– Aurelio Porfiri
I would like you may continue to lead us in what early Christianity is telling us about Mary Magdalene…
After centuries of debates, two lines of interpretation emerged in the major Christian traditions.
In the Greek Church, Mary Magdalene remained the holy woman who wanted to anoint the body of Jesus and discovered the empty tomb. Thanks to the Gospel of John and some apocryphal traditions, she was brought close to the cross of Jesus and, with Mary the Mother, to his burial – but little was added to the canonical narratives.
In the Western, Latin Church things went differently. Learned Christians discussed the fact that in many different scenes Jesus was effectively anointed, before his death, either by an anonymous woman (in Mark and in Matthew), a few days or hours before the crucifixion, in Bethany of Judaea, in the house of Simon the Leper, or (in John) by Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, in their house, in Bethany of Judaea, or finally (in Luke) by an anonymous woman, a “public sinner”, in a village probably in Galilee, months before the crucifixion, in the house of Simon a Pharisee. Was it possible that Jesus was anointed by at least 3 different women in 3 different times or houses? So, slowly, the idea took place that Jesus was anointed only one time. First, Mary Magdalene was identified with Mary of Bethany, then with the anonymous woman and finally with the sinner, whose sin, being a woman, was understood as some sort of prostitute.
Is it this identification somewhat reliable?
Nothing in the canonical texts supports such identification, but the image of a prostitute who then obviously converts and becomes a saint is a very powerful one – and extremely useful for pastoral functions: if even a prostitute, meeting with Christ, was able to repent and redeem herself, which sinner could not imitate her? Her image of repented prostitute continued growing for centuries and more and more elements were added to her legend. What does a repenting sinner do, especially in the Latin Middle Ages? He or she lives as ascetic the rest of their lives. In absence of any tradition regarding the penitent life of Mary Magdalene, they took the legendary life of Mary of Egypt (a sex-maniac who converted and spent her residual life in a desert, as a penitent saint, emaciated and dressed only with her hair), changed the name and applied it to Mary Magdalene. In which desert, though, did Mary Magdalene end up, since her tomb was venerated in Ephesus (and her relics brought to Constantinople)? Since the resurrected Lord told her (in the Gospel of Matthew and in John) to bring the announcement of the resurrection to others, she soon became an apostolic figure who, for strictly political and ecclesiological reasons, was told to have reached what is now Southern France. Two bodies of her were then discovered in different places and in different times, one under the control of a powerful abbey in Burgundy and one under the control of the powerful Anjou family, in Provence. Still, there was no desert, so this detail was substituted with a grotto in an inhabitable mountain. With the Reformation, slowly all of this was abandoned, first by the reformed Churches and finally also by the Catholic one, when, with the liturgical reform of 1969, it was officially stated that Saint Mary Magdalene had nothing to do with the presumed prostitute who anoints Jesus’ feet in the Gospel of Luke.
All’s well that ends well, then, for Mary? Actually, every coin has two faces, and the last chapter of our book, written by an American theologian who is a former prostitute, now working to help her sisters in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, with brutal candor tells the readers what it may mean, for a prostitute who is a believer, to lose the model for life, repentance, and redemption that a former prostitute turned a saint, like Mary Magdalene, used to be.
Why have some writers, like Dan Brown, used Mary Magdalene? What’s so special in her? Also, in some news of the recent past it was pretended that she was in intimate relationship with Jesus. From where may this misinterpretation have come? Do the apocryphal writings play any role in it?
With the Enlightenment and the Reformation, the Catholic Church came under fire for having supported legends like the above one, and helped their diffusion. In relatively recent years, though, those legends were reinterpreted outside any Church control, with the addition of new legendary elements, often presented as scholarly or scientific. At the beginning of the 19th century Jesus became an Essene, at the same time when the Essenes were considered to be the depositary of ancient, mysterious, but very effective medical secrets. In some way, therefore, Jesus was saved from death, healed from his wounds thanks to special ointments. He did not die on the cross, but survived, got married, had children, died old of age, possibly somewhere in India.
The discovery of Gnostic texts brought to our knowledge ancient apocryphal traditions, according to which Jesus kissed Mary Magdalene on her lips often. It is possible indeed that the historical Jesus introduced among his disciples the use of kissing, to show the belonging of all the members of his group to a new family. This would explain on the one side the kiss of Judas and, on the other side, the so-called kiss of peace, in the liturgy of the mass (which in the antiquity was a kiss on the lips, as we see especially when bishops preach against the bad habit of men coming to church and standing close to women just to have an excuse to kiss them…).
Among the Gnostic groups, though, which were usually dedicated to asceticism, and even prohibited marriage, the kiss was considered an act of communication of spiritual knowledge (like the “kiss” by which God insufflated Spirit and Life into Adam, according to the Book of Genesis). This sacred kiss was probably practiced in a sacrament called “The Wedding Chamber” in which the faithful were invited to unite with their spiritual or celestial counterpart. In the texts we have, the kiss on the lips is a sign of spiritual communication of secret knowledge. Reading those texts now, though, in a post-Freudian world, has brought many to think that they meant Jesus had an intimate, sexual relationship with Mary Magdalene. In any case, this makes her of all women the candidate to be the physical companion of the physical Jesus. Again, if Jesus was a real man, why should he not have had a woman at his side, a companion, a lover, a spouse? And, as a natural result of their love, why would they not have had children?
What I find fascinating is that, in our building of new “rational” legends, we go back to the old ones, the medieval ones (regarding the travel to Southern France, as an example), we add the new elements (the Magdalene as mother of the children – or at least one child – of Jesus), we consider it true, and we accuse the Church – which had finally abandoned all those legends in a process of rationalizing its cultural and pastoral heritage – of being responsible of the greatest “cover up” in the Christian history: Jesus had a woman, but that reality had to be covered by the sexophobic and misogynistic Christian hierarchy.
This new development has a not so marginal aspect: its “marketability.” A novelist must be free to write whatever he or she wants, even of historical and religious events or figures, as long as it is clear that the book is a novel. The Last Temptation by Kazantzakis (see the filmic version by Scorsese) is in my opinion a great book (even if the author was excommunicated by his Greek Orthodox Church, back in 1952); not so The Da Vinci Code. I do not criticize the novel per se, but those introductory sentences, outside of the narrative, where the author presents as historical “facts” a bunch of historically nonsensical data. What should we say? The book has been translated to more than forty languages and sold millions and millions of copies: the legend of Mary Magdalene goes on!
Artists also seem really fascinated with Mary Magdalene… what kind of hermeneutic do they apply to her?
The representations of Mary Magdalene in the visual arts follow the developments of her figure in her legends. This is particularly impressive and dramatic in the history of Western art. At the beginning, the most common images depict her as one of the Pious Women who wanted to anoint the dead Jesus, but discover the empty tomb and see the resurrected Lord (or some angel), instead. Then she appears at the crucifixion and at the burial of Jesus. But it is in the Western Middle Ages that her success literally explodes: as preacher, healer, traveler through the Mediterranean, finally penitent in a desert. And here something new happens: as a penitent she is depicted naked, dressed with her hair only, emaciated, having almost lost her human features (notably Donatello’s portrait) – but slowly, at the end of the Middle Ages, she becomes “beautiful”, her prosperous naked breast exposed (as in Tiziano’s). Slowly the artists decide to depict not as much her penance for her sins, but the permanence of her sinful body in an ascetic context. The commissioning clients were also changing: famous lovers of famous kings had themselves depicted as semi-naked Mary Magdalenes as well as piously dressed Mary’s of Nazareth, depending on the occasion And when French romanticism or British Victorian prudery took over, we have the most astonishing portraits of the Magdalene, where penance is forgotten and her portrait becomes a pretext to delineate the naked body of a beautiful young woman.
How about you: what is your personal idea about her?
Since I am not competing with some novelist, I can be short, as a historian should. My idea is that she was a woman who had the unique chance to meet one of the most extraordinary persons who ever lived and died on this bloody earth. She was his disciple, from the beginning to the end. Was she in love with her Master? Probably yes. Did he love her? I think so; from what I understand, Jesus was able to love humans. It does not create a problem to my faith to think that Jesus had a sexual life; but we have no proof whatsoever of any sexual involvement, with this Mary or with any other person. After the discovery of the empty tomb (in whatever way that may have happened) Mary disappears from the earliest narrative to enter the realm of legend. The ensemble of her legends is a wonderful instrument to understand the development of human ideas through the centuries, but they do not tell us anything about the historical Mary. And I think she deserves our respectful silence.
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