Mary Magdalene: Her Image and Relationship to Jesus

Some of the main points of this thesis include:

Mary Magdalene is best considered as the female counterpart of Jesus.

Mary Magdalene can be seen as a symbolic figure in disputes concerning the role of women in the historical and modern church.

Scriptural passages refer to Mary Magdalane as having seven demons, a person who witnessed the crucifixion and as a person who spoke to the resurrected Jesus.

Her portrayal has been seen as a negative one, making her out to be possessed by demons, as a penitent whore and as an adulterer.

In the 4th century the bishop Cyril pictured Mary Magdalene as a virgin.

Some Christians early on believed her to be a goddess.

Modern scholars generally believe that there is not enough evidence to hold Mary as being a sinful woman in love with Jesus.

One of the modern popular culture uses of Mary is in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code.

That book holds that the Catholic church has kept hidden proof that she and Jesus were married.

Mary has also been linked to being the Holy Grail herself.

One of the problems in figure out just what she did is that Mary was a very common name at the time. The New Testament has seven women named Mary.

The author Starbird holds that Mary and Jesus were married and that they had a daughter they named Sarah. The child was born in Alexandria.

European Christianity links Jesus and Mary romantically and spiritually.

One possibility is that she did not come from Magdala, that the word means Tower and that she was considered the watchtower of the flock.

Occult and heresy lecturer Lynn Picknett says the Grail was really the head of John the Baptist. He adds that the town of Magdala did not actually exist as such at the time of Mary and that there was a large town in Egypt called Magdolum and if she came from there she would have been a Black person.

The writer also notes that just became she (might have) had children it genetically did not make those children better than other children. Such thinking ties in to the Nazi concept that the Aryan race was genetically superior to other races.

There is confusion about which Mary is which and traits of one Mary being given to another Mary.

Hippolytus (170-235CE) conflates her with a woman from the Song of Songs.

In the movie The Last Tempetation of Christ Jesus was engaged to Mary but broke it off.

Gnostic texts hold that Peter was jealous of Mary. (Here's my problem with Peter being called the rock and that the church was built on him. He denied Jesus three times. He hid during and after the crucifixion, leaving it to Mary Magdalane to go the tomb to anoint his supposedly dead body, to be the first person to see his resurrected form and to be the person who told the (hiding) disciples about what had happened. So why was the church built on him?)

The negative myths around her because they reinforce sexism. (Another thing to consider here. Who provided the money and supplies for Jesus and the people following him? Not the disciples. Not Peter. Nope, it was the women followers that according to the Bible provided him out of their means.)

In Matthew, Mark, Luke and John there are only twelve references to Mary Magdalene.

Luke 8.2 says that she traveled with Jesus, had her own means to do so and had overcome her seven demons. (As noted in various papers those seven demons could have been mental problems or other health problems that the people of that time did not understand or have means of curing people of mental or physical illnesses with anywhere near the success we have today.)

The Gospel of Matthew mentions Mary Magdalene three times.

He mentions women 'watching from a distance' at the crucifixion of Jesus. In earlier versions of the Bible it is possible that an angel appeared to them to reassure them. This was later changed.

The Gospel of Mark mentions Mary Magdalene four times.

The Gospel of John mentions Mary Magdalene three times.

John 19:25 includes Mary, the mother of Jesus, Mary, his mother's sister, and Mary, the wife of Cleopas. Mary was a very common name for the time.

The Gospel of Mary and similar texts have stirred a good bit of controversy.

The Gospel of Thomas mentions the Mary name twice. One of those times is Peter (again) saying women are not worthy of life. (Look, guy, if women are not worthy of life than you wouldn't have been born in the first place. No women, no human population.)

In the Pistis Sophia Mary's name appears twelve times. Mary, the mother of Jesus, appears 3 times.

Early Christian writers got various Marys confused, mixing up Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany and Mary the mother of Lazarus.

Both the Cathars and Martin Luther said Mary Magdalene was a concubine to Jesus.

There's disagreement over just what the appearance of Jesus to Mary Magdalene post-tomb means. It cuuld be that he did not appear to her because she was his lover/wife but because she was his friend and he picked her over Peter as his successor. (That brings up a question would he pick her as his successor. On the negative side, women were very much second-class citizens at the time and there is a question of whether people would accept what she would say, even as the successor of Jesus, because she was a woman. On the other hand, she seems to have had an excellent understanding of just what Jesus was talking about, she was near him while he was dying and she came to anoint his body after he had presumably been dead for a while. It is possible that the strength of her knowledge and her speaking skills might have won over potential converts. Even in our present day women are generally kept from leadership roles in churches, especially Catholic churches and any woman that is a lesbian also has a very hard time being accepted as a spiritual leader.)\

One writer says that Christianity became dominant because of 'conformity to male authority.'

Pope Paul VI, in 1977, said a woman cannot be a priest because 'our Lord was a man.'

Modern devotees to Mary Magdalene include radical feminists, proponents for the ordination of women priests, New Age and Neo-Gnostic believers and conspiracy theorists, according to one writer.

The Gospel of John seems to legitimate Mary as an apostle whereas Luke's gospel doesn't.

The idea that women are not worthy of life (Peter again) demonizes women.

The Gospel of Mary seems to indicate that Jesus did kiss Mary Magdalene but there is argument over whether this was a romantic kiss or they of kiss given as a greeting with nothing else implied.