Egyptologist Carl Schmidt set about creating a German translation of the gospel. Except for the missing pages, the text was in good condition. And since Coptic script was used almost exclusively by Copts, Schmidt concluded that their communities in Egypt were the ones to translate, preserve, and perhaps even to save the Gospel of Mary from complete erasure.
The publication of Schmidt’s translation of the Gospel of Mary was ready to go to a printing press in Leipzig in 1912. But just as the printer was nearing completion, a water pipe burst and destroyed the entire first edition. Schmidt tried to salvage the mess but was interrupted by World War I. And then before he could return to Leipzig to resurrect the project, he died in 1938. He bequeathed the project to another scholar by the name of Walter Till.
In the meantime, in 1917, a small 3rd-century Greek fragment of the Gospel of Mary was found. It’s known as Papyrus Rylands 463 and was also discovered in Egypt, at Oxyrhynchus. This version added clearer confirmation to passages of the Berlin Codex and also additional evidence about the gospel’s early date. Walter Till incorporated the new information into his translation of the Gospel of Mary. It was ready to go to print in 1943, but by this time, World War II made the publication of Mary’s gospel, again, impossible. And then, Till gave up his attempts altogether.
When the war was over, there had been a discovery in a village called Nag Hammadi in Egypt of a large amount of early Christian scripture. For example, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and this powerful, and poetic piece of scripture called The Thunder, Perfect Mind, among many others.
No copies of the Gospel of Mary were found among the preserved texts at Nag Hammadi. However, the two texts that were found within the Berlin Codex rolled up with the Gospel of Mary appeared among the mass findings of manuscripts: The Apocryphon of John and The Sophia of Jesus Christ. These texts discovered at Nag Hammadi were collectively referred to as the “Gnostic Gospels,” because they focus on gnosis, which is a Greek term meaning self-knowledge, or more specifically, the knowledge that comes from direct experience.
The label “Gnostic,” though, created a misperception around these early Christian texts, and Mary’s gospel got thrown into the confusion.
So, let’s be clear: there is no such thing as “Gnosticism.” There wasn’t a cult of organized Gnostics these ancient texts define. These texts, including the Gospel of Mary, are evidence of the various forms of Christianities that existed before the 4th century when the current form of the bible was codified. I know I just made Christianity plural there. But this is what these ancient texts prove; there were many threads of Christianity in the wake of Christ. And one of those threads, let’s call it a red one, believed women were as worthy as men to teach, and lead the church. But this wasn’t (obviously) the thread that won out.
Here’s a curious sympathy, or synchronicity; supposedly, these texts found at Nag Hammadi were smuggled from out of Egypt and sequestered for a while in the manuscript collection of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. This is fascinating, to me at least, because Jung believed that the church would die without the “Mother,” and that the feminine had been “submerged” in our collective unconscious. He also wrote The Red Book, which is essentially his efforts to connect directly to his soul.
The commonality between all of these early Christian sacred texts found buried in Egypt is that they spoke of this hidden, more human, and feminine side of Christ, of Mary Magdalene’s importance, and of salvation as an inward act of personal transformation.
The Nag Hammadi findings were at last released to a panel of international scholars to begin to assess their import and contribution to understanding the beliefs of some of the earliest Christians.1 So, although Mary’s gospel was found in 1896, the first print edition of her gospel wasn’t published until 1955. Mary’s gospel is the only gospel written in the name of a woman.
A third, and potentially final, version of the Gospel of Mary has been found, also in Greek, and also at Oxyrhynchus, in northern Egypt. This is a very significant discovery. As author, scholar, and Harvard Divinity professor Dr. Karen King explains in her translation of Mary’s gospel, “Because it is unusual for several copies from such early dates to have survived, the attestation of the Gospel of Mary as an early Christian work is unusually strong.”2
Episcopal priest, and author, Cynthia Bourgeault claims that if Dr. Karen King is correct, “this would place the Gospel of Mary Magdalene within the earliest strata of Christian writings, roughly contemporary with the Gospel of John.”3
This arduous and somewhat calamitous process of Mary’s gospel finally making its way into print feels significant to me. It reflects the almost magnetic reluctance of shifting our perspective about her, like the effort of what it would take for a river to change direction. And for me, it reflects the process of what it has taken me personally to share my truth about who she is and the truth about how her gospel has impacted my life.
As we make our way through each passage Mary’s gospel contains, I’ve also included passages at the start of certain chapters from these three texts, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and The Thunder, Perfect Mind, because they help to contextualize Mary’s gospel. Her gospel wasn’t this one-off, unicorn among horses, type of scripture. Reading it alongside these other gospels and early Christian scripture allows us to see that it was a part of a community of belief.
I’ve been trained as a theologian, which just means “a person who engages in the study of god.” Or in my case, a person who engages in the study of all that has been left out of our ideas of god. I will draw from my direct experience, and illuminate each passage as far as I’m able to, and also move us through the legend of Mary Magdalene herself, and her misunderstood status as the penitent prostitute to reveal a much more historically and theologically accurate vision of who she was, and remains.
The seven powers mentioned in Mary’s gospel (darkness, craving, ignorance, craving for death, enslavement to the physical body, the false peace of the flesh, and the compulsion of rage) are the precursors to Christianity’s seven deadly sins (pride, greed, envy, gluttony, lust, sloth, and anger). And I believe, they are the “seven demons” that Luke 8:2 claims were expelled from Mary: “With him went the Twelve, as well as some women who had been healed of wicked spirits and of infirmities. They were Mary, known as Mary of Magdala (from whom seven demons had been expelled).”4
The emphasis of that passage is traditionally on the fact that Mary had to be healed of those seven “demons,” but I like to focus on the fact that Mary was the first to be listed among the women who had been healed and that walked with Christ. These are the same seven powers, or “demons,” that Pope Gregory in the 6th century proclaimed during his Homily 33 proved her “sinfulness.” For me, rather than proving how far she “fell,” I see the seven “demons” as proof of how much she overcame.
It feels important, potent maybe, to make a small yet conscious effort toward reparation. To repair our idea of Mary Magdalene, I’m going to move through the seven powers she teaches about in her gospel, and give my version of a homily, or a sermon. And by sermon, I don’t mean a formal or official one; they’re more like love letters.
And even though these seven powers will progress from the first to the seventh in a linear way in this book, they are meant to be understood as powers that circle back into our lives again and again, for some of us, several times a day. And each sermon-like-love-letter in a way will be a chance for me to practice a Christianity that never excluded Mary’s gospel, and that understood these seven powers not as demonic or sinful but simply as human.
For the passages of Mary’s gospel, I have referred to Dr. Karen L. King’s translation from her seminal book, The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle. For the list of the seven powers translated from the Greek in Mary’s gospel, I’ve preferred Cynthia Bourgeault’s translation from her book The Meaning of Mary Magdalene. For the Gospel of Thomas, I have used Elaine Pagels’s translati
on from Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas. And I have used Orthodox theologian Jean-Yves Leloup’s translation of the Gospel of Philip, from his book Jesus, Mary Magdalene and the Gnosis of Sacred Union. Any passages from the New Testament that I quote or refer to are from Dr. Hal Taussig’s A New, New Testament: A Bible for the 21st Century Combining Traditional and Newly Discovered Texts.
I came across the quote that opens this chapter from The Thunder, Perfect Mind in my early 20s before I found Mary’s gospel, but in many ways, it led me to it. I read, “I am the whore and the holy woman,” and my whole body applauded. I had to brace myself against the bookshelf from the shock and extreme relief I felt in the corner of the bookstore where I couldn’t stop inhaling it. I had no idea what god was or wasn’t, I had no clue that I would soon be devoting my life to feminist theology, but everything in me knew that this is what I had been missing.
This voice was raw, and contradictory, and powerful, and paradoxical, and made so much sense to me I wanted to scream sincerely for the first time in my life, “Hallelujah!”
I didn’t understand why but finding this voice made these crazy rivulets of joy, these electric currents of energy, race through me.
My eyes read, and re-read, “I am she, the Lord.”
We Can’t Half-Ass Death
Every nature, every modeled form, every creature, exists in and with each other.
— MARY 2:2
I was up in the middle of the night, several years ago, scrolling through the Internet like it had secrets to reveal to me. I clicked through to an article about a seed bank that’s buried deep in a mountain in Norway. Supposedly, there are over 800,000 varieties of seeds from plants, to trees, to fruits and vegetables . . . it’s the world’s reserve in case of mass destruction.
Almost every country in the world has made a deposit. But only one has made a withdrawal, and that only recently: Syria. The war has so devastated the land that they needed to ask the world’s reserve for some seeds to start again.
It fascinated and horrified me at the same time, that a seed bank in case of world destruction would be needed. That we need to have a back-up plan to safeguard ourselves against what we’ve forgotten—how dependent we are on each other, and the planet.
But I also imagined walking through row after row of all those seeds. The magnitude of all that potential. That mountain vault might as well be holding bars of gold. Seeds are the precursor to currency. They are the original coin. And it felt inescapably hopeful that I stumbled upon this scary and interesting fact.
I resonated with needing to start over, or wanting to begin again. Actually, I didn’t want to start over, who does? I just knew that I was at an end.
“Every nature, every modeled form, every creature, exists in and with each other.” This is how the Gospel of Mary opens after the initial missing pages, and I am not sure if there was ever a more eloquent way to describe love. It’s not a love we’ve seen in practice very often. Sometimes, in moments of crisis. But it’s a love that renders us all equal. It’s a love that says I am not separate from you. We exist in and with each other. It’s a love that reaches everything, and everyone. If we all exist in and with each other, then we are all inextricably connected.
There is no stranger, no immigrant, no alien, no other.
I was realizing, as I was wide-awake yet again at 3 A.M., that being fiercely independent only gets us so far. And it’s actually a good sign when an old way we’re operating in the world comes to an end, but it doesn’t feel good. At all. It feels like anxiety attacks, or drinking too much, or insomnia, or watching TV like we’ll get paid for it. Or a little bit of all of the above, which was how I was handling it.
Sometimes it has to get worse before it gets better. I like this adage. I cling to it. It’s true to the same degree that you can’t half-ass death. You have to die all the way to be dead. And this is what scares us about it. Its finality. But in life, this is just the way it is. You have to die all the way before you can resurrect.
So, for me, when things got worse, when I was moving every other year to afford rent, until I found myself isolated out in the woods, which felt like the wilderness after city living in tiny apartments for most of my life, the fourth move with my little man, my seven-year-old son, and I was awake night after night, because being alone in a house unsettled an old trauma, from dormant to a palpable terror. I dreaded going to sleep.
And as much as I tried, I couldn’t reason with my nervous system. I would hear a noise while asleep, and I’d shoot up in bed like a meerkat, unable to relax for the rest of the night.
I was exhausted.
I was exhausted not just from a lack of sleep. It was from all the energy it took to remain blind to what I could almost see that night, but not quite. It was standing right behind me like Jason in his hockey mask from Friday the 13th. I needed to go “home” to Cleveland. (Cue horror music.) I could afford to stay still then, and I would have family to help me. But then, I would also have to come face-to-face with why I had left home in the first place.
So, now I’ll tell you what I heard later that night, after reading about the world’s seed bank. Just, don’t judge me. Or try not to. Actually, I can’t ask you that because I judged it. When I heard it, I felt one of those sinking sensations, as if my whole body responded with “fuck” in slow-mo.
I was lying there in bed, frozen again like a wide-eyed meerkat because I had just heard a loud, very suspicious noise from the basement, and maybe you’ve had a night like this too, or some version of it. When seemingly beyond your control, your mind starts making a moral inventory of all your shortcomings, of all those times when you now realize you should have said yes, but said no. And the opposite. All those no’s! As if there was a way to not end up here. As if there could have been a choice that would have led you to that expectation you had for your life.
Then, for this quick, but clear millisecond, I realized that this state of mind had become my default. I realized I was imprisoned again in this onslaught of judgment. I wasn’t actually there in my room, but trapped inside my thoughts. And in that millisecond, I saw all the comments I had been making about myself, about still being single, and isolated, and lonely, and disconnected, and anxious, and literally in the dark; and I realized it was like listening to the comments of a crazy online troll. Every night, I was getting in bed with a poop-emoji-slinging troll, tearing apart where I am right now, and why I’m not where I thought I would be. And that troll was me.
I said a prayer.
And what I mean by prayer is I finally took a breath. I realized how trapped I was; how I had become bound and overrun by what A Course in Miracles refers to as “the tiny mad ideas” of the ego. And I got that this is exactly what a “demon” is.
I took that first breath, and let it just anchor me into my heart. “Every nature, every modeled form, every creature, exists in and with each other.” I felt my love for my son, and let that love, which contains unfaltering forgiveness, extend to me. As I found so often, my love for him teaches me how to love myself, how to let love reach within me where it has never been before.
And then, I took another breath, and I imagined with that second breath that it lit this stubby little candle in my heart. And then I asked, with the minuscule, almost imperceptible amount of space that light carved out, “What the hell do I do now?”
These hot, heavy tears dropped from my eyes, because being that close to what I was actually feeling hurt. And it felt good too. The honesty in it. Then, I heard the answer. But again, I don’t want to freak you out. When I say, I “heard” the answer, it’s not a voice as if on an intercom at Target, or on an airplane. There’s no comparison actually. It’s a sound that never reaches the ears, having come from within them. It’s a voice that comes from silence. And I know that seems contradictory. But maybe, because you’re reading this, you already know what I mean.
So, the third breath I took, I took with my whole body. My lungs filled like gills, billowed o
ut beyond my rib cage, and just shifted the weight of everything, because I heard, within me, in that voice that’s more of an experience than a sound, the answer of what’s next for me.
“Give to me what you cannot carry.”
And maybe that seems really basic. Elemental. But it changed everything for me. And the reason why—the reason it felt like my whole system was responding to that answer with a loud, boldfaced f-u-c-k, in slow-motion—is because as simple as that line sounds, I knew that it meant starting over for me.
“Starting over” isn’t it exactly. It’s more like becoming aware of what I’ve always known. It’s nearing a closer proximity of what’s actually true for me. I guess it’s about integrity. In that moment, I understood I had the power to start all over, which just means to recognize what has been true for me for as long as I can remember.
“Give to me what you cannot carry” was asking me to start again, now, with what I’ve always known, and sensed: that there is so much more here, unseen, that I could be counting on, leaning on, trusting. That I exist in and with a presence that’s in this silence, in this tiny space, with a stubby little candle, here in my heart.
What I mean is (and I’m realizing I’m the one who’s freaked out to admit this), “Give to me what you cannot carry” came in a voice and a presence I recognized. It’s a love that has never left me.
A love that I couldn’t seem to either reconcile or reject.
But now I knew I had to. I knew I would have to tell this story—the story of the Christ I’ve met with because of Mary’s gospel. I knew that the only way forward and through, would be to die to who I had thought Christ was, die to what I thought it meant to be Christian, and actually begin to figure out what it means to me.
Mary Magdalene Revealed Page 2