Matthew, Mark, Luke …and Mary?

The woman who sits quietly writing already has known the greatest love, and because of that love has also endured the greatest loss. She writes from the depths, both of her love and of her wisdom, which is the wisdom of the inner ways taught to her as the one worthy to receive such precious knowledge. And she also writes from her own first-hand experience as a witness to the events which she relates, and from the wellsprings of insight which are uniquely hers. The woman does not know, nor can she know, the cruel twists of the invented history about her that is to come. And perhaps that is as well, for were she to know these things, even her great spirit might falter.

A yawning gulf stretches between the Mary Magdalene who shows us a wisdom and nobility of spirit as revealed in the original texts about – and possibly actually by – her, and the redeemed woman of former ill repute perpetuated by the Church. My imagined portrait of Mary features a fragment of the surviving Gospel of Mary in the background: a text which presents us with a radically different version from the Mary of the Church.

Mary, the Magdalene, writes in ink on papyrus the [1]Gnostic declaration: In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. This text written in her own [2]hand has no title. It is simply a manuscript. But its spiritual clarity and emotional intensity, and the immediacy of the events which it describes will ensure that it remains one which is read, copied and circulated.

This original text will be lost to history, but some fifty years later other hands less tolerant, and perhaps more jealous, of a mere woman’s authorship of such wisdom will radically amend her text, altering it to seem as if a man had written her words – a simple matter for a copyist to alter ‘she’ to ‘he’, apparently to make it acceptable to the new orthodoxy. The text itself clearly tells us that it was written by the [3]‘disciple whom Jesus loved’, the orthodox assumption being that this is John. And there are indeed two points in the narrative where both Mary Magdalene and this unnamed ‘beloved disciple’ appear in the same scene: at the foot of the cross, and at the tomb following the Resurrection. Yet it is precisely at these points in the story that the narrative appears to stumble, [4]contradicting itself as to exactly who was where, and when. It is as if an unknown hand is shuffling the deck in the middle of the deal, attempting to shoehorn events to fit the changed context.

The weeping Magdalene outside the tomb, as portrayed in the 19th-century by Antonio Ciseri. In the fourth Gospel Mary is described as simultaneously running away from the tomb and remaining behind at the tomb alone: an impossibility of circumstance which only can be reconciled if the ‘disciple whom Jesus loved’ and John are not the same person. Mary’s luxuriant loose tresses were the traditional artistic means of signalling her status as a former prostitute.

And the Magdalene herself? Already ciphered away as the true author of the text, this most wise of the original disciples now becomes demoted and reinvented by the triumphant forces of orthodoxy to be portrayed, not as one of Jesus’ inner circle, but as a mere follower and a former whore. The fact that scripture never actually describes her in such terms seems of little consequence. Such tactics are not unknown to the Church, which already has reinvented such apparently pro-Gnostic writers as [5]Anthony, Clement of Alexandria and [6]Paul to become paragons of orthodox doctrine.

Not for nothing did Clement ironically caution that ‘not all true things are the truth.’ For almost two thousand years the image of Mary Magdalene as a [7]redeemed whore will persist. Artists down the centuries become willing and unwitting co-conspirators, seeing their chance to depict the Magdalene in her penitent scarlet woman guise as a pious pretext to reveal some vulnerable female flesh. But as it always does eventually, the tide of opinion and scriptural scholarship turns.

A staged photograph from the 1920’s portraying the penitent Magdalene. Even up to the previous century we see the loose hair and the element of suggestive nudity being used to denote Mary’s presumed repentance of her former profession: a lifestyle for which there is no evidence whatever anywhere in scripture. The unknown photographer nevertheless engages our sympathy with a dramatic simplicity of composition and by keeping the face of the model hidden from our view.

So what is the basis for our calling this particular book 'The Gospel According to St. John'? In the 2nd-century [8]Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyon, was considering what he should call the untitled manuscript. He seemed to recall that his mentor, Bishop Polycarp, had once mentioned to him that the manuscript was written by John the apostle. And so under the editorial hand of the bishop, the text became accepted into scripture with its new title. Incredibly, this tenuous boyhood memory of a single individual is the only basis we have for calling John the author. For impartial contemporary scholarship the text is anonymous.

This sympathetic 19th-century portrayal of the Magdalene by Mateo Cerezo, while still endowing her with a prostitute’s loose tresses, nevertheless creates around her an atmosphere of devotion and study. The skull was used as a memento mori – a reminder of human mortality – which the artist counterpoints with Mary’s tender gaze towards the promised immortality offered by the crucifix.

When the only reason we have for attributing the authorship of the fourth Gospel to the apostle John is based upon a hearsay boyhood memory, then tradition rests upon foundations of sand. But if John did not write it, then who did? The ‘beloved disciple’ remains unnamed, and yet entrenched tradition insists that it is John. But other [9]texts tell us specifically that the ‘beloved disciple’, the ‘disciple whom Jesus loved’, is Mary Magdalene. Remembering that the fourth Gospel originally was a [10]text belonging to these other writings, by restoring the inconsistencies and changes of gender we can read this fourth Gospel very much as it could be read in what perhaps was its original form, before the alterations were made which allowed the text to become an acceptable part of the orthodox canon.

If for you this all seems a little far-fetched, how differently would you feel about things if new evidence would come to light that the text was written by (for example) the disciple Bartholomew? Is it after all mere chauvinist bias which makes the idea of a female authorship implausible? And if you still resist the idea, then consider this: it is a cold fact that we have more circumstantial evidence for considering that Mary was the text’s author than ever existed for assigning the authorship to John.
Hawkwood 

Today, 22nd July, is traditionally the day of Mary Magdalene: a good day for redressing the outdated misconceptions which orthodox opinion has been only too prepared to allow to accrue around her name.
       

Notes:

[1] The term Logos (right) is essentially Gnostic, and this is the word used in the Gospel’s original Greek. The concept of the Logos actually has its origins in the pre-Christian Greek mystery schools (as does the concept of the Trinity). The author David Fideler describes the Logos as “the pre-Christian idea of ..the pattern of Harmony which was seen as underlying the order of the universe.” In subsequent translations of the fourth Gospel, the term ‘Logos’ has been exchanged for the more simplistic term ‘Word’, but ‘Logos’ and ‘Word’ are not interchangeable concepts.

[2] Such texts also could have been dictated to a scribe.

[3] John 21:20 and 21:24.
    
[4] During John 20:1-11, Mary’s location pops in and out of being both already at the entrance to the tomb and simultaneously running away from it. An assumption that it is she who is the ‘beloved disciple’ and not the separate figure of John makes this discrepancy disappear.
   
[5] Please see my post Anthony of the Desert: Life as Fiction.

[6] Just as the orthodox bishop Athanasius presented the life of Anthony as a fictionalized biography after his death to make it appear as if Anthony was a paragon of orthodoxy, the letters of Paul were altered and supplemented for the same reason. The letters appearing in Paul’s name in the New Testament as 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy and Titus are forgeries. 1 Timothy 2:9-15 notoriously emphasises the subservient role of women, but these are all chauvinist dictums put into the mouth of Paul by a later unknown hand. Please see my post "Behold This Woman" (left) for more about this subject. These writings attributed to Paul, but not by him, are the very letters which turned up (perhaps a little too coincidentally?) at the time that Irenaeus was writing his massive multi-volume work Against Heresies, attacking all that he judged to be non-orthodox. The rigorous anti-female stance of this forged letter has served the Church well ever since. So does the fact that we now know these letters to be forgeries mean that they will at last be dropped from the canon? Of course not. We have made scripture immutable. That is its weakness. 


[7] Please see my post The Gospel of Mary.

[8] Irenaeus himself tells us this in his writings. Please see my post The Gospel According to Somebody.

[9] This notably occurs in the Gospels of Philip and Mary. Stylistically, the Gospel of Mary is particularly comparable to the fourth Gospel. That the fourth Gospel is fundamentally different from the other three is signalled by the collective term Synoptic (meaning: ‘viewed together’) Gospels used for Matthew, Mark and Luke. The fourth Gospel has a specific spiritual and emotional intensity and didactic style which is mirrored in The Gospel of Mary, pointing to the possibility that these two texts, and perhaps also the Gospel of Philip, came from the same community, of which Mary could have been the spiritual leader, or at least in which she played an influential role. 

[10] In my post Vesica Piscis: The Tale of a Fish, I cite the author Margaret Starbird’s conclusion that the number 153, the number of fish in the disciples’ net in John 21:10-11, is actually the gematria equivalent of the name η Μαγδαληνή – The Magdalene – which opens the possibility that if Mary is indeed the author of the fourth Gospel, then the inclusion of this specific number can be viewed as her authorial signature – and one which was not recognised by orthodox powers for its true significance, hence its being included in scripture. And if this specific number is mere whimsy, why include it?

WTF?? This note has been added 23 July 2015, after reading a post on another blog which also chose Mary Magdalene as its theme for yesterday. The post which can be read here, written by Erik Richtsteig, a Catholic priest based in Ogden, Utah, provided me with one of those jaw-dropping moments of incredulity which I'm seriously considering for my 'WTF Moment of the Month' award. Here's why: Father Reichsteig acknowledges (as I do) that there is no evidence whatever in scripture for the baseless tradition by the Church that Mary Magdalene was a whore. He then immediately follows this with the assertion that he nevertheless "will go with tradition every time over the fads of academe." Put plainly: this particular priest prizes baseless Church tradition above actual scripture, above the Bible itself.


Sources:
Much of the basis for this post comes from the paper Mary Magdalene: Author of the Fourth Gospel?, by Ramon K. Jusino, 1998. The complete text may be read here. The proposition that Mary was the author of the fourth Gospel remains a hypothesis, although a credible and well-reasoned one. What is not in doubt is the vast and unfounded discrepancy between her depiction in these early contemporary and near-contemporary texts and her portrayal by the Church.

Elaine Pagels: The Gnostic Paul: Gnostic Exegesis of the Pauline Letters. Trinity Press International, 1975.
Hans-Josef Klauck: Ancient Letters and the New Testament: A Guide to Context and Exegesis. Baylor University Press, 2006.
David Fideler: Jesus Christ, Sun of God: Ancient Cosmology and Early Christian Symbolism. Quest Books, 1993.
Margaret Starbird: Magdalene’s Lost Legacy: Symbolic Numbers and the Sacred Union in Christianity. Inner Traditions, Bear and Company, 2003.

Statue of the weeping Magdalene (above) by Antonio Canova. Imagined portrait of Mary Magdalene (top image) created for this post by Hawkwood for the © David Bergen Studio, All Rights Reserved.

Shame

Where did the idea come from? How did this notion begin that the human body is something to be ashamed of, and can we identify who was involved in perpetuating such a mindset? I was already flowing along on this stream of thought after writing my [1]previous post about the story of the Fall in the Book of Genesis, and was given further impetus by being reminded (in a quiz panel program that I happened to be watching) that evidence for the [2]wearing of clothing can be traced back to some 170,000 years ago – but no further.

A young Muslim woman contemplates her world. What are acceptable standards of dress in a culture generally turn out to be standards which are considered acceptable by men about women. The more that men fear a woman’s autonomy, the more strident is the call for a woman to cover herself, and clothing becomes a means of control, whether in Islam, or in Jewish Orthodoxy, or elsewhere.

Since this period in human history also relates to a follow-up on ice-age climate conditions, it is a reasonable assumption that the introduction of clothing into human society had a lot more to do with basically keeping warm than it did with any notion of modesty. Protection and insulation against the cold would also have allowed an expansion into more northern latitudes, and the wearing of clothes also would have opened up new areas of culture, as specific styles or choices of dress evolved to denote social status, group identity and other cultural markers.

Neanderthalers return from a successful winter hunt: a scene which took place in what is now France over 35,000 years ago. When considering the origins of clothing, the basic need to keep warm and survive seems to have taken precedent over any connections with modesty. Painting by Zdeněk Burian.

This is compelling stuff, because it is, after all, about us. Whether we are African, European, Indonesian or some other ethnicity, this is our common story, our shared history. All of the diverse cultures which exist and have existed have evolved over time. All have a worthy story to tell, and the way things are now became that way over many succeeding generations, and either evolved further or were preserved as traditions, with these two processes often running parallel with each other. Our clothing can define us, whether that is a specific regional style or the global ethnicity of a pair of jeans. And when clothing is the social norm, discarding it can even become a powerful statement of protest.

Protesters in Brussels are forced to the ground by police during a visit by the Russian President. Nudity can be, and is, used to make a political statement. I can think of any number of ways to conclude this courageous young woman’s painted-on slogan. Who is really being shamed here? Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina are still behind bars in Moscow.
(But see my added note below about their release.) 

So clothing – or the lack of it – can make a compelling statement, and send signals to others about who we are and what we stand for. And it does not necessarily follow that covering the body in some way is always modesty-driven, because many styles of covering actually serve to emphasise what is covered. But what about shame? If you who are reading this believe that you are a creation of God, how is it possible that you then presumably feel a sense of shame about what that same God has created? By inference it suggests a sense of shame in your God. This sense of shame is not a natural thing. It is not something which we have as young children. It is something that we have to learn, something that we are taught, something that is instilled into us by the authority figures and the society in which we live.

Xingu dancers before and after being included on the tourist route. Shame has to be learnt, and tourism as well as earlier missionary activity has played its part in teaching shame to indigenous cultures. The Xingu are now under considerable pressure from a variety of external forces.

This sense of shame is something other than a natural modesty. In the language of science humans are habitually bipedal – we walk upright on two legs. This simple fact means that, when naked, our genitals are ‘on view’. To avoid sending potentially confusing signals, it’s just socially more comfortable to keep things covered when sex is not the order of the day. So an appropriate degree of modesty makes social sense. It is the feeling of [3]shame, of feeling that what we have is in some way intrinsically ‘dirty’ and ‘sinful’ that is so crippling to the human psyche. Shame has to be learned, and the teacher, apparently, is religious belief.

What constitutes acceptable standards of dress can be both cultural, regional and belief-driven. Bathers (left) on a beach in Rio de Janero, and (right) on a beach in Gaza.

When it comes to our attitudes to sin, few individuals have coloured Western thinking more than Augustine, the bishop of Hippo, now located in Algeria, but then a province of the Roman Empire. Augustine lived in a world in flux: the Christian Goth Alaric had previously led his conquering army into the Roman Forum. The centre of Western civilization had been penetrated, and the society of that time had been shaken to the foundations. In his writings of the 4th-5th-centuries, what Augustine set out to do was to give early Christians a sense of their own identity, and the formulating of doctrine was the course which he set for himself.

The Temptation of Adam and Eve. Masolino de Panicale’s 15th-century fresco before (left) and after (right) restoration. The strategic wisps of foliage were added by unknown prudish hands at a later date. Evidently the artist – and his Church commissioners – had less qualms about the element of nudity.

Augustine devoted years of contemplation to the subject of sin. His conclusion was that the original sin committed by Adam and Eve was actually present in the human seed at the moment of conception. So in Augustine’s vision of things, there was no such thing as the innocence of childhood, because a new-born baby was already born [4]corrupted with the taint of the Fall, and all humanity was contaminated. Shame, therefore, was the right and proper reaction to this condition, and the phrase ‘naked and ashamed’ is now a familiar one.

This 1954 film poster assures us that Garden of Eden was ‘Photographed in COLOR at a REAL Nudist Park under the supervision and with the approval of THE AMERICAN SUNBATHING ASSOCIATION’. Apparently this eager reassurance was not quite enough, and Hollywood sensibilities demanded an extra added palm frond and the removal of the racy tag line before the poster was distributed.

These ideas of Augustine’s were radical for their time. Before this, such commentators as Clement of Alexandria were actually connecting the Fall in Eden, not so much with carnal desire and an awareness of being naked, but with the more fundamentally moral question of disobedience to God. It was Augustine who placed the emphasis on the shame of the flesh.

A spread from the May 2009 National Geographic, which was distributed in Islamic Indonesia only after the board of censorship had busied itself with a felt pen. Don’t tell me that the members of the board didn’t keep one or two uncensored copies for themselves. Photo by Mike Cheong.

For my friends in Indonesia: the uncensored spread from my own Dutch edition. When a black felt pen hides something this innocent, there is an added sense that such petty censorship also robs these women of their dignity.

Augustine’s extended attention given to this subject in his book [5]City of God makes for some weird reading, preoccupied as he seems to have been with the subject of physical sexual arousal. Augustine is clearly disturbed by the notion of genital autonomy, which he concludes is part of God’s punishment for man’s disobedience, and he laments the fact that sexual arousal apparently cannot be controlled by the intellect. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that if Augustine were alive and writing today as an unknown author, we probably would conclude that he should seek counselling as a matter of [6]urgency.

In this anatomy reference work for artists published in 1920, the model’s classical pose in general and her Grecian hairstyle in particular signal that the intentions of the photograph are academic and respectable – intentions which are emphasised by the determinedly technical caption. The result is an innocuous flesh-and-blood version of a marble statue.

Instead, as we know, it has not been Clement’s ideas, but Augustine’s, which down the centuries have gone on to exert an influence upon Western society more wide-reaching and profound even than the borders of belief, and upon those who might not even be aware that their behaviour and attitudes are being influenced by what Augustine thought and wrote. That a broadcast glimpse of Janet Jackson’s ‘wardrobe malfunction’ can send a nation into an uptight spin is example enough of our troubled mindset about bodily exposure, and of the way in which the human soul has been scarred by the legacy of [7]scriptural doctrine.

Whether you believe or not that the human body is created by God does not make it of itself intrinsically shameful, otherwise we would not have to be taught that it is. That we not only have to learn this, but perpetuate the idea in our turn by teaching it to impressionable others – with all the centuries-old baggage of guilt and sin which go along with such a notion – is the true reason for shame.   

Hawkwood 

Notes:

[1] Please see my post Eve's Story.

[2] No clothing exists from that distant time, but this date can be surmised from the time that head lice evolved into lice which live only on the body underneath clothing. Even humble parasites can be useful to anthropology.

[3] Launched with the interstellar spacecraft Voyager in 1977, this now-famous plaque (above) depicts humans of both sexes. Designed by astronomer Carl Sagan, and drawn by his wife Linda Salzman Sagan, it brought howls of protest from both sides of the American religious morality divide, with one side protesting the ‘indecent’ display of nudity, and the other pointing out (which cannot be denied) that the man’s penis is shown, but not the woman’s labia. Not only has the woman been coyly de-sexed: she has been reduced once more to the passive role, while it is the man who raises his hand in greeting to possible unknown alien discoverers. Now travelling beyond our solar system, Voyager will reach the nearest star system in some 40,000 years. Apparently not content with laying our religious guilt trips and sexual stereotypes on our fellow earth-dwellers, we are now transporting them to the stars.

[4] The doctrine behind this conclusion will be the subject of a future post.

[5] Augustine's text can be read online at: City of God.

[6] Note added September 7 2013: Apparently I am not the only one to view Augustine in this way. The author Laurence Gardner describes these doctrines of the early Church as 'an unhealthy sexual paranoia'. It is worth remembering that nowhere in scripture is the concept of Original Sin actually mentioned.

[7] The connection of guilt with religion is ruthlessly underscored in the language of my own country of the Netherlands. Due to the influence of Calvinism here, the Dutch words for pubic hair and a woman’s labia are schaamhaar (shame hair) and schaamlippen (shame lips) respectively, with schaamstreek (literally: region of shame) being the term for the groin. Language can itself have a powerful influence upon our attitudes and the way in which we perceive things.

Sources:

Melissa A. Toups, Andrew Kitchen, Jessica E. Light and David L. Reed: Origin of Clothing Lice Indicates Early Clothing Use by Anatomically Modern Humans in Africa, in vol. 28, issue 1 of Molecular Biology and Evolution journal. 

Robert Metcalf: Unrequited Narcissism: On the Origin of Shame. University of Colorado, Denver, September 2006. Studies in the History of Ethics.

Elaine Pagels: Adam, Eve and the Serpent. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988.

Alfred Fripp, Ralph Thompson and Innes Fripp: Human Anatomy for Art students. Seeley, Service & Co., 1920.

Josef Augusta and Zdeněk Burian: Prehistoric Man. Paul Hamlyn, 1960.

Mike Cheong’s blog is at psytiphic.blogspot.com. Garden of Eden artwork by John J. Lomasney.

‘Putin protest’ photos by FEMEN. In this second photo of the sequence (right), one policeman kneels on the woman's back while another prepares to force her hands behind her back to cuff her, which is what a third photo shows. I thought that my neighboring country of Belgium was a democracy. The Ukranian-based protest group FEMEN also protests against such religious issues as church dogma and sharia law, which has in turn prompted counter-protests against FEMEN's demonstrations by Muslim women wearing determined smiles and signs which say DO I LOOK OPPRESSED?. But oppression can at times move in subtle ways. How did such clothing cover-up doctrines originate in the first place, and who introduced them? If anyone can conclusively establish for me that these religious dress codes were not originated by men (either independently or in the name of their god), then I will publish their comment here. The current Iranian law for adultery specifies that prior to stoning men are to be buried up to their waists (thus leaving their arms free), and women up to their shoulders (with their arms also buried). Anyone who can manage to extricate themselves before dying is spared. Do the math.

Note added January 2014: Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina (seated left) and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (seated right) were released late last month, but as they only had two months of their sentence left to serve, they concluded (as I do) that their 'early' release was a sop to the West in the light of the coming winter Olympics in Russia. Pussy Riot have now disbanded but plan to continue together to raise awareness of injustice within the Russian political and judicial system.