[Vision2020] Was Mary Magdlene a Missionary in France after the First Easter?

Tue Apr 22 11:02:59 PDT 2014

Dear Visionaries:

Christians in Europe celebrated 2nd Easter Day yesterday (and they just had
an entire week off last week!), and now I'm celebrating 3rd Easter Day.

Legends have it that after that first Easter, Mary Magdalene boarded a boat
that eventually landed in France in AD 42, where she continued her
Christian ministry.

St. Augustine, one of the greatest orthodox theologians, called her the
"apostle to the apostles," and many medieval theologians followed Augustine
in granting Mary this exalted title.  After all, Paul defined apostleship
as any person who had seen the risen Christ (1 Cor. 9:1).

Continue reading below. The longer version is attached as a PDF file.

Just trying to make Christianity and the study of religion even more
interesting than it already is,

Nick

*MARY MAGDALENE: APOSTLE TO THE APOSTLES*

Legends have it that after that first Easter, Mary Magdalene boarded a boat
that eventually landed in France in AD 42, where she continued her
Christian ministry.

St. Augustine, one of the greatest orthodox theologians, called her the
"apostle to the apostles," and many medieval theologians followed Augustine
in granting Mary this exalted title.  After all, Paul defined apostleship
as any person who had seen the risen Christ (1 Cor. 9:1).

Mary was one of the most remarkable women in the Bible. She is described as
an independent woman, who "provided for [Jesus and the disciples] out of
[her] means" (Lk. 8:2-3).

It took two millennia for the Catholic Church to dispose of the long
standing myth that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute. In 1969 the Church
indirectly removed the stain of her alleged sins by assigning new
scriptural readings for her saint's day on July 22.

Passages from the erotic Song of Songs are no longer read, and the passage
from Luke 7:37-38 about "a woman from the city, who was a sinner" is also
deleted.  Catholics now read the poignant passages from the Book of John
(20:1-2, 11-18), in which Mary is the first to see and talk with the risen
Christ.

The story of Magdalene as a prostitute was the result of mistakenly
identifying Magdalene with Mary of Bethany (John 12:1) and an unknown woman
"who was a sinner" (Luke 7:37-38), both of whom took oil and bathed Jesus'
feet with their hair.

This conflation of New Testament women was made official in a famous sermon
by Pope Gregory I in 591, and was imprinted in millions of Christian minds
with paintings of the penitent Mary Magdalene with loose red hair carrying
an alabaster jar of ointment.

Gregory's claim that Mary had "turned the mass of her crimes to virtues"
presents to all Christians, as Susan Haskins explains, "the redeemed whore
and Christianity's model of repentance, a manageable, controllable figure,
and effective weapon and instrument of propaganda against her own sex."

In the Eastern Orthodox Church Mary was never identified as a prostitute;
indeed, they have her preaching in Rome, even before the emperor himself.

In the Jewish tradition anointing someone with oil is a ritual for making
that person a messiah (an "anointed one"), and the priests of Israel and
even King Cyrus were messiahs (Is. 45:1). So perhaps it is Luke's unnamed
woman who officially makes Jesus the Messiah.

In Matthew's account of this story, the woman is not a sinner, and Jesus
praises her by predicting that "wherever this gospel is preached in the
whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her" (26:13).

Matthew and John see the woman's anointment not as messiahship but as
preparation of Jesus' body for burial, an equally important sacred ritual.  In
the ancient Near East anointing with oil was a priestess's job, so it is
not surprising that New Testament women play this significant role.

Women in the early church played significant roles.  Single women traveled
and preached with Paul as equals; and Priscilla, who was later martyred and
canonized, had a church in her home.

John Mark's mother also hosted some of the earliest Christian worship in
her home.  In her book *When Women Were Priest*s, Karen Torjesen offers
strong evidence that women officiated at the Eucharist in these early
Christian services.

Returning to Mary Magdalene, we need to address the question of why so many
women and men are now identifying so fervently with her. Diane
Apostolos-Cappadona may have the answer: "[Mary] was an independent woman .
. . . she didn't need a child, she didn't need a husband. . . . She becomes
the preacher, the missionary, the evangelist, the healer, the miracle
worker. . . . These are the things that attract people to her."

Nick Gier religion and philosophy at the University of Idaho for 31 years.
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