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<\/a>Lucas van Leyden
1519<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>
\u00a0<\/p>\n
The 22nd of July is marked out as a feast for Mary Magdalene<\/a>.<\/p>\n As best I can, I try to note this day every year. As a person of the Zen way, but also marked profoundly by my natal Christianity, I am deeply interested in several threads of the Christian tradition. And very high on that list is Mary Magdalene.<\/p>\n As I noted, over the years I\u2019ve paused to reflect on this most remarkable and in some ways mysterious woman, especially on or around her feast day. Each time I do I find a need to tweak and often to add some nuance that has arisen out of my ongoing encounters with this most remarkable of women.<\/p>\n And reading between the lines of the traditional narratices, I find some rather wonderful things.<\/p>\n Me, I find her pretty much endlessly fascinating. She was arguably the closest of Jesus\u2019 various disciples. According to some sources, admittedly mostly at the fringes of the canonical texts, she is considered his true successor. I\u2019m kind of inclined in that direction, myself.<\/p>\n Mary enters the canonical narrative as profoundly troubled. In Luke she is said to have been possessed by seven demons, which Jesus drove out of her. From there she became his devoted disciple. And from that time a constant companion.\u00a0In the canonical gospels she is named a dozen times. Significantly Mary is noted as a witness to the crucifixion in three of the gospels. And\u00a0as testified in all four, a witness to the resurrection.<\/p>\n Beyond the evidences within the gospels, Mary has been made out to be a problematic figure. Often it sure looks like someone wants to put her in her place. By which I mean definitely not up to the standards of an authentic apostle. It\u2019s outside the gosples we get the prostitute connection. While others have made much of the potential analogy between the seven demons and the seven deadly sins, taking a problem and frothing it much further, showing her as a seriously troubled soul.<\/p>\n It\u2019s worth noting how it wasn\u2019t until some four hundred years after her death that we seriously get the \u201crepentant sinner\u201d meme, when Ephrem the Syrian took it up. That said, the major culprit in the campaign of calumny\u00a0against her\u00a0is Pope Gregory<\/a> (the Great) who in 591 appears to first have made her a prostitute. The pope collapsed Mary Magdalene with both the repentant sinner with the the perfume and with Mary of Bethany, Lazarus\u2019s sister. Sadly, but upon consideration, hardly surprisingly, this collapsed or \u201ccomposite\u201d Mary of the shady past has been carried forward ever since.<\/p>\n It is important to note the Orthodox never went with this narrative.<\/p>\n Their own non-canonical traditions never have her being a prostitute and instead focused on her living on after Jesus\u2019 death as companion to his mother. And even in the West both John Chrysostom and Ambrose rejected this view. If I understand this correctly, this prostitute meme has never been part of the Benedictine tradition, either. Actually in its own good time the Roman church has finally and formally rejected this view through a 1969 revision of its calendar of saints.<\/p>\n This all said, the majority of Western Christians have Mary as that penitent prostitute. The reasons for this are numerous. And not all of them pernicious. But, it can\u2019t be missed how at the same time she fits all the traditional definitions of an \u201capostle,\u201d the primary successors to Jesus\u2019 ministry. A major problem for some people. Her having that shady past\u00a0has much less currency in our contemporary Western culture. But it continues as a hint, a whisper, of why she should not be considered what she in fact was.<\/p>\n Mary Magdalene was a close, and who knows, there are strong suggestions she maybe was the closest of Jesus\u2019 disciples.<\/p>\n Going in another direction, she has also been describe as Jesus\u2019 wife. I like that idea. Me, I\u2019m quite taken with the gnostic text, the Gospel According to Mary<\/a>. Although, I admit I don\u2019t understand how the scholar Karen King, whom I deeply admire, can date it to the actual time of Jesus. Most scholars place it in the second century. In truth this admiring picture is slightly more plausible than the prostitute meme, but only slightly.<\/p>\n