Magdalen Chapter

[Sourabh Doherty]

MaryMagdalene[a] (sometimes called Mary of Magdala, or simply the Magdalene or the Madeleine) was a woman who, according to the four canonical gospels, traveled with Jesus as one of his followers and was a witness to his crucifixion and resurrection.[1] She is mentioned by name twelve times in the canonical gospels, more than most of the apostles and more than any other woman in the gospels, other than Jesus's family. Mary's epithet Magdalene may be a toponymic surname, meaning that she came from the town of Magdala, a fishing town on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee in Roman Judea.

The Gospel of Luke chapter 8 lists Mary Magdalene as one of the women who travelled with Jesus and helped support his ministry "out of their resources", indicating that she was probably wealthy. The same passage also states that seven demons had been driven out of her, a statement which is repeated from Mark 16. In all four canonical gospels, Mary Magdalene is a witness to the crucifixion of Jesus and, in the Synoptic Gospels, she is also present at his burial. All four gospels identify her, either alone or as a member of a larger group of women, as the first to witness the empty tomb,[1] and, either alone or as a member of a group, as the first to witness Jesus's resurrection.[2]

Mary Magdalene is considered to be a saint by the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, and Lutheran denominations. In 2016, Pope Francis raised the level of liturgical memory on July 22 from memorial to feast, and for her to be referred to as the "Apostle of the apostles".[3] Other Protestant churches honor her as a heroine of the faith. The Eastern Orthodox churches also commemorate her on the Sunday of the Myrrhbearers, the Orthodox equivalent of one of the Western Three Marys traditions.

Because she was the first to witness Jesus's resurrection, Mary Magdalene is known in some Christian traditions as the "apostle to the apostles". She is a central figure in Gnostic Christian writings, including the Dialogue of the Savior, the Pistis Sophia, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Mary. These texts portray her as an apostle, as Jesus's closest and most beloved disciple and the only one who truly understood his teachings. In the Gnostic texts, or Gnostic gospels, Mary's closeness to Jesus results in tension with another disciple, Peter, due to her gender and Peter's envy of the special teachings given to her. In the Gospel of Philip's text, Marvin Meyer's translation says (missing text bracketed): "The companion of the [...] is Mary of Magdala. The [...] her more than [...] the disciples, [...] kissed her often on her [...]."[6]

It is widely accepted among secular historians that, like Jesus, Mary Magdalene was a real historical figure.[7] Nonetheless, very little is known about her life.[8] Unlike Paul the Apostle, Mary Magdalene left behind no known writings of her own.[9] She was never mentioned in any of the Pauline epistles or in any of the general epistles.[10][11] The earliest and most reliable sources about her life are the three Synoptic Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, which were all written during the first century AD.[12][13]

Soon afterwards he went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. The twelve were with him, as well as some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Herod's steward Chuza, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their resources.

Bart D. Ehrman, a New Testament scholar and historian of early Christianity, contends that the number seven may be merely symbolic,[26] since, in Jewish tradition, seven was the number of completion,[26] so that Mary was possessed by seven demons may simply mean she was completely overwhelmed by their power.[26] In either case, Mary must have suffered from severe emotional or psychological trauma for an exorcism of this kind to have been perceived as necessary.[25][26] Consequently, her devotion to Jesus resulting from this healing must have been very strong.[14][32][33] The Gospels' writers normally relish giving dramatic descriptions of Jesus's public exorcisms, with the possessed person wailing, thrashing, and tearing his or her clothes in front of a crowd.[34] By contrast, that Mary's exorcism receives little attention may indicate that either Jesus performed it privately or that the recorders did not perceive it as particularly dramatic.[34]

Because Mary is listed as one of the women who supported Jesus's ministry financially, she must have been relatively wealthy.[14][35] The places where she and the other women are mentioned throughout the gospels indicate strongly that they were vital to Jesus's ministry[36][37][38][39] and that Mary Magdalene always appears first, whenever she is listed in the Synoptic Gospels as a member of a group of women, indicates that she was seen as the most important out of all of them.[40][41][42] Carla Ricci notes that, in lists of the disciples, Mary Magdalene occupies a similar position among Jesus's female followers as Simon Peter does among the male apostles.[42]

That women played such an active and important role in Jesus's ministry was not entirely radical or even unique;[37][39] inscriptions from a synagogue in Aphrodisias in Asia Minor from around the same time period reveal that many of the major donors to the synagogue were women.[37] Jesus's ministry did bring women greater liberation than they would typically have held in mainstream Jewish society.[43][39]

Virtually all reputable historians agree that Jesus was crucified by the Romans under the orders of Pontius Pilate.[46][47][48][49] James Dunn states of baptism and crucifixion that these "two facts in the life of Jesus command almost universal assent".[50] Nonetheless, the gospels' accounts of Jesus's crucifixion differ considerably[51] and most secular historians agree that some of the details in the accounts have been altered to fit their authors' theological agendas.[51] Ehrman states that the presence of Mary Magdalene and the other women at the cross is probably historical because Christians would have been unlikely to make up that the main witnesses to the crucifixion were women[52] and also because their presence is attested in both the Synoptic Gospels and in the Gospel of John independently.[53] Maurice Casey concurs that the presence of Mary Magdalene and the other women at the crucifixion of Jesus may be recorded as an historical fact.[54] According to E. P. Sanders, the reason why the women watched the crucifixion even after the male disciples had fled may have been because they were less likely to be arrested, they were braver than the men, or some combination thereof.[55]

Because scribes were unsatisfied with the abrupt ending of the Gospel of Mark, they wrote several different alternative endings for it.[81] In the "shorter ending", which is found in very few manuscripts, the women go to "those around Peter" and tell them what they had seen at the tomb, followed by a brief declaration of the gospel being preached from east to west.[81] This "very forced" ending contradicts the last verse of the original gospel, stating that the women "told no one".[81] The "longer ending", which is found in most surviving manuscripts, is an "amalgam of traditions" containing episodes derived from the other gospels.[81] First, it describes an appearance by Jesus to Mary Magdalene alone (as in the Gospel of John),[81] followed by brief descriptions of him appearing to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus (as in the Gospel of Luke) and to the eleven remaining disciples (as in the Gospel of Matthew).[81]

In his book published in 2006, Ehrman states that "it appears virtually certain" that the stories of the empty tomb, regardless of whether or not they are accurate, can definitely be traced back to the historical Mary Magdalene,[82] saying that, in Jewish society, women were regarded as unreliable witnesses and were forbidden from giving testimony in court,[83] so early Christians would have had no motive to make up a story about a woman being the first to discover the empty tomb.[83] In fact, if they had made the story up, they would have had strong motivation to make Peter, Jesus's closest disciple while he was alive, the discoverer of the tomb instead.[83] He also says that the story of Mary Magdalene discovering the empty tomb is independently attested in the Synoptics, the Gospel of John, and in the Gospel of Peter.[84] N. T. Wright states that "it is, frankly, impossible to imagine that [the women at the tomb] were inserted into the tradition after Paul's day."[85][54]

Casey challenges this argument, contending that the women at the tomb are not legal witnesses, but rather heroines in line with a long Jewish tradition.[54] He contends that the story of the empty tomb was invented by either the author of the Gospel of Mark or by one of his sources, based on the historically genuine fact that the women really had been present at Jesus's crucifixion and burial.[54] In his book published in 2014, Ehrman rejects his own previous argument,[86] stating that the story of the empty tomb can only be a later invention because there is virtually no possibility that Jesus's body could have been placed in any kind of tomb[86] and, if Jesus was never buried, then no one alive at the time could have said that his non-existent tomb had been found empty.[86] He concludes that the idea that early Christians would have had "no motive" to make up the story simply "suffers from a poverty of imagination"[87] and that they would have had all kinds of possible motives,[88] especially since women were overrepresented in early Christian communities and women themselves would have had strong motivation to make up a story about other women being the first to find the tomb.[89] He does conclude later, however, that Mary Magdalene must have been one of the people who had an experience in which she thought she saw the risen Jesus,[90] citing her prominence in the gospel resurrection narratives and her absence everywhere else in the gospels as evidence.[90]

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