Bruce Chilton

Mary Magdalene Bruce Chilton AN IMAGE BOOK PUBLISHED BY DOUBLEDAY Published in the United States by Doubleday, an imprint of the The Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. www.doubleday.com ISBN-10: 0385513186 ISBN-13: 978-0385513180 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 To the Memory of Rose Miller Prologue MARGUERITE IS anyone there? Is there anyone there?“ Marguerite called out loudly. “Yes, right beside you,” I replied, trying to reassure her. People who are dying sometimes wonder whether they are still alive and with people they know. As their priest, I have heard this question a number of times during visits with terminally ill patients. But Marguerite repeated her question despite my response: She wasn’t calling to me at all, and it took me a moment to realize that. I had found Marguerite in bed, on oxygen, and far from her normal, alert self. She was one of my favorites among the congregation of the small Episcopalian church that I serve in Barrytown, New York. She proved to be the best critic of sermons I have ever met. A formidable professional, she had been a social worker in Manhattan and possessed a passion for children’s rights that did not wane with her retirement. After she passed the age of ninety, congestive heart failure gradually sapped life from her. She couldn’t travel to church any longer, but we made it a point to meet at her home late in the afternoon once or twice a month to talk politics, gardening, and religion, drink gin and tonics, and pray together. As months passed and Marguerite weakened, I started to bring her the bread and wine of the Eucharist. She would haltingly say the Lord’s Prayer with me just before we shared this sacred food of Christianity’s holiest rite, which she could follow even when her mind became fogged. She had called out her question partway through our little service of the Eucharist. Later, she told me that she had been in a different place when she had asked, “Is anyone there?” She had wanted to know whether there was anyone there for her on the other side of death. Who was there like her, to accept her into the presence of God? Where were the women in the transcendent realm? Marguerite was an educated and committed Episcopalian. She was familiar with Catholicism, but no saint in that tradition had the same spiritual meaning for her as did the women in the Bible. In some ways, Marguerite was downright anti-Catholic, and that contributed to her problem. She did not pray to Mary, the mother of Jesus, as many of her Catholic friends did and still do. She looked with Protestant suspicion on the devotion to Mary that emerged during the Middle Ages, with its lucrative rewards for the clergy, who received donations in Mary’s name and imposed penances on people to win her favor, the proceeds benefiting the Church. All that seemed to Marguerite rooted more in the desire of the medieval papacy to win prestige and profit from its favorite holy patroness than in the text of the New Testament. Marguerite knew a great deal; I really didn’t have anything to tell her about women in the Bible or Christendom’s female saints. She was after something different and more profound, and she had come up against an obstacle that lay across the path of her faith. In its formative years, Christianity developed a deep ambivalence toward women at its core. Ancient Christians acknowledged women’s vital role from the first days of Jesus’ movement and yet systematically diminished their authority in relation to men. References to women in the New Testament and other ancient Christian writings are fleeting, occasionally dismissive, and lead to understandable confusions. As a result, today people sometimes conflate Mary Magdalene, Jesus’ most prominent female disciple, with Mary, the mother of Jesus, or with other women in the Gospels (several of whom are also called “Mary”). That confusion is easily sorted out, although the fact that it occurs at all points to an underlying problem: Women in the Gospels and Christian tradition often have the look of ornaments or afterthoughts. Retelling biblical stories about women in the traditional way could not answer Marguerite’s plea. She wanted to know where women were built into the fabric of revelation, where—at the end of the day, at the end of a life—they were welcomed into the presence of God as more than ancillary support staff for whom men had condescended to make a place. Having developed close contact with progressive religious groups in Manhattan during her working life, Marguerite was familiar with what she considered contemporary theology’s wishful thinking. She knew that commentators had spun legends about heroic women from biblical references that were often no more than a mere mention of a name. She had listened to speaker after speaker at fashionable Protestant churches as they tried to make Christianity palatable by constructing a picture of Mary Magdalene that seemed truer to modern feminism than to the texts of the New Testament. Marguerite was well familiar with the “hypothesis” that Mary was the true Holy Grail, the wife of Jesus, mother of his child, a Jewish princess from the house of Benjamin and an emigree to France, an embodiment of the pagan earth mother, whom the Catholic Church for thousands of years has sought to marginalize and suppress. This Mary becomes the great untold story of Western culture, a figure who has been both reviled and revered, a goddess who has taken many forms—witch, heretic, tarot priestess, holy whore, the incarnation of the eternal feminine, her womb the chalice that bears God’s child. Marguerite had no patience with this program. No feverish myth justified by a conspiracy theory, no vague assurance that God has his feminine side or that early believers looked to the leadership of “strong” women satisfied her. I had no direct response to her question—and neither did modern theology. But her question haunted me. I turned it over and over in my mind, and her appeal—as well as the prompting of friends every bit as insistent as Marguerite—eventually led me to analyze the evidence regarding Mary Magdalene and to write this book. In the years since Marguerite’s death, there has been an increased awareness that major teachers in the New Testament—Paul, Barnabas, Peter, and James—were not just empty vessels filled with Jesus’ message, but powerful sages in their own right. Their teachings shaped the Gospels and crafted the practices and beliefs that made Christianity into a world religion. My study of Mary Magdalene has convinced me that she belongs on this list of the creators of Christianity. Writing this biography led me to a new reading of the Gospels. I argue that Mary provided the source of the Gospels’ exorcism stories and influenced much of what early Christians believed about how to treat demonic possession. For that reason, she should be recognized as one of the principal shapers of Christianity’s wisdom as it concerns dealing with the world of spirits. Mary’s method of exorcism was intimately linked to the ancient Judaic practice of anointing, and she emerges in the Gospels as a model of that practice, as well. Oil served to consecrate people for ritual purposes, to signal celebration, and as a medium for communing with the divine. We shall see that exorcism and anointing involved mastering the ebb and flow of spiritual energy—and, in this arena, Mary was one of Jesus’ most gifted adepts and, in turn, a significant influence upon him. Her mastery of Jesus’ wisdom included a profound understanding of what it means for a person to be raised from the dead. Jesus himself bluntly denied—as we will see in detail—that Resurrection involves a simple continuation of physical life on this earth. He said that in heaven people are not married to the spouses they had when they were alive, but become “like angels” (Mark 12:25). Angels no more have mates than they have aunts and uncles. This spiritual view set Jesus apart from other Jewish teachers of his time, many of whom saw the afterlife in a materialistic way, and aligned him with Judaism’s spiritual masters. Mary Magdalene was the disciple who best appreciated Jesus’ visionary teaching of Resurrection, and without her, Christianity would have been entirely different. It is not even clear that its core faith in Jesus’ victory over the grave could have emerged at all without Mary. That is why she has been known as “the apostle to the apostles” since the second century: It was from her that the apostles first learned that Jesus had been raised from the dead. By the time the Gospels were written, more than forty years after Jesus’ death, Christianity had declared the allegedly “natural” authority of men over women, to this extent conforming to its surrounding society. An increasingly male clergy tightly controlled exorcism and anointing; a literally physical view of Resurrection began to prevail. It is not surprising that after her death Mary Magdalene was nearly written out of the record of Christian memory. The Gospels in aggregate relate that she was called “Magdalene,” indicating where she came from, and that until Jesus healed her, she had been possessed by seven demons. She followed Jesus in Galilee and helped to support him (Luke 8:2-3).

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