The Bible’s Lost Stories

The Bible’s Lost Stories

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What started out as scholarship with an openly feminist political agenda has evolved into serious and respected inquiry. To understand this change, consider what has happened to the field during the career of Bernadette Brooten. As a graduate theology student at Harvard in the late 1970s, Brooten was told that scholars already knew everything there was to know about women in the Bible. Yet Brooten, now a professor of Christian studies at Brandeis University, made the remarkable discovery by reading older versions of the Bible that Junius, one of the many Christian “Apostles” mentioned by Saint Paul, was in fact a woman, Junia, whose name was masculinized over the centuries by translators with their own agenda. Brooten’s discovery became “official” when Junia’s real name was incorporated into the New Standard Revised Version of the Bible, which came out in 1989.

Today, there are female Biblical scholars at dozens of institutions, and at least two universities—Harvard and the Claremont Graduate University in California—offer degree programs on women in religion. These scholars have produced a new dictionary called “Women in Scripture,” a woman’s study Bible, and feminist commentaries to various books of the New Testament and early Christian literature. “There are increasing numbers of resources concerning Biblical women that are making their way into libraries, classrooms and bookstores,” says Amy-Jill Levine, professor of New Testament studies at Vanderbilt University Divinity School. “They’re no longer just cleaned up or romanticized stories, but rigorously historical, imaginative, cross-cultural collections.” These insights are also filtering out into popular culture with a slew of literary interpretations of women’s Bible stories in the wake of Anita Diamant’s 1997 best seller, “The Red Tent,” including many about Mary Magdalene.

Florida reading group members discuss the dozens of new books about Mary Magdalene
IMG: Women in reading group
The fascination with Magdalene has a long and rich history of its own. Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, a cultural historian at Georgetown University, curated an exhibit last year of Magdalene portraits at the American Bible Society in New York. “She’s gone through conflations and misinterpretations and reinterpretations and retrievals,” she says. “I’ve seen her represented in every medium of art through every Christian period—as the witness to the Resurrection, the seductive temptress, the haggard desert mother signifying penitence, the beautiful woman reborn signifying new life.” But for most people, the image that sticks is the rehabilitated prostitute. Scholars blame Pope Gregory the Great for her bad rep; in A.D. 591, he gave a sermon in which he apparently combined several Biblical women into one, including Magdalene and an unnamed sinner who anoints Jesus’ feet. Although the Vatican officially overruled Gregory in 1969, the image stuck until quite recently. “It became a snowball that grew and grew until her name in legend and art history evoked the whore,” says Jane Schaberg, professor of religious studies at the University of Detroit Mercy and author of “The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene.”

Part of the problem may stem from what scholars have called “the muddle of the Marys.” There are a lot of women named Mary in the New Testament, and it’s not always clear which is which.
But some scholars also think mary Magdalene was defamed because she was a threat to male control of the church. As the “Apostle to the Apostles”—the first to encounter the risen Christ and to take the news to Peter and the other male Apostles—she was clearly more than just an ordinary follower. In several Gnostic Gospels—written by Christians whose alternative views of Jesus were eventually suppressed as heresy—Mary Magdalene rivals Peter for the leadership of the early church because of her superior understanding of Jesus’ teaching. The Gospel of Philip, for example, describes her as Jesus’ close companion whom he often “used to kiss.” Karen King of Harvard Divinity School, author of “The Gospel of Mary of Magdala” and a leading authority on women’s roles in the early church, sees her as a target of jealousy because she threatened Peter’s status. By transforming her into a reformed whore, King believes, the church fathers “killed the argument for women’s leadership”—and for recognizing women as fit recipients of divine revelation. King says the transformation also created a powerful symbol of the prostitute as redeemed sinner, the female version of the Prodigal Son. If Jesus could accept her, he could accept anyone.
In “The Da Vinci Code,” Brown suggests that she still had one more hold on Jesus—as his wife. That theory has been circulating for centuries. Some historians think it is possible because Jewish men of that era were almost always married, but many others dismiss that reasoning. Some argue that Jesus wasn’t conventional in any other sense, so why would he feel the need to be married? Others say that relegating her to the role of wife is belittling. “Let’s not continue the relentless denigration of Mary Magdalene by reducing her only importance to a sexual connection with Jesus,” says John Dominic Crossan, professor emeritus of religious studies at DePaul University in Chicago. “She’s not important because she was Mrs. Jesus. That’s like saying Hillary Rodham Clinton is only important because she’s married to Bill Clinton. Both women are important in their own right.”

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