This translation is not completely accurate as it was automatically generated by a computer.
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A UMNS Feature
By Heather Hahn*
3:30 P.M. ET March 27, 2013
“Christ’s Appearance to Mary Magdalene after the Resurrection” is a
painting by Alexander Ivanov from 1835. A web-only photo from Wikimedia
Commons.
You’ve got to feel bad for Mary Magdalene.
Sure, she has fame many of today’s celebrities would envy. She’s
played a leading role in works ranging from Renaissance paintings to
just about every Passion play and movie made about Jesus’ life. But all
that stardom has come with a price.
Few other followers of Jesus have been saddled with such a notorious
reputation. She’s the reformed harlot who is the polar opposite of the
Virgin Mary. Or, thanks to the best-selling thriller “The Da Vinci
Code,” she’s seen as Jesus’ secret love interest. If she were a
celebrity today, she would get salacious headlines on TMZ and an
unflattering photo on the cover of US Weekly.
Lost in all the speculation about her love life is the biblical
record. The New Testament never identifies her as a prostitute, former
or otherwise, and certainly not as Jesus’ would-be girlfriend.
The Bible shows Mary Magdalene as an important disciple of Jesus —
the one witness to the Crucifixion and Resurrection identified in all
four canonical Gospels. In three Gospels, she encounters the risen
Christ. In the Gospel of John, she is the first person to testify to
the good news that Christ has conquered death.
This Easter Sunday, United Methodists and other Christians around the world will hear that account in John 20:1-18.
The passage features Mary Magdalene’s tearful conversation with a man
she first mistakes for a gardener but ultimately recognizes as the risen
Savior.
The Rev. Sanford “Sandy” Brown, senior pastor of First United Methodist Church in Seattle, is among the clergy who plan to preach on these verses from the lectionary.
Brown said it’s significant that the four Gospels agree that women
remained with Jesus during the Crucifixion and that women — particularly
Mary Magdalene — discovered the empty tomb. Given women’s often
debased place in first-century society, Brown said, these accounts tell
Christians something important about Jesus’ ministry.
The women “went to the tomb in love and service to Jesus’ remains
and memory,” he said. “The one who serves is the one who receives the
greatest joy. The humble is the one who is exalted.”
Magdalene in the Bible
The New Testament offers few clues as to Mary Magdalene’s background
before she followed Jesus. Many scholars speculate that her last name
refers to Magdala, a fishing village in Galilee where she might have
grown up.
The Gospels of Luke and Mark identify her as a woman Jesus healed of
seven demons, though neither specifies the nature of these unclean
spirits. What the first-century world labeled demons could refer to
sinfulness or what we would consider physical and mental infirmities
today.
A “Penitent Magdalene” is depicted by 17th century painter Nicholas Régnier.
A web-only photo from Wikimedia Commons.
Luke first introduces Mary Magdalene with a group of women who support Jesus’ ministry “out of their resources.” But in the previous chapter, Luke tells the story
of an unnamed penitent woman with an alabaster jar who anoints
Christ’s feet with perfumed oil and wets them with her tears. That seems to be the start of the confusion.
The Bible does not say what happened to Mary Magdalene after Jesus’
Ascension. She is not named in Paul’s letters or in the Acts of the
Apostles, the sequel to the Gospel of Luke.
Ann Graham Brock, affiliate professor of New Testament at United
Methodist-related Iliff School of Theology in Denver, argues in her
book “Mary Magdalene, The First Apostle: The Struggle for Authority”
that the greater the emphasis on Peter’s role in a text, the more
diminished Mary Magdalene’s role tended to be. That’s especially
evident in Luke and Acts, where Peter is featured prominently.
However, more than a century after Jesus’ time, Mary Magdalene
remained a popular role model of discipleship in extra-canonical texts
such as the Gospel of Philip and Gospel of Mary.
By the third century, Brock writes, some early Christians had given Mary Magdalene the honorific “apostle to the apostles.”
Mary Magdalene was likely the “foremost of Jesus’ women disciples,” Brock told United Methodist News Service.
Still, as the church grew and became more established, women leaders
were sidelined and that included the women named among Jesus’ earliest
followers.
Magdalene and the pope
“I always say it was the church hierarchy that drove Mary Magdalene
to prostitution,” said Mark A. Chancey, professor of religious studies
at United Methodist-related Southern Methodist University in Dallas and
co-author of “Alexander to Constantine: Archaeology of the Land of the Bible.”
“Driving her to prostitution fits in the context of putting women in their place.”
Credit Pope Gregory the Great with fusing Mary Magdalene, Mary of
Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus and Luke’s sinful woman in
the popular imagination.
In a sermon delivered in A.D. 591, the pope gave the Roman Catholic
Church’s official sanction to the view that Mary Magdalene was the
promiscuous woman with the alabaster jar whom Jesus redeemed.
Mary of Bethany ended up in the mix because in John’s Gospel, she anoints Christ’s feet before the Passion.
The sermon transformed Mary Magdalene into the bad girl of the
Gospels, and his interpretation prevailed in Western Christianity for
nearly 1,400 years.
Magdalene in art
That was especially apparent in religious art. Throughout the Middle
Ages, miracle plays and pictures frequently showed Magdalene as
weeping for her sins. Because of these tearful depictions, the English
contraction of Magdalene’s name — “maudlin” — soon took on the
connotation of effusive sentimentality.
Meanwhile, other legends developed about Mary Magdalene’s life after
the Ascension. One common story is that she sailed away with Martha
and Lazarus and spent the rest of her life in a cave repenting of her
decadent life. As the years passed, the story went, her clothes
dwindled into rags and she had nothing to cover her but her long, curly
hair.
This image of the later penitent and mostly naked Magdalene proved a
popular one with artists such as Renaissance painter Titian.
Joan Baldridge, an art historian in Little Rock, Ark., said this
image of Mary Magdalene gave artists an excuse to paint a sexy “pinup.”
She became sort of the Marilyn Monroe of the 16th century.
In 1969, the Roman Catholic Church officially separated Luke’s
sinful woman, Mary of Bethany and Mary Magdalene into three distinct
women during a revision of its missal — the book containing the
services of Mass throughout the year.
But the change has been slow filtering into the pews and into
popular culture. As recently as Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the
Christ” in 2004, Magdalene was still shown as an ex-prostitute.
Baldridge, an Episcopalian, did her master’s thesis at New York
University on Mary Magdalene and the depictions of her in art. In
recent years, she has given lectures on Magdalene around the country to
churches, art groups and a university religion class.
“I believe that Mary Magdalene is being done a tremendous disservice
by the unrelenting myth of her as a reformed prostitute,” Baldridge
said. “Even the idea that she had a romantic relationship with Jesus
undermines her and implies that is the only reason she was close to
Jesus.”
Rehabilitating Magdalene
Instead, Baldridge sees Magdalene as a spiritual inspiration.
“She is more prominent in these signal events that we mark at
Eastertide than the Virgin Mary or the 12 disciples,” she said. “The
sheer volume of her presence in these accounts is significant. To me,
an accurate portrayal of her would be as one of those closest to Christ
— one who, perhaps, understood his teachings better than anyone else
around him.”
Like Baldridge, a number of United Methodist scholars and clergy are trying to rehabilitate Mary Magdalene’s reputation.
Among them is the Rev. James A. Harnish, senior pastor of Hyde Park United Methodist Church in Tampa, Fla. Harnish’s study Women of the Bible — part of Abingdon Press’ Converge Bible studies — gives particular attention to Magdalene.
“One of the reasons Mary is so fascinating is that there are so many ways we can find ourselves in her story,” he said.
Her example teaches Christians today, Harnish said, that
“extravagant faithfulness grows out of an extravagant awareness of the
extravagant love and grace of God in Christ.”
*Hahn is a multimedia news reporter for United Methodist News Service.
News media contact: Heather Hahn, Nashville, Tenn., (615) 742-5470 or newsdesk@umcom.org.