The Gospel of Mary has been one of those fascinating and mysterious of all the early Christian writings.
Some Church historians and scholars believe it was written as early as when the Gospel of Matthew and Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians were written [80 CE] or perhaps as late as the writings of Irenaeus [180 CE], while still others date the text to around the time that the Gospel of Luke was written [around 120 CE], but no matter where you place it in the timeline of early Christian texts, it still remains one of the more controversial writings ever studied.
Even though we have two copies of this gospel, they are both in fragments. One copy is missing almost 10 pages while the other is missing 12 pages. But that lack of completion does little to diminish our interest in the document. If anything, it deepens the mystery surrounding who wrote it, why it was suppressed and – most importantly – what does it have to tell us about what Jesus told Mary Magdalene?
No one knows for certain why there are fragments missing from Mary’s Gospel. Some scholars believe it could simply be because of the way the text was stored. There are many early texts that are missing pages or sections of the manuscript. [These are called “lacuna”]
But some take a more conspiratorial position that Mary’s Gospel was intentionally edited by those who feared the teachings or disagreed with the contents.
Honestly, it’s hard to say why, exactly, the Gospel of Mary is incomplete. It could simply be that so few copies were made by early Christians – no doubt due to the way so many proto-orthodox church leaders like Tertullian and Irenaeus condemned the text – that only fragments survived the passing of time.
Either way, we can certainly say that there is plenty of evidence in Church history as well as in certain early texts that there was no small amount of animosity between Mary Magdalene and the Apostle Peter. We see it in the Gospel of Thomas, and in the Gospel of Philip, and of course here in the Gospel of Mary, that Peter resented Mary’s intimacy with Jesus and felt quite strongly that her womanhood disqualified her from being a disciple or an apostle of Christ.
This animosity can either be an indication that Peter and Mary didn’t get along on a personal level, or it could mean that the disciples of Peter and the disciples of Mary didn’t agree about who Jesus was and what his message was all about. Or it could mean that both are true.
What we do know is that, at least in these texts, Mary and Peter didn’t see eye-to-eye when it came to Jesus and his Gospel message.
We also know, thanks to the excellent scholarship of Libbie Schrader Polczer, that early Christians felt threatened enough by the person of Mary Magdalene that they went out of their way to literally erase her from the Gospel of John.
So, someone in the early Christian church felt that Mary Magdalene’s voice was “dangerous” enough to warrant editing the scriptures for as a way to eliminate her prominence, authority and status among those first disciples and apostles of Jesus.
The fact that we know so little about her, then, may be evidence itself that her voice has been silenced and that her Gospel has been suppressed by patriarchal religious leaders who felt threatened by her femininity as much as by her message.
In our study of this fragmented text, we’ll examine the various themes that run throughout the sections that we have access to and try to make sense of it all.
One thing you’ll notice as you read through the Gospel of Mary is what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t say anything about Hell, or Heaven. It never mentions anything about our need to be saved, or forgiven, or holy. It doesn’t urge us to read our Bibles or keep the law or follow the rules. It also doesn’t ever speak of Jesus as a Divine being sent to show us the way.
So, what does it say?
Well, that’s what we want to dive into in our study, but one of the main differentiators in the Gospel of Mary is the fact that it’s the only Gospel [that we know of] that purports to be written by a woman.
It’s also the only Gospel text where a woman is openly invited to teach men [especially if those men are Apostles]!
Another key difference here is that the emphasis in the Gospel of Mary seems to primarily focus on Jesus as the “Child of Humanity” – or the “Son of Man” as he’s called in the New Testament Gospels – rather than as the “Son of God.”
This shift in emphasis is quite profound in Mary’s Gospel. In fact, because Jesus is understood as the Child of Humanity/Son of Man, we are also encouraged to become fully human as he is human.
It’s also significant that Jesus never points to the sinfulness of humanity. On the contrary, the assumption being made in the Gospel of Mary is that being human is a beautiful thing. The Marian Gospel message becomes simply this: Embrace your humanity and learn how to be as human as Jesus was.
This, of course, flies directly in the face of what I call the “Worm Theology” of today’s Evangelical Christians. No wonder Irenaeus and other early Church fathers refused to endorse Mary’s Gospel!
Not only this, but Jesus, in Mary’s Gospel, literally tells Peter: “There is no sin!”
So, right away, this text is at odds with what we read in the four New Testament Gospels.
As we take some time to study the fragments of Mary’s Gospel together, I hope you’ll try to keep an open mind. There may be a lot for us to unpack and some of it may challenge our assumptions about Jesus and his message. Still, other teachings we encounter may confirm things we’ve read Jesus say and do in the Canonical Gospels, and especially in texts like the Gospel of Thomas.
Sadly, we only have 8 small chapters to look over together, but I suspect that those few pages will contain more than enough food for thought to hold our interest.
I hope you enjoy this study into the lost Gospel of Mary. It’s going to be a lot of fun.
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The newest book from Keith Giles, “The Quantum Sayings of Jesus: Decoding the Lost Gospel of Thomas” is available now on Amazon. Order HERE>
He co-hosts The Heretic Happy Hour Podcast and his solo podcast, Second Cup With Keith which are both available on Spotify, Amazon, Apple, Podbean or wherever you find your podcast fix.
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