I just returned from the thickly packed cluster of academic conferences held in San Diego, November 16th-20th–this included the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion, the Society of Biblical Literature, the American Schools of Oriental Research (ancient Near Eastern/Mediterranean archaeology), and the Biblical Archeology Society. Besides seeing many friends, hearing some interesting papers, and browsing the massive displays of new books by hundreds of publishers, I read a paper on Mary Magdalene in a joint meeting of the Early Jewish & Christian Mysticism section with the Religious Experience in Early Judaism & Christianity consultation. My assigned task was to offer a reflective review of Jane Schaberg’s important and provocative book, The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene: Legends, Apocrypha, and the Christian Testament (Continuum, 2004). As my readers know, I have quite a positive evaluation of this book and its importance and I had posted a blurb at this site back in March. I thought some might be interested in what I said, so I will paste in my remarks here:

My brief review is organized around three main points: The Women, the Problem, and the Ending. By “the Women,” I mean not only Mary Magdalene, but the author, Jane Schaberg as well, and a third, Virginia Woolf, who is brought along by Jane as a kind of meditative conversation partner throughout the book. Although this book is a thoroughly academic and scholarly historical investigation of Mary Magdalene, it is at the same time a sharply challenging and engaging personal narrative of Jane’s own journey in her search for the historical Mary Magdalene. She departs from the formal and structured categories common among us and bares her soul along the way. The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene is a thickly multifaceted work that resists easy characterization. It is at once carefully documented historical scholarship, meditative personal memoir, and cutting feminist critique. As such, one is hard pressed to review it with any sort of standard academic detachment. I was deeply drawn into the book at each of its many levels. I have to confess, my “heart burned within me” as I worked my way though the structured stages of her presentation. Jane has devoted a good bit of her career to the exposure of the multiple strategies of suppression of the memory of the two most important Marys in Jesus’ life—that of his mother and his companion Mary Magdalene. If you have read her courageous and important work, The Illegitimacy of Jesus: A Feminist Theological Interpretation of the Infancy Narratives, published twenty years ago, I recommend a revisiting. It is now out (Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2006) in an expanded paperback version that includes her personal reflections on the hostile reactions that work elicited from the small and the great in our field. As an illustration of this personal side of this book on Mary Magdalene I offer here two extended quotations, one on Woolf, the other about Schaberg herself:

“Woolf’s influence has been felt in many disciplines; but to my knowledge not yet much in Religious studies. In my own case, she functions something like the mentor I never had. ‘Consulting’ her, reading her avidly in the course of writing this book, is part of the feminist methodology I use here, infusing and refreshing the conventional methodologies of my discipline, oxygenating the masculinist atmosphere. Woolf puts me in the mood to think and write; she somehow keeps me going. She teaches the writer’s life of concentration and commitment, and makes it happier by repudiating the sacrifice of friendship, love, and simple social pleasures, for the needs of others. Scorning ‘adultery of the brain’ or ‘intellectual harlotry’ (writing what one does not want to write, for the sake of money rather than in the interests of culture and intellectual liberation), she urges connected thinking, and political savvy” (p. 32).

In this second quotation Jane reflects on the hostile reaction she received from the publication of her book, The Illegitimacy of Jesus and how her teaching in Detroit, and her surviving cancer have all had their part in the way her writing on Mary Magdalene unfolded:

“Yes I was ‘victimized’ a bit, and yes it set me back. But backlash also had the unintended effect of making me more personally and intensely interested in the process of censorship and silencing. It gave me reserves of anger and energy to draw on. I know in my bones how serious the opposition is to women’s insight, women’s revisioning. I know a little more about strategies of suppression . . . Reading from Detroit in this time is reading embedded in experiences of the deep and tangled structures of racism, sexism, poverty, classism, colonialism, and of the despair and courage displayed by those whom these structures have enmeshed. Despite my early efforts to get a ‘better’ job, I am lucky to teach in a non-elite, richly diverse classroom Virginia Woolf would approve of, where some—many—of our students are the poor (or the nearly poor, the recently poor) with whom I try to be a co-learner in the effort to demystify strategies of oppression like ‘whiteness,’ and to recognize powers of resistance . . . I belong to a group of survivors ‘privileged’ to experience my mortality: first as a young child with a heart valve problem, then in my forties with Stage 3 breast cancer. But all I remember about the latter experience is the terror of death, the striving to beat death, the will to live, the love of life. Having had to face the fear brought me no closer to an articulated faith, but only sometimes to the grasping of mantra-like phrases (‘now and at the hour of our death’ and ‘Shema’ Yisrael’) and to the presence and support of good friends. Nothing more. Nothing less” (pp. 14-16).

The essential historical problem the book addresses is captured in the subtitle: “Legends, Apocrypha, and the Christian Testament.” How does one move from, or otherwise account for or connect, the sparse accounts of Mary Magdalene in our canonical gospels with the plethora of later Mary Magdalene traditions and materials? Let’s begin with the beginning.

“And they all forsook him and fled.” This shortest line in the gospel of Mark (14:50) is as poignant as it is tragic. In five Greek words Mark dismisses the male apostles, the Twelve. Judas hands Jesus over to his enemies with a kiss, while the remaining “Eleven,” as Matthew later labels them; flee in fear, forsaking all, not to loose but to save their lives. In Mark Jesus is left utterly alone, abandoned and forsaken by all, and at the end, even by God—but not quite.

And there were also women, looking from afar; among whom were both Maria the Magdalene, and Maria, the mother of Jacob the less and Joses, and Salome; who when he was in Galilee, followed him, and served (dihko/noun) him; and many other women that came up with him to Jerusalem (Mk 15:40-41)

And so Mary Magdalene enters our history, in this earliest and most significant reference to her and the many other women who stood by the cross. These two Marys witness the burial of Jesus, according to Mark, and they, along with Salome, show up at the tomb very early Sunday morning to anoint the body with spices, only to find it missing. They are commissioned by a mysterious young man wearing a white robe to tell the male disciples and Peter that Jesus has been raised up and will meet them in Galilee. “And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had come upon them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (Mk 16:8). Thus Mark closes his account, with the exit of these three women as mysterious as their entrance. In Mark these women fail to fulfill their mission of proclamation, presumably that will be left to Peter and the other male disciples, who will see him in Galilee.

Nonetheless, this Markan tradition that Mary Magdalene and her Galilean women companions stood at the cross and were first witnesses that Jesus was raised is incorporated in modified ways in both Matthew and Luke. This sparse Markan tradition regarding Mary Magdalene is as limited as it is mysterious. Was it another Mary, or perhaps the same, who had anointed the head of Jesus with an expensive oil of nard two days earlier at Bethany—her deed celebrated as her perpetual memorial but her name lost or left out? Luke has an earlier scene of an unnamed woman, “a sinner,” anointing Jesus in Galilee (Luke 7:36-50). Immediately following that story he inserts Mark’s reference to the women followers of Jesus in Galilee, but he adds these women had been healed of evil spirits and disabilities, naming Mary Magdalene as one of them “from whom seven demons had gone out.” Such juxtaposition can hardly be without intention. Luke also includes these women; though he seems reluctant to even name them, as first witnesses to Jesus being raised. He makes it clear, however, that their testimony, delivered to the male Eleven, is judged as the idle talk of hysterical females. Even Celsus, a hundred and fifty years later, knows that a deluded “hysterical female,” aka Mary Magdalene, first delivered the story of Jesus’ resurrection. Mark insists on muting the first witness status of Mary Magdalene and her female companions, but that he includes it at all is quite telling. Luke lays the foundation for portraying Mary Magdalene as a sinner, hysterical and sexually threatening, the madwoman in Christianity’s attic.

Finally, I turn to the Ending. Schaberg’s final chapter, “Mary Magdalene as Successor to Jesus” is in my judgment one of the most impressive pieces of textual reading I have ever encountered. What she attempts to show is that the singular account in John 20:1-18, where Mary Magdalene encounters and speaks to Jesus in the garden tomb, preserves fragments of a tradition of Mary Magdalene as successor to Jesus—and thus, “first founder” of Christianity, in the sense of authoritative witness to resurrection faith. Whether this early tradition can be connected or not to later Christian texts that present Mary as a leading intellectual and spiritual guide, a beloved companion of Jesus and transmitter of his teachings, is a separate issue. What Schaberg shows, successfully in my view, is that the narrative structure of John 20 reflects an imaginative reuse of 2 Kings 2:1-18 where Elijah the prophet ascends to heaven, leaving his disciple Elisha as his designated witness and successor. This intimate personal appearance to Mary Magdalene, which focuses on ascent to heaven rather than resurrection of the dead per se, is parallel to, but sharply distinguished from, the more generic Synoptic accounts of angelic proclamations to the group of women.

Upon this foundation Schaberg offers a preliminary sketch of what she rather boldly labels “Magdalene Christianity,” both suppressed and lost in the Synoptic tradition, and particularly in Acts, much like the history of James and the Jerusalem community from 30-50 CE, Crossan’s “dark ages.” For some , such as Crossan, Schaberg’s reconstruction of John 20, as well as that of Schüssler Fiorenza and others, is “too optimistic” in terms of reconstructing what happened after Jesus’ death. His own reconstruction erases not only the empty tomb, but the memory of the women as first witnesses, and Mary Magdalene as his possible successor. Crossan once told Schaberg, as she recounts in her book, “Jane, if I could give you the empty tomb I would” (p. 252). Her response captures a characteristic of her wonderfully self-reflective style throughout her work: “I was stunned into silence by Crossan’s wish to ‘give’ me the narrative of the tomb; by the fact that it even occurred to him that he might. I wondered if I had to ‘take’ it. No, I knew I did.” And by that she meant she was obligated to offer her own reconstruction, attempting to be as clear about method as Crossan demands, and in particular to examine the assumptions behind his own reconstruction.

Schaberg’s academic contribution is much more than this ending. She applies her considerable analytical skills in taking the reader through the thick mass of archaeological and textual evidence related to Mary Magdalene. Her extended “profile” of Mary Magdalene in chapter four, drawn from a careful combing through all the apocryphal Magdalene materials (Nag Hammadi texts as well as the Gospel of Mary, Pistis Sophia, Gospel of Philip, Gospel of Peter, and fragmented sources), is one of the most sustained and thorough treatments available.

My main suggestion is that Schaberg, in considering the notion of Mary Magdalene as “companion” of Jesus, might find less dichotomy between the “intimate/erotic” and the “sexual/romantic.” Despite the desire to make Mary Magdalene the “wife” of Jesus in popular circles, as witnessed by the extraordinarily positive reception of Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code among the masses, I do not think the possibility should be precluded or dismissed. Indeed, I think there are some compelling arguments that Jesus may well have been married, and if such were the case, then Mary Magdalene does indeed seem to be our best candidate. I think the recent discussion of the Talpiot “Jesus Family tomb” has opened a new set of issues in this regard, at least for me.

Schaberg has caused me to seriously rethink and supplement my own reconstruction of Jesus and his earliest followers, but most particularly, the place of the empty tomb and Mary Magdalene’s role as visionary successor of Jesus. I have begun to explore how this might relate to my reconstruction of the prominence of James and the brothers of Jesus in the early movement, and what role such a mystical/visionary understanding of Jesus earlier and separate from that of Paul and his communities, might have played in the whole.

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