Mary Magdalene in the history of Christianity and Contemporary Culture Series 1, No.5

The orthodoxies had previously hidden or suppressed certain aspects of Christianity. Culture and masculine ego perhaps had also interfered with some truths of early Christianity, which led to the suppression of some materials. The Gospel of Mary was found in Egypt in 1896, and the recent discovery in 1945 of the library of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt has become useful to broaden our horizons. The Nag Hammadi library contains writings attributed to direct disciples of Jesus Christ known as Galilean Rabbi Yeshua, considered the Messiah foretold in the Old Testament by others as a prophet or a teacher and others as the Saviour of the world.

We have alternative perspectives in the extensive collection of texts and gospels to study. We have the gospels of Phillip, Peter, Thomas, and Bartholomew alongside the Canonized gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It has been established that the Gospel of Thomas contains certain logia, or simple sayings, that are likely to be older than the revisions of the canonical texts and may have been skillfully used by the editors of the latter as the hypothetical ‘Q’ source.

We must take cognize the seven demons released from Mary Magdalene and look at them symbolically as a vessel prepared by God to conclude the work started by the Virgin Mary, Mother of Jesus. Eve, the woman was the one tempted directly and deceived by Satan (Serpent) in the Garden of Eden; this began the introvillio of demons into the body of a human. As a form of purification, Jesus decided to come through a woman to cleanse the passageway; Mary Magdalene’s deliverance of seven demons completed the circle. The release of the seven demons purified a woman and restored the woman as a spiritual vessel, the unique helpmeet for Adam (Man).

In her books and lectures, Margaret Starbird concluded in the line of the DA VINCI CODE that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ wife and had a child for him. She went further than it was Joseph of Arimathea that took her out of Jerusalem to avoid the total elimination of the family. The DA VINCI CODE generated a lot of arguments and Scholarships. The claim that Jesus married Mary Magdalene is blasphemous, Sacrilege, and nothing short of the demoniac. It negates the faith in Christology that Jesus is both human and divine. To suggest that a divine God can copulate with a woman and bring forth a child diminishes the attributes of that God. The Creed of Saint Athanasius (Quicunque Vult) has these words “… And in this Trinity, none is afore, or after other: none is greater or less than another, but the whole three Persons are co-eternal together: and co-equal….” Christians believe that Jesus is God, and His ‘I AM’ sayings in the Gospels also confirm His divinity.

Starbird and the authors of the Da Vinci Code erred in their postulations. No hard facts from the Bible, legends or extra-Biblical manuscripts/writings could support their claims. God is beyond marital copulation. If Angels were forbidden to copulate with human beings, Jesus Christ would never have had a sexual relationship with any woman, not just Mary Magdalene. The New Testament recorded Jesus’s attendance at a wedding in Cana, Galilee; the same New Testament would have explicitly recorded Jesus’ wedding to Mary Magdalene if it had been so. It would have been a great joy for his disciples to celebrate the Master’s wedding, but it was not so.

 God created helpmeet for man, and Jesus Christ is not just man but also God, the actual creative agent of man (John 1:1-3). Some scholars readily disagree that Mary Magdalene was an Apostle, and her gender might have been responsible for this. Still, I will prove that she was not only one of the several disciples of Jesus Christ but also the actual replacement for Judas Iscariot, the twelfth disciple. In Margaret Starbird’s writings and lectures, she concluded that Mary Magdalene is the woman with the Alabaster Jar; the same person is known as Mary, the sister of Lazarus and Martha; also referred to as Mary of Bethany by Apostle John. Is this an accurate statement? No, I will reveal the true identity of Miriam of Magdala, popularly called Mary Magdalene. It seems only natural that Mary Magdalene, who followed Jesus everywhere and was there on Easter morning, would have been accorded special revelations from the Master. In the common belief of Jesus’ followers, the post-Resurrection time is one of the decisive revelations, including Jesus’s communication of the mission given to the disciples before his final departure. Because Mary Magdalene is the first to have “seen the Lord” (John 20:18), her presence among the disciples listening to her report of Jesus’s last words is essential for the gospels of the post-Resurrection.

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