I’d like to share my lighthearted look at Mary Magdalene. This is abbreviated from my talk about her to keep the spicy bits in.
In the sixth century, Pope Gregory suddenly declared that Mary Magdalene was a whore. There is absolutely nothing in the Bible or tradition to support such an idea. It simply sprang from the fevered brain of a celibate man whose hormones were probably giving him a hard time.
But guess what? Mary Magdalene was not a whore: she was the founder of Christianity. How’s that for a rewrite of history?
Just think for a moment about that first Easter morning. What would have happened had the women not gone to the tomb? Since without an empty tomb there would have been no Christianity, we owe it all to Mary Magdalene.
Early Egyptian sources tell us that Mary had followers “devoted to her understanding of the religion.” That’s almost as surprising as America electing a black president. However, women played strong roles in Egyptian society, incidentally, the home of the Gnostic Gospels. Again and again we find Mary highly valued in these works. In fact, a Gospel of Mary was discovered in 1896, quite possibly the text of Mary Magdalene’s followers.
I wonder what the real Mary Magdalene would have thought of her reputation today. She has made it really big in pop culture—thanks to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code—as Jesus’ wife and mother of his child. This fantasy has powered Brown’s book to the status of best-selling novel of all time. Again there’s not one shred of evidence for this idea. Of course, it’s fiction but…
Some of the goofs in The Da Vinci Code are quite amusing; for instance, Brown claims that Jesus’ marriage to Mary Magdalene is frequently reported in the Gospels that did not make it into the New Testament. Say what? It is never reported in any Gospel, canonical or otherwise.
Using the Gospel of Philip, Brown quotes two statements about Mary Magdalene. Unfortunately, both have problems. The first quote gives us one of the historical howlers of the novel. Here the Gospel says: “There were three who always walked with the Lord: Mary his mother and her sister and Magdalene, the one who was called his companion…”
One of the characters in The Da Vinci Code claims this shows that Jesus and Mary were married, because, he says, “any Aramaic scholar will tell you, the word companion, in those days, literally meant spouse” (Da Vinci Code, p. 246). In the first place, the Gospel of Philip was written in Coptic, not Aramaic. And that “companion” meant “spouse” in any language is utter blather. You share bread with a companion, not bed–although one can, at times, lead to the other.
As to the other passage, Brown claims it shows that Jesus and Mary used to kiss each other frequently on the mouth. The problem here is this manuscript is full of holes. It reads: “And the companion of the [gap in the manuscript] Mary Magdalene [gap] her more than [gap] the disciples [gap] kiss her [gap] on her [gap].”
Which of Mary Magdalene’s gaps Jesus kissed her on must forever remain a mystery. However, even if he did kiss on her mouth, the Gnostics believed that they exchanged the spirit through kissing. It was not a prelude to sex.
Mary has yet to regain her former status as an apostle and the woman without whom Christianity might never have come to be. Some theologians—not only women but also a few men—are struggling to right this wrong. So far the world is not listening. I’m doing what I can to change that.
