How faithful to the Bible is the film Mary
Magdalene?
Michael Haag, author of The Quest for Mary
Magdalene, examines Garth Davis’s film
This film presents Mary Magdalene as a
young woman who leaves her fishing village on the shore of the Sea of Galilee
to join Jesus, who teaches forgiveness and love in his mission to bring about
the Kingdom of God. With the disciples she follows Jesus to Jerusalem, where he
cleanses the Temple of money lenders, declaring that the Kingdom of God is not
to be bought and sold. Fearing that Jesus’s actions will incite a popular
insurrection, the authorities arrest and crucify him. “You are my witness,”
Jesus has told her, and Mary, alone of the disciples, stands at the cross till
the end. But it is not the end, as Mary understands when she goes to the tomb
on the third day and finds it empty.
Yet, although Mary Magdalene stands at the
heart of one of the great spiritual stories, she was sidelined and ignored by
the new religion promoted by the 12 male disciples and for 1,500 years the
Church even slandered her as a whore.
It is a story, the film-makers say, that
sheds light on contemporary issues of equality and feminism. Going back to the
original texts, the canonical gospels and also the gnostic gospel of Mary
Magdalene and reading them afresh, the film-makers have set about getting
closer to Jesus’s message by retelling events from the female perspective of
Mary Magdalene.
Yet much is down to how the sources are
interpreted, the film-makers admit; and they are storytellers after all, not
theologians. That leaves the question: is their version of the story
well-founded and believable, and does it succeed in rescuing the lives and
spiritual quest of Jesus and Mary Magdalene from centuries of denial and
distortion?
Mary Magdalene is a spiritual film, not a
religious one; the spiritual sense is immediately conveyed by the landscapes
and the silences. It is a gentle, understated, sometimes slow-motion film, its
characters moving against a vast and dramatic landscape, shot in Sicily. This
is also a love story of a kind, which is maybe why people prefer to think of
Mary Magdalene as a slip of a girl and not a matron decades older, which is
quite possible; the gospels do not say.
Mary Magdalene at the Last Supper
It comes as a surprise in the film to see
Mary Magdalene sitting with Jesus at the Last Supper.
In each of the synoptic gospels (Matthew,
Mark, Luke) Jesus shares the Last Supper with “the twelve”, while the Gospel of
John mentions the disciples without giving a number. In none of the gospels is
there mention of anyone else being there, but there may have been more, and
there would have been servants bringing the food and wine. There is no reason
why women should not have been partaking of the dinner along with other
followers of Jesus; this would be entirely normal for a Passover Seder, at
which women would be expected to play the same role as men and additionally
light the candles.
This is a reminder that if the gospels fail
to mention Mary Magdalene at a scene it does not mean that she is not there.
And here at the Last Supper and elsewhere in the story there are very strong
reasons why Mary Magdalene should be there.
Who was Mary Magdalene?
Probably in a bid to make a contemporary
point about women’s oppression, the film opens with Mary Magdalene, a young
woman from a simple fishing village, accused by her family of bringing shame on
them and being possessed by demons for refusing to marry.
“If there is any demon in me,” says Mary
Magdalene in the film, “it has always been there.” But Jesus tells her
otherwise: “There are no demons here.” And to her family’s demand that “God
made you to be a mother”, Mary Magdalene replies: “I’m not made for that life.”
Instead, Jesus tells her, gently baptising her in the waters of the Sea of
Galilee, “you’ll do God’s will”.
But the Gospel of Luke tells us she was
anything but a poor bullied village girl. From the beginning she was a great
benefactor of the Jesus movement.
Many in those days believed that the moment
of judgment was near. But now Herod Antipas, who was ruler of Galilee and
Perea, had just cut off John the Baptist’s head, the event that impelled Jesus
to take up John’s cause and preach his ministry of universal salvation through
baptism. Bypassing the rituals of the Temple in Jerusalem and its priests, who
were widely seen as substituting religiosity for an authentic relationship with
God, baptism meant a new start, a rebirth. Baptism was an innovation for all,
especially for women, who were treated as marginal by the Temple and the Torah.
Mary Magdalene, who had once been afflicted
by seven demons, suggesting a severe spiritual crisis, devoted herself to this
cause. Jesus and the 12 disciples had to be fed and cared for as they travelled
around Galilee, and it was Mary Magdalene, along with Joanna, the wife of
Chuza, steward of Herod Antipas, and a number of other women who, as Luke’s
Gospel says, “provided for them out of their own resources”.
So Mary Magdalene, who is always mentioned first
among the women, was wealthy and probably high-born and certainly independent
and kept company with Joanna, a Galilean aristocrat who had defected from the
court of Herod Antipas, and the like. Together they had sufficient means to
keep Jesus’s mission on the road and to help to maintain an unknown number of
wives, children, aged parents and other dependent relatives left behind when
the disciples “followed him”.
Rivalry between Peter and Mary Magdalene
Peter, who left his wife and mother-in-law
behind when he followed Jesus, was one of those disciples who depended on Mary
Magdalene’s support. But it is not for that reason that throughout the film
Peter demonstrates an antipathy towards her. It is her favoured relationship
with Jesus, a spiritual communion.
Much of the story in the film is told in
silences. “Is that what it feels like to be one with God?” Mary Magdalene asks
Jesus. In the silence you can hear God, Jesus tells her.
But Peter is more down to earth and also he
is jealous. “It is not right that he has raised you up to lead us,” Peter says
to Mary Magdalene.
This intimacy between Mary Magdalene and
Jesus, and Peter’s rivalry, is barely evident in the canonical gospels. It is
found in gospels of similar date and known as gnostic gospels, among them the
gospel of Mary Magdalene, that took a radically different view of Jesus and
salvation; it was neither his death on the cross nor his resurrection that
mattered, rather his teachings, which he instilled in Mary Magdalene.
Jesus comes to Jerusalem and attacks the
Temple
What mattered to Jesus was not the Roman
garrison stationed in Jerusalem during Passover by Pontius Pilate, the governor
of Judea, rather the practices at the Temple and the behaviour of its
priesthood. According to the three synoptic gospels, Jesus went to the Temple
straightaway where he violently cast out the money lenders and others who were
selling there; they had turned this “house of prayer”, said Jesus, into a “den
of thieves”, reports the Gospel of Matthew.
“God’s kingdom is not to be bought and
sold,” cries Jesus in the film.
After his symbolic cleansing of the Temple,
Jesus taught there daily, and crowds of people came to hear him. But by what
authority did he teach, the priests wanted to know, to which Jesus gave them to
understand that his authority, like that of John the Baptist, 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 would share with Mary Magdalene in the gnostic gospel of that name.
“You are my witness,” Jesus tells Mary Magdalene in the film, speaking of his
love of God that would condemn him to death.
And then the gospels tell us that “the
chief priests and the scribes the same hour sought to lay hands on him” and
“sought how they might kill him”.
Resurrection
Were it not for the Gospel of Luke, where
he mentions those women who travelled with Jesus around Galilee and financed
his ministry, we would not have heard of Mary Magdalene until the day of his
death. She seems to appear in the gospels out of nowhere, the chief witness to
the crucifixion of Jesus and to the events that follow, after the 12 disciples
have run away. But the film rightly makes clear that Mary Magdalene has been
there all along, witness to the ministry of Jesus and his closest companion.
“And very early in the morning the first
day of the week, they came unto the sepulchre at the rising of the sun.” This
is Mark’s Gospel telling about Mary Magdalene and the other women visiting the
tomb to anoint the body of Jesus. But they found the tomb empty and “they
trembled and were amazed”.
And there at Mark 16:8 is where the
original version of Mark’s Gospel ends. The oldest of the canonical gospels
ends with nobody seeing the risen Jesus; Mary Magdalene and her companions see
only the empty tomb. That is the amazing and frightening event.
But 200 years or so later the gospel was
extended and 12 verses were added. This is the version of Mark found in Bibles
today. The extended version ends with Jesus appearing before his disciples and
telling them to “go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every
creature. He that believeth and is baptised shall be saved; but he that
believeth not shall be damned.”
This command by the resurrected Jesus is
known as the Great Commission; it is the basis for the dispersal of the
apostles from Jerusalem to found the apostolic sees and with it the principle
of apostolic succession, which is the fundamental building block of the
hierarchy of the Church.
This was not the message that Mary
Magdalene knew, not the love and forgiveness that led to the Kingdom of God.
For Mary Magdalene, in the original version of Mark, the amazement and fear she
felt in the empty tomb was the awe one feels in the presence of the divine. No
appearance of Jesus, no palpable resurrection, no touching of wounds, no
ascension into heaven, no sitting on the right hand of God, no Church hierarchy
nor threat of damnation was required. Jesus had said, and Mary Magdalene
understood, that the Kingdom of God is all around us; it is waiting for us to
enter if we know how. As Jesus says in the Gospel of Mark: “The time is
fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand.”
In the film, when Mary Magdalene tells the
disciples about the empty tomb, Peter says they will now go into the world and
preach the word. To which Mary Magdalene replies, “I will speak his words” —
his words of forgiveness and love. Her reward has been to be denounced by the
Church as a whore.
