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Women Named Mary in the Meadow of John Moschus

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Women Named Mary in the Meadow of John Moschus chapter 7 What Happened to Mary? Women Named Mary in the Meadow of John Moschus Ulla Tervahauta Introduction The various Marys of the New Testament lived on in early and medieval Chris- tian traditions. Apocryphal texts portray Mary of Magdala as a teacher of the disciples or investigate the early years of Mary, Mother of God. New Marys also emerge, such as Mary of Egypt, to this day a popular saint in eastern orthodox Christianity. There are other stories that portray Marys and provide entertain- ment with a moral teaching. In this article, I discuss several Marys who appear in John Moschus’s Meadow, a collection of monastic stories originating from the late sixth to the early seventh century. These figures show how biblical and other literature was applied and turned into popular forms in the sixth cen- tury and onwards by Moschus and others. As outsiders from the male monastic perspective, the portrayal of these women enable us to explore questions of identity, gender, and inclusivity/exclusivity. I will approach the reception of biblical traditions and views towards women through three stories featuring a woman who is at some point named Mary. There is a Mary who murders her own children: this Christian Medea does not avenge a treacherous husband, but resorts to extreme violence because the man she would marry refuses to have a woman with another man’s children. She is punished by divine judgement. Second, a story of a prostitute, in some manuscripts named Mary, repents and becomes a nun. Her story builds on gospel narratives of Jesus’s encounters with various women, including the woman who anoints him. Third, there is an unnamed woman anchorite who was later to become one of the most famous Marys of eastern Christianity, Mary of Egypt. She is yet unnamed in Moschus’s work, and neither is she the harlot of the later version of her story. All three Marys in the Meadow reveal creative use of literary sources and suggest that attitudes towards women are not straightforward to categorize. The way biblical sources are used in the first two Mary stories sheds light on the way the Bible is used to shape them: this suggests thorough knowledge of biblical lore and shows that the Bible was not only a source of exegetical interpretation or spiritual guidance, © ULLA TERVAHAUTA, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/9789004344938_009 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. what happened to mary? 155 but a foundation on which new stories and characters were created.1 Just as analysis of the use of sources in these stories enables one to explore how biblical and other literary traditions are employed, it reveals attitudes towards women and their roles as part of the society and the Christian community. Monastic authors are sometimes harsh on women who are seen as a source of temptation, but to what extent this is the case with Moschus? John Moschus and His Meadow Before we turn to the Marys in the Meadow, some words about the work and its first context are in order. The brief stories of the Meadow were for the most part written in the early 600s, at the height of the monastic culture in Palestine. They are attributed to John Moschus, also known as Eucratas, who began his monastic career at the monastery of Theodosius (Deir Dosi) in the Judean desert, but stayed also in the small laura of Pharan (Ein Fara), the monastery of Chariton, and the laura of Sabbas (Mar Saba). The Meadow purports to stem from Moschus’s and his disciple Sophronius’s travels around the Levant and Egypt.2 In Meadow 67 Moschus suggests that he spent some ten years in the laura of Eliotes in the Sinai.3 Moschus and Sophronius travelled to Antioch and 1 Cf. Lorenzo Perrone, “Scripture for a Life of Perfection. The Bible in Late Antique Monasti- cism: The Case of Palestine” in The Reception and Interpretation of the Bible in Late Antiquity: Proceedingsof theMontréalColloquiuminHonourof CharlesKannengiesser,11–13October2006, ed. Lorenzo DiTommaso and Lucian Turcescu (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 393–417. 2 Henry Chadwick, “John Moschus and his Friend Sophronius the Sophist,” jts 25 (1974): 41– 74; Siméon Vailhé, “Jean Mosch,” Échos d’Orient 5 (1905): 107–116, esp. 108; Brenda Llewellyn Ihssen, John Moschos’ Spiritual Meadow: Authority and Autonomy at the End of the Antique World (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 1–4; and most recently, Fergus Millar, “John Moschus’ Rem- iniscences of the Christian Near East: Monks, Heretics and Others” in Millar, Empire, Church and Society in the Late Roman Near East: Greeks, Jews, Syrians and Saracens (Collected Stud- ies, 2004–2014), Late Antique History and Religion 10 (Leuven: Peeters, 2015), 285–310. For the monasteries, see Yizhar Hirschfeld, The Judean Desert Monasteries in the Byzantine Period (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), xviii (map), 21–23 (Pharan), 23–24 (Chariton), 24–26 (Mar Saba), 78 (Theodosius). 3 Henry Chadwick suggested that this period would have been about 580/581–590/591, oth- ers differ from Chadwick by a few years. Chadwick, “Moschus and Sophronius,” 57; Vailhé, “Jean Mosch,” 108; John Wortley, The Spiritual Meadow (Pratum Spirituale) by John Moschos (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1992), xviii; Llewellyn Ihssen, John Moschos’ Meadow, 3. Daniel Sahas dates John and Sophronius’s travels to 578/79–619 and John’s death in agree- ment with Chadwick to 619. Daniel J. Sahas, “Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem” in Christian.
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