Who Framed Mary Magdalene? Part One

WHO FRAMED MARY MAGDALENE?

Twenty-one years ago, even without the question mark, a former editor of U.S. Catholic (vol 65 #4), Heidi Schlumpf, put it bluntly. Mary Magdalene has been framed.

That’s quite a charge, given the ubiquity and even much-loved image of a penitent sinner. Her luxuriant tresses are in disarray, her full breasts illuminated by a celestial glow to which she has tilted her head and rolled back her eyes. She seems transfixed on a vision that she (not we) beholds. In similar iterations from medieval western European art and sculpture to 20th century rock operas, she has been offered for our consideration and contemplation: the example par excellence of the woman fallen into sin (almost always insinuated as sexual), likely a prostitute, who repented and was healed of her (sex) demons. She becomes part of the company of women who follow Jesus in his ministry, from town to village to Temple in Jerusalem, and on to Golgotha. Across Christianity she is considered a Saint, and extravagant legends tell of her travels across the Mediterranean after the Crucifixion to Rome or to Provence, of her retreat to a cave, of her relics housed in magnificent Abbeys. Even after the Reformation she was extolled in sacred Motets, Cantatas, Oratorios.

So what is the problem here? To quote Prof. Heidi Schlumpf, the question arises nevertheless: “How the first witness to Christ’s Resurrection was made into a prostitute, and how women today are restoring her reputation.”

Wait, wait! First witness to Christ’s Resurrection, a prostitute?

It’s a long story.

For a harlot is a deep pit; an adventuress is a narrow well. She lies in wait like a robber and increases the faithless among men. .Proverbs 23:27-28

We can usefully begin in 591 CE when Pope Gregory I delivered an Easter Homily the jist of which for the next 1400 years in the Christian west provided the substance of the biography of Mary Magdalene.

It is Easter, and Gregory is recalling scenes from the Gospels in which we see Jesus in the Easter story. He begins with the Gospel of Luke [7:37] and the appearance of the nameless woman “of the city, who was a sinner,” who brings a jar of expensive ointment with which to bathe Jesus’s feet and dry them with her hair. Gregory then moves on to John [12:1-3], who names the woman with “the pound of precious perfume” as “Mary.” Gregory next evokes Mark [16:9] at the Resurrection when “[Jesus] appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he [had] cast seven demons.”

I pause to let this sink in: a woman, now cured of an affliction, is the first to see the resurrected Christ and she has a name, Mary Magdalene. But this is not the Good News of Easter that Gregory wants to tell us. No: “The woman, whom Luke calls a sinner, and John calls Mary, I think is the Mary from whom Mark reports that seven demons were driven out.” Nowhere in fact in the New Testament is possession by “demons” synonymous with sinfulness, let alone prostitution. [McGrath 230] But Pope Gregory presses on: “She whom Luke calls the sinful woman, whom John calls Mary, we believe to be the Mary from whom seven devils were ejected according to Mark. What did these seven devils signify, if not all the vices? It is clear, that the woman previously used the unguent to perfume her flesh in forbidden acts.”

And we’re off.

In What Jesus Learned From Women, New Testament scholar James F. McGrath cites Margaret Hebblethwaite from her Six New Gospels: “The tradition that Mary was a prostitute is among the most extraordinary and implausible inventions ever woven out of Gospel texts.” [McGrath 229]

But it has had a long and vivid life, including among those sinning but penitent Christians who heard in this version of Mary’s story that they still had a place in the community. Gregory had ended his Homily reassuringly: “She turned the mass of her crimes to virtues, in order to serve God entirely in penance.” By the eleventh century she was also often painted as a figure at the foot of the Cross, dishevelled and in tears; her veneration had spread across western Europe, churches claimed her relics, Basilicas her patronage. Legends told of how the Magdalene along with several other persecuted followers of Jesus took to the sea and tossed up on the southern coast of France. Her cave, overlooking the Massif de la Sainte-Baume, became a pilgrimage site, never mind that the entire legend was a medieval invention.

Mary Magdalene is mentioned twelve times in the New Testament (second only to mentions of the Mary Mother of God). It comes as a shock to cradle Catholics – and to the nonreligious steeped in the “sexy saint” of The Da Vinci Code or Jesus Christ Superstar – that most of those NT references place her in the Crucifixion and/or at the Empty Tomb narratives, a loyal and fearless disciple and witness. Johann Sebastian Bach gives her an aria in his Easter Oratorio, an “agitated solo for the oboe d’amore” and alto voice, a lamentation of loss and spiritual longing.Saget, saget mir geschwinde “Tell me, tell me quickly, Tell me where I can find Jesus, Whom my soul loves?” And for an Easter Mass in St Mark’s Basilica in Venice Andrea Gabrieli (1533-1585) gives her a Motet set to words from John 20:11-13, Maria Stabet ad monumentum: “But Mary stood outside the tomb weeping….”

This is the “real” Biblical image of Mary Magdalene, a woman in a group of women who never left the appalling scene of the Crucifixion (the male disciples had fled in terror), who hasten to his tomb after burial (the men still in hiding) with oil and  aromatic herbs such as olive, laurel, palm and cypress with which to anoint Jesus’s body in its shroud, who find the Tomb empty. They walk away, disconcerted and fearful. The Gospel of Mark ends there but John’s Gospel continues. Mary, alone this time, weeps in consternation and bewilderment. Where have “they” taken the body of her Lord? She looks around and sees a gardener. “Whom do you seek?” he asks her. Perhaps, she thinks, he knows where the body is. “If you have borne Him away, tell me where you have laid Him and I will take him away.” Then come the two short lines of Scripture that never fail to take my breath away as I picture the little scene. The gardener is Jesus, Risen. He is the Good Shepherd who calls His own sheep by name. “Mary.” Mary Magdalene knows that voice and falls to her knees. “Rabboni! Teacher.” And then, as she is bid, she returns to the rest of the disciples. “I have seen the Lord.”

You could say that the story of Christianity begins there, with Mary Magdalene’s apostleship [Gk. apostolos sent forth] but that is not how it turned out in the western Church. As far back as the third century in Dura Europos, Syria, a normal domestic house that had been converted for Christian worship bore frescoes, prominently installed near the sanctuary, that showed women approaching the sepulchre, carrying their jars of ointment. Had the narrative already slipped from the telling by the time of Pope Gregory?

Mary T. Malone writes in Women and Christianity Vol. II, “One cannot cease to be amazed at the power of [the] fictional composite of [Magdalen’s] supposed biblical and Christian virtue, when the real biblical image of Magdalen as the leader of the women disciples and the ‘apostle to the apostles’ had never stirred any similar enthusiasm, even among most women.” [Malone 265] Malone suggests why the “fictional composite” held such sway: “She was a favourite of Jesus, a model of conversion and repentance and, above all, a redeemed whore.” [Malone 269] Above all? Yes, if you agree with Thomas Arentzen’s notion of a Mary Magdalene complex, “the pull to stretch Christian women’s lives out on a rack between promiscuity and chastity, between sexual decency and debauchery.” Between those eternal verities of Woman: The Madonna and the Whore.

However, scholars and theologians mainly women have pushed back. The sexualization of Mary Magdalene has effectively “silenced her” as a spiritual Mother, “cut her off at the knees,” “suppressed” her and the potential of women’s leadership in the church. Until her demons were identified as “the forbidden acts of the flesh,” victims of such demonic affliction were not generally held to be blameworthy [McGrath 231]. All the women listed in Luke 8:1 as Jesus’s followers had been cured of their demons and, moreover, helped sustain the group from their own private means. (Might they have been independent of male authority as unmarried women of means, or as widows, or merchants?)

Some writers in search of the authentic Magdalene cite uncanonical (read: heretical by the end of the fourth century) Gnostic texts. The Gospel of Philip says that Jesus loved Mary more than he did the other apostles, but at the crucial development where it was written that “he used to kiss her often on -” the manuscript is damaged and the curious or prurient among us will never know where and when Jesus kissed Mary.  The Gospel of Mary [Magdalene] was discovered in an antiquities market in Cairo in 1896 and dated to perhaps the first half of the second century. (“The ‘Christian Gnostic’ movement and its writings date from the middle of the 2nd century AD or later. By then, most, if not all, of the writings that became our New Testament were 80 to 100 years old.”) Nevertheless it carries powerful messages from a Mary Magdalene, authorized by Jesus himself, who is a teacher.

“Then Mary stood up, spoke, and turned their [the apostles’] hearts to the good. ‘Do not weep and do not grieve nor be afraid, for his grace will be with you completely, and will protect.” [Pagels 103] Clearly, according to such a “heretical” text, Jesus himself has found Mary capable of learning, perhaps then gifted for teaching – for discipleship is a form of apprenticeship – which is an excellent argument right there for her authority among the male apostles. I thus join James McGrath in asking why so many (women) readers of the Gnostic Gospels “prefer” to discern in their mystical and enigmatic disclosures a “romantic connection” between Mary and Jesus rather than her noteworthiness in the New Testament as a teacher and apostle to the apostles ? [McGrath 241-2]

Why exactly do we need to go there in order to reclaim Magdalene from the patriarchy? But some feminist theology, notably Cynthia Bourgeault’s presentation through Gnostic texts of the Woman at the Heart of Christianity, the subtitle of her classic The Meaning of Mary Magdalene (2010) – does go there. Not to a “romantic connection” but to a “love relationship.” Bourgeault acknowledges that it is an “emotionally-charged” question but sees that a love relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene “most likely did exist and is in fact at the heart of the Christian transformational path.”  It is a love that creates a “healing and generative energy,” a “refined and luminous” spiritual love, one might even say Christianity’s “long-missing key.” [Bourgeault x]

A kind of return-to-the-sources for the truth of Mary Magdalene’s life of apostleship, the reclamation for current generations, has been ongoing among some Christians of the western Churches for awhile. In her ground-breaking work of 1985, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins, the New Testament scholar Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza revisits, for example, the event of the seven demons cast out of Magdalene: this does not characterize her Biblically as a “sinner” but as “someone who has experienced the unlimited power of the Kingdom of God in her own life.” [p 124] The Kingdom is already here, not as a sign of the special holiness of the elect but as a “wholeness of all,” the central vision of Jesus according to Schüssler Fiorenza. [p 121] After all, he preached that in the Kingdom many who are first will be last and those last will be first. [Mark 10:31] And what woman in first century Palestine, on hearing that promise would not have, in the quiet of her own heart, heard herself included?

For these Catholic women and men it had clearly not been satisfactory to leave things as they were in 1969 when Pope Paul VI removed the descriptive “penitent” from all references to Mary Magdalene in the Catholic liturgical calendar, and, more drastically, stopped Liturgical readings from the Gospels that referred to her as the “penitent sinner.” But when the Vatican issued a decree in 2016 that elevated the commemoration of St Mary Magdalene to the lofty level of a Feast (July 22), celebrations blossomed in Catholic parishes, schools, retreat houses, hospital chapels – the Future Church, perhaps? – as though finally a 2.000-year-old wrong had be righted.

As an Orthodox Christian, I can only cheer on these brothers and sisters. Not a millennium too soon, Pope John Paul II issued an Apostolic Letter in 1988, On the Dignity of Women (Mulieris Dignitatem) tin which he wrote that, as the first eyewitness of the Risen Christ, and for this very reason, “[Mary Magdalene] was also the first to bear witness to him before the Apostles” and came to be called “the apostle of the Apostles.” [italics in original] He footnotes several Latin textual sources going back to St Thomas Aquinas, a 13th century Doctor of the Church, who wrote precisely a thousand years after St Gregory of Nyssa, c.335 – c.395. who wrote of Mary Magdalene’s witness of the Risen Lord: ” And these glad tidings He proclaims through the woman, not to those disciples only, but also to all who up to the present day become disciples of the Word.”

 Mary Magdalene as penitent sinner “has taken such a hold on the Christian imagination,” asserts Mary T. Malone in an all-too-casual collapse of western Christianity into Christianity as a whole, “that all the exegesis in the world seems unable to dislodge it.” [Malone 264] A footnote to this lamentation takes the reader not to exegetical sources in Eastern Christianity  but to current c. 2001 scholarship by women scholars in the Western tradition. The “centuries-old case of mistaken identity is being rectified,” writes Heidi Schlumpf.