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May 8 , 2006 • VOL. 44, NO. 9 • Oakland, CA
Leonardo Da Vinci painted “The Last Supper” on the wall of the refectory (dining hall) of the Dominican friars at S. Maria delle Grazia. Some art historians believe he separated the figure of Christ from the apostles so viewers could begin to understand the profound loneliness of Christ on the eve of his passion. The person to the right of Jesus is historically believed to be the Apostle John. In “The Da Vinci Code” novelist Dan Brown says that person is Mary Magdalene.
Mary Magdalene is an enigmatic saint
WASHINGTON
(CNS) -- St. Mary Magdalene was a leading disciple of Jesus and used her
resources to support him and the apostles. She was a woman from whom Jesus
cast out seven demons. She was a firsthand witness to his crucifixion
and burial and the first person to witness his resurrection and proclaim
it to the apostles.
That is what the Gospels say about her.
Was she also the unnamed repentant sinner (often thought to be a prostitute)
in Luke’s Gospel, who anointed Jesus’ feet and washed them
with her tears? Or the Mary who was the sister of Martha and Lazarus of
Bethany?
In the West, Christian teaching and preaching made those identifications
for centuries. But modern scholars say these were three distinct women,
not one. Eastern Christianity has consistently regarded the three as distinct
individuals.
Was she the wife of Jesus? Did she bear his child? Were she and Jesus
ancestors of the Merovingian dynasty of early French kings?
Even ancient heretical sects and fantasy-laden medieval Christian legends
that exalted Mary Magdalene did not make those claims, though Dan Brown’s
best-selling novel “The Da Vinci Code” does.
When the book comes out as a movie on May 19, it will almost certainly
draw new attention to Mary Magdalene, one of the most prominent women
in the New Testament but an enigmatic figure about whom nothing is known
apart from the references found in the Gospels.
A teachable moment
Father Raymond F. Collins, a New Testament scholar at The Catholic University
of America in Washington, said in an interview that the Dan Brown version
of Mary Magdalene is “two legendary steps away from” the real
person found in Scripture.
But in interviews, he and St. Joseph Sister Elizabeth A. Johnson, a theologian
at Fordham University in New York, concurred that the wide popular curiosity
about Mary Magdalene generated by Dan Brown’s tale has created a
“teachable moment.”
Father Collins, who wrote the “Mary Magdalene” entry in the
six-volume Anchor Bible Dictionary, 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 Elizabeth has written extensively on the place of women’s
experience and female imagery in Christian theology. She 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.
Women in ministry
Sister Elizabeth 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.
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.
Who is Mary Magdalene?
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 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.”
