Can the Bible’s fallen woman be redeemed?
As a new Hollywood film seeks to redefine Mary Magdalene, Peter Stanford looks at the historic slandering of Christ’s closest witness
It is one of the most familiar scenes in Western culture – 13 men sitting round a table at the Last Supper – for Christians, the first Eucharist. But in Hollywood’s latest take on biblical history there is an extra guest: the Mary Magdalene of its title, played by the American actress Rooney Mara. And her presence is no mere token or part of some Dan Brown-style conspiracy theory, but rather the natural consequence of this virtuous woman being as significant among Jesus’s inner circle as all the other men there. She too is an apostle, the equal to Peter, Andrew, James and John.
It’s certainly a radical shift from the Mary Magdalene of traditional Christian lore, who has become known as an embodiment of loose morals: a wanton prostitute, the tart with a heart who is rescued from her sinful ways by Jesus.
It is that tainted Mary whose name was given to laundries in Ireland, where young, unmarried, pregnant women, many of them victims of abuse, were sent to be punished, often for years on end. And in the now bygone age when nuns taught in the classrooms of convent schools, Mary Magdalene was regularly trotted out as a kind of double act with Jesus’s mother, the Virgin Mary: one the pure, perfect (though unattainable) role model for girls, the other a condemnation of their sexuality.
Down the ages, Mary Magdalene has also suffered from bad PR in countless works of religious art; there are as many as 50 representations of her in the collection of the National Gallery in London. Tintoretto’s late 16th century Penitent Magdalene is typical, with her as the doe-eyed seductress, topless with only carefully-placed long golden strands of auburn hair preserving her modesty, but looking towards the light of God.
So enduring, indeed, has this fallen-woman stereotype proved that Mary Magdalene’s best-known role in recent times has been in Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1970 musical Jesus Christ Superstar; in I Don’t Know How to Love Him, she shares that she “had so many men before, in very many ways”.
In Australian director Garth Davis’s new film, by contrast, there is no suggestion anywhere that Mary is a harlot. Instead, Mara plays her as an intense, articulate and morally upright woman at the very heart of the familiar narrative of the life and death of Jesus (Joaquin Phoenix, with whom Mara formed a real-life relationship).
As Davis told the audience at the world premiere in London, the real Mary Magdalene has been “hidden away for 2,000 years” and now the era of #Metoo is the perfect moment for her to re-emerge.
He has a point. As a female emblem in a religion whose upper echelons have ever been dominated by men, she has certainly been traduced. Nowhere in the gospels does it say that Mary Magadalene was a prostitute. Luke chapter seven ends with an unnamed woman “with a bad name” gatecrashing a dinner attended by Jesus, washing his feet with her tears, and then drying them with her hair. The next chapter begins with the first reference to Mary Magdalene, “from whom seven demons had gone out”.
In the Christian tradition these two have been conflated, the assumption being that demons can only be sexual demons, and that getting a bad name must mean you sell sex. It reveals more about the mindset of male theologians than it does about Mary Magdalene.
True to his stated purpose, Davis has Mara’s Mary forcibly exorcised of seven demons, not because she is promiscuous, but because she has shown herself intellectually and emotionally independent by rejecting the assumption that she will marry and have children, deciding instead to follow Jesus.
Does this really count as a radical reappraisal? It certainly stands in direct contrast to other big screen attempts to bring Mary to life – from Monica Bellucci’s sexy sinner in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, to Barbara Hershey’s siren causing Willem Dafoe’s Jesus to have erotic dreams about her in Scorsese’s 1988 The Last Temptation of Christ.
Yet Mary Magdalene has had her rather subtler champions for centuries. In his 1607 sonnet, John Donne wrote of her: “An active faith so highly did advance/that she once knew, more than the Church did know”. Donne was taking his cue from one key incident reported in three of the four gospels in the New Testament. Matthew, Mark and John recount how it is Mary Magdalene who is the first to see the risen Christ, not Peter or the male apostles, and that it is therefore she, not them, who is the first witness to the resurrection and to the birth of the Church.
Among the 50 works in the National Gallery is Titian’s sublime 16th century Noli Me Tangere (“Let No One Cling to Me”) that perfectly captures this charged moment. The title comes from the next line in John’s gospel: “Jesus said to her, ‘do not cling to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father’.”
What even the Church has long accepted is that this has made Mary “the apostle to the apostles”, as Thomas Aquinas, arguably Christianity’s greatest theologian, put it in the 13th century. But does that mean she was on a par with them? Peter, after all, went on to be the first Pope, while women still cannot be priests in Catholicism.
In the first four centuries of the emerging Church, Mary Magdalene’s role was widely debated. As well as the four gospels in today’s Bibles, there were many other “extracanonical” texts, written in the form of gospels in the name of others who feature in Jesus’s life. Among these texts, of which fragments and sections still exist, was at least one attributed to Mary Magdalene, and it argues that the male apostles robbed her of the leadership role Jesus intended for her.
Here is the nub of Mary Magdalene’s true character that Davis says has been hidden for 2,000 years. Hidden, though, is rather overstating it. In the 6th century, it is certainly true that, as the film points out, Pope Gregory the Great decreed that Mary Magdalene was a penitent whore. Yet, try as they might, the Church authorities have never quite managed to have the last word on the subject.
There were the popular medieval legends that grew up around her, suggesting that after Jesus’s death, she set sail for France and founded her own church. These resurfaced more recently as part of the frenzied conspiracy theorising in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, which imagined that Mary Magdalene had given birth to Jesus’s child and that this secret had been suppressed by the Church.
A more thoughtful take on the same unofficial history came in 1984 when the award-winning, convent-educated Anglo-french novelist, Michèle Roberts, published The Wild Girl, a feminist re-reading of her story: “I wanted to imagine a Christianity that might have developed differently, and valued women equally with men.”
So does this latest film. In its stated aim of wanting to rebrand her, it stands in a long line of others. The overall tone of Mary Magdalene may be a little too self-conscious, and its pace occasionally glacial for memorable cinema, but by wearing its seriousness of purpose on its sleeve, it will contribute to the long-overdue rehabilitation of Christianity’s most slandered figure.
Mary Magdalene is released on Friday.
Peter Stanford’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Faith is published on March 22 by Hodder.