The Greatest Blasphemy

What is blasphemy, and what would you consider to be blasphemous? When considering such a question, most of us might first think about the old adage of ‘taking the Lord’s name in vain’, that is: using the Deity or the forms of that Deity as an oath. But such oaths have become so common that they have passed into the language. Even an atheist will mutter ‘My God!’ or ‘Jesus Christ!’ in a moment of exasperation. No, the real blasphemies are to be found elsewhere. The blasphemies considered here are far more insidious, because they probably would not even be thought of as blasphemies by those who practice them, and because such blasphemies are committed within the context of, and in the guise of, religious practices.

A Muslim woman wearing a niqab. I have yet to find a single instance in which it can conclusively be demonstrated that such a religious dress code was instituted by a woman. In patriarchal societies it is patriarchal religions, patriarchal traditions and patriarchal values which predominate, it is men who decide on God’s behalf what either is correct or unacceptable to wear, and it is men who therefore grant themselves the greater freedoms of dress.

It is a human conceit to imagine that we know the preferences of God. And yet such a conceit is practiced on a daily basis in religious communities. We decide on God’s behalf what God either would or would not approve of. The hate mongering of the now notorious Westboro Baptist Church with their infamous slogan ‘God hates fags’ is such an instance. How do they know? Do they have God’s private cell phone number? From a standpoint of simple logic one could equally argue that God actually likes gays, because so many good and decent and loving [1]people on this planet are gay. And it serves little purpose to point out that such ‘ungodly’ practices are forbidden by scripture, because that only counts for something if those specific scriptural texts are universally accepted as being the actual word of God, and that is far, very far, from being the case.

I have not been able to identify the church where this notice appears, but it does incongruously seem to suggest that the request for silence potentially applies to only two of these six items. In reality, of course, all six are prohibited for the congregation. But who’s to know if God doesn’t actually like smoking, has a cell phone, keeps a dog, and smiles benignly upon sassy dresses, baseball caps and hamburgers with milkshakes?

Another field rich in human assumptions about God’s preferences is religious dress codes. Perhaps a distinction should be made here between those styles of dress which are intended as outward expressions of religious adherence and community, such as the turbans worn by Sikhs, and those which we presume actually have God’s nod of approval, or even meet God’s demands. We now know that the dress codes for women as prescribed by Paul in his first letter to Timothy (1 Timothy, 2:9-14) are not actually by Paul at all, but were [2]appended under Paul’s name much later by an unknown hand. Even though this passage of scripture is now known to be an anonymous appendage, it still goes on serving the Church’s needs enough to keep it in scripture, and in turn to cite scriptural precedent for keeping women in a subservient role.

A Sikh girl wearing the distinctive turban or dastaar. One of the younger world religions, Sikhism is in its outlook and conduct altruistic and egalitarian, does not seek to convert others, believes that no one religion has a monopoly on the truth, and shuns religious rites and rituals including all forms of circumcision and cutting, believing such rituals to be ‘blind spirituality’.

Here two streams of assumptions come together: The assumption that God requires us to dress in a specific way, and the assumption that God approves of dress codes which undermine gender equality. God wants you to cover your head in a place of worship. God thinks that you should conceal your hair/face/body in public. The list goes on. But such statements say more about us and the ways in which we seek to control others in subtle and in not-so-subtle ways. In a patriarchal society it is patriarchal beliefs which hold sway, and those in power will do what they can to make sure things stay that way.

When such gender-directed religious dress codes are taken to their most extreme expression, women are cyphered away to the point of being non-entities, and the burka becomes the order of the day. And when congregations in a place of worship are segregated according to gender it is as if we are sending a clear signal to God, not only that those men present cannot trust themselves to keep their lustful thoughts in check, but that those same men seek to please God by banishing half of the congregation to an inferior, non-visible status while they themselves maintain an all-too-visible centre-stage profile. ‘Look at me, God, I’m worshipping you!’ Male ego, apparently, demands God’s attention as much as anyone else’s.

The all-covering head-to-toe Islamic burka. Only a fabric mesh allows the wearer a limited window on her surroundings. We hide away that which we most fear, and a more graphic expression of men’s fear of women is difficult to imagine. It has been pointed out that such practices are nowhere mentioned in the Quran, although they apparently are mentioned in auxiliary texts.

It is not clear where or when circumcision originated, but we have wall reliefs from Ancient Egypt depicting the [3]practice. It is therefore likely that it was a custom exported from that country from the years of Israelite exile, and is now customary in two of the world’s religions: Judaism and Islam. There’s another assumption right there: God wants your sons and/or your daughters to be circumcised. As with any of the other above assumptions, we cannot know the mind of God. It is the crucial difference between what God thinks we should do (which we cannot know), and what we think God thinks we should do. Male [4]circumcision is practiced on infants too young to have a voice of their own, and who therefore are legal minors who have no choice in the decision to have non-reversible modifying surgery performed on their genitals. We deny our own children any say in the matter: a state of affairs that in another context would otherwise be looked upon as a particularly bizarre form of [5]child abuse.

A wall relief from Saqqara in Egypt dating from 2,400 BCE. The origins of the practice of male circumcision are uncertain, although they certainly pre-date the two world religions which practice it. Circumcision is therefore a custom inherited from a pagan past, and the scriptural assertion that it originated as a demand by God of the Israelites has no anthropological foundation.

But even male circumcision is neither as drastic nor has the same intent as female circumcision. Even to call it circumcision is misleading. If the equivalent operation were to be performed on a [6]male child, then the entire glans – the head of the penis – would be cut off. The term used by those opposing this practice – female genital mutilation, or simply FGM – is therefore an accurate one, the more so when considering the additional factor that the procedure is generally carried out using unsterilized blades and without anaesthetic on young girls who are denied a voice of their own about what is happening to them and the bodies which will carry them through the rest of their life. Such radical cruelty inflicted upon those young girls who have no [7]say of their own is not about religion. It is about [8]power and control and a misplaced sense of [9]tradition – and about the fear that is generated by male insecurity. In a society in which men fear women’s sexual autonomy, the clitoris is perceived as a threat that needs to be removed.

The girl in this photo was told by her mother (at right) that the mother was taking her to a party with her young friends. “Circumcision is a noble act to do to women. There’s nothing wrong with doing it.” This quote comes from Sheikh Mohamad Alarefe, Saudi Arabian theologian and professor at King Saud University. I would suggest that if there is ‘nothing wrong with doing it’, then the sheikh leads by example and has the same procedure performed upon himself.

This to me is the greatest blasphemy: to presume to know the mind of God. Whether that concerns dress or other religious customs, it is the subterfuge that we either seriously believe or are fooling ourselves into believing that such things are done ‘in God’s name’. Now that is taking the Lord’s name in vain, if ever anything is. And think about it: is it not a shocking blasphemy to think that we have the right to modify, that we can [10]‘improve upon’, what God already has created? And yet we do just this when we surgically modify the genitals of those who are too young to resist. Instead, we wield the knife and presume to play God, and then let ourselves off the moral hook by sanctimoniously saying that it is ‘for religious reasons’.

And when it comes to religious dress codes, maybe you see things differently, but I was always taught that God sees what is in our hearts, not what is on our heads, or what is covering our bodies. So if religious constraints require you to wear a hat in church, or to wear a skirt instead of slacks, or to hide your hair or even your face in public, then maybe it’s because your fellow man is demanding more of you than God is.

Hawkwood


Since no one really knows anything about God, those who think they do are just troublemakers.
~ Rabia Basri, 8th-century female Sufi mystic and Muslim saint.

Notes:

[1] Please see my post Sex and Trust.

[2] Please see my posts It's Real! It's Fake! and "Behold This Woman" for more about these spurious letters written in Paul's name. To save you looking them up, the verses are: “...Also that women should adorn themselves modestly and sensibly in seemly apparel, not with braided hair or gold or pearls or costly attire but by good deeds, as befits women who profess religion. Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became the transgressor.” (Revised Standard Version)  

[3] Greek accounts by Strabo (left) from the 1st-century BCE mention that Egyptians practiced both male and female circumcision, which confirms that Islam adopted these practices from a pre-existing pagan culture. 19th-century accounts from both Europe and America document secular cases of surgical removal of the clitoris ‘to prevent hysteria and masturbation’. Young boys, apparently, could go at it like a steam hammer, but the idea that females had their own autonomous sexual identity apparently was – and in many circles still is – too much of a threat to the male ego to be tolerated.   

[4] The story that circumcision might help to prevent lower prostate cancer is worth mentioning, although it turns out that this could be more a matter of simple personal hygiene. The story can be read here. The other story that intercourse with a circumcised male reduces the risk of cervical cancer in the female seems to have a number of variables, including the promiscuity of males with monogamous partners, the age at which circumcision is carried out (the younger the age, the less likely circumcision appears to be an influencing factor), and again, personal hygiene-related issues. That story can be read here.

[5] The map at left shows the global prevalence of male circumcision. Blue is above the 50% threshold: the lighter the blue, the more prevalent the practice. Red is below that threshold. While with a country such as the United States the prevalence might be due to social factors, in north and central Africa, the Middle East and Indonesia the predominant religion combined with societal traditions is the determining factor. I would suggest that it is only the fact that circumcision has become so widespread, also outside of religious traditions, which makes it so broadly acceptable. It is only by stepping back and considering the practice more objectively that it might be seen for the bizarre practice which it is. And my point made in this post that it is practiced on legal minors, on those too young to voice their own objections, is what tips it over the line into child abuse. It is. For a father to say ‘if it was good enough for me then it’s good enough for my son’ is the same argument as a father saying ‘I was beaten by my dad and it never did me any harm, so I beat my son too’.

[6] The map at right shows the global prevalence of female genital mutilation, with those areas of greatest prevalence shown in light blue. Egypt and Somalia have the highest rate, with 91% to 98% of all females undergoing some form of genital cutting. There are different types of FGM procedures, from excision (cutting off) of the clitoris to infibulation, the most extreme form, which also involves excision of the inner and outer labia and almost stitching shut the vaginal opening. To read and/or download a fact sheet about FGM please visit The Clarion Project. 

[7] When interviewed by the BBC (BBC HARDtalk, 11 January 2016) pro-FGM activist Fuambai Sia Ahmadu (left) claimed that type 1 FGM (excision of the clitoris) “is equivalent to male circumcision”. It is not. As mentioned above, the male equivalent would be to cut off the head of the penis. Ms Ahmadu said that the lack of a clitoris had not made any difference to her sex life. But with no comparision to draw upon, how could she possibly know? Ms Ahmadu also claimed that a woman feels more feminine without her clitoris because of its resemblance to the male penis: a statement which finely demonstrates my point about the human hubris of presuming to know better than God what is ‘correct’ for us. Human sexuality is a shifting thing. In early embryonic development all human genitalia are identical.

[8] The so-called Islamic State militant group has declared their intention that if (as far as they are concerned, when) they create their caliphate, then all women in Iraq between the ages of 11 and 46 will be forced to undergo FGM. I remarked in a previous post (Isis in Paris) that IS is deeply misogynist in its intentions. This news is a further confirmation of that, although IS now deny the story. A report can be read here.

[9] The Question of Tradition: Tradition is the usual defence offered by those who seek to maintain these practices: ‘It’s an important part of our tradition’ is what we hear. Anthropologically, tradition is a primitive mechanism inherited from our distant past, most probably as a survival mechanism. ‘We did such-and-such this way, and nothing bad happened to us, so we’d better do it the same way from now on, just in case.’ I recently heard a leader of a religious community expressing his concern about the possible disappearance of circumcision as a (to him) valued religious tradition. “If such an essential tradition disappears” he wondered, “what would we be left with?” Hmm... just a wild idea on my part, but maybe… God? 

[10] It is worth making the point that I am drawing a distinction between such procedures which are carried out on minors as a religious practice and those body modification procedures which are carried out in a secular context by adults who have chosen such procedures for themselves. If you choose to have a stud in your tongue (or anywhere else) that is really up to you.

Sources:

Niqab photo from the Huffington Post. Photo of Sikh girl from Michael Freeman Photography. Photo of FGM being performed on a young girl from The Clarion Project. Other photos from uncredited sources. Global map of male circumcision prevalence adapted from a work by AHC300. Global map of FGM prevalence by Woman Stats Project.

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.

The Word of God

What is the bottom line of your faith? If you are Christian, is it accepting the divinity of Jesus? Perhaps it is in the acknowledgment of his sacrifice to take your sins upon his own shoulders, or in tracing his perfect [1]lineage back to the prophets of old. But none of these things, however vital they might be to your faith, are necessarily at the foundation of what makes your faith workable. The keystone upon which all these other things rests is the simple acceptance that scripture is the revealed Word of God: that the texts of the [2]Bible, and every word which appears in them, are the product of Divine Revelation. Because without accepting this premise scripture becomes like any other secular text, and its supernatural elements – all of them – are reduced to an interesting but questionable fiction.

Ascribing authorship to the four gospels and other such texts is a considerably less certain exercise than the editors of my own [3]King James Version admit to. In fact, it’s not certain at all. Centuries before copyright laws existed, it would not have been considered a subterfuge to attach the name of some respected prophet or apostle to a text with the wish to imbue that text with an aura of authority.

That in almost every case we simply do not know who wrote these texts (regardless of the various names to whom these texts are nominally attributed) need not in itself be a reason to preclude them from being divinely inspired, any more than some of the greatest [4]literary works which we have are diminished in their greatness simply because their authors are unknown to us. So we must use other criteria to determine these texts’ divine source. But what are these criteria? By what standards can we possibly determine beyond doubt whether, when we open our Bible, the words that we read are truly those of God speaking through his chosen ones? 

While I was reading through some of the many annotations and footnotes in my copy of the [5]Gnostic Scriptures, a singular thought occurred to me. Here was a volume of texts presented with scrupulous scholarship. Its various translators of the original [6]Coptic and [7]Greek languages into English were happy enough, where appropriate, to provide possible alternative phrases and meanings where the original language had no exact English equivalent or was ambiguous. Little or no attempt had been made to polish the language of the originals for the sake of introducing a poetic turn of phrase. What richness of language there was emerged from the original texts, and not from any over-enthusiastic translation, however well-intentioned.

A portion of the poorly-preserved Gospel of Judas, written in Coptic. Such fragments dramatically illustrate the herculean task faced by scholars to recreate such texts, with reasonable assumptions made upon the basis of the context of the words around them being used to suggest what the words in the missing lacunas might have been.

But that was not all. Any ambiguities were further referenced to the works and examples of other translators beyond this particular edition, making any amount of cross-checking possible. And any lacunas (gaps in the text, usually caused through damage) were acknowledged as missing from the originals. If a word or a phrase used by the translator to fill such a gap was a speculative guess, then it was called just that. Scholastically, it was all impressively honest stuff.

My singular thought was: is there anywhere an equivalent volume published which deals with canonical texts in the same way? I know of individual books which do this for [8]specific texts in scripture, and there are of course individual studies and papers dealing with specific books or parts of books, but not a volume (or a series of volumes) which covers the whole of the Bible. On the face of it, there is no reason why there should not be a canonical (yet scholarly impartial) equivalent of my edition of the Gnostic scriptures. All of these texts, whether canonical or outside the canon, are ancient texts in ancient languages, written on scrolls or in [9]codices in various states of preservation. They are not even the original texts (no, none of them), but were written down by scribes and copyists, sometimes by blindly copying the characters of a [10]language unfamiliar to them, and with the inevitable scribal errors which this involves.

Part of the Dead Sea scroll in Ancient Hebrew known as the Great Isaiah Scroll. Where more than one copy of a text is available we can use these copies to create the complete text. But what if (as has happened) two copies contradict each other? How can we choose which version is the correct one? Perhaps only one copy is more true to the original – or perhaps even neither.

When reading, say, the King James Version, it is the easiest thing in the world to imagine that, yes, this must be the definitive complete version of scripture, simply because that is what it sounds like, and forget that the 17th-century KJV has been superseded in its accuracy both by contemporary scholarship and by new discoveries made since, particularly the Dead Sea scrolls, discovered just two years after the unearthing of the Gnostic texts at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945.There is no ‘definitive’ version of scripture, simply because we do not have one. Neither can there ever be one, for who knows what texts still lie somewhere undiscovered that would yet demand revisions to what we now have? 

Just as with the Gnostic texts, what we instead have are variant readings with scribal errors, and the grappling with the exact meanings of words which [11]translation inevitably involves. Often-enough, a slight mistranslation can lead to a major error, such as the KJV having the Israelites cross the Red Sea, when the texts specify that they actually crossed the Reed Sea (Yam Suph: Hebrew: יַם-סוּף) – then an area of marshland east of the Nile Delta (at the time of these texts the Red Sea was actually known as the Erythraean Sea), or specifying the resting place of Noah’s ark as Mount Ararat, when the texts say, not ‘Ararat’, but the word ‘RRT’: the vowel-less rendition of the considerably less specific area of the kingdom of Urartu.

The Lord’s Prayer translated into the language of the Native American Choctaw Nation. Such powerfully-expressed sentiments as are found in this prayer perhaps lend themselves more readily to translation than complex episodes which took place within the cultural context of the Middle East of the Late Bronze Age, and which were written down in the Early Iron Age by minds already distant from the original settings of the events which they describe.

If I choose examples which already have been covered on this blog, then events taken as ‘Gospel’ truth shift under scrutiny from being actual historical events (the [12]Exodus, or the bloody Israelite [13]conquest of Canaan under the sword of Joshua) into being revealed either as metaphor or as concocted fiction. This hardly need surprise us, as the narratives relating these and other such Biblical events were only written down centuries (in the case of Joshua, almost a full thousand years) after the events which they describe. In our terms, the Book of Joshua is a historical novel.

How, then, can we reconcile these ancient texts, so full of errors, [14]contradictions and mistranslations, with being the immaculate revealed Word of God? Even Noah and his [15]ark turns out to be a story imported from the Babylonia of Israelite exile. David and Solomon might have existed, but their historical reality in all probability made them mere local warlords, rather than being the mighty father-and-son kings whose deeds resound in the pages of the Old Testament. If our belief accepts scripture as being divinely inspired en bloc, with all its omissions, mistranslations, bloody slaughters in God’s name, and shamelessly invented pedigrees of conquest, how do we reconcile these less-than-perfect (and certainly in places, morally odious) texts with divine perfection? In short: what is, or is not, divinely inspired, and how do we separate the two?

Two pages from a letter written in 1943 by Etty Hillesum in the holding camp of Westerbork in occupied Netherlands, prior to her deportation to Auschwitz. If this remarkable young woman could both find and recover a state of grace in a place that was a waking nightmare of inhumanity, why should we not consider that the Spirit acted through her at least as much as through the words that are written in scripture? How can we know where such a line exists?

The letters and diaries of Etty Hillesum reveal an ongoing dialogue with God through which she was able, even when facing the ultimate horrors of the Nazi death camp in which she died, to draw upon deep wellsprings of solace within herself, and even find compassion for her captors who took her life. Contrastingly, in the second book of [16]Kings we are told that forty-two little children are torn to pieces by bears, apparently for doing what little children do everywhere: for making fun of a bald man. In this case, the bald man in question being the prophet Elisha, the wrath of the Lord seems to have descended upon the children with ruthless [17]finality. Which of these two sources are we to consider more worthy of being divinely inspired: the horrific killing of little children for a triviality, or the profoundly spiritual yet deeply human words of a Holocaust victim?

You might criticize me for choosing such a grotesquely bizarre episode of scripture as my example, but that’s the whole point about scripture: it’s all in, or all out. If you want Psalm 23 and the Sermon on the Mount, then you also get the cruel deaths of those forty-two children and many other such shockingly inhuman episodes along with them. But what about those worthy ancient texts which are nowhere to be found between the covers of the Bible? Where is the magnificent passage from the Book of Enoch describing his ascent through the spheres of heaven, at least as stirring as anything in Ezekiel? Where are the profound spiritual insights offered by the Gospel of Thomas?

The prophet Enoch, who was claimed to be the seventh generation from Adam, and the great-grandfather of Noah. The book which bears his name might not have been written by him, but it does provide us with many of the details which otherwise are frustratingly missing from Genesis, from the nature of the fruit in Eden to the true reason for the Flood, as well as a stirring description to rival that of Ezekiel of Enoch’s ascent through the celestial spheres. We are left to wonder why this remarkable text never actually made it into scripture, but I for one consider scripture to be the poorer for its omission.

And that is what seems to be the problem with scripture as it has come down to us: the gaping flaw in our logic of perceiving it as being the result of Divine Revelation. However divinely inspired it might or might not be, whether a text – any text – is or is not the Word of God is something which is decided by imperfect and very fallible us.

Hawkwood

Notes:

[1] Luke 3: 23-38 meticulously traces the lineage of Jesus from God, then Adam, all through the generations to the carpenter Joseph: a logic which passes me by when doctrine declares that his conception was of divine origin, and so making the tracing of such an earthly lineage redundant.

[2] Clearly this also applies to any texts which other religions deem to be the result of Divine Revelation. However much respect (or the lack of it) we might give the texts of another belief, one religion does not regard the text of another religion as falling within this category, otherwise the world would be of one faith. I have various editions of the Bible in my collection, including three editions in Dutch (right: the Dutch edition of the Bible illustrated with Rembrandt's etchings of Biblical subjects), as well as an authorized English translation of the Quran. Irrespective of my own beliefs, I treat them all with due consideration and respect. 

[3] King James Study Bible. Zondervan, 2002.

[4] The epics of Gilgamesh and Beowulf, and the 14th-century romance of chivalry Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are three examples which fall into this category.

[5] The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, edited by Marvin Meyer. Published by Harper One for Harper Collins, 2008.

[6] Coptic is an adaptation of written Egyptian using the Greek language.

[7] Such texts were written in Koine Greek: the common form of the Greek language in the Hellenist Middle East (that is: the areas which were subject to Greek influence following the conquests of Alexander the Great, which would have included Galilee and what is now Syria).

[8] Elaine Pagels’ The Gnostic Paul: Gnostic Exegesis of the Pauline Letters (Trinity Press International, 1975) and Hans-Josef Klauck’s Ancient Letters and the New Testament: A Guide to Context and Exegesis (Baylor University Press, 2006) both provide exhaustive analysis of the letters of Paul.

[9] Codices are manuscripts bound in book form.

[10] From Ancient Hebrew into Greek for the Septuagint, or from Greek into Coptic. It is only to be expected that the more remote from the source, the less certain is the accuracy of the translation. The list, of course, goes on: from Aramaic into Greek, from Greek into Latin, from Latin into Middle English, from Middle English (and German) into the poetically archaic English of the King James Version, and so into all the languages of today. Translation, as anyone knows who has tried it, is not just a matter of transposing words. So many, many words simply have no equivalent in another language. Inflexions of meaning and differences in syntax and idiom can all conspire to force drastic compromise upon the translator, and subtle metaphors can become lost in a plodding literalism to take on new meanings which the original writers never intended. On this title page (left) of the Bible, translated from the Greek and Hebrew into German by Martin Luther in 1524, the artist Lucas Cranach depicts Joshua as an armoured knight very much belonging to his own time. 

[11] Please see my post A Simple Misunderstanding.

[12] Please see my post Odyssey and Exodus: the Long Journey Home.

[13] Please see my post The Butcher of Canaan.

[14] Please see my post The Words of Jesus.

[15] Please see my post The Lost Ark of Noah.

[16] 2 Kings 2: 23-24. I personally view these two short verses as two of the most callous and brutal which I have come across in all of scripture. This is not to say that I believe this shocking incident actually happened. It is what it says about it being included in scripture, and about what those who wrote it imagined to be God’s suitable justice. The two verses are short enough to include in full here: “23: And he (Elisha) went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head. 24: And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the LORD. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them.” If you think such bloody brutality would make even a Christian Apologist bend a knee, I refer you to this Christian website. Just scroll down to the picture of the bears and read how the ‘little children’ of scripture have mysteriously morphed in this commentary to become ‘young men’ who (according to this writer) get their well-deserved come-uppance. Seriously?

[17] While there appears to be much focus on the incident of the bears tearing the children to pieces as the result of Elisha’s cursing them, the following episode of Elisha raising a child from the dead (2 Kings 4: 8-37) seems to be glossed over in terms of placing it alongside the first incident to create a savage irony (which is why I do so here). Scripture tells us that Elisha had the power of life over death. Why then did he not compassionately use that power earlier – or more to the point: why did Elisha behave so despicably in the first place?

Sources:

Etty Hillesum: An Interrupted Life: The Diaries 1941-43, and Letters from Westerbork. Henry Holt and Company Inc. 1996. Other sourced titles are included in the notes above.

Gospel of Judas from National Geographic. Great Isaiah Scroll from Wikimedia Commons. Choctaw translation of the Lord’s Prayer provided by John C. Sacoolidge. Choctaw beaded sash from the 1830’s from the Oklahoma Historical Society. The imagined portrait of the prophet Enoch is painted by Hawkwood for the © David Bergen Studio, with a section of the Greek text of the Book of Enoch as a background.

The Gospel of Mary

Sometime in the late 6th-century a misconception about certain passages in scripture came to be seen as an entrenched truth. What happened seems simple enough: Pope Gregory I, known as Gregory the Great, made a confused assumption that in Luke’s gospel the [1]unnamed ‘repentant sinner’ who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears was Mary Magdalene. Exactly why the pope might have thought this is unclear, as there is no indication whatever in the gospel that connects the woman in the story with Mary Magdalene. But things did not stop there.

Mary Magdalene. The image of Mary in the gospel which bears her name is of a woman of great dignity, leadership, personal courage and deep spiritual insight: a view of the Magdalene as remote from her misguided portrayal down the centuries as is possible.

Mary the sister of Martha, the ‘woman with the alabaster jar’ who anoints Jesus’ feet as related in [2]Luke's and John’s gospel, was also assumed by the pope to be Mary Magdalene, although Luke’s retelling of Jesus’ visit to the house of these two sisters in the town of Bethany makes it clear that the woman referred to is Martha’s sister, and not Mary Magdalene. Even given the possible misattribution caused by two women having the same name (Mary was then one of the most frequently-encountered of women’s names) it is the gospels themselves which clear up any possible confusion about the separate identities of these three women: the unnamed ‘repentant sinner’, Mary the sister of Martha, and Mary Magdalene.

Mary Magdalene, as envisaged in the 15th-century by Rogier van der Weyden: a Magdalene holding the alabaster jar of ointment but nevertheless very much of the artist’s own time, and set in a landscape of rolling Flemish hills. What our own age might miss, but what would have been apparent to the artist’s audience, is that the elaborate dress with its embroidered red sleeves, and the hair flowing loosely over her shoulders, would have been clear signals that this Magdalene was portrayed as a high-class prostitute.

And yet Pope Gregory decided that these different women actually were one and the same. These passages in Luke’s and John’s gospels, according to the pope, all describe Mary Magdalene. So why is it that such an obvious misreading of the gospels has survived for fourteen long centuries? Contemporary scholarship now recognizes the pope’s error, but the image of Mary Magdalene as the repentant sinner who washed the feet of Jesus still endures in the popular imagination.

Why does the Church of Rome not correct such an obvious fallacy by a previous pope in some sort of official edict? Perhaps because countermanding this mistake would undermine the dogma of papal infallibility? Or alternatively, perhaps because it has been expedient for the Church to perpetuate, and in doing so, to exploit, such a female stereotype? I’ll leave you to decide. What is the case is that the image of Mary Magdalene as a redeemed whore has been the subject of countless depictions in art and popular culture ever since. Images are powerful things. They influence the way we think about something, even if we might not be aware that they are doing so. Mary Magdalene, as the woman who holds the alabaster jar which contains the precious [3]ointment used to anoint the feet of Jesus, also has been a much-portrayed figure in art – all on account of Pope Gregory’s mistaken assumption.

The penitent Magdalene, by Paul Jacques Aimé Boudry. By the 19th-century portrayals of the Magdalene had descended into mawkish picture-postcard sentiment, and the unfounded legend that she had spent her last years as a [4]naked recluse was seized upon by such artists as an excuse to portray some pseudo-classical nudity disguised as lofty religious ideals.

Where there can be no doubt is when Luke actually mentions Mary Magdalene by name, as being the woman from whom Jesus casts out ‘seven devils’. Luke specifies her as being ‘Mary called Magdalene’. But what does this curious verse mean? Was Mary possessed in some way? Did Jesus perform a kind of exorcism? It is a passage from Luke’s gospel which has caused much speculation. To find an answer, and also to reach beyond Pope Gregory’s misunderstandings, we need to push back even further in time, to three centuries before that particular pope went astray in his assumptions.

This fragment in Greek of the Gospel of Mary was discovered along with many other texts in an ancient refuse dump near Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. It gives an indication as to how much painstaking restoration work has been necessary to make these texts live again after so many centuries of obscurity.

We have three surviving fragmentary copies of the text known as the Gospel of Mary, all of them from Egypt. One discovered near the town of Akhmim is from the 5th-century and written in Coptic, and the other two from the 3rd-century and written in Greek were discovered in an ancient refuse dump at Oxyrhynchus – a valuable archaeological site which also has yielded some of the poetry of Sappho. It is perhaps an irony of history that both the writings of Mary and Sappho have been discovered in the same location. In a man’s world Sappho was widely regarded as the [5]greatest poet of her age, and history confirms her identity. The Gospel of Mary is the only known gospel to be attributed to a woman. Unlike the verses of Sappho, we cannot know who wrote it, any more than we can ascertain who really wrote the four canonical gospels. What we can say is that its unknown author wrote from a viewpoint that is so sympathetic to a woman’s perspective, so insightful, that it could indeed have been written by a woman, which would have been entirely feasible in an early Christian Gnostic community.

Oxyrhynchus and Akhmim: the two discovery sites of the three copies which we have of the Gospel of Mary.

In this gospel it is Mary who rallies the fearful and demoralized disciples after Jesus takes leave of them following his last resurrection appearance. It is Mary who then is forced to defend herself in the face of accusations by Peter that, being the disciple whom Jesus loved the most, Jesus told her things to which only she was privy. And it is the disciple Levi who comes to her defence against the ‘wrathful’ and hot-headed Peter. But other passages in the text describe Mary’s deep understanding of the visions of the mind, the perceptions of the spirit, and the ascent of the soul. It is Mary who offers this profound wisdom to the other disciples (who notably are addressed by her as her ‘brothers and sisters’, making it clear that [6]female disciples also were present, and therefore also were among this inner circle of followers). Reading this text as a whole, it is difficult to avoid the impression that Peter reacts out of mere jealous pique and bruised male ego.

Magdala (Migdal), the birthplace of the Magdalene, was in Galilee, and Bethany, the location of the house of the sisters Martha and Mary, was to the south in Judea. Between these two lay Samaria, which needed to be traversed when making journeys to Jerusalem for the Jewish feast days.

And what of those ‘seven devils’? It is ironic that it is a non-canonical text which supplies us with the answer to the identity of these ‘devils’ which otherwise would be left unexplained. Ascending through the various levels or ‘powers’, Mary describes the soul as encountering the power which has “…seven forms. The first form is darkness; the second is desire; the third is ignorance; the fourth is zeal for death; the fifth is the kingdom of the flesh; the sixth is the foolish wisdom of the flesh; the seventh is the wisdom of the wrathful person. These are the seven powers of Wrath.” Jesus’ action towards Mary can now be seen for what it truly is: not some trivial and all-too-literal exorcism, but an indoctrination into the inner mysteries, which Mary in her turn masters. It is known that Luke drew upon older texts for some of his material, and the ‘seven devils’ episode would seem to be a scrambled version of these older mysteries whose true meaning was lost on Luke, remembering that the Gospel of Mary would itself have been copied from older texts. 

These texts were in circulation before the Bible as we know it existed. There were no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ texts as orthodoxy later labelled them. And the Gospel of Mary was of course written long before Pope Gregory muddied the waters with his misconceptions. Being closer to the source, it offers us perhaps a more authentic Mary: a Mary who is indeed a wise and profound teacher, and even the closest to Jesus and most deserving of his disciples. This Mary is a very long way indeed from the redeemed whore perpetuated by the Church, and the time for her overdue and deserved reinstatement is now.

Hawkwood 

  

Notes:

[1] See Luke 7:36-50 for the passage about the unnamed ‘sinner’ who washes Jesus’ feet with her tears, then wipes them with her hair before anointing them with ointment from an ‘alabaster box’.

[2] See Luke 10:38-42 for the passage in which Jesus is received in the house of Martha and Mary, and John 11:1-2 for a further mention of the woman who anointed Jesus’ feet.

[3] The ointment was probably spikenard, one of the costliest of all the spices.

[4] This legend seems to have arisen out of more confusion with yet another Mary: Mary of Egypt, who did indeed spend her life living as a repentant naked hermit in the desert around the Jordan. Please see my post Mary of Egypt: A Heart in the Wilderness.

[5] No less a person than Plato even described Sappho as ‘the tenth muse’. To read more about Sappho and the remarkable ways in which her works have been rescued from obscurity, please see my post Sappho.

[6] Among its other themes, the book below tackles the question of the Vatican’s total refusal to admit that women (therefore also Mary) were among the disciples, quoting a letter by Pope John Paul II to the then Archbishop of Canterbury that the pope was “firmly opposed to this development.” Well, of course he was. The entrenched sexist policies of the Church of Rome must be held to, even if this means flying in the face both of what scripture itself says and what is now accepted scholarship. The pope ends his letter by stating that he views it “as a break with tradition of a kind we have no competence to authorise.” But if the pope himself has no competence to authorise it, then who in the Vatican does?

Sources:

Susan Haskins: Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor. Harcourt Brace and Company for Harper Collins, 1993. This title gives a detailed overview of the many ways in which our image and perceptions of Mary have changed over the centuries. 

Complete translations of both the Coptic and Greek versions of the Gospel of Mary, introduced and translated by Karen L. King, together with comprehensive annotations, can be found in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, edited by Marvin Meyer. Harper Collins, 2008. This gospel is also available separately as: The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle, by Karen L. King. Polebridge Press, 2003.

Mary Magdalene, by Rogier van der Weyden, is in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. The Oxyrhynchus fragment is from the Oxyrhynchus website. My imagined portrait of Mary Magdalene which heads this post is intended to express the Magdalene as she is portrayed in the Gospel of Mary. The maps have been created for this post by the © David Bergen Studio.