Better than "Secrets"

There is a poignant riff at the beginning of Cynthia Bourgeault's wild and difficult book The Meaning of Mary Magdalene that is even a little bit sad. She writes of an Abbot friend of hers who learned she was writing a book on the Magdalene, and kindly advised, "Go gently. Try not to leave me behind." In the course of the book, Bourgeault nearly manages this, only delicately inferring, not outright declaring, that Jesus and Mary Magdalene may have been sexually involved.

Bourgeault's book is rife with insight nonetheless. She deliberately exceeds Jungian, secular feminist and Buddhist categories with "wisdom Christianity," where Sophia (represented by the Magdalene) is "not a divinity to be worshipped... [but] a transformational force to be actualized." Many of Bourgeault's insights are helpful encapsulations of traditional Christian notions, such as her suggestion that "agape is what emerges from the refiner's fire when that surging desire to cling, possess, consume the object of one's adoring is subjected to the discipline of kenosis, self-giving love." Reading her book, I found myself frequently baffled, but especially grateful for the restraining influence of the Abbot. 

But other Mary Magdalene scholars, it appears, benefit from no such counsel. Most notoriously there was Atlantic article that became a full scale book showing how willed credulity regarding Mary Magdalene, and the so-called "Gospel of Jesus' Wife," damaged the reputation of Harvard Divinity School professor Karen King, as it is very likely a forgery. The ensuing embarrassment was not enough, it seems, to prevent other books dependent upon King's Magdalene scholarship, namely Meggan Watterson's Mary Magdalene Revealed. This publication is based on a somewhat more reliable text, the so called "Gospel of Mary Magdalene" which, Stephen Shoemaker points out, might actually be about Jesus' mother, not Mary Magdalene, for the word "Magdalene" appears in none of the surviving manuscripts. 

I am glad this mysterious text has helped Watterson find a measure of faith that has some association with Christianity. Mary Magdalene Revealed does reveal important insights ("the body is wise," "you don't have to feel separate from love," or just Scriptural admonitions like "love is stronger than death," or even "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner"). Still, such insights are packaged in a way that suggests traditional Christianity is keeping this wisdom from you and it can only be received by consulting the Nag Hammadi. What traditional Christianity can keep you from, however, are the less insightful ideas in this book, such as Watterson's insistence that "there is no such thing as sin." Or perhaps just a quick glance at the news will clear up that misconception.

All of this is enough to make us long for a book about Mary Magdalene that doesn't deploy the publishing gimmick of promising "secret" information. After all, bestselling books like The Immortality Key that claim to reveal such secrets (the psychedelic origins of Hellenism and Christianity in that case) often prove to be bogus (as this serious review explains). At their best, as with Mark Vernon's A Secret History of Christianity, the "secret" turns out to be a useful repackaging of Christian mysticism that, thank goodness, is no secret at all. Meanwhile, however, most books about suppressed "secrets," usually heavily featuring Mary Magdalene, make us long for a book on the Magdalene that does give us flashbacks to The Da Vinci Code. We need a book that does not rely on sketchy "secret" texts, but is also not afraid of such texts either. In short, we need an adventurous, historically rigorous book about Mary Magdalene that is premised upon the most surprising sources of all: the canonical gospels themselves.

Thanks to my colleague Jennifer Powell McNutt, we finally have one such book in The Mary We Forgot. Like the best of the above publications, Professor McNutt's book offers the same necessary sorting through, and correction of, the complex historical process that saw Mary Magdalene become a prostitute. Jennifer's book also contains adventurous travelogues, even if she finds herself less "perched like a baby goat in yoga gear on the side of a mountain in the South of France searching for Mary Magdalene's 'Cave of Eggs,'" (on offer in Mary Magdalene Revealed) than enjoying the challenges (and thrills) of taking a family of five to the very same pilgrimage sites in France. Which is to say, The Mary We Forgot is certainly personal, but is is backed by exhaustive Biblical and historical scholarship, including lucid and indispensable charts. 

I may be a friend of Jennifer's, but my evaluation that her writing is lively, warm and richly informed is clear-eyed nonetheless. Jennifer writes from the Reformed tradition, but with ecumenical sensitivity and generosity. She offers the same legitimate complaint about the way women have frequently been treated within the Christian tradition, but Jennifer has the wisdom to see that the solution is within the Biblical tradition, not outside of it. Which is to say, the canonical Mary Magdalene emerges in this book as a figure who disproves the claim of Christianity's inherent misogyny. Anyone who has witnessed Jennifer preach at her home church knows that this is not a mere promise or a bluff, but a lived reality.

Those who write recklessly about Mary Magdalene might stop to consider something: The assumption that one must be heterodox to embrace Mary Magdalene in fact perpetuates her sidelining, and the sidelining of women in general, from the mainstream of Christian faith. Professor McNutt's Mary Magdalene—which I'd venture to say is closest to the real one—avoids this considerable risk. But there is another, and more important reason, why Jennifer's Mary Magdalene rings true: This Mary wants us to be less surprised by her remarkable place in the Bible and in the Christian tradition than by what surprised her. Namely, her dearest friend's unexpected rebound from what seemed to be final and total catastrophe. "Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: 'I have seen the Lord!'" (John 20:18). 

Hers was, and remains, news too good to keep secret.