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Something about Mary Magdalene

Luke 24:1 – 12

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 28 May, 2006

HISTORY IS never about finding something that supports your own prejudices. It is about finding the evidence, analysing it, and accepting it even if it makes you rethink everything.

That is the main problem of Dan Brown’s theories about Mary Magdalene. He was so desperate to make a case for the marriage of Jesus and Mary that he used anything he could find.

He based his ideas on the theories of Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent. But he didn’t bother to check the facts, either.

When I was about 11, some family friends visited, bringing their two daughters who were a little younger than my brother and I. All we kids were in the spare room mucking around. Suddenly, the girls went into "Oooh! Aaah!" mode. While we were all skylarking, the crotch of my pants had split, just a little, and, for a moment, the girls got a glimpse of my underpants. They were shocked and stunned!

I was embarrassed, but I did think, “So what? What’s so shocking about underpants?”

And that’s how I feel about Dan Brown’s allegations in The Da Vinci Code, when he says that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married.

Brown says, “Oooh! Aaah!" and I say, “So what!?” In fact I would like to add a rude word, because he is just playing emotional games, trying to shock people. That’s childish!

What difference would it make if Jesus had been married, or if he had had a child? There is nothing in the Bible to say that the Messiah had to be single.

The worst that he could say, if he proved that a marriage had occurred, would be that the gospels didn’t tell the entire story.

We are not saved by Jesus’ singleness: we are saved by his death. We are not saved by celibacy, but by Jesus’ self–sacrifice for us.

Where did Brown get this idea from?

He make a lot of the so–called Gospel of Philip. This book does exist. It does describe Mary at one point as Jesus’ “companion”.

However, this Gospel of Philip is far from being an early Christian record. Nor does it really say that Jesus was married to Mary.

The Gospel of Philip was probably written around 200 AD. In the first in this series, I pointed out that the gospels were probably written before 70AD. This spurious gospel was written over a century after the gospels.

Furthermore The Gospel of Philip does not say that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. The supposed authority, Teabing, quotes a fragmentary passage describing Mary as Jesus’ companion. He tells Sophie that this word means “spouse” in Aramaic.

In fact, The Gospel of Philip is written in the Egyptian Coptic language, not in Aramaic. And the word used for companion in that passage is actually the Greek word, koinonos, which does not mean “spouse” in either Greek or Coptic.

And even if the romantic or marital interpretation of this fake gospel made sense on language grounds, it doesn’t on theological grounds. The Gospel of Philip is a Gnostic writing, and the Gnostics looked down on physical relationships. They would never have as their model for a spiritual life someone who got married. They thought that being married meant you couldn’t properly be saved.

Then Brown gets really silly and makes conjectures about Jesus having fathered a child. He plays games with some Old French words. There is no way that a serious historian or linguist would do that.

Then he thinks there is some secret message encoded into Leonardo’s painting of the Last Supper.

If he’d looked at a few other Leonardo paintings, he’d have seen that the artist was quite excited at the chance to paint pictures of girlish boys. It doesn’t prove anything about Jesus. It might say a thing or two about Leonardo da Vinci!

It may be fun to write it, but it’s just so silly!

However, let me praise Dan Brown. There is something he has gotten sort of right. And that is that the churches in general have treated women pretty poorly.

Here’s a question: how many Baptists does it take to change a light bulb?

Thirteen.

That’s seven deacons to make the decision, a maintenance man to climb the ladder, and five ladies to bring tea and sandwiches.

I said last week that we had a great debate here twenty years ago about whether we could have female deacons, Interestingly, the same people who said you can’t have female deacons elected Joan Oates to the Pastoral Search Committee! Very strange!

I pay tribute to the women who have been deacons and the women who have represented us at the Baptist Assemblies. We owe a lot to them. I pay tribute to women who have preached here to good effect, or led services or challenged our faith.

But in some churches even today women would never be allowed to be deacons, or preach. Women in those places know they will never get positions of leadership.

Certainly, the first apostles were all men, but they had to be free to travel, and that wasn’t as easy for women in those days. On the other hand, a group of women did travel with Jesus and his band from time to time, when it was safe to do so.

The Bible isn’t against female leadership!

But a combination of men wanting to maintain control, and some problems in the early church with women, led to a gradual restriction on women’s roles, and we need to repent at that failure in the church.

Dan Brown is right: there were many female leaders in the early church.

Dan Brown is also right that Mary Magdalene has been treated badly by history.

But he is wrong to say that the Bible teaches the oppression of women. He is wrong to say that the fault lies with the Bible rather than with the church.

You only have to look at what the Bible teaches about women.

The Old Testament is full of women in leadership: Deborah, Miriam and Esther spring to mind.

In the New Testament, there are teachers like Priscilla, there are congregational leaders like Lydia in Philippi and Chloe in Corinth. There are manager–deacons like Phoebe. And there is even that apostle, Junia or Junias, who is probably female. And there are so many prominent women in the gospels: half a dozen Marys, an Anna or two, a Joanna, a Martha, and many who don’t get named, but are there nevertheless.

And doesn’t Peter preach at Pentecost that even male and female slaves will prophesy under the Holy Spirit’s direction?

But let’s look at Mary Magdalene.

First, we should notice that there are two popular images of her in our society.

At University, I studied Old English poetry, and read some fascinating articles by C.S. Lewis, who also wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Lewis was actually an academic linguist, and was attached to Magdalen College at Oxford University. That name is the mediaeval form of Magdalene. So, on the one hand, you have Mary Magdalene thought of as a patron of learning. And that is reflected in many mediaeval paintings of Saint Mary Magdalene.

On the other hand, there are paintings of a topless woman, also described as Mary Magdalene, a typical mediaeval prostitute. Some relatively modern writers call a prostitute a “Magdalene.”

So Dan Brown has picked up on an ambivalent attitude to Mary.

So what do we know about Mary Magdalene?

She figures in all four gospels, so she must have been pretty important in the thinking of the gospel writers.

The earliest we hear of her is in Luke 8, not long after the murder of John the Baptist. We read,

^{LK 8:1} After this, Jesus travelled about from one town and village to another, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God. The Twelve were with him, ² and also some women who had been cured of evil spirits and diseases: Mary (called Magdalene) from whom seven demons had come out; ³ Joanna the wife of Cuza, the manager of Herod’s household; Susanna; and many others. These women were helping to support them out of their own means.

The fact is that Mary is never described as having been a prostitute. She had seven demons, and I have known at least two pastors’ wives who had around that many demons, so we are not necessarily even talking about someone who behaved strangely or lived any kind of immoral life. Sometimes demonisation can immobilise a person so they could barely do something immoral if they tried!

However, one of the Popes thought that she was the same woman mentioned in Chapter 7 who had been a prostitute and repented, so that is where the idea of Mary as a Prostitute comes from. That was around the 600s AD, so, that was long after the famous Council of Nicea.

If Mary Magdalene had been a prostitute, it didn’t matter anyway. In the genealogy of Jesus, doesn’t it mention Rahab, who was a prostitute in Jericho? Doesn’t it mention Tamar, who acted as a prostitute to force her father–in–law into getting her pregnant when her husband died?

God hates prostitution, but he loves prostitutes. Jesus spent a lot of time with tax collectors, prostitutes and other sinners.

God’s grace is great and his mercy extends beyond measure. Is anyone outside his reach?

The other passages about Mary Magdalene are all to do with the crucifixion and resurrection.

John tells us that Mary Magdalene was one who stayed with Jesus as he died on the cross:

JN 19:25 Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.

But the most important part of the story is that she was also a witness to the resurrection.

Once again, John gives us the detail, but her testimony appears in the other gospels, too:

^{JN 20:1} Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. ² So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!”

And to complete John’s account, we read,

^{JN 20:10} Then the disciples went back to their homes, ¹¹ but Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb ¹² and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.

¹³ They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?”

“They have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.” ¹⁴ At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.

¹⁵ “Woman,” he said, “why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”

Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.”

¹⁶ Jesus said to her, “Mary.”

She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means Teacher).

¹⁷ Jesus said, “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet returned to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, `I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ “

¹⁸ Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: “I have seen the Lord!” And she told them that he had said these things to her.

We don’t hear about Mary Magdalene after that, although she was almost certainly among the people gathered on the Day of Pentecost.

However, at each point where Mary appears, she plays an important role.

As one of the women who travelled around with Jesus and helped support his ministry, she shows us just how vital women were in Jesus’ work. They may not have been in the forefront, but, without them, his ministry may well have collapsed.

In the second place, she shows the loyalty of the women who supported Jesus. There is only one male disciple mentioned in the crucifixion story — John. But several of the women stood by Jesus as he bore our sins on the cross. This is consistent with the women who mourned for him as he was carrying his cross to Calvary.

But her final role is her greatest. She was the first witness to the resurrection, and her account of meeting the risen Jesus is the most detailed.

The point is that a woman had marginal legal standing as a witness under Jewish law. No woman’s testimony stood in its own right. It had to be backed up to be valid.

If the gospel writers planned to con people into believing that Jesus had truly risen from the dead, there is no way that they would have had a woman like Mary as the first witness.

It is this emphasis on the least likely witness which really makes the story most credible.

Dan Brown is way off beam to suggest that Jesus and Mary were married or had a child. He is way off beam to say that the Bible oppresses women.

He is right, though, to say that the church has not continued to give women the leadership they had in the first and second centuries, and he is right to ask us to look at Mary Magdalene with fresh eyes.

But here is where we part company with him.

We see Mary, we look at her total loyalty to Jesus. We are moved by her grief at his death and excited at her discovery that he was alive again.

Let’s learn from her to testify fearlessly to the risen Christ.

Above all, let’s accept and act on her challenge to believe: to believe that her testimony is true, to believe that Jesus is risen, and to believe enough to act on it. May God bless us! AMEN

© Peter R. Green 2006. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)