Photo: from books.google.com at this link
Extremely readable history of Mary Magdalene, from the Bible to Dan Brown, that will teach you some things even if, like me, you've read a lot about her already, from the likes of Vermes, Ehrman, etc. For example, you probably know that nobody in the Middle East of this time had first and last names. Jesus of Nazareth was the Nazarene. John the Baptist, was, well...You get the idea. No one had last names. So it's also been known for awhile that Mary Magdalene was called that like Jesus was called Jesus the Nazarene. As he was a Nazarene, from Nazareth, she was the Magdalene, from Magdala. Well, not so fast there. Michael Haag, author of this book, posits that there was no Magdala at the time we're talking about, from 1 to 33 A.D. (or CE, if you will). (Except in Matthew 15:39, where after feeding the multitudes Jesus took ship to Magdala. But a Codex much older than the copy we have in use in our present Bibles [You know the Bible is thousands of years old and has been copied, and miscopied, millions of times, yes?] known as the Codex Vaticanus has the same village in that passage as Magadan, not Magdala. So why the last name? Haag says she was known as "the Magdala" (like John was "the Baptist") and that the word comes from the Aramaic (the language Jesus spoke) magdal and the Hebrew migdal--and that these words mean "tower." Like, how shepherds had a tower that they could use to see the miles of fields where the sheep grazed. Sound familiar? As Jesus said he was the shepherd who watched over his sheep, or flock, meaning his disciples and believers today, so too did somebody watch over Him. That, apparently, is the nickname (and Jesus did give a lot of nicknames, as he did to most of the disciples) Jesus gave to Mary Magdalene. She was the Tower. She watched over him.
Photo: St. Peter, from Catholic.org.
No wonder Peter didn't like her. Peter wasn't Peter's real name. His real name was Simon. Peter is a nickname Jesus gave to him because it means Rock. And he was the first Pope, essentially, as he was "the rock" that the Church was founded upon. But now that you understand the thing about nicknames, which Jesus gave out like he gave out parables, well, now, it makes you think, right? No wonder Peter complained about Mary Magdalene all the time.
[The book lags a little in the last few chapters as Haag embarks on a quick trip through present day renditions of Mary Magdalene. Feel free to skip those. It's a little better when it describes Mary Magdalene in paintings from the Renaissance and the Middle Ages, though I think it worked for me more because I'm interested in those times, and not so much because of what Haag had to say about Mary Magdalene in those times. It's at its best when it covers the Bible and the gnostics--ironic, because Haag describes himself as more of a historian on the Templars and Crusades, and not so much as a biblical scholar. But that's where he's at his best here.]
Haag's research is exhaustive and he deals a lot in common sense--things you would think go hand in hand with historians, but that hasn't been my reading experience. Often they're either too much one or the other, but they need to be combined to make sense of something that happened thousands of years ago. Haag does that well with the Bible. For example, after I thought I'd read everything there is to read about Mary, the mother of Jesus, I see this:
"There are indeed hints in the gospels that stories were going round in the lifetimes of Jesus and of Mary his mother saying that he was a bastard and she was an adultress. 'Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and of Juda, and Simon? [A]nd are not his sisters here with us?' says Mark 6:3. In Judaism a son would be identified by naming his father even if Joseph had been dead for a long while, but Mark, who mentions every other member of the family, leaves Jesus' father unknown. Nor does Mark mention Joseph in any other part of his gospel. And in John 8:41 during a confrontation at the Temple[,] the Pharisees say to Jesus, 'We be not born of fornication', insinuating that he was."
Photo: from Pantera's Wikipedia page at this link. "Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera (c. 22 BC – AD 40) was a Roman soldier whose tombstone was found in Bingerbrück, Germany, in 1859."
I just looked those passages up again in my New Testament. Mine replaces Joses with Joseph, and Juda with Jude, but all the rest is the same. And you can't disagree with the logic Haag uses. I've known all the stories before: I don't believe there was a census, because at no other time in the history of the world has a leader told his people that, for a census, everybody had to pack up and move back where their original ancestors came from. Can you imagine that happening in America today? What a nightmare! And the story of the slaughtering of the firstborn? No other writers writing at the time--and even in antiquity, there were many--mention anything like that. You would think it would make headlines, that everyone would have a comment to say about it, even someone in a court, in his private diary, never mind actual historians (apparently there have always been historians translating history, even in ancient history). But nobody did, outside of that one biblical passage, Matthew 2:1-16. So, yeah, I'd already known and thought about that, [and just click here in my blog so you can read about my thoughts of Mary and Pantera], but this was the first time my attention was drawn to that one passage, of Jesus, "the son of Mary." Of course Haag is right. From ancient times, in the Middle East, in the Nordic stories, in Beowulf, in the Odyssey, possibly all over, a man is defined as being the son of his father, not the son of his mother. Beowulf and Odysseus were referred to like that long after their fathers had died. But when the father is unknown? Or the man had been born out of wedlock, for whatever reason?
Photo: from Pantera's Wikipedia page at this link.
Haag shows some good research and some good common sense, in equal measure. (And I have to add that, for a very long time, I've been put off by Jesus's only biblical conversation with his mother, at the wedding at Cana, in John 2:1-5. Yes, she seems to have been nagging him, but he is still rather curt and annoyed with her. No other writer has mentioned the same slight surprise at this that I have always felt. Until now. So thanks, Mr. Haag. Just a little thing, but it bothered me. And how do we feel about that conversation being the only one between Jesus and his mother? Doesn't it seem like she's been rather scissored out? Mary, His mother, is venerated now, but she got short shrift then.
And the author proves rather conclusively, I think, that Jesus and his disciples were financially supported by Mary of Bethany, Mary Magdalene (if they're different; many scholars think they're the same, as Haag seems to), Joanna (possibly a former wife of someone relevant in the royal court, a man named Chuza), Mary, Jesus's mother, and a few other loyal women. I've considered this, but not for too long. But, yes, there seems to have been money flowing in, and it wasn't from Jesus himself, right? And his followers were fishermen (who were not necessarily poor at that time, but the Bible says these were) and others said to be destitute, so who had the money? Could the women be hiking all over the Middle East unless they had some money? And the women who were not from money, or who were not married to it, where did they get enough money, in that time, to be financially independent? (Get my, and Haag's, drift here?) But where do the robes come from? The food? The water? The sandals? Over the few years of the biblical stories? The Bible stays rather close-lipped about this, but it makes sense. These things cost money, and the guys didn't have any. Why else would these men, as worried about women as they were (Peter, for example, was apoplectic about them, especially Mary Magdalene; you can look that up), have these women along all the time, but that they were the bank?
Photo: from La Pieta's Wikipedia page at this link
So, yeah, makes you think. And that's why I read books like this. To think very seriously about a book that essentially controls my government right now, and yet none of those guys (and I emphasize the guys) seem to have actually read all of it. (Trump, especially, I assure you, has not. But a caveat: He's never said that he has. In fact, he's not very religious. But the southern gentlemen controlling him are. [The Russians controlling him may be as well.] Or, at least, that's what these fine conservative white men will tell you as they push their agendas along. Believe me, when Trump's impeached, these fine men will cut their strings with him very fast, and then say they never really liked him in the first place, that they had their doubts about him all along.)
Well, anyway, because I believe you have to know and study the weapon of choice of your adversary, I have read every single word of the Bible, Old Testament and New. Yes, every word. Twice. And countless times in close readings while reading books about it. Which is right, by the way, to read books like Haag's and not to just take the author's word for everything. That's part of the whole problem, right? To just take someone's word for something very important without reading it yourself? So I do that--I read the Bible, and I read about the Bible, and then I read the Bible again to better think about the things that I have read in books about the Bible.
Because, for God's sake, someone's got to. See what I did there?
So if you're interested in this kind of thing--and if you're being unfairly controlled by conservative social laws in the U.S., you should be--then you should read this. It says a lot of right, and righteous, things about how women have historically had their importance stripped from them since antiquity. If it can happen to Mary Magdalene, and Mary, mother of God, then it can happen to you, right? Right?
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