Beautiful Sinner - The strange career of Mary Magdalene

[im10ashus]

THE SAINTLY SINNER
The two-thousand-year obsession with Mary Magdalene
by JOAN ACOCELLA
Issue of 2006-02-13 and 20
Posted 2006-02-06

The Catholic Church presumably has enough on its hands right now without worrying about popular fiction, but the Holy See cannot have failed to notice that Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code,” a novel claiming that Jesus was married, has been on the Times best-seller list for almost three years. (Its message will soon spread more widely: the paperback is due out next month, and the movie version will be released in May.) Brown is by no means the first to have suggested that Christ had a sex life—Martin Luther said it—but the most notorious recent statement of the theory was a 1982 book, “Holy Blood, Holy Grail,” by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. “Holy Blood,” which was one of the main sources for “The Da Vinci Code,” proposes that after the Crucifixion Jesus’ wife, with at least one of their children, escaped to France, where their descendants married into the Merovingian dynasty and are still around today. Nobody knows this, though, because, according to the authors’ scenario, the truth has been kept under wraps for a thousand years by a secret society called the Priory of Sion. The book offers a fantastically elaborated conspiracy theory—involving Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, and Jean Cocteau (all “grand masters” of the Priory of Sion), plus Emma Calvé and various others—that cannot be briefly summarized, but the upshot is that the Priory may now be ready to go public with its story. The authors warn that the organization may intend to set up a theocratic United States of Europe, with a descendant of Jesus as its priest-king but with the actual business of government being handled by some other party—the Priory of Sion, for example.

And who is the woman who caused all this trouble? Who married Jesus and bore his offspring and thereby laid the foundation for the overthrow of post-Enlightenment culture? Mary Magdalene.


Mary Magdalene gets only fourteen mentions in the New Testament. Luke and Mark describe her as the subject of one of Jesus’ exorcisms—he cast “seven devils” out of her—and as one of several women who followed him. In all four Gospels, she is present at the Crucifixion. Nevertheless, her role remains minuscule, until, all of a sudden, after Christ’s death, it becomes hugely magnified. Each of the Gospels tells the story a little differently, but, basically, the Magdalene, either alone or with other women, goes to the tomb on the third day to anoint Jesus’ body, and it is to her (or them) that an angel or Christ himself announces that he is risen from the dead, and instructs her to go tell this to his disciples. That command gave the Magdalene a completely new standing. The Resurrection is the proof of the truth of Christian faith. As the first person to announce it, Mary Magdalene became, as she was later designated, “the apostle to the apostles.”

But there was a problem. Why her? Why a person who previously had been referred to only in passing? Above all, why a woman?

cont'd...

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060213fa_fact2

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. Interesting article,

especially the information about the Gnostics, who appear to be following the basic tenets of mysticism, which is shared by mystics of every religious stripe. I have a friend who is a scholar of Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek, and I believe he said one time that a pronoun Jesus used once to refer to Mary Magdalene was one usually used by a husband to refer to his wife.

[im10ashus]

2. I couldn't believe they would have burned part of the writings.

Imagine what was lost.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

3. Pearls before swine

a lot of sacred writing has been burned or otherwise destroyed over the centuries. What is hoped is that the mystical schools have kept alive the Truth, as what is transmitted therein is usually not written down except upon the tablet of the heart.

[hunter]

4. Very interesting...

To quote some more from the article:

Soon afterward came the publication of the Nag Hammadi library. The feminists had long suspected that the New Testament, together with its commentators, had downplayed women’s contributions to the founding of Christianity. Here was the proof. Writings on the Magdalene exploded after 1975. Conveniently, this happened at the same time as the rise of postmodern literary theory, which held that all texts were unstable and porous, marked by “gaps” that the reader had to fill. If anything ever had gaps, it was the revised Magdalene. She wasn’t a prostitute anymore, but what was she?

I remember this was a very big deal among the feminist Christians I knew in the late 'seventies. There were very similar discussions about St. Brigid of Ireland.

These are uncomfortable explorations for many Christians. I love this admonishment in the Catholic Encyclopedia:

"Viewing the biography of St. Brigid from a critical standpoint we must allow a large margin for the vivid Celtic imagination and the glosses of medieval writers..."

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02784b.htm

Oh yes, be wary of that vivid Celtic imagination!

[lovuian]

5. The Church's purposeful pushing Mary Magdelene as a

adulterer and prostitute was to demean one of the greatest disciples of Yeshuah... She threatened the Patriarchal base of the Roman Catholic Faith...