The Magdalene Review

This weekend I read Bruce Chilton’s latest book, Mary Magdalene: A Biography. Readers of the review that follows should keep in mind that it is against a galley. The endnote numbering wasn’t even incorporated into the text in the copy I have, so even though the notes weren’t meaningless after having read the text, there are still some major disconnects that will only be remedied by reading the book in its final published form. Realistically, I have so many books in my reading queue at the moment that going out and buying this book is unlikely, so I’ll go ahead after issuing that one caveat.

Speculative non-fiction books have always been difficult for me to appreciate. Works of non-fiction that ask, “What if this thing had been true?” and then proceed on a hypothetical path based on the original assumption strike me as hollow gestures toward the subject on which they focus. Rather than presenting scholarship in a straightforward manner, they instead feel novelized and sensational. There are a great number of “would have,” “may have,” and “probably did” kinds of statements in such books. Bruce Chilton’s biography of Mary Magdalene is not an exception. Mary Magdalene is a subject ripe for speculation, and there are a number of “biographies” in circulation as they have been imagined by different authors (Gordon Thomas’ The Thirteenth Apostle comes immediately to mind). Chilton’s addition to the corpus of Magdalene scholarship adds a few new ideas, but in a questionable format.

Most notably, he asserts three things about Mary Magdalene:

1. She was intimately involved in Jesus’ exorcism ministry as one who had first-hand experience with the subject.
2. She was a practitioner of healing by anointing, a magical ritual practice.
3. She was a visionary who sensed Jesus in his spiritual (non-physical) resurrected form.

Although the book is filled with troublesome statements and suppositions, there are only a few I’ll mention here. First and foremost is the fact that Chilton hypothesizes the existence of an oral source of exorcistic material used by the author of Mark to fill out his exorcism pericopae. Apparently the suggestion for such a source doesn’t originate with Chilton, but that it seems to pop into his book fully formed without much of a case being made for its existence is peculiar. His reasons for believing such a source existed are based on his reading of Markan internal evidence only, by intuiting Mary Magdalene’s signature on the exorcism accounts. (Mark is the Gospel Chilton uses to support almost all of his guesses because of its primacy; he asserts that Mark’s use of “the Magdalene source” was the most primitive, with the later Gospels gradually “suppressing” Mary Magdalene’s influence.) An appendix contains Chilton’s Magdalene source as he reconstructed it from Gospel passages.

On the subject of Mary Magdalene as an anointer, one of Chilton’s innovations I found interesting was his defense of a partial unity theory.

Mary is the indispensable character in Mark’s account of the Resurrection, the pivot of the action around whom the final events turn. She, and she alone, embodies the connection between Jesus’ interment and the angelic announcement to the same Mary Magdalene (16:6-7) that Jesus has been raised from the dead. She connects his death and Resurrection, not only by who she is but what she does: Mary Magdalene established the place of anointing as a central ritual in Christianity, recollecting Jesus’ death and pointing forward to his Resurrection.

In this way, Mark implies, rather than states, Mary’s identity as the woman with the ointment, so our inference is not a deductive certainty. An implication is just that and shouldn’t be confused with proof: It leaves traces for the audience of the Gospel to infer its meaning. But read without this inference, Mark breaks Jesus’ promise that “wherever the message is proclaimed in the whole world, what she did will also be spoken of in memory of her” (Mark 14:9). By permitting ourselves this inference, we allow the Gospel not to contradict the very saying of Jesus that it takes pain to convey.

The anointing in Mark (and Matthew) is performed by an anonymous woman. In Luke, she is an anonymous woman who was a sinner, and in John, she is named as Mary of Bethany. Chilton, via his belief that Mary Magdalene was the anointing woman in Mark, states that she was also Mary of Bethany. In Luke, however, in an apparent effort to minimize Mary Magdalene’s influence on the Christian story, the anointing scene is changed all around and a sinner woman–with whom Mary Magdalene is not to be confused–is introduced. Honestly, I’m still not sure what to think about the Lukan perspective on Mary Magdalene, being that it is the abberation among the synoptics. Chilton, however, appears to have it all figured out: the author of Luke intentionally minimized her role in order to denigrate her. In this, he joins the ranks of several other Magdalene authors.

Anointing, as a powerful ritual healing practice, was the subject of much concern for Chilton. Jesus apparently wasn’t confident of his abilities at times, but luckily for him, Mary Magdalene was nearby to teach him how to get things done. The two Markan stories of healing with spittle bring about a fascinating observation:

The Talmud of Jerusalem also speaks of anointing with spit with the intention to heal. Women were typical practitioners of this type of healing. In one case, the woman applies her unction of saliva seven times, much as Jesus had to repeat his healing to clear up the blind man’s sight (Mark 8:22-26). Matthew and Luke repressed these stories of healing with spit not only because they involved more magic than they were comfortable with but also because Jesus was following a practice of women’s household sorcery that he had learned, in all probability, from his most prominent female disciple–Mary Magdalene.

Of all the reasons to suppose that Mary Magdalene was a visionary, Chilton gives by far the oddest explanation I’ve come across. In Mark’s empty tomb narrative, he says that the women “perceived” (theoreo) that the stone had been rolled away from the tomb, rather than physically saw that the stone had been moved (horao). Apparently the misplaced stone and the angelophany were sensed by the women spiritually but not witnessed materially.

..in the vision of the women, Jesus was no longer [in the tomb] at all, but in Galilee. That is where the young man directed them, and when the women turned away from the tomb, as they were told to do by the young man, they left the question fo Jesus’ physical body behind them, unanswered. It is quite possible his corpse remained where it lay.

This is a little puzzling to me in light of the fact that the next verse says that the women “entered into the sepulchre,” which would lead me to believe that they would have either seen a corpse or not. Presumably, they saw an empty tomb. They didn’t just see an angel outside of the tomb and take off running.

Mary Magdalene’s role as a visionary in the later Gnostic texts was an extension of her already-established identity as a seer according to Chilton. This brings us to the next portion of the book: Mary Magdalene in Gnosticism. I have to say that I wasn’t completely disappointed with this section. I thought his handling of the “companion” (koinonos) and “kissing on the mouth” controversies from the Gospel of Philip were well done and evenly considered. Not so with his treatment of the “becoming male” passage in the Gospel of Thomas, however. I found it terribly odd that Mary’s statement in the Gospel of Mary about how Jesus had made them “into men” was a positive indication of their spiritual maturity but the passage in Thomas about “becoming male” was a sign of sexism inherent in Gnosticism.

It’s obvious that Chilton has done his homework, citing a recent interpretation that androgeny at the time was masculine, but his treatment of the similar language in the two texts didn’t seem fully considered. Rather than really digging into a thoughtful analysis of the “making male” language, he appeared more interested in criticizing feminists and other readers who latch onto Gnosticism as a gender-inclusive answer to patriarchal Christianity. It’s tricky, I’ll admit, but scholars like Annti Marjanen, Marvin Meyer, Karen King, and Jane Schaberg have made much more headway in that area.

Overall, there were some uplifting moments of bright observation about Mary Magdalene’s role in early Christianity, which makes it at least possible that I will return to the book at a later date for a more in-depth read. Unfortunately, however, because of the speculative format and language, it’s going to get shelved with other “inspirational” volumes in my collection instead of “history.”