The fanciful fictions about Mary Magdalene in Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code," due to be released May 19, are not the only errors about the biblical saint that modern scholars are seeking to correct.
They are also trying to set straight centuries of erroneous Christian tradition regarding her that developed, especially in the West.
In A.D. 591 Pope St. Gregory the Great preached a sermon in which he identified as one person the New Testament figures of Mary Magdalene, the sinful woman who anointed Jesus' feet and washed them with her tears, and the Mary who was the sister of Lazarus and Martha of Bethany.
Although he was only reflecting a tradition that had gained some ground in the West (and was resisted by many of the church's early theologians), the sermon became a reference point for later scholarship, teaching and preaching in the West, Father Raymond F. Collins, a New Testament scholar at The Catholic University of America, said in an interview.
The Greek Fathers --- the great theologians of the early church in the East, who wrote in Greek --- consistently maintained that Mary Magdalene, the unnamed repentant sinner and Mary of Bethany were three distinct women. That remains the tradition in the Orthodox churches.
The identification of Mary Magdalene as a repentant sinful woman was solidified in the Latin Church for centuries by the use of that story, reported in the seventh chapter of Luke, as the Gospel reading for Mary Magdalene's feast, July 22. In fact, in the Roman Calendar before the Second Vatican Council, the day was called the feast of "Mary Magdalene, penitent."
Father Collins noted that this changed in 1969 with the reform of the Roman Missal and the Roman Calendar. Since then the Gospel reading for Mary Magdalene's feast has been Chapter 20, verses 1-2 and 11-18, of the Gospel of John.
The first two verses tell of her coming to Jesus' tomb early Sunday morning, finding it empty and running to tell Peter and John that someone has removed Jesus' body. The second part of the reading tells of Mary staying behind, weeping, after Peter and John leave, and the risen Jesus speaking to her and telling her to announce to the rest of his followers, "I have seen the Lord."
Sister of St. Joseph Elizabeth A. Johnson, a theologian at Fordham University, said the version of Mary Magdalene as "the prostitute to whom Jesus forgave much and who loved him ... took on a profound Christian ideal of a sinner who repents and therefore is a model for Christians in that way. But what got lost in the process was her actual role as a leader of witnessing to the Resurrection in the early church."
Of the repentant prostitute version of the Magdalene, she said, "What a lot of us who've done some work on her say is ... it's a wrong one and in the process it's robbing us of (appreciation of) women's leadership at a crucial moment in the early church. In other words, in a way it's easier ... to deal with her as a repentant sinner than as she emerges in the Gospels in her own right."
'Not a public sinner'
So who is the real Mary Magdalene? Father Collins, who wrote the "Mary Magdalene" article in the Anchor Bible Dictionary, told Catholic News Service, "Luke describes Mary Magdalene as a woman from whom Jesus cast out seven demons, and that characterization of Mary Magdalene is repeated in the longer canonical ending of Mark's Gospel."
But he noted that in Jesus' time it was not uncommon to attribute physical or mental afflictions to demonic possession and this did not imply that the possessed person was sinful. "Whatever affected Mary Magdalene was considered to be the effect of demonic possession so she would not have been considered a public sinner the way the medieval legends have made her out to be," he said.
He said she is called the Magdalene because she comes from Magdala, "a fishing village up in northern Galilee."
He said one also learns from Luke "that she supported Jesus from her resources," suggesting that she was a woman of some means, and that she was one of several women from Galilee who were disciples of Jesus and followed him.
Luke's Gospel is the only one that mentions Mary Magdalene by name in the narration of Jesus' public ministry. But all four Gospel writers place her as a witness to Jesus' death on the cross, a witness to his burial and the chief witness to his resurrection, making her one of the most significant female figures in the Gospels apart from Jesus' own mother, Mary.
Sister Johnson said that when one looks at the Magdalene's biblical role as the one the risen Christ appears to and commissions to announce the good news to the others it has "many implications for how we tell the story of the origins of the church. There is the typical story of where Jesus chose the Twelve and put Peter in charge and the women, you know, were accessories. When you put Mary Magdalene into the picture, you can't tell the story that way so simply anymore."
When asked for her own view of what that should mean for the church today, she said, "I would draw the implication that if the risen Christ saw fit to ask a woman to go and preach the good news of his resurrection, the church should do no less nowadays."
The saint and the claims
With "The Da Vinci Code's" claims --- not even made by ancient heretical sects and fantasy-laden medieval Christian legends ---that Mary Magdalene was the wife of Jesus, bore his child, and that she and Jesus ancestors of the Merovingian dynasty of early French kings --- Father Collins and Sister Johnson concurred that the wide popular curiosity about Mary Magdalene generated by Brown's tale has created a "teachable moment."
Father Collins said that the Brown version of Mary Magdalene is "two legendary steps away from" the real person found in Scripture. He said the first legends about Mary Magdalene come in some of the apocryphal gnostic gospels of the second and third centuries. There, in addition to her role as the first witness to Jesus' resurrection, she is treated as receiving other special revelations from the risen Jesus. But even in the gnostic gospels she is not called Jesus' wife.
One gnostic text, the Gospel of Philip, portrays her as Jesus' closest companion, but not his wife.
Sister Johnson, who has written extensively on the place of women's experience and female imagery in Christian theology, said the legends developed in the gnostic gospels are interesting not because they portray Christ's life and times accurately, but because they offer insight into struggles in the early church. The legends about Mary Magdalene show struggles over the leadership role of women in the early church, she said.
In the Gospel of Thomas, another gnostic text, there is a competition between Peter and Mary Magdalene. Peter asks the Lord to send her away because "women are not worthy of Life." Jesus answers that he will lead her "in order to make her male ... a living spirit resembling you males."
Father Collins said novelist Brown goes well beyond such early legends by imagining the disciple from Magdala to be Jesus' wife and the mother of his child.
In the novel, Jesus and Mary Magdalene were ancestors of the Merovingian dynasty that ruled from about 500 to 751 in what is now France, and secret survivors of the royal line continue to the present day to guard (much like the gnostics of the second and third century) arcane secret knowledge about Jesus that the official church rejects and seeks to suppress.
Sister Johnson said those early gnostic texts --- 13 of which were only uncovered in 1945 when a farmer found them buried in a large jar near Nag Hammadi, Egypt --- show some groups in early Christianity "wanting to promote women as bearers of knowledge, as wisdom figures, as those whom Christ trusted" with special revelations.
"The fight over women's ministry in the early church is borne out in those apocryphal gospels," she said.
She said part of the argument in the church today is whether the advocates of all-male church governance won those early battles over women in ministry "because that's the way Christ wanted it" or whether there are other explanations.
She noted, however, that Mary Magdalene is the first witness to the Resurrection in all four canonical Gospels, and because of her role in announcing the good news to the rest, St. Augustine referred to her as "apostola apostolorum," the apostle to the apostles.
Another strand of legend behind Brown's novel is the fact that according to medieval pious legends that circulated in France --- which relied on identifying Mary Magdalene as being the same person as Mary of Bethany --- Mary Magdalene and Lazarus were cast out of Palestine and set adrift in an oarless boat that landed in southern France. They then became among the first to preach the faith there.
Father Collins said that legend, along with the one in Eastern Christianity that has Mary Magdalene accompanying John and Jesus' mother to Ephesus, is simply not credible.
Sister Elizabeth said there has been a great surge in scholarly study of Mary Magdalene in the past 20 to 30 years --- in part because of feminist theology and the efforts to take a new look at the role of women in Scripture and in the early church, and in part because of the Nag Hammadi find and the new insights those texts offer into church life in the second and third centuries.
"It was 'The Da Vinci Code' that made people ask the question, 'Well who is Mary Magdalene really?' and it opened the door for all this scholarship ... to come flooding out into the public sphere, where it normally wouldn't show its head," she said.
Summing up the real Mary Magdalene with what she called the "w's," Sister Elizabeth said, "Let's get this straight: She was not Jesus' wife ... neither a wife nor a whore, but a witness."
---CNS |