Mary of Egypt: A Heart in the Wilderness

Whatever the monk Zosimas expected to encounter when he [1]ventured into the Jordanian wilderness, what he discovered instead was something he could not have anticipated. There among the rocks and sand in front of him squatted a woman, emaciated and completely naked with dark leathery skin, her matted, straggling hair making her barely recognizable as anything human. Apparently reassured by the fact that her unexpected visitor was a monk, the woman gestured to Zosimas that she wished to use his cloak to cover herself. Then having wrapped herself in this makeshift garment, the woman asked the astonished monk to sit down with her, and she began to tell her story.

My painting of Mary portrays her as she might have appeared some ten years into her solitary retreat. Rather than portraying the Saint Mary of the Church, I wanted to be true to Mary’s humanity, to grant her the dignity of a very human soul living in harsh self-imposed exile from her own kind.

What we know of the woman’s story, and what she told to the monk Zosimas, we can learn in the account of her life written down by Sophronius, the Patriarch of Jerusalem during the 7th-century. Her name was Mary, and she had run away from her home in Egypt at the young age of twelve to journey to Alexandria. In the city she had lived a dissolute life, selling her sexual favours on the streets for the next seventeen years, or simply giving herself away for the sake of the experience. Apparently driven by a need to satisfy a carnal craving in new surroundings, she boarded a ship carrying pilgrims bound for Jerusalem. The pilgrims, both during the voyage and in Jerusalem itself, proved to be as willing as the residents of Alexandria, and she continued her wanton lifestyle within the city walls. Until the day that she found herself at the door of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Sophronius’ account of Mary’s life does not provide us with the details of her journey, but using maps of the period it is possible to surmise that the ship on which she embarked from Alexandria would have sailed for the port of Joppa, which had a well-trodden connecting road to Jerusalem. The actual location of Zosimas’ monastery is unknown, but calculating its distance from Jerusalem and its location near the west bank of the River Jordan gives us its likely location. From the monastery Mary would have crossed the Jordan and travelled eastwards into the trans-Jordanian desert. 

Intending to enter in the hope of finding more clients among the congregation, she felt her way barred by some unseen force. Interpreting her impure lifestyle as the cause of her being unable to set foot in the church, she experienced a deep inner remorse. At this the withholding force seemed to vanish, and she entered the church and prayed by the relic of the [2]True Cross. Emerging once more into the sunlight, she felt that she heard a voice say to her: “If you cross the Jordan you will find glorious rest.” Renouncing the life which she had led, she journeyed to a monastery by the Jordan to receive Holy Communion before crossing the river to begin the life of a [3]recluse – a life that she would follow for the rest of her days.

Having related her story to Zosimas, Mary asked the monk to meet her in a year’s time to give her Holy Communion. At the appointed time Zosimas arrived at the banks of the Jordan to see Mary walking towards him across the waters. A further meeting was arranged for the following year, and this time Zosimas returned to the place where he had first encountered Mary, only to find her dead. It is said that a lion helped him to bury her, digging with its claws into the dry desert earth which had been Mary’s home for so many years, and which now would be her last resting place.

Two traditional icons of Mary. An anonymous Russian artist has surrounded Mary with scenes from her life (left), beginning with her kneeling in prayer before the relic of the True Cross, and ending with her burial by the lion. Gregory of Sinai monastery has chosen to depict the moment (right) when Mary walks across the River Jordan to meet Zosimas.

This, briefly, is the story of Mary – Mary of Egypt as she became known. It was preserved as an oral tradition by the monks of Zosimas’ monastery before being recorded by Sophronius a century later. In it we recognize elements similar to the life of [4]Thecla: a remarkable life of a turn to faith interwoven with the supernatural elements of legend. For the orthodox faithful, it provides a textbook example of repentance and redemption, and the mercies of the Spirit which such redemption ensures. But because these aspects of her story are the focus for the faithful, what is glossed over in such orthodox accounts is another central aspect of Mary’s story. It is a story of astonishing practical survival.

A popular 13th-century account of the lives of the saints apparently confused Mary’s story with that of Mary Magdalene. The story that Mary Magdalene spent her final years as a solitary naked penitent is wholly erroneous, but it nevertheless was seized upon by artists who were willing enough to portray the penitent naked Magdalene, as in this romanticised 19th-century version by Alfredo Valenzuela Puelma, which depicts an improbably healthy-looking Magdalene swooning before the cave in which she was supposed to have lived.

We do not know the exact years of Mary’s life, but if we assume that she must have been almost thirty when she crossed the Jordan, then her death in her late seventies means that she still must have lived for some forty-seven years in the wilderness. The legend relates that when she left for the desert she took only three loaves of bread with her. For the rest, she lived on whatever her unforgiving surroundings provided her with. This is a feat of endurance which leaves the achievements of even the most radical hard-core survivalists looking like a Sunday afternoon picnic. Given that the basic practical events of Mary’s story actually happened, we must marvel at the survival skills which she must have developed just to stay alive, and with them the mental and emotional commitment needed to sustain her existence of utter solitude. Zosimas mentions that she prayed in a near-unintelligible whisper, with all her words running together. And yet she apparently retained enough of her language skills to communicate her story to the monk.

The unforgiving harshness and haunting grandeur of the Jordanian desert. Mary somehow managed not only to survive, but to live in this hostile landscape, and not just for months or for years, but for several decades. Faith is a wondrous thing in itself. To add miracles to her story perhaps diminishes what she achieved on a human level.

We might or might not accept the supernatural elements of the story – the unseen force at the doors of the church, Mary walking on the waters of the Jordan, and the [5]helpful lion – for such elements remain a matter for individual faith. Such miraculous occurrences were needed to confirm Mary’s sainthood by the Church, and in any case remain a distant and unverifiable hearsay. My painting of Mary which heads this post does not need them: I find Mary’s commitment of faith and feat of survival sufficient marvels in themselves. The Church might have need of such miracles and mysteries, but there in the wilderness beyond the Jordan beat a heart in quiet solitude, and the human heart holds mysteries far greater than these.

Hawkwood    

Between Truth and Legend: Is Mary's story true? The circumstances of her life existed as an oral tradition before being set down in writing a century after the events. Faith is the criterion for us accepting the supernatural elements of her story, but what of the story itself? We know from documented examples that ten years is enough time for a human to revert to a feral state and lose the faculty of speech. And yet after some forty-seven years Mary was articulate enough to relate her story to Zosimus, even though the monk described her manner of praying as near-incoherent. I personally believe the substance of Mary's story, although that substance might have been embroidered upon over the years, as stories typically are.

Notes:

[1] It was expected of each monk at the monastery that he should make an annual sojourn into the desert to fast in prayerful contemplation.

[2] Please see my post Helena and the True Cross to read more about the veracity of this holy relic.

[3] A medieval tradition seems to have confused Mary Magdalene with Mary’s story. This tradition has a post-Resurrection Magdalene also living for many years as a repentant naked recluse, for which there is no evidence whatever. The source of this erroneous tradition was The Golden Legend, a 13th-century compilation of the lives of saints. The Legend freely mixed historical facts with fanciful fiction and hearsay miracles: a dubious literary cocktail which only increased its popularity. Later scholasticism treated the Legend more critically – although even up to the 19th-century artists were still portraying Mary Magdalene as a naked recluse (left, by Hans Olaf Heyerdahl) in the style of Mary of Egypt. Please see my post The Gospel of Mary.   

[4] Please see my post Thecla: A Woman between Rain and Fire to read Thecla’s remarkable story.

[5] Whether the intervention of the helpful lion could be considered as miraculous is perhaps questionable. I tend to think of it as a typical storybook element: unlikely and improbable, but not actually defying the laws of physics and nature, as miracles appear to do. 

Sources:

The original account by Sophronius on which my post is based can be read here. My post necessarily condenses or omits many of the details purportedly related by Mary to Zosimas, including the fact that she prostituted herself on board the vessel bound for the Holy Land specifically as a way of paying for her passage, and also includes an extended and detailed account of her first meeting with Zosimas, which is moving in itself.

Jordanian desert adapted from a photo by criscris1. Map and portrayal of Mary created for this post by Hawkwood for the David Bergen Studio © All Rights Reserved.

Empires of Sand, Empires of Dust

Her wrists are shackled, not with iron, but with a chain of gold: an acknowledgement by her captors of her high status. The golden chains are perhaps a mixture both of respect and of irony: respect for this woman’s considerable achievements, and the underlying irony that chains are still chains, whether of [1]gold or of unyielding Roman iron. Queen Zenobia of Palmyra gazes for the last time over her beloved city before being escorted to Rome to be paraded through the streets prior to her [2]execution. The establishing of her own Palmyrene Empire and the revolt which she has led against the might of Rome has at last been crushed, and the sun will surely continue to shed its light upon the eternal empire of the Caesars for as long as the world lasts.

Queen Zenobia gazes for the last time upon her beloved city of Palmyra, as portrayed by Herbert Schmalz in the 19th-century. Her declaration of independence from Rome and the expansion of her empire as far north as Asia Minor and as far south as Egypt became a threat to Rome which could not be ignored.

Well, as we know, Roman rule proved to be rather less eternal than any Caesar preferred to imagine. Less than a century and a half after Zenobia was defeated, the [3]Christian Visigoth Alaric rode with his army into the forum of Rome and put an end to imperial Roman domination forever. The events of history should chasten us. In history, nothing is less certain than the status quo: change is always coming, and history contains constant reminders of the folly of imagining that things will simply go on being the way they are. The truth is of course that, human pride being what it is, we usually prefer to imagine (and probably firmly believe that) our values will endure, whether those values come in the form of political power, empire building, or a particular religious belief – or a mix of all three.

Palmyra in the last half of the 3rd-century. Zenobia extends her Palmyrene empire to become a serious rival to Roman rule. Palmyra occupied a privileged location at the junction of major trade routes connecting to the silk road eastward (shown above in red). These connections made the city affluent, sophisticated and cosmopolitan, with the harmonious blending of different cultures being reflected in the city’s art and architecture.

As recently as the end of last [4]month Islamic State militants continued their destruction of Zenobia’s Palmyra. Having already demolished with explosives the beautiful Baalshamin temple, the city’s elegant Roman arch and other sculptures and monuments, the militants switched to a new tactic by combining their two crimes – the one cultural, the other humanitarian – into one, by tying their captives to the city’s columns and then blowing up the columns. As with their destruction of other irreplaceable cultural treasures, IS justify their actions by claiming that such artefacts are ‘idolatrous’, and therefore an affront to their Islamic beliefs. It is an easy option to dismiss such a hollow justification with contempt and revulsion, but if such a course is taken, what tends to get overlooked in the heat of negative emotions is what ‘idolatrous’ actually means in practice.

The Baalshamin temple, the principal temple in Palmyra. Baalshamin was the principal deity of Palmyrene beliefs. Current status: destroyed by Islamic State militants.

In the context of religious belief we tend to think of ‘idols’ as being of carved wood and stone: actual objects of worship that we either bow down to or seek to destroy, depending upon the fervour of our own beliefs. But is an idol always a thing of stone or wood? Religious idols can take other forms. Consider a Christian Fundamentalist who believes unquestioningly that everything in scripture is the direct revealed word of God, and therefore is flawless and final. Scripture has in such a case shifted from being a thing of spiritual revelation to being uncritically and blindly accepted en bloc, with any scholarly assessment of such texts’ editorial compilation within a historical context being roundly disregarded or – perhaps even worse – dismissed as a subject of mere irrelevance. In such a blindly uncritical situation such texts have become an idol in themselves, with such fatuous fundamentalism becoming degraded from sincere religious belief to the level of mere idol worship, the idol in this case being, not of wood or stone, but of words.

The lion of Al-Lat, the most massive and imposing sculpture in Palmyra shown in its restored state. Current status: destroyed by Islamic State militants.

When seen in this light, Islamic militants are themselves idolatrous: the Quran, rather than being perceived as a religious text, has been degraded to the form of an idol that is blindly and uncritically glorified at the expense of their own humanity. For such militants, the Quran has been ‘idolized’. We might commonly refer to the religious extremists who carry out such inhuman acts as mass rape and beheadings as ‘barbarians’, but they have made themselves barbarians in a literal as well as in a metaphorical sense. There can be no such thing as ‘religious extremism’, because when religion takes such extreme forms it follows a darker god to become something other than religion – even when it is done in religion’s name. Religion without humanity is barbarism, and if you follow your religion to the point where you lose your humanity, then you have by default also lost your religion.

The Roman triumphal arch in Palmyra, an elegant example of Roman secular architecture. Current status: destroyed by Islamic State militants.

The recent destruction of the buildings in Palmyra by Islamic State is hardly the first time in history that opposing forces have targeted architecture. The invading Persians sacked the Acropolis in Athens. Under the political will of Pericles it was rebuilt the following generation, but when Alexander with his conquering army reached the beautiful Persian capital of Persepolis he exacted a terrible [5]retribution for the destruction of the Acropolis, ordering his troops to raze the city to the ground. They did, and one of the most treasured and comprehensive – and irreplaceable – libraries of that time was consigned to the flames. Unlike Persepolis, the Acropolis rose phoenix-like from the ashes – only to be sacked once more seven centuries later by [6]Christians who were all-too-eager to dismantle this seat of pagan worship.

Palmyra’s magnificent amphitheatre would have been used for staging oratory performances. Current status: now used as an execution ground by Islamic State militants. 

Palmyra itself, known as the Venice of the Sands, represented a perfect flowering of different cultures, with an aesthetically successful and unique blending both of Roman, Palmyrene and Persian influences in its architecture. What makes its destruction different is that almost two thousand years later, up until earlier this year, it existed as a partial yet still magnificent ruin in our contemporary world. Its special status as a UNESCO World Heritage site effectively means that it was being preserved in trust, as the collective cultural heritage of you who are reading this, and of future generations to come. But it is always so much easier to destroy something than to build it, and in this sense Islamic State has squarely chosen for the easy option.

Originally sculpted as a funerary bust, this carved limestone portrait of a Palmyrene noblewoman speaks of all the refinement and sophistication of Palmyrene arts and the citizens who created them. Current status: in the collection of the British Museum, London.

So what happens now? Having survived for almost two thousand years, the most beautiful buildings of Zenobia’s beloved Palmyra have been reduced to dust and rubble, and the sand of its [7]amphitheatre is stained with the blood of those executed by the will of IS extremists. IS might rise further in its own brutalising attempt at empire building, or it could collapse internally, with no stable political or bureaucratic infrastructure in place to consolidate what has been gained by blood and terror. History can at times seem very impatient to introduce change, with rapidly-moving events appearing to happen at whirlwind speed – and it also can bide its time, and change can seem slow in coming. But change will come eventually as day follows night. In a hundred, or a thousand, or [8]six thousand years, historians will record the dim memory of half-forgotten and long-obsolete beliefs, and the pages of the Quran will have long blown away on the indifferent desert winds.

Hawkwood

Khaled Asaad and Kayla Mueller

THE HUMANITARIAN CRIMES OF ISLAMIC STATE: This post focuses generally upon the cultural crimes of Islamic State with relation to the buildings in Palmyra, but mention must also be made of its humanitarian crimes. Khaled Asaad, the 82 year-old Director of Antiquities at Palmyra, was tortured for several weeks in an attempt by IS to force him to reveal the whereabouts of cultural treasures hidden at the site. He refused and was subsequently beheaded, after which his body was hung from the ruins which he had spent a lifetime’s career preserving. The selling of such cultural artefacts on the black market has been a way for IS to fund its operations. IS treats systematic rape almost as a doctrine, the captured U.S. aid worker Kayla Mueller being just one of many such victims of the IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi before he murdered her. The Palmyra amphitheatre has since May of this year been used as a place of execution by IS. Shortly after they overran Palmyra IS executed three hundred local men whom they considered to be ‘pro-government’. This mass execution was followed by a second: the massacre of another four hundred local residents, most of them women and children. With the exception of the murder in Iraq of Ms Mueller, all of the above atrocities by Islamic State took place in Palmyra. Similar atrocities have taken place in Iraq and elsewhere.

In the Palmyra amphitheatre teenage members of Islamic State stand behind soldiers of the Syrian army who were executed by them moments after this photo was taken.

A QUESTION OF RESPECT: A bizarre echo of what is happening in Palmyra is taking place right now in the very heart of the Muslim world. Since the mid-1980’s the Saudi authorities have seen fit to destroy some 95% of all historic buildings in Mecca (including several important mosques) dating from the time of the prophet Muhammad to make way for new hotels, apartments, shopping malls and parking lots. The question has to be asked: how can a religious culture be expected to respect the historic value of other cultures when it clearly does not even respect its own?

The most holy place in all of Islam is now dominated by a colossal brooding hotel.

PALMYRA AND ECONOMIC REALITY: In terms of the tourist economy of the country, Palmyra was a golden egg for the Syrian government and a local source of income. But for the future to come, in whatever form it takes, who is going to want to visit a sad and bloodstained pile of rubble? Even given a worst-case scenario in which Islamic State actually introduces its ruling caliphate in the region, it has now effectively cut itself off from this lucrative source of income. It does not take an economic genius to figure out that alienating governments, both regional and beyond, is a short-term road to long-term economic disaster. Religious fundamentalism and myopic idiocy are horns on the same goat: a lesson of history which fortunately seems to be lost on the militants of Islamic State.

Notes:

[1] Zenobia’s gold shackles are not a fictional fancy: a contemporary account mentions her wearing such chains when she was paraded through Rome.

[2] Zenobia’s fate in Rome is uncertain, with one account having her marry a Roman senator and becoming a familial matriarch. But Roman punishment for insurrection and the need to set an example to others being the ruthless beast that it was, it does seem more likely that she was executed. Unlike the political puppet masters of our own world, Zenobia belonged to an age when the person who opened hostilities was the same person who led the troops into battle. Zenobia seems to have been a true amazon, accompanying her troops on foot during marathon marches.

[3] Alaric seems to have kept a foot in both camps, adopting Christian practices while still finding room to follow pagan beliefs.

[4] BBC News report of 27 October, 2015: ‘IS blows up Palmyra columns to kill three captives’.

[5] Alexander’s ruthless destruction of the Persian capital would seem to be the very definition of the ‘what goes around comes around’ dictum. It could be that in an indeterminate future some new fanatical religious sect will desecrate the Kaaba in a long-deserted Mecca. The famous Black Stone set into the Kaaba already has been smashed to pieces in medieval times, which is why it is now encased in a silver mount (right). Not unsurprisingly, those who carried out this destruction were members of an extreme Muslim sect. Also unsurprisingly, IS have threatened to destroy the Kaaba as an 'idol of stone'.

[6] I have no illusions about this incident in history. Had explosives been available at that time the Parthenon would have been reduced to dust and rubble indistinguishable from the dust and rubble that once was the Baalshamin temple in Palmyra. 

[7] Teenage boys belonging to IS execute prisoners in the Palmyra amphitheatre.

[8] This time frame of 6,000 years in the future I have borrowed from my post All Things Must Pass (left). I have chosen this specific time frame because it is as distant from our own time as we are from the beginnings of civilization in Sumer. Such a span of time is clearly beyond our imagination. What once were living religions (the gods of Olympus, Odin and Valhalla, etc.) are now seen by us as mythologies, so it is only reasonable to presume that the religions of our own world will become the mythologies of an unimaginable distant future.

Sources:

New York Times, 14 August, 2015: ISIS Held Kayla Mueller, U.S. Aid Worker, as Sex Slave Before Fatal Air Strike, by Rukmini Callimachi. Retrieved 3 November, 2015. (IS had previously claimed that Ms Mueller had been killed in an allied air strike, before the truth of what had happened was learned from two other young women who had managed to escape.)

The Independent, 19 August 2015: Isis executes Palmyra antiquities chief and hangs him from ruins he spent a lifetime restoring, by Adam Withnall. Retrieved 3 November, 2015.

BBC News, 5 October, 2015: Islamic State ‘blows up Palmyra Arch’. Retrieved 1 November, 2015.

BBC News, 27 October, 2015: IS ‘blows up three columns to kill three captives’. Retrieved 29 October, 2015.

Mail Online, 24 May 2015: ISIS slaughters 400 mostly women and children in ancient Syria city of Palmyra where hundreds of bodies line the streets, by Kate Pickles. Retrieved 4 November 2015.

The Independent, 17 February 2014: Mecca for the Rich: Islam’s holiest site ‘turning into Vegas’, by Jerome Taylor. Retrieved 4 November, 2015.

Photo of the Palmyrene funerary bust by PHGCOM. Photo of Kayla Mueller by Matt Hinshaw for the Daily Courier via Associated Press. Photo of Khaled Asaad, the lion of Al-Lat and executions in the amphitheatre from Getty Images. Other photos from uncredited sources. Map prepared for this post by Hawkwood for the David Bergen Studio © All Rights Reserved.

For an excellent virtual tour of Palmyra you can visit Tito Dupret's site here and wander around the city as it was before Islamic State occupation. Such comprehensive documentation of these monuments which no longer exist has now become doubly valuable, and historic in itself.

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.