Something about Mary: Truth or Fiction?

The first time I realized there was “something about Mary,” I was taking a Ph.D. course in “Women of the Renaissance.” I wanted to look at some paintings for a project I was doing, and I did a Google search for paintings of “Mary Magdalene.”

Strangely, I kept coming up with scenes that showed Mary Magdalene with her sister, Martha, and their brother, Lazarus. Huh? I thought. That was Mary of Bethany. I want Mary Magdalene.

It wasn’t long before I discovered that most of the painters of religious works during the Early Modern period thought Mary of Bethany and Mary Magdalene were one and the same. Not only that, they portrayed her as a public-“sinner”-turned-believer, and the “sinner” part was in quotes, if you know what I mean.

So I did some further checking and I discovered that the confusion about Mary started about a millennium earlier than the period I was investigating—in A.D. 591. Back then Gregory the Great preached a sermon in which he lumped together several women—the “sinful woman” who anointed Jesus’ feet with her tears (Luke 7), Mary of Bethany (John 11–12) and Mary Magdalene. It took another thousand years for the confusion to get cleared up. The Second Vatican Council made the official correction in 1969, and Mary M. was vindicated.

Apparently Mel Gibson didn’t get the word. His “flashback” scene for Mary Magdalene’s character in “The Passion of Christ” connects Mary with the woman caught in adultery (John 8)—taken, incidentally, from a section of scripture that experts across the board agree probably was not even in the earliest manuscripts.

The gospel record is that Mary Magdalene had seven demons cast out of her (Luke 8:2), and some have connected demon possession with immorality. While that’s possible, a search through the Bible for demon possession demonstrates that sexual immorality is never actually mentioned in association with possession.

In The Da Vinci Code, slated to appear in theaters next May, Dan Brown presents the extreme opposite view of Mary. The story, which he tries to pass off as non-fiction when it comes to history, presents Mary Magdalene as never having been a prostitute. So far so good. But then he goes on to assert that she was married to Jesus and even bore him a child. Oh please.

Now, Gregory the Great’s mistake was understandable. He couldn’t do a computer word search like we can to find all the references to Mary Magdalene. A modern search for “Mary” in the New Testament turns up a bunch of possibilities. No fewer than fifty-one passages in the New Testament include the name, as there were several Marys. And while it’s fairly easy to sort through them when we have a list of verses in front of us, sixth-century manuscripts weren’t so easily compared.

Brown’s error is much less forgivable. Scores of conservative scholars insist there is not one shred of evidence, either in- or outside of scripture, to suggest that Mary and Jesus had such a relationship. Scores of liberal scholars say the same thing. Incidentally, conservative and liberal scholars agreeing on a point of theology is about as rare as a water pump on the moon. Brown is way out on his own on this one. As my dad would say, “It’s nothing but pure, unadulterated hog wash.”

So what’s the truth about Mary? We know, as I mentioned, that at one time she had seven demons cast out of her. We also know that she was an eyewitness of the sufferings of Jesus. In addition, she was among the first at the tomb. After the resurrection Jesus appeared to her. As a result she had the privilege of announcing to the apostles, “I have seen the Lord!” (John 20:18). For this reason the church fathers later called her “the apostle to the apostles.” An apostle is a “messenger,” and she was blessed with the task of relaying the good news to the disciples.

What are some of the larger messages we learn from Mary? We see that Christ has the power to change the life of someone—man or woman—who has been in spiritual bondage. And we learn something about the validity of the New Testament. Anyone trying to fabricate a convincing history wouldn’t have made women the key witnesses at a time when a woman’s testimony didn’t “count” in a court of law. Yet other than Joseph and John the apostle, women were the key witnesses in the major events of the gospel—Jesus’ birth, death, and resurrection. God was willing to choose women as witnesses when their word in the legal culture carried as much weight as a dust bunny—maybe less.

Yet the best part about Mary is what we learn of Jesus through her. The Oxford-educated British author, Dorothy L. Sayers, summed it up beautifully in a piece she penned nearly sixty years ago, though it could’ve been written yesterday:

“Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man—there has never been such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, flattered or coaxed or patronised; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them either as ‘The women, God help us!’ or ‘The ladies, God bless them!’; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unself-conscious. There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could possibly guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything ‘funny’ about woman’s nature.”

Yes, there’s something about Mary. She was transformed by the power of God and she had the honor of seeing and speaking with the risen Christ. But there’s more. In hearing her story we too can “see the Lord”: He had the power to transform. He esteemed women. He cared for the humble. He suffered and died. And He is alive!