Whatever the Catholic Church or other churches decide, the future of Mary Magdalene looks secure in the public imagination, more secure than Mary the mother of Jesus. That is how it was in the gospels and that is how it is now; in the beginning was Jesus and Mary Magdalene.
And if and when the Church should pass away, when formalised Christianity itself should pass, what then of Mary Magdalene? I prefer to believe there really was a Mary Magdalene. The reality seems stronger than everything ever written by Paul. She is the authentic figure. Jesus ends in her and in those who have listened in the silence of the empty tomb.
Further Reading
BIBLES
King James Bible
http://www.kingJamesbibleonline.org The King James Version of the Bible is used throughout this book. It can be accessed and searched online at the dedicated website King James Bible Online.
Bible Hub
http://biblehub.com/
You can read and search different English translations of the Bible, – KingJames, New International Version, Douay-Rheims, etc – at this website. It also has Bibles in various languages and provides Greek and Hebrew interlinears of English-language Bibles so that you can read verses of the Old and New Testaments in their original languages.
Scripture 4 All
http://www.scripture4all.org/
A dedicated website for Hebrew and Greek interlinears of English, German and Dutch Bibles.
MARY MAGDALENE
Mary Magdalene: A Biography by Bruce Chilton, Doubleday, New York 2005. Chilton, a professor of religion and a priest in New York state, sees Mary Magdalene as an anointer and healer; he identifies her with Mary of Bethany.
Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend by Bart D. Ehrman, Oxford University Press, New York 2006. A highly readable general book by a New Testament scholar.
Mary Magdalene, The First Apostle: The Struggle for Authority, by Ann Graham Brock, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2003. Apostolic succession and the marginalisation of Mary Magdalene.
The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages by Katherine Ludwig Jansen, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2000. The development of Mary Magdalene as sinner and a penitent leading to her cult at Sainte-Baume.
The Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine, translated by William Granger Ryan, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2012. The medieval bestseller on the lives of the saints, including Mary Magdalene.
Mary Magdalene: Iconograpic Studies from the Middle Ages to the Baroque edited by Michelle A. Erhardt and Amy M. Morris, Brill, Leiden and Boston 2012. The continuous reinvention of Mary Magdalene’s image in art to suit the needs of the Church and of private patrons.
The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene: Legends, Apocrypha, and the Christian Testament by Jane Schaberg, Continuum, New York and London 2002. Considered a landmark work in feminist studies, Schaberg attempts to theologically resurrect Mary Magdalene, interweaving her story with that of Virginia Woolf.
‘Missing Magdala and the Name of “Mary Magdalene”’ by Joan E. Taylor in the Palestine Exploration Quarterly, 146, 3 (2014), 205–223, explains there was no Magdala; Mary was named ‘tower’.
Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor by Susan Haskins, Harper Collins, London 1993. Only the first chapter, less than thirty pages, deals with Mary Magdalene of the gospels; the rest is an exhaustive account of her legendary afterlife up to modern times.
Searching for Mary Magdalene: A Journey through Art and Literature by Jane Lahr, Welcome Books, New York and San Francisco 2006. A beautifully produced coffee table book.
Mary Magdalene, or Salvation in Fires by Marguerite Yourcenar, translated by Dori Katz, Aidan Ellis, London 1982. Yourcenar tells the story attributed to Jerome in the fourth century of Mary Magdalene being jilted by John the Evangelist at the marriage of Cana, falling into prostitution, and finally devoting herself to Jesus.
JESUS
Jesus: Nativity, Passion, Resurrection by Geza Vermes, Penguin Books, London 2010. The gospels carefully described, tested and analysed by the leading Jesus scholar of recent times.
Jesus: An Historian’s Review of the Gospels by Michael Grant, Macmillan, London 1977. Grant, an outstanding classical historian, admits the extreme difficulty of drawing historical accounts from the gospels but manages a well-judged and readable account.
Jesus by A.N. Wilson, Sinclair-Stevenson, London 1992. A somewhat iconoclastic biography of Jesus which dismisses the story of his birth in Bethlehem, his life as a carpenter, his betrayal by Judas, and takes Paul to task for inventing a Jesus cult. This book was written when Wilson, now a Catholic, was an atheist.
How Jesus Became Christian by Barrie Wilson, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 2008. Barrie Wilson, a professor of religious studies in Canada, shows by examining the gospels that Jesus was never anything other than an observant Jew but who was turned into a god by Paul. Which explains much about Mary Magdalene too.
MARY, MOTHER OF JESUS
Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary by Marina Warner, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1976. Warner’s outstanding book traces the historical development of Mary as Virgin, Bride, Mother, Queen of Heaven and Intercessor, and how these aspects have affected and been depicted in literature and art, as well as their influence on the lives of both men and women. She is also ample in her treatment of Mary Magdalene and the ‘muddle of Marys’ in the gospels.
Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture, by Jaroslav Pelikan, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 1996. The other important account of Mary the Mother of Jesus. Pelikan describes the developed traditions and then traces them back to their biblical and doctrinal sources, seeking what he calls the ‘eternal feminine’ at the heart of all that is holy. He also ventures into Black Madonnas and Mary the Mother of Jesus in Islam.
THE GOSPELS
Jesus and the Eyewitnesses by Richard Bauckham, William B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Cambridge, England 2006. Bauckham argues the case that the gospels are largely based on reliable eyewitness accounts.
Gospel Women: Studies of the Named Women in the Gospels by Richard Bauckham, William B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Cambridge, England 2002. An examination of women’s lives in Palestine, the credibility of their stories in the gospels, in particular a valuable look at Joanna the wife of Chuza, and also a consideration of The Secret Gospel of Mark.
Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark by Morton Smith, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1973. The full-blown academic study by Smith of the Secret Gospel.
The Secret Gospel: The Discovery and Interpretation of the Secret Gospel According to Mark by Morton Smith, Victor Gollancz, London 1974. Smith’s popular history of the Secret Gospel.
PALESTINE AT THE TIME OF JESUS
The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land edited by Thomas E. Levy, Leicester University Press, London 1998. Good on the Hellenisation and Romanisation of Palestine, and field towers such as that at Migdal Eder.
THE WORLD OF EARLY CHRISTIANITY
Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew by Bart D. Ehrman, Oxford University Press, New York 2003. A great variety of Christianities flourished when the new religion began; eventually this diversity was replaced by orthodoxy and dissent was persecuted as heretical.
Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament by Bart D. Ehrman, Oxford University Press, New York 2003. Provides readers with all the relevant apocryphal and gnostic gospels of the lost Christianities.
Early Egyptian Christianity: From its Origins to 451 CE by C. Wilfred Griggs, Brill, Leiden 1990. This academic work is one of the very few books about the poorly documented and elusive subject of early Christianity in Egypt.
Contested Issues in Christian Origins and the New Testament by Luke Timothy Johnson, Brill, Leiden 2013. Johnson, an historian of relig
ion and a Catholic who takes issue with several teachings of the Church, examines in these essays the Jewish and Graeco-Roman contexts of early Christianity, gnosticism, Marcion, Paul and the quest for the historical Jesus.
Introduction to the New Testament, volumes 1 and 2, by Helmut Koester, Walter de Gruyter, New York and Berlin 1987. This is regarded as the standard reference work on the New Testament. Koester suggests that in the earliest version of the story only Mary Magdalene discovered the empty tomb; the account was later diluted by the gospel writers who added the names of other women.
Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth to Nicaea, AD 30-325 by Geza Vermes, Penguin Books, London 2013. This book relates how there were many streams of Christianity in the early centuries and they only began to be channelled into one great instrument of faith and state under the Roman emperor Constantine at the Council of Nicaea.
Christ’s Resurrection in Early Christianity and the Making of the New Testament by Markus Vinzent, Ashgate, Farnham, Surrey 2011. Vinzent, a professor at King’s College London, argues that the resurrection was unknown or of no interest to the earliest Christians and only became so when Marcion revived the letters of Paul in the 130s; he also says that the gospels were written at about that same time.
On the True Doctrine: A Discourse against the Christians by Celsus, translated by R. Joseph Hoffmann, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York 1987. The famous attack on Christianity by a second century Greek philosopher.
Jews and Christians: Graeco-Roman Views by Molly Whittaker, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1984. Judaism and mystery religions; the environment in which Christianity took shape.
Isis in the Ancient World by R.E. Witt, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London 1997. Witt stresses the influence of Isis worship on Christian thinking, practice and iconography.
GNOSTICISM, CATHARS AND DUALISM
The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle by Karen King, Polebridge Press, Salem, Oregon 2003. Translated and elucidated by professor Karen King, Mary’s gospel rejects Jesus’ suffering and death as a path to eternal life and replaces that with the inner spiritual knowledge possessed by Mary Magdalene.
Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village 1294-1324 by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth 1980. The classic account of the Cathars in their own words, drawn from their testimony to the inquisition.
The Gnostics by Jacques Lecarrière, Peter Owen, London 1977. A beautiful and poetic book about the gnostics with an introduction by Lawrence Durrell.
The War on Heresy: Faith and Power in Medieval Europe by R.I. Moore, Profile Books, London 2012. The Cathars were persecuted and destroyed, says Moore, not because of their beliefs but because of the needs and ambitions of their persecutors.
The Perfect Heresy: The Life and the Death of the Cathars by Stephen O’Shea, Profile Books, London 2000. A good popular history, including the place of Mary Magdalene in Cathar beliefs.
The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1980. The first and still one of the best popular but scholarly presentations of the Nag Hammadi gnostic gospels.
The Other God: Dualist Religions from Antiquity to the Cathar Heresy by Yuri Stoyanov, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 2000. A sweeping account of the recurring struggle between the one god and the periodically dying and rising other god.
Index
The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific entry, please use your e-book readerʼs search tools.
Page references for illustrations are given in italics
A
Acton, William 287–8
Acts of the Apostles 140, 158, 159, 165, 166, 168, 184, 197
Antioch 71
Egypt 184
Jesus’ followers 140
Mary Magdalene 112–13, 158, 164
Mary, mother of Jesus 3, 4, 6, 224
Paul 112, 160, 161–2, 164, 168, 169
Peter 159, 168
Stephen 161
Adonis 175, 176
agape feasts 200, 201
Aix-en-Provence 243, 246, 248
al-Samman, Muhammad 191
Albani Psalter 5
Albi 257
Albigensian Crusade 257–60
Albright, William F 18, 19
Alexander the Great 21, 59, 172
Alexandria 54, 59
Carpocratians 200
Catechetical School 218, 226, 228, 231
Christianity 182, 184, 185, 187–8
gospels 220
lighthouse 56, 170, 170, 171–2
Phibionites 200
Alone of All Her Sex (Warner) 293
Alphonse, count of Toulouse 258
Ambrose 235
Ammonius Saccas 228
Amphipolis 172
Andrew 32, 47, 209
Andronicus 72, 73
see also Chuza
Angelico, Fra 2, 97, 98, 100, 270
ankhs 230, 231
Annas 104, 150
anointing
at Bethany 88–92, 89, 102, 112, 113, 138, 153, 177, 233
at Capernaum 89–90, 112, 233
of Jesus’ body 91–2, 131, 132–3
Antioch 59, 70–1, 172
Aphrodite 172, 175, 176
Apollo 172
Apollonia 172
Apollos 184
apostles 72–3, 126
see also disciples
Apostolikon 179, 180
Apuleius 176
Arabia 183
Aramaic 13–14, 17, 21, 54–5, 159
Archelaos 77
Artemis 172
Asia Minor 34, 53, 54, 59, 232
Askew, Anthony 211
Astarte 172
Asterius 176
Athanasius of Alexandria 192
Athena 172
Athens 172
Attis 175, 176
Augustine, St 235, 266, 270, 276, 285
Augustus 174, 186
B
Babylon 184–7
Badilo, St 246
Baigent, Michael 295–6
baptism 26–8, 145, 178, 283
Bar Kokhba revolt 179, 189, 218, 220
Barabbas 110
Barnabas 71
Bartholomew 47
Bauckham, Richard 296
Bélibaste, Guillaume 254, 260, 263
Ben-Gurion, David 139
Benedict XII, Pope 253, 260, 263
Benedict XVI, Pope 139
Bernadette 290
Bethany 82–3, 83, 91, 102, 140–1, 148, 149, 149, 152
anointing of Jesus 88–92, 89, 102, 112, 113, 138, 153, 177, 233
raising of Lazarus 91, 92–3, 92, 148–9, 152–4
resurrection ritual 144–7
Bethlehem 4, 14, 16, 20, 21, 36
Helena’s visit 14
Jerome 36
Jesus’ birth 4
massacre of the innocents 20–1
towers 15–16, 15
Bethsaida 46, 63, 64, 65, 76
Béziers 257–9
Bible
language 54, 56
see also New Testament; Old Testament
Bida, André 128
bios 176
Blake, William 102
Boccaccio, Giovanni 266, 275, 277
Bogomils 250
Botticelli, Sandro 277, 281
B
rown, Dan xi, 100, 213, 293–6
C
Caesarea 22, 85, 171, 231
Caiaphas 93, 103, 104, 106, 107, 108, 150
Cairo 185
Caligula 175
Calvacanti, Guido 275
Cana 4–5, 34–7, 35, 37, 74, 76, 138
Canzonieri (Petrarch) 266, 267, 269, 270–1
Capernaum 25, 34, 46, 47, 49
anointing of Jesus 89–90, 112, 233
Carcassone 259
Carpocratians 141, 143, 147, 200, 201
Castor 169, 171–2
Cathars xi, 216, 247, 250–4, 251, 255, 257–62, 258, 298
Cavalca, Domenico 36
Celsus 217, 218–19, 220–3, 224, 238, 290
Cenacle 96
Chanson de la Croisade Albigeoise 259
Charles, King of Anjou 248, 255, 263
Chaucer, Geoffrey 266
Chilton, Bruce 296
Chnoubis 215
Chora Church, Istanbul 180
Christianity
attacks on 217–20
Cathars 250–4, 255, 257–62
Egypt 181–2, 184–94, 185, 226–32
and evil 197–8
gnosticism 188–90, 192–202, 250–4
and Judaism 179
Marcion 179, 181
relics 244–5
spread 14, 183–4
Chuza 8, 30, 51, 60, 69–70, 72
Cicero 115, 116, 265
circumcision 28, 33, 160, 164
Ciseri, Antonio 109
Claudius 175
Clement of Alexandria 141, 143–8, 176, 187, 200, 218, 220, 226, 228, 231
Cleopatra 170, 174
codices 188–9
Nag Hammadi Library 190–2, 193
Collins, Wilkie 291
Colonna, Cardinal Giovanni 265
Communion of the Apostles, The (Fra Angelico) 97, 98, 270
Compostela 245, 246
Constantine the Great 14
Constantinople 232, 236, 243, 274, 276, 294
Contagious Diseases Acts 289
Copts 185, 186, 188, 190–2, 207