11

THE GREATEST WEDDING OF ALL TIME

Now that we have analyzed both the Jesus and Mary the Magdalene figures in our manuscript, we have to deal with the fact that, according to the text, they got married. By this point in our narrative, the idea of Jesus being married should no longer seem far-fetched. As stated, for a Jew then, as now, fulfilling the first Biblical commandment—“be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28)—was seen as a righteous obligation, not a flight of fancy. Jesus must have taken this Biblical commandment at least as seriously as do all other Torah-observant Jews.

Let’s put it differently. As previously noted, an unmarried Jesus would have been absolutely scandalous to his contemporaries. A celibate Jesus—not a married one—is what people of his era would have found shocking. His unmarried status—if it were true—would have invited considerable comment and nasty gossip. An unmarried son? Now that’s something that would have called for an explanation. Was he being disobedient to the expressed will of God? Was he feebleminded? Did he belong to some strange ascetic cult? Was he, perhaps, physically incapacitated in some way? Or was he not so inclined? What explanation would fit?

In the mid-second decade of our era, roughly 15 C.E., Jesus would have been approximately twenty years old, just the right age for marriage. At the time, males married between the ages of fifteen and twenty; females even younger. Jesus’ mother, Mary, for instance, would have been a young teenager when she married Joseph. A 2nd-century Christian document, The Infancy Gospel of James, says Mary was as old as sixteen but could have easily been fourteen or fifteen. Yes, Mary the mother of Jesus was a young teenager, not the mature twenty-something so often found in later Christian representations of the Madonna and child.

The year 15 C.E., therefore, is an approximate date that makes sense for Jesus’ wedding. Is there any echo of this status in the canonical Gospels? In fact, besides the wedding at Cana and Mary the Magdalene’s desire to anoint Jesus’ naked corpse, Jesus’ marriage is hinted to at least two more times in the Gospels. Matthew 22:1–14 contains the “Parable of the Wedding Feast.” The story imagines what would happen if a king were to throw a wedding feast for his son. According to the parable, some invitees refuse to attend the wedding, offering excuses, while others make light of the invitation and return to work. The king is obviously a surrogate for God and the son for Jesus. The Gospel—that is, the “Good News”—is that God’s son is getting married. The message to the faithful is: don’t refuse to come to the greatest wedding of all time. Theologically speaking, for some of Jesus’ earliest followers, it is this wedding that opens up the kingdom to everyone.

The Book of Revelation 19:6–9 also depicts a marriage. It is the marriage of the Lamb, that is, Jesus, to a bride described in Aseneth-type imagery as “clothed with fine linen, bright and pure.” Here, the Book of Revelation specifically blesses those who are invited to the metaphysical party, the marriage feast.

A Challenging New Image of Jesus: Jesus the Family Man

The Joseph and Aseneth manuscript is forcing us to reassess the marriage-related passages in the Gospels. More than this, it is obliging us to rethink what we know about the historical Jesus and the historical Mary the Magdalene. For example, Christians today typically think of Jesus as asexual. According to this view, he wasn’t married, didn’t have children, and did not enjoy family time with his relatives. He wasn’t like us, with sexual feelings and passions. He wasn’t beset by all the conflicting emotions that being part of an extended family entails—happiness, sorrows, hurts, hopes, dreams, successes and failures. Jesus isn’t depicted as grieving over the loss of close relatives, nor is he up all night, anxious over a child with an unexplained fever or pain. He is not portrayed as sharing in the successes of friends or commiserating with those who have suffered tragedy in their lives. While he is a teacher, a healer, and a debater, we don’t see Jesus caught in a web of social and familial relationships—Jesus as husband, father, uncle, brother, or son-in-law does not exist. In fact, in Matthew 12:48, when some of his followers say that his mother and brothers have come to speak to him, Jesus explicitly rejects his biological family. He rudely dismisses them, saying to his followers: “‘Who is my mother and who are my brothers?’ And pointing to his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother’.”

As a result of the victory of Pauline Christianity over all the other forms that once existed, the conventional picture is that Jesus is God incarnate, a being far removed from our way of existing in the world, curiously detached from what ordinary people experience and feel. As Meyer puts it, “This prominent Christian focus on Jesus as a dying and rising savior . . . seems to minimize or even ignore the life of the historical Jesus . . . in whose name and memory Christianity was founded.”¹

For Christians—and even non-Christians accustomed to thinking in theological terms—facts associated with the historical Jesus seem blasphemous. He was—wasn’t he?—the son of God, God in human form, a divinity, the savior of all humanity, the redeemer, the second person of the Trinity. To think of such a unique being as experiencing sexual urges—let alone satisfying them—seems outrageous.

But it wasn’t outrageous to all, most, or even many early Christians. Once deciphered, Joseph and Aseneth provides solid, textual evidence that Jesus had an active sexual life, was a family man—a father, a brother, an uncle, and a real husband. And this outraged no one.

Our exploration now takes an interesting turn, right into the very heart of what Jesus’ marriage to Mary the Magdalene signified for his earliest followers.

Many Unanswered Questions

Clearly, if they did marry, Jesus’ marriage to Mary the Magdalene would have been no ordinary wedding. It raises many interesting questions. First, what would this marriage have meant to Jesus? Second, why Mary the Magdalene?

Moreover, what did Jesus’ marriage mean to his original followers? What authority would “Mrs. Jesus” have had among Jesus’ early followers? And if he was married, did Jesus’ marriage threaten anybody, as the Joseph and Aseneth text implies? Although these questions seem unanswerable, reading our manuscript in light of the known history provides all the answers.

What Do We Really Know of Jesus’ Life?

A wedding around 15 C.E. would help fill in some of the missing gaps in Jesus’ life. But before we get to the wedding, let’s start at the beginning. As already noted in passing, his name wasn’t Jesus. Nobody ever called him that. He wouldn’t have turned around in a crowd if anyone had shouted out, “Jesus, Jesus.” Jesus is an Anglicized rendition of the Greek version of his Hebrew name. His name, in Hebrew, was Yeshua, which can be translated into English as Joshua or Jesus. According to the Gospel of Matthew, Yeshua/Jesus was born just before the death of Herod the Great in the year 4 B.C.E.—say 6 or 5 B.C.E. But that birth date is uncertain, for the Gospel of Luke dates it some ten years later, around 6 C.E. when a historically verifiable tax census took place. The tax census seems to match the story in the Gospels concerning a census that causes Joseph and a pregnant Mary to leave Nazareth and end up in a Bethlehem manger. According to the Gospels, Jesus had four brothers. The “brothers” are mentioned in the Gospels of Matthew (13:55) and Mark (6:3). They were younger, older, or not full brothers at all.

In Luke 2:21 we are told that Jesus, following the requirements of Torah, was circumcised on the eighth day after his birth. We are also told that his parents underwent the Jewish ceremony—still practiced today—for the Redemption of the Firstborn.² According to this ceremony, in gratitude to God for not killing the firstborn males of Israel at the time of the Biblical Exodus, Jewish parents “redeem,” or symbolically buy back, their firstborn male children for the price of a silver coin.³ To this day, friends gather, food is served, and a silver coin is given to a descendant of a temple priest—usually a man named Cohen (priest), in a kind of exchange for the infant. The fact that Luke 2:21 tells us that Jesus’ parents redeemed him from the temple priests tells us that Jesus was the firstborn male of Mary.

We also know from Luke that Jesus’ family trekked annually from Nazareth up to Jerusalem to observe the festival of Passover (Luke 2:41–51). This represented a major commitment on the part of Mary and Joseph, Jesus’ parents. In those days, this pilgrimage took at least two weeks and involved serious travel expenses and loss of income. In other words, from his circumcision to his redemption to the annual pilgrimage, the Gospels paint a picture of Jesus’ family as Torah-observant Jews.⁴ They were what we would call today an Orthodox Jewish family. But what about Jesus? What do we know about his youth?

As it turns out, one of the few incidents we hear of regarding his youth is an episode involving Jesus discussing Torah with temple teachers, when he was only twelve years old. As the story goes, during the Passover pilgrimage, Jesus lagged behind his family, spending time discussing fine points of Torah law with temple authorities (Luke 2:41–52). In other words, the only thing the Gospels choose to tell us about Jesus’ youth is that he was precocious in Torah studies.

After that, silence reigns within the canonical Gospels until the late 20s C.E. when Jesus begins his mission. It’s a rather thin resume. Think about it, isn’t it amazing that from the time Jesus was eight days old—when he was circumcised—until he’s in his early thirties, we know nothing about him except for one incident on the steps of the Holy Temple? Obviously, there is much to learn about this thirty-year period of silence.

If we know so little about Jesus, how could we possibly hope to learn anything about Mary the Magdalene? The canonical Gospels are, fortunately, not the only Christian source of information about Mary the Magdalene. We also have the so-called Gnostic Gospels. As we are beginning to see, these play an important role in helping to uncover the reality that Jesus and Mary the Magdalene were married. They also help explain what the wedding of Jesus and Mary the Magdalene meant to their loyal followers. On this point, we need to reiterate that the contents of the New Testament were decided upon in the 4th century C.E. This occurred, as we have noted, as the result of a letter circulated by Archbishop Athanasius of Alexandria, Egypt, to his churches and monasteries. In it, he outlined what was scripture and what was not. He had literally hundreds of existing texts from which to choose. In time, other bishops “agreed” with Athanasius’ list, and this became the “New” Testament. This set of writings reflects the ideology of the winning party, the group within early Christianity favored by the Roman emperor Constantine. It is by no means an impartial set of writings and certainly not reflective of the range of early Christian positions. Historically speaking, we must go outside the canonical Gospels to reconstruct Jesus and Mary the Magdalene’s life.

The Wedding

Dan Brown notwithstanding, if we base ourselves on Joseph and Aseneth and Gnostic movements such as the Valentinians, Jesus and Mary the Magdalene were married. In these texts, that’s a fact.⁵ In the canonical Gospels, the strongest arguments for their marriage have to do with Mary’s presence at the crucifixion and at the burial. According to all the Gospels, Mary the Magdalene—along with some women in Jesus’ family—was present at the crucifixion. If she wasn’t his wife, why was she there? More than this, according to three of the four canonical Gospels, after the crucifixion she goes to anoint (wash) his naked corpse to prepare him for burial. As stated earlier, if she wasn’t his wife, how could she presume to touch his naked body? In the context of 1st-century Judaism, in the absence of menfolk, only family could get close to the corpse.

So it seems that sometime, probably around 15 C.E., when Jesus would have been twenty and Mary the Magdalene around eighteen, they must have married. Likely, they got married in the Galilee where they were both living, perhaps at Cana where the only wedding recorded in the Gospels takes place. It must have been—like all weddings—a joyous occasion, no doubt attended by everyone in the village. His mother would have been there. So, too, his four brothers—Ya’akov (Jacob or James as we usually refer to him in English), Yosé (or Joseph), Simon, and Judah—as well as his two sisters (Matthew 13:55). The names of the sisters are not mentioned in the New Testament, but early Christian tradition refers to them as Mary and Salome. Joseph, Jesus’ father, probably was not there: he seems to have died by the time of Jesus’ marriage. In fact, Joseph is not mentioned in any records after the pilgrimage to Jerusalem for Passover when Jesus was only twelve. Were mother Mary’s parents—Anna and Joachim—in attendance? Maybe his cousin John the Baptizer came for the celebration? If they were still alive in the year 15 C.E., maybe John’s parents—Elizabeth and Zechariah (Luke 1:40)—were also present.

And what of Mary the Magdalene? Were her parents there? Any siblings? Other relatives?

Unfortunately, until now, we didn’t know the answers to these intriguing questions. They seem to have been purposely written out of the Gospels. But Joseph and Aseneth tells us that Mary the Magdalene’s parents were there and that the wedding was a big one. According to the text, Aseneth—a.k.a. Mary the Magdalene—prepared for her wedding carefully, donning her finest robe and golden boots. She adorned herself with a band around her waist, filled with precious gems. She wore golden bracelets around her wrists and an expensive necklace around her neck. She put a golden crown on her head and covered her face with a veil. She looked at herself in a basin of reflected water and saw that her face was radiant, like the sun, and that her eyes were like the morning star (18:5–10). She was now ready to meet Jesus, her groom.

According to our manuscript, after Joseph/Jesus entered her father’s estate, Aseneth/Mary the Magdalene insists on washing his feet. As we have said, an echo of this incident is present in the Gospels. In Luke, the woman is anonymous. She appears with an alabaster jar; she weeps, kisses Jesus’ feet, and washes them. She then dries his feet with her hair (Luke 7:37, 38).⁶ This story is also related in John (11:2), where the woman is identified as “Mary of Bethany.” In the Catholic tradition, at least from the 6th century, Mary of Bethany is identified with Mary the Magdalene.⁷ Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy write, “In the Gospel of Luke, Mary wipes her hair on Jesus’ feet. According to Jewish law, only a husband was allowed to see a woman’s hair unbound and if a woman let down her hair in front of another man, this was a sign of impropriety and grounds for mandatory divorce. . . .”⁸ Interestingly, in Joseph and Aseneth, Aseneth/Mary the Magdalene does not kiss Joseph’s/Jesus’ feet. On the contrary, it is he who kisses her right hand. She, in turn, kisses his head. As we saw earlier, in Joseph and Aseneth, Jesus refuses to let Mary the Magdalene cross an intimacy line before marriage. It seems that this version of the story is earlier. It is more consistent with 1st-century Jewish norms than are the canonical Gospels where the two share intimacies not appropriate for an unmarried couple. In the Gospels, therefore, the story seems to be a leftover from a real-life event that occurred right before their marriage. In fact, it seems that the only reason this story survived in the canonical texts is because it was so important. In Joseph and Aseneth, it is immediately after this foot-washing ritual that the main protagonists are ready to be married.

Though Jesus and Mary the Magdalene were now betrothed, the Joseph and Aseneth text explicitly tells us that they waited before engaging in sexual relations (21:1). In Judaism, then and now, marriage is a two-step process: first a betrothal, then a marriage. Today, the two ceremonies are performed practically at the same time. In the 1st century, however, there was a long time—sometimes years—between betrothal and marriage.

The Joseph and Aseneth manuscript goes out of its way to tell us that Mary the Magdalene did not have sexual relations with her husband after the betrothal and before the marriage. This is an all-important clue. What the text is telling us is that this wedding is taking place not in Egypt, as the surface story suggests, nor in Judaea as our reading would imply, but specifically in the Galilee. To understand why, one has to understand 1st- and 2nd-century Judaean marriage practices. According to Rivka Nir, the northern Galileans differed from the southern Judaeans with regard to their attitude toward sex in the period between betrothal and wedding: “there seems to be a regional division, with Judaea allowing such practice and Galilee forbidding any sexual contact until after the wedding.”⁹ In the Babylonian Talmud, Rabbi Yehudah states that from the “first, in Judaea, they would leave the bride and the groom alone for one hour before the chuppa [wedding ceremony], so that his heart may become crude with her. But in the Galilee they did not do so.”¹⁰ In other words, the wedding described in Joseph and Aseneth is a Galilean wedding, and the only wedding described in the Gospels takes place in the Galilee in a town called Cana, just outside of Nazareth.

But why would the text go out of its way to make this point? Is it simply to tell us that Jesus and Mary the Magdalene were not promiscuous like the Judaeans? Or is it because the issue of sex after betrothal but before the wedding ceremony was a touchy subject in the family? After all, the Gospel of Matthew tells us that Joseph was going to refuse to marry Mary, Jesus’ mother, when he found out that she was pregnant after their betrothal and before their marriage (1:19). It took an act of divine intervention to get him to go through with the marriage. By insisting on the fact that Jesus and Mary the Magdalene did not have sex until marriage, is Joseph and Aseneth telling us that Jesus’ relations with his wife were unlike his mother’s relations with her husband?

According to the text, Jesus and Mary the Magdalene didn’t have to wait long to consummate the marriage. The wedding took place the day after the betrothal. In the manuscript, “Pharaoh”—the ruler—is astonished at Aseneth’s beauty and he blesses her. Restored to its original form, replacing Joseph with Jesus, the blessing reads: “Blessed are you by the Lord God of Jesus because he is the firstborn of God and you will be called the Daughter of God Most High and the bride of Jesus now and forever” (21:3). If our reconstruction is right, here we have the actual blessing conferred at Jesus’ wedding on his bride. Put differently, as a result of our deciphered document we have not only textual proof of Jesus’ marriage to Mary the Magdalene, but also a verbatim rendition of the blessing conferred on his bride.

The wedding ceremony commences. Pharaoh takes golden crowns and places them on the bride and groom. Even today in Eastern Orthodox Christian weddings, the officiant places crowns on the heads of those about to be married. Remarkably, in another historical echo of that long-ago wedding, the names of Joseph and Aseneth are invoked twice within the Orthodox Christian wedding liturgy.¹¹

The wedding celebrations lasted a week. Only then did Joseph/Jesus have sexual relations with Aseneth/Mary the Magdalene.¹² They had, in time, two children.¹³

The detailed descriptions in Joseph and Aseneth give us unique insight into the marriage of Jesus and Mary the Magdalene. Obviously, for Jesus’ followers, this wedding represented the union of the “Son of God” (6:3; 6:5; 13:9; 23:10) to the “Daughter of God Most High” (21:3). According to this text—ignored for millennia—it was a marriage made in heaven, a gala affair, and a weeklong celebration of rejoicing. Family members met and greeted each other, relatives caught up with each other’s doings, and there would have been endless parties to attend throughout the village. Since the Gospel of John gives us the only description of a wedding attended by Jesus and his family, let’s revisit the Wedding at Cana and see if it is consistent with the marriage described in Joseph and Aseneth.

In the first place, we should note that Cana is just a few miles northwest of Nazareth. Strangely, John doesn’t tell us who’s getting married. He leaves that all-important fact out. But he does tell us that when the wedding party runs short of wine, Jesus performs a miracle, changing water into wine. If it’s not his wedding, why does he play the role of wine provider? If it’s not his wedding, why aren’t we told whose wedding it is? If it’s not his wedding, why does his mother insist that it’s Jesus’ responsibility to supply wine to the guests?

In any respect, it must have been someone important for Jesus and his family to attend and for Jesus to supply the wine. Furthermore, notice the amount of wine Jesus generates: we know from archaeology that each of the six stone vessels that were involved in the water-into-wine miracle held some twenty or thirty gallons of liquid—that’s 120 to 180 gallons of wine! Assuming that only (or primarily) males indulged—a good assumption, given women’s roles at the time—and that (on average) each drinker had the equivalent of half a bottle of wine, there would have been over twenty-five hundred guests at this wedding. This is nothing less than a royal wedding, or the wedding of someone whose followers believed was the “Son of God.”

What Did the Wedding of Jesus and Mary the Magdalene Signify to Early Christians?

Gnostic Christianity

What were the theological implications of Jesus’ marriage to Mary the Magdalene? To understand the meaning of such a wedding for Jesus’ followers, we have to turn to an alternate form of Christianity, namely Gnostic Christianity. Gnosis is the Greek word for “knowledge” or “insight.” The Gnostics were those Christians who did not follow what came to be known as “orthodox” or “catholic” Christianity. While it is clear that the mainstream church did not pursue issues related to Jesus and marriage and downplayed Mary the Magdalene (by the 6th century she had become a reformed whore), for the Gnostics it was Jesus’ marriage to Mary the Magdalene that made all the difference in the world. It was in fact, from their point of view, the basis for human salvation. This may strike some of us as strange, for this message contrasts sharply with the more familiar message of Paul who focused on “Christ’s passion”—that is, on Jesus’ suffering and death. Put differently, in the early phases of Christianity Jesus’ followers had at least two brands of Christianity to choose from—Gnosticism and Paulism. For the first, Jesus’ marriage and sex life were the central events of his ministry; for the second, it was Jesus’ asceticism and suffering, his death and resurrection that were key.¹⁴

Paul was born in Anatolia in what is now Turkey. He’s known as Paul of Tarsus, a city in south-central Turkey some twelve miles inland from the Mediterranean Sea. He was born Saul. He was Jewish. His family may have originated in the Galilee.¹⁵ According to the Book of Acts (18:3), the family business was tent-making. Since there was little recreational camping in those days, their main client must have been the Roman army. Paul’s family suspiciously moved out of the Galilee to Tarsus right after the Jewish Revolt that took place around Jesus’ birth and Herod the Great’s death. Were they fleeing for their lives from Jewish revolutionaries who saw them as collaborators with Rome? Is that what forced the relocation? It would make sense, since Paul seems very confused about his Jewish identity, sometimes asserting it with pride and sometimes vehemently opposing his own traditions.

Paul was also a Roman citizen. This reinforces the idea that he was supplying tents to the Roman army. Roman citizenship would also not have endeared Paul and his family to the revolutionaries. This is important because it shows that Paul came from what we would call today an assimilated Jewish family. They were Hellenized, and they probably regarded Jewish revolutionary groups as fanatics. We know from the Book of Acts that Paul was initially in the employ of the temple priesthood, which itself was appointed by the Roman authorities. In other words, although he grew up in Tarsus, at some point he moved to Jerusalem and worked as an enforcer of Roman power. By his own admission, he regarded the early followers of Jesus, the people who actually knew Jesus, as troublemakers. He persecuted them and was present when at least one of Jesus’ followers was stoned to death.¹⁶ While he had never met the historical Jesus, at some point, this self-described enforcer had a vision of the resurrected Christ and became a follower, rather than an enemy of Jesus. Trouble was that his version of Jesus’ teaching did not jibe with that of Jesus’ original followers, the ones who knew him best and who had followed him throughout his mission. It seems that some wanted to kill Paul—likely Torah-observant members among Jesus’ first followers¹⁷—and he needed Roman protection to save his life.

Unperturbed, Paul continued to spread his version of Christianity with great zeal and success. Around 64 C.E. he disappears from history. Some argue that he was caught up in anti-Christian persecutions that followed the great fire of Rome that, according to the Roman historian Tacitus, the Emperor Nero blamed on the followers of Jesus.¹⁸ Others argue that he had all along been a Roman spy and was now taken in out of the cold.¹⁹ Either way, Paul disappears, leaving behind Pauline groups. These differed from Jesus’ first followers in terms of origins, teachings, and practices.²⁰ Two years later, Judaea revolts against Roman rule and four years after that, Judaea, Jerusalem, and the House of God (the Temple of Jerusalem) all go up in flames, torched by the future Roman emperors Vespasian and Titus. With the destruction of the Jerusalem Church, the headquarters of the movement that grew around Jesus, Pauline Christianity moves to the fore. Also, with the destruction of Judaean independence and the diminishment of Jewish power, non-Jewish Christianity takes over from the original movement. In this way, Pauline theology eclipses whatever the original followers of Jesus actually believed.²¹

As a result of this Pauline victory, we tend to regard Pauline groups as historical and movements such as the Gnostics as marginal and unhistorical.²² The reality is probably the exact opposite. After all, Gnosticism seems to have grown out of the original Jewish mystics who followed Jesus, and Christian orthodoxy seems to have grown out of the Gentile groups that originated with Paul. The first group more or less preserved historical teachings. The second group—including its founder Paul—had no knowledge of the historical Jesus and based themselves on ideas that were supposedly revealed mystically to Paul after Jesus’ crucifixion, teachings that seem at odds with what the Jesus of history taught and practiced.

Theologically, Paul taught that we should all participate in the suffering and death of Christ, the hope being that we, like Jesus, might be raised from the dead. Identification with and participation in Jesus’ death—and, hopefully, in his resurrection—was virtually the only aspect of Jesus that Paul was interested in. He wasn’t interested in his life, ministry, or teachings. He rarely quotes Jesus. The Gnostics, however, thought that Jesus’ death had no significance. None at all. They focused on his life, vitality, sexuality, and, most significantly, the marriage through which they believed he linked heaven and earth. Whatever the truth, the fact is that the Gnostics attempted to theologize history while the Pauline Christians attempted to historicize theology. Put simply, for those who actually knew Jesus, the challenge was to find theological meaning in his life. For those who did not know Jesus, the challenge was to find historical justification for their theology. In other words, if you based your Christianity on post-crucifixion revelations, the challenge was to find historical justification for your ideas. But if you actually knew Jesus, if you broke bread with him and, say, his wife, you would have to find meaning in the fact that he ate like the rest of us and was married.

Gnostics kept themselves separate from the Pauline Christians, the—“Congregations of the Christ,” as they came to be known. While for Paul’s followers Jesus was a god, for the Gnostics he was a guide and a teacher sent from the one true God to enlighten humanity and to act as a catalyst for spiritual growth, maturity, and redemption. In the earliest “Dormition” traditions—those Gnostic traditions related to the death of the Virgin Mary—Jesus is identified as a Great Angel. The text puts special emphasis on “secret and often soteriological [i.e., salvation] knowledge, and [on] a common Gnostic creation myth.”²³ Meaning, according to the Gnostics, Jesus wasn’t just a teacher but a teacher of esoteric or hidden knowledge. Sometimes the Gnostics refer to Jesus as Son of God, but it is not always clear whether they meant a literal son, or an enlightened being whose task it was to turn all of us into children of God.

Despite the fact that the church tried to wipe out the Gnostics by marginalizing them, ridiculing them, killing them, and burning their books, we know a lot about Gnosticism today primarily as a result of the discovery of Gnostic texts and gospels in Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945. Gnostics living in the 4th century C.E. had buried these books so as to avoid the fires of orthodoxy.

Among the newly discovered texts, there are fifty-two intriguing new writings, including Gospels attributed to Thomas, Philip, Mary the Magdalene, and even Jesus himself. The manuscripts also include secret books ascribed to James and John. None of these writings provide a narrative structure similar to the canonical Gospels. The Gnostic Gospels are either sayings or long discourses—no story component. Basically, they cared about Jesus’ teaching, not his ministry. In the 4th century, none of their writings were included in the New Testament, but it is simply a historical fact that they represented an important branch of early Christianity.

From a Gnostic point of view, since Jesus was the “Son of God” (i.e., the long-awaited Messiah or “anointed one”), every move he made was laden with cosmic significance. This isn’t hard to understand. Some measure of this perspective is preserved, for example, in the Catholic Communion, which is based on the Last Supper. In other words, Catholics believe that when one takes Communion, the wine that one consumes is miraculously transformed into Jesus’ blood and the wafer into his body. The point of the matter is that a meal shared by Jesus with his disciples takes on cosmic proportions because, well, he’s Jesus. If sharing a meal can be significant, how much more so is sharing his bed?

Simply put, for Gnostic Christians, especially a group called Valentinians, after their 2nd-century leader Valentinus (c. 100–c. 160),²⁴ it wasn’t the Last Supper or the crucifixion that was the most significant episode in Jesus’ life, but his marriage to Mary the Magdalene.

The Gnostic View of Redemption

As stated, to understand the meaning of the marriage of Jesus of Nazareth to Mary the Magdalene for their earliest followers, we have to mine Gnosticism in light of Joseph and Aseneth.

Gnostic cosmology is based on the idea that a fundamental rift exists within the universe. In the Gnostic writing The Secret Book (or Apocryphon) of John, Jesus discloses to his disciple, John, how creation actually took place.²⁵ In so doing, he provides John with a creation story that differs markedly from the Book of Genesis.

According to this view, the one true God—the Perfect One—is described as an invisible Spirit, greater than what we might think of as the God of the Hebrew Bible. The Perfect One is absolutely complete, illimitable, unfathomable, immeasurable, eternal, unutterable and unnamable, a being much greater than anything that is in existence, not a part of space or time, the source of all mercy and knowledge, the head of all worlds who sustains the universe through goodness. This creative being, the mother-father of all, is a perfect “dyad” of male-female. It is this dyad that created a series of primordial entities. The Gnostics called the first such entity “Barbelo,” which is an image of the “perfect Spirit,” the one who precedes all that there is.²⁶ Then, a series of further creations or “aeons”—male-female emanations from the Perfect One—took place. The complex details need not detain us. Eventually, an entity called “Sophia,” the Heavenly Wisdom, is fashioned.

And this is where all the trouble begins.

Sophia decides to go it alone—to act on her own, without any male involvement. As The Secret Book of John puts it, “She wanted to bring forth something like herself, without the consent of the spirit, who had not given approval, without her partner and without his consideration.”²⁷ Out of this great desire she creates a child, one called Yaldabaoth. In Hebrew, this name means “she gave birth” (i.e., she created), “by means of the sign.” Yaldabaoth turns out to be the one whom we normally call God; that is, the God of the Bible. According to the Gnostics, he is not the real God who created all that there is, but a much lesser being—Yaldabaoth. This god is described by the Gnostics as jealous, wicked, and ignorant because he/she himself/herself does not know that there is a greater spiritual power than itself. This god does not know who he/she is or where he/she came from. It is this limited being who creates humanity. As a result, we humans are far removed from the true source of life and goodness which is the Perfect One. Put differently, Yaldabaoth simply botched creation. As the Gospel of Thomas says, “Whoever has come to know the world has just discovered a carcass” (Saying 56).²⁸

According to this view, creation went from bad to worse. The greatest flaw was caused by the wayward Sophia who gave birth to supernatural entities without benefit of male assistance.²⁹ According to the Gnostics, this rebellion by Sophia destroyed the balance of the universe, which they viewed as a dyad of male and female primordial principles. An echo of this idea can also be found in the 2nd-century Talmud, the most important text of Judaism outside of the Bible. In the Talmud, there is a midrash or elaboration on the Bible stating that prior to Eve, Adam had a wife called Lilith. Lilith rebelled against Adam’s rule, so to speak. Specifically, when engaged in sexual relations, she insisted on being on top. For her transgressions, she was banned from the Garden of Eden. This takes place prior to the creation of Eve.³⁰ In other words, in the Talmud, we also find some kind of cosmological imbalance created when the sexual harmony between male and female principles is disrupted.³¹

Valentinus was arguably the greatest Christian Gnostic teacher. He lived and taught at the beginning of the 2nd century. Following his teachings, the Valentinian Gnostics believed that Jesus left the Pleroma, or the heavenly realm, for the sole purpose of taking up residence with Sophia.³² In other words, meeting Mary the Magdalene was not incidental to his mission. It was central. The divine Jesus became incarnate so that he could find and mate with the wayward divine Sophia and in so doing re-harmonize the universe. Put simply, the redemption of the cosmos depended on the sexual life of the incarnate Jesus and the incarnate Mary the Magdalene/Sophia. In a sense, for their followers, Jesus and Mary the Magdalene were living cherubim. Cherubim are the angelic figures that kept guard over the Ark of the Covenant. Various rabbinic traditions portray them “as if their bodies were ‘intertwined with one another,’ possibly alluding to sexual intimacy.”³³

According to the Valentinians, accompanying Jesus on his earthly mission were his angels, a special group of spiritual beings. When she first encountered Jesus, Sophia—like Aseneth—immediately wanted to embrace him. In a Valentinian text called Excerpts of Theodotus, when Sophia saw Jesus she ran up to him, rejoiced, and worshipped him. But when she saw the male angels who were sent out with him, “she was abashed and put on a veil” (section 44). This is a direct parallel with Aseneth’s reactions in Joseph and Aseneth. Furthermore, as in our Joseph and Aseneth, in the Excerpts of Theodotus Jesus does not return Sophia’s initial embrace.

Also, in Valentinian theology as in Joseph and Aseneth there are double marriages: heavenly and earthly. Angels literally sit on the marriage bed. Why? Because in their own marriages Valentinians tried to emulate the holy couple. If they succeeded, they believed that they—like Aseneth—drew angels into their bedrooms. In April DeConick’s words, “if the married couple had drawn the spirit, or angel, it joins with them during sexual relations.”³⁴ DeConick summarizes the Valentinian ideas this way: “the Valentinians believed that sex was more than a physical activity with physical consequences. The thoughts of the sexual partners either raised intercourse to sacred heights or drew it down to the depths of sin.”³⁵

How does Valentinian theology match up with Joseph and Aseneth? Put simply, every aspect of Valentinian Gnosticism is reflected in our text. Aseneth first rejects Jesus, then comes running to embrace him. Jesus first rejects Aseneth, then embraces her. Aseneth’s transformation, the celestial sex with a Jesus look-alike angel, the veil, the garments—everything in our text accords with Valentinian theology.

In this theology, it was the task of the “Christ,” the new Adam, to return Lilith (or Aseneth or Sophia) to her rightful place at his side. In this way, he would return humanity to the Garden of Eden and the eternal life for which we were all destined. In Kraemer’s words, “Aseneth and the angelic double of Joseph reverse the primordial sin of Eve and Adam.”³⁶

Redemption, from this perspective, is only possible by the union of the male and the female on both the spiritual and physical level. That’s what the Gnostics looked for: marriage and the joining of the male to the female, in heaven and on earth. According to them, this was the only route to overcoming original sin—not Adam’s, but Sophia’s.

If all this sounds strange, keep in mind that sex as sinful is a post-Pauline concept. Prior to Paul, at least in the so-called pagan world, sex was redemptive. In many societies, for example, in ancient Egypt as in Mesopotamia generally, the fertility of the seasons depended on the fecundity of the royal couple. Given that the ancient Egyptians perceived their rulers as divine beings, they believed that the physical relations between them had spiritual and metaphysical implications. In other words, the sex of divine kings and queens was different from everyone else’s sex. Because they were divine and human at the same time, their act of procreation was a metaphor for creation itself. In this sense, therefore, Egyptian-based Christian Gnosticism was drawing on millennia—we reiterate: millennia—of Egyptian tradition. So it is not surprising that they viewed Jesus not merely as a prophet or messiah but, literally, as a god. It is also not surprising that they would have viewed his consort as a goddess.

From this it would follow that the most intimate activity between the god and the goddess is also the most important. Practically speaking, Gnosticism stressed the need to elevate the physical to the spiritual, the world of matter to the world of spirit. This is exactly the opposite of what became the orthodox Christian doctrine of the incarnation. According to orthodox or Pauline Christianity, spirit became matter, the divine Logos became enfleshed. For the Gnostics, it was the other way around: flesh had to become spirit. That’s why Pauline Christianity celebrates asceticism and the Gnostics celebrated sex.³⁷

As we have seen, Joseph and Aseneth reads like a Valentinian manuscript. More precisely, we believe it is a Valentinian Gospel. Since it may precede Valentinus, we may refer to it as a proto-Valentinian text. To arrive at this conclusion, one simply has to look at other Valentinian texts. The most important of these is the Gospel of Philip. This Gospel was most likely composed in Syria during the 2nd century. The original language was probably Greek.³⁸ In other words, the Gospel of Philip is roughly situated in the same time and place as Joseph and Aseneth. According to Marvin Meyer, “a major theme in the Gospel of Philip is the nature of the sacraments, especially the sacrament of the bridal chamber.”³⁹ This Gospel lists five sacraments—Baptism, chrism (anointment), the Eucharist, redemption, and the bridal chamber—calling each a “mystery.” The highest mystery is the last one—the “bridal chamber”—which the Gospel calls the “Holy of Holies.” What happens in the Holy of Holies is only for the select few: “go into your chamber and shut the door behind you, and pray to your Father who is in secret.”⁴⁰ In other words, according to the Gospel of Philip, the greatest lesson that Jesus taught humanity is not how to die and live again, but how to have sacred sex. This teaching, however, was only for the few because “if a marriage is open to the public, it has become prostitution, and the bride plays the harlot” (82.10).⁴¹

This was explosive material even in the 2nd century. In the Gospel of Thomas, the disciple Thomas is aware that Jesus’ secret teaching, if made public, would be regarded as sacrilegious by the Christian masses. As a result, he advocates an esoteric approach to Jesus’ message. Otherwise, he says, “If I tell you one of the sayings he spoke to me, you will pick up rocks and stone me” (Saying 13).⁴² Another Gnostic text, the Book of Baruch, opens with an oath: “I swear by the Good, who is over all, to keep these mysteries and to tell them to no one.”⁴³ In The Round Dance of the Cross, the reader is told “if you have seen what I do, keep quiet about my mysteries.”⁴⁴ Clearly, this theology was not meant for everyone.

The secret teaching was not intended to be salacious, although its practitioners were accused of salacious acts. According to the church fathers, Valentinian Gnosticism deteriorated into orgiastic celebrations akin to pagan rituals such as those practiced by the Dionysians. Most Valentinians, however, upheld Pauline principles, at least in public. They only followed Valentinian rites in private. In fact, the elect among the Valentinians did not believe that the average Christian should become aware of the greatest mysteries. According to the Valentinians, average Christians should rely on good works and faith as their ticket to heaven. For the initiated, however, for those who understood that the highest level of spirituality involves the spiritualization of sex, a hidden teaching was available. This teaching involved the Valentinian sacrament of the bridal chamber.

For the Valentinians, this sacrament operated on several levels. In its most basic form, it involved sexual intercourse as an act of worship—but it was undertaken not only in a physical or carnal sense, but in a spiritual sense as well. In its Valentinian context, the act represents the full union of the male with the female. As the Gnostic writing Exegesis on the Soul says, once they have sexual relations, a man and a woman become a single life. In a sense, the couple symbolically becomes the original creation of God, the original human that, as we have already noted, was both male and female prior to the separation (Genesis 1:27). In this sense, holy sex is the means of healing not only the rift created between the sexes but also the alienation of humanity from God.

By definition, a sacrament is a rite in which an outer physical expression conveys an inner spiritual truth. This means that there must be the physical element present. For example, a Baptism isn’t a Baptism without water. Similarly, a Eucharist isn’t a Communion without actual bread and wine. There is no sacrament of Ordination without a physical laying on of hands. Similarly, if the bridal chamber is to be a sacrament, then it must by definition have a physical component, namely, real sexual intercourse. The point to all these sacraments, however, is that the rite is more than physical: a spiritual connection is conveyed in and through the physical representation. A Baptism isn’t just water; a Eucharist isn’t just bread and wine; the Bridal Chamber isn’t just physical sex.

For the Valentinians then, the reenactment of the sacramental rite of the bridal chamber was a mystery that involved actual sexual relations. Perhaps one can try to relegate Valentinians and their views to the Christian margins. People have done this successfully for almost two thousand years. But were the Gnostics really at the margins? Let’s take, for instance, the earliest traditions related to the death of the Virgin Mary. According to Stephen Shoemaker, they probably have “a Gnostic origin.” Why has this been forgotten? Because the Pauline Christians who preserved these traditions felt the need to sanitize the earlier texts. Reading these texts, Shoemaker detects “an editorial cleansing that is quite evident in the earliest transmission of these legends.”⁴⁵ Another obstacle to getting at the Valentinians and other Gnostics is that their traditions—to the degree that they have been preserved—have not been translated into English and, in some cases, not into any modern language. But the Gnostics in general, and the Valentinians in particular, were not marginal. Consider this: one of the earliest—if not the earliest—Christian inscriptions found in Rome dates to the 2nd century.⁴⁶ It is not Pauline. Rather, it is Valentinian and explicitly talks about the “brothers of the bridal chamber” who “carry the torches” so as to glorify “the Son.”⁴⁷ Like Joseph and Aseneth, this earliest of Christian inscriptions is written in code. According to Snyder, the Christian character of the text “would have been clear to insiders but not glaringly obvious to someone unfamiliar with the theology of the group who commissioned [it].”⁴⁸ Like Joseph and Aseneth, the inscription throws readers off by using so-called “pagan” vocabulary and concepts. But again, like Joseph and Aseneth, the language of the text makes “the most sense under a Christian interpretation.”⁴⁹ In other words, it is a Christian poem that employs conventions of pagan poetry to throw the uninitiated off course.⁵⁰

Since scholars do not like to explore the possibility of Christian inscriptions and sacred sex, they interpret Valentinian theology as metaphorical,⁵¹ or they don’t see the sex at all. With respect to this particular inscription, scholars are divided between those who see it as a Baptismal Valentinian inscription and those who see it as Valentinian funeral poetry.⁵² But let’s look at what it actually says:

To my bath, the brothers of the bridal chamber carry the torches,

[here] in our halls, they hunger for the [true] banquets,

even while praising the Father and glorifying the Son.

There [with the Father and the Son] is the only spring and source of truth.⁵³

Here we have a fraternity of brothers carrying torches and escorting someone from a bath to a bedroom, consummating the true banquet in the bridal chamber, all the while praising the Father and glorifying the Son. In any event, scholars agree that this inscription most probably originated not in a cemetery but in a villa⁵⁴ and that it is Valentinian.

In other words, we can argue whether Valentinian Gnosticism was marginal or not. We can also debate whether it preserves an authentic history. We can even argue whether or not Joseph and Aseneth is a Valentinian text. But the idea that the Valentinians believed what we’ve described above is a historical fact confirmed in text and archaeology.

The sacrament of the bridal chamber represented the culmination of the spiritual process. According to the Gnostics, it was the only means by which redemption could be truly achieved. As a result, they participated in the redemptive act, as a sacrament: human sexual intercourse, spiritually undertaken, mimicking the actions of the Savior. It was a powerful message.

The Gnostic view of sacred sex as a Christian sacrament was not born in a vacuum. As stated, there was an Egyptian precedent: namely, in ancient Egypt the welfare of the state depended on the sex life of the rulers. More than this, for the Egyptians, the very idea of the afterlife was associated with sacred sex. The myth of Isis and Osiris was central to this belief. According to the story, Isis and Osiris were brother and sister, husband and wife. Their jealous brother Seth murdered Osiris, tearing the body into fourteen pieces, which he scattered throughout their kingdom. After a long search, Isis located all but her lover’s penis. She reassembled her brother/husband, turned herself into a hawk, and then hovered over the crotch of her dead mate. Using the flapping of her wings, she literally resurrected his penis. She then lowered herself onto his organ, received his seed, and gave birth to Horus—the son of god—from whom all pharaohs claimed descent.⁵⁵ In other words, sacred sex, resurrection, and the afterlife were part and parcel of the cultural–theological landscape into which Christian Gnosticism was born.

There was even a Midianite precedent for sacred sex that is mentioned in the Bible with respect to the heresy of Zimri and Kosbi, who copulated before the Ark of the Covenant (Numbers 25). This was not a mere act of exhibitionism. According to the Bible, it represented a theological challenge to Torah-based Judaism. For their part, the Greeks had Dionysus. Like Jesus, he was a dying-and-resurrecting god, and like the Gnostic version of Jesus, he drove his followers—especially women called maenads—into sexual frenzy.

Paul came from Phrygia, an area of modern-day Turkey that worshipped Attis, not Dionysus. Like Dionysus and Jesus, Attis is a dying-and-resurrecting god. He is called “the Good Shepherd,” and the earliest depictions of him show him with a sheep across his shoulders. These are all images that were later incorporated into the iconography of Pauline Christianity. Attis too had a great love in his life, Cybele. But they did not engage in sacred sex. On the contrary, on his wedding night, Attis castrated himself in a moment of madness and ecstasy. Attis is Cybele’s honey-man. He is bee-like. Basically, he is a male bee (drone) whose sexual organs are torn off after copulating with the queen.⁵⁶ The Latin poet Catullus, writing in the 1st century B.C.E., put it this way, “exalted by amorous rage, his mind gone, he cut off his testicles with a sharp flint.”⁵⁷ Attis’ priests, the Galli, would imitate their god by driving themselves into a holy frenzy, emasculating themselves, and offering their penises as holy sacrifices.⁵⁸ In this context, to honor their gods men made themselves females. In contrast, in Gnosticism, Jesus makes the female male. In a sense, one can say that Jesus and Mary the Magdalene created a syncretic cult that combined elements of Jewish, Artemisian, and Dionysian mysticism that involved the hieros gamos—sacred sex. The 3rd-century C.E. philosopher Porphyry presents “Jesus as a great teacher who after his death had been wrongly proclaimed a god by his followers. In this view, Jesus was a pious pagan.”⁵⁹ At the very least, he was a Jew with an attraction to religious syncretism.

For his part, Paul took over this movement but substituted sacred castration for sacred sex. Paul did not insist on literal emasculation, although the church father Origen did just that. Rather, as we see later with the Roman Catholic priesthood, Paul advocated abstinence and celibacy instead of sex and procreation. There was one group, the Naassene Gnostics, that incorporated this idea into their mysticism. Hippolytus states that the Naassenes did not become Galli physically but spiritually: “they only perform the functions of those who are castrated” by abstaining from sexual intercourse.⁶⁰ In the 2nd century, Clement of Alexandria argued that the central purpose of Jesus’ mission in the world was to end carnal procreation.⁶¹ Basically, the orthodox critique of Valentinian sexuality came from individuals who had adopted a Christian Attisism, as articulated by Paul.

Tertullian, an important church father writing at the end of the 1st century and beginning of the 2nd century, for example, explicitly criticized the Gnostics for what, in his view, was participation in sordid sexual practices.⁶² But the Valentinians countered that they were not engaged in anything distasteful. Quite the contrary, they were unapologetic. From their point of view, they were celebrating the mystery of divine love: “Love [never says] it owns something, [though] it owns [everything]. Love does not [say, ‘This is mine’] or ‘That is mine,’ but rather, ‘[All that is mine] is yours’.”⁶³ Paul’s famous “love is patient, love is kind” teaching (1 Corinthians 13:4–7), which is so incongruous with the rest of his theology, can now be seen as a desexualized echo of Valentinian beliefs. And these in turn seem to be rooted in some kind of historical experience, namely, the marriage of Jesus and Mary the Magdalene.

Over and over in Valentinian texts, Mary the Magdalene—sometimes called Sophia—is portrayed, like Aseneth, weeping, repenting, and being redeemed through her relationship with her holy partner. For example, in The Secret Book of John it is written that when Sophia repented, she did so “with many tears.”⁶⁴ It is also said that “the whole realm of fullness heard her prayer of repentance.” And it is further said that “the holy spirit poured upon her some of the fullness of all.”⁶⁵ In a Valentinian context, it is clear that what is meant by “poured upon her,” etc., is basically the sexual act between Jesus and Mary the Magdalene. It is now also clear that the marriage of Jesus and Sophia in The Secret Book of John is the same as the marriage of Joseph and Aseneth in Joseph and Aseneth. Both represent a theology that teased meaning out of an actual marriage between Jesus and Mary the Magdalene.

Marriage was central to the Valentinians. It was not simply a compromise with man’s carnal nature, as in Pauline Christianity. Rather, it was a celebration of the most hidden aspects of the act of creation. Concerning marriage, the Gospel of Philip states: “No [one can] know when [a husband] and wife have sex except these two, for marriage is a mystery for those married. If defiled marriage is hidden, how much more is undefiled marriage a true mystery.”⁶⁶ In other words, if ordinary marriage is private, how much more so is the sacred marriage between Jesus and Mary the Magdalene. But if one wants to aspire to the highest mystery, one needs to learn that sex in this undefiled marriage “is not fleshly but pure. It belongs not to desire but to will. It belongs not to darkness or night but to the day and the light.”⁶⁷

Valentinian Christians believed that their teachers had powers that the rest of us don’t. For example, they believed that a true master of Jesus-inspired sexual techniques could impregnate his soul mate without intercourse. After all, “the perfect conceive and give birth through a kiss.”⁶⁸ For people who believed this, there was no end to virgin births.

Despite this, the Valentinians rejected Jesus’ virgin birth as taught by Pauline Christianity. They pointed out that in the Hebrew tradition, “the holy spirit” is called the shekhina and is feminine. They therefore mocked orthodox Christians, stating “some said Mary became pregnant by the holy spirit. They are wrong and do not know what they are saying. When did a woman ever get pregnant by a woman?”⁶⁹

For the Valentinians, virginity is a state of mind, not biology. It is part and parcel of a theology of sacred sex. The Joseph and Aseneth text literally calls Aseneth/Mary the Magdalene a virgin. Not only that, it’s clear from the manuscript that her status as virgin was part of her divine role. Like Artemis, despite sharing a bed with the Son of God, Mary the Magdalene remained a virgin. How is this possible? It’s possible because she is a goddess and he is a god. When you sleep with a god, you don’t lose your virginity. If this is true, we come to the realization that the original Virgin Mary was Jesus’ wife, not his mother.⁷⁰

In this respect, in the Gospel of Philip, the Valentinians say that “three women always walked with the master: Mary his mother, [his] sister, and Mary of Magdala, who is called his companion (koinonos).”⁷¹ As stated, the word koinonos can be translated as lover. In this sense, at the highest level, mother, sister,⁷² and bride all teach the unity of love. They are all virgins because none of them are defiled. But it was Mary the Magdalene who was Jesus’ soul mate. Again, according to the Gospel of Philip, when the disciples became jealous of Jesus’ relationship with Mary the Magdalene, he rebuked them, saying “Why do I not love you like her? If a blind person and one who can see are both in darkness, they are the same. When the light comes, one who can see will see the light, and the blind person will stay in darkness.”⁷³ Clearly for Jesus, his relationship with Mary the Magdalene was all about the “light.” Those who did not understand were left in “darkness.”

This bond between bridegroom and bride is the mystery of marriage. According to the Valentinians, the existence of the world depends on this mystery and the “power of intercourse”⁷⁴ that is related to it. When people are outside marriage, their power is corrupted. According to the Gospel of Philip, “When foolish females see a man by himself, they jump on him, fondle him, and pollute him. Likewise, when foolish males see a beautiful woman by herself, they seduce and violate her in order to pollute her. But when they see a husband and wife together, the females cannot make advances on the man and the males cannot make advances on the woman. So also if the image and the angel are joined, none can dare to make advances on the male or the female.”⁷⁵ As in Joseph and Aseneth, the Gospel of Philip celebrates the coming together on the bridal bed of the male, the female, and “the angel”—that is, the physical is literally transposed into the spiritual when male, female, and the heavenly realm are brought into perfect balance.

The canonical Gospel of John calls Jesus the Word. In contrast, the Gospel of Philip encourages each one of us to become the Word, and promises that “if you become Word, Word will have intercourse with you.”⁷⁶ When that happens, death is overcome. “When Eve was in Adam, there was no death. When she was separated from him, death came. If [she] enters into him again and he embraces [her], death will cease to be.”⁷⁷ In this sense, Jesus is the new Adam and Mary the Magdalene is the new Eve—as a new integrated entity, they repair the rift created when God’s paradise was destroyed and sin and death entered the world.⁷⁸ Together, they show us the way to immortality.

For the Valentinians, “redemption is in the bridal chamber.”⁷⁹ As in Joseph and Aseneth, the bridal chamber is defined as the holy of holies. Notice the parallels between the Jerusalem temple in the Gospel of Philip and the tower in Joseph and Aseneth. The descriptions are almost identical: “There were three structures for sacrifice in Jerusalem. One opened to the west and was called the holy place; a second opened to the south and was called the holy of the holy; the third opened to the east and was called the holy of holies, where only the high priest could enter.”⁸⁰ The author of the Gospel of Philip decodes the architecture of the sacred temple in terms of the Gnostic sacraments, “the holy place is baptism; the holy of the holy is redemption; the holy of holies is the bridal chamber.”⁸¹

But there is actually a triple code at work. On the one hand, Aseneth’s dwelling at the top of her tower is a clear metaphor for the temple. On another hand, there is clear sexual imagery here with Aseneth’s bedchamber representing the Holy of Holies inside the temple. There is a third level, however, that would not have been lost on Joseph and Aseneth’s 1st- or 2nd-century readers. In the rabbinic use of the word chamber, besides the commonplace meaning, the term can take on a specific connotation. In Peter Schafer’s words, “In halakhic [rabbinic law] terminology, heder [chamber] signifies the innermost part of the female genitals, that is the uterus followed by the ‘aliyyah (literally ‘attic’ = the vagina) and the prozdor (literally ‘vestibule’ = the vulva).”⁸² So when Aseneth sits on her bed, dripping honey from her mouth, with the man angel next to her in her innermost bedchamber, the metaphor for Valentinians—and not only Valentinians—would have been clear. Aseneth’s body is the temple containing the Holy of Holies. It is within that sacred space that redemption occurs, spiritually and physically. Her body—her womb—is the bridal chamber. So Mary is truly the Magdalene: she is Tower, Temple, and Holy of Holies. In sum, DeConick asks, “how important was sex to the Valentinians?” And she answers, “the coming of the final day and the redemption of God depended on it.”⁸³

When we enter the world of Valentinian Gnosticism, we enter a philosophical space very different from the one we are used to. For example, Gnostics had a very different idea of sin from the one the West has inherited from orthodox Christianity. In Marvin Meyer’s words, “I believe that among the Gnostics, sin was not the basic human problem; ignorance was . . . you may call something sin but . . . there really isn’t any ultimate thing out there called sin.”⁸⁴ Whatever sin might have meant for them, it certainly did not mean sex.

The church father Epiphanius of Salamis seems to have infiltrated a Gnostic sect around 335 C.E. In his attack on this “heresy,” he has left us a graphic account of Gnostic rituals, which included considerable foreplay and sexual intercourse. Tellingly, after 730 ritual copulations, the adept declares, “I am Christ.”⁸⁵ They also seem to have had a gospel related to Mary the Magdalene that has not yet been discovered. It was called The Questions of Mary. In it, Jesus, like Adam, has a woman ripped from his side. Since he is God, he rips her out of his own side and proceeds to have intercourse with her. He does all this as a way of instructing Mary the Magdalene in the secrets of their theology.⁸⁶

Of course, the Valentinians were well aware that their teachings could be misconstrued in inappropriate ways. Their solution for this problem was to keep their rituals secret and to encode their sacred texts. In their words: “If marriage is exposed, it has become prostitution, and the bride plays the harlot not only if she is impregnated by another man but even if she slips out of her bedchamber and is seen. Let her show herself only to her father and her mother, the friend of the bridegroom, and the attendants of the bridegroom. They are allowed to enter the bridal chamber every day. But let the others yearn just to hear her voice and enjoy the fragrance of her ointment, and let them feed like dogs on the crumbs that fall from the table.”⁸⁷

Here we have the cipher for Joseph and Aseneth. According to the Gnostics, had Joseph and Aseneth explicitly described the relationship between Jesus and Mary the Magdalene, it would have turned that relationship into a kind of prostitution. It would have cheapened the entire theology.⁸⁸ So, as Jesus initially taught the Syro-Phoenician woman, those at a lower level have to be satisfied with the crumbs that fall from the table—for the dogs. They cannot engage in the sacrament of the bridal chamber. But for those limited few described in the Gospel of Philip and in Joseph and Aseneth—the bridegroom, the bride, the father, the mother, the friend (the angel), and the attendants—they will get to “enter the bridal chamber every day.” They will participate in life everlasting. The Gospel of Philip is clearly the companion text to Joseph and Aseneth. It couldn’t be any clearer. It couldn’t fit any better.

Again, we realize that all this may sound strange to the modern ear, but it was not so for many early Christians. They simply had to come to terms with the consequences of worshipping a man-god, and this was true for both the Pauline Christians and the Gnostics. Unlike the Pauline Christians, who focused on the significance of Jesus’ death, Gnostic Christians reflected on the sacramental meaning of the most intimate aspects of his marriage.

But it’s not only about sex and marriage. Thinking through what the humanity of Jesus meant, they speculated on the implications of his humanity when it came to everything—food and waste, for example. In this respect, Valentinus writes that Jesus “ate and drank in a unique way, without excreting solids.”⁸⁹ In other words, since we know from the Gospels that Jesus ate, the question arises, did he defecate? The Valentinians’ answer was a resounding “no”! According to this view, Jesus’ body was so perfect that it did not create waste. Similarly, he was so perfect that he could have sex, in a sense, without having sex. His partner would literally not lose her virginity and his arousal would be triggered by spiritual, not carnal, desires.⁹⁰

But if Gnosticism—an ancient version of Christianity that is at least as old as the Pauline version—explicitly states that Jesus was married to Sophia and that Mary the Magdalene was his consort, why have scholars ignored this ancient attestation to the marriage? The answer is simple—theology. People don’t want a married Jesus, so they reduce Gnosticism to mythology and elevate the canonical Gospels to history. In part, the orthodox camp of scholars and theologians was able to do this because Gnosticism is expressed mostly in sayings, not in narrative gospels. But now, in Joseph and Aseneth, we finally have a Gnostic text that is a narrative. It seems to provide us with the historical circumstances that gave rise to Valentinian theology.

Unlike other Gnostic texts, Joseph and Aseneth is not a series of fragments: it is an encoded Gospel with a beginning, middle, and end. Instead of thinking of Valentinian Gnosticism as a mythology shopping for a god and finding one in Jesus, we can now see that the followers of Jesus and Mary the Magdalene created a theology in order to explain the most intimate aspect of their relationship—their sex life.

As with the wedding at Cana, the redemptive powers of their bridal chamber are echoed in the canonical Gospels themselves. In Mark 2:18–20, some Pharisees wonder why, while everyone is fasting according to Torah law, the disciples of Jesus do not fast. Jesus’ answer is that “While the bridegroom is with them, the attendants of the bridegroom cannot fast, can they? So long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. But the days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in that day.”

Notice Jesus’ description of himself as a bridegroom. Notice also the implications of his status as bridegroom. His activity in the bridal chamber nullifies Torah law! As long as his followers (the attendants of the bridegroom) are with him, and as long as he continues to be a “bridegroom,” the attendants do not need to join the Torah-abiding community in their fast. In these circumstances, they are exempted from the law. In other words, the sacrament of the bridal chamber is the new Sinai: sacred sex supersedes the revelation at Mount Sinai. The old law continues to be in force for the ones who don’t attend to the bridegroom; but, for the ones who do, a New Testament has now been revealed.

Jesus’ nullification of Torah law, specifically as it concerns sexual relations, is hinted at in one of the most famous chapters of Jesus’ life, the Last Supper. Prior to this Last Supper, Jesus told his disciples that when outsiders were listening he had to speak in parables (Mark 4:11), but for insiders he had a different rule: “. . . when he was alone with his own disciples, he explained everything” (Mark 4:34, emphasis added). The Last Supper was an occasion when the inner circle was around the table, but others were hosting it. Meaning, there were outsiders present. By his own rules, Jesus had to speak in code. It is at this moment that he starts talking about sex in semi-coded terms. We say “semi-coded” because he is surprisingly explicit. After all, he compares the bread on the table to his own body. We can theologize all we want, but the fact is that Jesus suddenly shifts the conversation from bread to his own body. But what is he telling us about his body and sexual relations? The answer to that question is in the blood. Jesus proceeds to talk about the wine on the table, comparing it to blood: “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you” (Luke 22:20). What can this possibly mean?

Traditionally, many Christian groups have understood these actions as the prototypes for the Eucharist. Meaning, during the Last Supper, Jesus instructs his disciples in some kind of ritualized cannibalism. By some miracle—“transmutation”—those who ingest the bread (called “the host,” because it “hosts” the body of Christ) and drink the wine are actually tasting Jesus’ flesh and drinking his blood.

Two points have to be made concerning the traditional Christian interpretation. First, it is entirely alien to Jewish tradition. Let’s remember, as far as we know, all the disciples at the Last Supper were Jews. It would never occur to them that they are being instructed with respect to some kind of new and kosher cannibalism. In its cultural and religious context, this interpretation is simply a nonstarter. This kind of interpretation has its origin in pagan theology, not Jewish theology. For example, in the 2nd century C.E., Achilles Tatius of Alexandria composed a tale about the god Dionysus and his great gift to humanity: “the blood of the grape.” That is, wine. He goes on to call wine “blood so sweet.”⁹¹ Furthermore, the wild immortal female followers of Dionysus—the Maenads—were rumored to devour the raw flesh of an animal in their “feast of flesh.” As Marvin Meyer states, the “participants believed they were consuming the god himself.”⁹² While pagan writings are rife with this kind of fare, there is nothing like this in any Jewish writings. As another example, the 1st-century Roman poet Lucan wrote of a witch who devoted herself to some kind of underworld cult. When the witch turned to her deity for help, she referred to her cannibalism as a merit for which she should be rewarded: “If I call on you with a mouth sufficiently evil and polluted, if I never sing these hymns without having eaten human flesh . . . grant [my] prayer.”⁹³

In the ancient world, Christians were often accused of cannibalism. This is usually interpreted as a pagan misunderstanding of the Eucharist, but the charges of cannibalism and infanticide related to orgies were varied and numerous. As Andrew McGowan states, “Christians became for a time the ancient cannibals par excellence.”⁹⁴

Our point is not to enter into a discussion of whether some early Christians did or did not engage in actual cannibalism. Our point is that the interpretation given to the Last Supper by various Christian groups has absolutely nothing to do with the historical context of the Last Supper and everything to do with various pagan myths, theologies, and rituals. So let’s return for a moment to the Last Supper—which we take as an actual historical event. Jesus refers to the wine as his blood and the drinking of it as marking a “new covenant.” If he’s not referring to some kind of cannibalism, or cannibalism by transmutation, what is Jesus talking about?

One way to look at the scene is that Jesus is nullifying the Mosaic kosher laws (i.e., the laws involving kosher and un-kosher food). According to the Torah, Jews may not partake of other humans nor, in fact, drink the blood of any animals. To this day, therefore, kosher meat involves a process of salting which removes blood from animal flesh. These kosher laws derive from the Biblical statement “You are not to eat the blood of any flesh, for the life of all flesh is its blood; whoever eats it shall be cut off” (Leviticus 17:14). Is this what it’s all about? Is Jesus merely allowing his disciples to put juicy steaks on the grill? Is he advocating for rare roast beef? Steak tartare? Is this how his statement would have been understood by the people around the table at the Last Supper? Obviously not.

In fact, the prohibition against drinking blood is specifically carried over from the Hebrew Bible to the Christian New Testament. At the so-called First Jerusalem Council, James, the brother of Jesus, makes the prohibition against drinking blood one of the very few rules that Gentiles wanting to become followers of Jesus must still adhere to: “And so my [James’] judgment is that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God. Instead, we should write and tell them to abstain from eating food offered to idols . . . from eating the meat of strangled animals, and from consuming blood” (Acts 15:19–20). So if Jesus’ new covenant of blood is not referring to cannibalism, or the consumption of blood, what is this new divinely sanctioned deal all about?

The answer is simple. It has been all but forgotten, obfuscated by thousands of years of Pauline theology. The issue of blood—in the Jewish context—refers first and foremost to laws relating to matters of “family purity.” These laws are now unfamiliar to most Christians who, not observing Torah, pass over the purity laws of Leviticus as if they did not exist. Some background is required.

Jewish family purity laws are a subsection of purity laws in general. Purity, in its Biblical context, has been misunderstood as relating to issues of clean and unclean. In reality, it’s another matter altogether. Generally speaking, one is pure when coming into contact with life-giving forces and impure when coming into contact with death (or the vacuum created by the departure of life-giving forces from a place that they once occupied). The blood of animals is a good example. Since blood is perceived as the life blood of existence, when we kill an animal, Biblically speaking, we must not partake of what the Bible identifies as the substance that had carried the life force of the now-dead creature. Similarly, and more importantly, the presence of blood makes a woman impure to her husband, because menstrual blood represents the loss of the capacity to create life. This means that during her cycle, when a woman goes through a period of fertility, there is a life force in her. Then, when the woman’s egg is eliminated, there is a loss of that life-giving potential. As a result, until she ovulates again, she’s considered impure to her husband. The ancients may not have understood the precise mechanics of ovulation, but they did understand fertility periods.

Put simply, a Torah-observant Jew, then and now, does not touch his wife during her menstrual cycle. In fact, so important is this rule that the rabbis have added another week after menstruation has stopped to the Biblical “no touch” period . . . just to be sure. Once a woman is pure, she can immerse herself in a mikveh (a ritual pool), becoming sexually available to her spouse.

In its historical context, for the people around the table at the Last Supper, the immediate impact of Jesus’ statement about blood would have had nothing to do with cannibalism or barbecues and everything to do with sex. This shouldn’t surprise us because, for early Christians, “eating and sex alike were closely associated with the sin of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3; [Adam and Eve] sinned when they ate the forbidden fruit, and upon being cast out of Eden, they slept together and had children.”⁹⁵ Seen in this light, we now realize that a theologically motivated scribe probably tampered with the depiction of the Last Supper in the Gospels. Originally, this is what Jesus probably said: “this is my body, this is her blood.” But even if he said what the Gospels say he says—“this is my body, this is my blood”—what he seems to be doing is “appropriating” the blood and annulling its impure status. By doing so, he is eliminating the sexual “off” period observed by Torah-abiding men and women. He’s announcing that there is no more impurity now that the bridegroom has arrived. Practically speaking, the implication of Jesus’ statement for his followers would have been that men and women can have sexual relations at all times.

The issue of a woman’s menstrual blood is not peripheral to the birth of Christianity. It may sound odd to non-Jews today to be talking about female menstruation in the context of the Last Supper, but we have to remember that non-Jews were not sitting around the table at the Last Supper. Everyone in the room was Jewish except, as it seems, Jesus’ companion, Mary the Magdalene. For these people, menstrual blood was more important than death on the cross.

Let’s also remember that central to Pauline theology is the idea that Jesus is the “sacrificial lamb.” Meaning, Jesus is sacrificed on the cross to remove the sins of the world. But the idea of a “sin offering” is not original with Paul. It is Biblical. Until 70 C.E., for some thousand years, every day, animals were sacrificed in the temple of Jerusalem to atone for sins. Paul’s innovation was to substitute Jesus—a human being—for the animal sin offering. Was Paul right? At the Last Supper, was Jesus really prophesying that he would annul the Biblical laws by dying? Or was he saying that he had already annulled them by living? When Jesus tasted the wine and referred to blood, was he referring to his own blood on the cross, or was he making a comment about sexual purity involving menstrual blood?

In Judaism, the only animal sacrifice associated with death and resurrection is the sacrifice of the “red cow” (Numbers 19:1–13).⁹⁶ This is a Biblical mystery referring to a cow that has a reddish color. The cow is burned in its entirety on the sacrificial altar and its ashes are then mixed with water, which has the power to purify individuals who have come into contact with death. The required redness of the cow seems to be connected to blood.⁹⁷ In fact, the elixir created by mixing the ashes of the sacrificed red cow with water is called mei niddah in Biblical Hebrew. This is usually translated as waters of “separation.” But as Hyam Maccoby has pointed out, it can also be translated as “waters of menstruation.”⁹⁸

In the ancient world, menstrual blood was associated with virgin birth. To qualify for the sacrifice, the Biblical red cow had to be a virgin. Furthermore, according to Griselda Pollock, “[m]any peoples believed that fetuses are formed from menstrual blood which later becomes the milk that nourishe[s] the born baby.”⁹⁹ In other words, in the ancient world, menstrual blood was associated with virginity and—through fetuses forming out of blood—virginal conception. In Judaism, by associating menstrual blood with the sacrifice of the red cow, the Bible desexualized the issue. It moved people away from actual menstrual blood and involved them with “waters of menstruation” created from the ashes of the red cow. At the Last Supper, Jesus re-sexualized the blood by taking it out of its temple context. In this way, he challenged the Biblical laws of purification in front of an audience that understood exactly what he was talking about.

Put simply: seen in its historical context, it’s obvious that at the Last Supper Jesus could not have been referring to the wine on the table as his own blood. By referring to the wine as blood and then drinking it, what Jesus was saying was that the mei niddah (i.e., the menstrual blood symbolized by the ashes of the red cow) were no longer needed. By drinking her mei niddah at the Last Supper, he was saying that the real instrument for overcoming the impurity of death was his wife Mary the Magdalene. Gnostically speaking, for his original followers, it seems that it was not his suffering on the cross that overcame death, but the bridal chamber he shared with Mary the Magdalene, even during her menstrual period. This is not theoretical. This is exactly how some early Christians understood Jesus. In fact, they went further. Not only did they have sex during a woman’s menstrual period, they ate the menstrual blood just to make the point. We know of these people from the attacks on them. In the late 4th century C.E., Epiphanius, Bishop of Salamis in modern-day Cyprus, wrote against a group that called themselves Nicolaitans. He accuses them of eating the blood of menstruation.¹⁰⁰ Later, a group that Epiphanius calls Borborites, who were descended from the Nicolaitans, was also accused of strange sexual sacraments, some of which included smearing their hands with menstrual blood.¹⁰¹

Put differently, if sacred sex is the vehicle of the ascent to heaven, by putting aside periods of menstruation-related impurity, Jesus makes this ascent available all the time. Compare Jesus’ type of ascent to the rabbinic tradition where you have, for example, Rabbi Nehunya son of Haqanah, a mystic who ascends to heaven while remaining physically present among his fellow rabbis. His body never leaves the room but his spirit does. To bring him back down to earth, the rabbis employ menstrual blood “to bring him [Nehunya] back, the rabbis put a rag on his knees that has been in contact with a miniscule amount of female impurity.”¹⁰² In contrast to the rabbis, as stated above, what Jesus is saying is that there is no more female impurity. He purifies it for all time when he drinks the “blood” at the Last Supper. From this perspective, heaven is available all the time and nothing can bring the true mystic down to earth.

It may very well be that Jesus’ annulment of family purity laws was not unique to him. It seems that around that time, other religious leaders were also disregarding Torah laws governing sexual relations. For example, in the Damascus Document, found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, there is a passage that has never been completely understood. Here, the author describes the Jerusalem leadership of his time as utterly and completely sexually corrupted. “[T]hey relished the customs of fornication,” says the writer. He also charges that they “threw off all restraint” and, as in our reading of the Last Supper, he connects this type of lewd activity with a Biblical passage concerning wine: “their wine is venom of serpents, the cruel poison of vipers.”¹⁰³

Based on the sources, therefore, it seems that at the Last Supper Jesus was referring not to his blood, but to Mary the Magdalene’s blood. He’s not making a statement about kosher cannibalism, but about kosher sex. As attested to by many writers in the Roman world, some followers took his sacred sex formula to heart; but, as the Damascus Document demonstrates, others saw the ideas surrounding the wine of the Last Supper as the venom of vipers.

It took the lost gospel of Joseph and Aseneth to bring this theology into clear focus. Make no mistake about it: this is not simply about sexual liberation. It’s a different model of redemption. In this scenario, salvation is not brought about through Jesus’ death but through his life-giving marriage, sexual relations, and offspring. It is a union that brings the entire universe back into a primordial harmony. The bridal chamber—not Holy Communion, the Mass, or the Eucharist—is the rite whereby his first followers partook in this process of redemption. This is the key element that has been obscured for almost two millennia by the Pauline interpretation of Jesus’ words at the Last Supper.

The implications are staggering. If, indeed, followers of Jesus felt—as Paul explicitly states—that Jesus liberated them from the Mosaic law, then what scholars have called a libertine or freewheeling tradition ensues.¹⁰⁴ Basically, what this means is that the line between sacred sex and outright prostitution in the early Jesus movement was very thin indeed. Again, if you think this is far-fetched, consider this: the most consistent charge against Christians and heretic Christians in ancient times was that they engaged in depraved sexual acts.¹⁰⁵ That’s what the pagans said. That’s what the Jews said. That’s what the church fathers said of the heretics. And that’s what the Gospels record.

In Mark 6:1, for example, it is said that Jesus’ neighbors in his hometown of Nazareth were scandalized by his behavior. In contrast to his cousin John the Baptizer, Jesus was accused of being gluttonous and a drunkard (Matthew 11:19). More than this, people didn’t like the company he kept, specifically “publicans” (that is, Hellenized collaborators with the Roman regime) and “prostitutes” (Mark 2:16). Scholars often say that the sin of publicans was tax collection, as if this was the only issue of importance for 1st-century Jews in Judaea. But Jews were far more concerned with issues of purity than taxation. The Hellenized world was a world where homosexuality and bisexuality were common and acceptable, especially in the upper classes. Accusing Jesus of hanging out with publicans and prostitutes is accusing him of hanging out with two groups of people whose sexual practices are disapproved by the Torah.

This theme of Jesus and prostitution is echoed in the Talmud where the only saying of Jesus that is recorded is his legal opinion that the wages of a prostitute, if donated to the holy temple in Jerusalem, could be used for building the toilet of a high priest (Bavli Avodah Zarah 16b–17a).¹⁰⁶ In his Dialogue with Trypho, the 2nd-century Christian apologist Justin Martyr defends Christians against charges that they are involved in “godless and lawless and unholy things,” which include the practice of all-night orgies and incestuous intercourse (108.3).¹⁰⁷ At the end of the 1st century, a Christian prophetess in Thyatira, modern Turkey, encouraged fellow Christians to engage in sacred sexual acts with her (Revelation 2:18–26). Graffiti found in Carthage dating to a little before 197 C.E. shows a figure with donkey ears and a hoof carrying a book and wrapped in a toga. The accompanying inscription reads “the god of the Christians [is] a donkey who beds [with his worshippers].”¹⁰⁸ Minucius Felix, a Christian apologist writing in approximately 200 C.E., repeats a pagan accusation against Christians: “they recognize each other by secret signs and objects, and love each other almost before they meet. Among them religion constantly joins with itself, as it were, a sort of lust, and they commonly call each other brothers and sisters, so that even ordinary debauchery may be made incest by the use of the sacred name” (Octavius 9.2).¹⁰⁹

These attacks don’t only come from outside the original Jesus movement. They don’t just come from people who misunderstand what truly goes on among Christians. These charges come from inside the movement as well. In 1909, the famous Syriac scholar J. Rendel Harris made an astounding discovery. He discovered forty-two Odes of Solomon, which he described as “an early Christian hymnbook.” In fact, what he discovered was the earliest Christian hymnbook. Like Joseph and Aseneth, it emerged out of a Syriac milieu, and, like Joseph and Aseneth, it never mentions Jesus while constantly referring to him. Specialists agree that the collection of odes is Christian. Some believe an Essene-turned-Christian composed them, others believe that a Judeo-Christian, or an early Gnostic, wrote them. As James Charlesworth puts it, “the odes seem to have been composed when Judaism, Gnostic ideas . . . and belief in Jesus’ messianic stature are mixing easily.”¹¹⁰ The texts are dated to 125 C.E., but they may be earlier. They are called proto-Gnostic¹¹¹ by Charlesworth because, like most scholars, he doesn’t want to move Gnosticism into the 1st century. Essentially, if Gnosticism is kept in the 2nd century, it can be relegated to myth. But if it appears in the 1st century, it may be recording history. What history?

Although Charlesworth hints at a possible connection between the Odes of Solomon and Joseph and Aseneth,¹¹² the first to draw attention to the similarities is Kraemer. For example, regarding Ode 13, “Behold, the Lord is our mirror,” she notes, “this hymn corresponds quite nicely to Aseneth’s use of the water basin as a mirror.”¹¹³ Elsewhere, she draws attention to the similarities between sun imagery in Joseph and Aseneth’s description of Joseph and the Odes. For example, Ode 15 states “He is my sun, and his rays rouse me.” In Kraemer’s words, “as Christ here is the sun whose light dispels darkness from before the soul’s face, so Joseph is Helios, whose light dispels darkness before Aseneth.”¹¹⁴ She concludes that “both Aseneth and the Odes could easily be at home in the same community.”¹¹⁵ But what community? Did the Syrian Christian community originate these stories? Or is it preserving tales told by the first group of Jesus followers: the people who knew him?

Upon a closer reading, we see that the Odes of Solomon witness the very issues that we have been talking about: Jesus’ sexual theology and the danger of prostituting it. Jesus’ teaching is described in exactly the same language as Joseph and Aseneth, complete with honeycomb, bees, and offspring. Specifically, Jesus is described as “the son of God,”¹¹⁶ riding “a chariot.”¹¹⁷ There is a woman in the story who is associated with bees and has children: “As honey drips from the honeycomb of bees, And milk flows from the woman who loves her children, So also is my hope upon you, O my God.”¹¹⁸ Jesus’ relationship with his lover—i.e., the one the Gnostic gospels identify with Mary the Magdalene/Sophia—is described in terms that are both carnal and metaphysical: “for I should not have known to love the Lord, if He had not loved me continuously. I have been united (to Him), because the lover has found the Beloved.”¹¹⁹

Despite the elevated sexual theology, the author witnesses to the fact that sacred sex doesn’t always stay sacred. False teachers who imitate the rites of the bridal chamber lead followers astray and pull them into prostitution. For example, Ode 38 rails against someone called “the Corrupter” who turned the bridal chamber into a den of prostitution: “And they imitate the Beloved and His Bride, And they cause the world to err and corrupt it.” The writer goes on to describe a drunken orgy in the name of the Christ: “And they invite many to the wedding feast, and cause them to drink the wine of their intoxications. So they cause them to vomit up their wisdom and their knowledge, and make them senseless.”¹²⁰

What all this demonstrates is that there was something in the original Jesus and Mary the Magdalene movement that contemporary and later critics repeatedly associated with sexual excesses. That something, in Morton Smith’s words, must have started with Jesus: “whatever else Jesus may or may not have done, he unquestionably started the process that became Christianity.”¹²¹ Therefore, we have to take very seriously the fact that the common feature of all the early anti-Christian accusations have to do with sexual practices mixed with religious rites. In Smith’s words, they are “only explicable from a tradition based on observation of Jesus himself.”¹²²

But for Jesus to engage in anything like the sexual practices attributed to his followers, there must have been some Biblical source text that he could cite to defend his actions. Put differently, since most of Jesus’ earliest followers were Jews, even if their view of Jesus and Mary the Magdalene was influenced by Syro-Phoenician (Canaanite), Artemis-based religious ideas, you would expect to find some Biblical Jewish text that would justify their beliefs concerning this couple. If for their earliest followers Jesus and Mary the Magdalene were co-partners in “messiahship,” there should be a prophetic Hebrew text that they would have used to rationalize their movement. More than this, the descriptions of Jesus and Mary the Magdalene in our manuscript—including the rites of sacred sex—would have to be modeled to some extent on a Hebrew text in order to give them scriptural sanction. In fact, there is such a text, and we are led to it by the Christian Bible. The Epistle to the Hebrews, traditionally written by Paul or, more likely, by a contemporary who was influenced by him, is dated to some time between Jesus’ crucifixion and the destruction of the Temple (70 C.E.), meaning it is one of the earliest Christian writings. In this text (Hebrews 1:8–9), the author is referring to Jesus as messiah, and he references Psalm 45 as a proof text. Here is how the King James translation renders the Psalm: “But unto the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever: a sceptre of righteousness is the sceptre of thy kingdom; Thou hast loved righteousness, and hated iniquity; therefore God, even thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows.”

So the earliest Christians used Psalm 45 as a proof text for Jesus’ messiahship, even as a justification for calling Jesus both “Son” and “God.” In Jewish tradition, Psalm 45 is not a reference to Jesus, though it is taken as a prophetic description of the messiah yet to come.

In other words, both traditions agree that Psalm 45 is describing King Messiah. So if Jesus’ apostles used this text to understand Jesus, what would they have gleaned from it? Does it refer to a sacred marriage? Sacred sex? Would they have found a way to wrap their minds around the fact that their leader had taken up with a former pagan priestess?

In fact, Psalm 45 would have provided them with all they needed to celebrate the messiah’s bridal chamber. The Psalm is so explicit that it is never translated properly. Here is what it says in the original Hebrew: verse 3 describes the coming messiah as “more beautiful than human beings” (i.e., he is not a mere mortal). Then, in the lines referenced in Hebrews, it describes him as a warrior for truth and righteousness. Like Joseph in our manuscript, who appears riding a chariot and carrying a scepter, verse 5 describes the messiah as “riding” to victory, and verse 7 describes him carrying the “sceptre of royalty.” More than this, it states that “God is your throne” or “Your throne, O God, is for eternity.” Meaning, the messiah is a godlike figure subservient only to God on High, but superior to humans. Verse 8 states that God has “anointed” the chosen one with the “oil of gladness.”

Now that the poet has described the crowning of King Messiah, he goes on to the controversial, overlooked, and mistranslated passages. In verse 9, the messiah is prepared for the bridal chamber by being anointed with perfumes: “myrrh, aloes and cassia.” It then states that “from ivory chambers many will gladden you.” Who are these “many?” Verse 10 states, “daughters of kings will come to you.” During this bridal-chamber ceremony, the messiah is not alone. Rather, to his right is his “consort.” The Hebrew word is shegal. This is often translated as “queen.” But mishgal means “sexual intercourse.” So the literal translation is either “sexual partner,” “wife,” or “consort.” “Consort” is a more appropriate appellation for the woman standing at the messiah’s right hand, because she is then described as wearing ketem offir. This is often translated as “golden settings,” or “golden jewelry,” but Offir is a place, and ketem offir should be translated as “the mark of Offir,” which is synonymous with a kind of gold that was used in the building of the temple. So, to the right hand of the messiah, who is visited by daughters of kings whose purpose is to gladden him, stands his consort arrayed in the gold of the temple.

At this point, verse 11, the Psalmist addresses this woman: “Hear, O daughter, and see, and incline your ear.” What is she supposed to hear? The Psalmist is explicit: “Forget your people and your father’s house.” In other words, the messiah’s consort is not destined to be Jewish. What people does she belong to? Verse 13 tells us that she is a “daughter of Tyre,” meaning she is a Syro-Phoenician woman. Once this Syro-Phoenician woman becomes the consort or wife of the messiah, verse 12 tells her that “the king will lust after your beauty, for he is your Lord and you shall bow down to him.” By bowing down to him, however, she elevates herself above everyone else, specifically the temple priesthood. Verse 13 tells us that at the afternoon sacrifices, the people’s elite will “supplicate before your countenance.” Meaning, by sharing King Messiah’s bed, this former Syro-Phoenician priestess, a daughter of a king, will be elevated above everyone but the messiah. Verse 14 tells us that she will share her “honor” only with the king. Verse 15 tells us that she will also make available to him “her virgin attendants.” The ceremony is consummated with “gladness and joy” in the “chamber of the King.” The Psalm concludes by telling us that the sons who will result from this ritual will “replace” (in Hebrew tachat ihiu) the Davidic royal line and will be appointed “princes in all the land.” The last line states that “your name will be remembered in all generations” and that “nations will praise you forever more.”

Psalm 45 is the Jewish source code of the earliest followers of Jesus and Mary the Magdalene. Of course, it can be and has been read in different ways. But the simplest reading would have provided Jesus’ earliest followers with what they were looking for: the job description for the messiah. His job was not to die on a cross. Rather, his job was to replace the traditional temple priesthood, establish a new royal/priestly line, and find a Tyrean princess willing to abandon her father’s house and her religion. Thereafter, their mission was to establish a new covenant by consummating their relationship in the royal bridal chamber. Psalm 45 demonstrates that Joseph and Aseneth did not emerge out of a theological vacuum: it was firmly rooted in the Galilean Judeo-Phoenician context of the 1st century.

All these references to sacred sex and fornication led Henry Chadwick to speculate that behind it all there must be a lost gospel of some kind: “an apocryphal work . . . the mother of their [Gnostic] licentiousness.”¹²³ Now, finally, we have the text Chadwick was looking for: a gospel that makes sense, from the inside, of the actions that gave rise to the various accusations—namely, sacred sex based on Jesus’ union with Mary the Magdalene, a former priestess of Artemis.

Marriage as Redemptive

When we leave the orbit of Pauline Christianity, we enter a vastly different conceptual environment. As we have seen, Joseph and Aseneth finds its natural home in Valentinian Gnosticism. In fact, it seems to describe the situation that gave rise to that Gnosticism. It is similar to such important writings as the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Mary, and The Secret Book of John. The focus, concepts, and intellectual landscape of all these texts mirror each other.

With Joseph and Aseneth and Valentinian Gnosticism, the emphasis is on life, happiness, and redemption—not suffering, death, and salvation through participation in Christ’s “passion.” In Gnosticism, the focus is on celebrating vitality and offspring. The most holy act is the sacrament of the bridal chamber—that is, sacred sex. According to this view, the “aeon” Jesus (i.e., the enlightened Jesus) fulfilled his task not when he became a human and not when he was crucified, but when he met, married, and had sexual intercourse with Mary the Magdalene. In this way, he returned the wayward Sophia to her proper home. As the Gospel of Philip (63:33) states, “Sophia . . . is the mother of the angels and the companion of the [savior]. The [savior loved] Mary of Magdala more than [all the disciples], [and he] kissed her often. . . .”¹²⁴ More than this, both in the Gospel of John and the Gnostic Gospel of Philip, Jesus is described as the “Word.” Here is how the Gospel of Philip describes it:

Humans have sex with humans, horses have sex with horses, donkeys have sex with donkeys. Members of a species have sex with members of the same species. So also the spirit has intercourse with spirit, word mingles with word, light mingles [with light] . . . if [you] become human, [a human] will love you. If you become [spirit], spirit will unite with you. If you become word, word will have intercourse with you.¹²⁵

Since Jesus is the “Word,” who is he having “intercourse” with? Clearly it has to be someone on the same level as him. If he is a god made flesh—“in the beginning there was the Word . . . and the Word became flesh” (John 1:1–15)—the Gospel of Philip is alluding to a goddess also made flesh. Here is an explicit reference to the idea: “if you become Word, Word will have intercourse with you.” Notice the Gnostic philosophy: as you ascend spiritually, you also ascend physically. Remember, it is only after Aseneth/Mary the Magdalene’s repentance that the angel comes to her bed.

Put differently, according to Valentinian Gnostics, when Jesus married Mary the Magdalene, he literally re-harmonized the cosmos. In a sense, their union returned humanity to a pre-exile-from-paradise state. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were blameless and shameless. They were not even aware of their nakedness until after Eve ate of the forbidden fruit. Prior to this act of disobedience, there was no tension between the physical and the spiritual. In a sense, by mating, Jesus (the new Adam) and Mary the Magdalene (the new Eve) re-opened the door to paradise: “Adam came from two virgins, the spirit and the virgin earth. Christ was born of a virgin to correct the fall that occurred in the beginning.”¹²⁶

Historically speaking, it’s now clear that the matrimonial home of Jesus and Mary the Magdalene was no ordinary home. For their followers, it was a temple. Their bedchamber was no ordinary bedchamber: “The bedchamber is . . . the holy of holy.”¹²⁷ The road to salvation ran literally through their bedroom. In the words of the Gospel of Philip, “if someone becomes an attendant of the bridal chamber, that person will receive the light.”¹²⁸

In the Hellenized world that Jesus was born into, these kinds of ideas were not strange or novel. In some sense, they were mainstream. For example, the followers of Dionysus acknowledged the god’s presence in a phallus concealed in a baby basket. One who was possessed by the god would feel this power by getting high on wine or some other drug or by becoming sexually aroused. Such a person “became one with Dionysos.”¹²⁹ In other words, one could become one with the god through a ritual involving sacred sex.

When it comes to Jesus and Mary the Magdalene, we have to remember that according to their Gnostic followers, Jesus and Mary the Magdalene were no ordinary human beings. Valentinus argued that one of Jesus’ defining characteristics was his self-control in all things. We can imagine what this means sexually. In fact, according to Valentinus, Jesus’ “power of self-control was so great that even the food inside him was not corrupted.”¹³⁰ For the Gnostics, Jesus and Mary the Magdalene were gods who had been spirit and were now flesh. The Gospel of Philip explicitly states “when we were Hebrews we were orphans . . . but when we became Christians we had a father and a mother.”¹³¹ The father and mother were Jesus and Mary the Magdalene. At this point, it is clear that there are simply no other candidates for these historical roles.

From the Valentinian point of view, when Jesus and Mary the Magdalene had intercourse, the physical and spiritual were no longer divided and all divisions disappeared. By imitating them, their followers participated fully in all that the holy couple had to offer. In a sense, they also became “Christs”—i.e., anointed ones. Basically, Paul substituted suffering for sex, but left the theological infrastructure intact. To become infused with the “Christ-Spirit,” one had to suffer rather than procreate . . . but the end result was the same: “you have received the spirit of Son-ship. When we cry, ‘Abba Father,’ it is the Spirit itself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children then heirs, heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him” (Romans 8:15–17).¹³² In contrast, according to the Gnostics, the way to be “glorified with Christ” was not to be an ascetic who suffers like Jesus, but to find a mate and make love in the manner that Jesus and Mary the Magdalene made love. For the Gnostics, the bed, not the cross, was the ultimate symbol of redemption.¹³³

Some of this sacred sex theology may have been retained as a memory in the view that Magdala was a licentious city,¹³⁴ and in the church’s tradition that Mary the Magdalene was a prostitute.¹³⁵ Ours seems to be the best explanation for these traditions, since there is absolutely nothing in the Christian Bible that identifies Mary the Magdalene as a prostitute. Put differently, in the words of Nancy Qualls-Corbett, “Although clouded in confusion from Biblical scripture, I think and feel that Mary Magdalene was endowed with the selfsame attributes as the sacred prostitute.”¹³⁶

Although somewhat distorted, the original Gnosticism is even echoed in Paul’s strange androgyny theology of the sexes. For example, in his letter to the Galatians, Paul states: “You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (3:26–28). Consider what this means in a sexual context. This statement is anathema to any Torah-observant Jew where the emphasis is on holy separation (i.e., separating kosher from un-kosher, weekdays from the Sabbath, purity from impurity, etc.). With respect to male and female differences, the Torah explicitly forbids a man to dress like a woman or vice versa (Deuteronomy 22:5). Meaning, in the Jewish world that Jesus and Paul were born into, men are supposed to be men and women are supposed to be women. But here is Paul proudly proclaiming that in Jesus there is neither male nor female. The Gnostics agreed. In the Gospel of Thomas, like Paul, Jesus states: “When you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female . . . then you enter [the Kingdom].”¹³⁷

In fact, bisexuality and androgyny seem to run throughout the Gnostic texts. As another example, at one point, Peter attacks Jesus’ relationship with Mary the Magdalene, arguing that “women are not worthy” of eternal life. To which Jesus responds, “I shall guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter Heaven’s Kingdom.”¹³⁸ Once again, this strengthens the parallel between Mary the Magdalene and Artemis, who is called in the Orphic hymns (36) “of manly form.” Clearly, there is a vision of androgyny here—of male and female becoming one.

Of course, it will be argued that all this is metaphor. But in a Gnostic context, it can’t be. For the Gnostics, the sex was real. After all, their model was not a celibate Paul, but a married Jesus. It all seems rooted in a syncretic theology of sex that evolved as a response to a real-life marriage between Jesus and a former priestess of Artemis.

To be clear, for their followers, Jesus’ marriage to Mary the Magdalene healed the rift dividing male from female and humanity from God. According to the Gnostics, once the holy marriage took place, believers now had the ability to be made whole. This was a vision of a restored humanity returning to its primordial state.

The reason all this had to be a secret doctrine, or at least a doctrine revealed in stages to its adherents, is that—obviously—it can easily be misunderstood. Gnostics were aware of the potential for licentiousness built into their theology. So they opted for secrecy and secret codes: “If marriage is exposed, it has become prostitution, and the bride plays the harlot. . . .”¹³⁹ In other words, not everyone would understand the holiness of sacred sex. Not everyone would understand that when participating in this kind of Holy Communion you don’t lose your virginity but, in a sense, you gain it. You move from a state of sin into a state of innocence.

From a Gnostic point of view, therefore, Mary the Magdalene was the original mother of the Church of the Gentiles, the original Virgin Mary. From this point of view, even though she had sexual relations and offspring, she was permanently in a state of spiritual purity. She was called “the mother of the virgins” (15:7). More than this, in Joseph and Aseneth, Mary the Magdalene becomes the shelter for those who turn to God in repentance. In effect, she was equated with repentance, and as such she was elevated to the status of “Daughter of God” (15:6). She was the necessary other half of the Jesus equation. The Gnostics would have never conceived of Jesus as celibate. They would have regarded such an idea as the height of foolishness. From their perspective, the fundamental rupture in the universe was the separation of Sophia from her mate. A celibate Jesus would have been a contradiction in terms. It would have perpetuated everything that is wrong in the world. His mission, so to speak, was not to go it alone but to correct the fact that she had. It was his God-ordained task to return her to her rightful place in the community of those spiritual beings that the Gnostics called aeons.

Seen in the Gnostic light, Mary the Magdalene is a co-redemptrix (that is, she is a co-redeemer of humanity) for, without her, Jesus could not have wrought salvation. According to this view, death is not conquered by Jesus’ resurrection, but by the new Eve’s sex life with the new Adam: “When Eve was in Adam, there was no death. When she was separated from him, death came. If [she] enters into him again and he embraces [her], death will cease to be.”¹⁴⁰

For at least some of their original followers, after he was gone, the possibility of redemption continued only through her. This is the logical consequence of the idea that Jesus was not a metaphysical solo act but, rather, one half of a holy dyad. To understand how this theology expresses itself after the crucifixion, we must revisit the central story of orthodox Christianity (i.e., the empty tomb) and re-examine it in light of our newfound gospel.

After the crucifixion, the discovery of the empty tomb signals Jesus’ resurrection. This is the central event on which the church is based. Nothing is more important. It’s as simple as that. But what actually happened, and how can we understand it in light of the Gnosticism revealed in our text?

According to the Gospels, it is none other than Mary the Magdalene who discovers the empty tomb on the Sunday after the crucifixion (John 20:1–18; Luke 24:1–12; Matthew 28:1–10; Mark 16:1–8). Put simply, the entire religion depends on her report.¹⁴¹ When it comes to that report, however, the message becomes confusing and contradictory. In one scenario, Luke admits that no one believed her and her female companions: “they believed them not” (24:11). In another version, there is a “gardener” outside the tomb that Mary somehow identifies with Jesus. In several versions, there are angels involved. In one version, Peter and someone called “the beloved disciple” run a foot race to the tomb to see if it is, indeed, empty. What all these have in common is an attempt to diminish Mary the Magdalene’s role in the central event of Christianity. Suddenly, it’s not just Mary the Magdalene and the empty tomb—the gardener is involved, Peter is involved, the mysterious beloved disciple is involved, angels are involved, other women are involved, et cetera. In fact, so frustrated were orthodox Christians that the empty tomb was discovered by Mary the Magdalene and not by the Virgin Mary that, by the 7th century, they rewrote the story and substituted the mother for the wife.

This latter tradition appears in The Life of the Virgin, written by Maximus the Confessor, one of the most important theologians of the early Byzantine period. In this work, Maximus takes the classic description of Mary the Magdalene as a weeper and transforms it into a description of the Virgin Mother. His description of the mother is practically identical to the description of Aseneth, a.k.a. Mary the Magdalene, in our text, including the creation of tear puddles on the ground: “She stretched forth her hands, beat her breast, and groaned from the depths of her heart, and she endured her torments and drenched the earth with her tears.”¹⁴² Maximus then says that since the “immaculate mother was inseparable from the tomb [of the Lord] . . . she received the good news of the Resurrection before everyone else.”¹⁴³ This blatant contradiction of the Gospels reflects a need to disassociate the resurrection from Mary the Magdalene. Why?

Let’s look at the typology again and the Gnostic symbolism provided by our lost—now found—gospel. Joseph is Jesus. Aseneth is Mary the Magdalene. More than this, Joseph is Mithras/Helios/Apollo/Sol Invictus, and Mary the Magdalene is Ashera/Great Goddess/Artemis. What is the symbology associated with each? As we’ve seen “Artemis is a bee.”¹⁴⁴ Joseph is a bull. Deuteronomy 33:17 calls him a “firstborn bull” and says “his horns are the horns of a wild ox.” In the Roman pagan world, a parallel tradition is reflected in the stories associated with the Sun god Helios Mithras. The central event on which this mystery-religion was based involved the slaying of the primordial bull and the redemption of the world through his blood. The followers of Mithras had a Communion-like meal where the initiates ate bread and drank from a cup of water mixed with wine. It seems that these elements were “symbolic of the body and blood of the bull.”¹⁴⁵

The bull on the one hand and the bee on the other were associated in the minds of the ancients with one unique, singular phenomenon: resurrection. But the resurrection only works if they are both involved. This is the way Marija Gimbutas puts it: “the idea of a ‘life in death’ in this singularly interesting concept is expressed by the belief that the life of the bull passed into that of the bees.”¹⁴⁶ One of the earliest writers to mention the bull-born bee is Antigonos of Karystos, about 250 B.C.E., who says: “In Egypt if you bury the ox in certain places, so that only his horns project above the ground and then saw them off, they say that bees fly out; for the ox putrefies and is resolved into bees.”¹⁴⁷

The language of the Gospels follows the resurrection formula described by Antigonos to the letter. Namely, Jesus is buried in a tomb according to the rules of flesh putrefaction and bone reinterment. The idea is that “the ox putrefies and is resolved into bees.” If he is the ox and she is the bee, then the story of the empty tomb describes the process whereby he became her. Those who rejected Mary the Magdalene kept the story of the resurrection but dismissed the vessel for the resurrection. They wrote other people into the event and effectively diminished her role in the whole affair.

But if we use the typology of Joseph and Aseneth—he is Joseph the ox and she is Artemis the bee—and place it back into its historical context, we realize that in the resurrection language of the time, the ox didn’t rise out of the grave . . . he survived through the bee. Using the symbolic syntax of Joseph and Aseneth, we have come to realize that the resurrected Jesus is Mary the Magdalene.

We haven’t invented the above idea. It emerges from the historical context itself and survives for centuries. For example, from the 2nd century there was a movement in Phrygia, modern Turkey, known as Montanism. A man named Montanus and two women named Priscilla and Maximilla led it. One of these “Christian prophets” had a “famous vision of Christ in female form.”¹⁴⁸ In fact, from the 4th century onward, a tradition developed in Christian art that involved “representing Jesus as quite feminine with long hair, wide hips and even breasts.”¹⁴⁹ Basically, Jesus came to be depicted as Mary the Magdalene.