She was Mary of Magdala, one of the earliest followers of Jesus of Nazareth. According to the Bible , she traveled with him, witnessed his Crucifixion and was one of the first people to learn of his Resurrection. Over the centuries, everyone from early church leaders and scholars to novelists and filmmakers have revised and elaborated on the story of Mary Magdalene. But is there any truth to either of these stories? There were apparently hundreds, if not thousands, of followers of Jesus, but we don't know most of their names.
So the fact that she's named is a big deal. In the Gospel of John, Jesus actually appears to Mary Magdalene alone after his Resurrection, and instructs her to tell his disciples of his return John The whole history of western civilization is epitomized in the cult of Mary Magdalene.
For many centuries the most obsessively revered of saints, this woman became the embodiment of Christian devotion, which was defined as repentance. Yet she was only elusively identified in Scripture, and has thus served as a scrim onto which a succession of fantasies has been projected.
How the past is remembered, how sexual desire is domesticated, how men and women negotiate their separate impulses; how power inevitably seeks sanctification, how tradition becomes authoritative, how revolutions are co-opted; how fallibility is reckoned with, and how sweet devotion can be made to serve violent domination—all these cultural questions helped shape the story of the woman who befriended Jesus of Nazareth.
Who was she? From the New Testament, one can conclude that Mary of Magdala her hometown, a village on the shore of the Sea of Galilee was a leading figure among those attracted to Jesus. When the men in that company abandoned him at the hour of mortal danger, Mary of Magdala was one of the women who stayed with him, even to the Crucifixion. These are among the few specific assertions made about Mary Magdalene in the Gospels. This prominence derived from the intimacy of her relationship with Jesus, which, according to some accounts, had a physical aspect that included kissing.
Beginning with the threads of these few statements in the earliest Christian records, dating to the first through third centuries, an elaborate tapestry was woven, leading to a portrait of St.
Mary Magdalene in which the most consequential note—that she was a repentant prostitute—is almost certainly untrue. On that false note hangs the dual use to which her legend has been put ever since: discrediting sexuality in general and disempowering women in particular.
Her recent reemergence in a novel and film as the secret wife of Jesus and the mother of his fate-burdened daughter shows that the conscripting and twisting are still going on. In the gospels several women come into the story of Jesus with great energy, including erotic energy. There are several Marys—not least, of course, Mary the mother of Jesus. But there is Mary of Bethany, sister of Martha and Lazarus.
The first thing to do in unraveling the tapestry of Mary Magdalene is to tease out the threads that properly belong to these other women. Some of these threads are themselves quite knotted. It will help to remember how the story that includes them all came to be written. The four Gospels are not eyewitness accounts. Jesus died in about the year a. The Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke date to about 65 to 85, and have sources and themes in common.
The Gospel of John was composed around 90 to 95 and is distinct. So when we read about Mary Magdalene in each of the Gospels, as when we read about Jesus, what we are getting is not history but memory—memory shaped by time, by shades of emphasis and by efforts to make distinctive theological points. And already, even in that early period—as is evident when the varied accounts are measured against each other—the memory is blurred.
Now after this [Jesus] made his way through towns and villages preaching, and proclaiming the Good News of the kingdom of God. Two things of note are implied in this passage.
Second, they all had been cured of something, including Mary Magdalene. This otherwise innocuous reference to Mary Magdalene takes on a kind of radioactive narrative energy because of what immediately precedes it at the end of the seventh chapter, an anecdote of stupendous power:.
One of the Pharisees invited [Jesus] to a meal. She had heard he was dining with the Pharisee and had brought with her an alabaster jar of ointment. She waited behind him at his feet, weeping, and her tears fell on his feet, and she wiped them away with her hair; then she covered his feet with kisses and anointed them with the ointment. But Jesus refuses to condemn her, or even to deflect her gesture. The scene would be explicitly attached to her, and rendered again and again by the greatest Christian artists.
But even a casual reading of this text, however charged its juxtaposition with the subsequent verses, suggests that the two women have nothing to do with each other—that the weeping anointer is no more connected to Mary of Magdala than she is to Joanna or Susanna.
Other verses in other Gospels only add to the complexity. Matthew gives an account of the same incident, for example, but to make a different point and with a crucial detail added:. Jesus was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, when a woman came to him with an alabaster jar of the most expensive ointment, and poured it on his head as he was at table. All the people came to him an Related to an interpretation of Jesus Christ; frequently refers to the practice of finding prophetic allusions to Christ in older texts, e.
Related to a set of beliefs that emphasized the pursuit of "gnosis" enlightenment and the divide between the spiritual and the material. Most notably present in Christian traditions that were later deemed heretical. A Christian observance characterized by penitence and sometimes fasting held in the forty days between Easter each year and encompassing the Jewish holiday of Passover and the Christian Holy Week.
Of or belonging to any of several branches of Christianity, especially from Eastern Europe and the Middle East, whose adherents trace their tradition back to the earliest Christian communities. Lowercase "orthodox" , this term means conforming with the dominant, sanctioned ideas or belief system.
Site HarperCollins Dictionary. People Home Mary Magdalene. Add this:. Did you know…? Mary of Magdala was one of the women who followed Jesus. She was originally from Magdala, a village on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee.
Three Gospels describe her as a first witness to the resurrection. Luke and Mark describe demons being cast out of her. The portrayal of Mary of Magdala as a prostitute is the likely result of textual ambiguity and later confusion with the sixth-century story of Mary of Egypt, a reformed prostitute.
Mary of Magdala is never specifically identified as a prostitute in the Bible. Scholars debate whether she was wealthy: Luke 8 associates her with the affluent and politically connected Joanna. Ask a Scholar. Related Articles 4 Fishing Economy in the Sea of Galilee Studying the fishing economy of first-century Galilee can provide significant insight for understanding the references to fish and fishing throughout the canonical and noncanonical gospels.
Mary Magdalene in Popular Culture Popular imagination has built up a layered tradition around Mary of Magdala, whose depiction in the Bible itself is rather limited.
Villages of Galilee The archaeological evidence for Jewish villages in Galilee inform our understanding of the life of Jesus and early Judaism in the land of Israel. And then she sees Jesus. She is overwhelmed and says "Master! He says "don't touch me". Instead, she must go to the others and tell them that he has risen from the dead.
It's an awesome moment. Jesus stands before her, yet he's beyond her reach. We cannot say if Jesus really stood before her resurrected, or if Mary simply believed she had seen him. But either way, in this one moment, Mary's experience took the movement in an important new direction. A new concept developed, which had nothing to with what Jesus himself was preaching, and this is the concept that Jesus didn't die - or he did but he was raised from the dead.
The movement is not a failure. It is in fact a great success. The person who declares this is Mary Magdalene. Jesus' resurrection was the turning point for Christianity. This was when it changed from a small movement to a whole new religion. And Mary Magdalene was a key figure in this event. You might think, then, that at the very least Mary would be recognised as an apostle - one of the early missionaries who founded the religion - as she seems to meet all the criteria set out in the Bible.
The reason why she is not perhaps lies in another long lost apocryphal text. In a Cairo bazaar in , a German scholar happened to come across a curious papyrus book. Bound in leather and written in Coptic, this was the Gospel of Mary. Like the books found at Nag Hammadi, the Gospel according to Mary Magdalene is also considered an apocryphal text. The story it contains begins some time after the resurrection. The disciples have just had a vision of Jesus. Jesus has encouraged his disciples to go out and preach his teachings to the world, but they are afraid to do so because he was killed for it, and they say "if they killed him, they are going to kill us too".
It's Mary who steps forward and says: don't be worried, he promised he would be with us to protect us. It says she turns their hearts toward the good and they begin to discuss the words of the Saviour. In texts like the Gospel of Philip, Mary was presented as a symbol of wisdom. However in the Gospel of Mary, she is the one in charge, telling the disciples about Jesus' teachings. At this point Peter asks Mary to tell them some things that she might have heard, but which the other disciples haven't.
She says "Yes, I will tell you what has been hidden from you". She talks about a vision she had of Jesus and a conversation that she had with him. As the Gospel tells it, Mary then relates the details of this conversation, which is to do with spiritual development and the soul's lifelong battle with evil. At this point controversy arises, and Andrew steps in and says "well, I don't know what the rest of you think, but these things seem very strange to me, and it seems that she's telling us teachings that are different from the Saviour.
Would Jesus have spoken privately with a woman rather than openly to us? Did he prefer her to us? Matthew defends Mary and quells Peter's attack on her. In the text, Peter's problem seems to be that Jesus selected Mary above the other disciples to interpret his teachings. Peter sees Mary as a rival for the leadership of the group itself.
Peter need not have feared. Most people think of Peter as the rock upon which the church was established. He is the main or major disciple figure, and Mary Magdalene is a kind of side figure in the cast of characters.
One of the absolutely fascinating things about the Gospel of Mary is it really asks us to rethink that story about Christian history: did all the disciples get it? Did they really understand and preach the truth? Perhaps the Gospel of Mary was just too radical.
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