diana of Ephesus, the many-breasted virgin fertility goddess whose temple would later be rededicated to Mary, and in the year 431 A.D. it would be the site of the Council of Ephesus, where Mary was declared theotokos: "mother of God." Modern pilgrims still visit the small stone house where she is said to have lived.
Other texts had Maryam living with John in Nazareth, and yet others, like The Twentieth Discourse, in Jerusalem, where she died at an unspecified date and was buried in the Vale of Jehoshaphat, below the towering walls of Herod's temple. The empty monument known as Mary's Tomb still stands there, curiously ignored by tourists and theologists alike.
But are we really to believe that the woman who raised as outspoken and revolutionary a man as Jesus would meekly disappear into the background after his death? Can we really conceive of her retreating to Nazareth to live out her days in the routine tasks of village life, as though nothing had happened? Or fleeing to Ephesus for no reason other than to live with John, as though she were incapable of looking after herself? In fact, how are we to believe that such a woman would retreat at all?
She has already left Nazareth, her ties to home and kinfolk weakened by the villagers' rejection of her son's preaching. For the past two years, she has traveled with her son and his followers on the road, from Capernaum at the northern tip of the Sea of Galilee all the way to the terrible destination of Golgotha. In this time, the followers, especially the women among them, have become her new family—an alternative, egalitarian family of the kind her son envisioned when he spoke of those who followed him as his true kin.
In this light, a number of apocryphal writers suggested what must be seen as far more realistic possibilities for Maryam than living out her days with John. For instance, the Discourse of Theodosius, archbishop of Alexandria, has her "living in Jerusalem with a number of virgins" as well as the apostles Peter and John, while the Homily of Evodius, archbishop of Rome, states that several disciples lived with Maryam after the crucifixion, "as did Salome and Joanna and the rest of the virgins who were with her."
"Living with a number of virgins" resonates with what
we know of Maryam. These are certainly the women who stood vigil with her at Golgotha. They are the women who spread the word of the resurrection, and who, like Maryam herself, have come too far to turn back to so-called normal life. Deeply committed to the teachings of Jesus, it would make sense that they'd now gather in a new kind of community formed around the woman who raised and taught him. Led by Maryam, they will devote themselves to the principles of justice and wisdom, combine activism with contemplation, and offer shelter and healing to those in need: women and men, peasants and urban poor, rebels and outcasts. They will, in fact, create an early form of liberation theology.
In Jerusalem, as Theodosius has it? A few other apocryphal accounts are more specific, and have Maryam living and eventually dying on Mount Zion, just outside the Jerusalem city walls. This tradition led to the graceful Dormition Abbey being built there, its name deriving from the age-old euphemism for death—sleep—as in the Latin dormit, "she fell asleep."
But Maryam had a whole life yet to live before she was ready to "fall asleep." And Mount Zion was not the place to live it. Sheltering rebels right outside the city walls would be foolishly dangerous, but one of the many villages hidden in the hills around Jerusalem would be a very likely place—a village like Ein Kerem, for instance, whose name means "the spring of the vineyard." Just a couple of hours' walk due west from the Jerusalem city walls, its stone houses clung to the sides of a deep valley as they still do today, hidden from the world yet easily accessible to those in the know.
Let it be this village, with its spring and its vines, its fig and carob and olive trees, for this is a place that has meant renewal for me ever since a New Year's Eve many years ago. We were four women in an old stone house built into the hillside, talking and laughing through the night as children slept. We didn't even notice the passing of midnight. We realized we were tired only when we heard the first birds sing. Then, with dawn about to break, we went up to the large flat roof, glasses of strong sage tea cupped in our hands for warmth, and kept vigil as the first sun of the new year rose up in the east.
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