Reviving Mary Magdalene: Emergency Rescue Work

You may imagine why my life partner, my spouse, has been reading aloud to me pages of Dr. Mary Pipher's wonderfully helpful (anthropology / psychology / sociology / spiritual) book.  She's asked me to read some of the pages for myself too.  As we read together, as I study alone further, we're not doing academic exercises.  We're involved in our own emergency rescue work.  It's work together as parents, equals, a mother and father.  We're raising a son and daughters in a misogynistic culture, much like yours I'm guessing.  But I'm not writing as an alarmist or to alarm you.  You know.  You know where you live, what your own children must negotiate, and how set against women (y)our society can be.  Read the books, the glossy magazines.  Read Dan Brown's view of Mary Magdalene in his pop book that has "only two female characters in his lengthy novel -- the love interest of his alter ego symbologist and an elderly nun who survives for all of two pages" (as David Lose points out; HT Shawna R. B. Atteberry).  Read the traditional Christian view of Mary Magdalene, even as Dan Brown would use fiction to challenge it; Stefan Lovgren, reviewing Brown's novel for National Geographic, says the historical obvious:  "Depicted by the Church as a prostitute, Mary Magdalene was an intimate disciple of Christ."  Why the focus here on Mary Magdalene?  Well, of course why!  Why has she been so mischaracterized?  What's that say about your culture?

So, in this post, I'd love for us to look at how gynophobic and misogynistic views affect us all in profound ways.  Can we think about and make some change?  The subtitle of the post really could have been, "Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls," or "Saving Ourselves," or "Saving the Self of Mary Magdalene," or "Saving the Bible from Misogynists." 

But enough of what I have to say.  Below are 5 important statements for us all (all related):

1.

The male interpreters and writers want to see a prostitute, so that’s what they write about. For the record Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute either.

-- Shawna R. B. Atteberry, "Good Stuff I Read This Week"

2.

Mary Magdalene has always been the subject of both popular and scholarly intrigue. Was she the wife of Jesus, his complete initiate, a Goddess or a priestess? Did the Church dramatically alter her image to deny her importance? These questions have inspired representations of her in art, film and literature, from "Caravaggio" to "The Last Temptation of Christ" and "The Da Vinci Code". The "Mary Magdalene Cover-Up" is the first book to bring the original sources that have informed our current day view of Mary to a wider audience. Esther de Boer has brought together an impressive array of texts from the first century, when Mary Magdalene was alive, to the sixth century, when her image as a penitent sinner was invented. Each text is accompanied by an informed and lively commentary by the author placing it in its historical context. This combination of original texts and commentary enables the reader to draw their own conclusions about this most enigmatic of first-century women.

-- from Esther de Boer, HT April DeConick

3.

It is extremely important to note that the Bible NEVER associates Mary Magdalene with prostitution or sexual immorality of any kind. Most people don’t realize this and, in fact, think that that is her primary memorable feature. Why is it so important to get it straight? Here are just a few reasons:

1. It’s wrong; as such, it misrepresents the contents of the biblical texts.
2. It misrepresents our earliest evidence of the nature of Christianity.
3. It perpetuates the notion that many women in the Bible were sexually immoral or suspect.
4. It belittles the bold, central role that women have always played in Christian history, including our own era.
5. It continues the historical and ongoing tendency to reduce the importance of females in general and restrict them to the limited categories of wife, virgin, mother, or whore.

Each of those categories is tied to male control of female sexuality.

--Jaime Clark-Soles, "Introducing the Real Mary Magdalene:" and Engaging the Word: The New Testament and the Christian Believer

4.

It has traditionally been assumed that the Bible promotes a special feminine role for women.  Yet we are immediately faced with the problem:  what model shall women emulate?  Eve?  Mary?  Sarah?  Mary Magdalene?
      In the New Testament, Jesus is held up as the one model for both men and women.  This central biblical teaching can in one stroke expose as a purely human invention the idea of special "feminine" roles for women.  To take Eve as a model of "true feminism," for example, would be like taking Adam as the example of "a real man."  [and who would we take as the masculine, male counterpart of Mary Magdalene?]

--Philip Cary, "One Role Model for All:  The Biblical Meaning of Submission," in Reta Halteman Finger's The Wisdom of Daughters: Two Decades of the Voice of Christian Feminism

5.

     We need to change society if we are to produce healthy young women. But I can't single-handedly change the culture, and neither can the families I see [in counseling].  I try to help families understand some of their daughters' behavior as a reaction to a misogynistic culture and its manifestations at home, with friends, in school and in the larger community. We work together to assess the impact of the culture on the life of each family and to develop plans for damage control. It's emergency rescue work.

--Mary Bray Pipher, Ph.D., Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

The Actually Good Samaritan, A Woman

Here are 4 related posts on the Good Samaritan as a Woman or the Samaritan Woman as not so bad.  They're also posts on how the human (female) perspective gets lost (or tarnished) in interpretation too often:

1.

For years I’ve been saying that jumping to the conclusion that the Samaritan Woman Jesus meets at the well of Jacob is a prostitute is nothing but male fantasy (which is why it’s been wrong for 2,000 years. The male interpreters and writers want to see a prostitute, so that’s what they write about.

-- Shawna R. B. Atteberry, "Good Stuff I Read This Week"

2. 

He [Jesus] eventually invites her [the Samaritan Woman] to call her husband, and when she replies that she has no husband, he agrees: "You have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband" (4:18).  And that's it. That's the sentence that has branded her a prostitute. Conservative preacher John Piper's treatment is characteristic. In a sermon on this passage, he describes her as "a worldly, sensually-minded, unspiritual harlot from Samaria," and at another point in the sermon calls her a "whore."

--  David Lose, "Misogyny, Moralism and the Woman at the Well" (HT Shawna R. B. Atteberry)

3. 

In her response to Jesus, the Samaritan woman introduces the idea that theirs is both a gender and an ethnic difference. Here, however, she is safe and intimacy with Jesus is based on the sharing of truths.

Our ideas about intimacy often have sexual connotations and it is interesting that in her disclosure about having five husbands, we regard her immoral, aware as we are of her unusual noon-day visit to the well (so she might avoid day-break or evening crowds). Reader-response theories wonder if the text seeks to undo us for the judgements we impose on the text. She might have outlived her husbands in a culture where levirate marriage was the norm, or more convincingly Schneiders (1997, 249) argues that 'the entire dialogue … has nothing to do with the woman's private moral life.' Schneiders (1997, 247) and Moore (2003, 282) believe there is an allegorical significance to the woman's five husbands being representative of Samaria's colonial past, with the present man representing 'the Samaritans' false worship of the true God,' (Barrett, 1965, 225).

--  Rachel, "The Samaritan woman's encouragement to us to engage in theological discourse"

4.

Give it until the very end, until you have nothing left.  And then your reward will come.

     How readily women hear that message!  How easily we believe these words.  Give all.  Don't question.  Don't be angry.  Don't doubt that your reward will be on some distant horizon....

     The parable of the Good Samaritan came to my mind, but with a new lesson, one particularly for women.

     ...a Samaritan, as she journeyed, came to where he was, and when she saw him, she had compassion, and went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring oil and win, then she set him on her own beast and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.  And the next day she took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, "Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, I will repay when I come back." (adapted from Luke 10:33-35 KJV)

      She left.  She left!  The woman tended to his wounds, brought him to a safe place, took care of him, and paid his way.  And then she left.
--  Peggy Weaver,  "The Good Samaritan Woman"