The Magdalene Review

MM as harlot: a new perspective in academia

From my book:

“Clearly, the legend of Helen is meant to be a Gnostic allegory for the fall of Sophia (which is in turn an allegory of the fall of the soul), but the parallels between Simon Magus and Jesus should also make us look more closely at the parallels between Helen and Mary Magdalene.

Both Helen and Mary Magdalene have represented Sophia’s presence in the physical world; wouldn’t the fact that Helen was incarnated as a prostitute have had some bearing on what was thought of Mary Magdalene’s pre-Jesus life as well? This is a question that hasn’t been fully explored by scholars, but as the studies of Mary Magdalene’s roles in Gnosticism continue, it very well could be the earliest indirect reference to Mary Magdalene as a prostitute.”

Apparently, someone in academia picked up the gauntlet I tossed down in this section in 2004. Here is the first paragraph of the conclusion of a 2007 thesis that very studiously explores the theme I mentioned above as well as the importance of MM’s medieval identity as a fallen woman.

“If Mary was in reality not this paragon of penitence, the contrite whore of the medieval imagination, then who was she? There are numerous possibilities, impossible to verify. If not an actual prostitute, her figure was perhaps viewed as a symbolic whore, the fallen soul and companion to her redeemer figure, an itinerant holy man named Jesus, just as Helen was companion to Simon Magus.”

Mary of Magdala: The Evolution of an Image, by Rachel D. Owen

The thesis is marvelous. Owen’s primary goal is to establish that MM’s medieval identity as a penitent, redeemed prostitute wasn’t necessarily without historical basis. Without scriptural basis, certainly, but neither is there anything to conclude with any hard evidence that she wasn’t a redeemed prostitute. On the contrary, there is circumstantial evidence that MM may have been linked to the harlot identity on several different fronts. Not only was a symbol of the fallen soul, counterpart to Helen, but also as an authority figure appreciated by heretical sects at a time when heretics and independent women were often denigrated as prostitutes. In short, there are plenty of logical ways MM could have landed a bad reputation.

Far be it from me to say that the conversation on MM the harlot is over; I’m sure the controversy is really just beginning now that an eloquent argument with academics who favor a wholesale deletion of 1400 years’ worth of tradition has been presented. The publishing of this thesis does represent significant progress from where I’m sitting though; let’s treat MM’s identities as cumulative layers, one upon the other, instead of random veils tossed at her from various directions.

Big congratulations to Rachel Owen for contributing a brave and articulate voice to modern MM scholarship.

Some rescheduled MM events

On Easter I mentioned that I was reading Bart Ehrman’s new book, Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene, impressed with Ehrman’s take on Mary Magdalene’s role as the founder of Christianity. I’ve finished reading the section of the book on Mary Magdalene, and was looking forward to chatting with him for a few minutes after a talk he was to give in Seattle last night. Unfortunately, he had to fly back home for an emergency and the talk is being rescheduled.

My best wishes to Dr. Ehrman and his family for a speedy recovery from whatever emergency has occured.

I’m going to wait to post a review of Ehrman’s book for now, until I can read the rest of it and hopefully ask him a few questions. Until then, I’m comfortable recommending it highly, so please don’t hesitate to pick up a copy if you have the opportunity. It’s a level treatment of Mary Magdalene in the Gospels, in the Gnostic texts, and in modern preoccupation with her marital status. Although Ehrman pokes fun at some of the marriage theories, he manages to do so good-naturedly, and inoffensively. Definitely on the more liberal side of Christianity, but that agrees with me.

Speaking of rescheduled events, Margaret Starbird’s appearance on Larry King Live has been postponed, and I’ve not yet heard of a new date. I’ll post more about it as soon as I hear anything else.

In the stacks

To the 50-some books stacked up next to my desk, I’ve added a few new titles:

Searching for Mary Magdalene : A Journey Through Art and Literature, edited by Jane Lahr. This is a lovely art book in which images of Mary Magdalene are accompanied by relevant literary material such as excerpts from the NT gospels, Gnostic texts, poetry, and even the holy grail romances. I haven’t yet had a chance to fully examine the book, but my first impressions have been positive.

The Arcadian Mystique: The Best Of Dagobert’s Revenge Magazine , by Richard Metzger and Tracy Twyman. The fringest of the fringe ideas about Mary Magdalene and the Priory of Sion conspiracy theories, Dagobert’s Revenge is a defunct magazine in which it wouldn’t have been unusual to see references to UFOs as well as the Bavarian Illuminati. Its inclusion in my reading material shouldn’t be taken as any kind of endorsement; it’s part of my job to know what people are saying about Mary Magdalene. I am also interested in what Boyd Rice, an industrial artist and writer who describes himself as a “social Darwinist” and “facist,” has to say about Priory of Sion related issues as well as the whole “bloodline” idea. Yes, I’m reading with an eye toward potential racism here, because Rice sends up red flags for me, so to speak, as he does for many. More on that after I’ve finished with the book.

Three Marys, by Paul Park. This is a novel that Chris found for me in the bargain books at University Book Store. All I know about it is that it is a fictional exploration of the gospel story from the perspective of the Marys.

Testament: A Novel, by Nino Ricci. This is a novel I went looking for after reading Ron Charles’ review for The Christian Science Monitor at Powells.com. Though on the surface this book sounds similar to Three Marys, it promises to be a much more engaging and sophisticated work. Jesus’ story is told from the viewpoints of Judas, Mary Magdalene, Jesus’ mother, and Simon, each casting his or her own spin on the situation as it appeared to them. I’m looking forward to reading this one.

Also currently en route from Amazon.com is The Everything Mary Magdalene Book, by Meera Lester. The Everything series strikes me as very similar to the Dummies and Idiot’s Guide series, sans insulting title. Lester also wrote Mary Magdalene: The Modern Guide to the Bible’s Most Mysterious And Misunderstood Woman, a title I declined to write in favor of the Idiot’s Guide. Lester did a decent job with it; my understanding was that the editor wanted a very introductory book, a “Mary Magdalene 101″ type of thing, that included original devotional material. Looking back on it, I’m glad I didn’t take this contract for this reason if no other. I’m terrible at creating devotional material that is meaningful to anyone but myself; Meera Lester seems to be very good at that sort of thing.

Bruce Chilton’s Mary Magdalene: A Biography

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.”