Mary Magdalene

Mary Magdalene (Mary of Magda, currently Mejdel in Israel) is mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew, appearing at the scene of the Crucifixion: "There were also many women there, looking on from afar, who had followed Jesus from Galilee, ministering to him, among whom were Mary Magdalene, Mary the Mother of James and Joseph, and the mother of the sons of Zebedee" (Matthew 27: 55-56). Mary Magdalene is also the most notable witness to the Resurrection, together "with the other Mary": "Now after the Sabbath, toward the dawn of the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the sepulcher …" (Matthew 28: 1-10). The women are told by the Angel of the Lord that Jesus has been resurrected, and they inform the Apostles.

Mary Magdalene is present at the Crucifixion in all three synoptic Gospels and in the Gospel of John, which stresses the importance of this woman disciple by describing her as the first person to whom the risen Jesus appears in the garden and addresses: "But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb … she turned around and saw Jesus standing…. 'Mary….' She turned and said to him in Hebrew 'Rabboni….' Mary Magdalene went and said to the disciples 'I have seen the Lord,' and she told them that he had said these things to her" (John 20: 11-20).

THE CHURCH AND THE IMAGE OF MARY MAGDALENE

Thus, Mary Magdalene was recognized as the first witness to the most important tenet of Christian dogma: the Resurrection. After the Church began combining the various women named Mary and pronounced without evidence that Mary Magdalene was the sinner who washed and anointed the Lord's feet in the Gospel of Luke, her figure became distorted. Thus, Gregory the Great declared in 591 that Mary was the sinful woman in Luke, the same one whom John calls Mary of Bethany and the one who in Mark is exorcised by Jesus. Many Latin Church fathers adopted that version and identified her with Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, and also with the anonymous sinner in Luke 7: 36-50. The Greek Church Fathers, starting with Origen, ascribed a different identity to each of the three Maries, but throughout the centuries in Europe and America, the world Mary Magdalene became associated with the prostitute who washed Jesus's feet and dried them with her hair.

Popular religious legends and traditions, starting from the ninth century with the Miracula of Mary Magdalene and continuing with the Legenda Aurea of Jacobus of Voragine (born 1230) dated around 1260, have direct bearing on her iconography, and Mary Magdalene has been depicted as the repentant and penitent Magdalene with loose long hair, a symbol of abandonment to God. The Legenda, moreover, records the legend that Mary Magdalene ended up in Marseilles, France, pregnant with a child, perhaps from John, from whom ultimately descends the French royal line.

It also is said of Mary Magdalene, whose second name means remaining guilty and whose first name means marum mare, or bitter sea: "[S]he was magnificent in the superabundance of grace, because where trespass abounded, grace was superabundant." (Legenda Aurea, pp. 374-375). According to the same legend, Mary died at Aix-en-Provence after having spent thirty days in the desert. In 769, during Charlemagne's time, Gerard, the duke of Burgundy, unable to have a son, had a monastery built at Vézelay and ordered that the relics of Mary Magdalene be brought there from Aix. According to the Chronicler Joinville, in 1248 Louis IX, the king of France (Saint Louis) made a pilgrimage to Aix, where the body of the Magdalene was said to lie (Le Goff 1996). In 1279 new remains of relics were discovered at Aix in the crypt of Saint Maximin, who had been Mary's protector from her time in Palestine and to whom Peter had entrusted her (Legenda Aurea, pp. 374-381). She is the patron saint of Vézelay, where her relics are kept and where she is venerated; her feast day on July 22 is a major holy day.

MARY MAGDALENE AS PATRON SAINT

Mary Magdalene has become the patron saint of prostitutes, perfume makers, gardeners, and barrel makers. In France she is associated with the ripe fruits of late summer. The fruits (grapes, peaches, pears, and plums) that suddenly ripen around her feast day were called madeleines, and on that day the wine growers made an offering of their first grapes, hanging them on her altar (Canadé Sautman 1995, Gaignebet and Lajoux 1985). Mary Magdalene is also the patron saint of women in labor and is connected to the red color of the veil she wore at the Crucifixion (Canadé Sautman 1995). According to the ethnologist Claude Gaignebet, the wild man of winter in European popular tradition is a companion of Mary Magdalene and is dressed with her hair (Gaignebet and Lajourx 1985). She also is connected with the Apostle James, who, like her, is a Saint of the Canicula (dog days), stone cutters, the guarding dog, and the shell of Venus.

The word maudlin, meaning tearful penitent, is derived from the Middle English Maudelen, from the Late Latin and Greek Magdalènè. It is apparent that Mary's reputation has been affected by this characterization, though in a melancholy way, and this image has obscured her other side as an exemplar of the contemplative life, in contrast to her sister Martha, as she is seen by Dante (Convivio, IV, xvii, 10-11).

OTHER IMAGES OF MARY MAGDALENE

The figure and role of Mary Magdalene are complicated further if one considers the Gnostic Gospel of Mary Magdalene, discovered in Egypt in 1896, in which Mary assumes a leading and principal role, more important even than that of Peter (Pagels 2003). This text establishes Mary Magdalene as a true disciple of Jesus and the one to whom the Risen Christ appeared and imparted things unknown to the others. Thus, Mary becomes, as Ann Graham Brock (2003) states, the "apostle of the apostles," and her figure is a direct challenge to the doctrine of the Catholic Church with respect to the ordination of women in the priesthood. The importance of the various Gnostic texts, including the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Jude, is accepted by feminist scholars who seek to bring back the figure of the historical Magdalene that the Church has chosen to distort. Jane Schaberg, a feminist biblical scholar, does that in The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene (2002) by showing that Mary was a powerful woman who was very close to Jesus and even John but whose legitimacy was undermined by the Church in its desire to bury the true image of an important female disciple. Schaberg's contention has been accepted and transmitted in the work of feminist scholars such as Karen L. King (2003), Ann Graham Brock (2003), Margaret Starbird (1993), and Bruce Chilton (2005).

Since 1969 the Catholic Church has made a distinction between the sinner described in Luke, Mary of Bethany, and the Mary Magdalene, who was present at the Cross and the Resurrection. Although it recognizes that Mary Magdalene speaks the language of love (as in the "Gospel of John" in The Jerome Biblical Commentary 1968, p. 462), it has not modified its teaching regarding women and the priesthood. In the canonic Gospels, Jesus is shown to have broken the taboo of talking to women in public, as in the case of the Samaritan woman, but the Gnostic Gospels show that Peter and the disciples could not accept the idea that a woman had received preeminence from the Lord, as in the case of Mary Magdalene. The power of popular beliefs and the iconography of the repentant woman implanted and exploited over the centuries made it impossible to dissociate the figure of Mary from the penitent whore. That characterization remained a constant until the work of feminist scholars as well as other biblical scholars raised serious questions about the figure of Mary Magdalene as a sinner or a saint (see Time, August 11, 2003, and The New Yorker, February 13 and 20, 2006) and the issue of whether she was one of the first apostles.

Although there is no evidence that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute, that she was the lover of Jesus, or that they were married and had a child, there is evidence in both the canonical and Gnostic Gospels that she was an apostle like the others, perhaps one who was even closer to Jesus. The myths and the legends surrounding Mary Magdalene and the popularity of contemporary films and novels such as Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code (2003) have reopened the debate and perhaps will give Mary Magdalene her proper historical meaning as one of the closest and first apostles to Jesus.

see also Catholicism; Folk Beliefs and Rituals; Melancholia and Sex.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brock, Ann Graham. 2003. Mary Magdalene, the First Apostle: The Struggle for Authority. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Divinity School.

Brown, Dan. 2003. The Da Vinci Code: A Novel. New York: Doubleday.

Brown, Raymond E.; Joseph A. Fitzmyer; and Roland E. Murphy. 1968. The Jerome Biblical Commentary. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Canadé Sautman, Francesca. 1995. La Religion du quotidien: Rites et croyance populaires de la fin du moyen age. Florence, Italy: Leo S. Olschki.

Chilton, Bruce. 2005. Mary Magdalene: A Biography. New York: Doubleday.

Gaignebet, Claude, and Jean-Dominique Lajoux. 1985. Art profane et religion populaire au moyen age. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Hearon, Holly E. 2004. The Mary Magdalene Tradition: Witness and Counter-Witness in Early Christian Communities. Collegeville, MN: Lithurgical Press.

King, Karen L. 2003. The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle. Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press.

Le Goff, Jacques. 1996. Saint Louis. Paris: Gallimard.

Pagels, Elaine H. 1987. The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Random House.

Pagels, Elaine H. 2003. Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas. New York: Random House.

Schaberg, Jane. 2002. The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene: Legends, Apocrypha, and the Christian Testament. New York: Continuum.

Starbird, Margaret. 1993. The Woman with the Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalene and the Holy Grail. Santa Fe, NM: Bear & Co.

Wilson, A. N. 1992. Jesus. New York: Norton.

                                         Giuseppe Di Scipio