The Wife of Jesus: Ancient Texts and Modern Scandals

“Greet one another with a holy kiss.”

– SAINT PAUL

Almost two thousand years after Mary Magdalene’s death, she has become the subject of a modern scandal. Our earliest accounts of Mary say that she had seven demons cast out of her, that she pursued an education normally reserved for men, and that she witnessed a dead man come back to life. These are all incredible claims. What is less incredible, by far, is the statement that she might have been married.

Given the choice of (a) demon-possessed, (b) shattered gender stereotypes, (c) witnessed a resurrection, or (d) was married, which of these topics is most likely to inspire a Hollywood film? Interestingly, the answer is (d). Ron Howard’s 2006 film adaptation of The Da Vinci Code grossed over $758 million worldwide. The story was inspired by the premise that Mary Magdalene was indeed married and that her descendants survive today.

Of course, it wasn’t the fact that she might have wed but who she might have wed that made the book and the film controversial. In 1988, Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of The Last Temptation of Christ created controversy by suggesting that Jesus was sexually attracted to Mary. Mary has become controversial because of the possible window that she provides into Jesus’ sexuality.

FASCINATION AND JEALOUSY

An important voice on the topic of Mary Magdalene’s evolution in Christian thought belongs to April DeConick, a scholar of early Christianity. One of the prominent threads of DeConick’s Holy Misogyny is the story of the erasure of women from Christian origins. She demonstrates how Mary Magdalene was initially remembered as a key figure among the earliest Christians, only to be systematically diminished in the mid-to late first century: “Jesus appears to have been something of a woman’s advocate during his era, and women were present in his mission as patrons and disciples.”¹ But the institutionalization of Christianity would not treat the memory of Mary kindly.

Tragically, we only see snippets of Mary’s life; fortunately, we see enough to be convinced that she was an important figure among the first apostles. It seems that her story was simply too fascinating to be eclipsed entirely. What happens when a figure is almost entirely forgotten by historical record but too compelling to ignore? As we saw with Salome: imagination fills in the gaps. Without a doubt, second-century Christian imagination and modern historical fiction have this in common.

THE NAG HAMMADI LIBRARY

Nag Hammadi Library is a collection of Coptic texts unearthed in 1945 in Upper Egypt. Several gospels that are not found in the New Testament were discovered in this collection, including the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of the Egyptians, and many others. These texts represent versions of Christianity that were prominent in the second century onward but were eventually branded heretical by the apostolic church.

In recent decades, several fragments of “gospels” have been uncovered that feature Mary Magdalene prominently. These, as you might guess, are not found in the New Testament. What scholars refer to as the Nag Hammadi Library reveals the impact that Mary Magdalene had on early Christian imagination. One of the key themes, where Magdalene is concerned, is the jealousy that she provoked in Jesus’ male disciples.

One text that features this theme prominently is called the Gospel of Philip, composed about one hundred years (or more) after Mary Magdalene was dead and gone. It is a collection of loosely related reflections about what it means to be spiritually enlightened. As with the four Gospels found in the Christian Bible, the key theme of this book is the worship of Jesus. But unlike Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the Gospel of Philip gives us almost no information about events in the life of Jesus.

What has made Philip famous in recent years is what it claims about Mary Magdalene. Philip tells us that Mary Magdalene was the “lover” of Jesus and that he “loved her more than all the disciples, and used to kiss her often on her mouth.” Of course, this detail allows the author to extend the jealousy theme. The male disciples ask, “Why do you love her more than all of us?”²

From a modern perspective, it is almost impossible to resist taking this at face value. A plain sense reading of this text would seem to indicate that Jesus and Mary were physically intimate. The trouble with reading it in this way is that Philip is not a “plain sense” sort of document. In fact, one of the unique features of Philip is elitism. What really mattered to the group and to the author who composed Philip was hidden meaning and enlightenment that transcended common sense.

Philip also claims that there were three Marys linked to Jesus. Mary was Jesus’ “sister, mother, and lover.”³ The name Mary seems to be symbolic in this text. Mary represents the ideal disciple. In fact, here is what Philip says about being plain-spoken:

The words we give to earthly realities engender illusion, they turn the heart away from the real to the unreal … words do not speak reality … all the words we hear in this world only deceive us … The Truth makes use of the words in the world because without these words, it would remain totally unknowable. The Truth is one and many, so as to teach us the innumerable One of Love.⁴

The school of thought that produced the Gospel of Philip believed that words were unable to capture reality. The words “mother, sister, and lover” were symbols that transcended common meaning. If we were to take these words literally, this author would probably accuse us of being “unworthy of life.” You really don’t get more elitist than that. Bart Ehrman explains that books such as Philip “are for insiders who – unlike us – already have all the background information they need.”⁵ Really, nothing in the Gospel of Philip was intended to be taken at face value.

Most scholars think that the author of Philip belonged to a Christian sect called the “Valentinians.”⁶ While “mainstream” Christianity (that which we commemorate as “apostolic” Christianity) taught that the death and resurrection of Christ would bring salvation, Valentinus believed that Jesus taught his true disciples the mysteries of heaven, and that the knowledge of this truth would bring salvation.⁷ One characteristic of this particular group is that they were keenly interested in sexual symbolism. Unlike many Christian groups who held serious misgivings about female participation in worship, the Valentinians believed that the male–female union was essential for enlightenment.⁸

A POSSIBLE RECONSTRUCTION OF VALENTINIAN THEOLOGY

In order to describe how a singular God could create such a diverse world, the Valentinians imagined that God the Father projected thought and that this thought took the form of “Intellect” (male) and “Truth” (female). This pair of personalities produced another pair of male and female counterparts, and that pair produced another, and so on. Each pair was one step removed from God the Father, but all of these existed within the mind of God. Importantly, each pair was a masculine and feminine union. But one of the lowest projections was a feminine form called “Wisdom.” She severed herself from her male counterpart and attempted to gain direct knowledge of God. This ruined the harmonious balance of the cosmos, and it was this misinformed personality that created the material world. The Gospel of Philip says that: “The world came into being through an error.”⁹ For the Valentinians, marriage between male and female was a way to correct the corruption of the material world.

Because of the Valentinians’ fondness for symbol, mystery, and metaphor, it is difficult to tell how much of their sex talk represents practice. Many scholars think that the Valentinians were all talk, that they used sexual metaphor to describe their spiritual ecstasy. Others believe that spiritual ecstasy was achieved through physical enactment. In this view, coitus, when performed by an enlightened married couple in sacred ritual, was a symbol of divine unity. DeConick explains: “The highest aspiration for the Valentinians was the marriage of purity, a conjugal relationship that was defined by sexual behavior with a spiritual focus.”¹⁰

In either case, Mary became a symbolic exemplar for this group. The Valentinians believed that physical gender was not indicative of the collective gender of the human race. They believed that all human spirits were female. Humans are female elements that derive from masculine (angelic) counterparts. In this view, humans will continue to be alienated from the mind of God until they are united with their higher, masculine selves at the end of time. But in the interim, union could be enacted through a “baptism of light.” From this perspective, Mary was able to achieve her true self through union with Jesus and became an example for all disciples (male and female).

It is highly likely that the group responsible for the Gospel of Philip is talking about a different kind of “kissing.” From their perspective, kissing probably symbolized their ongoing transformation into spiritual being. This symbol might have been borrowed from other sacred narratives where a spiritually superior being would breathe life into a person to bring them to life, sometimes eternal life.

We may see this idea reflected in a story about God and Adam. Genesis tells us that “the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.”¹¹ We probably see something close to this sort of special breathing at the end of John’s Gospel: “Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’”¹² The Gospel of Thomas has a different spin on this: “Jesus says: ‘He who drinks from my mouth will become like me. As for me, I will become what he is, and what is hidden will be revealed to him.’”¹³

With this in mind, consider this passage from Philip:

All of those who are begotten in the world are begotten by physical means; the others are begotten by spiritual means. Those who are begotten by the spirit hope for the realization of humanity … The realized human is fertilized by a kiss, and is born through a kiss. This is why we kiss each other, giving birth to each other through the grace that is in us.¹⁴

If the larger esoteric portrait of Philip is brought into view, “kissing” seems to have been a ritual to extend the breath of life (from Jesus) from one living soul to the next. This imaginative portrait of Mary illustrated how a disciple could attain unity with God. It was this sort of spiritual intimacy that made the imagined male apostles jealous.

PROBLEMS WITH PHILIP

There is one further wrinkle to consider before we move behind the Gospel of Philip’s portraits of Jesus and Mary and attempt to say anything about these figures historically. Like many ancient documents from the period, the text quoted above is fragmented. Time and nature have eaten away some of the Gospel of Philip so that the passage in question looks like this when literally translated: “ … and … companion of the … Mary Magdalene … used to … more than the disciples … kiss her … times the rest …” These gaps in the text represent places where the document has worn away. Coptic scholars are in the business of filling in these sorts of gaps, but the fragmentary state of this passage should give us reason for caution: “Our curiosity notwithstanding, we simply cannot know what was in the gaps.”¹⁵ There is enough information, however, to warrant some discussion about the nature of “kissing” in this context.¹⁶

But the real problem with the Gospel of Philip is this: what makes Philip’s statement about Mary scandalous for us is not what would have made it scandalous to the first audiences of this gospel. We read that Jesus “used to kiss her often on her mouth,” and we think of this as a keyhole look into Jesus’ libido. It sounds like schoolboy gossip to us. But to most of its ancient audiences, Philip’s portrait of Mary would have scandalized for a different reason entirely. A major question among many Christians was this: Are women (as inferior beings) worthy to receive eternal life? Even more shocking to these audiences: If Jesus gave a larger portion of his breath to Mary, does this mean that Peter and the other male disciples are inferior?

THE GOSPEL OF MARY

This gospel was probably composed in the second century and survives only in a few fragments. While most scholars hold to this date, Harvard professor Karen King has suggested a much earlier date. The least fragmentary of these is a fifth-century Coptic text. This text was purchased by a German scholar named Carl Reinhardt from an unknown manuscript dealer in Cairo in 1896. Two earlier (third-century) Greek fragments were discovered shortly thereafter.

According to Mary, the post-resurrection Jesus taught his disciples (both male and female) before his ultimate departure to Heaven. After grieving his departure, the male disciples ask Mary Magdalene to tell them what Jesus taught her privately. It seems that Jesus revealed otherwise secret teaching to Mary in a vision. Mary describes this vision. However, much of this vision has been lost due to the fragmentary nature of the document.

So, while we are preoccupied with sexuality, they were preoccupied with spiritual hierarchy. It is Mary Magdalene’s spiritual status and not her sex life that would have made her a scandalous figure in this context. Hierarchy in the spiritual realm is a key theme in the Gospel of Mary. In this text, as we would expect, Peter and the other male disciples are jealous of Mary. Again, the scandal is that Mary’s access to spiritual enlightenment is beyond what a misogynist might expect from a woman.

Saint Mary Magdalene (c. 1520), Quinten Matsys. This oil painting is more subtle than most depictions of Mary Magdalene. Here she is sober and not overtly sexualized. However, the alabaster jar is a common indicator that the nameless woman of Luke 7:37–39 is associated with Mary Magdalene. In that text, the nameless woman with an alabaster jar full of ointment washes and anoints Jesus’ feet. She is called a “sinner” in the narrative. Thus Matsys’ “Saint” betrays her legacy in Christian love as a sinner.

The Gospel of Thomas (the last verse of this gospel) conveys this exchange between Peter and Jesus concerning Mary: “Simon Peter said to them, ‘Mary should leave us, for females are not worthy of life.’ Jesus said, ‘See, I am going to attract her to make her male so that she too might become a living spirit that resembles you males. For every female thing that makes itself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.’”¹⁷ This saying may seem bizarre and offensive to our ears, but it demonstrates that the scandal of feminine spirituality was a hot topic for some early Christians. This passage has been notoriously puzzling for scholars of Thomas. But among some early Christians, the move to make Mary “male” might have been seen as a way to link Mary to her spiritual masculinity. Could this be what was at stake in Philip’s description of Jesus and Mary “kissing”?

KISSING IN FIRST-CENTURY CHRISTIANITY?

So far I have argued that the Gospel of Philip (alongside a handful of other second to fourth-century gospels) represents an imaginative reconstruction of Mary Magdalene. But it is important to recognize that historical imagination is not conjured from thin air. The gnostic imagination was fertile insomuch as Jesus fit into their unique mythology of creation, demigods, and souls entrapped within an evil material world. At the same time, these imaginative stories were loosely related to conversations about Jesus that began in the first century.

The obvious next step, then, is to ask: Does the Gospel of Philip reflect a memory of Jesus and Mary that began among Jesus’ contemporaries? The most common answer given by historical Jesus scholars is to say “almost not at all.” The gnostic teachings of Jesus are inventions of gnostic Christianity. Some scholars will grant that the jealousy of Mary expressed by the male disciples reflects late first-century disputes about women in Christian leadership, but what of the kissing?

As surprising as it might sound, there is a strong possibility that kissing was a common practice among many early Christians. In Jesus’ world, kissing was an intimate greeting reserved for family members.¹⁸ In fact, there are at least five (maybe six) instances of this sort of kissing in the New Testament. This practice fits well with Christianity’s belief that their religious group formed a spiritual family.¹⁹ As seen in the quotation that began this chapter, Paul encourages intimacy and solidarity among Christians symbolized by a “holy kiss.”

There is no doubt that the Gospel of Philip’s understanding of the holy kiss took on new meaning, but the author didn’t invent the practice. We can safely say that the early Christians kissed like brothers and sisters. What we do not see in the earliest Christian documents is the holy kiss taking on erotic significance. New Testament scholar Paul Foster aptly summarizes that in Jesus’ culture, familial kisses “did not carry the same overtones that have become attached to this practice in a highly sexualized modern society.”²⁰ The Gospel of Philip claims that Mary was Jesus’ “sister, mother, and lover.” As long as we keep in mind that these are metaphors for spiritual intimacy, we can indeed affirm that the Gospel of Philip reflects early Christian memory.

Did Jesus kiss Mary often on the mouth? While it is not unimaginable, we really cannot affirm or deny this claim with any confidence. The best evidence we have that Jesus practiced the holy kiss with his disciples comes from the story of his betrayal. In dramatic irony, Judas greets Jesus with a kiss, a symbol of intimacy and solidarity; the gesture results in Jesus’ arrest and execution. Does this episode suggest the practice of an ancient ritual that stems from Jesus’ teachings? The question will have to be left open.

CHALLENGES

What we can say with confidence is that there were women disciples in Jesus’ following. Mary Magdalene was prominent within this group. The memory of Mary’s inclusion remained a talking point among Christians for decades and centuries after. Indeed, she was probably remarkable among the diciples and too intriguing not to attract imaginative reconstructions of her relationship with Jesus.

The recent move to impregnate Mary Magdalene with sexual scandal belittles her historical significance. She wasn’t simply the nameless “wife” or “mother” or “sister” of someone. She transcended these categories. In Valentinian imagination, Mary was the ideal disciple, transformed by her relationship with Jesus. This belief may well reflect early historical memory. Mary was probably considered a “disciple.” If so, she transcended the common ranks of beast, female, male, enlightened male, deity. Mary found union with Christ. Mary is a symbol for all disciples (male and female) who find union with their higher, spiritual selves. Mary is the example of a human who has been saved from alienation and restored to harmony within the structure of the cosmos.

What we do not find in these portraits is a Mary Magdalene who was the literal wife of Jesus. Given the Valentinian philosophy about “literal” descriptions of reality, a literal wife of Jesus is the last thing that we would expect from them. This should be kept in mind when reading the next chapter, where I discuss how Mary’s fictional persona devolved the popular imagination.