Column No church conspiracy against Mary Magdalene
By ROSEMARY RADFORD
RUETHER
In recent years there has been a
great reclaiming of the figure of Mary Magdalene as a patron of womens
preaching and ministry. The new popularity of this New Testament figure has
come about through the recognition that Mary Magdalene has been the victim of a
historical defamation of character. She has been identified in the historical
tradition as a repentant prostitute, her image fixed as weeping sinner, wiping
Jesus feet with her hair. New Testament scholarship has shown that this
picture of Mary Magdalene is false. There are four stories of the anointing of
Jesus by a woman in the New Testament, none identified with Mary Magdalene. In
the earliest versions (Mark 14:3-9; Matthew 26: 6-13) an unnamed woman, not
called a sinner, anoints Jesus head as a sign of his impending death and
burial.
John (12:3) names the woman as Mary of Bethany and has her anoint
Jesus feet, but the story is about his impending death, not forgiveness
of sin. It is Luke (7:36-50) who changes the story and places it early in
Jesus life, naming the woman as a repentant sinner who weeps, dries
Jesus feet with her hair, anoints them with perfumed oil and is forgiven.
Again the woman is unnamed.
Mary Magdalene appears in the New Testament as one of the
followers of Jesus throughout his ministry who is cured of seven
devils (Luke 8:1-3), a concept associated with healing from illness, not
forgiveness of sin in the New Testament. She is the leader of a group of women
disciples who are present at the cross, when the male disciples have fled, and
at his burial. They arrive later to anoint the body and find that he has risen
from the dead. They are commissioned by Jesus or an angel to tell the disciples
he has risen.
Johns Gospel depicts Mary Magdalene in a personal encounter
with the risen Christ, followed by her testimony to the other disciples. Thus
Mary Magdalene stands in the New Testament as first witness of the
resurrection, the one who testifies of the risen Lord to the male
disciples.
Catholic and other Christian women have seen these roles as making
Mary Magdalene a unique apostle, the apostle to the apostles. They have assumed
that a patriarchal hierarchy, shortly after the death of Jesus, falsified her
identity in order to remove her as a role model for womens
ministry. This conspiratorial view of church tradition makes a sharp contrast
between a positive view of Mary Magdalene in the New Testament, and a
deliberate defaming of her in church tradition. This juxtaposition of
good New Testament and bad church tradition loses the
actual complexity and richness of church tradition about Mary Magdalene.
For the first five centuries of the church no writer
misinterpreted Mary Magdalene as a prostitute. Rather she was seen as a leading
disciple and image of the church. Several Gnostic gospels, such as the Gospel
of Mary, written in the early second century, see Mary as the special disciple
of Jesus who has a deeper understanding of his teachings and is asked to impart
this to the other disciples. Some contemporary Christian women have assumed
that the defaming of Mary Magdalene came about as an Orthodox effort to
counteract the high role played by Mary Magdalene in the Gnostic communities.
But there is no evidence that the Orthodox church leaders knew these gospels.
Although several church fathers have some notion that Gnostics claimed Mary
Magdalene as a leader, that does not cause them to disregard her. Rather they,
too, share a view of Mary Magdalene as a leading disciple.
The second century church father, Hippolytus, for example, sees
Mary and the other women disciples as symbolizing the New Eve, the faithful
women who reverse the sin of Eve. They represent the Bride of Christ, the
church, a role given by other church fathers to Mary, Jesus mother.
Hippolytus, in his commentary on the Song of Songs, is the first church father
to give Mary Magdalene the title of apostle to the apostles. He
sees Christ as making a special appearance to the male disciples to tell them
they are to accept and revere the womens witness to the resurrection:
Truly it is I who appeared to the women and who desired to send them to
you as apostles.
This high regard for Mary Magdalene continues in the fourth- and
fifth-century Latin fathers of the church. Ambrose, bishop of Milan, associated
Mary Magdalene with the New Eve who clings to Christ as the new Tree of Life,
thereby reversing the unfaithfulness of the first Eve. Augustine maintains this
view, pairing Mary Magdalene with Christ as symbol of the New Eve and the
church in relation to Christ as the New Adam. Her faithfulness reversed the sin
of the first Eve.
It is only at the end of the sixth century that Pope Gregory I
confuses the sinful woman of Luke 7 and Mary Magdalene in Luke 8 and identifies
her as a repentant prostitute, whose former sinfulness is contrasted with that
of the Virgin Mary. But there is no evidence that he makes this mistake in
order to remove her as a role model for womens ministry. Such
an idea is unknown to him. The misinterpretation seems to come about primarily
from a rhetorical tendency to reduce the complexity of Marys in the
New Testament to a simple dualism: the ever virgin mother and the repentant
sinner.
This view was never followed by the Eastern Christian church
tradition, which continued to see all these women disciples as representatives
of the New Eve, the church. While Pope Gregorys misinterpretation was
passed down in the medieval church tradition as normative, this did not cause
Mary Magdalene to become less popular. Rather new legends of sanctity were
associated with her. In the Eastern tradition it is believed that she joined
with Mary, Jesus mother, and John in Ephesus to become martyrs. Other
legends see her going into the desert as a hermit, role model of womens
hermetic life.
Western Christians give Mary Magdalene further adventures. French
medieval tradition believed that Mary Magdalene (conflated with Mary of
Bethany) fled Palestine with her brother and sister, Lazarus and Martha, and
arrived by boat in Aix, in what is now France. Lazarus became the first bishop
of Marseilles, while Martha overcame a dragon that was ravaging the region.
Mary Magdalene converted the king and queen of Southern Gaul and thereby became
the apostle to the Franks. A widespread cult of Mary Magdalene arose in
medieval France, and relics of her body were claimed at various churches.
Although the medieval church assumed that she was a former prostitute, the
focus was on her converted sanctity. Preachers even exalted her as a preacher
whose evangelizing career was foundational to the faith of the Western
church.
Medieval images of Mary Magdalene do not picture her as the
disheveled, weeping sinner. Rather they imagine her primarily in the context of
her witness to the risen lord, bringing the glad tidings back to male
disciples. It is in the Renaissance that this image changed. Renaissance art
delighted in picturing the erotic, half nude female body. Images of Mary
Magdalene weeping, with long hair partly covering her naked breasts, was a way
of exploiting this artistic type. This is the image of Mary Magdalene that has
come down in our own cultural imagination.
Already in the late 19th century scholars of the New Testament
began to realize that there was no scriptural basis for the identification of
Mary Magdalene with the repentant sinner of Luke 7. But this scholarship was
popularized only recently, and Mary Magdalene claimed as a role model for women
preachers and ministers. In this process of reinterpreting Mary Magdalene for
today, church tradition should not be reduced to a hostile conspiracy against
her. It has a richer tradition to offer.
Rosemary Radford Ruether is a professor of theology at
Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, Evanston, Ill. Her e-mail address
is Rosemary.Ruether@nwu.edu
National Catholic Reporter, February 9,
2001
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