Faith Journal

with Ray Waddle

The "Real" Mary Magadalene: an Easter Witness

The first time I really noticed Mary Magdalene, she was in Jesus Christ Superstar, the rock opera that premiered 35 years ago. She was the racy gal with the hit song (I Don't Know How to Love Him). She was unabashedly a prostitute.

This came as a (thrilling) shock to us teens. But I figured it was an accurate portrayal confirmed by the New Testament. No one would make up stuff that wasn't in the Bible, right?

Eventually I discovered the truth. Mary Magdalene is nowhere described as a prostitute in scripture. Yet such overheated fantasies about the Magdalene have persisted for nearly 2,000 years — Mary the whore, or Mary the wealthy blue-blood, even Mary the bearer of Jesus' child who escaped to France and whose descendants live there in secret even now.

None of it's in the Bible or officially taught by the churches. Yet speculation about Mary Magdalene has never been greater. We might ask why.

Year 2006 is shaping up to be her crowning year. We've seen a wave of new books, studies and magazine covers about her. Her biggest boost comes next month with the release of the movie version of the blockbuster novel The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. This fictional page-turner — part thriller, part conspiracy theory, part anti-Vatican position paper — retells the old legend that Mary was the true chief disciple of Jesus but was suppressed by Peter and other male founders of the church and so fled to Europe and raised the divine family in scintillating secrecy.

This is all very fascinating. It is also beside the point. The trouble with heavy-breathing theorizing about Mary is it distracts from the world-bending importance of the Easter story itself and, ironically, clouds Mary Magdalene's matchless role in it.

There aren't many New Testament references to Mary, but she is always listed first in the gospel lists of female followers of Jesus. In Luke, she is described as a person cured of seven demons. She apparently was a woman of means who helped Jesus "out of her resources." Most of all, Mary was one of the first persons — in some reports, the very first — to encounter the Risen Lord on Easter morning. In John's Gospel, standing loyally at the empty tomb, she had the first experience of the Resurrection. She ran and told Peter and the rest. She became the disciple to the disciples.

Yet her impact, her Resurrection faith, were unjustly minimized. A new biography of Mary, by scholar/minister Bruce Chilton, complains that Mary's role as an anointer, healer and Resurrection witness was nearly erased from the biblical record because of the early church's ambivalence toward women. That the Risen Lord appeared first to a woman embarrassed the maledominated church.

So she was turned into a prostitute as a way to demote her. Church folklore invented slurs and fabricated "facts." The Bible suggests she was a single woman with money? Then let's insist she made her money by prostitution. And let's also insist that the anonymous female "sinner" in Luke 7, the woman who washed Jesus' feet with her tears — well, let's just stipulate (without evidence) that her sin was harlotry, and her name was Mary Magdalene.

Chilton believes Christian history might have been different — less malecentered and gender-obsessed — if Mary had been given her due. Her gifts as a visionary might have flourished. Her style might have founded a branch of the church, much like Peter's.

What we do have meanwhile is the gospel record. It was produced closer to the Easter scene than the medieval rumors and gnostic texts that now preoccupy spiritual seekers and give the alternative history of Mary new life.

What all this buzz about Mary Magdalene has made me do is return to the gospels themselves and confront again the overwhelming experience of that first Easter. Scandalous secrets about Mary are a brightly-lit side show, kids' stuff compared to the demanding adventure of living an Easter faith.

She was there, and her witness puts us there.