Then Mary wept and said to Peter, My brother Peter, what do you think? Do you think that I have thought this up myself in my heart, or that I am lying about the Savior? Levi answered and said to Peter, Peter you have always been hot tempered. Now I see you contending against the woman like the adversaries. But if the Savior made her worthy, who are you indeed to reject her? Surely the Savior knows her very well. That is why He loved her more than us. – The Gospel of Mary 9:5-9
Today is the feast day of St. Mary Magdalene, long identified in Christian folklore as a prostitute (repentant or otherwise). Now, there is no Biblical evidence to that effect; Luke describes her as a woman “from whom seven demons had come out”, presumably one of Jesus’ miraculous cures. In fact, the four canonical Gospels say virtually nothing about her prior to the crucifixion, though all four identify her as the person to whom the resurrected Jesus first appeared. But as I explained in “Mary Magdalene”, the canonical Gospels are not the only ones:
…Gnostics were driven from Christian congregations early in the 4th century and their doctrines declared heretical in 388. Before this time there was no official consensus on which texts actually constituted the Bible, and among those used by Gnostic congregations (and subsequently excluded from the canon) were four more Gospels: Thomas, Philip, Mary and Judas, all but the last of which assign a much more prominent role to Mary Magdalene than the four canonical ones; indeed, the Gospel of Mary is actually attributed to her. These Gospels refer to Mary as Jesus’ “companion” and describe him as loving her more than his other disciples and often kissing her on the mouth; indeed, the Gospel of Mary identifies her as the unnamed “disciple Jesus loved” mentioned so often in John. These clear expressions of favoritism appear to have perturbed the male disciples, particularly Peter, who is said to have argued with Jesus about his allowing a woman to be not only equal to the male apostles, but actually preferred to them…
This argument is portrayed in Jesus Christ Superstar, though changed in two ways: the critic is Judas rather than Peter, and the criticism is about her being a hooker rather than a gender-hierarchy thing. The tradition of her being Jesus’ (perhaps sexual) companion seems to have survived the suppression of the books, and “in a sermon in 591 Pope Gregory the Great identified Mary Magdalene as a repentant harlot, possibly by identification with the ‘adulterous woman’ whom Jesus rescues from being stoned in the 8th chapter of John.”
So even though Mary was never the patron saint of prostitutes (that role fell, interestingly enough, to Saint Nicholas), the legend that she had been a whore was a popular one; hence the application of her name to “Magdalene homes”, the asylums for the “cleansing” of ex-prostitutes which became popular in the 13th century and then again in the 18th. The most notorious of these were of course Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, the last of which only closed in 1996; the long-awaited report on the atrocities committed therein was released only last February, and the nuns who ran them are still trying to evade responsibility. The legend also inspired me to have the sacred harlots in last week’s fictional interlude all take the first name “Magdalene”, just as regular nuns all take the first name “Mary”; in our world the Catholic Church officially repudiated that doctrine in 1969, but as you probably noticed a lot of things are different in the world where that story takes place.
But canonical or not, the legend is still a popular one; its only real rival is the theory that she was actually Jesus’ wife, and that one is of comparatively recent vintage (though its proponents claim it existed as a secret doctrine since the people it concerns were still alive). In movies, books and the popular imagination Mary Magdalene is still the whore (repentant or otherwise) who was closer than any other person to Jesus, and I think it very likely that it will continue thus for a very long time to come.
The theory that Mary of Bethany was Jesus’ wife is a bit older and has more actual documrntation to it. I first read of it in Robert Graves’ King Jesus.
When it comes to the gospels – I really don’t know who to believe. I read strange shit throughout all the books that I can’t resolve. I’ve read some of Mary’s and Thomas’ gospels – and they are some strange shit indeed.
I’d just rather not take sides here – for or against the church since I really have no dog in the hunt anymore when it comes to Christian churces.
If I had a time machine the FIRST thing I’d do is go back to meet Jesus – and maybe write a “Gospel of Krulac” … and that way all y’all could be assured that the truth had been written about the guy. And I would find out if he was who he said he was.
But I got no time machine. 🙁
But did Jesus even exist? It seems that there are no accounts of him in the “official” Roman records; there is no record of his trial. The suggestion is that he was bigged up (or simply invented) decades later to fit the approved story.
There’s also the idea that monotheistic religions were originally based on sun-worship; which, if true, might go some way to explaining the haloes around the saints.
For Korhomme: http://www.probe.org/site/c.fdKEIMNsEoG/b.4223639/k.567/Ancient_Evidence_for_Jesus_from_NonChristian_Sources.htm -list of mentions, etc., of Jesus not from the Bible
I don’t believe any religion is more than a bunch of stories somebody made up to control people by making them fearful and uptight. But that doesn’t keep me from enjoying them all as myth cycles.
I first ran across the married-Jesus theory decades ago in Illuminatus!, which I recommend to anyone who hasn’t read it; if anything it seems a lot more relevant now than it did in the ’70s.
I remember reading Illuminatus! Every six pages or so I would ask myself, Why am I still reading this crap? I continued that way for all 700+ pages.
I dunno about you, but to me that is a sure sign of a masterpiece.
I think the fabulations about Mary Magdalene have the positive effect (if you hate sex, that is) of obscuring the fact that Jesus, in the Bible was more comfortable around people who were making a living working at available jobs, such as harlot or tax collector for the Romans, then he was with people who actually controlled the political, financial and religious power structures of his day.
We lose a lot, I think because when Jesus does stuff like interfering with an adulterous wife being gruesomely executed by stoning, or talking about Samaritans like they might actually be people it doesn’t mean anything to people in the modern world. We don’t stone women to death for adultery, and we would expect such behavior only in an uncivilized Middle Eastern backwater. Samaritan is synonymous in English with “good person,” the idea that people probably used to say, “He’s a Samaritan” and then spit like the word left an unpleasant taste in their mouth doesn’t even occur to most people.
In fact, I went to Church the other day (with my Mom, she enjoys Church) and the priest managed to spin the “cast the first stone” story as if Jesus was identifying the woman who he saved from death by stoning as the worst person there who needed to repent her evil ways. (A take on that story I hadn’t heard in Church before, where the people in the murderous crowd are usually identified as the villains.)
Some fundamentalists want to remove the story of the adulterous wife (the Pericope Adulterae) from the Bible. Even if they would not do so personally, they like the idea of stoning women to death due to their sexual behaviour.
In Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe, one panel shows a tender scene between Magdelene and Jesus, with Jesus commenting ‘Celibacy? Did I ever say anything about Celibacy?’
Which, if he was an Essene Rabbi, would certainly fit; the Jews don’t have any such rules in their faith…
Yeah exactly, there’s suggestions that the famous “water into wine” story was actually not just a miricale but infact his actual wedding!
I guess his best man was crap at giving speeches!
Seriously – if your wine runs out, who do you talk to:
1) the groom
2) the groom’s dad (okay, but I think we can agree this wasn’t who Jesus was)
3) the wine salesman in attendance (same here. Who might Jesus have been?)
4) the rabbi (… but not a very likely person to ask, leaving)
5) some guy.
Yeah, ‘groom’ fits.
Oh yeah, and party organizer. Jesus, the party organizer. Hrmmm.
… now I’ve got the image of Pinkie Pie delivering a sermon on the mount and during the snack break she multiplies cupcakes and candy. Wonderful.
I would have to agree. Mary’s reaction to it is not that ofjust any guest and it doesn’t suggest that she’s trying to show off her son’s special talent. Today, the brides family pays for everything, but Jewish custom at that time was that the groom makes all the wedding preparations.
Thank you for this piece. You did an excellent job of opening up tje dialogue. I find it quite sad that, starting with the early Greek church and continuing until today, very few take into consideration that Jesus (or Yeshua in Hebrew) was a Jew and Jewish Rabbis were not single men. Men like Marcion tried to remove all traces of Judaism from those early Gospels because they were gnostic and thereby making them heretical. Who knows how many words of wisdom and historical explanations were purposely stricken from history. Simcha Jacovovici (The Naked Archaeologist) did a very interesting program a few years ago and came to the possible conclussion that Thomas was the beloved disciple and was the son of Jesus. We need to keep these people the humans that they were so we can see their true histories.
Doubting Thomas might have been his son? That….would explain a lot.
I would recommend that everyone read Bishop John Shelby Spong’s “Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism.” His arguments for Jesus’s being married to Mary Magdalene are compelling, if not rock solid. I personally believe that she was Jesus’s wife, and might well have been the victim of 1st century AD human sex trafficking, who escaped and whose only available groom–according to the customs of the time–would have been someone like Joseph the Carpenter wife’s bastard son, Jesus of Nazareth.
I suppose this is as good a place as any to mention Atheists for Jesus. No, it’s not from The Onion and no, it isn’t run by Bill Maher.