Something Else About Mary

"The portrait of Mary [Magdalene] as a repentant prostitute is pure fiction with no historical foundation whatsoever. The historical Mary of Magdela was a prominent Jewish follower of Jesus, a visionary, and a leading apostle." -Karen King, in The Gospel of Mary of Magdela

Even before I entered Divinity School, I had a fascination with the Bible. As an undergraduate English major, I was encouraged by one of my professors to read the Bible, because, as he said, "You can’t understand literature if you don’t have a knowledge of the foundational text of Western civilization." And, of course, he was right.

But even earlier than this, my experience in a Unitarian Church Sunday School had peaked my interest. Though my church was not particularly biblical, and certainly not christocentric, it encouraged then, as it does now, an openness and a curiosity about religious questions. For me, that early curiosity extended to the Bible and especially to the historical figure, Jesus.

I remember one Christmas, while I was in graduate school studying English, that I read through the entire New Testament. I didn’t understand much of what I was reading, but I learned a lot. I learned, for example, that there were four gospel accounts of Jesus’ life which didn’t agree in all essentials, but which in popular understanding have been conflated to give the impression that the New Testament offers a single interpretation Jesus’ life and teachings. It doesn’t. It contains multiple theologies. That was enough to make me want to know more.

When I finally got to Divinity School in 1979, I jumped at the opportunity to study the Bible in depth. In my first semester I enrolled in two classes on the Bible. I will never forget the entertaining and enlightening lectures on the Hebrew Bible by Professor Michael Coogan, nor the methodical scholarship and spirituality that Professor Jerome Neyrey, a Jesuit priest, brought to the study of the New Testament. Professor Neyrey had a way of saying "JEE-sus" that always focused your attention on the task at hand.

In was in classes like those, and later in a class on New Testament Theology, with the late great Jesuit professor George McRae, that I came to truly understand that it requires a great leap of faith to be a practicing Christian. For all of these scholars, the study of the Bible was approached with full recognition that it is a human document with all the blemishes and inconsistencies that implies. For once, I was glad that I was already a heretic.

The seventies and eighties were also a time of tremendous flowering in the field of what came to be known as "feminist biblical studies" and of a huge influx of women into the study of religion and the practice of ministry. The times they were a changin’.

Perhaps like me you will not be very surprised to learn that everything the church teaches about the Bible is not factually true. One of the most fascinating of the little lies told by the church concerns the biblical character of Mary of Magdala--more familiarly known as Mary Magdelene. A recent article in the Smithsonian magazine by James Carroll ["Who Was Mary Magdalene"] gives a concise summary of this controversial contemporary of Jesus. For those interested in a more in depth study of Mary and of the issues surrounding her, I recommend Harvard Divinity School Professor Karen King’s book The Gospel of Mary of Magdela, from which I read to you this morning.

The popularity of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code has helped to revive interest in Mary, who in church tradition, and for reasons which Carroll spells out in his article, has usually been described as a repentant prostitute. Practically every reputable biblical scholar now believes she was not. As theologian Elizabeth Watson has said, ". . . I see this (the identification of Mary Magdalene as a prostitute) as a move on the part of the patriarchal church to play down her role. How are you going to maintain a patriarchal stance when the number one disciple is a woman?"

Much of the contemporary interest in Mary concerns the nature of her relationship with Jesus. We know that she was a follower, and both intra and extra biblical evidence suggests that she was an important one--perhaps even, as Watson suggests, the most important one. She may also have been a significant rival of the Apostle Peter, the "rock" upon which Jesus supposedly founded his church.

But our more prurient interest in the possibility of a sexual relationship with, or even of a marriage to Jesus will probably never be satisfied. The sources only take us so far, and until something new comes to light, we are reduced to mere speculation.

Some of the salient facts about Mary: she is mentioned as a follower of Jesus who, along with other unnamed women, helped to provide for his needs. This implies that she was fairly well to do. She is listed as present at the crucifixion of Jesus. She is listed in both the gospels of John and Mark as the first one to see the risen Christ and to proclaim the resurrection: a not insignificant role is you consider that the resurrection is the foundation of orthodox Christianity. She was a significant enough character in the early Jesus movement to have had her own Gospel. She apparently fully understood Jesus’ teaching, may even have been a spokesperson for him, but at some point became controversial.

If we are to believe the Gospel of Mary, one of the hundreds of books and fragments discovered in the Egyptian village of Nag Hammadi in 1945 [also included was the extremely valuable Gospel of Thomas, a so-called "sayings gospel" because it includes mostly sayings of Jesus without any narrative], Mary Magdalene may have been part of the diverse movement in early Christianity that has come to be known as Gnosticism. To those wishing to know more about this movement I recommend Elaine Pagel’s groundbreaking study The Gnostic Gospels.

Without going into too much detail, suffice it to say that gnosticism, which means "knowledge," was a competing theological world view to what would ultimately become Christian orthodoxy. Gnosticism tends to be rather esoteric, but, then, so doesn’t orthodox Christianity, if you think of it. In other words, gnosticism was a rival theology, or more properly, theologies, that lost. In fact, gnosticism was so completely suppressed that until the discovery at Nag Hammadi practically our only knowledge of it came from the polemic of the early church "fathers" who were writing in opposition to it. Thanks to Nag Hammadi, we now know a lot more about gnosticism than we did before. [See The Nag Hammadi Library.]

As a member myself of a sect considered by some to be heretical, I find certain aspects of gnosticism quite revealing. First, and perhaps most important where Mary Magdalene is concerned, it was a movement which apparently allowed the full participation of women--which, incidentally, there is strong evidence that early orthodoxy, or what eventually became orthodoxy, did as well [see the letters of Paul].

There is evidence that women held positions of authority in both the early church and the earliest Jesus movement. As theologian Watson has said, "In the gnostic gospels, Mary Magdalene is the number one disciple. She is the disciple to whom Jesus confided more than He did to the men disciples. The Gospel of Mary also records that Peter was insanely jealous of Mary. . . ." At least one woman is named as an apostle in the New Testament itself, and several are called deacons, a title St. Paul also gives to himself.

Sometime in the early years of the development church, women were silenced and removed from positions of authority, and the early egalitarianism of the Jesus movement died out. This is one of the most important learnings in the story of Mary Magdalene. And as a result of the power struggle which took place in the early church, Mary the apostle and teacher ultimately became something else. As Susan Haskins writes in her book Mary Magdalene: Myth and Metaphor, Mary "became the redeemed whore and Christianity’s model of repentence, a manageable, controllable figure, and effective weapon and instrument of propaganda against her own sex." And as James Carroll writes, ". . .what most drove the anti-sexualizing of Mary Magdalene was the male need to dominate women," a need which, he concludes, "in the Catholic Church, as elsewhere . . . is still being met."

But there is more positive stuff in Mary’s story and in gnosticism that should interest us Unitarian Universalists, ourselves inheritors of an heterodox idea of Christianisty. In the Gospel of Mary, for example, Mary comes across as a kind of early antinomian, an Anne Hutchinson archetype of early Christianity who believed that people should oppose the religious rules and laws which were beginning to be imposed on believers, seek divine knowledge within themselves, and not take others’ word for it. Gnostics apparently believed that true knowledge resides within us, and that we all contain a spark of the divine: hmmm, sounds pretty Emersonian to me. And, like Emerson and the Transcendentalists, they believed that the mind provided a direct connection to God. [Emerson’s epitaph: "The passive master lent his hand to the vast mind that o’er him planned."]

As Karen King writes, the heart of the Gospel of Mary is that "spiritual advancement cannot be achieved through external regulation; it has to be sought by transformation within a person."

It suggests that "God’s realm is already present within oneself and in creation." That’s pretty good Unitarian Universalist theology, too.

Perhaps more important than anything, the Gospel of Mary proves, in King’s assessment, that "theological reflections in the first centuries of Christian beginnings were much more diverse and varied than we had ever realized." It proves, that is, the myth of orthodoxy.

Obviously, then, "there is something else about Mary," and it’s a lot more important than any fruitless speculation about the erotic nature of her relationship to Jesus. Writing in a groundbreaking article in the Atlantic Monthly back in 1993 ["Women in the Bible"], Cullen Murphy concluded,

Perhaps the most important lesson offered by the work of feminist biblical scholars comes in the form of a reminder: that in religion, as in other spheres, circumstances have not always been as we see them now. Evolution occurs. Some things, it turns out, are not sacred. This point may be obvious, but with respect to religion, especially, it is frequently overlooked--and, in fact, sometimes hotly denied. Whatever one believes about the nature of their origin, the handful of immutable precepts at any religion’s core are embedded in a vast pulp of tradition, interpretation, and practice. And that pulp bears an all-too-human character. It is variously diminished, augmented, scarred, sculpted, and otherwise shaped by powerful human forces in every society and every time period through which it passes. Sometimes the change occurs slowly and almost invisibly. Sometimes it happens quickly and right before one’s eyes, as I believe is happening now--the proliferation of feminist scholarship on the Bible being both consequence and cause.

May we approach each new day with an open mind and heart, ever increasing our knowledge of ourselves and our world, and refusing to take at second hand what is, by rights, already our own. May it be so. Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock

Readings:
        John 20: 1-18
        From The Gospel of Mary of Magdela, by Karen King