An Historical Realist Heresy: Magdalenism

The Marriage (or Wedding) at Cana is one of the miracle stories told in the Gospel of John, and it has historical implications that modern readers (and especially non-Jewish ones) may completely miss. The bride and bridegroom are not specifically named, but Jesus and his mother Mary are the hosts of the wedding reception, providing the refreshments and the servants, and Jesus miraculously replenishes the wine instantly when it suddenly runs out. The British investigative journalistic team, consisting of Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, who collectively wrote the famous (and to some, infamous) book of historical nonfiction, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and in that work, the authors point out the objective historical and cultural ramifications of this little tale: in Ancient Judaean society, absolutely only one party would, by established custom, hold the wedding reception and provide the refreshments: the groom and his family. Jesus was a Jew, whatever else you might choose to believe about him, and therefore, if this gospel account preserves a true historical memory from Jesus' actual life, then Jesus would have to have been the unnamed bridegroom. For traditional Christians, this argument has proven highly uncomfortable. For literally millennia, the Church has taught Christians to be highly uncomfortable with our physicality and sexuality, and therefore, the figure at the very center of the faith, Jesus, must be celibate and asexual to be viewed as the "pure", spiritual hero we want him to be, right? And yet, whatever encrustations of dogma that have formed around the figure of Jesus over the past twenty centuries, we must remember that, while he lived on this Earth, he was a Jew, and Judaean culture had no spiritual misgivings about devout members of their faith feeling sexual attraction for each other and enjoying sexual love with one another once marriage had occurred. Ancient Judaean society had no institution of religious celibacy, nor was it considered a moral virtue to be celibate. In fact, Jewish wisdom literature taught that neither a man nor a woman fully discovers their spiritual humanity until they have known marriage. The Canonical Gospels leave a gap in the story of Jesus' life from the age of twelve until he begins his ministry at age 30. As the writers of Holy Blood, Holy Grail pointed out, it would have been considered a major social deviation for Jesus not to have taken a wife during that time. Yet Christians, influenced by Greek Platonist ideas of the moral filth of the body and sexual feelings, never questioned that such a thing might even be possible in their highly ethereal vision of Jesus. They assumed that, for all those years, Jesus had been content to work with his father Joseph in their workshop as a "tekton" (the Greek occupational word used in the original language of the Canonical Gospels, which can either mean "stone mason" or "carpenter"). It is interesting to note that the Gospel of John claims that the miracle of the wine at Cana was the first miracle Jesus publicly performed, and so perhaps this is another clue that this event may have occurred in Jesus' life before his official ministry. Now, thanks to the collection of Christian Gnostic manuscripts recovered from Nag Hammadi in Egypt, we actually have corroborative evidence of Jesus' possible married state. In the fragmentary Gospel of Mary and in the Gospel of Phillip, we discover that Jesus most beloved disciple was Mary Magdalene, with whom he shows a social familiarity and intimacy that would only be typical of that between a husband and wife in Ancient Jewish society. In these Gnostic gospels, Mary Magdalene is presented as a disciple of apostolic quality in terms of the spiritual insight she articulates in her own right, and she exerts enough influence that she is even a source of jealousy and envy among certain members of Jesus' inner circle, who evidently already had ambitions for roles of future leadership in his spreading movement. Mary Magdalene, of course, also figures in the Canonical Gospels as a woman who became a follower of Jesus teaching, after he had "cast out seven devils from her". Very cleverly, the British authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail claim this is a covert, metaphorical reference to the fact that Mary of Magdala had been a priestess of the Seven Veils in the cult of a Semitic mother goddess, such as the Levantine deity, Astarte, and therefore this reference is code that Jesus had converted her to his brand of Yahwist Judaism. And yet, whatever patriarchal characteristics traditional Judaism had at that point, there is reason to believe that the form of Judaism Jesus promoted gave equal standing to women, not only due to the implications of such non-canonical texts as the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Thomas, but also on the evidence of the earliest accounts of the Church, including the Canonical Book of Acts, and also the older, more authoritative versions of Paul's Letters found in the New Testament texts of the Sinai Monastery Version of the Greek Bible, dating from the 5th century, CE, wherein Paul actually extols and affirms the role of women in the Church as spiritual leaders and administrators of Christian communities. There are historical accounts that Mary Magdalene left Judaea after Jesus' death and moved to the already heavily Jewish-settled region of Septimania in southeastern Gaul. There she is said to have founded what became a diocese of churches originating in a Jesus-centered Jewish cult, and indeed to this day there an unusual number of Catholic churches, in that region of what is now France, dedicated to Mary Magdalene. So there are twin ramifications to the whole possibility of Jesus' marriage: (1) Jesus, the model for all priests and ministers that followed him, had taken, like any good Jewish rabbi, a wife in all due religious honor, and (2) that wife was likely to have been Mary Magdalene, who, far from being the "reformed harlot" of popular Church dogma (such a putative status for her being drawn from no scriptural passage whatsoever), was actually a model for co-equal spiritual leadership by women with men in the religious reform movement as originally intended by Jesus. If these matters are true, then we once again see the conspiracy of a misogynistic and anti-carnal Church to shut out women except in submissive and ancillary roles. I can only assume that this stance would serve an authoritarian agenda keep their congregations psychologically off balance by declaring their sexual drives no part of what Jesus wanted for people aspiring to a truly spiritual life. And as for the Song of Songs in the Hebrew Testament, which the Church accepted as canonical for the Christian Old Testament, the good Ecclesiastical Doctors taught that this beautifully poetic book was not really a a Semitic spiritual celebration of sexual love between man and woman, but actually a complex metaphor of the marriage of the soul to the Church! So, though the Church had burned such penetrating scholarly works as Origen's treatises of deep exegetical analysis of Holy Scripture, the Church was quite capable of using those very same techniques of scriptural analysis that it often branded as "heretical", in order to suit their own purposes of an ascetically celibate form of Christianity, carefully shielded from "the filthy reproductive nature" of women and their bodies, the "weaker spiritual vessel". Most heinously, they emended the very Letters of Paul, the cornerstone documents of the Christian Church, and made them to say quite the opposite of what an older version of the Pauline Epistles indicates. If there is any fundamentalist Christian who believes that the Holy Scriptures are the pure writ of God because anyone daring to meddle with them would be instantly struck down by heavenly lightning, Biblical manuscript scholars find that this just isn't so. It's time for the original form of the Letters of Paul to be restored to the official Christian Bible, and to remove the designation of "heretical" from the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and the Gospel of Thomas, where women disciples are constructively and meaningfully portrayed. It is time to bring Christianity back into being a holistic faith, where both women themselves and a natural healthy loving sexuality between consenting adults are not seen as somehow merely "acceptably unfortunate", but as actual strengths of a whole-bodied, whole-souled, sexually-equal faith tradition.