The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction (28 page)

Finally, is John 20:1, 11-18, an older, independent unit of tradition that John has inserted here in an alien context? Remember, if it is, then we would have the historical root of the apostolic claim of Mary Magdalene. There certainly are, as we have seen, ample signs that two stories have been fused together as we read John 20:1-20, but which is earlier? I take John 20:1, 11-18, to be the original Johannine text, with John 20:2-20 (the Lukan-derived visit of Peter and his companion) as the subsequent addition, clumsily patched in. Then someone added the Doubting Thomas tale onto the end of that one. And everything in chapter 21 is additional, too. This means that the episode in which Mary seems to be the sole witness of the departing Jesus, even though a literary invention of John based on pieces of Matthew and Luke, was originally intended to be the sole resurrection scene in John’s gospel. Later scribes supplemented it, layer upon layer. In this case, we need not take the clash between Jesus’s telling her to tell the Twelve good-bye on the one hand and the subsequent appearances to the Twelve on the other as a sign of John’s making new use of an older story. No, there was no pre-Johannine unit of tradition depicting Mary as the sole witness to the resurrection. John himself cobbled together the scene from bits of earlier gospels.

What does this review of the gospel Easter stories portend for the question of Mary Magdalene as an apostle? I hope to have demonstrated, against my own earlier theory, that the crucial passage John 20:1, 11-18, has apparently been composed by the Fourth Evangelist or one of his redactors on the basis of Matthew’s redaction of Mark, plus a rewrite of Tobit 12:18-21, plus a turnabout of the rumor that Jesus’s body had merely been moved to an unknown location. The story is scarcely even about the Magdalene, much less about any supposed Magdalene Circle of Christians. Mary comes second-hand from Matthew and appears in John just to recognize Jesus and to verify his identity for the benefit of the reader.

BLACK MAGIC WOMAN

While any notion of Mary Magdalene as an apostle must be tenuously pieced together from gospel fragments that appear on the surface to say nothing of the sort, there are two familiar characterizations of the Magdalene that are overtly stated in the gospels. First, Mary is said (Luke 8:2; Mark 16:9) to have been possessed at one time by seven demons. We sometimes read that demon possession was a put-down commonly aimed at those perceived as heretics. The evidence cited for this generalization comes from John’s gospel. There, Jesus’s opponents cry out, “You have a demon!” (7:20) and “Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?” (8:48) and “He has a demon, and he is mad; why listen to him?” (10:20). And thus some urge that Mary gained the false stigma of having been possessed because she was a teacher of doctrines rejected by authorities of her day. And if that were so, runs the argument, Christians of a later date who had forgotten the Magdalene controversy might have misunderstood the “demon” charge and taken it literally.

But I do not think that will work. These texts from John seem to make more sense as accusations that Jesus
possesses
demons rather than being possessed
by
them. Indeed, isn’t that precisely the point in Mark 3:22-23, “He has Beelzebul, and it is only by the ruler of the demons that he expels demons”? The theory of exorcism was that the mightiest magicians could “bind the strong man,” then “despoil him of his possessions” by ordering him to send his subordinate devils packing. This rationale is still visible beneath a layer of redaction in Mark 3:27. On second reading, the passages from John seem to mean the same thing. They are accusations that Jesus is no saint but a mere magician. This is only reinforced by the jibe that he is “a Samaritan” as well as “having a demon.” There, he is being compared to the infamous Simon Magus, the magician. Thus we seem to be left with no parallel text that would allow us to understand Mary the demoniac as garbled version of “Mary the heretic, Mary the Gnostic.”

It is striking that the demoniac Mary business enters the gospel tradition only in a very late stage, that represented by Luke’s rewriting of Mark (chapter 8, verse 2) and the interpolated Markan Appendix (Mark 16:9). And as I have pointed out already, both passages have Jesus casting seven demons out of her, a sure mark of legend, folklore, or pious imagination. Where did the legend of Mary’s sevenfold possession come from, and why so late? We will see in just a moment.

ONLY HER HAIRDRESSER KNOWS FOR SURE

As is well known, Mary Magdalene has always been painted as a prostitute. Many or most scholars today reject this tradition because they can find no basis for it in the canonical gospels. That seems to imply it is a rather late legend, the product of clever interpreters combining various gospel characters about whom little is said. Early commentators gratuitously identified Mary Magdalene with both Mary of Bethany (John 12:1-3) and the “sinner” of Luke 7:36-38, both of whom are shown anointing Jesus with expensive perfume. And certainly that is no evidence at all.

But I think there
is
early gospel evidence for Mary’s earlier career as a prostitute. It is hidden in plain sight, preserved in the very epithet “Magdalene” itself. We know that Jewish anti-Christian satire ridiculed the doctrine of the virgin birth of Jesus by claiming that Jesus was the illegitimate son of Mary of Nazareth by a Roman soldier named Pandera. It seems obvious that “Jesus son of Pandera” is a cruel pun derived from “Jesus son of the
parthenos
(virgin).” Similarly, they confused Mary of Nazareth with Mary Magdalene and punned that “Magdalene” meant not “of Magdala,” supposedly a village in Galilee, but rather
m’gaddla
, “the hair curler,” a euphemism for a brothel madam, since elaborate hairstyling was regarded as the mark of a prostitute.
¹⁹
If “Mary the hairdresser” was Jesus’s mother, then he was the son of a Roman soldier and a Jewish prostitute. In this pun, we probably have the starting point of the tradition of Mary as a prostitute. But my guess is the rabbinical satirists intended no pun at all. The only liberty they took, probably more of a mistake, was to identify the two Marys. As J. B. Lightfoot suggested long ago, Aramaic-speaking Christians already referred to Mary as “the Madame,” “the Hairdresser.” And this epithet survived in the long-lived tradition of Mary the reformed prostitute.

Unlike Mary the demoniac, Mary the Madame (Magdalene) is attested early in the gospel tradition, as early as the character herself, in the Markan Passion narrative (Mark 15:47; 16:1). So when and why was the demoniac image added onto the earlier prostitute image? I think that later Christians grew uncomfortable with the importance assigned a whore in the sacred narrative, even a reformed one, and they sought to wash her of that stigma by reinterpreting “
m’gaddla
” as a reference to her hometown, assuming there was a town named Magdala. In just the same way, some scholars argue that “Jesus the Nazorean” originally denoted Jesus’s membership in the ascetical Nazorean sect, represented today by the Nasoreans or Mandaeans of Iraq. Once Christians became uncomfortable with a divine being (as they eventually considered him) being a disciple of mere humans they conveniently reinterpreted “Nazorean” as “Nazarene,” the one from Nazareth (a town, however, unattested in any roughly contemporary record). Again, “Iscariot” originally was an epithet for Judas, meaning either “the False One” or “the Dagger,” but the gospel writers seem no longer to realize this, taking it as another hometown name, as if it meant “Judas of Kirioth” (implict at John 13:26). So it was a common kind of reinterpretation.

DO YOU KNOW THE WAY TO MAGDALA?

Was there even a town called “Magdala” for Mary to have hailed from? That is highly doubtful. The King James Version of Matthew 15:39 mentions “Magdala,” but better manuscripts and modern translations read “Magadan.” Where did Matthew find this information? Not in Mark, for Mark’s version of the story (8:10) reads “Dalmanutha.” No town with either name appears either in the Old Testament or any other pre-Christian records. Codex Bezae, a fascinating manuscript with many valuable variant readings, has “Melagada” instead of Dalmanutha at Mark 8:10. There is even a marginal scribal note advising how copyists might make “Melagada” into “Magada,” something a bit closer to “Magdala”: “Insert
dal
after the
g
, erase the
da
.”
²⁰

All this may sound quite strange to anyone familiar with recent writings on Mary Magdalene. Some scholars wax bold to inform us about the details of Mary’s hometown even down to its economics.
²¹
Where did they get this “information”? First, from anachronistically late writings like the Jewish Talmuds, written centuries after Jesus.
²²
Second, by arbitrarily identifying various Galilean towns or archaeological sites with “Magdala” even though no ancient record does. You can’t just say that every time Josephus mentioned the fishing village of Taricheae he really meant Magdala. This is the kind of “Pinthe-tail-on-the-Bible” archaeology William Foxwell Albright and his disciples were famous for practicing: “If the Bible says it existed, then it must be there
some
place! There’s a set of ruins over there?
Bingo!
By golly, we’ve discovered Kadesh-Bilgameth!” This sort of thing is frowned upon today, except, of course, when the results happen to come in handy.

The greatest irony in the use of such late sources to secure a place name meaning for “Magdalene” pops up in the Talmud, where we read how “Magdala was destroyed because of prostitution” (
y. Ta’anit
4, 69c).
²³
Don’t you see what has happened here? The transformation of the epithet “Magdalene” meaning “harlot” into meaning “from Magdala” has carried with it the telltale echo of the original. Now “Magdala” has become a second Sodom, Mary implicitly being rescued like Lot, only because she (must have) repented before it was too late!

Now we can see why later Christians substituted demon possession as the negative condition from which Jesus must have redeemed Mary. You see, being a prostitute was a freely willed career choice. Demon possession was not. The demoniac was a victim, not a sinner. Thus, Mary as a prostitute appears early in the gospel tradition, while Mary the demoniac appears much later.

DISTAFF APOSTLE?

What can we say about the historical likelihood of Mary Magdalene being a prominent Christian leader, perhaps even esteemed by her admirers as an apostle? Much is made of this possibility in
The Da Vinci Code
, where, as in today’s gospel scholarship, it has become something of a dogma. What is the evidence on which a positive judgment might be based? King, as we have seen, takes the widespread second-century occurrence of Mary as a resurrection visionary and interlocutor with the Risen Jesus to imply that there was a historical Apostle Mary. But my analysis of the Easter traditions rules out such an inference as far as I am concerned. It seems likely to me that the whole role of Mary as a resurrection visionary stems from John 20:1, 11-18, which, in turn, is a Johannine rewrite of Matthew 28:9-10. From this mustard seed has the whole tree sprung.

MESSIANIC QUEEN?

Finally, is it possible for Mary and Jesus to have been married or at least to have been romantically involved? This notion, too, is central to
The Da Vinci Code
. Of course it is possible. As we have seen, the Gospel of Philip says, “Now Mary was the favorite of the Savior, and he often used to kiss her on the lips.” It is obvious that the erotic imagery is being used metaphorically in such passages, and yet who can discount the possibility that here, as in other cases, some notion, originally taken in a physical, material sense, has been “docetized,” its offense to squeamish readers removed by “not taking it literally”?

Again, there is something quite suggestive in the gospel depiction of Jesus traveling with unattached women (Mark 15:40-41; Luke 8:1-3). We are reminded of some of the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, where Andrew, Philip, Paul, and others preach the celibate version of Christianity and attract high-born women to follow them. As might be expected, this has the effect of alienating their husbands, since the women are now too sanctified to sleep with them. And the husbands can be excused for suspecting their wives have been seduced by some Svengali using their devotion cynically as an entrée to enjoy sex with them all. For instance, in the Acts of Philip, the irate husband of convert Nicanora gives her an ultimatum: “It will be a fine thing for thee to be cut off by the sword, or to see thee [thrust] from beside me [for] committing fornication with these foreign magicians; for I see that thou hast fallen into the madness of these deceivers.”
²⁴
The female following of Jesus in the gospels looks like nothing so much as this, leaving us to consider whether, a la the suspicions of the husbands in the Apocryphal Acts, Jesus had been using the group of women as his harem. And in view of parallel cases from the whole history of Utopian cults and communities, we cannot dismiss the possibility.

Still, possibility is not probability, as it seems to have become for upholders of the Teabing hypothesis. The notorious tendency of conservative apologists and New Age paperback writers alike is to leap from mere possibility to the right to believe. “If there might be space aliens, we can assume there are.” “If the idea of Atlantis is not impossible, we can take it for granted.” “If the traditional view of gospel authorship cannot be definitively debunked, we can go right on assuming its truth.” No, you can’t. And though Jesus might have had sex with one or many women or men, the mere possibility is of no help. He might have been a space alien, too. Some think he was. But historians don’t.