Revisionist history is all the rage these days. Not satisfied with what our earliest and best witnesses have to say about the life of Mary Magdalene, various scholars have dredged up later data that has no strong claim to be based in first-century evidence and have used it to rewrite the story of Mary Magdalene. In order to understand what happened to the traditions about Mary Magdalene in the second century and on into the Middle Ages, we need to have a rather clear understanding of the nature, character, and origins of the Nag Hammadi texts, the primary source of alternative accounts. A more general discussion is required to put the Mary traditions found in some of those documents, discovered in the desert sands of Egypt at a place called Nag Hammadi in the late 1940s, into a proper context and perspective. Though what follows may seem to be a digression from the subject of Mary Magdalene, it in fact is not. The Gnostic documents discussed below are the source of most of today’s misunderstandings about Mary and her relationship with Jesus.
DOUBTING THOMAS
There is no doubting that the Gospel of Thomas, perhaps the most famous Nag Hammadi text, is an interesting document, but almost everything else about this gospel is debatable and debated, including whether it is a first-or second-century document. The majority of scholars think, for various reasons, that it is a second-century document, though it contains some early Jesus traditions that we also find in the canonical gospels. This gospel was touted by Gnostic scholar Elaine Pagels many years ago as a Gnostic gospel, but today even she is doubtful that this is a good way to characterize it.22 (In my view, her original assessment is probably more accurate than her recent retrenchment.) What I would stress about this gospel is that its “character”—particularly its sayings, which are distinctive to this gospel—makes it quite different from the canonical gospels. This suggests that it was written after, and on the basis of, not only the canonical gospels but also several of Paul’s letters and other New Testament documents.
If I am right in this assessment, the Gospel of Thomas probably adds very little that’s new about the historical Jesus or the historical Mary Magdalene or the various forms of Christianity that existed in the early or middle first century during what can be called the apostolic and formative era. This is an important conclusion because it makes it all the less likely that we can learn anything new at all about Jesus or his inner circle from apocryphal gospels written even later. If even the Gospel of Thomas does not provide a new window on Jesus and the earliest Christian period, we should surely abandon hope about documents written long after the age of the apostles and the eyewitnesses.
The tone is set in the Gospel of Thomas right from its outset. It claims to be offering us “the secret wisdom sayings” of Jesus. In other words, it purports to give us esoteric or insider knowledge about Jesus’s in-house teaching, and indeed in-house knowledge that goes back to one of the original disciples: Didymus Judas Thomas. The esoteric character of the document becomes immediately apparent not only from the incipit (or introductory passage), which uses the phrase mentioned above, but also from the first saying, which sounds nothing like the historical Jesus as he is depicted in the canonical gospels. It reads, “Whoever discovers the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death.” In other words, one must become a scribe or a scholar to be able to ferret out the meaning of secret sayings if one wants to have everlasting life.
This puts salvation on a whole different footing than what we find in either the authentic parables or the aphorisms of Jesus. Salvation is a matter of what you know and how well you understand these secret sayings. Furthermore, since salvation is dependent on an individual’s ability to interpret these sayings, we are dealing with self-salvation, and presumably salvation for the literate or even the learned. It is not a surprise that some scholars find this vision of salvation appealing. This is not salvation for the least, the last, the lost, and the illiterate, and it is certainly not offered on the basis of grace through faith.
Further proof that it is salvation only for the elite and the worthy is found in saying 62: “Jesus said, ‘I disclose my mysteries to those [who are worthy] of [my] mysteries.’” One gets the sense that salvation comes to those who persevere through the maze of interpretation, ponder the sayings deeply, and then have an “aha” moment. Listen to the second saying in this gospel: “Jesus said, ‘Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed. When they are disturbed, they will marvel, and will reign over all.’” This sounds like a form of revelation that can be received only by those who have far too much time on their hands—a scribe or a scholar, say. Like Jacob wrestling the angel, readers have to wrestle with the saying until they get a blessing. The focus is clearly on the inner workings of the mind.
And those inner workings are potent. Saying 3 insists that the Father’s kingdom is “within you,” though it also is said to be “outside of you.”23 Saying 70 takes that one step further, clinching the fact that we are dealing with a gospel of self-salvation: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you.”
Next in Thomas, we are given a Socratic twist. Saying 3b says, “When you know yourselves, then you will be known.” The search must be within yourself, at least initially. This is a gospel for narcissists. There is nothing here about knowing God being the key to understanding yourself. The I becomes the Thou—or at least the Thou is believed to be found in the first instance within the I.
Unlike the synoptic teachings of Jesus, which can sometimes be enigmatic in order to tease the mind of the audience into active thought about God’s divine saving activity, this gospel offers up conundrums or riddles for their own sake. Consider saying 7, which suggests, “Lucky is the lion that the human will eat, so that the lion becomes human. And foul is the human that the lion will eat, and the lion still will become human.” Or consider saying 19: “Congratulations to the one who came into being before coming into being. If you become my disciples and pay attention to my sayings, these stones will serve you.” No wonder Matthew, as quoted in this gospel, says Jesus is like a wise philosopher (saying 13), and Jesus warns in saying 21, “Let there be a person among you who understands.” This is not a gospel for the slow of understanding!
The lion saying seems to relate in some way to saying 11b, which reads, “The dead are not alive, and the living will not die. During the days when you ate what is dead, you made it come alive.” Clearly the author of this document is fascinated by what happens when a living being eats another creature that was alive. What these sayings probably reflect is the pagan notion that the life force can be transferred from a lesser being to a greater one (even to a god) by the greater being sacrificing or consuming or even strangling (and so squeezing the life breath out of) the lesser being.
What is the character of the person or community that generated this document in the second century? We get a clue in saying 12, where the disciples ask about who should lead them when Jesus departs. He responds, “No matter where you are you are to go to James the Just, for whose sake heaven and earth came into being.”
Now no one in the New Testament documents refers to James the brother of Jesus in this way. James the Just is what he was called by those outside the community (Josephus, for example, and later Christian sources such as Eusebius, the father of church history, writing around the turn of the fourth century).24 It is a phrase used only after James got a reputation for exhibiting a certain sort of piety in Jerusalem, well after the death of Jesus. Thus this saying does not go back to the historical Jesus; rather, it is used to legitimate a later tradition, reflecting a later view of James, and indeed a view of James that Jesus himself would never have endorsed, especially during his ministry when his brothers didn’t yet believe in him (John 7:3–5). Jesus actually spoke of persons other than his physical family being his own family of faith (see Mark 3:21, 31–35), as we will see in later chapters.
And if we were not puzzled enough, when we get to saying 22 we are confronted with the following:
When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter [the kingdom].
It is frankly hard to keep a straight face and say that this sounds anything like the historical Jesus we find in the Q sayings—those sayings from various New Testament texts that seem to come from a single, earlier, imagined source that historians call Q (from the German Quelle, or source)—or in Mark or even in the Gospel of John. The person who wrote this was a wordsmith, someone who liked to play with words and phrases with puzzling meanings.
Unlike the other gospels, the Gospel of Thomas lacks a future eschatological focus. In fact, when the disciples ask how their end will come, Jesus asks them if they have found their beginning. Their end is said to be found when they find their beginning (saying 18). This is just being obscure for obscurity’s sake! Or even more clearly we can compare saying 51:
His disciples said to him, “When will the rest for the dead take place, and when will the new world come?” He said to them, “What you are looking forward to has come, but you don’t know it.”
The disciples are called by this gospel to extreme asceticism, to abandon even clothing! Listen to saying 37:
When you strip without being ashamed, and you take your clothes and put them under your feet like little children and trample them, then [you] will see the son of the living one and you will not be afraid.
This comports with saying 64b, which says buyers and merchants will not enter the places of the Father.
You may well ask what happened to the Jesus who was known as the friend of tax collectors and sinners, the man who was accused of being a glutton and a wine-bibber. And can it really be said that the following (saying 30) sounds even remotely like the monotheistic Jewish Jesus of the early first century?
Jesus said, “Where there are three deities, they are divine. Where there are two or one, I am with that one.”
To this we may add the infamous saying 77:
Jesus said, “I am the light that is over all things. I am all: from me all came forth, and to me all attained. Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.”
This certainly sounds like pantheistic thought.
We also have misogynistic material at the end of the collection in saying 114, which reads:
Simon Peter said to them, “Make Mary leave us, for females don’t deserve life.” Jesus said, “Look, I will 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 the kingdom of Heaven.”
What is especially interesting about this saying, besides its misogyny, is that it recognizes Mary Magdalene as part of the inner circle of disciples. It hints at a rivalry between Peter and Mary, or between disciples like Peter and those like Mary. This theme is developed further in later Gnostic literature.
Some scholars have tried to soften the impact of saying 77 by suggesting it was later added to the collection,25 but alas, where is the textual basis for this conjecture? Do we have manuscripts that don’t include this saying? Well no, we don’t. This conjecture is a ploy of desperation meant to salvage the Gospel of Thomas from appearing to be what it is—a mishmash of some authentic sayings of Jesus found in earlier canonical gospels coupled with later pantheistic sayings, ascetical sayings, Gnostic sayings, philosophical sayings, and even misogynistic sayings. It is the distinctive sayings of Thomas, highlighted above, that indicate just how far removed this gospel is in its portrayal of Jesus from the Jewish eschatological non-ascetical Jesus we find in the Q sayings and in general in the synoptic gospels. Even the authentic sayings of Jesus that we do find in this gospel in various places are de-eschatologized in the service of the larger agenda of the author.
Careful examinations of the Gospel of Thomas by Klyne Snodgrass and C. M. Tuckett have shown that this text reflects not only a knowledge of all four canonical gospels but also familiarity with the editorial work of all the evangelists, including John, the so-called Fourth Evangelist.26 Thomas also reflects a knowledge of the editorial work of Matthew and Luke even in the Greek version of Thomas.27 It also reflects a knowledge of various of Paul’s letters, Hebrews, 1 John, and perhaps even Revelation. One has to ask, Who could the author of this document have been, and when could he have written to know all these sources in detail? The answer is surely that he is someone who lived in the second century and had an admiration especially for James, who was martyred in A.D. 62.
This is why James Dunn and others have rightly drawn the conclusion that Thomas postdates all the canonical documents, as do all the other Nag Hammadi texts. Listen to Dunn: “The more obvious interpretation of the Nag Hammadi documents is that they are all typically syncretistic: they draw bits and pieces of tradition from a wide range of religious influences in the ancient world, including Judaism and Christianity, but including others as well. As such they are totally explainable in terms of what we now know about second and third-century Gnosticism.”28 Just so, and as such this material is miles from the character of the canonical gospels. Dunn rightly includes the Gospel of Thomas in this description. The attempt to de-Gnosticize Thomas in order to rescue it and make it a genuine first-century gospel will not work (witness how this Gospel is now portrayed as the crown jewel of the Gnostic Society Library)29—and in any case, whenever it was written, its distinctive sayings are miles from the Jewish and eschatological and intelligible character of Jesus’s actual aphorisms, proverbs, and the like.
In the end, the Gospel of Thomas should never have been called a gospel, for it has no narrative about the life or death of Jesus, no recounting of miracles, and no prophetic signs. It simply serves up Jesus the talking head. What Thomas’s Jesus really wants to accomplish is to be a facilitator so that persons of discernment who are worthy can know themselves, can look deep within themselves, and can thus save themselves by obtaining esoteric knowledge while engaging in ascetical practices. Notice, however, that these are not Jewish ritual practices like circumcision, which is disavowed in Thomas and contrasted with the more valuable “spiritual circumcision.” Soteriology (that is, salvation theology) is indeed reduced to anthropology, and salvation becomes a human self-help program in this gospel. Therein lie two reasons for this gospel’s appeal in America, where we love self-help programs and where our theme song is generally “I Did It My Way” or even “It’s All about Me.”
What is truly strange is that no one is talking about the fact that this gospel has several sayings (quoted above) which suggest that this document was not compiled by a committed monotheist—which is to say, it was not compiled by someone who was either a faithful early Jew or a Christian. Rather, the distinctive sayings in Thomas, those that reveal the most about the author, show us a person who is:
Given these sorts of views, it is no surprise that we have no evidence that this gospel was ever seriously considered for inclusion in the New Testament. It violates the Jewish and eschatological character of the teachings of Jesus. It violates the adherence to monotheism which was the hallmark of early Judaism and its early Christian offshoot. Finally, it violates the inclusivity of Jesus, revealing its patriarchal character and bias against women in the climactic sayings of the collection, which are probably original.
But what of some of the later extracanonical documents—what about the famous Gospel of Mary or the Gospel of Philip, for example? Could they reveal to us a Jesus who was more like later Gnostics, and perhaps was even married to Mary Magdalene?
NAUGHTY GNOSTIC GOSPELS?
Thus far we have been talking about the most famous of the Nag Hammadi documents, the Gospel of Thomas. Before we turn to several others, perhaps I should say something about the Nag Hammadi finds in general.30 Though it may be fashionable to suggest that we should be gracious and include the Gnostic texts along with the New Testament as equally valid sources of the truth about early Christianity, the truth is that both sources cannot be correct about the historical Jesus, or about the nature of the movement he set in motion, or about the people he consorted with, such as Mary Magdalene.
I should stress that I quite agree that these Nag Hammadi documents deserve a close and fair reading; at least the same historical critical scrutiny should be applied to them as to the canon of the New Testament. In fact one could make a case for more critical scrutiny being applied to texts, the further removed in time they are from the subjects they are written about. But when you actually undertake such a scholarly enterprise, you realize pretty quickly that the Gnostic documents do not reveal anything about the historical Jesus that could not be deduced from the canonical material itself, and in the places they disagree with the canonical material, they are surely not more authentic witnesses to Jesus and his movement than the New Testament documents. Let us consider these Gnostic texts a bit further, and consider the work of two scholars, Elaine Pagels and Karen King, on these texts.
The Nag Hammadi documents found in a storage jar in 1945 by two brothers digging for nitrate soil to use as fertilizer are currently housed in the Coptic Museum in Cairo. Their journey to this museum was circuitous. When the brothers first took these documents home, their mother promptly used some of the papyrus to stoke the fire of her bread oven! The rest of the pages were rescued and eventually found their way through the hands of dealers and collectors into the aforementioned museum.
While these Nag Hammadi documents may have been deliberately hidden from the public eye at some juncture in a storage jar, they are now open secrets: anyone who has the time and patience can study them. Indeed, since they have all been translated into English, one can read them without benefit of learning Coptic or Greek or any other such ancient language. Elaine Pagels’s The Gnostic Gospels has become something of a popular reference text about the Gnostic texts we are most concerned with, but she does not present us with the actual texts intact; rather, she analyzes them at some length. The Nag Hammadi library, as it is best called, included a wide array of differing kinds of documents. It included even a portion of Plato’s Republic! One must always be cautious about judging documents that are part of a library. I would hardly want someone to judge my own theology on the basis of some of the books currently found in the Asbury Seminary library. Nevertheless, close scrutiny of many of these documents is very revealing when it comes to shedding light on Gnosticism.
Let us consider first the contents of the thirteen codices (the ancient equivalents of books) that contain these Nag Hammadi documents. Shown below is a table of contents, and what immediately jumps out at you is that not a single Old or New Testament book is included! If the community that generated these documents had the Bible as we know it, these codices do not show it. However, it is plausible that these works were selections deliberately hidden from view, perhaps in the fourth or fifth centuries, when we know that certain works deemed heretical were ferreted out and done away with.
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Table of Contents |
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II,1 |
The Apocryphon of John |
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II,2 |
The Gospel of Thomas |
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II,3 |
The Gospel of Philip |
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II,4 |
The Hypostasis of the Archons |
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II,5 |
On the Origin of the World |
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II,6 |
The Exegesis on the Soul |
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II,7 |
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The Book of Thomas the Contender (colophon) |
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III,1 |
The Apocryphon of John |
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III,2 |
The Gospel of the Egyptians |
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III,3 |
Eugnostos the Blessed |
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III,4 |
The Sophia of Jesus Christ |
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III,5 |
The Dialogue of the Savior |
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IV,1 |
The Apocryphon of John |
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IV,2 |
The Gospel of the Egyptians |
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V,1 |
Eugnostos the Blessed |
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V,2 |
The Apocalypse of Paul |
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V,3 |
The (First) Apocalypse of James |
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V,4 |
The (Second) Apocalypse of James |
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V,5 |
The Apocalypse of Adam |
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VI,1 |
The Acts of Peter and the Twelve Apostles |
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VI,2 |
The Thunder: Perfect Mind |
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VI,3 |
Authoritative Teaching |
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VI,4 |
The Concept of Our Great Power |
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VI,5 |
Plato, Republic 588b–589b |
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VI,6 |
The Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth |
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VI,7 |
The Prayer of Thanksgiving (scribal note) |
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VI,8 |
Asclepius 21–29 |
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VII,1 |
The Paraphrase of Shem |
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VII,2 |
The Second Treatise of the Great Seth |
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VII,3 |
The Apocalypse of Peter |
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VII,4 |
The Teachings of Silvanus (colophon) |
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VII,5 |
The Three Steles of Seth (colophon) |
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VIII,1 |
Zostrianos (cryptogram) |
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VIII,2 |
The Letter of Peter to Philip |
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IX,1 |
Melchizedek |
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IX,2 |
The Thought of Norea |
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IX,3 |
The Testimony of Truth |
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X,1 |
Marsanes |
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XI,1 |
The Interpretation of Knowledge |
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XI,2 |
A Valentinian Exposition |
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XI,3 |
Allogenes |
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XI,4 |
Hypsiphrone |
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XII,1 |
The Sentences of Sextus |
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XII,2 |
The Gospel of Truth |
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XII,3 |
Fragments |
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XIII,1 |
Trimorphic Protennoia |
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XIII,2 |
On the Origin of the World |
Several factors indicate that these documents came not out of a church community, but out of a rather isolated monastery in the Egyptian desert. For one thing, these documents were found at the base of a mountain where there is also evidence of a Byzantine-era grave area, including caves that were used for graves. One of these caves has an inscription in Coptic with lines from some Psalms texts. Scholars have suggested that these documents actually came from a nearby monastery but were buried several miles away because the content of these books had come under suspicion. In other words, we do not have clear evidence from these documents that there existed a separate Gnostic community.
These documents seem to have come from a Christian monastery—we know that there were several nearby—where a certain amount of speculation and open philosophical discussion was permitted. This theory of the origins of these documents is supported by the fact that the carton that came with Codex VII also contained fragments of a biblical codex, a homily, and a letter from one Pachomius, perhaps the Pachomius for whom the nearby Basilica of St. Pachomius is named. Furthermore, some of the scribal notes in some of the manuscripts show that the texts were studied by Christians. These readers inscribed pious Christian prayers in the colophons (that is, the appendices) to documents from several of the codices (I, II, and VII). Scriptoriums of monasteries were of course the main places book-copying took place in the early Middle Ages, and the monks frequently would copy all sorts of documents, without by any means necessarily endorsing all the content. We know, in fact, that the monk who was Pachomius’s successor, Theodore, undertook a purging of heretical books in A.D. 367 in response to a letter of Athanasius in that year. Possibly the Nag Hammadi codices were hastily buried by monks who objected to their destruction. This is just a plausible conjecture, however. We really don’t know what happened.
It has been suggested that these Nag Hammadi documents were not in fact in use for very long. There is material in Codex VII which shows that it was produced after A.D. 348, giving us a potential starting date, and the codices were probably placed in their storage jar somewhere in the fourth or fifth century, judging by dating of its lid. The content likewise offers clues that place the collection in that time period, particularly a document that calls itself a Valentinian exposition and several others that come from that strain of Gnosticism.
Valentinus is certainly one of the most prominent names associated with Gnosticism. He began as an orthodox monk in the second century, lost an election to be bishop, and thereafter pursued a Gnostic direction which Tertullian, a contemporary, called a lapse into heresy. His real influence came in the last third of the second century, and there is no evidence that his offshoot of early Christianity existed before the second half of that century. After his death there followed perhaps a couple of centuries of development of his line of thought before it was officially repudiated, but it is clear enough from Tertullian and Irenaeus that it was already deemed heretical by major figures in the second century.31 The fact that the Gnostics and their literature were allowed to have a hearing for a long time before the works were condemned by a widespread consensus of Christian leaders tells us something about the flexibility and fairness of early Christianity.
There are some fifty-two documents in the Nag Hammadi collection, but five are duplicates. Every one of these documents appears to be a Coptic translation of a Greek document, which suggests that they are translations from an earlier period, perhaps some of them going back to the second century. We can say this with some assurance in regard to the Gospel of Thomas, because earlier Greek fragments of this document have also been found. This is of course also true of Plato’s Republic, the Sentences of Sextus, and one other document.
One of the more crucial conclusions that has resulted from the more than half century of scholarly study of these documents is that they are not a library from a single sect or religious group of people. While most of the texts are Gnostic in their theological and philosophical leanings, not all of them can be labeled Gnostic. Instead, what unites them is their ascetical piety. Presumably they were collected to provide support and guidance for the ascetical lifestyle of monks.
Even among the documents that are clearly Gnostic there is variety. As noted earlier, some reflect Valentinian thought, the best-known form of Gnosticism. Among the documents that come from this school of thought are the Prayer of Paul, the Gospel of Truth, and most importantly for our purposes the Gospel of Philip. It is probable that the Gospel of Mary comes from this strain of Gnosticism as well, though it was not part of the Nag Hammadi collection. It first came to light in 1896 in Cairo.
Other Nag Hammadi documents subscribe to the Sethian brand of Gnosticism and the particular mythological system associated with it—namely, that Adam had a son named Seth who was the spiritual father of a Gnostic race of Sethians. Seth is portrayed as a revealer figure in this literature, which includes the Apocryphon of John, the Hypostasis of Archons, the Gospel of the Egyptians, the Apocalypse of Adam, the Three Steles of Seth, Zostrianos, Melchizedek, the Thought of Norea, Marsanes, Allogenes, and Trimorphic Protennoia.
While none of the Gnostic documents we are mainly concerned with (the gospels of Philip, Mary, and Thomas) reflect this brand of thought, these Sethian documents reveal two things important to our study: first, that Gnostic thought could be highly speculative in character, and second that it focused more on philosophical ideas than on historical events or persons. This is not a surprise since Gnosticism does not really want to underscore the importance of mundane events or processes or persons when it comes to knowledge and the consequent salvation that comes from it.
It is difficult to talk about any of these documents without giving a taste of them so that readers can see how different in character they are from the canonical gospels. Included below are a few representative samplings from various gospels (primarily Valentinian) that will give you a feel for how the texts read without narratives about the deeds of Jesus and without detailed commentary.
These documents I’ll quote from, like other Gnostic documents, see self-knowledge as the essence of salvation, and indeed even appear to urge the worship of human beings. The Gospel of Philip 85:1–4, for example, says, “God created man and man created God. So it is in the world. Men make gods and they worship their creations. It would be fitting for gods to worship men.”32 This is not, in fact, a critique of idolatry. It is the divine within human beings that seems to be the ultimate object of worship. Furthermore, the flaws that exist in creation are blamed on some malignant deity—perhaps the so-called Demiurge, which is a lesser god who made the tainted material realm. Human sin is not to blame for the tainted character of creation. Not surprisingly, in this system of thinking it is ignorance, not sin, that is the ultimate human dilemma.
Showing how very different Gnosticism as presented in the Gospel of Philip is from the claims of the canonical gospels is not difficult. Consider, for example, the following quote from the Gospel of Philip:
Some said, “Mary conceived by the Holy Spirit.” They are in error. They do not know what they are saying. When did a woman ever conceive by a woman? Mary is the virgin whom no power defiled. She is a great anathema to the Hebrews, who are the apostles and the apostolic men. This virgin whom no power defiled […] the powers defile themselves. And the Lord would not have said “My Father who is in Heaven” [a text paralleled in Matt. 16:17] unless he had had another father, but he would have said simply “My father.”
This quote identifies the Holy Spirit as a woman and implies that Jesus had a human father. It also shows the anti-Semitic flavor that permeates these documents. Being a Hebrew was not seen as a good thing. Notice as well an allusion to Mary being a perpetual virgin. This document clearly reflects knowledge of what the canonical gospels and later traditions claim, but its author is not afraid to contradict those sources in various important ways. For example, in regard to the resurrection of Jesus we hear: “Those who say that the Lord died first and [then] rose up are in error, for he rose up first and [then] died. If one does not first attain the resurrection, he will not die. As God lives, he would […].” This passage affirms the idea of preexistence, not only of Christ but of other humans. The putting on of flesh referred to here is what took place when one became a human being. Resurrection in the flesh is redefined as human conception leading to physical birth.
Consider, too, the Gospel of Philip:
Some are afraid lest they rise naked. Because of this they wish to rise in the flesh, and they do not know that it is those who wear the flesh who are naked. It is those who […] unclothe themselves who are not naked. “Flesh and blood shall not inherit the kingdom of God” [1 Cor. 15:50]. What is this which will not inherit? This which is on us. But what is this, too, which will inherit? It is that which belongs to Jesus and his blood. Because of this he said, “He who shall not eat my flesh and drink my blood has not life in him” [John 6:53]. What is it? His flesh is the word, and his blood is the Holy Spirit. He who has received these has food and he has drink and clothing.
Notice that this passage includes a quote from Paul and from the Gospel of John. There are also quotations from Matthew’s gospel and from the extracanonical Gospel of Thomas. Clearly this document was written later than New Testament times.
More telling for our purposes is the following quote, which refers to Mary Magdalene:
For it is by a kiss that the perfect conceive and give birth. For this reason we also kiss one another. We receive conception from the grace which is in one another.
There were three who always walked with the Lord: Mary, his mother, and her sister, and Magdalene, the one who was called his companion. His sister and his mother and his companion were each a Mary.
This passage is followed by another, the Gospel of Philip 63:32–36, which has gained notoriety in Dan Brown’s bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code.
As for the Wisdom who is called “the barren,” she is the mother of the angels. And the companion of the […] Mary Magdalene. […] loved her more than [all] the disciples, and [used to] kiss her often on her […]. The rest of the disciples […]. They said to him, “Why do you love her more than all of us?” The Savior answered and said to them, “Why do I not love you like her? When a blind man and one who sees are both together in darkness, they are no different from one another. When the light comes, then he who sees will see the light, and he who is blind will remain in darkness.”
What needs to be said about this text can be summarized quickly:
The Gnostics believed that, since creation is a fallen enterprise from the outset, normal human forms of relating, such as marriage and intercourse, are seen as inherently defiling, as the Gospel of Philip makes evident.
No one can know when the husband and the wife have intercourse with one another, except the two of them. Indeed, marriage in the world is a mystery for those who have taken a wife. If there is a hidden quality to the marriage of defilement, how much more is the undefiled marriage a true mystery! It is not fleshly, but pure. It belongs not to desire, but to the will. It belongs not to the darkness or the night, but to the day and the light. If a marriage is open to the public, it has become prostitution, and the bride plays the harlot not only when she is impregnated by another man, but even if she slips out of her bedroom and is seen.
As we have stressed, salvation in this system of thinking is a matter of knowing the right things, as is clear in the Gospel of Philip:
He who has knowledge of the truth is a free man, but the free man does not sin, for “He who sins is the slave of sin” [John 8:34]. Truth is the mother, knowledge the father. Those who think that sinning does not apply to them are called “free” by the world. Knowledge of the truth merely makes such people arrogant, which is what the words “it makes them free” mean. It even gives them a sense of superiority over the whole world. But “Love builds up” [1 Cor. 8:1]. In fact, he who is really free, through knowledge, is a slave, because of love for those who have not yet been able to attain to the freedom of knowledge. Knowledge makes them capable of becoming free.
Before I comment on any of these texts in more detail, let’s look at a sampling of material from the Gospel of Mary as well. This document has been more difficult to piece together because there are two different Greek recensions, and in fact the text is in poor condition.33 There is also the problem that the Coptic and Greek versions don’t match up. The Coptic version has Mary’s reaction to Peter’s rejection of her revelation (18:1–5); the Greek does not. P. Perkins, suggests, I think rightly, that this gospel was composed toward the end of the second century A.D., as was the Gospel of Philip, based on the fact that the Greek version is from the third century. Once again there is absolutely no historical evidence that this text, and its special interests, has its origins in the first century. Rather, it is the product of the Gnostic movement that arose in the second century.
Like various other Gnostic texts, such as the Apocryphon of John and the Sophia of Jesus Christ, the Gospel of Mary centers on the motif of the risen Jesus instructing the disciples in the esoteric and secret Gnostic teachings. Like so much of this literature, it proposes a strong rejection of the goodness of the material realm. Whatever has a material origin, the document claims, is subject to passion, disease, decay, death, and evil. The Gnostic believer, by contrast, has a spiritual point of origin and thus is not to participate in physical passions (7:1–8:10). The male disciples are commissioned, in this account, to spread the Gnostic version of the gospel, but they give way to despair because of the fear of suffering.
Mary Magdalene shames them, reminding them of God’s grace and protection. They already have the true Gnostic identity, she says. That process is defined in the Gospel of Philip as “putting on the perfect man,” but the Gospel of Mary says, “He has prepared us and made us into men,” a phrase that harks back to the Gospel of Thomas 114, which we discussed earlier in this chapter. Notice that Mary says she too has been made into a man. Lest we think these texts are somehow feminist-friendly, this phrase reminds us that this is not so. There seems to be an assumption, however, that men have more difficulty struggling with physical passions, and so women can sometimes be better examples of the true ascetic and thus the true Gnostic.
Mary, in this account, is asked by Peter to recount the vision or revelation she has received. This section of the manuscript is mutilated, and so we do not have it all. But what we do have entails a teaching about the mind being the intermediary between the soul and spirit to receive the Gnostic revelation, and it speaks of how the soul ascends past the cosmic powers on its way to heaven, the place of rest (15:1–17:9). Hence Mary has insight into the destiny of the soul enlightened by Gnostic wisdom. When Peter objects to this teaching, Levi rebukes him. There is a similar defense of Mary’s revelation in the Gospel of Philip, as we have seen, as well as in Pistis Sophia.
What are we to make of this material? Should we see such texts as an indirect testimony to women teachers in Gnostic circles? This is possible. Should we see Peter as representing orthodox Christianity’s voice, which objected to such Gnostic revelations? Perhaps so.
But what this text does not suggest is that Peter objected to the fact of Mary having some kind of revelation. The issue here is the substance of her teaching. In other words, it is doubtful that these texts attest to the banning of women teachers within orthodox Christianity. In the first place, these documents arose at the same time as we have clear testimony to women playing prominent roles in early Christianity, including being exemplary martyrs. The famous story of the martyrdom of Perpetua (told in the Acts of Perpetua and Felicitas) under the reign of Septimus Severus when there was a great persecution (A.D. 303–312) comes to mind. These events and their recounting came after or about the same time that these Gnostic documents were written.
It is of course true that there was opposition to women assuming teaching and preaching roles during and after the second century A.D., both inside and outside the orthodox churches. In the story of Paul and Thecla (from the second century), Thecla must in essence renounce her gendered identity and commit herself to absolute chastity to do ministry, but the same thing can be said of the women discussed in these Gnostic documents.
Not only are these Gnostic books not likely sources for the theory that Mary Magdalene was married, they are not very useful sources for the modern feminist agenda, because they do not attest to the equality of women and men in Gnostic circles. As we saw, women had to become “perfect men” to be accepted, and this entailed renouncing their physical identity. In other words, Gnostics were no less patriarchal in the way they thought about perfection than non-Gnostics were. Its just that they were not prepared to affirm the goodness of any created or fleshly identity!
Gnostic scholar Karen King seeks to make a case for Mary Magdalene being identified with Wisdom in the Gospel of Philip, which would imply that Mary is the mother of angels and the spiritual sister of Jesus, and indeed his female counterpart. However, that theory doesn’t seem to be supported by either canonical scripture or the Gospel of Mary. Wisdom in the canonical gospels is something Jesus is said to embody, and in the Old Testament it is a personified attribute of God, Yahweh (Prov. 3, 8, 9). In the Gospel of Mary, Mary Magdalene, though clearly privy to a special revelation from God, is not divinized or touted as some sort of female deity named Sophia. No, in that Gnostic account Mary as a female disciple puts the male disciples to shame; and they, having been shamed, go out and evangelize as good male apostles were supposed to do. In other words, Mary is used as a shaming device, perhaps to exhort male Gnostic ascetics to get on with the Great Commission—only in this case Gnostic Wisdom is the Gospel they are to spread.
At the end of the day, Gnostic literature is no friend to women in the Christian tradition. Why then have the more radical feminist scholars gravitated toward it, rather than toward the New Testament itself? The latter affirms a variety of roles for women, including teaching and prophesying (see, for example, Acts 18, with its description of Priscilla, and 1 Cor. 11).34 The answer in part is given in a moment of candor by Elaine Pagels when she says that her study of Gnostic literature has helped her “clarify what I cannot love: the tendency to identify Christianity with a single authorized set of beliefs however these actually vary from church to church—coupled with the conviction that Christian belief alone offers access to God.”35
This amazing remark is highly ironic. When you read the Gnostic documents, you discover that these folks are just as dogmatic as any of the orthodox Christians—indeed, often more so! They insist that you must have the Gnostic wisdom or your soul will not ascend to heaven. They are not early advocates of modern religious pluralism, and they should not be made the poster children for such a modern crusade. When it comes to Gnostics and Christians, we are dealing with dueling versions of the truth about God, creation, revelation, salvation, and a host of other subjects. Even in the Gospel of Thomas we find not a parallel to modern religious pluralism (which is a sort of Live and let live philosophy), but rather a syncretism of Jewish, Christian, and pagan ideas as if all were equally valid and valuable sources of truth, an attitude that early Jews and Christians of the New Testament did not share.
Both the Christians and the Gnostics saw themselves as serving up mutually exclusive truth claims, and both thought they offered the one way to salvation and the true knowledge of God. They were right about the issue of mutual exclusivity: both of these belief systems could be false, but both could not be true, nor could both be meaningfully or accurately called Christian. According to our earliest sources—that is, the New Testament documents—being Christian entails affirming the goodness of creation, of the incarnation of God in Jesus, of the death and bodily resurrection of Jesus, and of salvation by grace through faith in the atoning death of Jesus, with salvation being for everyone, not just the intellectuals; it’s more a matter of whom you trust than how much you know.
Instead of listening to Elaine Pagels or Karen King about this complex and confusing Gnostic literature, we would do better to heed the Eastern Orthodox scholar Frederica Matthewes-Green. She stresses that the rebuttal of orthodox Christians to the Gnostics was that the latter were playing fast and loose with the historical record about early Christianity, and in fact were letting their philosophical speculations lead them to engage in revisionist history as well as revisionist theology.
The problem wasn’t the insistence that we can directly experience God. It was that Gnostics’ schemes of how to do this were so wacky. Preposterous stories about creation, angels, demons, and spiritual hierarchies multiplied like mushrooms…. The version attributed to Valentinus, the best known Gnostic, is typical. Valentinus supposedly taught a hierarchy of spiritual beings called ‘aeons’. One of the lowest aeons, Sophia, fell and gave birth to the Demiurge, the God of the Hebrew Scriptures. This evil Demiurge created the visible world, which was a bad thing, because now we pure spirits are all tangled up in fleshy bodies. Christ was an aeon who took possession of the body of the human Jesus, and came to free us from the prison of materiality. ‘Us’ by the way did not mean everybody. Not all people have a divine spark within, just intellectuals: ‘gnosis’, by definition, concerns what you know. Some few who are able to grasp these insights could be initiated into deeper mysteries. Ordinary Christians, who lacked sufficient brainpower, could only attain the Demiurge’s middle realm. Everyone else was doomed. Under Gnosticism, there was no hope of salvation for most of the human race.36
This is hardly literature that might or should comfort the marginalized or the oppressed. To the contrary, it is intellectually arrogant and elitist to the core. Furthermore, it hardly differs in dogmatism from the Christianity Pagels complains about, and as we saw earlier it is tainted by occasionally blatant anti-Semitism. At times, like that other second-century heretic Marcion and his writings, it repudiates both the God of the Hebrew scriptures and those scriptures themselves. But Gnosticism’s most egregious flaw lies in the notion that salvation is a human self-help program or an exercise in which one pursues self-knowledge and self-awareness. Gnosticism repudiates the Christian belief that history, not just esoteric knowledge, matters, and that salvation was wrought outside of human musings and machinations, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, through his death and bodily resurrection. Gnostic literature attests just how far wrong one can go when one untethers one’s theological reflections from their grounding in historical events and persons. In fact, one can go all the way to pantheism if one pursues the earliest form of the Gnostic agenda far enough—the notion that there is a little bit of the divine in all things and persons.
In light of the evidence of the primary sources themselves, it is puzzling why scholars such as Elaine Pagels, Karen King, Stephen Patterson, Marvin Meyer, and James Robinson would find this material so exciting. None of them are actually ascetics like the original Gnostics, nor have they withdrawn from the world and anathematized the goodness of things material. Frankly, the Old Gnostics would have repudiated the new ones, and would even have rejected their revisionist take on Christian history, seeing it as an unnecessary enterprise. Focusing on real history and real events in space and time would not have been spiritual or philosophical enough for the old Gnostics; it would have been a good example of failing to transcend the material realm that nurtures and supports us all.
These scholars seem to be engaged in creating a new myth of origins, one that better suits their own more anthropocentric approaches to religion. This is only conjecture, but it makes some sense of why certain scholars would so strongly embrace literature that is not in accord with their personal agendas or consonant with their personal lifestyles. It is a tragic form of grasping at straws, because these scholars are left with no viable alternative than to reject the whole of early Christianity and its history, lock, stock, and barrel. They’re throwing all that away for nothing, because only an argument from silence can suggest that these later Gnostic variants from early Christianity were actually extant in the first century. There is no hard evidence to support such a claim unless Thomas provides it; and as we have seen, Thomas is most likely a second-century document reflecting back on the literature of the apostolic era.
It is striking to me that scholars who try to rewrite the history of early Christianity by privileging later documents and marginalizing earlier ones often ignore altogether such early Christian documents as the Didache, 1 Clement, the Epistle of Barnabas, Hermas, and even the letters of Ignatius, all of which come from the late first or early second century. Why? Precisely because these documents pursue the historical and theological trajectories found within the earlier documents—which is to say, the documents we now find in the New Testament. Barnabas is a profoundly Jewish document, 1 Clement echoes Paul’s 1 Corinthians, Hermas continues in the tradition of Revelation’s Jewish-Christian apocalypticism, and so on.
These noncanonical documents do not offer up wild and outlandish philosophy as an attempt to de-Judaize and de-eschatologize the early Jesus tradition or syncretize it with later pagan and ascetical notions. In short, these extracanonical documents do not support the notion that earliest Christianity was as intellectually broad-minded as these revisionist historians would like us to think. There were boundaries of belief and behavior even in the first century, boundaries beyond which Jesus’s followers knew they should not go; and the Gnostic documents clearly crossed those boundaries in various ways. As it turns out, the lost Christianities so often touted today were not so much lost as abandoned for good reasons. They were not suppressed because they offered an alternative, earlier, and truer version of Christian origins; they were tried and found wanting because they betrayed the essentially Jewish monotheistic, eschatological character of Jesus and his movement.
So should we despair of learning anything new about Jesus or his earliest followers these days? I would say no. The actual original mother lode, found in the New Testament, still has not been mined for all its worth. This study seeks to begin to unearth that great treasure. There is, however, one more set of traditions about Mary Magdalene of a non-Gnostic nature from an even later period that deserves our attention.
THE LEGENDARY MARY MAGDALENE
Last but not least, there are a surprising number of medieval stories about Mary Magdalene, some of which have a little basis in the New Testament and others of which have none whatsoever. For example, in the Golden Legend (1.374–83) from the eighth century, Mary is called the first apostle—indeed, the “apostle to the apostles.” She is said to be the beautiful, long-haired daughter of wealthy parents and the sister of Martha and Lazarus. Another story has her betrothed to John the Evangelist, but she loses him to the service of Jesus; after she is healed of her diseases, she also joins Jesus’s service. As a quasi-apostle she then undertakes a career in missionary work, going first to Ephesus and then to Marseilles, where she preaches the faith along with Martha and Lazarus. The Golden Legend goes on to have Lazarus become the bishop of that city after Mary Magdalene converts the local pagan ruler and his wife and enables them to conceive a child.
This tradition varies greatly from another medieval tradition about Mary Magdalene. In that version she spends thirty years doing penance near Marseilles as one of the seventy-two disciples who went with her to convert pagans in that region. According to this tradition Mary dies there after receiving final Communion from angels. She is then interred at Vezelay in Burgundy, where her shrine and her corpse become a prime source of relics. The twelfth-century Basilica of “la Madeleine” has long been a popular pilgrimage center.
Once again, unfortunately, in these traditions Mary Magdalene’s story is amalgamated with the story of the sinner woman of Luke 7:36–50 or John 7:53–8:11 (or both), as in Mel Gibson’s recent movie The Passion of the Christ.37
The unbelievable and unhistorical nature of many of these traditions does not mean that none of them has any basis in fact; but clearly such later traditions have to be examined with an extremely critical eye, especially when they do not seem to have any analogues or precursors in traditions that go back as far as the second century. We can say that to the extent that such traditions highlight what is already present in our earliest witnesses to the life of Mary Magdalene in the canonical texts, they have some basis in truth. For example, Mary certainly was the first proclaimer of the Easter gospel, the “Good News.” But to the extent that they depart from our earliest witnesses, they are not to be trusted. They should be seen as hagiography at best, and as a tendentious misuse of the Mary traditions to further certain later agendas at worst.
WHAT WE’VE LEARNED AND WHAT THAT KNOWLEDGE TELLS US ABOUT JESUS
We have examined two remarkable women and their legacy in this section of our book. The first of them, Joanna, was actually called an apostle in her lifetime. The second was later described as such by church fathers. While the biblical Joanna did not spawn later legends, the Mary Magdalene tradition clearly did so, chiefly because of John 20—a text that presents us with the woman who was the first person to encounter the risen Jesus on Easter. The remarkable nature of these women as witnesses is in no way diminished by the fact that we learn nothing historical or substantive about them, or about their relationship with Jesus or the inner circle of disciples, from the later Gnostic or medieval materials. But those later materials do confirm what we already knew about Mary Magdalene from the New Testament: she was important as a woman who witnessed and proclaimed the Good News.
Joanna and Mary Magdalene were important because they were among the first female disciples of any Jewish sage in early Judaism; because of the sacrifices they made to bear witness to the gospel message, despite rejection and even imprisonment in the case of Joanna/Junia, and because they remind us that the inner circle of Jesus did not involve just men, much less just the Twelve. Jesus’s inner circle was an odd collection of family and non-family members, both men and women. Lastly, these women are important because they set a remarkable precedent for women after them to discover the Good News and learn how to share it despite dispute and rejection and suffering. This in itself is more than enough to celebrate. We do not need the later Gnostic myths and medieval legends to gild these lilies. Joanna and Mary were already courageous saints in their own day.
But what does this fascinating material tell us about Jesus himself? First, it affirms the resurrection story as told in the New Testament. When these women, caught up in grief and in the rituals of burial, went to the tomb on Easter Sunday morning, the last thing they expected to see was a risen Jesus! They went to anoint the body, not worship the Lord. The most reasonable explanation for the stories we have in the gospels and other faith documents about these women having seen the risen Lord is that they did in fact see him, and that experience caused a revolution in their thinking and in the direction of their lives. Before they had been devoted followers of Jesus; now they were commissioned to be leaders and proclaimers of the Easter news, first to the Twelve and then to the wider world. It was Jesus himself who commissioned them for this, and indeed it was the appearances of the risen Jesus that made possible their transition from follower to leader.
As noted earlier, in a patriarchal culture like that of the early Jewish and Greco-Roman world, no one would have made up a story about a hero who appeared after death to some grieving women and use it as the basis of a new religious movement, unless one is pressed to do so by the witness of history. No, the stories run that way because that’s how it happened: Joanna and Mary Magdalene believed they saw and even touched the risen Jesus, and thus I believe he actually appeared to them and was alive and tangible. From the very beginnings of the post-Easter Jesus movement, there was a profound conviction that Jesus was indeed the risen Lord—a conviction that grew because he clearly, convincingly, and in various places and ways and to various persons presented himself in the flesh. Certainly neither Mary nor Joanna would have continued to be a disciple of Jesus if something had not happened after the crucifixion, nor would either have become an “apostle to the apostles.” This in turn has consequences for what we think about the historical Jesus and earliest Christianity.
The Easter experience of Joanna and Mary refutes attempts to create a gap between the historical Jesus and the risen Christ of faith, perhaps even a gap of many years. Such attempts simply will not work, historically speaking. The people who were in the inner circle of Jesus are the very people who were the earliest eyewitnesses of the risen Lord. They weren’t all victims of mass amnesia or hallucination after the crucifixion. To the contrary, they had clarifying experiences that confirmed and indeed amplified what they had already believed about Jesus before Golgotha. They had faith in Jesus before he died, and they continued to have faith in him thereafter—no disconnect there. They did not exchange one set of beliefs for another, but expanded their understanding of the original things they believed about Jesus. Paul tells us that these same Aramaic-speaking followers prayed to Jesus after he ascended, using the Aramaic phrase “Marana tha”—“Come, O Lord” (1 Cor. 16:22). They would not have prayed to a deceased rabbi to come back, though they might have hoped for his resurrection in due course. But believing that Jesus was the divine Lord, they prayed to him to come once more.
These remarkable messianic beliefs about Jesus, uttered first by Mary and Joanna and then shared with other monotheistic Jews—beliefs about Jesus being both human and more than human, someone who rightly could be worshipped and prayed to—did not arise out of thin air or wishful thinking on the part of postapostolic Christians of a later era. These beliefs, or at least some form and aspect of them, already existed in the inner circle of Jesus at least as early as Easter if not before.
The second thing these stories tell us is that the witnesses to the risen Jesus, both women and men, were not just watchers on Easter, confirming their own faith in Jesus; they believed they were commissioned to bear witness about these things. In other words, just as Jesus had sent his disciples out in pairs to bear witness during his ministry, so also did he spread the news about himself after the crucifixion. What sort of Jewish person would do this in a tradition-bound culture—a profoundly monotheistic culture at that? The options are only two: an extreme megalomaniac (and thus someone demented), or someone who had an exalted self-understanding and sense of importance. Jesus was the latter: he acknowledged that he was the Jewish messiah and king before he died, he was crucified for that treasonous acknowledgment, and he presented himself as the risen Lord thereafter.
If you recognize the genuineness of the testimony of Mary and Joanna, and realize that they became apostles, bearing witness to the risen Jesus, you have to recognize certain facts about the historical Jesus. He did not just present himself as a great teacher, a wise sage, a miracle worker, an exorcist. This inner circle knew better than that, and they were faithful to say so after the fact. The Jesus about whom the earliest disciples bore witness was and is the real Jesus of history and faith. The impact crater in the lives of these disciples, male and female, matches up with the impression Jesus deliberately left on these persons, as we will see in more detail as we turn now to Peter.