MARY MAGDALENE BY SUSAN HASKINS

Susan Haskins

Mary Magdalene is as factually central to the Christian story as she is fictively to the story of The Da Vinci Code. Beyond the myth of her 'bloodline' is the real debate that as the first witness to the risen Christ she could have a better claim as founder of the Church than Paul himself


Mary Magdalene has been in the background - and often in the foreground - of our consciousnesses for nearly 2,000 years. At the moment she is very much in the foreground and for many reasons, not the least of which is due to the release of The Da Vinci Code, the film of Dan Brown's novel. For those who believe the Christian story, Mary Magdalene was the first person to see the risen Christ, and yet for those very same people, for most of that 2,000 years, she was also another figure, playing a role that was far more prominent and for whom she was better known: the repentant prostitute forgiven by Christ.


She was that little scarlet-clad figure, so identifiable in Christian art, the art justified by Pope Gregory the Great when he declared that its purpose was to teach those who could not read the Bible and so that they might marvel and seek to emulate the exploits and martyrdoms of the saints. In countless images, the most depicted saint after the Virgin Mary, weeping and often wiping Christ's feet with her hair, Mary Magdalene was there to remind the sinner that it was his or her sins, as well as her own, that had put Christ on the Cross.


Just after my book on the Magdalen was published in 1993, a torrent of titles about her began to engulf bookshop shelves, ranging from the seriously academic and scholarly to the seriously deranged and speculative. It is a torrent that seems to have not yet ceased. I little knew that mine, written I thought when no one was interested in her, would be just the tip of an iceberg. Studies into her Gnostic figure, her medieval one, and relating her to the role of women in the Church continue to proliferate, together with works purporting to relate the "true" story of her relationship with Jesus, with her figure encapsulating at almost every level the female question. There is no sign of their abating.


I had come to Mary Magdalene through seventeenth-century art history and literature. Here she was the Weeper, the beautiful half-naked figure draped in her hair, sculpted by artists such as Bernini and painters such as Guercino, crying in her grotto. Poets, such as the Englishman Richard Crashaw, waxed lyrical over her tears and eyes, while John Donne quizzically asked of her, "Were there one, two or three Magdalens?"


She was here the very essence of feminine pulchritude, the lover of Christ and yet also a repentant prostitute, the prime model offered by the Church from the Middle Ages, and particularly again from the Counter-Reformation, to those who wished to repent of their sins. While their sins might have varying causes, the cause for hers was her sexuality: her beauty, vanity and lust.


Looking in the gospels for the source of this character was confusing. She was nowhere to be found and so began the search into how Mary Magdalene was transformed and had other figures accrue to her. For Mary is quite clearly not a prostitute, nor is the figure in Luke described as a repentant sinner. The gospels, the only information we have concerning her - until we include non-canonical Gnostic texts - show her clearly as a faithful follower to the bitter end, so faithful that she followed and supported Christ during his ministry, was at the Crucifixion (when his male followers had run away), sat by the sepulchre (according to Mark)


and rose before dawn to visit the tomb, to be rewarded for her fidelity and courage by the first sighting of the risen Christ (according to John).


All these are actions that show devotion and courage. That Mary Magdalene is important is also clear: since her name is always mentioned first, she is likely to have been leader of the women followers. But there are intimations that all was not right with her: she is described as having had seven devils driven from her. In Mark, the women, fearful of what they have discovered at the tomb on Easter morning, tell no one; in Luke their words are regarded as idle tales, and it could be and has been said that in not recognising Christ and taking him for the gardener that Mary Magdalene showed her ignorance of the significance of the Resurrection. Such negativities may have been merely the comments of the gospel writers or later editors, or contemporary male prejudice choosing to deride what the women had to say, seeking to demote their and her importance, particularly since women were disqualified from testifying, according to Jewish law.


Indeed, Christ's egalitarian treatment of women seems to have been remarkable for his times. He revealed himself as the Lord to the Samaritan woman, who became the apostle to her own people; he forgave Luke's sinner not because she repented, but because she loved; he made no judgement against the woman taken in adultery; and he appeared to Mary Magdalene, telling her to tell the other disciples, so that she is a messenger, apostle (the Greek word apostolein signifies someone sent as an envoy). This is a unique aspect of the gospels, showing that Christ regarded women as equals with men, as recipients and proselytisers of the faith, without gender bias.


While there might be some ambiguity in the women's roles in the canonical gospels, there is none in the Gnostic texts, where they are clearly disciples, and where Mary Magdalene is one of the most significant among them. One can therefore quite understand why, in a Church claiming that only men were chosen by Christ as priests and teachers, texts talking of Mary Magdalene's importance would clearly be undesirable.


In the Gnostic gospels, not only does Mary teach, as a conduit of revelation through her visions of Christ, but she is also the leader of the disciples after the Ascension, supporting and comforting the others; she is the woman who knows all, the "companion of the Saviour", "with whom he always walked" and "whom Jesus loved more than the other [male]


disciples", prompting jealousy and ire from the male disciples such as Peter. She is both an equal of and superior to the male disciples.


In the Gospel of Mary, the Pistis Sophia and the Gospels of Philip and Thomas, Mary Magdalene is placed firmly in the foreground, a hugely more powerful figure, derived from that in the Synoptic gospels, though the exact significance of these texts is still unclear. But what is manifest is that she is in a position of leadership.


Michael Baigent and his fellow writers of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (a book which was a major influence on Dan Brown) were not the first to posit a relationship between Mary Magdalene and Christ. The pagan Celsus suggested it in the third century and, much later, even Luther suggested that they had a sexual relationship. Is this because people find it difficult to accept the single independent female, as Mary Magdalene is described in Luke's Gospel, and one who may also have been wealthy, since she contributed, along with the other women, of her own means to bankroll the Jesus movement? Or is it because there is a desire to evoke Christ's own sexuality, making him a more human man?


Nikos Kazantzakis' Christ rejects Mary Magdalene's sexuality in order to assume his divinity in The Last Temptation of Christ; Scorsese's film of this novel caused a furore. Two serious books in 1992, by the American Anglican Bishop John Spong and by the Australian theologian Barbara Thiering, suggested that Christ and the Magdalen had married and had children, while the best-selling Greek novel, M to the Power of N, by Mimis Androulakis, was banned for blasphemy by the Orthodox Church in 2000 for suggesting that Christ and Mary Magdalene had sex.


In the Middle Ages, it was to John the Evangelist that Mary was betrothed (their marriage according to this legend took place at the feast of Cana, but was interrupted when Christ called John to join his ministry, and out of pique she became a prostitute), not to Christ. In medieval texts, but purely in a metaphorical fashion - just in the way that St John of the Cross described his love for God - Christ was described as Mary's lover, as she was his "sweet lover".


Sexual imagery has always been part of the mystical tradition, and one has to ask what mileage - except sensationalism and sales - is there in perpetuating the story of the repentant prostitute or the "bride" of Christ? As an independent female favoured by Christ, she has far more power than by being his "wife" and therefore receiving it second-hand.


Dan Brown's cleverness was to home in on what had been happening in the United States, and to a lesser extent in Britain, during the end of the 1990s and beginning of the new millennium. Interest in Mary Magdalene had become rife. Harvard Ecclesiastical History Professor Karen L. King's discussion of the Gnostic Magdalen (2003) reached a wide audience; as did studies by feminist scholars arguing the importance of Mary Magdalene's Gospel role for women's ordination, once taboo. Margaret George's Mary, Called Magdalene (2001) was a best-seller as was Margaret Starbird's indefinable prose in The Woman with the Alabaster Jar - just two manifestations of the popular genre.


Brown was also clever in linking his reading of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail - where Mary Magdalene was hypothesised as Christ's wife and vessel bearing their child - to her Gnostic figure as the saviour's "companion", whom he "kissed often", and further linking the figure of his heroine, Sophie, to Mary Magdalene (heroine of the Gnostic text, the Pistis Sophia, or Wisdom of the Faith) as her descendant. But Brown's Gnostic Magdalen is narrow, existing only in relationship to Christ, through marriage to him and as a vessel.


In the present ecclesiastical climate, with its stories of popes being murdered (John Paul I), links to Masonic matters (P.2), paedophile scandals and stories of "fallen" women having to work in the Magdalen laundries of Ireland, together with the submission of women in the Church - Mary Magdalene being emblematic of that - conspiracy theorists are having a field day. And to these theorists, every notion put forward by Brown has to be accepted, regardless of facts getting in the way. For instance, Leonardo's Last Supper was painted for the Dominicans, that very band of preachers who hunted out heresy, so their commissioned artist was unlikely to paint an image - of Mary Magdalene in place of St John the Apostle - that was heretical.


Much of the Magdalen's enduring fascination is because of the art that depicts her. There are wonderful images of dramatic sorrowful womanhood that strike chords in all of us who look at them, created by artists as diverse as Fra Bartolommeo, Bernini, Guido Mazzoni, Titian and Savoldo. She represents strength, courage and fidelity of womanhood and its relation to divine, and is an example of human fragility, as well as of love, fearlessness and power.


Above all, there is the extraordinary importance she has as Christ's leading female disciple, the first witness of the Resurrection, and First Apostle. (As the primary witness to the Resurrection, she could be said to have a better claim than Paul to have founded the Christian Church.)


Mary Magdalene is a metaphor for the history of womankind, a woman for all seasons, her very multifariousness showing us why she is still a matter of fascination today. But her true figure shows that there is no benefit, least of all to Mary Magdalene herself, in perpetuating the myth.


Susan Haskins writes on art. She is the author of Mary Magdalen, published by Pimlico. On 22 May she will speak on icon and metaphor: the image of Mary Magdalene as part of a series of talks organised by Winchester Cathedral and to be held in the Chapel of Winchester College.





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