New Testament: The Case of Mary Magdalene
Feminist questions about the New Testament are even more sensitive than about the Hebrew Bible. In the kind of comprehensive survey we’re attempting today, a single speaker is going to cover the entire New Testament. You have already heard from Pam Milne about some of the things that have happened to Jane Schaberg because of her scholarly work on the New Testament. Perhaps part of this comes from the provocative nature of some of her titles. One was a book called The Illegitimacy of Jesus: A Feminist Theological Interpretation of the New Testament Infancy Narratives. I think I may have been responsible for the title of another article, “How Mary Magdalene Became a Whore,” published in Bible Review.The interesting thing is that this scholarly material—when you really evaluate it, it is indeed scholarly and not a diatribe—often enriches our understanding and appreciation of the biblical text, without destroying or denigrating faith or the text. Instead, it can deepen our understanding and enrich our faith.
Jane Schaberg received her Ph.D. at the place where Phyllis Trible now teaches, Union Theological Seminary in New York. Dr. Schaberg is professor of New Testament at the University of Detroit and has written several books and numerous scholarly articles. She will address us today on one of the most intriguing figures in the New Testament, Mary Magdalene.—H.S.
I would like to take this occasion to thank Hershel Shanks for the tremendous work he’s done in his publications. First of all, he has made available to students and the educated public the discussions and debates of contemporary biblical scholarship. Second, he has placed these discussions in the context of the visual arts through the centuries, thereby constantly reminding us that these texts are works of art (whatever else they may be, and however flawed). I often think of the line from Adrienne Rich that art can lie as well as tell the truth.
Third, he has put scholars in close dialogue with readers who take the time to write letters (as with the old MS. Magazine, the letters are sometimes the most interesting sections of Biblical Archaeology Review and Bible Review). Fourth, he has given scholars the opportunity and challenge of speaking clearly, simply, in a nontechnical way, about their basic assumptions, methods, ideas and results. This is extremely difficult to do in any field, and extremely important. With this simplicity, we begin to see more clearly fault lines, problems, shaky assumptions, as well as the beauty and compelling quality of various interpretations or approaches. Finally, I’d like to thank Hershel for his support of feminist scholarship.
My work as a critic of the New Testament, or Second Testament, differs in significant ways from the work of Hebrew Bible, or First Testament, critics because the two testaments are very different. In the Second Testament, we have 27 fairly short books, which include a wide range of literary types—letters, treatises, a sort of historical novel, an apocalypse, and four different accounts of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. All of these works focus, in one way or another, on that one figure—on his teaching, the causes and meaning of his death, the impact of his life and the significance of belief in his resurrection on the communities that gathered in his name and memory.
We have a much tighter time frame for the production of these 27 works than for the production of the First Testament. The works that comprise the Second Testament were composed, most likely, within a hundred years of the death of Jesus. But not in the order that makes it easy to trace historical and theological developments—not first, that is, the accounts of Jesus and then of his impact. Instead, first we have seven or eight letters of Paul, plus a few attributed to him. Then we have the written accounts of Jesus’ life and other writings. The stories of Jesus, moreover, are not eyewitness accounts to be taken at face value as reportage. They are careful compositions, interweaving and designing tradition and creativity in response to changing situations. Second Testament critics are interested in the history of the founder and the movement as well as in the final shape of the 27 documents and the ideas, beliefs and ideologies they present.
Another reason our work is different from that of Hebrew Bible scholars is that we live in a country or (speaking more widely) in a Western culture that, for some purposes, considers itself primarily Christian. We have to deal, in countries like the U.S., with Christian fundamentalism and its powerful backlash. All of us on this panel share the situation of working also within the backlash against feminism.
What I’d like to do today is look at some of the major problems and themes that interest feminist/womanist Second Testament scholars and at our invitation to question, challenge and answer these perplexing and powerful texts. A womanist is a black feminist or feminist of color; the term was coined by Alice Walker1 and defined by Delores S. Williams. Like white feminists, womanists affirm the full humanity of women but also “critique white feminist participation in the perpetuation of white supremacy, which continues to dehumanize black women.”2 Then I want to show how research on the figure of Mary Magdalene, a Gospel character, illustrates and focuses some of these concerns.
There are eight areas of feminist/womanist interest I would identify as major:
1. The history (as far as this can be constructed) of women in the early Christian movement. Work has been done on women in the Jesus movement during his lifetime and on women in the Pauline communities, especially at Corinth and Rome. Studies have been done on their prophetic and leadership roles and on what may have attracted them to the movement. This interest of ours shifts the focus away from the quest for the historical Jesus as an individualistic, unique male genius to the quest for a man and his close associates and their relationships to one another.
2. Egalitarianism. The egalitarian makeup and vision of that early movement is of great interest to feminists, as well as the gradual, subsequent patriarchalization of the movement, which is documented in even the earliest texts. This patriarchalization is evaluated as a tragic betrayal but one that is, hopefully, reversible today. Here I would say womanist thought in particular makes a profound contribution with its optimistic insistence that the egalitarian vision is still for everyone, for women and men, boys and girls.
3. The Jewish context of this movement and the egalitarianism of that context. This is a correction of an earlier trend in feminist New Testament scholarship, now recognized as “blaming the Jews for patriarchy,” i.e., setting up the Jesus movement as feminist in sharp distinction to Judaism, which was wrongly imagined as monolithically sexist.
4. The living images of women in or derived from the Second Testament and how these images contribute to the shaping of gender ideals and roles, e.g., the Madonna Virgin Mother; the sexual woman as a symbol of evil (the great whore of Babylon in Revelation, part of the long prophetic tradition that Pam mentioned); or women as silent, submissive, noncommissioned supporters of the movement who are nearly invisible in its communities.
5. The Crucifixion and Resurrection. Reexamination of how we understand the significance of Jesus’ death, e.g., his death as a sacrificial atonement, especially when the understanding has fed into acceptance and glorification of suffering (of women, men, children, animals) and endorsed domination. I expect there will also be a feminist reexamination of the meaning of believing in resurrection. What are we to make of the element of embodiment, of the utopian vision drawn from apocalyptic literature?
6. Canon. Feminist scholars stress the need to go beyond the boundaries of canon, first to understand the canonical works in context and second to provide access to alternative religious visions. We want to trace the history of elements that later became marginal, experiments in community and leadership that were repudiated, and to uncover the contemporary relevance of the “roads not taken” by the so-called mainline church.
7. The fostering of midrashic creativity. Midrash, a rabbinic genre more than 1,500 years old, is an imaginative engagement with the biblical text, both with what is in the text and what is not, with what it offers and what it lacks, the ways it helps, the ways it hinders. Midrash can lead to recognition of the ambiguity and incompleteness and imperfection of the tradition as well a way of using one’s own experience as a primary source of authority.
8. The re-imagining of God. An essential part of uncovering or constructing our history and voices is the theological project of conceiving of God/dess (as Ruether puts it) as a deity of all the people, a deity imagined by all, one that empowers all. In Second Testament studies, re-imagining God has taken the form of speaking of God as a nonpatriarchal father (God’s fatherhood cancels the patriarchal fatherhood of humans; “call no man father” is a saying of Jesus [Matthew 23:9]). Interest has also been focused on speaking of God as Sophia (Wisdom), the female figure found in Hebrew Bible wisdom literature and later apocrypha.
Each of these aspects of our current work expands and deepens our loyalties or, to put it another way, breaks the boundaries set by tradition, religious organizations, canon and convention. Now I’d like to look at the figure of Mary Magdalene from these eight angles.
1. The history. It takes some effort and concentration to separate what we know of the historical Mary Magdalene from the repentant whore of later legend. The historical Miriam of Migdal, a town on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, was a member of the Jesus movement, probably in some leadership capacity (she is always named first among the women) and perhaps a source of financial support. In Luke 8:1–3 and Mark 16:9 (the Markan Appendix), we are told that she had been exorcised of seven demons—that is, she had been gravely ill and was healed.
All four Gospels of the Second Testament speak of her as following Jesus to Jerusalem, standing by at his crucifixion and burial and finding his empty tomb. Except in the Gospel of Luke, she is said to have been sent, alone or with other women, to tell the disciples that Jesus had been raised from the dead. According to three of the accounts (Matthew 28:9–10; John 20:14–18; the Markan Appendix, Mark 16:9), she was the first one to whom the risen Jesus appeared.
If not for her, there might have been no Christian story. More than 150 years ago, David F. Strauss and Ernest Renan rightly considered her, after Jesus, the founder of Christianity, although they both attributed her belief in the resurrection of Jesus to near madness and romantic passion.3
2. Egalitarianism. Mary Magdalene’s prominence (and the prominence of other women both in the Gospels and in the later communities) is a factor in the feminist discovery of and insistence on the egalitarian nature of the early Jesus movement. So too are the following factors: the absence of any sexist saying attributed to Jesus; his implicit criticism and subversion of patriarchy; his positive use of feminine symbols (such as the sweeping woman as the image of God); his open table fellowship with “sinners”; his reference to the Sophia of God and his understanding of himself as a prophet of Sophia.
But this is not a perfect proto-feminist picture. We have, to quote Judith Plaskow, “no evidence [that] Jesus was a champion of women’s rights in the contemporary sense. He is never portrayed as arguing for women’s prerogatives, demanding changes in particular restrictive laws that affect women or debating the Pharisees (or anyone else) on the subject of gender.”4 Nor is there an explicit description in the Gospels of women and men working together, although we have clear evidence from Paul of men and women as co-workers. So we may question, as Hisako Kinakawa does, whether or not real collaboration was ever realized in Jesus’ lifetime.5
Another problematic bit of data about the historical Jesus is the probability that he chose 12 men to represent the eschatological dream of a restored Israel (Matthew 19:28; Luke 22:28–30), an image that eventually, as a result of Luke’s concentration of authority in “the 12 apostles,” helped to crowd women out of leadership roles.
Whatever life was actually like in the Jesus movement, and in spite of the important presence of women, the evidence shows that when events were recorded and remembered later, women’s presence quickly began to be erased. There is no call narrative for Mary Magdalene (or any other woman) and no discussion or teaching during Jesus’ ministry involving her. She is spoken to only by the figure(s) at the empty tomb and by the risen Jesus. Dialogue with her as an individual occurs only in the tomb scene in the Fourth Gospel. Her Easter witness is challenged by the male disciples, and in Mark 14:8 it is not even given, as she flees silent from the tomb.
Except in the Gospels, she is not mentioned in the Second Testament, not even in 1 Corinthians 15:5–8, where those who received resurrection appearances of Jesus authorizing and authenticating their leadership are listed. In Luke 24:34, as in 1 Corinthians 15:5, the first appearance is said to be to Peter (Cephas). John 20:8 presents the Beloved Disciple (a male whose name is not given) as the first one to believe.
Analyzing differences among the four canonical Gospel accounts of Jesus’ crucifixion, empty tomb and post-resurrection appearances, we find that, as early as the Second Testament period, the powerful role of Mary Magdalene was in the process of being diminished and distorted. In the memories, traditions and rethinking of the Pauline and Lukan communities, her prominence was challenged by Peter; in Johannine circles, by the Beloved Disciple. Her partial effacement is related to the suppression of women’s presence in the Epistles, which is also reflected in the household codes, which order the family in pyramidal, patriarchal fashion, and to commands that women be silent and subservient in the churches.
3. Jewish Context. Understanding the Jewish context of the egalitarianism of the Jesus movement (in that brief moment before it was squelched) means understanding that Jesus’ acceptance of women and the strong presence of women in the movement represent “not a victory over early Judaism but a possibility within it.”6 Feminist studies of early Judaism (especially of epigraphical and archaeological evidence and nonrabbinic writings) indicate that some Jewish women may have been leaders in the synagogue and educated in Torah; they were also able to divorce their husbands, undertake business ventures, engage in prophetic, ecstatic activities, move around with comparative freedom and choose a communal lifestyle.
The historical Miriam of Migdal was a Jewish woman who was independent (her name is never associated with the name of a husband or son) and was linked with other Jewish women and men in a Jewish religious enterprise of historic significance. Participation required profound understanding and a creative grasp of Jewish traditions and possibilities, as well as courageous decisions to follow through in the face of Jesus’ murder by the Roman government.
4. Images of Women. A fourth aspect of interest to feminist scholars is the patriarchal manipulation of images of women in order to reinforce setting up and maintaining social structures of inequality and domination. Patriarchal images of women were used to blame them, to warn them, to confine them, to undermine their self-confidence and talents, to wipe out their history and to idealize them. In short, they were used to hold them in a primary role as enablers of men.
The image of Mary Magdalene is a fascinating example of this manipulation. In spite of the Second Testament evidence we have discussed, the word most people free-associate with her is “whore.” She is the repentant whore, the whore who loved and was forgiven by Jesus. This image often reappears today, from a song in Whoopie Goldberg’s Sister Act to Scorcese’s The Last Temptation of Christ to Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice’s “Jesus Christ Superstar.” Once you notice it, you begin to see it everywhere. The image now has a nearly 2,000 year history in legend and art.
How did Mary Magdalene, who is mentioned by name only in the texts discussed above, become a whore? By the post-Second Testament conflation, or blending and tangling, of texts that mention her with texts that do not. Especially there is conflation with the highly artistic and memorable scene in Luke 7 where the sinful “woman in the city” interrupts a meal at the house of a Pharisee, where Jesus is a guest, and, weeping, bathes his feet with her tears, dries them with her hair, kisses them and anoints them.7 This woman’s actions are interpreted as a living parable of love resulting from and leading to forgiveness. Whereas the Second Testament accounts of Mary Magdalene are silent about her background and motivation, Luke 7, a text that has nothing to do with her, provides a background (prostitution) and motivation (love grateful for forgiveness, shading into romantic love) for Mary Magdalene, which became the dominant facets of our memory of her. The conflation began as early as the second or third century C.E.
Legends associated mainly with Provence in southern France provide a post-Gospel life for the Magdalene. In one strand, she spends the end of her life, 30 solitary years, in dramatic repentance in the dank, dripping grotto of Saint Baume, a high cave inaccessible to everyone but angels and people with very strong hiking shoes. In the post-Reformation period, when the Roman church stressed the sacrament of penance, the ascetic, weeping Magdalene was a popular instrument of propaganda. In thousands of artistic depictions of her, her past life as a whore was not forgotten but was crudely signaled by complete or partial nudity and provocative Playmate-like poses of “pious pornography.”8
She became the patron saint of prostitutes, called Magdalenes. Portraits of mistresses and wives posing as the Magdalene were commissioned. Take a tour through any major art museum, and you can follow her histrionic, voluptuous, beautiful images and ponder the distance between them and her shadowy Gospel figure. The distortion of her image, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has remarked, shows the deep distortion in the attitudes toward, and in the self-understanding and identity of, Christian women and men.9
The Magdalene of legend and art is woman reduced to wild sexuality, which must be punished, woman supposedly fully explained by romantic love. She is a male fantasy. At root, these legends are a reaction against her power and authority as the major Christian witness, which they obscure. By thinking back to the historical figure, women can begin to reassert control of our religious models and thus of our religious lives.
5. The Crucifixion and Resurrection. A fifth area of feminist interest is the meaning of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. One of the characters in a book by mystery writer P. D. James calls the cross the “stigma of the barbarism of officialdom and of man’s ineluctable cruelty.”10 Womanist scholars have been especially trenchant in their criticism of the acceptance and glorification of suffering and sacrifice that is part of Christian theology. Delores S. Williams, for example, writes, “There is nothing divine in the blood of the cross … [which] only represents historical evil trying to defeat good.” Redemption, Williams argues, comes not through Jesus’ death but through his ministerial vision of righting relationships, his life of resistance.11
We have, as far as we know, no record of the thoughts or impressions of the women at the cross of Jesus. I like to think their reactions were similar to the reactions of the protagonist in Margaret Atwood’s 1972 novel, Surfacing, when she comes upon a dead heron strung up on a tree, an act of meaningless “American” cruelty. To her, the heron is a sacred object, like Christ to the Christian. She identifies with the heron but also feels a “sickening complicity, sticky as glue, blood on my hands, as though I had been there and watched without saying no or doing anything to stop it.”12 As she comes to self-awareness, she divorces herself from the interpretations men use to justify their crimes. 13 She understands the life power rising from death, and she proclaims: “This above all, to refuse to be a victim … [to] give up the old belief that I am powerless.” Eventually, that is, she begins to say no. Quite a different reaction than, say, Paul or Luke’s to the cross of Christ!14
We do have vestiges of the witness of women associated with the empty tomb. This tradition, which appears in all the canonical Gospels as well as the Gospel of Peter, is not much in favor with many male historical Jesus scholars, such as Crossan,15 Mack16 and Borg.17 They view the tradition of the empty tomb as a late historical addition and associate it with a crass understanding of resurrection, primarily because of the inherent assumption that it matters what happened to the corpse, as opposed to the spirit, of Jesus.
Feminist scholars are re-examining those assumptions of lateness and crassness. They are raising the question of how the testimony of women about the empty tomb and “appearances” to them (revelations) fit into the schema of development of the Easter faith. How are we to understand the empty tomb tradition (“he is not here”; the corpse is not here) in the light of Jewish apocalyptic expectations and the feminist interest in embodiment? How and why does it matter what happened to the corpse of Jesus?18
6. Canon. A study of the Magdalene in noncanonical documents of the first four centuries C.E. shows the importance of breaking out of the canon. Magdalene appears in several Gnostic writings, such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, Sophia of Jesus Christ, Dialogue of the Savior, Pistis Sophia and the Gospel of Mary (Magdalene). These works preserve and develop a tradition of her authority and the jealous rivalry or conflict between her and Peter and other male disciples. In the Gnostic tradition, when she is challenged, the Savior (or, once, Levi) defends her. Neither silenced nor excluded, she speaks out boldly and powerfully, entering into long dialogues with the risen Jesus and comforting, correcting and encouraging his male disciples. In these works she is a visionary, a spiritual guide and teacher praised for her understanding and often identified as the intimate “companion” of the Savior.
Unlike the Mary Magdalene of later Western legend and art, the Gnostic Magdalene is not, and was not, a prostitute or sinner. She does not represent repentance or forgiveness or chastised sexuality. Nor is she the Savior’s romantic or sexual partner, his favorite woman.19 Rather, the erotic element, which is present in the Gnostic works (Jesus is said to have kissed her and preferred her), appears to indicate a mystical communion. Love is based on her intellectual and spiritual grasp of the Savior’s teachings.
Mary Magdalene functioned in Gnostic circles both as a representative of the female followers of Jesus and as a symbol of the importance and leadership of women among the Gnostics. She may have been a prophetic role model, on whose memory women in some circles, for a time, based their successful claims to power. The hypothesis that she reflects the prominent roles women actually played in these communities as leaders and as sources of revelation and authority is difficult to test but is, nevertheless, in the process of being tested. Thanks in great part to the ongoing analysis of Gnostic materials, we can now glimpse the tradition that was displaced, distorted, lost and overlaid by the legend of Mary Magdalene the whore.
We can glimpse the early Christian arguments in favor of women’s leadership, allowing us to see that views excluding women were only one side of a hotly debated issue. As Karen King notes, the exclusion from the canon, under the label of heresy, of “every significant type of early Christianity which supported women’s leadership” is a fact that we cannot ignore. “To raise the issue of canonical authority,” she writes, “means asking why these traditions have been labeled as wrong (‘heretical’), and how the canon became closed.” The “heresy” involved understanding “inspiration” as ongoing, as dwelling among people rather than in texts, and of prophetic experience as the basis of spiritual authority.20 This leads also to a reevaluation of “heresy.”
7. Midrashic Creativity. Women and men, in offices, workshops, study groups, classrooms and even churches and synagogues in many countries, are creating midrash off the springboard of the canonical texts. 21 Let me mention particularly the feminist midrash of Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Feminist Revision and the Bible, and her new book that’s just come out, The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions.
The Magdalene material (canonical and noncanonical, legendary and artistic) is interesting stuff to work with in this regard. Focus for a minute on biblical intertextuality, which involves such ventures as these. One might ask oneself or one’s students to:
• rewrite the ending of the Gospel of Mark (which ends with the women fleeing the empty tomb in fear and silence)
• write an ending to Mark that might have been suppressed by some early Christians
• imagine the on-the-road experiences of women in the Jesus movement
• name and get rid of the seven demons of the Magdalene
• express the thoughts of the Magdalene at the cross
• create a dialogue between the historical Magdalene and the unnamed woman in Luke 7 or the Magdalene’s repentant prostitute legendary self or her images in the art museums
These imaginative exercises require tapping into your own anger and hope and power, your own experiences. In contrast to the deformed images of Magdalene, feminist midrash is an attempt to find a different Magdalene, to chart a steady course between the shoals of romantic love and penitential grovelling.
This Mary Magdalene will not moan about her past whoring and will not be defined by her sexual attractiveness. She will be a woman redeemed but not rendered sexless,22 a mystic and a thinker. She will have new things to say, especially if her class or race is imagined in different ways, as when Alicia Suskin Ostriker imagines Lilith as a black woman.23 In the absence of historical information about Mary Magdalene, we can follow a different trajectory. Rather than drawing her image from the Second Testament texts conventionally associated with her (the “sinner” in Luke 7, the woman taken in adultery in John 8, the silent, contemplative Mary of Bethany at the feet of Jesus in Luke 10), we can draw instead on the story of the unnamed woman in Mark 14, whose anointing of Jesus is a prophetic act of power.24
8. Re-imagining God. The re-imagined God of the re-imagined and reconstructed Mary Magdalene is quite different from the God said to have dishonored Miriam in the Hebrew Bible (like a father spitting in his daughter’s face), the God who sent Hagar back into slavery or the God who remained silent at the abandonment of Tamar, the Levite’s concubine and Jephthah’s daughter, different from the God thought to countenance the silencing of women prophets, the covering of women’s heads, the subservience of women to men (e.g., 1 Timothy 2:8–15). The God whom feminist scholars are teaching us to re-imagine as Sophia (Wisdom) sends women prophets as well as men, stands by them, is justified by them, notices and remembers when their blood is shed (Luke 7:35; Matthew 18:34–35).
In the wake of the return of the goddesses, to use Tikva’s phrase, we are in the midst of a profound change in cultural consciousness, a new understanding of the feminine in relation to the divine. Feminist thought represents this transformation in consciousness, which demands the transformation of social forms and modes of anion and responds to them. The aim, as the motto of the journal Feminist Studies puts it, is “not just to interpret women’s experiences but to change women’s condition.” This means dissolving old loyalties, in terms of our conversation here, loyalties to canon (sacred texts), doctrine, orthodoxy, gender roles, versions of history, understanding of authority, exclusive communities and even religions.
Virginia Woolf called “freedom from unreal loyalties” a great teacher25 of women. Once women, she wrote, have some wealth, some knowledge, and some service to real loyalties, they “can enter the professions and escape the risks that make them undesirable.” Elsewhere she wrote, “As a woman, I have no country.”26As women we also have no religion. Or the religion we do have is considered heresy, as males define it.27
Feminist scholarly work on the figure of Mary Magdalene is restoring the historical figure and her potential to inspire, instruct and energize. This work is aided by 20th-century methodologies and discoveries like the Gnostic documents from Nag Hammadi. But we have also found, with regard to the Bible as well as other subjects, that Foucault was right when he said society does not suddenly discover or rediscover truth, for example, the truth that Mary Magdalene was a leader, not a whore. Changes in politics govern what is accepted as truth. In other words, something is shifting in the relations of power.28 Our very presence here on this panel illustrates this shift.
Feminist questions about the New Testament are even more sensitive than about the Hebrew Bible. In the kind of comprehensive survey we’re attempting today, a single speaker is going to cover the entire New Testament. You have already heard from Pam Milne about some of the things that have happened to Jane Schaberg because of her scholarly work on the New Testament. Perhaps part of this comes from the provocative nature of some of her titles. One was a book called The Illegitimacy of Jesus: A Feminist Theological Interpretation of the New Testament Infancy Narratives. I think I may have been responsible for the title of another article, “How Mary Magdalene Became a Whore,” published in Bible Review.The interesting thing is that this scholarly material—when you really evaluate it, it is indeed scholarly and not a diatribe—often enriches our understanding and appreciation of the biblical text, without destroying or denigrating faith or the text. Instead, it can deepen our understanding and enrich our faith.
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