The Quest for Mary Magdalene Read online

  Jesus called Herod Antipas ‘that fox’. This was his answer to the Pharisees who came to Jesus and warned him that he must leave Galilee because Herod wanted to kill him. ‘And he said unto them, Go ye, and tell that fox, Behold, I cast out devils, and I do cures to day and to morrow, and the third day I shall be perfected’ (Luke 13:32). Jesus knew that even as the Pharisees were warning him against Herod they themselves were laying in wait for him, ‘seeking to catch something out of his mouth, that they might accuse him’ (Luke 11:54).

  But Jesus had friends among the Pharisees in Jerusalem and it may be that through them he hoped to win the city over. There was Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, both members of the Sanhedrin. Both men would honour Jesus after his death, Joseph by placing his body into his own fresh-cut tomb, Nicodemus by bringing ointments to anoint the corpse, one of several things about Nicodemus that links him to Mary Magdalene. For all the importance of Joanna in Tiberias, it is always Mary Magdalene whose name is placed first, as Jerusalem is more important than Tiberias; Jerusalem, the holy city and pilgrims’ goal, a venture in which Nicodemus had considerable interests.

  Now, as Passover was approaching, Jesus went up to Jerusalem with his disciples and the women and Mary Magdalene.

  Nevertheless I must walk to day, and to morrow, and the day following: for it cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee; how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate: and verily I say unto you, Ye shall not see me, until the time come when ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord. (Luke 13:33-35).

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Strange Days at Bethany

  THE GOSPELS TELL OF Jesus’ parables, his sermons and his healings as he takes his ministry round Galilee but this is presented as hardly more than a preamble to the last week of his life – his Passion in Jerusalem which takes up a quarter of Matthew and Luke, a third of Mark and John. Jesus enters Jerusalem in triumph, cheered by the multitudes. But the atmosphere is heavy with warnings as triumph turns to dread and a mysterious conspiracy unfolds. And then suddenly in the space of a single night and day Jesus is arrested and tried, he is beaten, taunted and humiliated, the multitudes shout for his destruction, and he is nailed to a cross until he is dead.

  Until this last moment when Jesus is dying on the cross Mary Magdalene is nowhere to be seen in the gospels except in those three brief verses of Luke 8:1-3. But at the height of the Christian drama as Jesus dies, is buried and rises from his tomb Mary Magdalene plays a central role. Finally at the heart of the Christian mystery there are only two people; this is the mystery of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

  The Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem

  John the Baptist had been beheaded by Herod just the year before; now Mary Magdalene was with Jesus as he journeyed the two hundred miles from Galilee to Jerusalem along with the disciples and the other women. They crossed over to the east bank of the river Jordan and revisited the spot where John had baptised Jesus and had proclaimed, ‘He that cometh after me is mightier than I’ (Matthew 3.11). Jesus knew the road well because as Luke 2:41 tells us, ‘his parents went to Jerusalem every year at the feast of the passover’; a hard tortuous road that climbed up through the barren Judaean steppe, an ancient pilgrimage route leading to Jerusalem and its Temple. Jesus had walked this road from childhood to man; now Mary Magdalene was with Jesus as he walked it for the last time.

  The travellers came to the village of Bethany; beyond it rose the Mount of Olives overlooking Jerusalem. Over the coming days strange things would happen here at Bethany and Jerusalem, among them events of great significance in shaping the identity and meaning of Mary Magdalene.

  As Jesus approached Bethany – all the synoptic gospels tell this story, Matthew 21:1-7, Mark 11:1-2 and Luke 19:29-35 – he sent two of his disciples ahead to bring him a colt, the usual biblical name for the foal of a donkey or an ass. This was the donkey on which Jesus would make his triumphal entry into Jerusalem.

  And it came to pass, when he was come nigh to Bethphage and Bethany, at the mount called the mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples, Saying, Go ye into the village over against you; in the which at your entering ye shall find a colt tied, whereon yet never man sat: loose him, and bring him hither. And if any man ask you, Why do ye loose him? thus shall ye say unto him, Because the Lord hath need of him. And they that were sent went their way, and found even as he had said unto them. And as they were loosing the colt, the owners thereof said unto them, Why loose ye the colt? And they said, The Lord hath need of him. And they brought him to Jesus. [Luke 19:29-35]

  Jesus knew about the donkey but the disciples did not; Jesus had made the arrangement for the donkey in advance with the help of someone he knew at Bethany – someone who was helping Jesus stage his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, who would also announce his coming and rouse the multitudes too. ‘And the multitudes that went before, and that followed, cried, saying, Hosanna to the Son of David: Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest. And when he was come into Jerusalem, all the city was moved’ (Matthew 21:9-10).

  This triumphal entry into Jerusalem had been carefully arranged so that Jesus would be seen to fulfill a prophecy. ‘All this was done’, says Matthew 21:4-5, ‘that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, Tell ye the daughter of Sion, Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass’.

  During Passover week Jesus and his followers stayed at Bethany, a two-mile walk over the Mount of Olives to Jerusalem. Photograph by Félix Bonfils in 1875.

  Bethany in 1875. Michael Haag collection.

  Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, fresco by Giotto, 1305, in the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua.

  Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem by Giotto. Wikimedia Commons.

  Matthew is quoting from the Old Testament book of Zechariah 9:9: ‘Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass’. In accordance with the prophecy, Jesus came not as a conquering warrior on a horse but as a humble man of peace.

  A man of peace but a king all the same, who comes to the daughter of Zion. We have met the daughter of Zion before; she is there in the prophecy of Micah 4:8: And thou, O tower of the flock, the strong hold of the daughter of Zion, unto thee shall it come, even the first dominion; the kingdom shall come to the daughter of Jerusalem’.

  The triumphal entry into Jerusalem, arranged as though a ceremonial ritual, is the enacting of prophecies, and Jesus is not acting alone. These are the Last Days; they are marked by the appearance of the messiah, the descendant of King David, who like a shepherd gathers in the dispersed, the afflicted and the lost. When Jesus enters Jerusalem he is delivering the kingdom to the daughter of Zion; she is the holy city of Jerusalem, she is the people of Israel, she is the tower of the flock, she is the migdal, the name Jesus gave to Mary Magdalene.

  Cleansing the Temple

  Jesus entered Jerusalem as hundreds of thousands of pilgrims poured into the city from all over Palestine and the diaspora, for this was the feast of the Passover in early April, which celebrates the Exodus from Egypt as well as the beginning of the spring planting season, and all were making their way to the Temple for sacrifices and prayers.

  Though Judaea was a Roman province, Jerusalem was policed by Jewish troops under the authority of the Temple high priest with the support of the Sanhedrin, that is the council of Jewish elders. It was not the task of the Roman army to patrol the streets.

  Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, was based at Caesarea, the provincial capital on the coast where he kept four cohorts, each cohort numbering about 480 men, and some cavalry. The Romans also kept a cohort at Jerusalem to defend the Antonia fortress and its arsenal at the northwest corner of
the Temple Mount, but when the governor came to Jerusalem for major feasts like Passover he would bring soldiers from Caesarea and quarter them in the Praesidium, the governor’s palace, which some identify with Herod the Great’s former palace to the west. So as not to offend Jewish religious sensibilities, the Romans had learnt to come to Jerusalem without their battle standards and their shrines to their pagan gods.

  Pilate himself had learnt the strength of Jewish feeling about images when he once sent troops from Caesarea to take up winter quarters in Jerusalem and allowed them to set up their ensigns there. They did so at night so that no one would notice but the people found out and multitudes went to Pilate at Caesarea and implored that he remove them. As Josephus tells the story, Pilate ordered the protesters to disperse but they fell on the ground and bared their necks, saying they would willingly die rather than accept the violation of their laws about images, ‘upon which Pilate was deeply affected with their firm resolution to keep their laws inviolable, and presently commanded the images to be carried back from Jerusalem to Caesarea’.

  What mattered to Jesus was not Roman rule but the practices at the Temple and the behaviour of its priesthood. According to the three synoptic gospels, Jesus straightway went to the Temple where he cast out the moneychangers and others who were selling there; they had turned this ‘house of prayer’, said Jesus, into a ‘den of thieves’ (Matthew 21-12-13). Jesus went about the cleansing of the Temple with some violence, overturning the changers’ tables and throwing their money to the ground, while according to John 2:15-16, who places the event earlier in Jesus’ career, he lashed out at the traders with a whip.

  And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers’ money, and overthrew the tables; And said unto them that sold doves, Take these things hence; make not my Father’s house an house of merchandise.

  Each pilgrim would wish to sacrifice a lamb, a goat, a dove or some other animal; tens of thousands of animals each day were sacrificed during Passover week. Suitable animals were raised on Temple-owned lands such as the fields near Bethlehem, at Migdal Eder, the Tower of the Flock, where lambs were specially raised for the sacrifice. The Temple was a vast abattoir where the pilgrim or a priest cut the animal’s throat and priests captured the spilling blood in bowls of silver or gold and splashed it against the corners of the altar. Unless it was a bird the animal was flayed and the skin kept by the priests, while the fatty portions of the animal were put on the altar fire and burnt until they were reduced to ash.

  Jesus attacks the moneychangers and sellers of sacrificial animals, driving them from the Temple with a whip. By Alexandre Bida, French, 1870s.

  Jesus attacks the moneychangers. Illustrations of the Life of Christ by Alexandre Bida, New York 1874.

  Each animal cost money but it had to be paid for with the Temple’s own sacred shekels, not the impure currency of the Romans stamped with a profane image such as the head of the emperor or a pagan motif, hence the moneychangers.

  When Jesus drove the moneychangers from the Temple and the sellers of doves and other sacrificial animals he was attacking the whole process of sacrifice which kept the priesthood and their auxiliaries in business; he was threatening the very economy of Jerusalem which depended almost entirely on its status as the cultic capital of Judaism.

  After his symbolic cleansing of the Temple, Jesus taught there daily, but ‘the chief priests and the scribes and the chief of the people sought to destroy him, And could not find what they might do: for all the people were very attentive to hear him’ (Luke 19:47-48). By what authority did he teach, the priests wanted to know, but Jesus turned the tables on them, asking, ‘The baptism of John, was it from heaven, or of men?’ The catch, they understood, was that ‘If we shall say, From heaven; he will say, Why then believed ye him not? But and if we say, Of men; all the people will stone us: for they be persuaded that John was a prophet’. So they answered Jesus, saying they could not tell whether John’s baptism was from heaven or of men, ‘And Jesus said unto them, Neither tell I you by what authority I do these things’ (Luke 20:4-8).

  Without actually saying so Jesus was declaring that John’s authority and his own came directly from heaven; he was asserting direct communion with God, a free worship of the heart unmediated by the priesthood and their rituals. He was talking of that vision of the divine that he shared with Mary Magdalene, the woman he had named the migdal, the tower, the beacon, the saving light in the darkness. And again the gospels tell us that ‘the chief priests and the scribes the same hour sought to lay hands on him’ (Luke 20:19) and ‘sought how they might kill him’ (Luke 22:2).

  Strange Days in Bethany

  Every evening after teaching at the Temple during Passover week Jesus and his disciples would return the two miles over the Mount of Olives to their lodgings in Bethany. There while Jesus was at the house of Simon the leper ‘came unto him a woman having an alabaster box of very precious ointment, and poured it on his head, as he sat at meat’ (Matthew 26:7). Simon must have been a cured leper as otherwise his leprosy would have excluded him from social occasions. The gospel of Mark 14:3 describes the same event: ‘And being in Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at meat, there came a woman having an alabaster box of ointment of spikenard very precious; and she brake the box, and poured it on his head’.

  In each case the woman is nameless; she comes and she goes. And yet when his disciples protest at the extravagance of the act, Jesus answers them, saying, ‘For in that she hath poured this ointment on my body, she did it for my burial. Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached in the whole world, there shall also this, that this woman hath done, be told for a memorial of her’ (Matthew 26:12-13; Mark 14:8-9 says the same thing).

  But though Jesus tells us that this woman will be remembered throughout the world for what she has done, Mark and Matthew do not allow us to remember her; they conceal her name.

  Further confusion sets in with Luke 7:37-38 who describes an anointing of Jesus by an unnamed woman in the house of Simon, but this Simon is a Pharisee, not a leper, and the event takes place at Capernaum during Jesus’ ministry in Galilee.

  The anointing of Jesus at Bethany. Mary Magdalene is the title of this wood engraving by Eric Gill in 1926.

  The anointing of Jesus at Bethany. The Engravings, by Eric Gill, edited by Christopher Skelton, London 1990.

  And, behold, a woman in the city, which was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster box of ointment, And stood at his feet behind him weeping, and began to wash his feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment.

  The fourth gospel, that is the gospel of John, returns us to the eastern slope of the Mount of Olives and also gives a name to the woman who anoints Jesus. Here in Bethany, says John 12:2-3, Jesus sat at supper not with Simon the leper nor the Pharisee but with Lazarus and his two sisters Martha and Mary. ‘Then took Mary a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair: and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment.’ On this occasion it is Judas Iscariot who complains at the expense while Jesus again connects the ointment to his death: ‘Then said Jesus, Let her alone: against the day of my burying hath she kept this’ (John 12:7).

  Both John and Mark place a measurable value on the precious ointment, giving its cost as more than three hundred denarion in the original Greek (three hundred pence in the King James translation) at a time when a denarius was a day’s wages (see Matthew 20:2), so that Jesus was anointed to the value of a man’s labour for a year. The source of this considerable wealth is left unexplained. How did this woman of the anointing, this nameless woman of Mark and Matthew, or this Mary the sister of Lazarus in John, possess such very precious ointment, and what allowed her to feel free to use it on Jesus? The gospels do n
ot say.

  One might try to explain this confusion by saying these are separate anointings at Bethany on different days. Mark and Matthew say the anointing dinners were ‘two days’ before the Passover meal while John gives the impression that it was on the same day as Jesus’ arrival at Bethany, ‘six days’ before the Passover meal. But in essence it is always the same event, for each gospel remarks on the costliness of the anointing, the protest against the expense and Jesus’ remark that it is done against his own death and burial.

  Some of this confusion might otherwise be explained by the nature of Bethany itself. Bethany was a place where pilgrims stayed while visiting the Temple at Jerusalem during the feasts. Galileans, who had to travel especially far from the north, had established something of a colony at Bethany, taking in guests or otherwise providing for others and being provided for. There were also hospices and almshouses there for the sick and poor. That might explain why Lazarus and his sisters were at Bethany and also Simon the leper; Jesus might have stayed or dined with one and then another or they might all have been together at the same house. Simon the leper was perhaps the father of Lazarus, Martha and Mary.

  Bethany was a headquarters for Jesus and his followers, not only during this Passover visit to Jerusalem but during earlier visits too. Jesus had friends living in Bethany and knew the place well enough to make arrangements for the donkey to be awaiting his Passover arrival, and the multitudes who greeted his entry into Jerusalem would have been told in advance by his followers in Bethany that he was coming. Sometime before this last Passover visit to the city his friends Martha and Mary, whom he had known in Galilee (Luke 10:38-39), desperately called him to Bethany where he performed his most spectacular miracle when he raised their brother Lazarus from the dead (John 11:1-45).