With biblical drama Mary Magdalene hitting cinema screens just in time for Easter, it seems the debate about Mary and her relationship to Jesus is set to ignite yet again. With worthy intentions of restoring the saint’s reputation, the film both makes Mary the protagonist and defies her more sexualised depictions in previous popular culture representations.
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Jesus Christ Superstar, for instance, focused on the fractured relationship between Jesus and Judas. Even so, Mary Magdalene, “the prostitute with a heart of gold,” manages to deliver one of its most popular songs, I Don’t How To Love Him.
Superstar’s Mary is caretaker to an overwhelmed Jesus, and, confused by her unrequited love for him, she wonders why, as someone who has “had so many men before,” her feelings now make her “seem like someone else.”
If this sounds familiar, it’s because Mary Magdalene is the original "repentant prostitute,” an archetype recycled in literature and popular culture for centuries, who is sometimes redeemed by love (Pretty Woman) and other times by death (Les Miserables).
Aside from the fact the Gospels never refer to her as a prostitute, perhaps the most surprising thing about the Biblical Mary is how large she figures in the popular imagination considering her somewhat minor role in the Gospels themselves.
“You can’t tell the story of Jesus without Mary Magdalene,” Dr Michele Connolly, who teaches New Testament Studies at Sydney’s Catholic Institute, replies when I ask her why Mary continues to fascinate.
As one “sent” by Jesus himself, she is the first apostle. For Christian women, this is stunning grounds for recognition (still sadly lacking in many ways) of the authority of women to witness to Jesus.
According to James Carroll, a former priest turned Roman Catholic Reformer, Mary’s brief but pivotal appearances in all four Gospels made her the ideal “scrim onto which a succession of fantasies has been projected.”
The most enduring of these being Pope Gregory the Great’s promiscuous woman who anoints the feet of Jesus and is forgiven for her sins. This, argues Carroll, is not only “almost uncertainly untrue” but has served as a driving force behind the demonisation of sexuality and the disempowerment of women.
Gregory’s sixth century idealisation of austerity and chastity set Western Christianity on its course. Although Mary has long been regarded as an esteemed disciple by Eastern Churches, Rome used her example to taint all women with original sin, making penitence their only recourse.
Meanwhile, Jesus’s celibacy underscored his divinity, with the asceticism attributed to him used, since the time of the Crusades, to assert his moral superiority over Islam’s founding prophet Mohammed considered lascivious and materialistic in comparison.
But if Mary wasn’t the “sinful” woman Gregory used as an example to others, who was she?
“She is the one dispatched by the risen Jesus to take his word back to the disciples,” Connolly explains. “As one “sent” by Jesus himself, she is the first apostle. For Christian women, this is stunning grounds for recognition (still sadly lacking in many ways) of the authority of women to witness to Jesus.”
And so Mary is transformed from remorseful sinner to beloved apostle. But that’s not where the story ends. For even as Mary’s stature has risen within the Church, voices outside it insist her relationship to Jesus was physical as well as spiritual.
The possibility of a marriage between Mary and Jesus is one neither the Catholic nor Anglican Church entertains. Jane Tooher, who lectures in Ministry, New Testament and Church History at Moore Theological College, calls it a “non-issue.”
“There is no possibility of real debate,” Tooher told SBS by email, “because there is no ancient text which presents Jesus as in a romantic relationship with Mary Magdalene.”
Dr Robert Myles, lecturer in the New Testament at Western Australia’s Murdoch University takes a decidedly historical perspective but agrees that, “the earliest historical evidence indicates Jesus was single or celibate.” However, he tells SBS, the admittedly scant evidence, “creates a gap for the popular imagination to try and fill those gaps. As such, arguments for a married Jesus are circumstantial, drawing largely on cultural norms requiring Jewish men to marry and have children, and Jesus’s failure to announce his celibacy.
While Mary Magdalene, Jesus Christ Superstar ,and The Da Vinci Code (which alleges the Church covered up the marriage between Mary and Jesus), may be flights of fancy, much of their inspiration comes from tantalising glimpses in The Gospel of Mary.
Such erosion of high-status women is not limited to Christianity. Khadija, Mohammed’s much older first wife and his first convert, assured him his revelations were divine and convinced him to spread his message.
This second century Gnostic text suggests Mary’s relationship with Jesus involved kissing, and even exalts her above the male apostles: “He loved her more than us,” Levi admonishes Peter.
Unsurprisingly, Mary’s Gospel was deemed apocryphal by the men who later compiled the canon.
Such erosion of high-status women is not limited to Christianity. Khadija, Mohammed’s much older first wife and his first convert, assured him his revelations were divine and convinced him to spread his message. Yet, Khadija is largely forgotten in favour of Aisha, praised in orthodox Sunni Islam as “the mother of all Muslims,” but who is now infamous for her young age.
While many scholars now agree Aisha’s youth was greatly exaggerated, it was nonetheless used to overshadow Mohammed’s older (read: non-virginal) wives, as well as her own considerable achievements, including issuing religious decrees, promoting education for women, and challenging the chauvinists of her time.
It seems both Christianity and Islam exhibited an early egalitarian spirit that was quashed by men eager to reassert their authority. This “male need to dominate women,” argues James Carroll, is precisely what “drove the anti-sexual sexualizing of Mary Magdalene.”
However, Tooher thinks our fascination with the relationship between Jesus and Mary says more about us than them. “So much of our world today is sexualised,” she argues. “We assume two people who are very close must be in a sexual relationship (but) Christians believe Jesus…was sinless, and so he related to Mary in a perfect way.”
That a “perfect” relationship must be chaste can itself be taken as a sign of the Church’s own obsession with (denying) sex. However, that Mary was one of the first eye-witnesses to the Resurrection, “at a time when a woman’s eye-witness testimony was not accepted in a Jewish court of law,” argues Tooher, “says something about the value God places on women.”
The value placed on women by the men of the early Church, however is another matter, and the denial of a physical relationship can seem like a theological hangover of the drive to keep sex (and women) out of religion.
Then again, as Myles also points out, the need to couple Jesus and Mary also tells us much about the imposition of heteronormative ideals into the story. “When Jesus is imagined being in a relationship,” he explains, “it is rigidly heterosexual.” Myles says that had Mary and Jesus being in an intimate relationship, the Biblical texts would have mentioned it and, “it would not have been the big issue we now make it out to be.”
Of course, there are practical reasons for Christians to resist a married Jesus: the prospect of descendants of God living among us is a theological headache. But secularists also have reason to be cautious; defining Mary as Jesus’s wife could overshadow her role as a revered leader in her own right.
“Some would see that arguing for Mary Magdalene as Jesus’ wife ‘promotes’ women, yet Mary is one of Jesus’ disciples and Jesus valued this more highly than any earthly relationship,” warns Tooher.
“Don’t you think it’s rather funny,” sings Jesus Christ Superstar’s Mary, “that I should be in this position?” Indeed, for after all these centuries, it seems Mary Magdalene remains defined by her sexuality whether it was ever hers or not.
