The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction (26 page)

The Philip passage steps lightly. “Kissing” was often used as a euphemism for sexual intercourse, and this same gospel elsewhere says that “it is by a kiss that the perfect conceive and give birth” (59:2-3).
²
Later, we are assured that the implied sexual intercourse is purely spiritual and metaphorical in nature (76:6-9; 82:1-10).

Finally, one more depiction of Mary Magdalene as the special recipient of post-Easter revelations occurs in the Greater Questions of Mary, yet another Gnostic dialogue. The text, like that of a shorter but similar dialogue, the Lesser Questions of Mary, is not extant, but orthodox heresiologist Epiphanius preserved a particularly juicy tidbit: “They aver that he gave her a revelation: after taking her aside to the mountain and praying, he brought forth from his side a woman and began to unite with her, and then, believe it or not, holding his semen in his hand, he showed that ‘This is what we must do to be saved.’ Then, when Mary fell to the ground in shock, he raised her up again and said to her: ‘Why did you doubt, O you of little faith?’” (
Panarion
26.8.2-3).
³

Notice the recapitulation of the Edenic splitting of Eve from the side of Adam, as well as the intercourse between them. Here is a charter either for Gnostic libertinism or for the sacrament of the Bridal Chamber, where the soul unites with Christ. This latter was some sort of mysterious initiation rite administered by Syrian, Jewish, and Gnostic Christians. No one knows exactly what it was.
⁴

MAKING MARY MALE?

Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza shows how virtually the same “becoming male” terminology familiar from Gnostic texts occurs in the writings of the first-century Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo.
⁵
There it is more fully explained and in such a way that it makes sense of the Gnostic use of the terminology we find in Thomas 114. For instance for Philo, spiritual development by ascetical effort is “becoming male” because Philo denominates the rational soul as “male,” the irrational soul (i.e., emotions, appetites) “female.” A person who integrates these elements and thus finds God’s grace to grow spiritually has “become one.” See the Gospel of Thomas: “They shall become a single one” (saying 4). As for “becoming male,” what it might mean for an early Christian woman apostle is clear from the Acts of Paul, where Thecla shaves her hair and “tailored her mantle into a cloak in the male style.” Paul then charges her, “Go, and teach the word of God” (11:25, 40, 41). She is to preach the gospel of celibacy: “Blessed are the continent, for only to them shall God speak” (11:5). Here is a woman who becomes an apostolic preacher by renouncing sexuality and becoming as a man in appearance!
⁶

FOREBEAR OR FIGUREHEAD?

Most scholars who discuss these texts have focused on whether they are part of a pro-women argument aimed by Gnostics at the orthodox bishops. Mary Magdalene, some suggest, was appropriated as the mouthpiece for pro-women Gnostic views because she was known by all as a prominent female gospel character, not one of the Twelve, characters who had already been claimed by the orthodox. She is female and a “leftover” character. This is Elaine Pagels’s view: The “secret texts use the figure of Mary Magdalene to suggest that women’s activity challenged the leaders of the orthodox community, who regarded Peter as their spokesman.”
⁷
Pheme Perkins rejects this theory as arbitrary, though she also seems to assume that the texts tell us nothing of the historical Mary. Perkins agrees Mary has become a purely literary mouthpiece, but she thinks the women’s issue was not particularly in view: “We are skeptical of those who use this picture of Mary to claim that Gnostics upheld community leadership by women in opposition to the male dominated hierarchy of the orthodox Church. . . . Mary is the hero here not because of an extraordinary role played by women in Gnostic communities, but because she is a figure closely associated with Jesus to whom esoteric wisdom may be attached.”
⁸

Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza sides with Pagels: “The debate between various Christian groups on primacy in apostolic authority is reflected in various apocryphal texts which relate the competition between Peter and Mary Magdalene. . . . Those who claim the authority of Andrew and Peter . . . argue against the teaching authority of women,” while their opponents “appealed to the women disciples as scriptural precedents and apostolic figures.”
⁹
Karen L. King sums up the dilemma well. What she says about the Gospel of Mary applies equally well to all these texts: “Does the final scene in the
Gospel of Mary
reflect actual conflict between the historical figures of Peter and Mary? . . . Or were Peter and Mary . . . only narrative representatives for opposing Christian groups or differing theological positions?”
¹⁰

The common assumption is that Gnostic writers merely “used” Mary as a symbolic figure, a “precedent,” much as modern Christian feminists do when they argue that Mary Magdalene was
in a manner of speaking
an “apostle” since “apostle” means “sent one,” and she was “sent” to proclaim the news of the resurrection to the Twelve.
¹¹
Those who argue that way seem to mean that
solely on the strength of her activity on Easter morning
she can now serve as a kind of literary precedent for women in ministry. But, however one answers the question of a pro-women polemic underlying the Mary Magdalene texts, might one not also argue that Mary Magdalene did, in fact, carry on an apostolic ministry in circles receptive to her, circles that eventually contributed to the great Gnostic movement of the early Christian centuries? King thinks so: “The strength of this literary tradition, attested as it is in multiple independent witnesses, makes it possible to suggest that historically Mary may have been a prophetic visionary and leader within some sector of the early Christian movement after the death of Jesus. This much may be said of Mary of Magdala with a high degree of historical probability.”
¹²

MAGDALENE MOUTHPIECE

But I think the evidence points in a different direction. I agree with Pheme Perkins: Mary Magdalene is merely a literary mouthpiece in these texts. We might compare Mary Magdalene, Gnostic apostle, to Joseph of Arimathea, pressed into service (albeit centuries later, though that is beside the point) as the apostle of an indigenous Celtic Christianity ostensibly planted by this New Testament figure centuries before Roman Catholic missionaries set foot on the British Isles bearing their popish evangel. According to certain of the grail legends (see chapter 2, “The Holy Grail”), Joseph had received the cup of the Last Supper from the Risen Jesus. Joseph then took the grail to Gaul, where he established the second table of the grail (the first, of course, having been that of the Last Supper). Later still, he took it to Glastonbury, England. Eventually King Arthur would build the famous Round Table as the third table for the grail. Is there any historical basis to this story? Not a chance, but that did not stop the tale from providing after-the-fact justification for Celtic, non-Catholic Christianity, as it still functions for some sectarians today. Why was Joseph of Arimathea chosen for the honor? Simply because, like Mary Magdalene, he was a gospel character close to Jesus, but not one of the Twelve, who had been irrevocably claimed on behalf of the Catholic Church. It seems to me that Mary Magdalene is another like Joseph of Arimathea. Her apostleship is a later propaganda argument on behalf of one side in a theological dispute between Catholic and other types of Christianity. Furthermore, the very parameters of the debate, which assume that the Twelve are synonymous with apostolic authority, marks the role of Mary in the Gnostic texts as secondary, historically inauthentic. For in the lifetime of the historical Magdalene, such a monolithic authority structure, such a “Catholic” conception of the Twelve, could not yet have existed.

THE NEW TESTAMENT EASTER STORIES

Can we follow the trajectory we have plotted through the Gnostic texts further back into the canonical gospels? This is important because, depending on what we find there, we might discover a first-century basis for Mary Magdalene as a historical apostolic figure.

The trail would seem to lead directly to John 20:1, 11-18, a story in which Mary Magdalene is the first to see the Risen Christ at the empty tomb or anyplace else.
¹³
Christ tells her little by way of revelation, whether Catholic or Gnostic, but the striking thing is that he tells her to let the male disciples know he is ascending to his Father. In other words, by the time they receive the report, he will have departed! He tells Mary, in short, to tell them good-bye! This certainly implies Mary is the only one to have seen the Risen Lord. The other apostles are excluded as recipients of Easter appearances just as surely as Acts excludes Paul from true apostleship on the same basis. Can this story originally have been an independent one, placed in the context of John 20 in order to obviate the surprising implications of Mary having been, according to the underlying tradition, the
sole
witness to the risen Jesus?

Raymond E. Brown suggests that it was John 20:1-18, the appearance to Mary
in its canonical form
, as the first in John’s series of resurrection episodes, that inspired the use of Mary as a revealer in the later Gnostic texts.
¹⁴
This is once again to make the link with Mary Magdalene a purely
literary
one. To make the case that Mary Magdalene’s apostolic importance to Gnostic groups in the next couple of centuries stemmed from an actual apostolic claim on her part, one would need to make the John 20:1, 11-18, episode historical in nature. One would need to say something like this must have happened to form the basis for any actual claim Mary may have made to apostolic status. And this claim would have continued to be reflected in the later Gnostic texts not because of literary borrowing but because of historical memory. Is this likely?

The very preservation of the original unit John 20:1, 11-18, might be said to presuppose a context in which a group of early Christians cherished and passed down the story of Mary’s
unique
Easter revelation, thus a circle of Christians for whom Mary was the chief apostle. How else could the original, independent episode have survived long enough for the fourth evangelist to co-opt it? This would be a powerful argument in favor of the hypothesis that Mary Magdalene was an apostle. But is it a viable understanding of the passage? I used to think so and said so in an article some fifteen years ago. Now I am not so sure. I fear that a brief survey of the Easter traditions of the gospels is in order if we are to be in a proper position to evaluate these claims.

WARP AND WOOF

It is vital that we understand the range of techniques that were in play among the four evangelists in composing their empty tomb and resurrection narratives.
First
, later gospel writers freely rewrote their predecessors, Matthew rewriting Mark, and so forth.
Second
, they padded the stories by rewriting, without attribution, Old Testament scripture texts.
Third
, they borrowed common miracle stories from the cults of rival saviors like Asclepius, Apollonius, and Pythagoras, all of them Sons of God.
Fourth
, they parodied polemics aimed at the Christian resurrection doctrine by outsiders.

Mark’s is the earliest gospel, and he has followed the Passion of Jesus Christ with a story of his empty tomb’s discovery by Mary Magdalene and other women followers (Mark 16:1-8). A mysterious “young man” tells them Jesus is risen. As Charles H. Talbert has shown, such a tale fits neatly in the same class with other current stories in which the loved ones of a vanished and/or slain hero cannot find his body, only to be informed by a heavenly voice or an angel that he has been taken up.
¹⁵
Scholars, unconsciously continuing to take the story as history even when they say they know better, puzzle over the failure of the frightened women to convey the angel’s message. They were ordered to tell Peter and the others to go to Galilee to await Jesus. But they didn’t. Then how is it
we
are hearing the story?

Well, of course, the same way we hear what Jesus prayed to the Father in the Garden when there were no witnesses present to overhear and repeat it! Mark has simply created both scenes out of whole cloth. He is the omniscient narrator. All right, then, but why have the story end on such an odd note? Well, of course, for the same reason he has Jesus tell his inner circle of disciples, who have just witnessed the visitation of Moses and Elijah atop the Mount of Transfiguration, to keep mum about it—till the resurrection occurs. For the same reason Jesus tells them not to reveal his messiahship. For the same reason the Risen Jesus appears only to small groups in locked rooms. This is a technique of clever imposture whereby a narrator “explains” why some innovation of his is true
anyway
, even though no one remembers ever hearing it before! So Mark has added something altogether new to his readers: the story of the discovery of the empty grave of Jesus, who has been assumed into heaven like Hercules or Asclepius or Romulus or Enoch or Moses or Elijah—you get the picture.