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Mary of Clopas and Mary the Mother of Jesus

Is Mary of Clopas also Mary the Mother of Jesus?

Now we return to the account of the cross in John’s Gospel introduced in Chapter 9. Who was Mary of Clopas? The evangelists had their reasons for including the material that they did; the names of the women are not simply mentioned in passing.

To start with, it is not absolutely clear whether Mary of Clopas was Clopas’ wife as it is usually translated (see Appendix 4 for an explanation of familial relationships in Greek). Neither is it certain whether there are three women in John’s crucifixion narrative (19.25–27) as is normally supposed. It could be two, three, or four. These possibilities have all been considered in biblical scholarship. The commas would not have been present in the original Greek documents: ‘standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother’s sister Mary of Clopas and Mary Magdalene’.

(a) This could refer to two women only: the mother of Jesus and her sister, who are then named as Mary of Clopas and Mary Magdalene. If so, Mary of Clopas is another name for the mother of Jesus, and her sister is Mary Magdalene. This is usually rejected as being an unusual and improbable option.

(b) The traditional position is that three women are referred to in John 19.25: the mother of Jesus (who we know is called Mary, but John does not name her); his mother’s sister who is called Mary of Clopas; Mary Magdalene, thus, three Marys in all.

(c) If four, then they constitute the mother of Jesus and her sister, neither of whom are named, and two other women called Mary of Clopas and Mary Magdalene. Some scholars prefer (c) to the usual option (b).

Despite the fact that option (a) is the least popular in traditional scholarship, it makes sense in light of the discussion in the previous chapter, where we saw that Mary was not always described simply as the mother of Jesus. I am going to argue that the Mary described as ‘Mary of Clopas’ was originally Mary the mother of Jesus, in the same way as Mary mother of James and Joses in Mark’s Gospel.1 The arguments for this are more intricate than those in the last chapter concerning Mary mother of James and Joses/Joseph. Jerome in the fourth century suggested that Mary the mother of James and Joses and Mary of Clopas might be the same person although, as we have seen, he strongly disagreed that this was also Mary the mother of Jesus (On the Perpetual Virginity of Blessed Mary 15–16).

The first argument for this is quite simple: the presence of two Marys observing the cross, one of whom is Mary Magdalene and the other Mary the mother of Jesus, can be found in the synoptic gospels, Mark, Matthew, and Luke, and this seems to have been passed down from the pre-gospel Passion tradition. Therefore, it would be no surprise to find it in John.

If we are right, then the description of Mary at the cross changed from ‘Mary of James’ (as in Mark 16.1 and Luke 23.49) to ‘Mary of Clopas’ in John 19.25. This will remind us of the succession in the Jerusalem Church, which passed from James to Symeon, son of Clopas. This is the second argument. For some reason, Mary was associated with the leadership of the Church at Jerusalem, as belonging to the household of the leader: first, with her son James (and his brother Joses/Joseph), and then Clopas, the father of the second leader.

It is quite possible that ‘Mary of James, etc.,’ was reformulated (in an oral or written tradition) as ‘Mary of Clopas’ sometime after the succession of Symeon, when it was important to establish Symeon’s credentials. Clopas’ name will then have been inserted into an older naming of the witnesses at the cross, that is, ‘Mary of James and Mary Magdalene’ (the other way round in the synoptic gospels) became ‘Mary of Clopas and Mary Magdalene’.

This can be summarized in this table:

Mary the mother of Jesus was not the mother, wife, or daughter of Clopas as far as we know.2 After all, were she to have been one of these, the writer of John’s Gospel had words available in Greek. Why would you refer to a person as Clopas’ Mary without identifying the precise relation?

The answer might not be far away. It could emerge from a reading of the next verse which refers to the beloved disciple: ‘And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.’ This describes a relationship where a woman who is not the mother, wife, or daughter of a man yet moves into his home. By means of these verses, John’s Gospel tells us that the first-century Christian tradition included the notion that the mother of Jesus could be regarded in a symbolic sense as the mother of a man who was not her son. This will be very important as we consider the role of Mary in relation to leading apostles.

This would mean that Clopas is a candidate in the identification of the ‘disciple whom Jesus loved’. Mary is ‘Clopas’ Mary’ because she has been taken into his home, at least metaphorically. Therefore, we have a rationale for option (a): there are two women at the cross in John, one of whom is Mary Magdalene and the other is the mother of Jesus = Mary of Clopas. If this is the case, then the mother of Jesus and the beloved disciple are not anonymous after all.

There is another reason to suggest that the Mary at the cross with Mary Magdalene in the four gospels is the same woman, the mother of Jesus. The assumption that the evangelists simply included various women who were remembered as being there makes it statistically unlikely that so many different Marys were the prominent witnesses that the gospel writers had to hand (unless they had a particular reason for naming a Mary rather than anyone else). If Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary the mother of James and Joses, and Mary of Clopas are all different people, as is usually believed, then of the six named women at the cross and tomb across the gospels (these plus Mary Magdalene, Salome, and Joanna), four are called Mary. The fact that about one in four women in the Jewish community were called Mary does not make this occurrence particularly likely. The chance of any four of six women being called Mary are about 1 in 30. If two of the Marys are the same person (the mother of Jesus and the mother of James and Joses, but not Mary of Clopas), there are five women and three Marys; the likelihood drops to about 1 in 11. If, however, three of the Marys are the same person, there are four women and two Marys, yielding a likelihood of about 1 in 5, thus being six times more likely than the traditional view.

Here is a summary of the arguments for Mary of Clopas being Mary the mother of Jesus:

· There are two Marys at the cross and tomb in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Mary the mother of James and Joses (that is, Mary the mother of Jesus), and Mary Magdalene. It makes sense that John too followed this template, which must have been an early tradition.

· Clopas’ son was the successor to James in Jerusalem; therefore, in John’s Gospel, Clopas has replaced James (and Joses) in the description of Mary at the cross.

· The theory that Mary was linked in early Christian tradition using the metaphor of adoption to important apostles who were not her actual sons is confirmed by the fact that John’s Gospel describes her as being taken into the household of the beloved disciple.

· It is unlikely, even given that one in four women in that society were called Mary, that so many different women called Mary would be remembered in the cross traditions.

However, there are also arguments against. The first problem is that the mother of Jesus is unnamed in John 2, at the marriage of Cana, so why would she be named now, as ‘Mary of Clopas’? Surely, the traditional interpretation, that she is unnamed in John 19 as well, is the more likely? To try and answer this objection, one can only suggest that the name ‘Mary of Clopas’ was in John’s source for the crucifixion (as with ‘Mary of James, etc.,’ in the synoptic gospels), and so he faithfully reproduced it.

The second problem with our argument is that the beloved disciple was identified as John and not Clopas at a reasonably early point in the Church. The second-century bishop Polycrates of Ephesus (according to Eusebius, Church History III.31.3) wrote that the gospel was written by ‘John, who was both a witness and a teacher, who reclined upon the bosom of the Lord, and being a priest wore the sacerdotal plate. He also sleeps at Ephesus.’ This John has been traditionally reckoned to be John the son of Zebedee, the disciple who was one of the twelve, but there has been an argument that a second John, known as ‘the Elder’ (as he calls himself in the opening of the second and third epistles of John), is a better solution. To account for the second-century understanding that John was the beloved disciple, we would have to assume that the tradition in which Clopas was regarded as the beloved disciple was eventually supplanted by one naming John.

To explain that, we can point out the likelihood, given the Gospel of John’s view of Jesus’ brothers as non-believers in John 7.5, that the community in which the gospel was compiled had become alienated from the Jerusalem leadership. Therefore, James and Symeon son of Clopas were no longer figures held in reverence by the Johannine community. While John does mention Clopas, he does not expand on the importance of this figure. Like Mark, he felt constrained to include what had been handed down to him but without providing further detail.

A third problem is that, if there are only two women at the cross in John’s Gospel, we now have Mary the mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalene described as sisters, something that occurs nowhere else. We will explore this further in the final section of this chapter.

Finally, it might be objected that we have fallen into the same trap as many interpreters, starting as far back as the early centuries of the Church, in trying to conflate two or more figures from different gospels into being just one person for convenience, because it is uncomfortable having so many distinct characters with which to deal. This certainly happened in the Western Church with Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, and the anointing woman in Luke 7. While remaining aware of that danger, we could argue that Mary’s case is an exception. We can make a case for the divergent ways in which she is described: because of her importance to the crucifixion narrative and its meaning for authoritative witness in the Church, she attracted a variety of qualifying relationships: she is related to Jesus, to James and Joses, Jesus’ brothers and heirs, and now to Clopas, the father of the heir to James.

Here summarized are the arguments against:

· The mother of Jesus is not named in John 2, so it is reasonable to think that she was likewise anonymous in John 19.

· The beloved disciple has always been associated with the name John, and not with Clopas.

· There is no tradition that Mary the mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalene were sisters.

· It is dangerous to assume that characters in the New Testament are the same person in order to simplify the problem of the gospels being different.

On balance, I think that we can proceed with the assumption that Mary of Clopas was another way of describing Mary the mother of Jesus. This solution would have three people in the tradition being reduced to just one: Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary the mother of James and Joses, and Mary of Clopas are all the same person. They are all ways of describing Mary.

Therefore, it is best to conclude that two women are named in all four gospels as being observers at the crucifixion: Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Jesus described in various ways. Given that there is interdependence between the gospels, and that Mary Magdalene is consistently identified as being present, it should not surprise us that Mary the mother of Jesus (and of James, etc.) is there in each one as well. It is only the different ways of referring to her that have obscured this.

Our argument is supported by the fact that Mark uses the Greek version of the name Mary, which is Maria, at the cross and tomb. The other evangelists, when mentioning the Marys at the cross in all four gospels, and at the tomb in the synoptic gospels, stay with the Markan Maria. However, when the other evangelists developed various stories about women called Mary that are not in Mark (Mary the mother of Jesus in the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke; Mary of Bethany in Luke and John; Mary Magdalene at the tomb in John), they generally use the Aramaic name Mariam (the manuscript variants are complex – see Appendix 5.)

From this, we can conclude that ‘Maria mother of (or just “of”) X and Maria Magdalene’ constituted a traditional formula in the gospel tradition that could not be overlooked or ignored in relation to the cross and tomb list. As it happens, the expression ‘X the mother of Y’ is a rare expression in the New Testament and it only occurs when the mother’s name is Mary.

It is therefore not unreasonable to suggest that all the Marys at the cross and tomb except for Mary Magdalene were derived from the same person, a mother figure for certain prominent apostles in the very earliest Church. Otherwise, we would have to assume that being called Mary was a qualification for several otherwise insignificant women to get a special mention in the early Christian tradition!

Mary and Jerusalem

Our conclusion is that Mary of Clopas is Mary the mother of Jesus, and that this identification arises from her association with the Jerusalem Church leadership. Like other theories about the origin of John’s Gospel, concluding that the description of Mary at the cross is based on the succession in the Jerusalem Church from James to Symeon cannot be proven beyond doubt, but it is certainly plausible and, I would argue, the best solution to the enigma of the Marys. It suggests that the idea of the beloved disciple, the pre-eminent witness, derives originally from an honour bestowed on the Jerusalem leadership. The original ‘beloved disciple’ was James, who actually was the son of Mary, and so this would not have needed an adoption scene by the cross, but then the honour passed to Clopas and maybe others. Eventually, the beloved disciple was identified as John the son of Zebedee.

This theory corroborates two conclusions that scholars have arrived at with respect to John’s Gospel: that its sources are very much earlier than the writing of the gospel, and that the gospel shows evidence of an intimate knowledge of Jerusalem.

In the earliest Church tradition, therefore, a relationship to Mary was crucial in the Church at Jerusalem. James was the son of Mary and the brother of Jesus. The succession from brother to brother is an obvious one. If we did not have John’s story of the beloved disciple, we could leave it there. But that text establishes a relationship with Mary as a key aspect of apostolic authority in the Jerusalem Church even when the leader was not her son. Given that the Jerusalem Church was originally dedicated to maintaining the Jewish tradition in Christianity, this explains why Mark (in 3.31–35, see Chapter 7) was keen to say that Christians could be taken into the family of Jesus without needing to refer to the mother and brothers of Jesus.

This might also help to explain the mysterious reference in Acts 12.12 to the ‘house of Mary, the mother of John whose other name was Mark, where many had gathered and were praying’. Another Mary and another key apostle as a son! John Mark is important in Acts chapters 12 to 15 as a companion of Paul and his co-missionary Barnabas, of whom John Mark was possibly a cousin (Col. 4.10).3 Acts 12.12 is the first mention of John Mark, and so the reference to his mother’s house serves as an introduction to this character. That is why the house of Mary is not associated in this instance with any other of the Jerusalem apostles.

Acts goes on to relate that he was the cause of the separation of Paul and Barnabas, as Paul did not want him on their mission, thinking of him as unreliable. Barnabas disagreed and sailed to his native Cyprus with John Mark. This is one of the few places in Acts where we see dissension among the apostles. Yet the reference in Acts 12.12 establishes John Mark as an important Christian in Jerusalem and Paul had his opponents there, so the argument may have been linked to viewpoints on Christians observing the Torah; Galatians 2.13 shows that there was disagreement between Paul and Barnabas on the question of table fellowship.

It seems reasonable to ask: was Mary regarded as a mother to the Jerusalem community as a whole? Did she adopt in some spiritual sense the leading apostles, such as Clopas and John Mark, and regard them as sons along with James, Joses, Judas, and Simon? Is this the origin of the idea of her adopting the beloved disciple in John 19.26–27? Throughout the New Testament, Christians are called brothers and sisters; ‘Father’ refers to God. Mothers, on the other hand, nearly always seem to have the name Mary. Paul does not speak of Mary the mother of Jesus, but he does write just once about a spiritual mother. He contrasts the mothers of Abraham’s children, Hagar the slave and Sarah the free woman, relating these to the Law and freedom in Christ: ‘Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. But the other woman corresponds to the Jerusalem above; she is free, and she is our mother’ (Gal. 4.25–26). This idea of spiritual motherhood links to Jerusalem and corresponds to the heavenly Jerusalem spoken of in Revelation. Yet the mother Church may have had at one time a human mother figure.

In conclusion, the argument that Mary of Clopas is at the same time Mary the mother of Jesus depends on whether we accept that John’s Gospel incorporates an older tradition into the heart of the gospel in the crucifixion narrative in the same way as Mark’s does. The confusion surrounding the lists of women make this likely.

Sisters?

Our theory leaves just two Marys at the cross in each of the gospels and, if we are right about John 19.25, in John’s Gospel they were described as sisters. Could Mary the mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalene have been sisters in some sense? It would not be surprising if Mary Magdalene were to have been a relative of Jesus, given her role in the burial (it is fashionable for people to think of her as the wife of Jesus, but we have no evidence in the New Testament for that). Mary and Mary Magdalene being birth sisters runs into the same problem as Mary and Mary of Clopas being sisters: they would not have had the same first name. Therefore, this sister relationship, if it existed, was the sisterhood of either relatives or close friends.

Both women feature at very important moments in John’s Gospel: the ministry begins with the mother of Jesus’ initiative at the marriage at Cana, and the tomb stories end with the appearance of the risen Jesus to Mary Magdalene. In John, Mary Magdalene has the garden scene alone where Matthew’s version includes both women seeing the risen Jesus. It is true that, several times, John uses the dramatic effect of Jesus relating to an individual rather than a group (for example, Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman, Martha). In his gospel, both the Marys experience one important moment of the story alone with Jesus: the mother of Jesus at the wedding at Cana and Mary Magdalene at the garden tomb. They experience one together (the crucifixion).

There is a powerful symmetry here: the cross scene through its female characters points back, first, through the mother of Jesus, to the beginning of the ministry and the first of the signs of Jesus which made the crucifixion inevitable and, second, through Mary Magdalene, forward to the garden and its tomb, which is inevitable because of the crucifixion. There is a logic in supposing that the mother of Jesus takes us from Cana to the cross, and Mary Magdalene from the cross to the resurrection, so that these two women stand together at the central point of the crucifixion.

Martha and Mary of Bethany, who appear at another crucial moment in the gospel, the raising of Lazarus (chapters 11 and 12), are also sisters. This is the only passage in John’s Gospel, apart from 19.25, where the word ‘sister’ is included. The raising of Lazarus is one of the events which are the ‘signs’, so important to John’s Gospel. There are seven such signs (if we do not include the resurrection itself): Cana, three healings, the feeding of the crowd, the walking on water, and the raising of Lazarus. Mary and Martha therefore appear at the seventh and last sign. The raising of Lazarus in John’s Gospel is the event which caused the critical tension with the authorities leading to the execution of Jesus; it is another pivotal moment on the journey to the garden tomb. It is followed by Mary of Bethany’s anointing of Jesus.

John’s Gospel could be said to rest on a fulcrum of sister relationships which includes two pairs: Martha and Mary; Mary the mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. A possible clue to the importance of sisters lies in the short second epistle of John, written by the same person as the gospel. It begins: ‘The elder to the elect lady and her children, whom I love in the truth, and not only I but also all who know the truth, because of the truth that abides in us and will be with us forever’ and concludes: ‘The children of your elect sister send you their greetings’.4 1 Peter 5.13 corroborates this: ‘your sister church in Babylon [= Rome]’, literally ‘she who is at Babylon’.

This table illustrates the theme of sisters in the writings of the author of the Gospel of John:

Therefore, the theme of sisters plays an important part at key moments in John’s Gospel, and it may not be a coincidence that the same writer refers to two churches as sisters. This may have helped to shape the sister theme in the gospel. While Mary the mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalene were historical persons with individual contributions to the mission of Jesus, over time they may have come to be associated with a pair of prominent churches, one of which was obviously at Jerusalem.

Having mentioned the sisters Mary and Martha in John’s Gospel (they also appear in Luke 10.38–42), we now move to the anointing narratives, which appear in all four gospels. The anointing woman is unnamed in three gospels, but in the Gospel of John she is Mary of Bethany.

Notes

1 Other writers have concluded that Mary of Clopas is actually Mary the mother of Jesus, for example, Robert Eisenman, in James, the Brother of Jesus and Peter Cresswell, The Invention of Jesus. This means that I am not alone in reaching this conclusion, suggesting that it might have some basis. However, I first mooted the idea in December 1996 in an article in The Month, and so it is not derived from these writers. They approach the New Testament in a very different way to the one that I do, and they come to this answer for reasons which contrast with my own. For the most part, they reject the foundations of New Testament belief in ways that I do not, as discussed in Chapter 1. James D. Tabor, The Jesus Dynasty, also identified Mary of Clopas as the mother of Jesus, but in his recent book, Marie, he now suggests that Mary of Clopas was Mary’s daughter and Jesus’ sister.

2 She was traditionally his sister-in-law, as he was thought to be the brother of Joseph by Hegesippus (see chapter 9), but that might simply have been derived from the belief that she was Mary of Clopas’ sister. Even if it were true, it doesn’t change our overall argument.

3 He may or may not be the Mark referred to in the epistles (2 Tim. 4.11; Philemon 1.24; 1 Pet. 5.13).

4 It has usually been assumed that the ‘elect lady’ is the church community to whom John is writing and the ‘elect sister’ the church community from which he is writing. On the other hand, it has also been suggested that the lady is a distinguished individual in the early Church, and that attempts to make her a metaphor detract from the role of women in the apostolic period. Despite this, the signature verse of 2 John suggests the first answer to be most likely, i.e., that the ladies are metaphors for individual churches.

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