The gorgeous female cryptographer and the hunky college professor are fleeing the scene of a ghastly murder they did not commit. In the midst of their escape, which will eventually utilize an armored car, a private jet, electronic-surveillance devices and just enough unavoidable violence to keep things interesting, our heroes seek out the one man who holds the key not only to their exoneration but also to a mystery that could change the world. To help explain it to them, crippled, jovial, fabulously wealthy historian Sir Leigh Teabing points out a figure in a famous painting.
“‘Who is she?’ Sophie asked.
“‘That, my dear,’ Teabing replied, ‘is Mary Magdalene.’
“Sophie turned. ‘The prostitute?’
“Teabing drew a short breath, as if the word had injured him personally. ‘Magdalene was no such thing. That unfortunate misconception is the legacy of a smear campaign launched by the early Church.'”
Summer page turners tend to sidestep the finer points of 6th century church history. Perhaps that is their loss. The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown, now in its 18th week on the New York Times hard-cover fiction best-seller list, is one of those hypercaffeinated conspiracy specials with two-page chapters and people’s hair described as “burgundy.” But Brown, who by book’s end has woven Magdalene intricately and rather outrageously into his plot, has picked his MacGuffin cannily. Not only has he enlisted one of the few New Testament personages whom a reader might arguably imagine in a bathing suit (generations of Old Masters, after all, painted her topless). He has chosen a character whose actual identity is in play, both in theology and pop culture.
Three decades ago, the Roman Catholic Church quietly admitted what critics had been saying for centuries: Magdalene’s standard image as a reformed prostitute is not supported by the text of the Bible. Freed of this lurid, limiting premise and employing varying ratios of scholarship and whimsy, academics and enthusiasts have posited various other Magdalenes: a rich and honored patron of Jesus, an Apostle in her own right, the mother of the Messiah’s child and even his prophetic successor. The wealth of possibilities has inspired a wave of literature, both academic and popular, including Margaret George’s 2002 best-selling historical novel Mary, Called Magdalene. And it has gained Magdalene a new following among Catholics who see in her a potent female role model and a possible argument against the all-male priesthood. The woman who three Gospels agree was the first witness to Christ’s Resurrection is having her own kind of rebirth. Says Ellen Turner, who played host to an alternative celebration for the saint on her traditional feast day on July 22: “Mary [Magdalene] got worked over by the church, but she is still there for us. If we can bring her story forward, we can get back to what Jesus was really about.”
In 1988, the book Mary Magdalene: A Woman Who Showed Her Gratitude, part of a children’s biblical-women series and a fairly typical product of its time, explained that its subject “was not famous for the great things she did or said, but she goes down in history as a woman who truly loved Jesus with all her heart and was not embarrassed to show it despite criticism from others.” That is certainly part of her traditional resume. Many Christian churches would add her importance as an example of the power of Christ’s love to save even the most fallen humanity, and of repentance. (The word maudlin derives from her reputation as a tearful penitent.) Centuries of Catholic teaching also established her colloquial identity as the bad girl who became the hope of all bad girls, the saved siren active not only in the overheated imaginations of parochial-school students but also as the patron of institutions for wayward women such as the grim nun-run laundries featured in the new movie The Magdalene Sisters. In the culture at large, writer Kathy Shaidle has suggested, Magdalene is “the Jessica Rabbit of the Gospels, the gold-hearted town tramp belting out I Don’t Know How to Love Him.”
The only problem is that it turns out that she wasn’t bad, just interpreted that way. Mary Magdalene (her name refers to Magdala, a city in Galilee) first appears in the Gospel of Luke as one of several apparently wealthy women Jesus cures of possession (seven demons are cast from her), who join him and the Apostles and “provided for them out of their means.” Her name does not come up again until the Crucifixion, which she and other women witness from the foot of the Cross, the male disciples having fled. On Easter Sunday morning, she visits Jesus’ sepulcher, either alone or with other women, and discovers it empty. She learns–in three Gospels from angels and in one from Jesus himself–that he is risen. John’s recounting is the most dramatic. She is solo at the empty tomb. She alerts Peter and an unnamed disciple; only the latter seems to grasp the Resurrection, and they leave. Lingering, Magdalene encounters Jesus, who asks her not to cling to him, “but go to my brethren and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father … and my God.” In Luke’s and Mark’s versions, this plays out as a bit of a farce: Magdalene and other women try to alert the men, but “these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.” Eventually they came around.
Discrepancies notwithstanding, the net impression is of a woman of substance, brave and smart and devoted, who plays a crucial–perhaps irreplaceable–role in Christianity’s defining moment. So where did all the juicy stuff come from? Mary Magdalene’s image became distorted when early church leaders bundled into her story those of several less distinguished women whom the Bible did not name or referred to without a last name. One is the “sinner” in Luke who bathes Jesus’ feet with her tears, dries them with her hair, kisses them and anoints them with ointment. “Her many sins have been forgiven, for she loved much,” he says. Others include Luke’s Mary of Bethany and a third, unnamed woman, both of whom anointed Jesus in one form or another. The mix-up was made official by Pope Gregory the Great in 591: “She whom Luke calls the sinful woman, whom John calls Mary [of Bethany], we believe to be the Mary from whom seven devils were ejected according to Mark,” Gregory declared in a sermon. That position became church teaching, although it was not adopted by Orthodoxy or Protestantism when each later split from Catholicism.
What prompted Gregory? One theory suggests an attempt to reduce the number of Marys–there was a similar merging of characters named John. Another submits that the sinning woman was appended simply to provide missing backstory for a figure of obvious importance. Others blame misogyny. Whatever the motivation, the effect of the process was drastic and, from a feminist perspective, tragic. Magdalene’s witness to the Resurrection, rather than being acclaimed as an act of discipleship in some ways greater than the men’s, was reduced to the final stage in a moving but far less central tale about the redemption of a repentant sinner. “The pattern is a common one,” writes Jane Schaberg, a professor of religious and women’s studies at the University of Detroit Mercy and author of last year’s The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene: “the powerful woman disempowered, remembered as a whore or whorish.” As shorthand, Schaberg coined the term “harlotization.”
In 1969, in the liturgical equivalent of fine print, the Catholic Church officially separated Luke’s sinful woman, Mary of Bethany and Mary Magdalene as part of a general revision of its missal. Word has been slow in filtering down into the pews, however. (It hasn’t helped that Magdalene’s heroics at the tomb are still omitted from the Easter Sunday liturgy, relegated instead to midweek.) And in the meantime, more scholarship has stoked the fires of those who see her eclipse as a chauvinist conspiracy. Historians of Christianity are increasingly fascinated with a group of early followers of Christ known broadly as the Gnostics, some of whose writings were unearthed only 55 years ago. And the Gnostics were fascinated by Magdalene. The so-called Gospel of Mary [Magdalene], which may date from as early as A.D. 125 (or about 40 years after John’s Gospel), describes her as having received a private vision from Jesus, which she passes on to the male disciples. This role is a usurpation of the go-between status the standard Gospels normally accord to Peter, and Mary depicts him as mightily peeved, asking, “Did [Jesus] really speak with a woman without our knowledge?” The disciple Levi comes to her defense, saying, “Peter, you have always been hot-tempered … If the Savior made her worthy, who are you to reject her? Surely, the Savior loves her very well. That is why he loved her more than us.”
Them’s fightin’ words, especially when one remembers that the papacy traces its authority back to Peter. Of course, the Gnostic Gospels are not the Bible. In fact, there is evidence that the Bible was standardized and canonized precisely to exclude such books, which the early church leaders regarded as heretical for many non-Magdalene reasons. Nonetheless, feminists have been quick to cite Mary as evidence both of Magdalene’s early importance, at least in some communities, and as the virtual play-by-play of a forgotten gender battle, in which church fathers eventually prevailed over the people who never got the chance to be known as church mothers. “I think it was a power struggle,” says Schaberg, “And the canonical texts that we have [today] come from the winners.”
Schaberg goes further. In her book, she returns to John in light of the Gnostic writings and purports to find “fragments of a claim” that Jesus may have seen Magdalene as his prophetic successor. The position is thus far quite lonely. But it serves nicely to illustrate the way in which any retrieval of Magdalene as a “winner” inevitably shakes up current assumptions about male church leadership. After Pope John Paul II prohibited even the discussion of female priests in 1995, he cited “the example recorded in the Sacred Scriptures of Christ choosing his Apostles only from among men …” That argument would seem weakened in light of the “new” Magdalene, whom the Pope himself has acknowledged by the once unfashionable title “Apostle to the Apostles.” Chester Gillis, chair of the department of theology at Georgetown University, says conventional Catholics still feel that Mary Magdalene’s absence from many biblical scenes involving the male disciples, and specifically from the ordination-like ritual of the Last Supper, rule her out as a priest precedent. Gillis agrees, however, that her recalibration “certainly makes a case for a stronger role for women in the church.”
Meanwhile, the combination of catholic rethinking and Gnostic revelations have reanimated wilder Magdalene speculations, like that of a Jesus-Magdalene marriage. (“No other biblical figure,” Schaberg notes, “has had such a vivid and bizarre postbiblical life.”) The Gnostic Gospel of Philip describes Magdalene as “the one who was called [Jesus’] companion,” claiming that he “used to kiss her on her [mouth].” Most scholars discount a Jesus-Magdalene match because it finds little echo in the canonical Gospels once the false Magdalenes are removed. But it fulfills a deep narrative expectation: for the alpha male to take a mate, for a yin to Jesus’ yang or, as some neopagans have suggested, for a goddess to his god. Martin Luther believed that Jesus and Magdalene were married, as did Mormon patriarch Brigham Young.
The notion that Magdalene was pregnant by Jesus at his Crucifixion became especially entrenched in France, which already had a tradition of her immigration in a rudderless boat, bearing the Holy Grail, his chalice at the Last Supper into which his blood later fell. Several French kings promoted the legend that descendants of Magdalene’s child founded the Merovingian line of European royalty, a story revived by Richard Wagner in his opera Parsifal and again in connection with Diana, Princess of Wales, who reportedly had some Merovingian blood. (The Wachowski brothers, those cultural magpies, named a villain in The Matrix Reloaded Merovingian, filming him surrounded by Grail-like chalices. His wife in that film was played by Italian actress Monica Bellucci, who will also play Magdalene in Mel Gibson’s upcoming Jesus film … Sorry, this stuff is addictive.) The idea that Magdalene herself was the Holy Grail–the human receptacle for Jesus’ blood line–popped up in a 1986 best seller, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which inspired Brown’s Da Vinci Code. When Brown said recently, “Mary Magdalene is a historical figure whose time has come,” he meant a figure with a lot of mythic filagree.
Ellen Turner was 48 years old when she first learned that Mary Magdalene was not a whore. Through Catholic school and a Catholic college, she attests, “I thought about her in the traditional way, as a sinner.” But eight years ago, the 56-year-old technical writer tapped into a network of neo-Magdalenites through her connection with the liberal Catholic groups Call to Action and Futurechurch. The discovery that, as Turner puts it, Magdalene “got the shaft” started her thinking about how to change the situation. She was happy to find that the two organizations, which see Magdalene’s recovered image as an argument for their goal of a priesthood open to all those who feel called, coordinate celebrations around the world on her feast day.
Last month Turner and her husband Ray played host to such a celebration at their home in San Jose, Calif. About 30 participants drove in from as far away as Oakland. After meeting and greeting and strolling the meditation labyrinth in Turner’s backyard, the group held something resembling a church service, with an opening hymn, a blessing over the bread and wine and readings about Magdalene from the four Gospels. There was no priest, but Turner herself read what, if this were a Mass, might be a homily. “From the beginning,” she intoned as the sun sank over Silicon Valley, “her view has been ignored, unappreciated. The first to see the risen Lord–those with more power have sought to marginalize her. Yet she is faithful. She remains. She cannot be silenced.” –Reported by Lisa McLaughlin
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