9

ASENETH: HER STORY

The Meeting

Joseph and Aseneth opens with Joseph about to descend on the estate of Potiphar, Aseneth’s father, a priest of Heliopolis in Egypt. The late-morning heat is overpowering, and Joseph and his retinue wish to stop to rest and enjoy refreshments.

Potiphar is overjoyed and immediately orders preparations for a feast. He and his wife take their daughter aside, explaining to her that Joseph, “the Powerful One of God” (3:4) and the ruler of all Egypt, is about to honor them by having lunch with them. He describes Joseph as a worshipper of God, a virgin, and a man of great wisdom. He calls him “the savior” (4:7). He adds that the “holy spirit of God” (4:8) is in him. Potiphar then informs Aseneth that he intends to give her to Joseph as a wife.

Aseneth’s immediate reaction is one of “rage and indignation” (4:10). Why, she asks, should she be handed over like a prisoner to a person “who is not one of my people” (4:10)? She also wonders out loud about the rumor that Joseph “attempted adultery” with his master’s wife (4:11).¹ Potiphar wisely decides to hold his tongue, knowing that his daughter would eventually calm down.

Joseph sends “twelve men ahead of him” (3:2) and then arrives in regal style, rich in royal and divine symbolism. The next chapter will probe the significance of these important details, for they tell us much about who Joseph is modeled on. For the moment, suffice it to say that this Joseph—like Jesus and unlike the Biblical Joseph²—is surrounded by twelve men. Like Jesus, as depicted in countless paintings, mosaics, and stained-glass windows, Joseph is here described as arriving on a chariot made of gold and pulled by white horses. Later editions of the text say that the horses were four in number. The text is also very clear that he is “clothed in beautiful white linen and wrapped in a purple cloak” (5:5). He wears a crown of gold and he holds a royal scepter. This is a classic depiction of the Greek god Helios, called Apollo by the Romans. Later, he is also called Sol Invictus, the “Unconquered Sun.” At about the same time as the rise of Christianity in the 2nd century, Sol Invictus became identified with the Persian Sun god Mithras and worshipped throughout the Roman Empire. The Egyptians called him Horus. The Phoenicians called him Ba’al. All these appellations were various names for the Sun god who drives his chariot across the heavens, dies and is resurrected every morning, remaining, that is, unconquered by darkness. Helios/Apollo was believed to have had twelve disciples represented by the twelve signs of the zodiac.

These symbols—the signs of the zodiac and the chariot—also meant something in a Jewish context. Let’s not forget, the original Jerusalem Church was essentially a Jewish affair. According to Rachel Elior, the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example—or at least some of them—were part of what would later become known as the “Merkavah” chariot tradition. This Jewish form of mysticism involved some kind of ascent to the heavenly throne, use of a solar—as opposed to a lunar—calendar, and, as in Joseph and Aseneth, the belief that an angelic priesthood would imminently appear. Joseph and Aseneth, therefore, appears to be consistent with the beliefs of an ideological minority within the Jewish spectrum. More important, however, is the manner in which these ideas were adopted by the non-Jewish Christian movement.³

The early Gentile Christian Church promoted Jesus–Apollo–Helios–Sol Invictus–Mithras symbolism and syncretism (fused religious symbols) so as to attract various peoples in the Roman Empire to the Christian fold. In fact, after the empire became Christian in the 4th century, only Jesus could be depicted with the symbolism once reserved for Apollo, Helios, Mithras, and Sol Invictus. It was illegal for anyone else—commoner or Caesar—to be portrayed in this way.

Identifying sun imagery with Jesus is not unique to our analysis. It’s the norm. For example, right under St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, archaeologists have found a largely pagan cemetery dating to the 1st century. One of the most impressive tombs belongs to what has been identified as an early Christian family named Julii. How did archaeologists determine that the Julii family gave up paganism and became some of the earliest followers of Jesus? On the wall of the tomb, there is an image of Jonah and the whale (associated by early Christians with Jesus), a Good Shepherd (Christian iconography), and Jesus, depicted as the Sun god, riding on a chariot pulled by white horses.⁴ Simply put, although there is precedent for some of these symbols in the Jewish and pagan traditions, the earliest Christian tomb in Rome—right under the Vatican—depicts Jesus in exactly the manner that he is portrayed in Joseph and Aseneth.

The mix of sun-god imagery, signs of the zodiac, and Jewish symbolism is a classic marker for the early Church of the Gentiles. In fact, churches of this kind have been unearthed in the very birthplace of the movement—in the Galilee. Because there is Jewish symbolism in the mosaics that have been excavated there, Israeli archaeologists have dubbed the ancient buildings that housed them “synagogues.” But our contention is that the mosaics at Beit Alpha, Tiberias, Sepphoris,⁵ etc. have been wrongly identified, in the same way that Joseph and Aseneth has been wrongly labeled as Jewish. Many scholars mistakenly assume that a Jewish symbol or character must mean a Jewish text or edifice. They disregard the fact that in the early stages of the development of the new religion, many Christian groups still had a distinctly Jewish flavor and used Jewish symbols. In the Galilean Beit Alpha, Tiberias, and Sepphoris houses of worship, for example, the depictions of Helios perfectly match the description of Joseph in our text, and they are both virtually identical to depictions of Jesus from the 1st century to this day. In other words, Joseph’s grand entrance in our text is a classic depiction of Jesus as a Sun god. Commenting on this entrance, Nir states “Joseph is pictured as Helios, but he’s also the prototype of Jesus Christ.”⁶

We’ll elaborate on Joseph/Jesus in the next chapter. Let’s return to Aseneth’s story, one that has been suppressed and ignored for centuries. What does it tell us? And what can we infer about Mary the Magdalene as a result?

Again, we let the text take the lead.

As the story unfolds, Aseneth catches a glimpse of Joseph from the upper window of her very tall tower and, seeing him in person, she is immediately taken with him. Her reaction is spiritual, physical, and sexual. When she sees him, her knees literally shake and “the joints of her hips were loosened” (6:1). She now regrets her former impetuous words. She says of Joseph/Jesus, “Now I see the sun shining from his chariot” (6:2). Putting her former arrogance aside, she states that she would be willing to be given to him, to “serve him forever” (6:7). Aseneth’s physical reaction to Joseph is significant. In the Gospels “Jesus was expressly portrayed as a man who loved women, and whom women loved.”⁷ Also significant is the self-deprecation by the formerly arrogant Aseneth.

The encounter between Jesus and the Syro-Phoenician or Canaanite woman in the Gospel of Matthew (15:21–29) that we alluded to earlier seems to parallel Aseneth’s first encounter with Joseph. Consider: in Matthew, when the Gentile woman asks Jesus to heal her dying daughter, Jesus tells her that he is only interested in healing Jews, that is, that he was sent only to the House of Israel. He compares his disciples to his “children” and compares the Syro-Phoenician woman to a dog. What’s going on here? Either Jesus believes that all Gentiles are dogs, or there is something about this woman that connects her specifically with dogs. It’s unlikely that Jesus believed all Gentiles were dogs. This does not fit with what he has to say about Samaritans, Romans, or other ethnic groups. So, clearly, there must be something about this particular woman that merits the designation of “dog.” The incredible thing is that the woman doesn’t argue. She agrees with this characterization. When she does, Jesus calls her a woman of faith and agrees to heal her daughter. Again, what’s going on here?

To reiterate, Jesus calls the Syro-Phoenician woman in the Gospels a dog. Since she is female, it would be more correct to say “bitch.” As it turns out, the bitch was a sacred animal for the goddess Artemis.⁸ A recent discovery of hundreds of dog burials in Ashkelon, Israel, in a Phoenician/Canaanite religious context, sheds more light on the incident involving the Syro-Phoenician woman.⁹ Specifically, it seems that dogs were not only sacred, but were used in Canaanite pagan rituals—hence Jesus’ insult. For the dog appellation to make sense, the Syro-Phoenician woman must have been a Canaanite priestess involved in dog sacrifices. Jesus is insulting her by reminding her of her occupation. By agreeing with him, she is transformed. It is only then that he agrees to heal her daughter.

If we are right and Mary the Magdalene—a.k.a. Aseneth—is a Syro-Phoenician priestess, then her self-deprecation in the face of Joseph mirrors the Syro-Phoenician woman’s self-deprecation in the face of Jesus. The passage in Matthew may be another echo of the relationship between Jesus and Mary the Magdalene preserved in the canonical Gospels.¹⁰

Her parents now bring Aseneth down from her suite high in the tower. For the first time, she meets Joseph face to face. Aseneth’s father tells her to go and kiss Joseph. She immediately goes up to him. In later Greek versions of Joseph and Aseneth, in erotic detail, the text notes that “her breasts were already standing upright like handsome apples.”¹¹ But Joseph rejects her. Having said this, it’s a particular kind of rejection, a kind of erotic push–pull. The text says that he places his right hand on her chest between her two young breasts (8:5).¹²

As the saying goes, the devil is in the details. There is a rabbinic commentary in the Jerusalem Talmud which directly connects this breast-touching episode to Jesus. The Jerusalem Talmud was written during the 4th and 5th centuries. In this section, the rabbis are commenting on improper sexual relations involving someone named Gehazi. As it turns out, “Gehazi” is a code name for Jesus.¹³ He is described in the Talmud as pushing a woman away in an inappropriate manner. Like Joseph in Joseph and Aseneth, he “placed his hand on the most magnificent of her beauties—between her breasts” (Yebamot 2:4).

In other words, in Joseph and Aseneth and in the Talmud we have stand-ins for Jesus and a description of the exact same scene: a pushing-away that involves the erotic placement of the hand between the breasts of the woman who is being rejected. Clearly, they are describing the exact same episode in Jesus and Mary the Magdalene’s lives. But are there echoes of this scene in the Gospels themselves? In fact, Joseph’s touch-me-not arm movement in Joseph and Aseneth corresponds to one of the most dramatic scenes in the Gospels, when Mary the Magdalene goes to Jesus’ tomb only to find it empty. At that point, she despairs until she sees a gardener, who she identifies as Jesus. She then rushes toward him but is stopped dead in her tracks. Jesus puts up his hand and says “touch me not.” In the Latin version of the Gospels, this line was translated as “noli me tangere” (John 20:17). It became one of the most famous lines of the Gospels, depicted in countless masterpieces (see, for example, Fra Angelico, Correggio, and Fra Bartolomeo). In other words, in the Talmud and in Joseph and Aseneth we have the exact same scene as in the Gospels, except that in these texts the woman is rushing toward a very much alive Jesus. In Joseph and Aseneth, the touch-me-not scene is not the end of the story as it is in the Gospels but, rather, it is the beginning.

As he’s rejecting her, Joseph/Jesus says that it is not right for him to kiss Aseneth/Mary the Magdalene. After all, he’s a person who worships the one true God. Joseph/Jesus says that while he blesses God, eats the bread of life, drinks the cup of immortality, and is anointed with the oil of incorruptibility, Aseneth/Mary the Magdalene is a woman who uses her mouth to bless idols, eat “strangled food,” and drink the “libation of deceit” (8:6). Further, he says that she anoints herself with the “ointment of corruption” (8:6). Whatever these strange descriptions signify, they are all indicators of her commitment to—and, most probably, role in—the worship of false deities . . . and of Joseph/Jesus’ contempt for her religion.

Aseneth/Mary the Magdalene is naturally taken aback by this harsh and unexpected rejection. She weeps, and, as with the Syro-Phoenician woman in the Gospels, Joseph/Jesus takes pity on her. He puts his hand above her head and prays that she may be refashioned. He begins by invoking the God who calls all things from darkness into light, from error into truth, and from death into life. He prays that God will renew her, infusing her with His life so that she may eat of the bread of life, drink the cup of blessing, and, finally, that she may be prepared to enter into life eternal. Aseneth rejoices with Joseph’s blessing and returns to her room in the tower. There she experiences a mixture of emotions: happiness, but also consternation and fear.

Aseneth’s Transformation: Her Rebirth as the Bride of God

At this point in the narrative, we encounter a perplexing scene. After Joseph leaves, promising to return in eight days, Aseneth is left to ponder her future. What happens next represents an amazing transformation, one that is fundamentally sacramental and mystical in nature. It is described as a threefold sequence. First, there is true and heartfelt repentance—over a whole week. Then, there is an epiphany in which the true nature of Joseph is disclosed to her. Finally, it all culminates in nothing less than Holy Communion—the first Communion ever recorded. This remarkable experience results in Aseneth being refashioned. The text now tells us that she is no longer a worshipper of idols and is fit to become the Bride of God (4:1).

As described earlier, Aseneth’s transformation involves an encounter with a heavenly Joseph look-alike. She eats a piece of a mysterious honeycomb from his hand, and she also witnesses the heavenly stranger making the sign of the cross on the honeycomb . . . in blood. Then, all of a sudden, seemingly out of nowhere, Aseneth is swarmed by bees, which end up settling near the tower. How are these strange symbols and events to be understood?

We should not forget that standing behind the figure of Aseneth is Mary the Magdalene. What then do these incidents tell us about her?

Pagan Priestess

To begin with, we need to make sense of the symbolism in the manuscript and then trace its implications for understanding Mary the Magdalene’s relationship with Jesus. We don’t have to go far to decode some of the symbols in the text—any local Catholic, Orthodox, or Anglican church will do. The reason is simple. As we shall see, the symbolism in our text is directly related to the rite variously called the Eucharist, Mass, or Holy Communion, the partaking of bread and wine for sacramental purposes.¹⁴

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s pick up the story at the point that Joseph leaves Aseneth’s courtyard. Immediately after, Aseneth weeps bitterly and mourns. She places ashes on the floor and dresses herself in a somber black tunic, the one she had worn, according to the narrative, when her brother had died. Here, too, there is an interesting parallel between Aseneth/Mary the Magdalene and the Syro-Phoenician/Canaanite woman in the Gospels. In our text, we meet Aseneth/Mary the Magdalene after she lost a brother. In the Gospels, we meet the Syro-Phoenician/Canaanite woman as her daughter lies dying. In our text, Joseph/Jesus comes after the fact. In the Gospels, Jesus performs a miracle and saves the girl. Are we dealing with history here and theology in the Gospels?

In any event, at this point in the story, Aseneth/Mary the Magdalene discards all the icons of her life up to that point, taking her best robe, for example, and throwing it out the window for the poor. But she doesn’t stop there. She smashes into pieces the gold and silver images of her gods and goddesses. For good measure, she hurls them out the window. She then takes her dinner, including all the food and libations intended for her deities, and throws everything out the window—for the dogs to consume.

She cries so much that when morning comes, “. . . mud had formed from the multitude of tears from her eyes in the great weeping she had done” (10:17). She’s a real crier, this Aseneth. She mixes her tears with ashes and turns them into mud.

If the evidence so far has not clinched the identification of Aseneth with Mary the Magdalene, this propensity for tearfulness should. After all, we must not forget that the English word maudlin, meaning “tearfully or weakly emotional,” is an alteration of the word Magdalene, as in Mary the Magdalene. In the Gospel of John (20:11), the writer states “Mary stayed outside the tomb weeping,” and then Jesus said to her “Woman, why are you weeping?” From that time forward, Mary the Magdalene was identified with weeping. She’s called the weeper in poetry. In paintings, she is often represented with red and swollen eyes.

In any event, for seven days Aseneth mourns, eating nothing. All the symbols of her earlier life are now gone. Clothing that is symbolic of her old self, precious statues of deities, unholy food—all these have been jettisoned as she prepares herself for an enhanced life and a new role.

In Biblical terms, throwing idols out the window of a tower for the dogs is not connected on any level whatsoever with Egyptian religion, as in the superficial reading of Joseph and Aseneth. All these actions are explicitly connected to Canaanite or Phoenician religion—and always to women. There is a famous example of a Syro-Phoenician/Canaanite priestess—living in the area of the Galilee—being tossed out the window of her tower to be eaten by dogs. The priestess’ name is Jezebel. Her story is told in the Biblical Books of Kings (1 Kings 19; 2 Kings 1–9). To summarize that narrative: Jezebel is a coastal Canaanite, a member of a nation that scholars like to call “Phoenician” or “Syro-Phoenician.” According to the Bible, she marries Ahab, King of Israel. She then attempts to wipe out the religion of the God of Israel and substitute it with the worship of Ba’al, the Phoenician or Canaanite Sun god. As punishment, she is tossed out her window and the dogs devour her body. Clearly, what we have in the Joseph and Aseneth text is an apologetic for another “King of the Jews” who marries a Phoenician woman—Jesus. In this instance, however, we are told that the Phoenician woman in question repented. Rather than meriting a Jezebel-style death, Mary the Magdalene/Aseneth is forgiven because she does not fight the God of Israel. On the contrary, she tosses the deities that she had once worshipped out the window . . . to the dogs. Obviously, dogs are more interested in flesh and blood than gold and silver, but the point of the story is to tell the reader that Mary the Magdalene is not another Jezebel, she is the anti-Jezebel.¹⁵

And what of the window? It may surprise many, but the “woman in the window” motif is very well-known from near-eastern archaeology.¹⁶ One example is a Phoenician image found carved in wood, ivory, and bone.¹⁷ Although its precise meaning has been lost, it seems to connote some kind of Syro-Phoenician ritual. Clearly, it is no accident that Jezebel, who tried to impose the rituals of “the woman in the window” on Biblical Israel, gets tossed out the window. And clearly, it is no accident that Mary the Magdalene/Aseneth tosses the idols that Jezebel worshipped out the window.

More than this, “the woman in the window” was probably a Canaanite/Phoenician priestess. Her presence at the window probably served the same function as the Pope’s appearance in the Vatican window, or on his balcony in St. Peter’s Square. This parallel couldn’t be clearer in the Joseph and Aseneth text. When Joseph/Jesus first appears, Aseneth “went up the tower, entered her bedchamber and stood to the side of the large window facing east so she could look at Joseph as he entered her father’s house” (5:2).¹⁸ For his part, Joseph also notices this appearance at the window. As the text puts it, “Joseph looked at the tower and said ‘Remove the young woman who is observing from the window’” (7:2). He is obviously uncomfortable with a pagan priestess observing him, and he wants her removed from that role.

To reiterate, it seems very important to the author of Joseph and Aseneth that everyone understands that Aseneth/Mary the Magdalene is not another Jezebel. While the latter made war on the God of the Hebrews, the former embraces Him. While Jezebel murdered his prophets, Aseneth marries one. While Jezebel stays the woman in the window to the gruesome end, Aseneth is removed from the window. What the story is clearly telling us is that in preparation for marrying Jesus, the “King of Israel,” Mary the Magdalene—unlike Jezebel—renounced her native gods and fed them to the dogs.

The reference to Aseneth’s seven attendant priestesses is also suggestive. The Gospels of Mark (16:9) and Luke (8:2) tell us that Jesus cast out seven demons from Mary the Magdalene. This has been variously interpreted as Jesus curing Mary of seven vices, including an obsession with sex, or curing Mary of seven illnesses.¹⁹ On the face of it, neither of these explanations makes any sense. Seven illnesses are a lot of illnesses, and there’s no record or tradition of Mary being on her deathbed when she met Jesus. As for vices, this is a late tradition that started with Pope Gregory in the late 6th century, specifically associating Mary with prostitution. But Joseph and Aseneth may be providing us with the answer to Mary’s seven-demons puzzle.

Aseneth has seven women attendants, co-priestesses. In the eyes of monotheist Jews and pagans of the time, these priestesses would have been seen as spirits—or, in Greek, daimons—demons who officiated with her in her tower. When, as a result of meeting Joseph, Aseneth rejects her gods, she also has no further use for her seven vestal virgins. They are dispensed with—in a sense, cast out or cast away. The seven-demons story in the canonical Gospels seems to be an echo of the story of the seven virgin priestesses in Joseph and Aseneth.

But what of the tower? What does it mean? As always, let’s start with the facts. We know that Mary the Magdalene means Mary the Tower Lady, Mary of the Tower, or Mary from Tower Town. In every version, she is literally defined by a tower. We also know that in Jesus’ time there was a town called Migdal, or Magdala, on the Sea of Galilee, right in the center of his area of operation. Archaeologically speaking, a tower, albeit a much later tower, has been excavated on the site and nowhere else in the Galilee. Furthermore, Magdala may have been associated with towers for millennia. In 2013, next to the land ruins of Magdala, archaeologists discovered submerged in the Sea of Galilee a monumental tower/pyramid whose precise function is still a mystery.²⁰ In other words, in the ancient world, a tower was linked with Magdala much as the Eiffel Tower is linked to Paris today. But what did the Syro-Phoenician tower that dominated Magdala’s skyscape at the time of Jesus look like? Did it look like the tower described in Joseph and Aseneth?

The fact is that archaeologists have found one—and only one—intact Syro-Phoenician tower. This tower, which is presently in storage at the British Museum, was found in the 1850s in Carthage by archaeologist Nathan Davis.²¹ It’s a small version—likely a replica—of something that must have been much bigger. It is a kind of tourist version of the Eiffel Tower, not the tower itself. It dates to the 3rd or 4th century B.C.E. Carthage was a Syro-Phoenician colony in what is now Tunisia, a center that at one time vied with Rome for the domination of the Mediterranean.

The Carthaginians fought three wars with Rome, the so-called Punic Wars. After losing the last war, they were totally destroyed. Had they won, we’d all be speaking Semitic-based languages (e.g., Hebrew or Phoenician, a variant of Hebrew) instead of Latin-based languages. In any event, the same Mediterranean culture that colonized the port city of Carthage also settled the port town of Magdala. Here’s the revelation—the tower found in Carthage perfectly corresponds to the tower described in our Joseph and Aseneth manuscript. It has three windows, not four—one in each direction as we would expect—and a single entrance that is not aligned with the windows. It is clearly not a military tower, having no military indicators whatsoever. The fact that a scale tower of this kind was found carved in stone indicates a ritual use for it, once again confirming the linkage between tower, religion, and the Phoenicians.

But why would Phoenicians that were primarily—but not exclusively—based in what is now Lebanon want to build a tower and a town on the shores of the Sea of Galilee? The answer is simple—money. The Phoenicians were the great merchants of the ancient world, and Magdala was the world’s headquarters for the caviar of the ancient world—salted fish.²² Cato the Elder (239–149 B.C.E.) complained that “a fish sells for more in Rome than a cow, and they sell a cask of smoked fish for a price that a hundred sheep plus one ox in the lead wouldn’t bring.”²³ In Greek, Magdala was called Taricheae, or “town of the fish salters.” So it seems that what drew the Phoenicians to Magdala was the combination of readily available fish (from the Sea of Galilee) and salt (from the relatively close Dead Sea), and its location on the Via Maris, one of the main highways of the ancient world. The town of Magdala might have been a Phoenician merchant outpost dominated by a ritual tower, hence the name.

Significantly, Phoenician temples to Artemis were usually built on the shores of lakes and dedicated to Artemis Limnaia, meaning Lady of the Lake. So we can now infer that the temple that gave Magdala its name was probably dedicated to Artemis. Also, in a hymn dedicated to Artemis, the Greek poet Callimachus calls her “Watcher over roads and harbors.”²⁴ Magdala’s tower, on the Via Maris and overlooking the harbors of the Sea of Galilee, was perfectly positioned as a temple dedicated to Artemis.

Furthermore, Artemis’ connection to lakes resulted in declaring freshwater fish as sacred to the goddess. Rose Lou Bengisu reports that Artemis worship seems originally to have been connected to a fish cult.²⁵ As a result, fish had to be associated with the founding of any temple. As Sorita d’Este reminds us, “[a] fish figured in the founding of the city of Ephesus where the largest and most famous temple of Artemis was located.”²⁶ This explains the strange name that Magdala had in Aramaic: Migdal Nunia, or Fish Tower. This name has confounded scholars. We can now solve the mystery. The name does not refer to a pile of fish. It refers to the founding of the tower, meaning its dedication, as in Ephesus, to the goddess Artemis. The sacredness of the fish in the Artemis tradition may also explain why the fish became the earliest symbol of Christianity.

Taken together, therefore, the most recent archaeology, combined with a careful reading of Joseph and Aseneth and the Gospels, reveals that in Jesus’ time the Galilee was not a backwater, not exclusively Jewish, and not populated solely by poor peasants and fishermen. Historically speaking, the Galilee was a cosmopolitan place where Jews, Romans, and Syro-Phoenicians, amongst others, mingled. Also, it was linked to the heart of the Roman Empire by roads and money. How did all this happen?

The Galilee had been part of an almost exclusively Israelite state until the invasion of the Assyrians in 760 B.C.E. At that time, the ten northern Israelite tribes—the so-called Lost Tribes of Israel—were exiled and the area was largely depopulated. In place of the Israelite tribes, the Assyrians brought people from the east and north, including many coastal Canaanites/Phoenicians who gravitated toward Israel as their original homeland. Six hundred years later, during the Maccabean revolt in the 160s B.C.E., Jewish nationalism won the day and the Canaanite/Phoenicians of the Galilee were given a choice: convert to Judaism, or leave. Most left, but the rest converted. The result of this uncharacteristic conversion program was to leave the area under-populated and dominated by people who were nominally Jewish, but still pagan beneath the surface.

By the time of King Herod the Great—a Roman puppet who lived just prior to the birth of Jesus—the Romans complained that their strategic highways in the area were the targets of constant brigandage. They gave Herod a choice: clean up the Galilee, or we will. Herod cleaned it up in part by forcibly populating it with southern Judaeans, and by creating brand-new towns for these relocated Jews—towns like Nazareth.²⁷

As a result of all this, the Galilee was not a homogeneous place of orthodox Jewish peasants listening wide-eyed to local carpenter preachers. It was a place where non-Jewish²⁸ and Jewish populations were rubbing shoulders and coming up with syncretistic and revolutionary religious ideas.

This historical reality is reflected in the archaeological story being unearthed in places like Bethsaida. It also explains very nicely why a family that was originally from Bethlehem suddenly found itself in Nazareth of the Galilee. The repopulation of the Galilee created security on the roads and stability for people such as the Phoenician fish entrepreneurs of Magdala.

Given all this, strategic location and newfound stability literally converted fishermen into wealthy fish barons. More than this, the new money and the mix of Judaeans, pagan Phoenicians, Judeo-Phoenicians (forcibly converted by the Maccabees), and Hellenists who arrived in the wake of Herod and his Roman backers, created a cosmopolitan population the likes of which would never have been tolerated in the Judaean south. At Bethsaida, for example, archaeologists have discovered pagan places of worship²⁹ in the midst of Torah-observant Jews. Again, this kind of “multiculturalism” would never have been tolerated in Jerusalem.³⁰

In any event, the real world that Jesus was born into was one that is accurately reflected in the Joseph and Aseneth manuscript, a world at odds with the images generated by Hollywood films. It was a place where Jewish nationalism—orthodox and messianic—interacted with Phoenician and Roman paganism. And there was no better example of this kind of syncretistic or mixed culture than Magdala—Mary’s hometown. Magdala was a place of money. And this is perfectly consistent with the Christian Bible, which preserves the tradition that, at its inception, Mary the Magdalene helped finance the entire Jesus movement.

In sum, the description of the Tower Lady in the Joseph and Aseneth manuscript—that she is not Jewish, lives in a Phoenician tower, and is wealthy—seems to match the known facts about Mary the Magdalene. What we seem to have here is perfect synchronicity between text and archaeology.³¹

A Marriage Made in Heaven

By the eighth day of her spiritual rebirth, Aseneth is in a weakened state. She had been fasting and praying to God the entire time. Throughout, she confesses her sins . . . a litany of faults. Among other things, she admits to having transgressed the law of God; to having spoken evil things by worshipping idols; and to having spoken poorly of Joseph (that is, Jesus) (13:9 and earlier 6:3). She asks for pardon, especially for having spoken in haste and in ignorance. She had been told that Joseph/Jesus was just a peasant’s son from Canaan, a man of lowly birth, well beneath her social status.³² She had been misled. Having repented and confessed her sins, she now turns her life in a new direction. She literally becomes a new person.

Addressing God, Aseneth/Mary the Magdalene states that she had not realized that Joseph/Jesus was His “Son” (6:3, 6:5, 13:9). This then is her epiphany. She discerns that Joseph/Jesus is none other than the “Son of God” (6:3). This is not, of course, what we would call Jewish talk. It’s Christian through and through. While Jews still await a Messiah, they do not imagine him to be a “Son of God.” Only Christians combined the Jewish concept of a “Messiah”³³ with the Gentile concept of a “Son of God.” For Jews, the Messiah is a human being, an anointed king of Israel and a powerful leader who will help God bring about world transformation. The messianic period in human history will be very different from the world we now experience. It will be a time of everlasting peace, when evil will be defeated and the righteous will be rewarded. It will be a time when God’s Messiah, his “anointed one” from the line of David, will rule in Jerusalem and all people will come to worship the one true God.

Our manuscript reflects a very different perspective of messiahship than the traditional Jewish one. It reflects a view that has been associated with Christianity. Here, Joseph is described as God’s “Son,” but sometimes he seems to be God—Aseneth prays, “How can I hide myself from his presence so that Joseph, the Son of God, cannot see me? Where will I flee since every place is uncovered and spread out visibly before him?” (6:5). This is Christian terrain, wherein the divinity of Jesus represents an essential aspect of the belief in him. This “Son of God” is not the Messiah of Judaism.

Returning to the text, we note that in a more human vein, Aseneth gushes that Joseph is the most handsome, wisest, and strongest man who had ever lived. Humbly, she asks God that she be given to him as his servant, so that she might wash his feet and serve him as a slave for the rest of her life. Again, this section of the narrative is echoed in the Gospels where an unnamed woman, who has for centuries been identified with Mary the Magdalene, washes Jesus’ feet and dries them with her hair (Luke 7:37 and John 12:3). Graydon Snyder sees this passage as revealing “the love connection between Jesus and this woman.”³⁴

The hair-drying in the Gospels is significant in another way. In Judaism, hair can change its status to erva, meaning nakedness.³⁵ This happens only after a woman has had sexual relations and not before. That’s why to this day young, unmarried, orthodox Jewish girls do not cover their hair. But once a marriage has been consummated, the hair is considered “nakedness” and is covered as a sign of modesty and exclusivity to the husband. A grown Jewish woman would never dry the feet of a man with her hair, then or now. It would be tantamount to rubbing a private part against a man’s body. However, once hair is cut, it loses all status as nakedness. For this reason, to this day, orthodox Jewish women can wear wigs made of natural human hair. In other words, hair that’s been cut is not considered nakedness.

Given all this, if Mary the Magdalene did, indeed, wipe Jesus’ feet with her hair, as the Gospels report, she must have cut it first. Even if she wasn’t Jewish, she would have had to follow the local Galilean customs of modesty before drying a rabbi’s feet. Once we understand this, we again discover in the Gospels a powerful symbolic subtext related to Artemis. In the Orphic Hymn to Artemis (36) the goddess is referred to as the one “with lovely hair.” At coming-of-age ceremonies involving the goddess, girls would dedicate a lock of their hair to her. “It has been suggested that the lock of hair symbolized the virginity that the girl would be leaving behind.”³⁶ Put simply, by understanding the social context of the hair-drying act we see that the Gospels preserve the very moment, as elaborated on in Joseph and Aseneth, when—using Artemisian symbolism—Mary the Magdalene declares her intention to wed Jesus.³⁷

To get back to our text, the arrogant and impetuous Aseneth is now gone. She has experienced an immense epiphany—a deep disclosure or personal revelation. She now knows who Joseph really is: he is “God’s son.” Through repentance, a change in life, and true insight, she is now ready to undergo a unique and remarkable experience.

“When Aseneth stopped confessing to the Lord, behold, the morning star rose out of heaven to the east” (14:1). She is overjoyed, knowing that this star is the harbinger of a great day.

The symbolism is superb. There is a passage in the Book of Numbers that records one of the prophecies of the Gentile prophet Balaam, son of Beor (Numbers 24:15–19).³⁸ Early Christians, like many Jewish groups, believed that Balaam’s prophecy was a description of the coming of the Messiah. In fact, it is the only passage in the Torah believed to refer to the coming of the Messiah. The relevant phrase goes, “. . . a star shall come out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel. . . .” At the outset of the movement, Christians interpreted this Biblical passage as referring to Jesus. In the Gospel of Matthew, for example, this tradition is preserved in the Star of Bethlehem narrative. In this view, it is Jesus who fulfills the prophecy of a star coming out of Jacob.

After Jesus, Josephus, the Jewish historian, applied the star prophecy to the Roman general Vespasian, who became emperor in 69 C.E. while in Judaea quelling a Jewish revolt. In 135 C.E., Rabbi Akiva applied the same prophecy to another messianic figure, Simon Bar Cosiba—who has come down to us by his nickname Bar Kokhba, that is, “Son of the Star.” Bar Kokhba led an unsuccessful revolt against Rome and, like Jesus, ended up dead at Roman hands. In other words, star language is messianic language. And here, in Joseph and Aseneth, we have the star prophecy applied to Joseph—that is, Jesus. Not only that, the prophecy states that “a scepter shall rise out of Israel,” and Joseph arrives on the scene carrying a scepter.

No sooner does the morning star appear to Aseneth/Mary the Magdalene than the sky opens up, revealing a burst of intense light. Clearly, she’s about to undergo a kind of Baptism similar to that of Jesus. Notice the parallel. In Matthew 3:16–17, it states: “And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him; and behold, a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased’.”³⁹ When the heavens open up for Aseneth, she falls to the ground. As she does so, “a man from heaven” (14:4) appears and stands over her. He calls to her, “Aseneth.” She is perplexed that anyone—especially a man—could gain access to her inner chamber. The heavenly figure calls her name a second time, and she responds. She looks up and sees a being like Joseph “in every respect” (14:8). He has a robe, a crown, and a royal scepter. As in the iconography of Jesus, the features of his head radiate light. Aseneth rises, and the heavenly Joseph look-alike asks her to take off her black tunic, to wash with “living water” (Baptism), and to put on a new robe (14:12–13). She does as she is told.

Being dressed in new clothing and washing is clearly symbolic of Aseneth’s new life. Aseneth is now a different person, the new clothing being the outer expression of an inner transformation. But undressing in an apartment alone with a man, even a heavenly one, is an intimate act without parallel in the Hebrew or Christian Scriptures. It is an act that a woman reserves solely for her husband. And yet she undresses without even a hint of embarrassment. In other words, at this moment in the Joseph and Aseneth narrative we are told that after—and only after—she has renounced her pagan ways, Mary the Magdalene becomes Jesus’ wife. In the Gospels, we encounter Mary the Magdalene after her transformation, after the seven demons had been driven away. All that remains of her previous life are echoes in episodes such as the Syro-Phoenician woman and the woman who washes Jesus’ feet, kisses them, and dries them with her hair. But here, in Joseph and Aseneth, we have the full story prior to the transformation and including the rebirth.

The symbolism resonates on many levels. Washing, of course, is reminiscent of the rite of Baptism: the person immersed in water becomes cleansed from sins. But washing and stripping off old clothing is also the metaphor used in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas as the necessary preparation for a new life. Saying 37 of this Gospel states:

Jesus said, “When you strip without being ashamed and you take your clothes and put them under your feet like little children and trample them, then [you] will see the child of the living one and you will not be afraid.”⁴⁰

Joseph and Aseneth obviously parallels the Gospel of Thomas.⁴¹ After she puts on new clothes “without being ashamed,” the supernatural figure addresses Aseneth/Mary the Magdalene, indicating that she is refashioned and given new life. In fact, she is now ready to eat the “bread of life” and drink the “cup of immortality” and “be anointed with the ointment of incorruptibility” (15:3).

At this point, the text explicitly tells us: “Behold, the Lord gave you to Joseph as a bride and he will be your bridegroom” (15:4). The text also tells us that from here on in she will be called “City of Refuge” (15:5), adding that many nations shall take refuge in her and that those who come to God through penitence will find security within her. Clearly, the text is not talking about the Aseneth of the Book of Genesis. That woman is a minor figure who disappeared from the world stage at least seventeen hundred years before Joseph and Aseneth was written. What we are being told—in very clear terms—is that Aseneth (that is, Mary the Magdalene) was perceived by her followers as a figure of Penitence, and a Daughter of God, who prepared “a heavenly bridal chamber for those who love her” (15:7). In Kraemer’s words, the text describes a marriage that “enacts the divine union of the Son and Daughter of God.”⁴²

In Matthew, Jesus’ Baptism is followed by the heavens opening up and a voice declaring Jesus to be the Son of God. Here, Mary the Magdalene’s Baptism is followed by the heavens opening up and a heavenly, Jesus-like figure declaring that she is the Bride of God. The parallel couldn’t be more explicit.

Aseneth is now immediately bidden to put on her wedding robe and jewelry, to make herself ready to become Joseph’s bride. Strangely, she interrupts this process and asks the heavenly man to sit “upon the bed” (15:14) while she prepares food and wine for him. The heavenly figure accepts her offerings and requests that she also bring him a “honeycomb” (16:1), which he promises she will miraculously find in one of her rooms. The honeycomb is described as being “full of honey,” as “white as snow,” and smelling “of the spirit of life” (16:4).

On one level, the honeycomb—clearly—is like the manna provided by God in the wilderness for the Israelites. It gives life and sustains those who eat it. According to the Book of Exodus, the manna was white and tasted like wafers made with honey (Exodus 16:31). This manna became the type for the life-giving bread of the Christian Communion service and for Jesus himself as represented by this manna-like bread. As the Gospel of John says, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever” (John 6:51). In one of his hymns, Ephrem the Syrian puts it this way:

The Church has given us Living Bread

In place of the unleavened bread which Egypt gave.⁴³

For the early Christians and for Christians today, the life-giving bread is Jesus. It is also the consecrated bread used within the Eucharist, the Christian Communion, during which the bread becomes the “body of Christ Jesus.” Today, Christians disagree on precisely how the bread becomes the body of Jesus: whether the transformation is symbolic, spiritual, or “transubstantiated,” becoming, in this latter case, the actual “body of Christ.” But, again, here we have a typological equation:

Manna = Jesus as the “living bread”
The living bread = Christ’s body in the Eucharist

The First Holy Communion Ever

The narrative now turns to the honeycomb ceremony. The heavenly figure who, in a sense, has just shared her bed, places his hand above Aseneth’s head and gives her a double blessing. First, he blesses her saying that the “secrets of the Lord” (16:11) have been revealed to her. She now knows something about the mysteries of God. Second, he says, “Blessed are those who attach themselves to the Lord God Most High in penance because, from this honeycomb, they will eat and live forever” (16:11). What is about to happen is of tremendous import—nothing less than a renewal of life and life everlasting.

Remarkably, this initiation ceremony parallels a fragment of The Secret Gospel of Mark discovered by Morton Smith in 1958 in the monastery library of Mar Saba, in the Judaean Desert. According to Smith, the fragment is a copy of a 2nd-century document that preserves a secret version of Mark in which Jesus teaches “the mystery of the Kingdom of God” to a youth “wearing a linen cloth over [his] naked [body].”⁴⁴

In Secret Mark, the story seems to involve the resurrection of Lazarus, as described in the Gospel of John. But in Secret Mark there is no mention of the youth’s name. As in Joseph and Aseneth, the story in Secret Mark involves Jesus arriving at the residence of “a certain woman, whose brother had died.” This is exactly the situation in Joseph and Aseneth. In Secret Mark, Jesus touches the dead brother and brings him back to life. In Joseph and Aseneth, the story is structurally the same, but it is not the dead brother who is brought back to life: it is Aseneth—that is, Mary the Magdalene. The heavenly Joseph draws near to Aseneth and, as the Syriac manuscript says, “he stretched out his right hand and drew her head near” (16:10).⁴⁵ She is transformed from worshipping dead idols, and therefore being dead herself, to acquiring everlasting life—“renewed, reformed and revivified” (15:3). In a sense, it is she who is brought back to life, not the brother who is literally dead.

There are other narrative parallels. In Secret Mark, the moment the youth sees Jesus, he falls in love with him: “. . . the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him.” As we have seen, the youthful Aseneth goes through a similar process. In Secret Mark, the youth is rich. In Joseph and Aseneth, Aseneth is wealthy. In Secret Mark, after six days Jesus instructs the youth concerning what to do so as to be inducted into “the mystery of the Kingdom of God.” In Joseph and Aseneth, on the seventh day (i.e., after six days) the heavenly Jesus figure instructs Aseneth into “the secret mysteries of the Most High.” This is a perfect synchronicity, even when it comes to the number of days since, in Secret Mark, the youth is instructed on the night of the sixth day. Given that Jewish days begin the night before, at sundown, the two texts describe the same waiting period, seven days, before the initiation into the mysteries of the Kingdom of God begins. Once the initiation commences, in both cases it involves wearing a linen garment and engaging in some kind of sexuality.

Later Greek versions of Joseph and Aseneth make all this more explicit—and erotic—than does the Syriac: “And Aseneth stretched out her right hand and put it on his knees [that is, the knees of the heavenly Joseph] and said to him, ‘I beg you, Lord, sit down a little on this bed, because this bed is pure and undefiled, and a man or woman never sat on it. And I will set a table before you. . .’.” “Knees” here seems to be a euphemism for penis. The Syriac manuscript at 15:14 simply says, “sit a little upon the bed and I will set a table. . . .”⁴⁶

In Secret Mark, Jesus interacts with a young man. Interestingly, in Joseph and Aseneth, Aseneth is described in the following manner: “. . . today you are a chaste virgin and your head is like that of a young man” (15:1).

Clearly, both texts are describing some kind of sexual initiation. This fits well into the Hellenized Galilean context where the Jesus movement was born. For the Greeks, in Michel Foucault’s words, “truth and sex were linked . . . sex served as a medium for initiation into learning.”⁴⁷ But here, the narratives are depicting an encounter with Jesus. In Joseph and Aseneth, we seem to have a more historical version, rooted in an upcoming marriage. In John and Secret Mark, the sister’s rebirth is transferred to the dead brother. In Joseph and Aseneth, Jesus is not being intimate with a man who has risen from the dead, but with a beautiful young woman who had been spiritually dead and was now ready to become his bride.

Obviously, there are structural parallels between the two narratives. These parallels make clear that Joseph and Aseneth, like Secret Mark, fits within an esoteric Christian tradition that still resonates in the canonical Gospels.

Finally, let’s look at the honeycomb. In the story, it is the food of eternal life made, the heavenly Joseph says, by bees from the Garden of Eden. Since bees were equated with souls, the honeycomb was the food of immortality.⁴⁸ It was said that angels eat of it. And those who partake of it with angels never die. As part of the ceremony, the heavenly man breaks off a piece of the honeycomb and in the quasi-erotic, quasi-spiritual language of the text he places it in Aseneth’s mouth.⁴⁹ While doing this, he traces in blood the sign of the cross on the remaining piece of the honeycomb.

No one familiar with the Christian Eucharist would miss the significance of this ritual. Nearly seventeen hundred years ago, Ephrem the Syrian used the same imagery—of a finger tracing blood—to describe the Eucharist:

See—your image is depicted

In the blood of grapes

On the top of the bread,

And it is depicted on the heart

By the finger of love.⁵⁰

Some fifty years after Ephrem, Theodore of Mopsuestia made the same point, “and with the bread he makes the sign of the cross over the blood, and with the blood over the bread.”⁵¹ Close to a hundred years ago, E. W. Brooks commented briefly on the parallels between the honeycomb scene in Joseph and Aseneth and the Anglican Eucharist. His astute observation was lost, however, because much of Joseph and Aseneth scholarship after Brooks misplaced the narrative within a Jewish context. But, as Brooks noted, this is clearly Holy Communion—truly Holy Communion—for it takes place within the heavenly bridal chamber presided over by an angelic figure and features the food of angels. The language of this mystical ceremony in Joseph and Aseneth precisely mirrors the four actions of the Christian Communion:⁵²

1. Taking

In Joseph and Aseneth, Aseneth makes full repentance and then experiences a revelation concerning the true nature of Joseph, “God’s son.” This is similar to the spiritual movement in the first part of the Mass. The action moves through confession of sins, absolution, and then the reading of various scriptural lessons that culminate in the congregational response: “we believe.” What ensues is the affirmation of the Creed of Christianity that relates Jesus both to the Godhead and to his role as God incarnate. Then and only then is the table (altar) prepared for the Communion. Aseneth too takes, or prepares, a table for the man from heaven. It is set with wine and a white honeycomb.

2. Giving Thanks

In stage two, Aseneth is blessed by the heavenly figure, who tells her that she has been privileged to have had the indescribable things of God revealed to her. He identifies the honeycomb as the food of eternal life. No one, he says, who eats of this food will die.

Again, this is perfectly reflected in the drama of the Christian Communion service. As the Eucharist moves toward the consecration of the elements, the bread and the wine, the people gather together along with angels and archangels to praise the holiness of God. Congregants pray to eat the flesh of Jesus and to drink his blood so that his body may cleanse their sinful bodies and their souls may be washed by his precious blood. To this day, congregants ask that Jesus may dwell in them and they in him. In receiving Communion—the consecrated bread, now the body of Jesus—the priest prays that it may preserve the bodies and souls of the participants in eternal life. The same with the wine.

3. Breaking

The heavenly man—the Joseph look-alike—takes the honeycomb and breaks it, just as the priest takes the bread and, lifting it up, breaks it for all to see.

4. Eating

The heavenly figure now eats a piece of the honeycomb, just as the priest does at Mass. Then he gives a piece to Aseneth, placing it in her mouth, just as priests do in parishes today and have done throughout history.

Simply put, unarguably, here we have the four central actions of the Christian Communion. But there’s more. So as to drive the point home, the heavenly man makes the sign of the cross—in blood—on the remaining honeycomb (16:18–19). In the words of the text, “the path of the honey was now blood” (16:19). Could the Christian references be made any more explicit? It’s astounding how anyone could mistake this for a Jewish text.

If the implications of this text haven’t yet crystallized in our reader’s mind, suffice it to say that what Joseph and Aseneth here documents is a Holy Communion celebrated by Jesus himself with Mary the Magdalene as the penitent communicant ready for a new life. Later, Paul would take up the idea of the Lord’s Supper with enthusiasm. But he gives it a completely different spin. In Paul’s version, Communion involves eating the bread—which represents Jesus’ body—and drinking the wine—which represents his blood (1 Corinthians 10:16–17 and 1 Corinthians 11:23–26). As James Tabor has convincingly demonstrated, the originator of this idea is Paul, not Jesus and not Mark, the earliest Gospel.⁵³ In any event, the idea of eating your god’s flesh and drinking his blood is not Jewish. It comes from Greek religious traditions in which the deity was symbolically consumed⁵⁴—ritualized cannibalism.⁵⁵ Here, instead, Joseph and Aseneth describes an esoteric ceremony that takes place in a bridal chamber—on Aseneth/Mary the Magdalene’s bed. She is now fit to be the Bride of God and, very shortly, the actual earthly marriage service begins.

If this still needs repeating, all this has nothing—absolutely nothing—to do with the Aseneth of ancient history. It has everything—absolutely everything—to do with Mary the Magdalene. It is, obviously, the story of the young Mary, a girl of eighteen, being prepared for marriage with Jesus. It’s the story, clearly told and preserved by her followers, of Mary’s intense personal transformation from pagan priestess into the Bride of God.

Remember, for those who believe that Jesus is God incarnate, every one of his actions and words have metaphysical implications. If Jesus chose Mary the Magdalene as his koinonos, his companion—the woman who shared his bridal chamber—this would have deeply impacted on the beliefs of his followers. More than this, if he was God and Mary the Magdalene was the Bride of God, was she a goddess? The answer to this question involves the honey and the bees.

Honey and Bees

Let’s start with the honey. In fact, honey—as a symbol—is relatively easy to explain, at least in general terms. In the ancient world, honey possessed religious and medicinal value.⁵⁶ In ancient Greek, Egyptian, and Roman societies, for example, honey represented a valued offering to the gods and goddesses of the Mediterranean world. Writing in the 2nd century, the Roman writer Lucian has his hero in Menippus join some Chaldean mystics. This was their diet: “our food was nuts, our drink milk and a mixture of honey and milk.”⁵⁷ Honey was a symbol of health and wellbeing.⁵⁸ According to 3rd-century Neoplatonist writer Porphyry, honey is “both cathartic and preservative.” It is associated with death, mummification, and the whole preservation process. Likewise, one can “purify the tongue from all the defilement of evil with honey.” It is, literally, the “food of the gods,” and its sweetness is associated with “the pleasure arising from copulation.” It can also draw “souls downward.”⁵⁹ And it was always associated with religious ritual.

John Chadwick, who was the associate of Michael Ventris in deciphering the Minoan/Mycenaean linear B tablets, pointed out how important honey was in the life and religion of the Minoans and Mycenaeans. The main context in which honey appears in the now-deciphered linear B tablets is religious.⁶⁰ The Mycenaeans were not unique. Many groups clustered around ancient religious centers engaged in beekeeping. Indeed, honey is still honored in many societies around the eastern Mediterranean. It is often a companion to meals and festivities, especially in Turkey and Greece.

In addition, as Rivka Nir has pointed out, honey formed part of the Communion service in parts of the early church. She cites the testimony of Hippolytus, a late 2nd-century/early 3rd-century Christian writer living in Rome.⁶¹ Hippolytus reports that in addition to the bread and wine, the celebrant blessed milk and honey mixed together. His contemporary Tertullian also mentions a ritual use of milk and honey by early Christians as part of the meal following Baptism and as part of the agape (or “love feast”), a Communion-like meal.⁶² This rite was performed in order to fulfill God’s promise that his people will come to a land flowing with “milk and honey.” Here the metaphor for the land of Israel as the Promised Land is transposed to the church—the new Promised Land—and to the sacrament of Communion. Recently, physical evidence for the importance of honey to early Christians was discovered in Rome. Many of the tombs revealed in the Autoparco and Santa Rosa excavations at the Vatican had terra cotta pipes inserted into them so that relatives could feed the deceased by pouring wine, milk, or honey into the graves.⁶³

Where Honey, Bees and the Tower Meet

But to crack the Mary the Magdalene Code, as depicted in Joseph and Aseneth, we need to understand honey not in general terms, but in the way it is portrayed in our text. We need to find a place in the ancient world where honey, bees, and a tower come together. As luck would have it, we found just such a place in Ephesus, western Turkey.

As noted in the Preface, we made this discovery in July 2008, when we were in Ephesus filming an episode on Paul for a documentary series on early Christianity. As the New Testament makes clear, Paul had used this city as his western headquarters for a number of years, just as he had previously used Antioch in the east. It was also here, in the Church of St. Mary, where the Council of Ephesus was held in 431 C.E. This was the council that decided that Mary, mother of Jesus, should be spoken of as Mother of God, a phrase that caused enormous problems for Syriac Christians whose view of the person of Jesus differed from the dominant Roman view. Today, tourists to Ephesus can visit what is alleged to be the home of Mary, mother of Jesus, who was said to have traveled to Ephesus after her son’s crucifixion. Here, too, is the traditional burial place of John, one of Jesus’ disciples, under the Basilica of St. John. For all these reasons, some sixteen hundred years ago Ephesus became a major Christian center.

As a result of centuries of silting, today Ephesus is a few miles inland from the shore. But in ancient times, Ephesus was an important seaport, the gateway to Greece, Italy, France, Spain, and the cities of North Africa. Ephesus in the first few centuries C.E. was also preeminently the city of Artemis. It was the epicenter for followers of this great Greek goddess who was one of the most widely worshipped deities throughout the world of early Christianity. Her temples were everywhere—throughout the regions that today we call Turkey, Greece, the Aegean, Crete, Italy, Sicily, Spain, the Ukraine, southern France, and even, as we subsequently found out, in Israel and Jordan. Today, in the Vatican, anyone heading toward the Sistine Chapel passes by one of the only Artemis statues excavated in Rome. Strabo mentions a center dedicated to the goddess Artemis in Massilia that boasted a replica of Artemis of Ephesus. There were two important temples to Artemis in Athens itself: one on the Acropolis; another one dedicated to Artemis Agrotera (Huntress) clustered near the ancient Ilissos River, along with a massive temple to Zeus her father and Apollo her twin brother. Another temple was located on the island of Delos, the religious capital of ancient Greece and the goddess’ birthplace in the sacred grove of Zeus. Citing ancient records such as Pausanias, Sorita d’Este lists 116 sites known to have housed temples to Artemis.⁶⁴

Artemis’ popularity brought it into conflict with Judaism. This conflict is dramatically illustrated in the largest ancient synagogue discovered in the Jewish diaspora at Sardis, modern Turkey. Although the synagogue dates from the 4th century C.E., the site was developed at least two centuries earlier. The stylobate (an upper step supporting a column) in the synagogue’s outer court reused a stele of Artemis, relief side downward, with her face defaced. It seems that even in the 4th century she was causing problems to the Jews of Sardis.⁶⁵

The New Testament Book of Acts records an incident whereby Paul is run out of Ephesus by an Artemis follower. According to Acts, a man named Demetrius complained to civic authorities in Ephesus that, by introducing Christianity to the city, Paul was driving people away from Artemis worship. As a result, the goddess would be deprived of the preeminent position “that brought all Asia and the world to worship her” (Acts 19:27). Spurred by this allegation, the population of Ephesus chased Paul out of town. “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians,” Ephesus’ citizens shouted when they heard Demetrius raise his voice against Paul.

Demetrius wasn’t kidding when he attacked Paul. The worship of Artemis represented an important multicultural religion . . . and a huge international business vital to the economy of many cities, especially Ephesus. But why was Demetrius worried? Was Paul such a great orator that he could singlehandedly undermine a religion that had been around for thousands of years? The pagan world was multicultural—at least it accepted a variety of deities—so what was Demetrius worked up about? There’s only one explanation: the religion that Paul was espousing was too Artemis-like. The problem was not that the gospel that Paul was preaching was nothing like Artemis worship. The problem was that it was close enough that Demetrius feared that many Ephesians would defect.

In the 2nd century, Pausanias in his Description of Greece notes that all cities worshipped Artemis of Ephesus, and he gave a number of reasons: the renown of the Amazons who traditionally settled there; the immense size of the temple, which surpassed all other buildings in ancient Greece; as well as the prominence of the port itself, situated on the edge of the Aegean. Pilgrims and merchants descended upon the city by the thousands, and they needed accommodations, sacrificial offerings, food, travel arrangements, and, undoubtedly, souvenirs to show the folks back home. In Ephesus, Artemis’ impressive temple, dating back to the 6th century B.C.E.—three times larger than the Parthenon—was rated one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. It dazzled pilgrims with its beauty, and its white marble façade brilliantly reflected the sunlight. Today, only one of the original 127 columns remains standing. But one thing that does survive is a large statue of Artemis.

The statue of the virgin goddess is housed in the Ephesus Museum; it dates to the 1st century C.E. It is called “Great Artemis.” The goddess stands erect, serenely and confidently facing her devotees. Her welcoming pose greeted travelers from distant lands entering the sacred precincts of her temple. Working on a documentary, we were allowed to get within one inch of this imposing sculpture, rather than the 15 to 20 feet minimum required of tourists. Also, we were able to see the rear side of the statue that visitors cannot see. As we inspected the detail on the statue, we began to notice things that made sense of the imagery of Aseneth/Mary the Magdalene.

To our surprise, we discovered that Aseneth—that is, Mary the Magdalene—is modeled on the goddess Artemis.

Consider these significant parallels.

1. The Tower

First, we immediately noted that Artemis, like Aseneth and Mary the Magdalene, is a Tower Lady. She literally wears a Tower on her head. This is no ordinary headdress. It’s not a tiara. It’s a symbol. The Artemis Tower has several layers, like a series of three deep round cakes each piled on top of the other. Each layer, front and back, features buildings and temples. The Tower is a representation of a city built upon her head. It’s her city, complete with her sanctuaries and notable structures.

The Tower tells us something very important about this great moon goddess: Artemis is a protectress. Her temples are places of shelter. Her centers—like Ephesus—are cities of refuge. Aseneth, too, is said to be a City of Refuge. In other words, when we read Joseph and Aseneth, the focus should not be on the Biblical cities of refuge, as some scholars have suggested, but on Artemis. She provides shelter for her people through her temples: caring for them, protecting them, and nurturing them. This is her civic role.

2. Bees

Second, we were startled to see panels of bees on Artemis’ apparel, literally clinging to her as the bees cling to Aseneth/Mary the Magdalene in Joseph and Aseneth. Why bees?

The initial and immediate impression was that Artemis is the Queen Bee and her temple is a beehive. This impression was quickly reinforced when we examined the terminology used to describe the priestesses of her temple. They were called Melissai—that is, bees. Her male priests were referred to as—some people may be surprised by this—Essenes, or king bees.66 Furthermore, in order to serve in her temple, her priestesses were required to be parthenoi or “revered virgins.” Pausanias described the king bees—the Essenes—as living in purity and celibacy. They did so for a year. What happened after that year, he fails to tell us. Presumably, they returned to normal civilian life, free to marry or, perhaps, free to resume their marriages.

We wondered at the term Essenes, for that reminded us of the Essenes within Israel, who are widely regarded as strict followers of a particular view of Torah. They seemed to have lived in the 1st century B.C.E. and 1st century C.E., by the shores of the Dead Sea. Were these “Essenes,” who are presumed to be the authors of the now-famous Dead Sea Scrolls, priests of Artemis?

The etymology of the word Essene, when applied to the Dead Sea Scroll community, is hotly debated—does it mean practitioners of Torah? Or, perhaps, healers? Even in ancient times, it was not clear. The 1st-century Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo suggested that the origin of the name was to be found in Greek rather than in Hebrew: it is a variation of ostiotes, meaning holiness. If this is true, then out of the four main Jewish sects of the time, only the Essenes have a name rooted in Greek, not Hebrew. This would indicate that, from the beginning, the Essenes were part of a Jewish/non-Jewish world.⁶⁷ We suspect that the Essenes saw themselves as the king bees⁶⁸ of the Torah, the Hebrew counterparts to the priests of Artemis in Ephesus.

Let’s take a closer look at these Essenes. The fact is that we are not sure that the Essenes wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls. The writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls referred to themselves as the “Sons of Tzadok,” the Yahad (that is, the community), “the Way,” or the “Sons of Light.” Whether they wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls or not, we know for a fact that there was a group that some called Essenes living along the Dead Sea in the 1st century. The term does not appear in the Talmud; not once. The only people who referred to the Dead Sea sect as Essenes were Hellenized Jews such as Josephus and Gentiles such as the 1st-century Roman naturalist Pliny, both of whom wrote in Greek.⁶⁹ There must have been a reason for this designation. Josephus and Pliny, who were familiar with the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds, were likely aware of the broader connotations of the term “Essenes.” John Kampen believes that they “detected similarities” between the Dead Sea Jews and “the ‘Essenes’ in the temple of Artemis at Ephesus” and decided to designate both groups with “the same appellation.”⁷⁰ In other words, the reason the term is used to describe both a Jewish sect and the priests of Artemis is because there must have been a connection, ignored by the more mainstream Jews, between certain Jews in Jesus’ time and the worshippers of Artemis.

Perhaps the word “Essenes,” therefore, functioned as a generic description. As Allen H. Jones points out, the priests of Artemis and the Essenes by the Dead Sea functioned much in the same way.⁷¹ For example, both were in charge of preparing for feasts and both used a solar calendar. More importantly, Pliny, and his contemporary Philo, noted that the Essenes who lived by the shores of the Dead Sea were beekeepers.⁷² In his famous play The Frogs, the 5th century B.C.E. Greek playwright Aristophanes writes, “The bee-keepers are here and they will open the temple of Artemis.”⁷³ Clearly, the beekeepers are also the Essene priests who have the keys to the temple. According to Jones, there wasn’t a theological connection between the Israelite Essenes and the Artemis Essenes. Rather, it was a term describing superficial and accidental similarities between some Jews and some pagans. We think he’s wrong. The fact is that, as Jones himself states, beekeeping in the ancient world was almost always connected with religion. For example, among the Minoans, “beekeeper” always carried with it a religious connotation.⁷⁴ It is unlikely that there were two religious orders living at the same time, both engaged in beekeeping, and both called “Essenes” that had nothing to do with each other. The reason people have kept them apart is because in retrospect we can’t imagine ancient Jews being anything but orthodox in their practice. There’s a simpler explanation, however, concerning the relationship between the two groups: the Jewish Essenes, like the early Jesus followers who wrote Joseph and Aseneth, were not altogether kosher Jews. They were believers in Artemis or some kind of Judaic-Artemesian religious hybrid.⁷⁵

If this seems like a stretch, it’s because we’ve been conditioned to ignore the plain meaning of terms in favor of whatever theory has become the received wisdom of an age. But the fact remains: in the 1st century, there was a group of Jews called Essenes and a group of Artemis worshippers also called by the same name. They must have been related.⁷⁶

In other words, now that we understand from Joseph and Aseneth that Mary the Magdalene was regarded by some of the earliest followers of Jesus as the Bride of God and that they modeled her on the goddess Artemis, we can conclude that some of the people we call Essenes were followers of Jesus of Nazareth and Mary of Magdala. It seems that all along the earliest followers of Jesus may have been hiding in plain sight, obscured by the term “Essene.”⁷⁷

Here, then, we have the smoking gun. By connecting Mary the Magdalene to the Essenes of Artemis, what the Joseph and Aseneth manuscript demonstrates is that the marriage of Joseph and Aseneth—of Jesus and Mary the Magdalene—brought together Hebrews and Gentiles that saw themselves, or were seen by others, as Essenes.⁷⁸ Put a different way, from the inception of the movement, the followers of Jesus saw themselves as living in messianic times where both Jew and Gentile would soon be worshipping together. It seems that Paul did not invent Gentile Christianity: he hijacked the movement from the Bride of God and her Essene followers.

To return to our paradigm-shifting gospel, what exactly is the significance of bees and Artemis?

It turns out that in the Roman world, bees were taken as symbols of virginity because it was widely believed that they reproduced without sexual intercourse or any form of copulation—simply put, bees were the symbols of immaculate conception. Aristotle, for instance, in Generation of Animals, Book III, articulates this view. This was also the way in which bees were interpreted within early Christianity. In a work on the life of St. Ambrose, his birth around the year 340 C.E. was said to have been attended by a swarm of bees which flew about his cradle—some entering his mouth—before rising up and vanishing out of sight.⁷⁹ The author of the life of St. Ambrose interprets this swarming as a sign of Ambrose’s lifelong virginity, future greatness, and eloquence. Think of the implications of the above: in Joseph and Aseneth, the virginal bees are connected with the wife, not the mother.

It seems that once Mary the wife was written out of history, Mary the mother was elevated to near-goddess status and retroactively declared a virgin. This was not an arbitrary process. As Ann Graham Brock and Robert Murray make clear with respect to the Syriac tradition, this was a conscious theological policy of replacing Mary the Magdalene with Mary the mother. It involved a “deliberate and systematic ‘superimposition’ of the Marys.”⁸⁰ However, once we understand that in Joseph and Aseneth Mary the Magdalene is modeled on the virgin goddess Artemis,⁸¹ we can get beyond the superimposition and realize that Jesus called his wife, not his mother, a Holy Virgin. Later, the mother was substituted for the daughter-in-law. In other words, it was Mary the Magdalene who was the original Virgin Mary.⁸²

3. Bees and Breasts

While we were standing next to the statue of Artemis, we also noticed—how could one miss—a cluster of more than two dozen egg-shaped protuberances from Artemis’ body. These are often interpreted as multiple breasts, an attribution, perhaps, of the goddess’ fertility or, more likely, of her life-giving and life-sustaining functions. After all, she was the goddess who nurtured her people, saved them from harm, and brought them prosperity. As mentioned before, the fact is that they don’t look like breasts, are situated in the wrong place on her body, and lack any suggestion of nipples.

As stated in the Preface, others have speculated that perhaps these unusual shapes represent bulls’ testicles—testes from bulls sacrificed to Artemis, appended to her statue. This theory also doesn’t make much sense. First, bulls’ testes come in pairs and there are several isolated protrusions on Artemis’ body. Second, if they were bulls’ testes, they would be hung from her attire, not nurtured by her body.

When we saw the bees on Artemis’ body, it struck us immediately that the mysterious protrusions are bee-related. Some might call them “cocoons,” but this is not technically correct. They are “queen cells.” Normal cells do not protrude and they are horizontal. In contrast, queen cells are vertical and protrude out of the comb in order to accommodate potential queens. They look exactly like the protrusions from Artemis’ body. This process occurs when a queen dies, or at springtime during periods of plenty. Put simply, for a culture that prizes honey, queen cells represent renewal and plenty. More than this, they can represent the “resurrection” of the dead queen through her successors.

The swarming of Aseneth/Mary the Magdalene in our text is also very significant. Talking to beekeepers, we realized that bees swarm only when they are in transition between the mother hive and a new colony. What happens is that the breakaway swarm establishes a temporary colony in a tree. At its center, there is the breakaway queen from the hive. The swarming is the bees’ way of protecting the new queen so that scouts can find a “city of refuge,” so to speak—a new and permanent home. At this stage, the queen is transitioning from her virgin state to her mother state. In other words, Joseph and Aseneth may have been written at the very moment that the Jesus/Mary the Magdalene followers were declaring their abandonment of the old hive, what Christians call the “Old Testament,” and their establishment of a new hive or, more properly, a “New Testament.” Once bees leave a hive, they establish a new signature smell. And once that occurs, there’s no going back to the old hive.

For a society that venerated Artemis, the bee imagery signified healing, plenty, renewal, resurrection, virginity, and immortality. But there is one more thing. If the protrusions are, indeed, queen cells, then Artemis’ body is the honeycomb. As stated, in Joseph and Aseneth what we are witnessing is the first-ever Communion ceremony between Aseneth (a.k.a. Mary the Magdalene) and the angel (a.k.a. Jesus). But take note, in this ceremony it is not his body that they are eating—it is hers.

Taken all together, it is obvious that Artemis is not multi-breasted nor is she proudly wearing bulls’ testicles. She is the Queen Bee. Her attendants are bees. And her magnificent temple is the beehive. In our text, Mary the Magdalene seems to be fashioned in the image of this goddess.⁸³

The equation of Mary the Magdalene with Artemis fits the religious context in which the first followers of Jesus and Mary the Magdalene lived. For example, a series of tablets were found at Knossos on Crete that depict large jars of honey being given as offerings to the gods. Another group of tablets are known as the honey tablets in which the name of Eleuthia, the goddess of childbirth, is mentioned. According to John Chadwick, “it is of some significance that she [Eleuthia] later became identified with Artemis, whose symbol at Ephesus was a bee.”⁸⁴

On the island of Thera, modern Santorini, 3,500-year-old pieces of jewelry have been found which depict a female head with a bee’s body. Similar images have been found on the island of Rhodes at Kamiros. On Thera, coin-like bronze objects have been found on which there is a figure of a bee enclosed within a mysterious inscription that has not yet been deciphered. Hilda Ransome believes that these are all connected to the worship of Artemis and they have something to do with her “secret rites.”⁸⁵

Since Jesus has always been somehow associated with Mary the Magdalene, if we are right and Mary the Magdalene is modeled on Artemis, there should be some echo in the Gospels—however faint—of the connection between Jesus and Artemis, between Jesus and bees. And there is. Several times in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke)⁸⁶ Jesus is accused of engaging in forbidden magic, for example driving out demons in the name of “Baalzebub.” What is the meaning of this term? Scholars are not sure. As we’ve noted above, Ba’al was a Canaanite god. His name is translated as Lord. Zebub, in Hebrew, signifies a moving, buzzing insect, most often identified with a fly. People translate Baalzebub as “Lord of the Flies,” identifying this deity with the Canaanite Pantheon. However, there is no extra-Biblical reference to such a god. In fact, in light of our text, we may now hypothesize that the Baalzebub reference in the Gospels may be a Jewish put-down of a god or a goddess that is associated with a flying insect.

But why the put-down? We can now answer that question. It seems that what we have in the Gospels is a play on his association with bees. According to Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, “Mary Magdalene as well as Mary of Nazareth are many times associated with the attributes and characteristics of previous goddesses.”⁸⁷ If we are right, Mary the Magdalene was seen by her followers as the incarnation of a specific goddess—Artemis. Jesus, therefore, would have been associated with a bee goddess and, as the Gospels record, his opponents may well have charged him of heretically healing in her name. Put differently, since Artemis was associated by her Syro-Phoenician followers with bees, honey, and life, it seems that Jesus’ Jewish opponents were accusing him of being associated with flies, darkness, and dung.⁸⁸

Some might object that despite the parallels that we have drawn, no connection exists in the historical record between Artemis and the land of Israel, where Mary the Magdalene was from. Are they right? Was there a tradition of Artemis worship in the general area of ancient Israel? In fact, there was—a very long tradition.

The most incredible surviving monument to Artemis in this part of the world is her temple in Jerash/Gerasa. Jerash/Gerasa is in modern-day Jordan, across the Jordan River, not far from the Galilee. The structure that is found there today was dedicated around the end of the 1st century, but according to John Kampen, “the evidence suggests that a cult and temple to Artemis are not innovations introduced to Gerasa in 100 C.E. Nor was Artemis a rarity in Syro-Palestine in the first century.”⁸⁹

The most famous statue of Artemis found in Israel was discovered by an Italian team excavating at Caesarea in 1961.⁹⁰ Another statue was discovered in the area of Gadara across the Sea of Galilee from Magdala, Mary the Magdalene’s hometown. A further connection is with the Nabataeans of Petra fame. Their kingdom, also in modern-day Jordan, reached its greatest heights during the reign of Aretas IV (9 B.C.E.–40 C.E.), who reigned during the time of Jesus and Mary the Magdalene. At the time, the Nabataeans worshipped Atargatis—the so-called Syrian goddess—who was clearly modeled on none other than Artemis.⁹¹ Atargatis was a fertility goddess identified with dolphins⁹² and fish. She was a fish goddess. At Ashkelon, in modern Israel, she was described as half woman and half fish.⁹³ In other words, as with Artemis and early Christianity, the fish was sacred for the cult of Atargatis.

But how can it be that Artemis was so important in Biblical Israel, ancient Canaan, and yet is never mentioned in the Bible? The fact is that the Bible does mention Artemis. The Israelites were not immune to her theological charms. The reason we haven’t noticed her is because she too has been hiding for millennia in plain sight. In the land of Canaan/Israel she was not called Artemis. The fact is that she had different names in different places. In Phrygia, she was called Rhea, in Egypt she was called Isis,⁹⁴ and in ancient Canaan/Israel she was called Asherah. In the Bible she is one of the most notable goddesses attracting wayward Israelites. For example, when the children of Israel are about to enter the Holy Land, God warns them not to engage in Asherah (i.e., Artemis) worship by designating sacred trees next to their holy altars as symbols of her presence: “You shall not plant for yourself an Asherah of any tree next to an altar of God, your God, that you make for yourself” (Deuteronomy 16:21). Clearly, some Israelites did not heed God’s warning. In a place called Kuntillet ’Ajrud, in the Sinai Peninsula just outside modern-day Israel, a wall painting was found where Asherah/Artemis is described as the consort of the God of Israel himself.⁹⁵

When the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem in 587 B.C.E., some of the Judaean refugees confronted the prophet Jeremiah. They did not blame their misfortunes on their neglect of the God of Israel but, rather, of the goddess Asherah, “queen of heaven,” in whose honor they had once baked special honey cakes and burned incense (Jeremiah 44:16–20).

Asherah worship seems to have involved some kind of ritual sex. The greatest theological challenge that Moses faced at the time of the Biblical Exodus occurred when a prince of the tribe of Simon, Zimri by name, engaged in ritual sex with Kosbi, a priestess of the Midianite version of Artemis, at the entrance of the Holy of Holies where the Ark of the Covenant was kept. Simply put, the theological challenge of Artemis to the God of Israel did not start with Jesus and Mary the Magdalene. Already, in Moses’ time, Zimri and Kosbi were engaged in some kind of syncretic fusion of Judaism and Artemis worship. Perhaps they called themselves the “Son of God” and the “Bride of God.” Whatever they were doing, it involved an attempt to join the Midianite and Israelite nations. More than this, it seems they used sex in a cultic manner, a ritual that scholars would later associate with Gnosticism. The Zimri/Kosbi episode ended when Pinchas, a relative of Moses, speared Zimri and Kosbi in flagrante delicto—in the act of copulation (Numbers 25:1–8). What all this means is that Artemis (a.k.a. Asherah) was already seducing Israelites as early as 1500 B.C.E.

But what of the Galilee in Jesus’ time? The connection between the early Jesus movement and Artemis only makes sense if there was a long Galilean tradition of associating female goddesses with Artemis, or her Canaanite predecessor Asherah. Incredibly, in 2010, in the Beit She’an Valley in Israel, archaeologists discovered thirty intact, approximately 3,000-year-old beehives—part of a cluster of one to two hundred beehives—in the ruins of the ancient city of Rehov. The beehives date back to 900 B.C.E. Although some speculated that these beehives were part of a honey-making industry, the hypothesis makes no sense. The bees were found in the heart of an urban center. No community would want an estimated one million bees producing honey next to their windows. It seems that the bees served a cultic purpose. Incense burners were found next to the hives. More than this, the ceramic burners had small Artemis-like protrusions encircling the cultic stand—foreshadows of the Artemis queen-bee cells. The greatest surprise of all was the charred preservation of intact, millennia-old bees. This allowed scientists to examine the bees under a microscope. Shockingly, they were not of the local Syrian variety. They had been brought all the way from Turkey! It seems that they must have been Ephesian bees (i.e., bees from Ephesus)—holy bees. This places an Anatolian/Turkish bee cult next door to the Galilee nine hundred years before Jesus and Mary the Magdalene. Clearly, the iconography of Artemis was deeply ingrained in the Jesus-era Galilean psyche.⁹⁶

There may be echoes in the Gospels of this Galilean Artemis connection. In a famous incident, an unnamed woman anoints Jesus’ head with nard, perfume (Mark 14:3–9). The Jewish tradition was to anoint a king with oil, not perfume. Interestingly, Xenophon of Ephesus wrote a romance in which the main characters fall in love while participating in a festival for Artemis. In it he describes the members of the procession carrying torches, baskets, and perfumes for the sacrifice to the goddess.⁹⁷ So the perfume incident may be preserving a tradition whereby Mary the Magdalene anoints Jesus using the rites of a priestess of Artemis.

We see the Artemis connection again with respect to another of Jesus’ followers. One of the most mysterious characters mentioned in the Gospels is a man named Alphaeus. It is not a Hebrew name unless it is related to the Hebrew Halfi, which means “changing.” He appears five times in the New Testament.⁹⁸ We don’t know who he is except that he’s the father of two of the apostles—Levi/Matthew and James. So what is it about Alphaeus’ background that connects him so powerfully to Jesus? And why are the Gospels so quiet about him? As it turns out, “there was a sacred precinct to Artemis Alpheiaia, meaning of the river Alpheios, at the village of Letrinoi near the outlet of the river in Elis in southern Greece.”⁹⁹ According to Greek tradition, Artemis was the love object of Alphaeus. Pausanias relates that at Olympia the two divinities had one altar in common.¹⁰⁰ In other words, Alphaeus may be a theophoric name, that is to say, a name that embeds the name of the god in a personal name. It may point to a Galilean family that was already enmeshed in Artemis worship, or had a Canaanite/Phoenician background involving the goddess.¹⁰¹ This may explain why—when Jesus and Mary the Magdalene were perceived by some of their followers as gods incarnate—two of Alphaeus’ sons heeded the call and became part of the original twelve.

Finally, the Artemis-Judaism-early Christian connection may be illustrated dramatically by an archaeological find north of the Galilee in Dura Europos, a border outpost in modern-day Syria. There, archaeologists have uncovered a synagogue dating to the 2nd century. Right next to it was discovered the earliest house church ever unearthed. Surprisingly, various Hebrew texts were found in it. Clearly there were Jews worshipping in this church. There were also paintings in both the church and the synagogue. The latter are particularly spectacular. They depict various Biblical scenes such as the Exodus, Ezekiel’s Vision, and King David. But there is something very strange about this “synagogue.” First of all, why are there human images in a Jewish house of worship—a clear transgression of Biblical law? Second of all, in one scene, which depicts Pharaoh’s daughter bathing in the Nile, the princess is rendered in the nude. What kind of synagogue is this that depicts Biblical princesses in the fashion of modern centerfolds? And why is the synagogue right next to what is probably a Judeo-Christian house church? The answer, once again, may involve Artemis.

Right next to the synagogue, a temple dedicated to Adonis and the Nabataean counterpart to Artemis, Atargatis, was also discovered. In the temple, there were nine small rooms similar to the prostitution rooms in Pompeii and pagan temple cells where cult prostitution was practiced. Recently, Edward Lipinski concluded that the rooms in the Dura Europos Atargatis/Artemis temple “may well have included the sexual services of women.”¹⁰² What all this means is that in the 2nd century you have celebrants of Artemis, early Christians and Jews right next to each other, worshipping together and seemingly involved in Artemis-related ritual sex.

Artemis and Apollo: Twins—Sister and Brother

There’s another strange passage in Joseph and Aseneth in which Joseph and Aseneth are said to be not only husband and wife but also “brother and sister” (7:10; 8:1; 8:4). This obviously has nothing to do with the Biblical Joseph and Aseneth. But does it have anything to do with Jesus and Mary the Magdalene? How could they be both spouses and siblings?¹⁰³ The appellation sounds almost incestuous. Again, Artemis provides the answer for a problem raised by the Joseph and Aseneth text.

In Greek mythology, Artemis was the twin of none other than Apollo. They were sister and brother, the moon and the sun, paired forever. Both are children of Zeus—the supreme god—and his wife, Leto. While there are conflicting mythological accounts regarding the location of her birth, one version has Artemis born in the sacred lake on the island of Delos, the religious capital of ancient Greece. In other words, Apollo and Artemis are the son and daughter of god. As stated earlier, by early Christian times Apollo had become identified with Helios and Mithras, the Persian “son of god,” whose birthday was December 25th.¹⁰⁴ All these Sun gods were then identified with Jesus. What Joseph and Aseneth is telling us is that the moon goddess was identified with his wife.¹⁰⁵

Finally, if we’re right and Aseneth/Mary the Magdalene is modeled on Artemis, this would make sense of why she is portrayed in Joseph and Aseneth as both Jesus’ sister and his wife. In other words, the brother/sister, bridegroom/bride terminology only makes sense if Aseneth/Mary the Magdalene is understood as Artemis, consort and sister of Jesus/Apollo/Helios.

Aseneth/Mary the Magdalene Decoded

Step Three

Mary the Magdalene (Aseneth) is modeled on the goddess Artemis

Mary the Magdalene as Goddess

In Joseph and Aseneth, the typology could not be clearer. The unknown author of this work has taken a figure well known within the cultural context of his 1st-century Syro-Phoenician audience and merged it with Mary the Magdalene so as to convey an important truth about her. What truth?

Just as Joseph is a prefiguration of Jesus, drawn from a Hebrew text, Artemis is a prefiguration of Mary the Magdalene, drawn from a Gentile myth. We should note that early Christians had no problem drawing on pagan myths as foreshadows of the life of Jesus. Writing in Rome in the 150s, Justin Martyr states that all rational pagans are retroactively Christians: “those who have lived rationally [meta logou] belonged to Christ even though they have been atheists such as Socrates, Heraclitus and those like them. . . .”¹⁰⁶

From the point of view of the early Christians, therefore, in their story of Apollo and Artemis, the pagans had anticipated the arrival of the real divine pair—the children of the true God—Jesus and Mary the Magdalene.

When the symbolic language of Joseph and Aseneth is understood, it testifies to Mary the Magdalene’s immense power and status in the early Jesus movement. For example, scourging was related to Artemis even before the birth of Jesus. The philosopher Apollonius of Tyana describes the ritual scourging that was done in honor of Artemis of Scythia: “The scourging would continue until blood was flowing freely and the blood from the wounds would be smeared on the altar, as prescribed by the oracle.”¹⁰⁷ In Sparta, too, young men underwent severe scourging until the altar of Artemis was covered in blood.¹⁰⁸ In fact, the story of Jesus’ scourging during his final moments before the crucifixion may be borrowed from Artemis/Mary the Magdalene–related rituals.

Also, Artemis was often called Artemis Soteira, Artemis the Savior.¹⁰⁹ By describing Mary the Magdalene in Artemisian language, Joseph and Aseneth is describing Mary the Magdalene as the goddess incarnate. In other words, what has always been suspected is now confirmed. Mary the Magdalene was not a peripheral follower or a reformed prostitute. She was a savior in her own right; Jesus’ bride, his wife, his spiritual sister and . . . his co-deity.

Today, after two millennia of traditional Christian theology, describing Mary the Magdalene as a goddess seems strange. But, in the 1st century, it was understood that some people could be raised to the status of gods and goddesses. By a vote of the senate, the Romans regularly elevated emperors, along with their wives and sometimes their mothers, to the status of gods. For example, after her death, Livia Drusilla, wife of the emperor/god Augustus and mother of the emperor/god Tiberius, was posthumously turned into a goddess by the Emperor Claudius in 42 C.E., around a decade after the crucifixion of Jesus. Again, though this may seem strange to modern sensibilities, historically speaking, elevating a Gentile woman to the status of a pagan goddess is no stranger than elevating a Jewish rabbi to the status of a Roman god. Once the leap had been made in the minds of some of his followers that Jesus was God incarnate, his wife, like the wife of any ruler, would also have to be elevated to the status of a goddess.¹¹⁰

We’re so removed from the reality of the early Jesus-and-Mary movement that we’ve lost touch with the historical context into which that community was born. For example, after the crucifixion, many early traditions link early Christians to Ephesus—Paul, John, Mary the mother of Jesus . . . and Mary the Magdalene, are all said to have gone to Ephesus, where Ephesian Artemis ruled. The author of Joseph and Aseneth is drawing on iconic imagery from Jewish and Gentile sources so as to speak to his Jewish and Gentile audiences. He’s literally marrying the traditions of Rome, Ephesus, and Jerusalem. And all this prior to Rome becoming Christian, without so much as a hint of Paul’s influence.

At any rate, in the early days before the crucifixion, equating a flesh-and-blood woman such as Mary the Magdalene with the goddess Artemis would have been a good move. It would have immediately associated her with a goddess who was a healer, protector, nurturer, and savior. Since it is an undisputed fact that Jesus became associated with Helios/Apollo, if Jesus and Mary the Magdalene were married, Mary had to be associated with Artemis.

In the 1st-century world of Jesus and Mary the Magdalene, the goddess Artemis was the only way to come to terms with any wife of Jesus. Describing Mary the Magdalene as a rabbi’s wife would have meant nothing outside a Jewish context, and would have served to define her solely in relation to her male partner. Further, such an appellation would have been unthinkable for a group that already saw Jesus as a deity. Simply put, if he was a god, she had to be a goddess. If we’ve understood the text correctly, and Mary the Magdalene was a former priestess of Ba’al and Artemis, we now see that her transformation did not involve a total abandonment of Ba’al and Artemis for the sake of marrying a Jewish rabbi. Quite the contrary, she became Artemis when she married Ba’al/Helios/Apollo. In the process, she became the head of the newly founded Church of the Gentiles.

The author of Joseph and Aseneth is also telling us that just as the worshippers of Osiris, Mithras, and Dionysus (all dying-and-resurrecting gods) flocked to worship Jesus so, too, the worshippers of Artemis—the provider of shelter and everlasting life—flocked to the worship of Mary the Magdalene. In other words, to the Phoenicians/Canaanites of Tyre, Sidon, and Magdala, Joseph and Aseneth seems to have been a Gospel of the Church of Mary the Magdalene, the religious community of the first Gentiles who followed the teachings of Jesus as interpreted through the apostle Mary the Magdalene.

Archaeologically speaking, it is significant that in the controversial “Jesus family tomb” found in 1980 in Talpiot, east Jerusalem, close to the ossuary, or bone box, of a man called “Jesus son of Joseph,” there was an ossuary inscribed in Greek that reads “Mary also known as Mara.”¹¹¹ Mara is an Aramaic term used by Hebrews and Phoenicians/Canaanites. It can be translated as master or lady. It is the female equivalent of lord.

In the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) collection of more than a thousand ossuaries, there are only six that have the appellation Mara inscribed on them.¹¹² In the three instances where Mara is referring to a male, the epigraphers take the term to mean master.¹¹³ In the three instances that Mara appears next to a woman’s name, the term is not translated as the female equivalent of master, which is mistress, but is taken as a nickname for Martha.¹¹⁴ This is patently absurd.¹¹⁵ Mara, when applied to females, must mean the same thing as it does when applied to males. If it doesn’t, no one has made an argument as to why not.

In the Ethiopic Liber Requiei, the earliest Christian text dealing with the Virgin Mary’s death, Mara is used in one sense only: “our Master.” Stephen Shoemaker, the translator of the text, states that the Ethiopic equivalent of Mara means “mistress” and “lady.” But, for complete accuracy, he translates the word as “Master.” Shoemaker states that he is using this word “in a neutered sense,” meaning that “it should not be taken as suggesting the use of masculine forms.”¹¹⁶ Put simply, if we want to know what Mara means, we need to look no further than the Liber Requiei, where Mara refers to a woman and it means master.

If the Talpiot tomb is, indeed, the Jesus family tomb and one of the “Mary” ossuaries found in it belongs to Mary the Magdalene, then the “Mara” inscription on her ossuary means that she was called “lady” or “master.” Significantly, in the original Syriac of Joseph and Aseneth, Mary the Magdalene is also referred to using the epithet “Mara” or “Lady” (10:7; 18:13; 28:2; 28:11).¹¹⁷ But let’s not forget the connection with Artemis. One of the appellations of Artemis is Potnia Theron. For example, this is the way she’s referred to in Homer’s Iliad (21:470). Potnia is a Mycenaean word, which can be translated as “lady” or “mistress.”¹¹⁸ In The Greek Magical Papyri, a collection of magical spells found in Egypt dating from the 2nd century B.C.E. to the 5th century C.E., Artemis is referred to as both august virgin and mistress.¹¹⁹ Here again we have perfect synchronicity between the archaeology, the Artemis tradition, and our text.¹²⁰ When it comes to Mary the Magdalene, they are all telling the same story.

Now, again, it might seem far-fetched that a Jewish rabbi—a healer belonging to a Jewish religious elite—would marry a Gentile priestess, but this is only as a result of imposing later prejudices on earlier realities. The fact is that we have both historical and archaeological evidence for precisely the kind of union described in Joseph and Aseneth. Historically speaking, not long after Mary the Magdalene (around the end of the 1st century), Julia, a Herodian princess (a Jewish princess of the royal Herodian house), married a Roman senator and settled in Perga (modern Turkey), where she became a priestess of Artemis. Following in Julia’s footsteps, her daughter, Plancia Magna, also became a high priestess of Artemis.¹²¹

But one does not have to go outside of the Holy Land to find such Artemis priestesses. For example, in 1989 three adjacent burial caves were found in Jerusalem’s Kidron Valley in an area called Akeldama (i.e., the “field of blood”), traditionally associated with the place where Judas Iscariot hanged himself. The caves contained twenty-three ossuaries in total. Many of them had inscriptions on them. What the archaeology demonstrates is a totally syncretic family—some kind of mixed Jewish-Greek family that consisted of Jews, Gentiles, and converts. Incredibly, one ossuary has a bilingual inscription in Greek and Hebrew that reads Jesus. Next to it is an ossuary of a woman who is called Kyria in Greek—this means Mara in Aramaic. And next to her there’s an ossuary of a woman called by the very un-Jewish name of Megiste. She is identified as “the priestess.”¹²²

In case one thinks that this kind of archaeology is a complete anomaly, there is always the famous tomb of Jason found in 1995 in the fashionable Jerusalem district of Rehavia. Among the various images of ships and Greek names, there is a faded inscription written in Hebrew of a woman whose name is now illegible. But her title is not: it’s “the priestess.”¹²³

It seems, therefore, that from the beginning, the Church of The Lady, Mary the Magdalene, would have involved a Gentile congregation distinct from the Gentile congregations of the Christ, later founded by Paul. Paul’s group was founded on his mystical experience of the post-crucifixion Christ. In contrast, Mary the Magdalene’s group seems to have been born out of an attempt to understand her earthly marriage to Jesus of Nazareth. This Gentile Church was based not on Paul’s mystical experiences on the road to Damascus, but on Mary the Magdalene’s experiences as the Bride of God.

Our reading of Joseph and Aseneth suggests, therefore, that Paul and subsequent Pauline Christians retroactively made Jesus celibate so they could write Jesus’ wife out of their theology, while simultaneously taking over her Gentile Church. Margaret Starbird puts it this way: “In denying the role of the Sacred Bride, the church fathers in effect gave us a distorted view of Jesus. He became envisioned as a celibate god, seated on a celestial throne—the celibate son of a Virgin Mother.”¹²⁴ Joseph and Aseneth did not have the luxury of writing people in and out of history. All the text could do is find theological meaning in the historical reality of Jesus’ married life. In other words, the early Church of Mary the Magdalene could not leave Jesus’ marital status ambiguous, as it is in the Gospels, because people knew the truth. Furthermore, once Jesus had been deified, his followers had no choice but to also regard the woman who shared the Son of God’s bed as a goddess incarnate in her own right—the Lady: Mary the Magdalene.

It is interesting to note that just as virginity was later moved from Mary the Magdalene to Mary the mother, so too did the designation “Our Lady.” In other words, Pauline Christians took Artemis’ titles from Jesus’ Bride and conferred them on Jesus’ mother. In the process, they also made sure that the mother was totally desexualized. As the story was now told, she was born of an immaculate conception, gave birth through a virginal delivery, and stayed ever-virgin. Significantly, they did all this at the Council of Ephesus, where they started a tradition that the Virgin Mary relocated from Jerusalem to the center of Artemis worship in Ephesus. In this way, Jesus’ mother forever replaced both Artemis and Mary the Magdalene.

In sum, a Church of Mary the Magdalene would have represented a group of congregations or assemblies who had been nurtured by Mary the Magdalene during her lifetime. They would have surely followed her version of the teachings and practices of her husband-rabbi, the divine-human Jesus. Of course, there are echoes of all this in the Gospels themselves: the wedding at Cana, where the bride and the groom are never identified; the incident with the Syro-Phoenician woman; the episode where Jesus’ feet are washed by an unnamed woman who sensuously dries them with her hair; and the attempt by Mary the Magdalene to wash and anoint the dead body of Jesus.¹²⁵

But is there any evidence that the Church of Mary the Magdalene survived beyond Jesus and Mary the Magdalene? In fact, there is. For example, there are early traditions surrounding an enigmatic figure called Simon Magus, that is “Simon the Magician” and his Syro-Phoenician wife, Helena. In Pauline Christianity, Simon is vilified as a bad guy and an opponent of both Peter and Paul. For example, in Acts 8:9–24 he is presented as a false convert to Christianity who confronts the apostle Paul. Simon is also called a heretic in several early 2nd-century writings by Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, and Hippolytus. In at least one text, echoing traditions about Jesus, Simon’s mother is described as Jewish and his father as Roman.¹²⁶

Simon Magus’ story roughly parallels the story in Joseph and Aseneth—one generation of leadership later. It seems that Simon claimed to be Jesus reincarnated and, perhaps not coincidentally, Simon’s wife, Helena, like Mary the Magdalene, is described by the church fathers as a former prostitute.¹²⁷ In other words, Simon and Helena seem to be carrying on the tradition established by Jesus and Mary the Magdalene, as described in Joseph and Aseneth. In Simon we have a half-Roman, half-Jewish miracle worker who has a Syro-Phoenician priestess as his consort or wife. So for those who think that the Jesus–Mary the Magdalene coupling has no historical or textual basis, in Simon and Helena we see a couple that perfectly fits what we would expect from the Church of Mary the Magdalene after the Magdalene’s death. Justin Martyr called Simon’s movement Simonians.¹²⁸ It carried on the tradition of the bridal chamber and is credited with starting Gnosticism.

It seems, therefore, that Simon Magus and his wife Helena stepped into the sandals, so to speak, of Jesus and Mary the Magdalene. They were so important that they could not be ignored by the church fathers but, as with all opponents of orthodoxy, they were dubbed heretics, magicians, and prostitutes.

Textually and historically, there are further echoes of the marriage of Jesus and Mary in the so-called Gnostic Christian communities where Mary the Magdalene is depicted as the apostle to the apostles, the most important follower of Jesus, his lifelong companion and his trusted confidante. In fact, the Gnostics may have been the immediate successors to the Church of Mary the Magdalene.

Taking all this together with our lost gospel, it is now clear that, at least for her followers, Mary the Magdalene played a major role—perhaps equal to Jesus—in the drama of human redemption.