AUCKLAND, New Zealand (NZ Catholic) – She’s been denounced as a fallen woman, described as “a victim of mistaken identity for almost 20 centuries” and suggested as a likely candidate for “the patron of the slandered.” She’s been depicted in art and literature through the ages, and now – thanks to The Da Vinci Code – Mary Magdalene has emerged into the limelight again as the alleged wife of Christ and co-founder of an arcane dynasty at odds with the institutional church and its beliefs.
To Dan Brown, author of the fictional The Da Vinci Code and no stranger to exaggerated claims, she is the victim of a church-orchestrated smear campaign in “the greatest cover-up in human history.”
To the church, however, St. Mary Magdalene is an honored saint. She is celebrated as the first recorded witness of Christ’s resurrection and – whether a forgiven prostitute or not – is venerated as the “apostle to
the apostles.”
Apart from the Virgin Mary, few women are more highly esteemed in the Bible, which offers no conclusive evidence that she was a prostitute.
Confusion over her identity arises from references to three Marys in the gospels:
• First, the specifically named Mary Magdalene, one of the women “who had been cured of evil spirits and ailments” and who accompanied Christ on his preaching mission, providing for him and the apostles “out of their own resources” (Lk 8:2-3).
She is named as “watching from a distance” during the crucifixion and observing Christ’s burial (Mk 15:40, 47). When the Sabbath was over, she was one of the women who bought spices for anointing, but found the tomb empty (Mk 16:1-8). Mary returned later and “saw Jesus standing there” but thought he was the gardener; she recognized him only when he spoke her name (Jn 20:15-16).
On Christ’s instruction, she “went and told the disciples that she had seen the Lord” (Jn 20:17-18). “But they did not believe her when they heard her say that he was alive and that she had seen him” (Mk 16:11).
Christ had earlier “cast out seven devils” from Mary Magdalene (Mk 16:9) but the New Catholic Encyclopedia says this expression “probably describes a violent and chronic nervous disorder, rather than a sinful state.”
Her surname derives either from Magdala, a fishing village on the west shore of the Sea of Galilee, about 6 kilometers (4 miles) north of Tiberias, or possibly from an expression meaning “curling women’s hair,” which the Jewish Talmud explains as signifying an adulteress.
• Second, an unnamed penitent woman “who had a bad name in the town” (Lk 7:37). She entered a Pharisee’s home where Jesus was dining, wept over his feet and dried them with her hair, then covered his feet with kisses and anointed them with ointment; Jesus told the Pharisee that “her sins, her many sins, must have been forgiven her, or she would not have shown such great love” (Lk 7:37-47).
• Third, Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus. While Jesus was at dinner in their house, Mary anointed his feet with costly ointment and wiped them with her hair (Jn 12:3). A similar action to that of the anonymous penitent, but the same woman? We cannot be certain.
In the West, particularly following a homily of Pope St Gregory the Great in 591, all three identities were united in the person of St. Mary Magdalene. In the East they remained distinct, with St. Mary Magdalene and St. Mary of Bethany having separate feast days.
A revision of the Roman calendar in 1969 accepted the Eastern tradition of all three being different women.
For The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown mined a rich lore of pseudo-Christian texts from heretical Gnostic writers dating back to the first and third centuries after Christ – texts that were rejected from the official canon of sacred scripture because of their unreliable authors and fictitious stories.
Brown has Mary Magdalene participating in the Last Supper, marrying Jesus and bearing at least one child, whose descendants formed a French royal dynasty in the Middle Ages that continues to the present day. The book accuses the church of suppressing this secret, which has been kept through the centuries by a shadowy cult, called the Priory of Sion.
According to the “Jesus Decoded” Web site (www.jesusdecoded.com), recently launched by the Catholic Communication Campaign of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the claims made about Mary Magdalene on the basis of the Gnostic texts “cannot be taken seriously.”
“First, the Gnostic writings are historically more distant from the time of the apostles and written significantly later than the four New Testament gospels.
“Second, the prominence of Mary as a disciple and her closeness to Jesus are confirmed by the gospels, not evaded by them. At the same time, at no point do they offer any support for the gratuitous assertion that Jesus and Mary were married.”
And what really became of Mary Magdalene? According to tradition, she
retired to Ephesus with the Virgin Mary and died there. Her alleged relics were transferred to a monastery in Constantinople in the ninth century.
Numerous other popular, but unreliable, legends exist – including that she traveled miraculously with Martha and several others to France in an oarless boat and converted the whole of Provence.
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Pat McCarthy is the associate editor of the NZ Catholic.
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