MM in the news
From The Australian:
Righting wrongs about Mary
by Jill Rowbotham
Focusing on the opinion of one Elizabeth Fletcher, author of a book and website about women in the Bible, Rowbotham emphasizes Mary Magdalene’s Gospel importance and makes a few arguments against the DVC perspective, including:
The chief reason to believe Mary did not have a sexual relationship with Jesus was that his enemies never accused him of sexual misbehaviour.
After his death they accused him of illegitimacy, regarded as scandalous for a religious teacher, and of being “too fond of eating and drinking, especially with the wrong kind of people”.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but if Jesus was actually married to Mary Magdalene, he wouldn’t be accused of sexual misbehavior either. The above represents a rather weak argument, in my opinion. Still, it’s interesting to see the creativity being exercised in addressing this question.
3 Comments
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A very interesting little piece, which summarises a few of the nagging inconsistencies
which have surfaced since dVC in 2003.
While reading it, I had a sudden, wee flash of insight:
How are we so ignorant of historical fact over so short a time span ?
Imagine a 60 year-old man relating his life and times to his 20 year-old son
or nephew or friend. The narrative is repeated a number of times until the
20 year-old understands and is conversant with the stories and the timeframe
and the details etc etc. This is what historians call “folklore”.
Now imagine a present-day party at which a complex joke with a memorable
punchline is told by one guest to another. He passes it on to another and she to
another, and so on. The joke is highly likely to arrive at the other side of the room
reasonably intact, otherwise it would have ceased to have appeal.
OK. 50 people at the party. No problem.
50 x 40 = 2000
Just a mere 50 old mens’ stories between us and Jesus and Mary.
What goes wrong ?
C
Folklore isn’t history though. The joke analogy is interesting, because I am particularly *bad* at retelling jokes. They lose a lot of their flavor when told by me. So the person who hears a joke from me isn’t going to have the same impression of the same joke as told by someone else.
When I was a kid we did this exercise called the Whisper Game. You sit in a big circle with other children, and someone whispers something to the person next to them. That person then whispers it to the next person, and so on until the message comes back to the original person. That person then says what the original message was and what it was when it got back to them. Usually, the message is highly distorted by the time it passes around the circle. I think this is an *excellent* illustration of orally transmitted stories as in folklore.
Okay, so some cultures have a high rate of accuracy in transmission when the communication of knowledge is done primarily in an oral fashion. However, over the space of two-thousand years, across *many* different cultures and times, I find the likelihood of any kind of faithful transmission to be highly unlikely. This is why people started to write things down, after all.
History and folklore are absolutely, most emphatically, *not* the same thing, in my opinion. Both are valuable, but they’re different pursuits.
Point taken, Lesa. You have pointed up the distinction between a directed
and an undirected oral tradition. In Ireland, there is a huge groundswell of
story-telling and there are very strict rules about who gets told what and
the accuracy with which they are cautioned to relate and guard these facts.
I would say that THIS comes very much closer to history and not folklore.
And, here, we do have 2000-year-old tales very nearly intact.
C