Mary and Sophia. Diana Barsham examines the relationship between Mary Magdalene and the Old Testament Figure of Wisdom.
Mary Magdalene and Jesus the Gardener – fresco by Fra Angelico in the Convent of San Marco, Florence.
To those who know her only as the extravagant, demon-ridden woman of Luke’s Gospel, the idea of Mary Magdalene as a New Testament wisdom figure might come as something of a shock. Luke’s Gospel, written like Acts to support the leadership claims of first Peter and then Paul, [1] consistently underplays the significance of Mary Magdalene, even omitting her meeting with the risen Christ. For Luke she is the ‘bad girl’, “Mary, called Magdalene” in contrast to the ‘good Mary’ of Bethany who is shown listening to Jesus instead of helping her sister with the housework.
John’s Gospel by contrast aims to correct Luke’s version, using Magdalene’s own oral testimony, her own thoughts, words and feelings, to introduce new material and different perspectives. John’s Gospel is often described as ‘esoteric’, a term used in most ancient wisdom cultures to indicate the presence of a second level of meaning that only initiates can fully understand. In this, John is closer to the controversial gnostic gospels where Magdalene is described as ‘one of the three women who always walked with Jesus’ and is even identified as Sophia, divine wisdom herself, ‘the woman who knew the all’. [2]
In order to understand the contradiction in these accounts, we must turn as so often to the Old Testament and in particular to the Wisdom traditions expounded there. That Jesus was identifiable as the Messiah by his fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy is a commonplace of gospel interpretation. That he was also the living embodiment of a new wisdom with complex roots in Hebrew scripture is perhaps less fully understood. John’s Gospel espouses this view, structuring his anecdotes to illustrate this wisdom theme.
Used in the training of scribes, wisdom writing was a highly valued cultural commodity in the ancient world. From Hebrew Proverbs to Greek philosophy, it helped define a nation’s identity, becoming a repository of tribal memory as well as a guide to right living. The definitive locus of Jewish wisdom was the tenth century BC King Solomon who in 1 Kings: [3] famously chose wisdom as the highest gift of God. After his marriage to an Egyptian princess with her own alternative Wisdom tradition, Solomon built his legendary Temple of Wisdom, on the very spot, it was claimed, where God had created Adam and Eve.
Though Solomon’s temple was destroyed, his name remained for nine centuries the name of attribution for those writing in the wisdom genre. By the time Herod the Great’s temple was burnt by the Romans in 70 AD, Jesus had identified himself as Solomon’s successor, with a temple of a very different kind. In John, Jesus begins his ministry with an audacious claim: should this temple be destroyed, he could rebuild it within three days. The claim provokes outrage and incomprehension, with John having to explain that Jesus meant his own body.
Solomon’s reputation for wisdom reached its apogee in the visit of the fabulously wealthy Queen of Sheba. From distant Ethiopia or Arabia, she came bringing esoteric riddles of her own to put his wisdom to the test. For Jesus to be recognised as the new Solomon, he too needed the presence of just such another alien female wisdom source. John’s Gospel had the perfect answer.
By the first century AD, middle eastern wisdom traditions had absorbed the impetus of the Greek philosophers with their subtle, poetic metaphors. Fundamental to both old and new forms of understanding was the recognition that wisdom, under its different female names – Ma’at, Sheshat, Athena, Sophia, Minerva and Hokhmah – was an attribute of the Godhead, part of the immense creative power which brought the cosmos and the human world into being. Described as the ‘beloved companion’ of God, Wisdom in Proverbs 8 emphasises water as the prime ingredient of their creative power:
The Lord possessed me in the beginning…
When he prepared the heavens, I was there; when he set a compass upon the face of the depth;
When he established the clouds above: when he strengthened the fountains of the deep:
When he gave to the sea his decree…
Then was I by him…: and I was daily his delight…
In his famous opening sentence, ‘In the beginning was the Word’, John paraphrases this, defining Christ himself as the Word or Wisdom of God.
Reiterating the association of wisdom with water, John begins his gospel with Jesus’s baptism in the River Jordan, then illustrates his miraculous power over water by turning it into wine at the wedding in Cana. To further establish Jesus’s identity as the new Solomon, John goes on to describe Jesus’s dramatic overturning of the money-changers’ tables, a warning that Herod’s temple, with its corrupt forms of wisdom, would soon experience a similar reversal.
In the Apocrypha, first century wisdom texts mainly placed between the Old and the New Testament, Wisdom has become redefined by the Greek influence as a subtle, interpenetrating spiritual intelligence which puzzled the literal minded. [4] Not only the disciples but even highly educated Jews like Nicodemus struggled to understand Jesus’s teaching. When Jesus tries to explain his central doctrine of the second birth, Nicodemus demands: ‘How can a man be born again; can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb?’ With its imagery of marriage, death and rebirth, the rest of John’s Gospel is an attempt to answer this question.
Referring to Jesus as ‘the bridegroom’, John the Baptist equates him with the beloved from The Song of Solomon. Always regarded as a wisdom text, the Song celebrates the compelling and anguished union of erotic and spiritual love. Solomon and his Shulamite represent two contrasting wisdom narratives seeking to unite. The strangeness and difference of Solomon’s black, Egyptian lover will become associated with Mary Magdalene, her love song [5] often included in the church’s liturgical Easter readings.
In the Judeao-Greek tradition, wisdom has many guises. In Proverbs, she is a woman calling in the streets; the lady of a great house inviting people to her wisdom feast; finally the virtuous wife who rises at daybreak to run her household and support her husband financially. Though Proverbs is a compilation of several collections, one in particular offers advice to a young man on how to choose a wife. Two opposing figures battle for his soul, Lady Wisdom on one side, Lady Folly on the other. To keep his blood pure and his soul safe, the young man must avoid the tempting erotic idleness of the stranger woman Lady Folly, in favour of Lady Wisdom, the virtuous housewife who, like Martha of Bethany, busies herself with the cooking.
In keeping with Jesus’s openness to alien female viewpoints like that of the Syrophoenician woman, the Wisdom of Christianity expounded by Paul in his Epistles undergoes a strange and striking transformation. In 1 Corinthians (17–31), Paul argues that the Christian God has finally rejected ‘the wisdom of this world’, choosing ‘foolish things’ instead ‘to confound the wise’, as Jesus confounds the arguments of the educated Pharisees. Christian Wisdom seems folly itself to a world which cannot understand its subtleties, or symbolism.
Explaining this new type of wisdom – the dark wisdom of the cross, of Christ crucified – Paul reverses the roles of Lady Wisdom and Lady Folly. Lady Folly suddenly reveals her true colours, invoking a deeper, more dangerous wisdom only achieved through the transformation ritual of death and resurrection.
John’s Gospel reiterates this. Writing after Paul’s Epistles but in the knowledge of them, John shows Christ embracing a wisdom that contains the otherness of the outcast, the condemned, the unJewish, a wisdom that brings a wealth of its own. Turning to Mary Magdalene as a new oral source for his writing, John makes her testimony a transforming feature of the fourth gospel. [6]
In all wisdom mythologies there lies a sinister twist. Solomon was not the only wisdom figure partnered with a woman as clever as he. His model for this was God himself. John Barton neatly describes first century Wisdom as ‘a kind of right-hand woman for God’, [7] but the partnership brought problems. Such wisdom could challenge and even rival its divine source. In classical myth, Jove, threatened by the wisdom of his wife, Metis, turns her into a fly and swallows her. In another version of the myth, Sophia, holy Wisdom herself, challenges her divine father/husband and like Lucifer is cast out of heaven. She wanders the earth weeping, condemned to eat the bitter fruit of human experience while longing to return to her divine origins. Eve’s fatal quest for knowledge underpins the Hebrew Bible, the female wisdom figure invoking bitter controversies.
John’s Gospel rewrites this mythology of fall with Christ as the Saviour who, descending to earth, shows through his death and resurrection the way back to God. As part of this journey, he must redeem the fallen wisdom of Sophia, and reabsorb its divine component. This wisdom is not simply sin; it is one that has learnt, like the Egyptians, to grapple with death, developing the dark energies of survival in an alien world.
Where was such wisdom to be found? Solomon found it in his dark princesses. Jesus, hoping as Messiah to reunify the tribes of Israel dispersed after Solomon, turns to his neighbouring Samaritans and the alien wisdom of loving one’s enemy. He goes back to the beginning of Israel’s story, back to the well at Sychar in Samaria where Jacob (Israel himself) asks Rachel for a drink of water before choosing her as his bride (Genesis 29). Having already identified Jesus as ‘the bridegroom’ in Chapter 3 (29), John then recounts his electrifying, multi-facetted encounter with the Samaritan woman with wisdom’s water the literal and symbolic issue between them. In an incident charged with biblical resonance (4: 31–39), she becomes the first person to whom Jesus proclaims himself the Messiah as Magdalene will later be the first to learn of his resurrection. Such women may seem foolish choices in the eyes of the world but not to the new wisdom.
As a wife for Jesus, the Samaritan could hardly be more inappropriate, five times married and currently a concubine; but as a wisdom partner she is perfect. Smart, informed and not Jewish, like Sophia she knows the depth of human experience but has the wisdom to wait for the Messiah. Though the disciples are angry to find Jesus in conversation with her, he remains exhilarated after their encounter. He has seen the future and it is ripe for harvest!
Mary Magdalene and the Samaritan woman have much in common. Both are outsiders, rich, sensual, articulate and well-versed in the darker complexities of human experience. Through John’s irradiating symbolism, their stories mesh as past and future merge with the infinite. Like Jacob, Jesus is thirsty; in his last words from the cross, he will be thirsty again and Magdalene will hear him ask for a drink (John 19: 28). As at the well, so at the cross and tomb: the woman before him has what he needs, a means of going down into the darkness to raise the entombed but still living water. For Magdalene, the crucial water jar is love.
Accessing her oral testimony, John’s is the only gospel to mention the incident of the woman at the well, one vital to his wisdom scheme. This female wisdom figure is undeniably controversial, an introduction to the larger controversy that envelops Mary Magdalene. Certainly, she is a type of Mary Magdalene, running back to her town with news that she has found the Messiah, as Wisdom ran through the streets in the Song of Songs; as Magdalene too will run with news of Christ’s resurrection. The Samaritan woman, like Mary Magdalene, is both human character and an emblem of Wisdom’s otherness, as Jesus uniquely recognises.
The moving story of the woman taken in adultery also provides a link in the chain of images connecting the Samaritan woman to Magdalene. Recognising the trap being set for him, Jesus responds to her accusers by drawing two hieroglyphs in the sand, wisdom symbols for the maxim: Do unto unto others as you would have them do unto you. Because of their association, Jesus himself is labelled both a Samaritan and a devil (John 8: 48).
Here we encounter that aspect of the gospels so confusing to modern readers: the prevalence of the demonic and of exorcism in Jesus’s ministry. Linked to this issue is the tense but fascinating interplay between Luke and John over the figure of Mary Magdalene and her wisdom attributes.
Writing with one eye on Luke’s gospel, John’s anecdote of the woman taken in adultery is strategically placed at Chapter 8 to correspond both with Proverbs’ personification of Wisdom and with Luke’s introduction to Magdalene. Luke (8: 2) identifies her through images of storm, darkness, maddened pigs and menstrual blood, as the woman from whom Jesus exorcised seven demons. This echoes the Old Testament wisdom text of Tobias and the Angel. [8] Tobias’s accompanying angel, Raphael, has to perform an exorcism on his bride Sarah as her previous seven husbands have been murdered on their wedding nights. After wrestling Sarah’s dark demons, Tobias gains the wisdom to heal the blindness of his father as Jesus acquires through the exorcism of Magdalene the spiritual power to resurrect Jairus’s daughter.
Luke understands that Mary Magdalene is a wisdom figure but does not want to foreground this. The less said about such dark wisdom, perhaps, the better but you cannot understand the miracle of resurrection without it. Supporting Peter, Luke downplays the significance of Mary Magdalene throughout the passion narrative. He does this by removing the anointing scene from its Bethany context, placing his account of ‘the sinner woman’ who anoints Jesus immediately before his introduction to Magdalene. Luke does however recognise the wisdom component of this scene, introducing it with the motto: ‘Wisdom is justified of all her children’ (Luke 7: 35).
While Luke creates a division in the character of ‘Mary called Magdalene’ by implying that the Mary we meet in Bethany is a different person, John (11: 2) contradicts this, insisting that they are one and the same. For John, the Bethany household is not just the place where Lady Wisdom and Lady Folly change places, as in Luke’s anecdote of Martha and Mary (Luke 10: 38–42); it is also the site of divine wisdom’s reconciliation with its fallen self.
While the history of this controversy is beyond the scope of this article, two important points support John’s Bethany narrative. The raising of Lazarus and the dramatic anointing of Jesus afterwards occur at a supper at which John himself, though not Luke, would certainly have been present. For John it triggers the whole Passion story, with Mary’s extravagant gesture the ‘reason’ for Judas’ decision to betray Jesus. Mary alone, who will be present throughout the passion, has the wisdom to understand the imminence of Jesus’s death and to enact the appropriate ritual; but for Judas this crazy woman is to blame. In his superb defence, Jesus makes clear her beautiful action has set its seal upon his gospel. As Magdalene becomes the anointing priestess, so Jesus humbly washes his disciples’ feet. In these two acts of apparent ‘folly', human and divine wisdom merge their waters and Magdalene, like Saul of Tarsus, acquires a new name. Calling her ‘Mary’, the resurrected Christ marks her new status as she becomes ‘the mother’ of his second birth. [9]
© Diana Barsham, May 2024.
Diana Barsham taught early Christianity at the University of New York in London, until her recent retirement. She is now a Reader in the Diocese of Bath and Wells, and the author of The Touch of the Magdalene in the Writing of the Fourth Gospel, published by Austin-Macauley in 2021.
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
References
1. See Ann Graham Brock, Mary Magdalene, the First Apostle: The Struggle for Authority, Harvard University Press, 2003, for a detailed argument of this.
2. See The Gospel of Philip and Pistis Sophia.
3. John 2: 19–21.
4. See The Book of Wisdom 7: 22–30.
5. Song of Solomon, Chapter 3.
6. See Bruce Chilton, Mary Magdalene: A Biography, Image, 2005, for the thesis that John’s
Gospel also includes the story of Mary Magdalene.
7. Barton, John, A History of the Bible: The Book and its Faiths, Allen Lane, 2019, p.72.
8. The Book of Tobit. See Salley Vickers’ novel, Miss Garnet’s Angel for more on the wisdom history of this text.
9. This phrase comes from the 5th century Bishop of Ravenna, Peter Chrysologus.
Cathy on the way to the March for Climate Justice.
Different groups on the march
The YCCN pilgrims with their banner
With marchers from Islamic Relief
Recent Comments