Witness to the Resurrection, saint, sinner and feminist icon
Why was it first to a woman / that he showed his resurrection, and not to men?” asked the fourth-century poet Ephrem the Syrian. “Here he showed us a mystery.” The risen Christ appeared to Mary Magdalene first, at a time when, under Judaic custom, the testimony of women was not considered valid. None of her fellow disciples believed her, as Mark 16:11 relates. Yet in the year 1279, when one of her many bodies was found in the chapel of Saint-Maximin in Provence, it was observed that a fennel branch was growing from Mary Magdalene’s throat – a symbol of how the word of this apostle to the apostles had taken root. “Let all your mouths be stopt for ever, that despise the spirit of prophesie in the daughters”, declared the seventeenth-century Quaker founder George Fox, who saw in Mary Magdalene proof of women’s right to preach. The orientalist Ernest Renan wondered whether Christianity itself wasn’t a figment of Mary’s imagination. “Divine power of love!”, he mused. “Magdalene knew better than any one how to assert her dream.”
The enigma of Mary Magdalene remains inextinguishable, as two recent books on the subject suggest. Philip C. Almond has been a biographer of God, the Antichrist and the Devil, and a historian of witchcraft and the afterlife. He structures his excellent new study, Mary Magdalene: A cultural history, around the unusual mathematics of the Magdalene myth in Western Christianity. In addition to her role as first witness, she is remembered as the repentant prostitute, the woman cured of seven demons, the seductive sinner with the alabaster jar who anointed Jesus, washed his feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. Yet this image is a superimposition of three women onto one. It is often traced back to a sermon given in 591 by Pope Gregory the Great, who identified Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany (the sister of Martha and Lazarus) and the unnamed sinful woman in Luke as all the same Mary, to be celebrated on the feast day of July 22. The Magdalene wasn’t previously thought to have a chequered past. “It would have been grist to the mill for the opponents of Christianity”, Almond notes, “were they able to suggest that the early Church endorsed the view that its key witness to the resurrection was a sometime harlot.”…
After the truth-shower 