For the same reasons that the Joseph of the manuscript cannot be the Joseph of the Book of Genesis, Aseneth cannot be the obscure Egyptian woman who married the Hebrew patriarch. The Genesis Aseneth would not have been of interest to early Christians. Remember, Marcion did not even care about the God of the Old Testament, never mind Aseneth.
So who is Aseneth? Let’s recall what Joseph and Aseneth says about her. In our manuscript, Aseneth’s beauty, her home, and her spiritual transformation are described in great detail. She lives in a tower (2:1–7). She is eighteen years old, tall, beautiful, and a graceful virgin who has kept herself away from men. She has a kind of Jewish soul locked inside a Gentile body, being “noble and glorious like Sarah, beautiful like Rebecca, and virtuous like Rachel” (1:5). In other words, she possesses all the outstanding qualities of the ancient Jewish matriarchs while being a Gentile. Aseneth is summoned by Joseph to move from darkness into light, from error into truth and from death to life. As she repents, she destroys her idols and embraces monotheism. She then undergoes a rebirthing experience, culminating in a honeycomb sacrament and a wedding. Yet she is not in any way a formal convert to Judaism. There is no sense in the text that she is now committed to the 613 Commandments of the Torah. For example, we don’t suddenly see her changing her dietary requirements. Rather, after embracing monotheism, she is called a “City of Refuge” (15:5; 19:4) and is ready to be married—to become “the Bride of God” (4:1). All the while, she remains a Gentile. As we shall soon see, this is significant.
To really understand who Aseneth stands for, we need to make sense of the imagery associated with her: in the first place, the tower symbolism and also the term “City of Refuge,” which becomes her proper name. What is already clear, however, is that the text is not talking about an obscure woman. It is pointing at someone truly significant—nothing less than the Bride of God.
What does this mean?
The identity of Aseneth must be decoded in the same way that we successfully decoded Joseph—that is, we have to go back to the environment in which the text was translated, preserved, and transmitted. Since the earliest version of Joseph and Aseneth is in Syriac, maybe once again the ancient writers of Syriac Christianity will set us on the right path.
Aseneth = Tower
In Joseph and Aseneth, the family home is adjoined by a tower. Aseneth occupies the upper story of ten rooms. Aseneth is literally the woman in the tower—she’s the “Tower Lady,” if you will. Each of her rooms is described as luxuriously appointed. Three are described in detail.
One room serves as a shrine with a gold ceiling. It is adorned with precious stones. Around the room are representations of the gods and goddesses that Aseneth worships. There, in that room, Aseneth prostrates herself to her idols and offers daily sacrifices. It’s her chapel.
Her own bedchamber seems to have occupied the entire east side of the tower. It is described as a large room, with three windows looking out over the courtyard to the east and the street to the north, as well as to the south. Another room was a storeroom for all her personal possessions, her clothing and accessories, as well as ritual coverings for the idols. The remaining seven rooms were occupied by her personal attendants, seven virgins, all born on the same day as she was.
So, of what significance is the description of Aseneth as a tower lady? Using Syriac typological analysis, to whom does she correspond?
Mary the Magdalene = Tower
Since we have firmly set this story in a Christian context, we know of only one tower lady in Christian tradition, and she happens to be intimately associated with Jesus. She is none other than Mary the Magdalene.
As we shall now see, the reasons are straightforward and compelling. Scholars generally speculate that the term “Magdalene” refers to Mary’s place of birth. According to this view, Mary hails from Magdala in the Galilee, a village just a few miles southwest of Capernaeum, where Jesus’ headquarters were located during his Galilean activism. In other words, according to the prevailing scholarly opinion, she is Mary from Magdala.
The standard interpretation is only partially right. The problem with this interpretation of Mary the Magdalene’s name is that in the New Testament, Mary is called Mary the Magdalene, not Mary Magdalene.1 “The Magdalene” represents a title. It is not a surname or, for that matter, a place name. She is not, for instance, Mary of Magdala or Mary from the town of Magdala. She is Mary the Magdalene. What do we make of this?
Let’s start at the beginning. Migdal in Hebrew (Magdala in Aramaic) means—of all things—Tower. Translated literally, Mary the Magdalene means Mary the Tower. Even if Mary the Magdalene’s name does mean Mary from the town of Migdal, as the standard interpretation would have it, her name would mean Mary from Tower Town and, curiously, there are still remnants of a somewhat later tower in that ancient village on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Either way, Mary the Magdalene is the only figure in Christian tradition identified with a tower.
So we have two tower ladies: Aseneth and Mary the Magdalene. Taken together with Joseph/Jesus’ typology, Aseneth of the Tower in our manuscript is clearly Mary the Magdalene or “Mary the Tower” of the Gospels. Put simply, just as Joseph is a Syriac surrogate for Jesus, Aseneth is a Syriac surrogate for Mary the Magdalene.
Mary the Magdalene in the Canonical Gospels
But if that’s the case, doesn’t the parallel with the Gospels end there? After all, in Joseph and Aseneth, Aseneth, the Magdalene surrogate, is the focus of the story, a powerful figure and the bride of Joseph/Jesus. Does this imagery exist in a New Testament vacuum, or are there hints of her status in the Gospels themselves?
Again, let’s start at the beginning. With respect to her being a powerful figure, the fact is that according to the Gospels, along with several other wealthy women, Mary the Magdalene financially supported Jesus’ mission (Luke 8:2–3). This was no mean undertaking. It involved providing food, shelter, clothing, and travel costs for at least thirteen individuals—Jesus and his disciples—and their family members over a three-year period. Furthermore, Mary the Magdalene of the Gospels seems to have been with Jesus wherever he went. She was present during his last week in Jerusalem, and even at his crucifixion. As Ann Graham Brock points out, “Whenever the texts [i.e., the four canonical Gospels] refer to a group of women, they always name her first. More importantly . . . [she is] chosen to be the first witness of the resurrection.”2
Given all this, perhaps the tower imagery in the canonical Gospels should also be understood metaphorically, not simply geographically. That is, perhaps her title in the Gospels doesn’t simply refer to her hometown. Mary may have been called the Magdalene—the tower—because she was a towering figure or presence within early Christianity. If we look carefully at the plain meaning of the Gospels we see that, without a doubt, Mary the Magdalene is one of the most eminent persons associated with Jesus, if not the most important person in the group. The tower analogy, or nickname, would then testify to her exalted status among Jesus’ earliest followers.3
With this in mind, let’s remember that it was not unusual for members of Jesus’ band to be given nicknames. In the Gospels, many of the key figures are given such names, and they don’t refer to towns. For example, Peter’s name is really Simon. He is called Peter because in Greek Peter literally means the Rock or “Rocky.” The sons of Zebedee are nicknamed “Sons of Thunder.” And Judas Iscariot is, most probably, Judas the Sicarius, that is, the Assassin or “Dagger Man.” So, whether the Magdalene is a nickname referring to her place of birth or her status in the Jesus movement, in the Gospels, just as in our text, Mary the Magdalene is identified with a tower and perceived as a powerful figure.
As for Mary the Magdalene being the Bride of Jesus, here too there seems to be some synchronicity between Joseph and Aseneth and the Gospels. For example, in the Gospel of John, there is the so-called wedding at Cana (John 2:1) which some have identified with the wedding of Jesus to Mary the Magdalene.4 That’s the incident where, at his mother’s insistence, Jesus turns water into wine. But if he’s not the bridegroom, why does his mother expect him to supply the wine?5
To the careful reader, there is another incident recounted in the Gospel of John that powerfully indicates that Mary the Magdalene is, indeed, Jesus’ bride. As John tells it, after the crucifixion and the Sabbath that followed, before dawn on Sunday, Mary the Magdalene goes to Jesus’ tomb along with Jesus’ mother and sister. What is she doing there with his next of kin? The Gospel of Mark tells us (Mark 16:1) that her intention was to “anoint” the body—that is, to prepare Jesus’ naked body for final burial.
The above detail is of tremendous significance. Anointing Jesus’ body means washing it and then rubbing it with various oils. Anointing a man who has been whipped and crucified is no easy task. The badly mutilated body has to be carefully and repeatedly scrubbed. Obviously, a mere follower of Jesus—a marginal follower as some would have it—would not be allowed to “anoint” the naked body of the deceased religious leader and get it ready for burial—especially if the follower is a woman! In Judaism, this was a task that was reserved only for the very closest relatives—certainly not a disciple, and not some marginal female from an extended entourage. Simply put, this important and overlooked detail strongly suggests that Mary the Magdalene was Jesus’ wife. Otherwise, she had no business being there at all, much less touching Jesus’ naked corpse. It’s that simple.
Perhaps most tellingly, Mary the Magdalene was the first to see the risen Jesus and the first to speak with him. She was also the first to announce to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord” (John 20:1–18). Even before his own mother or, for that matter, his brothers and disciples, Jesus shows himself to Mary the Magdalene and reassures her that he will ascend to the Father.
The idea that Jesus would speak first with Mary the Magdalene and not Mary, his mother, represented a sore point within the early Christian community at the time when veneration of the latter was on the rise. Many, including Ephrem the Syrian, wished that Jesus had announced his heavenly birth to Mary, his mother, just as he had his earthly birth through her. That symmetry—Mary, the mother, present at both “births”—would have made sense, or so they thought. But, according to the Gospels, it was to Mary the Magdalene whom Jesus first chose to reveal himself. The choice is very revealing—this preference and word of comfort hint at the fact that she was his closest relative, not some marginal enthusiastic groupie.
Finally, another way orthodox Christians thought of Mary the Magdalene was as the bride mentioned in the Song of Songs. In the 2nd century, Cyril of Jerusalem said, “[When it is written], in the Song of Songs, ‘on my bed I sought Him whom my soul loved’ it is referring to the Magdalene.”6
Mary the Magdalene in the Gnostic Gospels
The Gnostic Gospels are even more forthcoming than the canonical Gospels about the preeminent role of Mary the Magdalene and her personal relationship with Jesus. These early Christian texts, such as the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, are very clear that Mary the Magdalene is the person closest to Jesus. She is described in Greek as his koinonos, a term that can be translated as “companion,” and, indeed, that is how it has mostly been translated. It can just as accurately be translated as “lover.”
The 2nd-century Gospel of Peter makes it clear why Mary the Magdalene went to the tomb on the Sunday that she found it empty. She went there to do “the things which women are wont to do for those that die and for those that are beloved of them” (12:50, emphasis added).
If you think that citing a Gnostic non-canonical text is weak history, consider this: the earliest manuscripts of the canonical Gospels date no earlier—even in fragmentary form—than the earliest Gnostic texts (i.e., 2nd to 4th centuries). It’s a scholarly guess that the canonical Gospels were initially composed in the late 1st century, but the manuscript trail ends well before then. Nonetheless, theological bullies treat the canonical writings as if they were the original, undisputed works. That helps them describe texts that they don’t agree with as late and, as a consequence, heretical or inaccurate.
The fact is that according to an increasing number of historians, the view of Mary the Magdalene espoused in the Gnostic Gospels is more historically accurate than the image portrayed in the canonical Gospels. For example, with respect to the Gnostic Gospel of Mary Magdalene, one of the preeminent scholars on Gnosticism, Karen King, states: “Historians . . . have come more and more to understand [that] the Gospel of Mary’s portrait [of the early church is] . . . in a number of respects more historically accurate than that of the master [canonical] story.”7 In fact, given its sudden appearance on the historical stage, it is impossible to explain the elaborate mythological system of Gnosticism if it’s not based on history. The alternative is to attribute Gnosticism entirely to writers such as Valentinus—but, as Bernard Green states concerning Valentinian beliefs, “. . . how they could have elaborated into such a complex and rigid mythological form within the space of about twenty years still needs to be explained.”8
The Gnostic Gospel of Philip tells the same story. There, it is explicitly said that “the companion of the [savior] is Mary of Magdala. The [savior loved] her more than [all] the disciples, [and he] kissed her often on her [mouth].”9 According to Elaine Pagels, the term companion here is rendered as syzygos and “can suggest sexual intimacy.”10 King goes further. She states that in the Gospel of Philip both the terms koinônos and hôtre may refer to heterosexual intercourse. She concludes therefore that “the multivalent representation of Mary as Jesus’ koinônos and hôtre, her link with the heavenly Sophia or Holy Spirit, as well as Jesus kissing her, all function as symbolic-paradigms for the salvation effected in the bridal chamber.”11 In other words, according to the Gospel of Philip, Jesus had a “real marital relationship with Mary Magdalene,” and this relationship provided the paradigm for “the initiation ritual [known] as a bridal chamber.”12
The Gnostic Gospels were revered by a large and influential segment of early Christianity—not some small cult or sect. Here, in these writings, Mary the Magdalene is not only the koinonos who is regularly and publicly kissed by Jesus, she is also his smartest disciple. According to Pagels, “. . . every one of the recently discovered sources that mentioned Mary Magdalene . . . picture Mary as one of Jesus’ most trusted disciples. Some even revere her as his foremost disciple, Jesus’ closest confidante. . . .”13 She is the one who knows Jesus’ true teachings and has the task of imparting her special knowledge to other disciples. We see this, for instance, in the Gospel of Mary Magdalene mentioned above. There, after the crucifixion, the disciples are disheartened and come to Mary the Magdalene, asking her: “How can we go to the Gentiles and preach the good news of the kingdom of the child of humanity? If they did not spare him, how will we be spared?”14 Good question. First of all, notice that they come to her because she has expertise concerning the Gentiles. Second of all, she’s clearly used to leadership. While Peter and the other disciples quiver, Mary takes charge, comforting all of them and handling their request to pass Jesus’ secret teachings on to them. She is clearly the apostle to the apostles, the apostola apostolorum.
Mary the Magdalene’s role within Gnosticism reflects an early understanding of her significance and her special connection to Jesus. In these non-canonical early Christian texts, Mary the Magdalene is the guardian and teacher of Jesus’ authentic message. All this fits perfectly with the portrait of Aseneth, the tower lady in Joseph and Aseneth.
Mary the Magdalene as Priestess
But there is more. In the manuscript, before she meets Joseph, Aseneth is some kind of pagan priestess—attended to by seven virgins. This is suggestive. Was Mary the Magdalene a Gentile priestess before she met Jesus? After her transformation, did she represent a particular faction within the earliest Jesus movement?
If Mary the Magdalene was a priestess, she would have been a “Phoenician” one. “Phoenician” was, essentially, a Greek name for coastal Canaanites. The Canaanites were the pre-Hebrew people of the area. By the time of Jesus, they lived primarily in the area of modern Lebanon, just north of the Galilee. In fact, Jesus’ ministry took place in the Galilee, a place of mixed Jewish and Phoenician/Canaanite culture. Allen Jones puts it very well when he states, “One tends to forget how close were the cultural relationships between and among the peoples of the Aegeo-Mediterranean area. The sea was a highway rather than a barrier.”15 Elaborating on this point, speaking specifically of Judaea, Morton Smith states that “the Semitic-speaking people of the land were by no means wholly Jewish. . . . Therefore, to picture Jesus’ environment we have to reckon with a strong strain of native, Palestinian, Semitic paganism. Besides this, the country had long been influenced by Phoenician and Egyptian beliefs.”16 Recent excavations at Bethsaida17—home to as many as five of Jesus’ twelve disciples—confirm the heterogeneity of the Galilean population in the 1st century C.E. Also, the discovery of what seems to be the town of Dalmanutha, described in the Gospel of Mark (8:10) as the place Jesus sailed to after miraculously feeding four thousand people by multiplying a few fish and loaves of bread, has unearthed architectural remains and pottery suggesting “that Jews and those following a polytheistic religion lived side by side in the community.”18 Dalmanutha was situated less than a mile from Magdala. In other words, the Galilee was a place of mixed Jewish and Phoenician people. It was a melting pot of various cultures, not purely Jewish by ethnicity or religion.
Jesus himself was no stranger to Phoenician culture. For example, in the Gospel of Mark (7:24–31), he takes an unexplained journey outside Jewish territory to the region of Tyre and Sidon—modern Lebanon. That is, he undertakes a journey to the middle of the Phoenician world. Why? According to the Gospels, there he has an interaction with an unnamed Gentile, a “Syro-Phoenician” woman (Mark 7:26) who seeks his help in healing her daughter. Can this be a canonical echo of the meeting that forms the heart of the Joseph and Aseneth narrative? Put differently, is the encounter between Jesus and the Syro-Phoenician woman an echo of the first meeting between Jesus and Mary the Magdalene?
To return to our text, Aseneth’s tower in the manuscript is described as a kind of temple with an outer shrine and an inner Holy of Holies or “bridal chamber.” This dual-chamber architecture parallels the temple in Jerusalem and the Phoenician temple in Tyre. This is not surprising. After all, Hiram King of Tyre helped King Solomon build the temple in Jerusalem (1 Kings 7:13; 2 Chronicles 4:11). More than this, Aseneth’s shrine is described as having a gold ceiling exactly like the temples in Jerusalem and Tyre. In other words, the story in Joseph and Aseneth seems to clarify a detail that is only alluded to in the canonical Gospels, namely that Mary the Magdalene was not only a Syro-Phoenician woman but a Syro-Phoenician priestess.
But if Mary the Magdalene was, indeed, a Phoenician priestess until her encounter with Jesus of Nazareth, did she now convert to Judaism? Or, perhaps, did she convert her tower into a church for her Gentile followers?
What Typology Tells Us
In Syriac Christianity, the types all dovetail. Aseneth is equated with Mary the Magdalene, just as Joseph is equated with Jesus. Here’s how Syriac Christians saw things:
1. Church = Tower
The tower imagery in Joseph and Aseneth and the match between Aseneth and Mary the Magdalene are no mere coincidences. Ephrem explicitly makes the identification of the tower with the church. Here’s what he says:
The Church, moreover, is the Tower
The Tower which the many built
Was a symbol, looking to the One:
He came down and built on earth
The Tower that leads up to heaven.19
Ephrem may be reminding us here that the ancients tried to reach God physically, by ascending ziggurats—terraced towers—to heaven. In contrast, the church represents a spiritual path to God. It is what “He who came down” wanted to build on earth.
But there’s more to the story. How did the one who “came down” build the church? What were the means by which the church came to be? And here we make an amazing discovery: both Aseneth and Mary the Magdalene are explicitly interpreted in Syriac Christianity as surrogates for the church.
2. Aseneth = Church
Ephrem depicts Aseneth, our tower lady, as the type for the church. His Hymn 21 goes as follows:
You [Ephraim] are the son of Aseneth, the daughter of a pagan priest;
She is the symbol of the church of the Gentiles.20
Ephrem’s hymn is telling us that Aseneth is “the daughter of a pagan priest.” But if we are not talking about ancient Egypt then, in a Phoenician context, as Athalya Brenner reminds us, “the king was high priest of Ashtoreth and his daughter was high priestess of Ba’al.”21 If the equation between Aseneth and Mary the Magdalene is correct, beyond the church typology, Ephrem is telling us that Mary the Magdalene was both a Phoenician and a priestess.
Furthermore, the hymn explicitly tells us that after her transformation, Aseneth becomes the symbol of the church. Clearly, she is not the church—she is the symbol of the church. Meaning she’s not an institution, she’s an individual. But this has nothing to do with the obscure Aseneth in the Book of Genesis. We are in solid Christian territory here. He must be speaking about the tower lady that Aseneth, typologically speaking, represents. She is none other than Mary the Magdalene.
Hymn 21 gives us the name of the particular church community that Aseneth represents. It’s the “Church of the Gentiles.” What is this church? How does this community relate to our understanding of early Christianity?
Aphrahat too, in Demonstration 21, makes the same point and explicitly connects Joseph/Aseneth to Jesus/church:22
Joseph married the daughter of an unclean priest
And Jesus brought to himself the Church from the unclean Gentiles.
Simply put, this means that just as Joseph married Aseneth, the daughter of a non-Jewish priest, so, too, Jesus can be said to have married the Gentile Church. In other words, in Aphrahat’s parallel, Joseph is Jesus and Aseneth—his Gentile bride—is the church. Writing in the 3rd century, Cyprian, leader of the church in Carthage, explicitly stated that the church was the “bride of Christ”—anyone who did not have the bride as a mother could not have God as the father.23
3. Mary the Magdalene = Church
But do either Ephrem or Aphrahat explicitly refer to Mary the Magdalene and relate her, like Aseneth, to Jesus’ bride—that is, to the church?
Remarkably, Ephrem does just that.
In another passage of Hymn 21, Ephrem the Syrian writes the following about Mary the Magdalene:
Let us call the Church itself “Mary.”
For it befits her to have two names.
For to Simon, the Foundation,
Mary was first to run,
And like the Church brought him the good news
And told him what she had seen
That our Lord has risen and was raised up.24
Here, it’s not the Virgin Mary but Mary the Magdalene—the first to run to Jesus’ tomb—who is called the church. After all, Mary the Magdalene is the first to see the resurrection and the first to proclaim the essential Christian message, namely, that Jesus was raised from the dead. In other words, according to Ephrem, while Simon Peter may be the foundation of the church, Mary the Magdalene, like Aseneth, is the symbol for the church.
4. The Church of the Gentiles
Furthermore, both Mary the Magdalene and Aseneth are referred to by Ephrem as “the Church of the Gentiles.” This strange terminology refers to those who had been converted to Jesus’ message but who remained non-Jews. Though they may formerly have been worshippers of many of the popular deities around the Mediterranean world—Mithras, Dionysus, Artemis, and so forth—these individuals remained non-Jewish but became attached to Jesus’ movement. Hence, they were the Church of the Gentiles, as opposed to the Church of the Circumcised, the Jewish followers of Jesus.
Ephrem’s description of Mary perfectly matches our manuscript’s depiction of Aseneth. In Joseph and Aseneth, Aseneth is renamed City of Refuge. The angelic being who visits her in her suite tells us the reason for this. In her, many nations—not the House of Israel—will take refuge with the Lord God, and she will protect those people who trust in God. In other words, Aseneth becomes a kind of tower leading to heaven, sheltering the Gentile faithful. Her walls, it is predicted, will guard those who attach themselves to the Most High God.
As in Ephrem, Joseph and Aseneth tells us that Mary the Magdalene represented a group of faithful who become “attached”—but not necessarily converted—to the religion of the Most High God. Mary the Magdalene, therefore, was a symbol for a specific community of believers. For those people, she became a City of Refuge or, in Ephrem’s words, a “Church of the Gentiles.”
Interestingly, as noted above, in the Gnostic Gospel of Mary Magdalene, Jesus’ disciples go to Mary the Magdalene to ask a question specifically related to the Church of the Gentiles: “How can we go to the Gentiles and preach the good news?” We also find backing for the idea that Mary the Magdalene was the leader of the Gentile followers of Jesus in a 2nd-century Greek text. There, a pagan philosopher named Celsus mentions a Christian group named after a woman named Mary, who is otherwise unidentified.25 Clearly, in light of the new evidence, we are talking about Mary the Magdalene. More than this, as Stephen Shoemaker states, Celsus’ group “bears some relation to the ‘Nassenes’ of Hippolytus’ Refutatio, whose teachings were supposedly passed down from James the brother of the Lord through a woman named Mariamne.”26 This is a group of Gentiles, and Celsus’ “Mary” is referred to by her Greek name “Mariamne,” not some Hebrew or Aramaic version of her name. Not coincidentally, Mariamne, or Mariamene, is the exact Greek version of Mary that appears on an ossuary (bone box) in a 1st-century Jerusalem tomb next to the ossuary of a man named “Jesus, son of Joseph.”27 In other words, the portrayal of Mary the Magdalene in our text, as the leader of the Gentile Church, matches both the archaeological and textual evidence.
But what about the designation City of Refuge applied to Mary the Magdalene? In effect, in Joseph and Aseneth, Aseneth/Mary the Magdalene is renamed “Artemis.” In Greek, the name Artemis means “safe and sound”—that is, the goddess who gives refuge. In the original Greek version of Joseph and Aseneth, there was probably a play on words here; she wasn’t being renamed City of Refuge, she was being renamed Artemis.28 As we shall see later, this is very significant.
Most interestingly, “City of Refuge” is a designation reserved for Jesus himself. There is an ancient Gnostic writing which talks about Jesus in exactly the same terms that Joseph and Aseneth uses to talk about Mary the Magdalene. In the 3rd-century The Acts of Judas Thomas, Jesus is called a “City of Refuge.” We find this idea expressed in a prayer:
Our Lord, Companion of his servants,
Guide and Leader of those who believe in him,
City of Refuge and Repose of the afflicted,
Hope of the poor and Deliverer of the feeble. . . .29
The City of Refuge is obviously a code for Church of the Gentiles. What we learn from all this is that the Church of the Gentiles goes back beyond Paul to the earliest days of Christianity, and it seems to have been led by Mary the Magdalene. In Jane Schaberg’s words: “I like to think of the Magdalene figure . . . as an actual person who lived and who, I think, has a better claim than Paul to being the founder of Christianity.”30 This Gentile Church was separate from the somewhat later congregations of the Christ that sprouted up throughout modern-day Turkey and Greece in the 40s and 50s under Paul’s influence. The theology of Mary the Magdalene’s Church of the Gentiles would have differed significantly, both from the “Christ congregations” of Paul—which were also Gentile in composition—and from the Jewish Jesus Movement, led by Jesus’ brother James until his violent death in 62 C.E.
In light of our text, it now becomes clear that there must have been three distinctive forms of early Christianity, each differing somewhat from the others in beliefs and practices:
The Jesus Movement—Jesus’ first Jewish followers under James in Jerusalem. Essentially, this was a Torah-observant Jewish group that saw Jesus as the anticipated fully human Messiah or redeemer.
The Church of the Gentiles—the community of Gentile followers of Jesus, stemming from Mary the Magdalene. This group paralleled the fully Jewish Jesus movement by preserving a more historical Jesus. At the same time, they seem to have introduced non-Jewish ideas into the movement—for example, the elevation of Jesus from a human Messiah to some kind of divine being or “Son of God,” and likewise the elevation of Mary the Magdalene to some kind of “Bride of God.”31
The Christ Movement—Paul’s congregations, based on Paul’s visions of the resurrected Christ. This movement diminished the statures of Mary the Magdalene, Jesus’ family, and his earthly ministry. It worshipped the Christ figure as a dying-rising savior god-human and viewed Jesus’ death as the gateway to salvation.
The first two movements would have arisen out of Jesus’ intimate circle—Jews and Gentiles. Paul, who came on the scene in the mid-30s, spearheaded the Christ Movement a few years after Jesus’ crucifixion. Simply put, as our text highlights, Paul seems to have had very little connection to the Jesus of history, his early Jewish followers, or the beginnings of the Gentile Jesus movement. Unlike Mary the Magdalene and James, Paul never met the Jesus who taught in the late 20s throughout the Galilee and in Jerusalem.
In time, a fourth movement developed, represented by Gnostic Christianity. This movement seems to have been related to the Church of the Gentiles in which Mary the Magdalene played such a prominent role.
We’ll return to these divisions within early Christianity in a later chapter.
Putting It All Together
Here’s what we have deciphered so far concerning the Aseneth character in Joseph and Aseneth:
Aseneth = Church = Tower
Mary the Magdalene = Church = Tower
Using methods employed by Syriac Christians, we’ve been able to establish the true identity of the Aseneth in our manuscript. The typological identifications reinforce one another: Aseneth and Mary the Magdalene are both Towers and types of the church. The logic is clear: Aseneth and Mary the Magdalene are identical, the former acting as a surrogate for the latter.
Aseneth Decoded
Step Two
Aseneth = Mary the Magdalene
The Shepherd of Hermas
There are other writings that build upon the same typology; for example, the influential 2nd-century writing The Shepherd of Hermas.32 Irenaeus, the early church father living in what is today Lyon, France, considered this text scriptural, placing it on the same level as the material in the Bible. This writing is also included in the Muratorian Canon, an early list of authoritative Christian texts.
Attributed to Hermas, the brother of Pius, bishop of Rome (around 140–154), The Shepherd of Hermas contains mysterious visions, commandments and parables all dealing with ethical concerns and the need for repentance. Reading it in light of Joseph and Aseneth, we can see that they belong to the same genre. In The Shepherd of Hermas, an “eminent looking man,” an emissary “sent from the most revered angel,” the “shepherd to whom you have been entrusted”33 reveals himself to Hermas, the hero of the story. The angel proceeds, god-like, to legislate commandments. The fourth commandment stresses that he is “in charge of repentance” and that “repentance is itself a form of understanding” (The Shepherd of Hermas 30, section IV, 2, verse 2).34 This angelic message parallels the importance of repentance uttered by the angelic Joseph in the transformation of Aseneth.
More than this, when speaking of the church, many of the images used in The Shepherd of Hermas parallel those used in Joseph and Aseneth. In the third vision, for example, an elderly woman approaches Hermas. She shows him a tower. Addressing her as “Lady,” Hermas inquires as to the significance of the tower. She responds, “The tower, which you see being built, is I, the church” (The Shepherd of Hermas 9, section III, 3, verse 3).35 Here we explicitly see that the tower = the lady = the church.
Moreover, around the tower are seven women, reminiscent of the seven virgins who attend Aseneth in her tower.36 They have different names which the “lady” indicates are Faith, Self-restraint, Simplicity, Knowledge, Innocence, Reverence, and Love. These represent seven steps in the spiritual process toward perfection, each one giving rise to the next. “Whoever,” notes the Lady to Hermas, “serves as their slave and is able to adhere to their deeds will have a place to reside in the tower, along with the saints of God” (The Shepherd of Hermas 16, section III, 8, verse 8).37 The tower, therefore, is the place of refuge: it represents the church where those who have been redeemed through repentance dwell.
In the fourth vision, Hermas recounts: “a young woman suddenly met me, clothed as if coming from a bridal chamber, dressed all in white and with white sandals, veiled down to her forehead. . . . From my earlier visions I knew that she was the church” (The Shepherd of Hermas, section 23, section IV, 2 verses 1, 2).38 Again, here we see the same typology at work: the Church = the Bride = the Lady = the Tower. Also note the importance of the “bridal chamber” from which the “young woman” emerges. This woman, the Bride, is the one who can protect the faithful from a prophesied great beast, which Hermas interprets as a foreshadowing of a great affliction.
Thus, Joseph and Aseneth is not alone in using the typology of tower, Bride, and lady for the church. Nor is this symbolism just confined to the eastern Syriac-speaking Christianity and the North African writer Tertullian. According to most scholars, The Shepherd of Hermas originated within Rome, right in the center of the empire. It was disseminated widely, becoming one of the most popular writings within early Christianity.
In other words, the imagery we encounter in Joseph and Aseneth was commonplace in the 2nd and 3rd centuries around the Mediterranean Christian world, another argument for an early dating of our manuscript. In Joseph and Aseneth we are not dealing with isolated or idiosyncratic typology. Such discourse was rife throughout the empire.
In fact, there are at least three Aseneth-type legends in the Syriac church—all of them explicitly Christian, all of them dated to the 3rd and 4th century. They concern St. Barbara, St. Irene, and St. Christina. Like Aseneth, St. Barbara is extremely beautiful, lives in the Egyptian city of Heliopolis, has a rich pagan father, lives in a tower, destroys her idols, and turns toward God. Unlike Aseneth, she is described explicitly as a Christian, and when she is murdered for her faith, she is designated a martyr. Like Aseneth and Barbara, St. Irene is beautiful, has a powerful father, and lives in a tower. She has a life-altering conversion from paganism to Christianity. She dies at least twice, but is resurrected each time. She ends her life in the region of Ephesus, the home of the goddess Artemis. Finally, there is St. Christina. Like Aseneth, Barbara, and Irene, Christina is pagan, has a powerful father and lives in a tower. She is being groomed as a Phoenician pagan priestess when an angel, who converts her to Christianity, visits her. She cries a lot and is ultimately martyred.
There are only two main differences between Aseneth and the rest of these saintly and beautiful tower ladies. They are explicitly Christian, while Aseneth’s theology is never described openly. More to the point, they are all celibate, while Aseneth is both sexually active and ultimately married. Kraemer puts it this way: “If the linchpin of the Aseneth tale is her marriage to Joseph, the linchpin of these martyrologies is the renunciation of marriage and the wrath such renunciation brings on women, together with its ultimate rewards.”39
We think the marriage explains the cover-up. Meaning: Barbara, Irene, and Christina are explicitly called Christian because they are celibate. Aseneth’s Christian past is masked because she is married.
Which story is the earlier? Clearly, Joseph and Aseneth. It is the only text where the religion of the female protagonist is kept ambiguous, and it is the only story that showcases a married woman. It would make no sense, given the Christian context where these texts were preserved, for a writer to model Aseneth on a celibate Christian woman and turn her into a married pagan heroine. On the other hand, it makes perfect sense—once the figure of Aseneth is transformed into various martyrs who are consistent with Pauline theology—that Barbara, Irene, and Christina are modeled on Aseneth. Basically, these three women are sanitized Pauline versions of Aseneth. In other words, what we are seeing is the historical process by which Mary the Magdalene was airbrushed out of history. First she is transformed into Aseneth, the Bride of God. Then she is transformed into the beautiful, celibate tower ladies and martyrs Barbara, Irene, and Christina.
What these three female Christian saints give us is a literary tradition—a genre. Given the similarities, there’s absolutely no reason to pull Aseneth out of this tradition, except that our original tower lady does not die a martyr’s death, is not Christian in the Pauline sense, and is very much married to someone called “the Son of God.” Unless there was some kind of psychological need for Syrian Christians to invent beautiful tower ladies, there is a historical reality behind the Syriac mythology. Faced with these kinds of texts, Ann Graham Brock says “It is possible to make the sociological link between text and historical context.”40 In other words, if Aseneth stands behind the Syrian Christian martyrs Barbara, Irene, and Christina, who stands behind Aseneth? Historically speaking, whom is she covering for?
The Clincher
Let’s go back to Hymn 21 of Ephrem the Syrian to see if the explicit equations between Aseneth, Mary the Magdalene, and the church can be made even more explicit. Here’s what the hymn says:
You [Ephraim] are the son of Aseneth, the daughter of a pagan priest;
She [Aseneth] is the symbol of the Church of the Gentiles.
She [Aseneth] loved Joseph, and Joseph’s son . . .
in truth, the Holy Church loved.
She had many children by the Crucified,
And every one of them is marked with the cross.41
Clearly, the above hymn cannot be read as referring to the Biblical Aseneth or Joseph, or Joseph’s son as in the Book of Genesis. That would be absurd—the Aseneth of the Book of Genesis did not have “many children by the Crucified.” If Aseneth is Mary the Magdalene, let’s examine how the hymn would read, simply substituting Jesus for Joseph and Mary the Magdalene for Aseneth:
Ephraim, you are the son of Mary the Magdalene,
daughter of a pagan priest;
Mary the Magdalene is the symbol of the Church of the Gentiles.
She loved Jesus, and Jesus’ son . . .
in truth, the Holy Church loved.
Mary the Magdalene had many children by the Crucified,
And every one of them is marked with the cross.
In other words:
• Mary the Magdalene is the daughter of a non-Jewish priest.
• Mary the Magdalene is the symbol for the Church of the Gentiles.
• Mary the Magdalene loved Jesus.
• Mary the Magdalene had many children by Jesus.
• The children were all marked for death.
In light of Joseph and Aseneth, this is now the most natural reconstruction. The substitutions make sense. They show decisively that in Syriac Christianity, Aseneth is linked to Mary the Magdalene. She is the Bride of God and the mother of his children.
Some might argue that this passage can also be construed spiritually with Mary the Magdalene representing the Church of the Gentiles. Converts to her movement would represent her “children.” On this reading, Aseneth/Mary the Magdalene is the church which had many metaphorical children by Jesus. All these children, therefore, are marked by the sign of the cross. Such a reading is obviously theologically motivated. It asks us to look beyond the plain language at metaphors that are not even hinted at. But, even if we accept this reading, the point is that, beyond a doubt, in Syriac Christianity, Aseneth is equated with Mary the Magdalene, who is then equated with an important branch of the Christian Church.
Having said this, with respect to metaphorical readings, the rule of thumb should be that they are perfectly legitimate ways to interpret a text, but not at the expense of ignoring the simple meaning of the words. In other words, it’s all right to go deeper, as we have done with Joseph and Aseneth, but it’s another thing to ignore the surface meaning altogether. In the instance of Ephrem’s Hymn 21, it’s very clear that a woman—here called Aseneth—is having “many children by the Crucified.” The plain meaning cannot be ignored. In fact, it has to lead. As Joseph and Aseneth will soon make clear, the plain meaning points to real history. Meaning, the marriage and children were real.