TLS on Mary Magdalene

The real Mary Magdalene
A new study of this important, ambiguous figure makes a case for reassessmentA. E. Harvey

All that is known about Mary Magdalene can be quickly told. She is mentioned in all the gospels as one of the witnesses to Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, and once in Luke’s Gospel among other women followers of Jesus, where it is also said that she was a person from whom "seven devils had gone out". On one occasion only (though a highly significant one) she appears alone: it is she, according to a haunting passage in John’s Gospel, who was the first to encounter Jesus in the garden after the resurrection. From this meagre information the most it is possible to infer with any confidence is that she was Galilean (Magdala is on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee), that she had been cured through an exorcism (presumably performed by Jesus), and that she was one of a small group of women who were close to Jesus both during his ministry and at his death, and who also had an experience of the risen Jesus. Mary Magdalene is distinguished from the other women solely by the fact that in John’s Gospel she is vouchsafed a dramatic meeting with the risen Jesus on her own.
From these scanty sources two streams of elaboration have flowed, one within the Church and one among groups known as "Gnostic" and regarded as heretical by the Church Fathers. One of these took its departure from the two occasions in the gospels where we meet at least one other woman called "Mary": the Mary known as a prostitute who wept over Jesus’ feet and dried them with her hair at the Pharisee’s banquet, and the Mary of Bethany who brought expensive perfume to anoint him before the crucifixion. There is no evidence that these two Marys were the same as Mary of Magdala; but the temptation to assume their identity was very strong, and was yielded to decisively by church authorities in the sixth century, thereby creating an icon of the penitent sinner pouring out her gratitude for Jesus’ forgiveness in reckless generosity and rewarded by a privileged encounter with him at the resurrection. This iconic quality is captured by Donatello in his astonishing sculpture of a haggard Mary, her nakedness concealed, it seems, entirely by her long hair.

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The other stream flows from the scene at the end of John’s Gospel, where Mary Magdalene is alone with Jesus, whom she mistakes for the gardener but then recognizes as the risen Lord whom she must not touch, but about whose miraculous resurrection she must immediately tell the other disciples. Did not this scene elevate Mary to a quite exceptional status in the narrative, making her a crucial witness to the resurrection and recording a uniquely privileged experience of the divine? Did not this one scene constitute a challenge to the otherwise consistent reports in the New Testament that it was only men who were the accredited apostles and witnesses to the resurrection? The prominence of women, and their sometimes surprising ease of access to and converse with Jesus, is a striking feature in the gospel narrative; even in Paul’s letters there are notable examples of women taking leading roles in the early Church. How did it come about, then, that apostleship became ascribed exclusively to men? (It was, and still is, arguable that the apparent exception, the apostle Junia in Romans 16:7, is a form of a Roman masculine name, Junias.) Might it not be that a male-dominated Church had deliberately downplayed her significance? Might it have been left to the so-called heretics to preserve her true dignity and importance, and thereby to recover an aspect of the life of Jesus – even an almost erotic intimacy with women, if not actual sexual love and marriage – which the main tradition of the Churches had suppressed in the interest of their disapproval of all expressions of sexuality other than within the marriage bond? It was a line of thought explored with vigour in some Gnostic circles. It has surfaced occasionally down the centuries until the present day; and now countless readers have been fascinated by the fictional exploitation of it in The Da Vinci Code.
Robin Griffith-Jones has rightly seen that, now that this alternative (and formerly heretical) image of Jesus has been given such a high profile in popular literature, it is time to subject the question to careful analysis, but in a form accessible to others besides scholars. His prose therefore runs easily, with an occasional touch of the rhetorical. But the research is serious and well presented, and his conclusions – and occasional refusals to come to a conclusion – deserve scrutiny.
As a prerequisite for assessing the strength of the alternative, "Gnostic", tradition, Griffith-Jones takes us on a journey through a selection of Gnostic texts. Gnosticism (a modern term) is notoriously difficult to define and characterize. A common but not invariable theme is the use of cosmic myths as well as gospel texts (particularly John’s Gospel) to help the devotee advance in the knowledge of realities beyond the material world and so achieve spiritual liberation from the constraints and temptations of earthly and carnal influences. Sometimes this led to extremes of self-denial and asceticism; sometimes to a degree of libertinism; and within the movement (if indeed it is correct to call it a single movement at all) there were clear differences over the status of men and women and their ultimate destiny in a paradise that would transcend all sexual distinctions. In this debate Mary Magdalene plays a notable part in some Gnostic texts, particularly the Gospel of Mary, which makes much of the privileged intercourse that Mary Magdalene had with Jesus after the resurrection, and portrays the male apostles as reluctant to acknowledge that such knowledge could have been vouchsafed to a woman. Do we overhear here a dispute about leadership in the early Church? Were women struggling to assert their rightful claims against an inveterate culture of male dominance? And may we find in this struggle against masculine pretensions a precedent, or even some authorization, for present male–female tensions within the Church?
All of this speculation hinges on the scene at the end of John’s Gospel, Mary’s encounter with the risen Jesus. Accordingly Griffith-Jones employs the same hinge on which to rest his argument. Claiming that he is offering a reading of John which has "hardly been seen in centuries", he seeks to show (in a mere dozen pages) that its intention is to lead the reader through successive stages of "knowledge" by means of the riddling self-disclosure of Jesus until the climactic scene (though in fact it is by no means the end of the Gospel) in which Mary Magdalen represents the reader having attained, not just certainty of Jesus’ resurrection, but a vision of the Holy of Holies (the tomb) and the Garden of Eden (the garden outside the tomb) where the new Adam (Jesus) and the new Eve (Mary) are – not united, for she must not touch him, but brought into an other-worldly intimacy of love such as the Gnostics envisaged being their destiny in paradise. It is this meaning, Griffith-Jones suggests, that is captured in Titian’s famous and perceptibly erotic depiction of the scene. "Mary, by her sensuous longing for Jesus, rises to heaven . . . while her Jesus gives himself to earth."
If we falter in our confidence in this reading of the scene, with its rich infusion of erotic imagery from the Song of Songs, we may begin to feel that the hinge has had too great a weight placed upon it. It is certainly true that this scene has fascinated generations of readers and inspired legions of artists; but does it really have such crucial significance in the Gospel? Is it really the case that the reader is intended to see in Mary the prototype and embodiment of the true "Gnostic", the one who is led to "know" a reality beyond the senses? The purpose of John’s Gospel, after all, is quite explicitly said to be that we should "believe", not that we should "know" (John 20:31). And the one truly "Gnostic" vision (angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man) is promised, not to a woman, but to a man (Nathaniel). For all Griffith-Jones’s protestations of a historian’s impartiality, his occasional references to contemporary Christian attitudes ("the solemn voice of a priest or minister browbeating us in church", etc) inevitably make one alert to traces of a hidden agenda.
Indeed, the subtitle itself, The woman whom Jesus loved, already goes beyond anything we can infer for certain from the gospel text. But the enterprise was timely and is carried out with style and much industrious research. It may not be the definitive study we might have hoped for; but it brings forward a case for reassessment which should not be ignored.
Robin Griffith-Jones
MARY MAGDALENE
The woman whom Jesus loved
286pp. Canterbury Press. £12.99.
978 1 85311 818 0

A. E. Harvey is a former Canon and Sub-Dean of Westminster. A revised edition of his Companion to the New Testament appeared in 2004.