Antti Marjanen, The Woman Jesus Loved: Mary Magdalene in the Nag
Hammadi Library & Related Documents. Nag Hammadi & Manichaean
Studies XL. E.J. Brill. 1996
Reviewed by Robert M. Price
It is sadly typical of the doldrums in which
mainstream "guild" New Testament scholarship languishes that a scholar
thinks to have advanced the discussion by trying to reduce rather than
increase our knowledge on a particular historical question. This book is
a dissertation, and part of the structure of a dissertation is the
initial reduction of previous research to a gallery of straw men against
which one's own contribution will then shine all the brighter. Previous
scholars in the field have provided but empty stone jars; by contrast
the dissertation writer has filled them with new wine. It is a
phenomenon akin to that "anxiety of influence" described so well by
Harold Bloom, whereby one poet tries to distance himself from his
predecessors by minimizing their influence upon him. As it happens, my
own brief article "Mary Magdalene: Gnostic Apostle?" (Grail: An
Ecumenical Journal, June 1990) has become grist for Marjanen's mill
in the present case. I must admit to feeling much like one of the
Gnostic heresiarchs calumnied by Epiphanius, a source Marjanen often
cites. My heresy, in Marjanen's eyes, is to have attempted to peel back
the numerous early Christian traditions of Mary Magdalene in order to
get as close as possible to the hypothetical historical Mary Magdalene.
Marjanen's arguments against my reconstruction form an index of familiar
polemical feints. He seems utterly oblivious of my major methodological
premise, that one may profitably seek to plot a course backward from
well-attested second- and third- century phenomena into canonical New
Testament texts, in the process asking whether the New testament texts
seem to take on new meaning when viewed hypothetically as seeds from
which the later tendencies grew. Of course, this approach is hardly
original with me. I rejoice to acknowledge Koester and Robinson (Trajectories
Through Early Christianity) as the pioneers in whose striding steps
I shuffle. Allied with the "trajectory" approach is the lesson of
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza which causes me to listen closely for faint
echoes of a once mighty rushing wind of female prophecy and apostleship
in the early days of Christian sectarianism. But all this Marjanen
discounts with a wave of the harmonizing hand.
For
instance, it seems quite clear to me (and to other scholars) that, since
in the pericope of Jesus' appearance to Mary Magdalene in John 20 Jesus
tells Mary to go and relay his farewell to his male disciples, not to go
tell them to meet him (as in Mark 16), subsequent Easter appearances
were ruled out. Mary would have been, according to this pre-Johannine
tradition, the exclusive witness to the resurrection. John has obscured
this implication by the simple expedient of adding more appearance
stories, drawn from other sources. Marjanen seems not to get the point
about the "Tell them goodbye" command and obliviously says that one need
not read the text the way I read it; that one may just as easily read
Mary's Jesus-epiphany as being confirmed by those following it in John
20. Yes, if one is a hell-bent harmonist of contradictions, I suppose
one can. And, as for trajectories, does it not occur to Marjanen that in
light of the astonishing prominence accorded Mary Magdalene in the later
Gnostic texts (which in general he himself cannot finally avoid
admitting, despite constant attempts to whittle away the implications),
one might see the John 20 Mary epiphany as the seed from which the later
trend grew? Marjanen tips his hat to James M. Robinson for his
hospitality at Claremont; too bad he didn't let Robinson's methodology
rub off on him while he was there.
I
follow the Magdalene trajectory into the canon also to try to sort out
the bewildering variety of treatments of Mary vis-a-vis the tomb
of Jesus. Does Mary see Jesus himself, or only angels? If Jesus, does he
have a message for her, or does he use her as a courier to the men? Does
Jesus say something distinctive to her, or does he merely echo the
angel's words? Or is she even there in the first place? Where else in
the gospels do we find such a degree of diversity? Does this mean
nothing, as Marjanen thinks? He thinks to overrule me by using the
oldest trick in the apologist's handbook: there wouldn't have been
enough time between the historical Mary and the canonization of the
appearance list in 1 Corinthians 15 to allow for such a catalogue of
polemical versions of the empty tomb story. But Marjanen forgets what he
momentarily recalled: that I do not claim that the most extreme
anti-Mary reaction (her complete omission in the 1 Corinthians list) is
the last to evolve. It is merely last in a typological map. I do not
posit a unilinear development, but many parallel growths. For some
reason, Marjanen attributes the former to me.
I
surveyed most of the second- and third-century sources Marjanen does,
though I did not take up space (unavailable to me in a short article) to
recap current debates over dating and provenance of individual
documents, which amounts to an obscuring of the forest by the trees in
this case. And from my survey I inferred a portrait of a historical Mary
who earned theological enemies by advocating male-female equality in
pneumatic ministry by means of encratic celibacy. While he is dismissing
me up front, Marjanen futilely claims that since no one source pictures
Mary as possessing just these distinctives, my reconstruction is an
artificial composite sketch. How odd that, in the course of his own
survey, he comes up with pretty much the same picture of Mary. He is
reticent, however, to identify the resultant portrait with the
historical Magdalene as I do because he has already found excuses to
drive a wedge between canonical books and non-canonical ones.
In
general, Marjanen satisfies himself with pointing out the tritely
obvious: that mine is not the only possible interpretation of the
relevant texts. I would not let an undergraduate student get away with
this. Why are alternative readings better? Of course the answer in this
case is that Marjanen needs to wipe the slate clean of what I have tried
to write upon it if he is to have a tabula rasa to fill by
himself. This is, so to speak, his redactional Tendenz.
If
this is the way Marjanen treats the work of his colleagues, one wonders
how fairly he is able to treat the ancient sources. His occasional
attempts to dim the spotlight in which the Nag Hammadi Magdalene glows
notwithstanding, Marjanen does a fine job in placing her portrayals
within the context of each document as a whole. As Jacob Neusner
insists, we have no business merely abstracting prima facie biographical
bits from the larger textual entities in which they appear. We must
recognize going in that the portrayal of Rabbi Eliezer or Jesus Christ
or Mary Magdalene in a particular ancient document is first and foremost
a function of the compositional interests of that document. And Marjanen
admirably listens to the whole document each in turn, synchronically.
But that's as far as he goes. Unlike Neusner, Marjanen never gets around
to the diachronic dimension. Neusner does think there is a chance that a
text compiled for some other reason may yet contain some genuine
traditions about earlier figures mentioned in them. But Marjanen is
content to remain wading in the shallow end of the pool.