The Deification of Mary Magdalene

New Images of the Magdalene

The idea that Mary Magdalene was the wife of Jesus did not originate in 2003 with publication of The Da Vinci Code, but it was Dan Brown’s mega-best-seller that galvanized the imaginations of millions of readers (Brown, 2003). According to the novel, the Holy Grail of medieval legend was not the literal cup Jesus used at the Last Supper but his wife, Mary Magdalene, who was pregnant with their child at the time. The great art-historical clue to this truth is the famous Da Vinci fresco, in which the feminine-looking figure leaning at the right hand of Jesus is not the beloved John, as has traditionally been thought, but the beloved Mary, signified by the letter M formed by positioning of the holy couple. The Gnostic Gospels, especially the Gospel of Philip which calls Mary Jesus’ ‘companion’ (Gospel of Philip 36) and claims that he kissed her often (Gospel of Philip 59), witness to the marriage. After the crucifixion, Mary and her child, a daughter named Sarah, fled by sea to the coast of Gaul, where they became the ancestors of the royal bloodline of the Merovingians, whose lineage combines both the royal dynasties of David (Jesus), and Saul (Mary Magdalene). One of the main characters in the novel is the symbolically named Sophie Neveu, a descendant of Mary Magdalene and Jesus, who accompanies the hero, Robert Langdon, on his quest for the truth about the origins of Christianity.

A less melodramatic but extremely prominent feature of the novel is that Langdon, a ‘professor of religious symbology’ at Harvard, makes these discoveries in the course of his research for a book on Symbols of the Lost Sacred Feminine. The secret of Mary Magdalene is not simply that she is the wife of Jesus and the mother of his royal heir, but that she is the embodiment of the sacred feminine who to this day is worshipped by members of the esoteric Priory of Sion as ‘the Goddess, the Holy Grail, the Rose, and the Divine Mother’ (Brown, 2003: 334). The union of Jesus and Mary points to the reality of sex as a ‘mystical, spiritual act’ in which ‘man’ achieves the ‘spark of divinity … through union with the sacred feminine’, and through which woman, presumably, unites with the sacred masculine (Brown, 2003: 408). Da Vinci cites the main ‘academic’ sources of this information as the works of Margaret Starbird (1993, 1998) and Holy Blood, Holy Grail. The latter work, by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln (1983), was the first to popularize the theory that the Grail was really the royal bloodline of Jesus and Mary passed down through the Merovingian dynasty. This secret knowledge was preserved by the Knights Templar and the Priory of Sion, a secret order supposedly dedicated to restoring the Merovingians to the throne of France since the Middle Ages (actually a twentieth-century hoax) (Bellevie, 2005: 239-44). One source of the art-historical speculations cited in the Da Vinci Code is The Templar Revelation (Picknett and Prince, 1997), in which Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince develop a convoluted conspiracy theory where Jesus plots to usurp Simon Magus’ role as his teacher John the Baptist’s successor, and Mary Magdalene is a priestess of Isis who initiated Jesus into the sacred mysteries of the goddess through ritualized sex. Picknett has since published a book entitled Mary Magdalene: Christianity’s Hidden Goddess, where she connects the suppression of Mary’s true identity as an Isiac priestess (or possibly a Mandean high priestess), Jesus’ equal and consort, to the occultation of the Hebrew Goddess (Picknett, 2003: 149-61). For Picknett, Mary is ‘perhaps the most important woman in history’ (Picknett, 2003: 241; italics Picknett’s), Christianity’s ‘black goddess’ whose divinity is only now on the cusp of recognition (Picknett, 2003: 234).

Margaret Starbird

While works like The Da Vinci Code, Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Templar Revelation can (and have been) easily dismissed as sensational and far-fetched money-makers, the writings of Margaret Starbird reflect a sincere search for historical and – more importantly – spiritual truth. The citation of her books by Dan Brown has gained her a great deal of attention and fame, but unlike the other authors in Da Vinci character Leigh Teabing’s library, Starbird genuinely challenges biblical scholars to engage with her works and notices when they do not (Starbird, 2005:149). Although her methods, arguments and conclusions do not always stand up to scholarly scrutiny, some of her exegetical insights merit attention, and, as I will argue, her central thealogical assertion is highly relevant to Christian feminist theo/alogy.

One of Starbird’s central claims is that contrary to the consensus of contemporary biblical scholarship, Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany are actually the same person (Starbird, 1993, 1998, 2005). This means that, for Starbird, the traditional Catholic view that the Mary who anointed Jesus prior to the crucifixion was both Mary Magdalene and the sister of Martha and Lazarus is correct. Starbird is well aware that the Eastern churches have never accepted the conflation of the two Marys, and that the Roman Catholic Church repudiated it in 1969 (Starbird, 2005: 23). For Starbird, however, it is important for the pre-eminent female disciple to be the woman who anointed Jesus because the anointing was more than simply an extravagant gesture of hospitality, or even a prophetic act of anointing for burial. Rather, it echoes the Ancient Near Eastern ritual of the hieros gamos, in which the royal priestess anoints her sacred king in preparation for his symbolic death and resurrection:

Anyone at that time and place could have identified the woman who anointed the king and met him later, after a liturgical pause of several days, resurrected in the garden. After performing a ceremonial nuptial rite proclaiming his kingship, the royal bride enjoyed the prerogative to unite in the chamber with her consort. The nuptial anointing ceremony itself bore obvious symbolic associations with anointing of the masculine by feminine secretions during the joyful consummation in the secluded bridal chamber (Starbird, 2005: 49).

Participation in such a ritual requires that the woman be both of high status (pre-eminent disciple) and the Bride of Jesus the Bridegroom.

A linchpin in Starbird’s argument that Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany were the same woman is that contrary to the majority of biblical scholars who regard the term magdalēnē as derived from the Galilean town of Migdal/Magdala, she notes that there is no reference to such a town in sources contemporary with Jesus (Starbird, 2005: 52-55, 59-61). The city at the site of present day Mejdel/Migdal was consistently called Tarichea by Josephus, never Magdala; likewise Strabo (Geography of Palestine 16.2, 42), Pliny the Elder (Natural History 5.71), Suetonius (Life of the Caesars, Titus 4), and other contemporaneous sources (Starbird, 2005: 52-55). The only first-century references to such a place are found in one variant of Mark 8.10 and one of Matthew 15.39; in both verses, the preferred readings are respectively Dalmanutha and Magadan (De Boer, 1997: 21). Starbird speculates that after the town’s destruction during the Jewish War (70 ce), the place was renamed Magdala (‘Tower’), as reflected in the rabbinic references to Magdala (Migdal Nunayah, Migdal Sebayah), which, according to the rabbis, had been destroyed for its sins (Starbird, 2005, 58-59; De Boer, 1997: 23). Beginning in the fourth century, Christian pilgrims mistook the renamed town for the birthplace of Mary Magdalene (Starbird, 2005: 56). Thus, Mary Magdalene could not, like Jesus the Nazarene (Chilton, 2005: 19), have been named after her birthplace because there was no such place as Magdala during her lifetime; rather, ‘Magdalene’ is a title derived from Micah 4.8-11, which addresses the Migdal-eder, the ‘watchtower of the flock’, the daughter of Zion deprived of her king, ‘the desolate bride crying over her deceased bridegroom king. … the Magdalene in her role as Daughter of Zion – the profaned and denigrated bride of Jesus forced into exile …’ (Starbird, 2005: 62). The nuptial imagery recurs in the post-resurrection encounter between Mary and Jesus at the garden tomb (Jn 20.11-18), which recalls the lament of the goddess over her beloved, recalling ‘the cults of Tammuz, Osiris, Ba’al, Attis, Adonis, and other tortured and sacrificed pagan gods whose bride mourns the death of her mutilated mate. This is the ‘never-ending story’ that is repeated in Micah 4, when the Daughter of Sion mourns her perished king and counselor, and that is once again re-enacted at the tomb of Jesus’ (Starbird, 2005: 64; cf. Wakeman, 1982: 26; Apostolos-Cappadona, 2006: 94).

Although I still lean toward the hypothesis that Mary Magdalene was named after her hometown, which, like other locations in ancient Palestine, went by both Aramaic and Greek names (e.g. the Sea of Galilee/Lake Tiberias) (De Boer, 1997: 23), Starbird’s championing of the identification of the two Marys deserves some consideration. The family of Mary, Martha and Lazarus is identified with Bethany only in John’s Gospel (Jn 11.1; 12.1); in Luke 10.38-42, Mary and Martha simply live in a village somewhere on the way to Jerusalem. In John’s version of the anointing scene, Jesus tells Judas to leave Mary alone, and to let her keep the ointment for his burial (Jn 12.7), implying that she will visit the burial site. Although in John it is Nicodemus who binds up Jesus’ body with expensive spices (Jn 19.39-40), Mary Magdalene visits the tomb on the first day of the week (Jn 20.1), and after running to tell Peter and the beloved disciple about the empty tomb (Jn 20.2-10), Mary reappears at the tomb weeping in (Jn 20.11), and her encounter with the risen Christ ensues (20.12-18). As Starbird notes, in the Gospels, the only named characters pointedly said to be ‘loved’ by Jesus are ‘Martha and her sister and Lazarus’ (Jn 11.5); the sisters send word to Jesus that ‘the man he loves’ is sick (Jn 11.3) (Starbird, 2005: 30). It is thus plausible that the beloved disciple is Lazarus, to whom, with Peter, his sister Mary naturally runs with the news that Jesus’ body is missing. I would add that in John, unlike the synoptics, Mary Magdalene is never introduced as one of Jesus’ female followers from Galilee (Mk 15.40-41; Mt. 27.55-56; Lk. 8.1-3); she simply appears at the foot of the cross (Jn 19.25) and at the empty tomb (Jn 20.1, 11). Prior to this, the only ‘Mary’ (Mariam) mentioned in the Gospel of John is Mary of Bethany. Thus the blurring, if not conflation, of the two Marys began long before Gregory the Great’s notorious pronouncement in 591 that Mary Magdalene was one and the same as Mary of Bethany and the sinner purged of seven demons (Mk 16.9; Lk. 8.2): John’s vagueness as to whether ‘Mary’ is one character or two leaves exegetical space for identifying her with the family at Bethany. Post-biblical Christian writers prior to Gregory associate Mary Magdalene with Martha; Hippolytus portrays ‘Mary and Martha’ as the first witnesses to the resurrection, where he dubs both of them ‘apostles to the apostles’ (On the Song of Songs 25.6 ) (Cerrato, 1997: 294). J.A. Cerrato notes that Hippolytus does not actually use the term Magdalene with regard to the Mary at the tomb, and speculates that his commentary is ‘one of the earliest writers to conflate Mary of Bethany with Mary Magdalene, a process incipient in the literature of this period’ (Cerrato, 1997: 295). The Epistula Apostolorum 9.3 places ‘Sarah, Martha and Mary Magdalene’ at the tomb (compare with 10.3). Likewise, the second Greek version of the Gospel of Nicodemus/Acts of Pilate (4^th to 5^th century ce) places Martha, Mary Magdalene, Salome and other virgins with Jesus’ mother at the cross. In Pistis Sophia (4^th century ce), Mary, sometimes specified as ‘Magdalene’, sometimes not, is credited with 39 of the 46 questions posed to Jesus by his disciples (De Boer, 1997: 65). One of Jesus’ other female interlocutors is Martha (Pistis Sophia 38, 39, 57, 73, 80), who, like Mary, is commended for her words (39). Starbird asserts that prior to Gregory, Tertullian, Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine all regarded Mary Magdalene as the sister of Lazarus from Bethany (Starbird, 2005: 58).

In addition to the biblical traditions, Starbird’s evidence for the marriage of Jesus and Mary is supplemented by highly speculative interpretations of medieval French legend and the supposed doctrines of the Cathars. However, if, as I have shown above, the Gospel of John is ambiguous as to whether Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany are the same person, both the anointing at Bethany and ‘Mary’s’ post-resurrection encounter with Jesus are, as Starbird suggests, highly amenable to nuptial interpretations where Jesus the Bridegroom encounters Mary the Bride (compare with Jn 3.29). The erotic overtones of the anointing scene – especially the Lucan and Johannine versions (Lk. 7.36-50; Jn 12.1-8; compare with Song 1.12) – have often been noted (Corley, 1993: 124-26; McWhirter, 2006: 106-22; Fehribach, 1998: 83-114; De Boer, 2006: 16). In the late second or early third century, Hippolytus of Rome read Song of Songs 3.1-6 and John 20.11-18 intertextually, identifying the sisters at the tomb seeking Christ with the female lover separated from her beloved (see McConvery, 2006: 217; McWhirter, 2006: 79-105). The parallels between the two passages are impressive: the woman wakes early to seek a beloved man (Song 3.1; Jn 20.1), but initially she does not find him (Song 3.2; Jn 20.2), she converses with men concerning his whereabouts (Song 3.3; Jn 20.2, 13), and then joyfully encounters him (Song 3.4; Jn 20.14-16). The Shulamite clings to her beloved and won’t let him go until they reach her mother’s house (Song 3.4); Mary is told by Jesus not to hold him for he must ascend to the father (Jn 20.17). The embalming spices mentioned in Jn 19.39-40 resonate with the myrrh, incense and spices of Song 3.6 (compare 1.13; 4.6, 14; 5.1, 13; 6.2), as does the garden setting (Jn 19.41; Song 4.12, 15, 16; 5.1; 6.2). The affinities of the Song of Songs with the sacred marriage traditions of the Ancient Near East are well known (Nissinen, 2008: 173-218), and the fourth Gospel portrays Jesus as bridegroom more extensively than any other New Testament text (McWhirter, 2006: Syreeni, 2008: 343-70), excepting perhaps Revelation (19.7; 21.2, 9, 17). If, as Kari Syreeni notes, the Gospel references to Jesus as Bridegroom (Mt. 9.15; 25.1-13; Mk 2.19, 20; Lk. 5.34, 35; Jn 3.29; cf. Jn 2.9) are reticent about the identity of the Bride (Syreeni, 2008: 344), John is the only one to allow a hint that she is Mary. Although Starbird takes the nuptial imagery of John much more literally than I am inclined to – I don’t think that John’s sacred marriage motif constitutes historical evidence that Jesus and Mary were literally married – it does figure in the ‘bridegroom-messiah’ christology of John (compare Jer. 33.10-11; Gen. 29:1-20; Ps. 45.10-15) (McWhirter, 2006). And, although more difficult to pin down, I would not be surprised if ancient audiences heard in Mary’s weeping at the tomb echoes of ancient myths of goddesses mourning their murdered consorts, like the Daughter of Zion longing in anguish for the restoration of her king (Mic. 4.8-13).

Ultimately, the idea that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were husband and wife, and that Mary fled to Egypt after the crucifixion pregnant with their child, and later to France, remains speculative. Starbird, like other proponents of this narrative, maintains that Jesus’ close family members would have left Jerusalem to escape their enemies, but considerable evidence shows that family members of Jesus remained in Jerusalem (Acts 1.14) and were active in the early Judean church (Gal. 1.19; 2. 11-14; 1 Cor. 9.5; see Tabor, 2007; Bauckham, 2004). The only evidence of a French tradition of a married Jesus appears in three anti-heretical tracts, one of which claims that the Cathars distinguished between a good, spiritual Christ and an evil, corporeal Christ whose concubine was Mary Magdalene, the woman taken in adultery; a doctrine also attributed to the Manicheans (see Beavis, 2012). Another pillar of Starbird’s case – that the Gospels contain numerological hints that point to the sacred marriage – is beyond my competence to judge. Surprisingly, Starbird herself admits that the royal bloodline hypothesis is ‘basically irrelevant, except as it applies to the question of the full humanity of Jesus’ (Starbird, 1993: 178); unlike Dan Brown, she does not speculate as to whether the lineage of Jesus and Mary has endured to the present. Much more important to her aims is the restoration of the sacred feminine, the lost Bride of Christ:

Can we make this loss of the bride conscious – can we redeem the sacred feminine as partner – in time to save the planet we live on, our sacred vessel Earth, and the human family? Survival of the species Homo sapiens may depend upon the answer. It was not only her voice that was silenced when she was denigrated, devalued, and branded; it was our own! (Starbird, 2005: 142).

Although she is convinced of her historical claims, Starbird is ultimately a mythographer who has concocted a powerful brew of legend, romance and archetype with wide appeal. The growing number of neo-gnostic and New Age groups that regard Mary as a sort of co-redemptrix (Bellevie, 2005: 264-66; Doll, 2006: 306-406) along with the growth industry in popular Mary Magdalene books, websites, listservs and conferences that interpret her as a goddess figure, attests that for many of Mary’s devotees, the answer to Rosemary Radford Ruether’s question ‘can a male savior save women’ is no (Ruether, 1993: 116-39): Jesus the incarnation of the Word must be complemented by his fully equal sacred bride, Mary Magdalene, the earthy expression of divine Sophia.

Feminist theologians have made many creative attempts to deal with the maleness of the Christian saviour. Some appeal to the historical Jesus as a model of gender egalitarianism (a model with which Starbird would agree) (Swidler, 1971: 177-83), or as a champion of human liberation (Ruether, 1993: 138; Wilson-Kastner, 1983: 98-100), a prophet of divine Wisdom (Schüssler Fiorenza, 1995), or Christ-Sophia (Johnson, 1992: 150-67). Others do not limit Christ to Jesus, but develop christologies of erotic power, Christa community (Brock, 1998) or God-in-nature (McFague, 2000: 29-46). To my knowledge, no academic feminist theologian has suggested Mary Magdalene as the female counterpart to Christ in the way Starbird has; the closest example I can think of is Jane Schaberg’s Magdalene Christianity, where all members of the community attempt to incarnate or embody certain beliefs such as the conviction that all have equal access to salvation, and that all are created in the image of God (Schaberg, 2003: 193-220). While I don’t think that the ‘Magdalene sophialogy’ of Starbird and her many admirers is necessarily preferable – it can be critiqued for being overly romantic, essentialist, heterosexist, etc. – I do think that feminist theologians should (a) be aware of it; and (b) consider what it is about Mary Magdalene as the sacred feminine/Bride of Jesus/Sophia that captures the popular (‘of the people’) imagination in a way that other feminist christologies don’t. As Starbird notes, her portrayal of Mary Magdalene offers more than an ‘apostle to the apostles’, but ‘a powerfully transformative Christian mythology’ (Starbird, 2005: 36). Mary is more than simply the human disciple of a divine Christ, but the fully equal sacred feminine. At the same time, she is human and accessible. Her narrative mirrors that of many women: she has a career, she falls in love, she marries, is an equal partner in the marriage, has a child, suffers loss, is maligned, and continues her career. Rather than being an impossible ideal (the Virgin Mother), a disembodied abstraction (Sophia) or an all-powerful goddess, she is both an image of the divine female and has a human story to which women can relate. I have suggested elsewhere (Beavis, forthcoming) that the next step in ‘Re-Imagining God’ in a feminist Christian context might be the acknowledgement of a ‘Goddess stream’ within Christianity parallel to the ‘goddess Judaism’ proposed by Jenny Kien (2000: 197-229), a tendency attested to by the growth of listservs such as Asherah (for members comfortable with the statement: ‘Goddess is a Jewish tradition’) and the phenomenon of Jewitchery, the blending of Jewish and pagan traditions. In fact, a movement in which Mary Magdalene figures prominently as a Christian goddess (as opposed to the Christian goddess) is evidenced by listservs like goddesschristians (1,764 members), magdalene-list (806 members), thechristianwitchcourse (586 members), and sisterhoodoftherose (468 members), and attested to by the sources discussed above. These materials offer a rich source of reflection for feminist theologians and thealogians, as well as a new direction in contemporary Christianity that requires further research by scholars of religion.