Sept. 13, 2006
Whoever said truth is stranger than fiction never some of the writers and editors of the Bible. But it will take more than a retraction from the Vatican to get to the bottom of a long festering debate.
Pope Gregory the First deserves credit. In A.D. 591, the Pontiff pulled off one of western civilization’s great swindles when he announced during a sermon that Mary Magdalene was the much-debated woman referred to in the Gospel of Luke, Chapter Four. Her connection to Jesus, he explained, amounted to nothing more than a repentant prostitute.
You see, back in the early centuries of Christianity, there was some debate – actually, lots of debate - about the notoriety and/or contributions of several female players in the New Testament. A few of them happened to be named Mary, and most theologians today concur that Mary Magdalene was indeed the closest Mary to Jesus of Nazareth (if you don't count his mother).
Yet many early Christians also believed that Magdalene was a royal descendant of the Tribe of Benjamin and that she and Jesus enjoyed an intimate, possibly even physical relationship. In fact, this key female figure in theology may have been pivotal to the development of the religion in the first place, playing the role of both financier and preacher.
As for the prospect that the two consenting adults married and bore one or more children, all that’s really known is that some time after Jesus was executed by the Romans for sedition, Mary Magdalene left the jurisdiction. She may have taken up residence in cosmopolitan Alexandria (in Egypt), and perhaps a dozen years later, sailed across the Mediterranean to Provence, France. On this second relocation, she is alleged by some to have brought along a 12-year-old daughter named Sarah.
This is where things get dicey. The suggestion regarding a potential line of descendants to Jesus would naturally cast doubt on the need for Vatican-controlled church hierarchy. Of equal concern to the papacy between the second and fourteenth centuries were different versions of the faith itself that were circulating. Some empowered the feminine gender as a spiritual and guiding force. At one point, things would get so out of hand that in the south of France, couples were foregoing the sacrament of marriage because that only legitimized a group of interlopers who were trying to run the church by fiat.
Hence, the persecution of the so-called heretics. That began under the Roman emperor Theodisius. (Earlier, in 313 A.D. the first Christian Roman Emperor Constantine declared Christianity the official faith of the Roman Emprie.) Heretics were people who didn’t kow-tow to version of the religion layed out at the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D., including the position that Jesus was celibate and that he was divine as well as human. In time, the Vatican would commission three Inquisitions. The armed muscle proved a formidable means of persuasion, with tens of thousands, if not millions of disbelievers permanently eliminated from the debate.
So taking Pope Gregory’s remarks in their historical context, events fall rather snugly, if disturbingly into place. While the Vatican conceded in 1969 that his Homily 33 had no basis in fact, the College of Cardinals didn’t invest much elbow grease in publicizing the retraction. In short, had not Dan Brown published the Da Vinci Code a few years back, probably no one outside theological circles would know that the Church had shamelessly engaged in political spin control at the expense of a holy woman’s reputation.
And not than anyone has, but one could also make the argument that if the Holy See hadn’t made such a fuss about the celibacy of Jesus, probably none of the molestations of children in the United States would ever have happened. Priests could have married, had a sex life and gotten on with the business of ministering to their congregations.
Equally troubling about the buzz surrounding the DaVinci Code is that the focus of the present-day speculation has centered almost exclusively on possible activity inside Mary Magdalene’s womb, rather than on who this woman was in her own right.
“When Mary Magdalene first set foot on the stage,” author Susan Haskins writes, “she emerged there as a worldly character, one who vaunted her sexuality, and adopted language and fashions of her time to represent in her life the figure of Everywoman.”
Haskins, however, goes on to explain that this venerable icon of Christianity had the screws put to her well after she was in any position to fight back. Mary Magdalene in essence “became part of what is now called the forgotten history of women.”
Just as that other femme fatale of biblical fame, “Eve”, bore principle responsibility for the Original Sin and expulsion of humans from Paradise, Mary Magdalene has for the past 1,400 years offered a convenient coat hanger on which humanity’s collective frustration with all that is wrong with the world has been quite visibly hung.
“For the man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man,” we are informed in the first Corinthians, 11:3,7,9. “Let the women keep silence in the churches, for it is not permitted unto them to speak, but they are commanded to be under obedience, so saith the law. And if they learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home; for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.”
Was this really a lesson we learned from the Son of God? If it was, why does Leonardo Da Vinci have Mary Magdalene sitting there right beside him at The Last Supper. (Obviously, some would say, because the man’s a homosexual!) In the scramble to get to the bottom of Mary Magdalene’s reproductive history, if any, one cannot help but wonder why so many Christians in times passed devoted so much energy to preserving outlawed spiritual beliefs that they ended up wrapped around a burning stake.
Growing evidence also suggests that the Genesis story about Adam and Eve was itself a total fabrication. This time Levite priests laying the groundwork for the Hebrew religion decided that putting woman securely in her place amounted to job number one on their agenda. Evidently, the older, Goddess based denominations of the Near East had proven a tough act to follow.
Maybe that’s because the feminine tradition had a twenty-five thousand year head start.
Before the Deluge
In the mid 1970’s Berkeley based art historian Merlin Stone sparked her own mini-DaVinci craze with the publication of a book called When God was a Woman. Unlike the Dan Brown novel, Stone’s work was nonfiction, and traces her attempt to sort out the archaeological puzzle surrounding the Neolithic Age. This period dates back some ten thousand years the Common Era, when some apparently advanced civilizations populated the
blue planet. Interestingly, it appears that the female portion of society back then was calling the shots.
In her introduction, Stone doesn’t mince words about what she was up to when she undertook this forensic expedition. “If we are ever to fully understand how and why man gained the image of the one who accomplishes the greatest and most important deeds while woman was relegated to the role of ever-patient helper, and subsequently assured that this was the natural state of female-male relationships,” she writes,” it is to these remote periods of human history that we must travel.”
Known as the age of agriculture and permanent settlements, the Neolithic has been traditionally glossed over in the history books. Why? Because the ruling roost of academia claimed these were times of primitive debauchery and “fertility cults”. In addition, since the earliest writing discovered dates back only to 3000 B.C.E., there’s no real hard evidence to prove what may or may not have taken place during this interval.
Yet, as Stone and other investigators would eventually uncover, the artifacts and edifices dug out of the ancient mounds of the Near East, Europe and Latin America have revealed, among other things, a well-developed, almost universal religion of a Great Goddess that went far beyond the pale of the occasional rain dance and communal orgies practiced on the solstice. The world’s first cities, for instance, emerged during the Neolithic, with feats of civil engineering and construction that are still in common use today.
The remains of temples and shrines honoring a Great Goddess or Great Mother dot the ancient landscape from Avebury (in the British Isles) all the way down to Iraq, just like so many Starbucks outlets. The Temple of Artemis, outside of Greece, was rebuilt several times over a millennium, eventually named one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
Stone writes, “Most of the information and artifacts concerning the vast female religion, which flourished for thousands of years before the advent of Judaism, Christianity and the Classical Age of Greece, have been dug out of the ground only to be reburied in obscure archaeological texts, carefully shelved away in the exclusively protected stacks of university and museum libraries. Quite a few of these were accessible only with the proof of university affiliation or university degree.”
The belief in a Goddess apparently extends at least as far back as the “Venus figurines” excavated throughout Europe and said to have originated in 25000 B.C. Many were found a few feet away from the shelves in the walls where they had been placed what are considered the earliest manmade dwellings. Other excavations have unearthed “plastered brick houses, some with clay ovens with chimneys and even sockets for doorposts,” from a period between 9000 and 7000 B.C.
By 5500 B.C., multi-room houses were being built around a central courtyard, similar to residential schemes in Europe today. “There is every reason to suppose,” scholar Jacquetta Hawkes has argued, “that under the conditions of the primary Neolithic way of life, mother-right and the clan system were sill dominant, and the land would generally have descended through the female line.”
As for the “cult” nature of spiritual beliefs among ancient Sumerians and Babylonians, historians generally concur that the mythology of these two matriarchal societies formed the backbone for the rosters of Egyptian and Greek goddesses and gods that would later emerge, and whose names of remain common knowledge to this day.
Regardless, Stone cites a leading authority on Palestine, W.F. Albright, who has argued that the spirituality of the Near East in ancient times consisted of “orgiastic nature worship, sensuous nudity and gross mythology”. This unseemly state of affairs he contrasts with “Israel’s pastoral simplicity and purity of life, its lofty monotheism and its severe code of ethics.”
Stone challenges such conclusions in light of the various massacres perpetrated by the Hebrews on the original inhabitants of Canaan in the last two millennia B.C.E. Despite their crude cultures, the nomadic tribes who constituted the Indo-European migrations to the Near East (beginning around 3000 B.C.E) enjoyed a Bronze Age technological edge militarily over their southern neighbors. The marauders were equipped with swords and horses weapons which could not be found in the defensive arsenal of the larger Near Eastern cities
According to Stone, by 1800 B.C.E. the situation of women had definitely changed for the worse. In Canaan, for instance, they lost their rights to property, money, and the ability to engage in commercial transactions or sign a contract. Kinship lines now passed from the mother to the father, and in many cases women became the bona fide property of their husbands. Goddess worship was forbidden, temples were destroyed, and the Hebrew god Yahweh became the central figure of religious worship.
“Perhaps the most shocking laws of all were those that declared that a woman was to be stoned or burned to death for losing her virginity before marriage, a factor never before mentioned in other law codes of the Near East, and that, upon being the victim of rape, a single woman was forced to marry the rapist; if she was already betrothed or married she was to be stoned to death for having been raped.”
The formulation of the Old Testament is generally thought to have begun in 500 B.C.
Part of the plan to install the new cultural order naturally involved ringing out the old. However, while the old legends carved on tablets or walls were being systematically destroyed by religious edict, much of the oral history survived the siege, subsequently passed down through generations of rural farming families who were less likely to be monitored by the religious police. Meanwhile, the more secular societies of Egypt and Greece managed to absorb all the more practical aspects of the older traditions, as well as much of the cosmology.
As for the Adam and Eve story in Genesis, modern mythologists have determined that this particular story did not spring from any previous tradition, unlike the two other creation myths in the bible. To the contrary, Adam and Eve appear to have been spun out of whole cloth for the purpose of dissuading later generations of man from reverting back to the old matriarchal ways.
“This curious mythological idea,” mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote in 1960, “and the still more curious fact that for two thousand years it was accepted throughout the Western World as the absolutely dependable account of an event that is supposed to have taken place about a fortnight after the creation of the universe, poses forcefully the highly interesting question of the influence of conspicuously contrived, counterfeit mythologies and the inflections of mythology upon the structure of human belief and the consequent course of civilization.”
Stone devotes an entire chapter of her book to an analysis of the Adam and Eve, pointing out that of the one thousand pages that constitute the holy bible, this piece of fiction was placed on Page 3. “Myths present ideas that guide our perception,” she writes, “conditioning us to think and even perceive in a particular way, especially when we are young and impressionable.”
God’s famous line at the end of the tale, “I will greatly multiply your pain at childbirth” represents an ingenious touch, according to Stone, demonstrating an awareness by the Levite priests that playing the guilt card on women would in time amount to its most powerful weapon. In the stroke of a chisel, the gender that once presided over the totality of human affairs had been relegated to the back of the bus.
Whose Reputation Shall We Destroy Next?
In 1945, the Coptic Scrolls, containing several previously unknown gospels, were discovered at Nag Hammadi, in Egypt. Sometimes referred to as the Gnostic Gospels, this material consists of texts, the writing of which date back to the second or third centuries A.D.
That’s not as old as the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are believed to have been written around the time of the Jewish Revolts against the Roman occupation in A.D. 66-74 and hidden away for safe-keeping. Good thing, too; the rebellion was eventually crushed and Jerusalem all but razed to the ground. While most of the Apostles are thought to have died in the ensuing violence, Mary Magdalene appears to have left Israel years earlier.
Like the Gospels of Mathew, Mark, Luke and John, among the texts preserved in the Coptic scrolls are accounts of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. There’s considerable debate over when the original texts were written, but most scholars agree the copies were penned sometime between A.D. 350 and 400. Judging by references in the material, it’s possible that the originals on which they’re based date back to the late first century A.D. - about the same time as the four Gospels featured in the New Testament are said to have been written.
For its part, the Vatican dismisses both the Coptic and Dead Sea Scrolls as unreliable duplicates of works that may have been contrived in the first place by small spin-off sects peddling alternative agendas. Among the Coptic texts are documents that claim to be covert, such as the Secret Book of James and the Secret Book of John.
Yet rather than being hidden because of some occult aspect of the groups that produced them, the classified nature of the documents may be attributed to the harassment and executions carried out by the Catholic Church. Ironically, the earliest existing versions of the four canonical Gospels are copies themselves, all of them penned sometime after the scrolls.
But that’s only the beginning of the debate over the arbitrary, if not politically inspired selection process that produced the Bible . Some fifty years before the papyrus at Nag Hammadi was uncovered, in 1896, a gospel identifying Mary Magdalene as its author was found, along with a few other texts, sitting in an antique store in Egypt. Purchased by a German collector, these documents were eventually deposited in the Museum of Berlin and are today known as the Berlin Codex. Together with the other works, the 1896 scriptures contain a startling narrative of Jesus’s life, one that differs dramatically in both tone and content from the stodgy old King James bible text that has been circulating for the last two hundred years.
Yet it was only in 1979 that this whole fascinating controversy reached the public eye when Elaine Pagels published The Gnostic Gospels. In her book, Pagels details the chain of custody, so to speak, of different scriptures associated with Jesus that did not make the cut for the canonical New Testament. Her crisp and absorbing narrative subsequently greased the wheels for a slough of other titles, among them the 1982 work, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, on which Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code is based.
One of the steamier bits of material in the Gnostic gospels is a passage in the Gospel of Phillip. In it, Mary Magdalene is proclaimed the disciple that Jesus loved most, and that Jesus kissed her frequently on the mouth. In other documents, she is also to as “the Apostle to the Apostles”, and credited with mustering all the disciples back together after the crucifixion.
In another Gnostic text called The Pistias Sophia, we get the inside scoop on a long-standing feud between the apostle Peter and Mary Magdalene. Apparently, these two disciples constantly bickered, forcing Jesus himself to mediate. During one such altercation, for instance, Peter suddenly blurts out, “My master, we cannot endure this woman who gets in our way and does not let any of us speak, though she talks all the time.”
Jesus replies, “Let anyone in whom the power of the spirit has arisen, so that the person understands what I say, come forward and speak. Peter, I perceive that your power within you understands the interpretation of the mystery of repentance that Pistis Sophia mentioned.”
A few paragraphs later, Mary Magdalene’s vents her own interpersonal frustration. “My master, I understand in my mind that I can come forward at any time to interpret what Pistis Sophia has said, but I am afraid of Peter, because he threatens me and hates our gender.”
That’s pretty intense language for A.D. 30. Yet Jesus calmly responds, “Any of those filled with the spirit of light will come forward to interpret what I say,” he says. “No one will be able to oppose them.”
Of course, he never said it would be easy.
It turns out that even the officially sanctioned canonical gospels have their television sitcom moments. Mathew, Mark, Luke and John all recount the infamous spikenard incident, which again pitted the male Apostles against Mary Magdalene
According to Margaret Starbird, the author of The Woman with the Alabaster Jar, spikenard is a rare and expensive perfume worth about a year’s wages during those long ago days in Galilee. One day, while everyone was gathered at the home of Lazarus, Mary Magdalene cracked open the jar and spilt its contents over Jesus in line with a popular ritual of the times.
The male disciples immediately protested the lavish expense of the perfume, with Judas Iscariot, the group treasurer, particularly throwing a gasket. Iscariot complained that the money could have better spent alleviating poverty. However, Jesus admonished him with the remark that while the poor are always with us, he himself would not be around much longer.
Pope Gregory drew from this episode when preparing his infamous “Homily 33”, claiming “It is clear, brothers, that the woman previously used the unguent to perfume her flesh in forbidden acts.”
The problem with his argument, of course, was that that none of the Gospels ever refer to Magdalene as a prostitute, though Luke uses the term elsewhere in his dispatch.
Magdalene and several other women associated with Jesus were known to belong to wealthy families, and probably used their not unsubstantial resources to fund the spread of the new religion, since neither Jesus, who was a carpenter, nor his male disciples possessed that kind of cash. Furthermore, Margaret Starbird writes that all of these folks stridently opposed the Roman occupation of Israel. Galilee is said to have been a hotbed of insurrection, and the savior’s famous meltdown in the temple therecould have been attributed in part to a protest against trade and commerce practices imposed by the Romans on local Jewish communities.
Starbird further asserts that the claim that Jesus was arrested and prosecuted as a result of Jewish prodding of Pontius Pilate is very unlikely, given his ultimate sentence. Blasphemy in those days didn’t carry the penalty of execution, whereas sedition against the Roman authorities routinely led to crucifixions.
Recently featured in special Newsweek publication documenting the history surrounding DaVinci Code claims, Starbird has followed Mary Magdalene’s life from her days as an Apostle to her alleged migration across the Mediterranean. In her book The Goddess in the Gospels: Reclaiming the Sacred Feminine, the author also reveals some fascinating parallels between biblical passes such as the Song of Songs, and the poetry and myths of earlier earlier matriarchal based religious traditions.
The Song of Songs retells the ancient Sumerian myth of the goddess Inanna and the God Dumuzi, a story that was hugely popular at the time Jesus and Mary Magdalene lived in the land of Canaan. Just as Dumuzi is referred to as a “shepherd” and “faithful son”, and the Goddess Inanna as the “sister” and “bride”, so too would the lives of the man from Galilee and the woman from the Tribe of Benjamin become inextricably linked for all time.
Copyright 2006-2008 TheCityEdition.com
See also, The Secrets of Margaret Starbird, Apocalypse 2012.
“Theology is ultimately political. The way human communities deify the transcendent and determine the categories of good and evil have more to do with the power dynamics of the social systems which create the theologies than with the spontaneous revelation of truth from another quarter.” Sheila Collins
