Mysteries of Mary Magdalene

2022-12-24 18:01:25Histori SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
Scene from the movie "The Passion of the Christ" (2004), Monica Bellucci as Mary Magdalene

She is a figure shrouded in mystery, portrayed over the years as a prostitute, a woman who committed adultery, an object of veneration, and even as the wife of Christ. In his new book Michael Haag follows Mary Magdalene through the centuries, exploring how she has been reinterpreted in each century.

According to the gospels, Mary Magdalene was with Jesus in Galilee, where he preached the kingdom of God to thousands of people, and healed the sick and lame. And she accompanied Jesus on his journey to Jerusalem, entering the holy city, in accordance with the prophecy of the Old Testament, "humbled and mounted on a donkey." Mary Magdalene was there when the crowds greeted Jesus, waving palm branches, spreading their clothes before him, and joyfully shouting “Hosanna” (a chant used to express reverence or joy).

When the Romans nailed Jesus to the cross, and when, abandoned by his disciples, he began to cry out: "My Lord, my God, why have you forsaken me?", Mary Magdalene was there.

And when he died, Mary Magdalene was part of the funeral procession, as the body was placed in a tomb that was covered with a large stone. Mary Magdalene was therefore present at the crucifixion of Jesus, at his burial, and earlier she was with Jesus throughout his ministry in Galilee. As a wife and friend of Jesus, she was the only person close to him in the critical moments which determined her purpose: to describe his destiny.

And it was Mary Magdalene again who went to Jesus' tomb on the third day and found it empty. The earliest version of Mark, the old gospel, says no more than that. He says nothing about the resurrection, nor about the reappearance of Jesus to his disciples. The whole mystery of Christianity begins in the initial moment when Mary Magdalene stood alone in the empty tomb.

This mystery, with its suggestion of intimacy, is related to the nature of Mary Magdalene's vision—that of the kingdom of God, which she shared with Jesus. The question that has arisen since then is how much of that vision has been distorted, suppressed, or lost in the controversies that shaped the new religion. These conflicts forced the Church to control the visionary nature of Mary Magdalene's experience, turning her into a prostitute.

Nor was it a historical accident that Mary, the mother of Jesus, who despite the birth accounts of Matthew and Luke, plays almost no role in the other Gospels and in the life of Jesus (and who has been considered by skeptics first and critics of Christianity as a woman who had committed adultery, while her son a bastard) has been transformed by the Church (without any evidence of the Gospel) into a drinkable virgin and Mother of God.

It was not until 1969, during the papacy of Paul VI, that the Vatican made some measured changes. Until then the reading for the feast day of Mary Magdalene on July 22 was from chapter 7 of Luke's gospel, in which an unidentified woman enters a house where Jesus is invited to a dinner and humiliates herself, she washed his feet with tears and wiped his feet with her hair. "And he said: Your sins are forgiven."

This story was replaced in 1969 by a very different reading, this time from chapter 20 of the Gospel of John, in which Jesus reveals himself to Mary Magdalene for the first time after the resurrection. He called her, "O woman, why are you crying?", And then he called her name, saying: "Mary", and recognizing her she said: Rabbi, which means: Teacher.

Without making an unequivocal public apology, the Vatican appeared to say it had been wrong about Mary Magdalene for 1,400 years, since 591, when Pope Gregory the Great delivered his homily confirming the triumph of Mary, the mother of God, declaring that Mary Magdalene was that sinful woman according to Luke, and that he decided she must be a harlot.

But not many people have paid attention to the Vatican's appeal, or perhaps they simply prefer a prostitute to the woman who witnessed the resurrection; the event that lies at the heart of religion and has shaped the history and culture of much of the world for the past 2,000 years.

In the musical Jesus Christ Superstar (1971), in Martin Scorsese's 1988 film The Last Temptation, or the 2004 Passion of the Christ directed by Mel Gibson, Mary Magdalene is a prostitute or adulteress.

The public appetite for "Mary Magdalena the prostitute" is being filled only with "Mary Magdalene, the wife of Jesus" and even as the mother of his child. Proof of this is the great attention that the media gave to the statement of Harvard University professor Karen King in 2012 about the discovery of an ancient fragment of papyrus, which bears the words "Jesus said to them: My wife".

Certainly in the Middle Ages, the Cathars in France regarded Mary Magdalene as the wife of Jesus in the divine world and as his concubine in the world of illusion – the world they believed to be the world we live in in our daily lives.

While in the first centuries of the Christian era, the Gnostic gospels portray Mary Magdalene as "friend", "wife" and even "wife" of Jesus, as the woman he loved more than all the other disciples; their relationship is often described in erotic terms. For this matter, there are also incidents in the canonical gospels of the New Testament, which have led some researchers to affirm that Mary Magdalene was really the wife of Jesus. For some the argument is not that this is not true, but why the truth was hidden.

The search for Mary Magdalene and the struggle for her identity is the history of the development of Christianity, and the very nature of our culture and society.

“History Extra”/Vox News

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