![]() ![]() Equally important, there are three unnamed women who are expressly identified as sexual sinners-the woman with a “bad name” who wipes Jesus’ feet with ointment as a signal of repentance, a Samaritan woman whom Jesus meets at a well and an adulteress whom Pharisees haul before Jesus to see if he will condemn her. There is Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and Mary the wife of Clopas. But there is Mary of Bethany, sister of Martha and Lazarus. There are several Marys-not least, of course, Mary the mother of Jesus. In the gospels several women come into the story of Jesus with great energy, including erotic energy. ![]() Her recent reemergence in a novel and film as the secret wife of Jesus and the mother of his fate-burdened daughter shows that the conscripting and twisting are still going on.īut, in truth, the confusion starts with the Gospels themselves. In conflicts that defined the Christian Church-over attitudes toward the material world, focused on sexuality the authority of an all-male clergy the coming of celibacy the branding of theological diversity as heresy the sublimations of courtly love the unleashing of “chivalrous” violence the marketing of sainthood, whether in the time of Constantine, the Counter-Reformation, the Romantic era, or the Industrial Age-through all of these, reinventions of Mary Magdalene played their role. On that false note hangs the dual use to which her legend has been put ever since: discrediting sexuality in general and disempowering women in particular.Ĭonfusions attached to Mary Magdalene’s character were compounded across time as her image was conscripted into one power struggle after another, and twisted accordingly. Mary Magdalene in which the most consequential note-that she was a repentant prostitute-is almost certainly untrue. Beginning with the threads of these few statements in the earliest Christian records, dating to the first through third centuries, an elaborate tapestry was woven, leading to a portrait of St. This prominence derived from the intimacy of her relationship with Jesus, which, according to some accounts, had a physical aspect that included kissing. From other texts of the early Christian era, it seems that her status as an “apostle,” in the years after Jesus’ death, rivaled even that of Peter. ![]() These are among the few specific assertions made about Mary Magdalene in the Gospels. She was present at the tomb, the first person to whom Jesus appeared after his resurrection and the first to preach the “Good News” of that miracle. When the men in that company abandoned him at the hour of mortal danger, Mary of Magdala was one of the women who stayed with him, even to the Crucifixion. Who was she? From the New Testament, one can conclude that Mary of Magdala (her hometown, a village on the shore of the Sea of Galilee) was a leading figure among those attracted to Jesus. How the past is remembered, how sexual desire is domesticated, how men and women negotiate their separate impulses how power inevitably seeks sanctification, how tradition becomes authoritative, how revolutions are co-opted how fallibility is reckoned with, and how sweet devotion can be made to serve violent domination-all these cultural questions helped shape the story of the woman who befriended Jesus of Nazareth. In one age after another her image was reinvented, from prostitute to sibyl to mystic to celibate nun to passive helpmeet to feminist icon to the matriarch of divinity’s secret dynasty. Yet she was only elusively identified in Scripture, and has thus served as a scrim onto which a succession of fantasies has been projected. For many centuries the most obsessively revered of saints, this woman became the embodiment of Christian devotion, which was defined as repentance. The whole history of western civilization is epitomized in the cult of Mary Magdalene. ![]()
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