15
†
Jesus’ Movement and his Family
We can summarize the characteristics of Jesus’ movement that we have explored in the previous two chapters as follows:
1. Non-violent resistance to tyranny of all kinds, both against Roman military rule but also in opposition to Jewish collusion under the dominance of the high priest and his retinue;
2. The belief that God would intervene to bring justice to the nation in the very near future;
3. The belief that, in anticipation of this, one could build God’s kingdom, not politically but in the midst of communities, and by doing so, one could overcome the oppressive effects of tyranny;
4. A conviction that spiritual malaise could be countered by giving people a sense of purpose and meaning through their relationship to a real and loving God;
5. A strong commitment to the poor, especially those forced to become outcasts by the social and religious system, and a rejection of worldly status;
6. All of this underpinned by faith in the Messiah who had to die for his people for new life to grow, that is, a servant Messiah, which is the key to Jesus’ movement; it did not seek to dominate people but to lead them by serving them. In this respect it presents a devastating critique of authorities who do the opposite.
What were Jesus’ main influences in shaping this movement? What inspired him as he grew up? It is customary to think of him being in direct communication with God and needing no human instruction. This is contradictory to the doctrine of the Incarnation. Jesus was human, and therefore needing to learn and grow like anyone else. If you doubt that this is a true reflection of what is said in the Bible, read Luke 2.52: ‘And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favour.’ There are obvious influences on Jesus’ understanding of his mission:
· The Hebrew Scriptures. They were not in the final Jewish canon that we know now, which was not agreed until the late first century, but Jesus as a teacher, a rabbi, will have known all the texts in detail.
· The ministry of John the Baptist. Jesus was baptized by John and was clearly a member of his community as he formulated his own mission. The first gospel, Mark, makes this clear, even if the later gospels try to water down the basic fact that Jesus was a follower of John and not the other way round. Jesus’ teaching, like John’s, continued the centuries-old Jewish tradition of preaching repentance in anticipation of God’s forgiveness. Jesus was not as strict with fasting as John (according to Mark 2.18 and parallel passages) and it is clear that Jesus, after John’s death, developed his own unique approach to mission, but his debt to his predecessor is clear from the way in which the New Testament tries to explain away or justify it.
However, we should not overlook the fact that parents were important teachers in the Jewish tradition. Luke 2.51 says that, after upsetting his parents by staying in Jerusalem aged twelve, Jesus ‘went down with them and came to Nazareth and was obedient to them’. The intimacy of Luke’s description of the annunciation and birth of Jesus encouraged Christians to think that Luke may have known Mary, and that she passed on her recollections to him. There are works of art that are ascribed to Luke; it is imagined that he painted the Madonna and Child as they sat for him. We may regard such stories as charming but highly unlikely cultural legacies. However, one aspect of Luke’s story that inspired the idea that the evangelist knew Mary is that he records her reflecting on events on two occasions. The first is at Luke 2.19: after the shepherds visited the baby Jesus and reported the praising of the angels that they had experienced, ‘Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.’ Then, after Jesus aged twelve was found engaging with the teachers in the Temple at Jerusalem, at Luke 2.51, we read: ‘His mother treasured all these things in her heart.’ While we may doubt that the writer of Luke ever met Mary, he would have been party to traditions and memories that led him to think that this was an appropriate detail to add in, despite it being unnecessary; the story works perfectly well without it. Therefore, the fact that he did include it is significant. At the very least, he regarded this as a means of describing what the very first hearers of Jesus must have been involved in: that is, reflecting and considering what the appearance of Jesus in the world might mean, and how they should respond to it.
As Joseph’s influence on Jesus is not mentioned in the Bible, we only have the testimony about Mary reflecting on her son’s vocation and then initiating the first miracle at Cana (John 2.3). Although these verses occur in passages that are unlikely to represent actual history, all we can say is that the gospels corroborate and do not contradict the suggestion that Mary instructed Jesus and gave some shape to his understanding of his mission; mothers were and are important teachers of the Torah in the Jewish tradition.
Mary is often referred to as ‘the first disciple’ in the modern Catholic Church, drawing on the idea that Mary is an exemplar and type of the Church. However, while the logic of this description is clear, it can be misleading. A disciple is a follower and a learner. Mary, on the other hand, was Jesus’ predecessor and, as his Jewish mother, his teacher. In Jewish tradition, the mother played an important role in teaching the faith to the young child (for example, Prov. 1.8). Indeed, Wisdom who teaches is imagined in a female form (Prov. 1.20), and Mary is seen in Catholic and Orthodox tradition as the embodiment of Wisdom.
The principle that people in Jesus’ movement may have preceded him is worth emphasizing. Mary Rose D’Angelo, in her book edited with Ross Shepard Kraemer, Women and Christian Origins, suggests that Mary Magdalene may have been Jesus’ predecessor.1 We do not know one way or another, but this would dovetail nicely with the view in this book that Mary Magdalene was some kind of sister to Mary the mother of Jesus, who certainly preceded Jesus. In a Messianic age, Jesus was anointed as the Messiah by the popular movement around him; he was not chosen by God alone as one reading of the gospels might suggest. The gospels also tell us that women, in partnership with God whose voice they heard, were the human initiators of this divine calling.
In Church tradition, there are many images of Mary’s mother (named Hannah or Anne in the Protevangelium) teaching her to read; in particular, she will have been taught the scriptures by her mother. The line of women and mothers is important. There is a gender issue here. How would we understand the relationship between Joseph and Jesus were Joseph to have been active in Jesus’ ministry and the early Church? Perhaps we would have imagined Joseph as Jesus’ father to have been someone who had inspired Jesus, and not merely a follower or disciple? Why then do we not say the same for Mary?
Indeed, if we count passages where Jesus’ action or understanding is directly affected by another person, we are left with very few. It has been suggested that Mary of Bethany’s action in anointing Jesus’ feet in John 12.1–8 is the inspiration for him washing the disciples’ feet in John 13.3–11, which is an interesting and satisfying conjecture, although the two actions are understood quite differently. Jesus does do healing miracles when asked to on several occasions; the most notable where Jesus learns from someone is the story of the Syrophoenician or Canaanite woman (Mark 7.24–30; Matt. 15.21–28). Here Jesus learns that the Gentiles as much as Jews yearn for his healing, and it is notable that a woman acts as his teacher. However, Cana remains the one instance in the gospels where Jesus responds with a miracle not instigated by the person who is the beneficiary (for example, the parent of an ill child), but asked of him by his mother. The writer of John’s Gospel therefore accepts that Mary had an influence on Jesus that goes beyond the immediate; it would not be unusual for any ordinary adult were their parent to give them direction, but for the divinely inspired Jesus of the gospels, it is notable.
And does John also record his brothers encouraging Jesus to act in John 7.1–16?
After this Jesus went about in Galilee. He did not wish to go about in Judea because the Jews were looking for an opportunity to kill him. Now the Jewish festival of Booths (Tabernacles) was near. So his brothers said to him, ‘Leave here and go to Judea so that your disciples also may see the works you are doing; for no one who wants to be widely known acts in secret. If you do these things, show yourself to the world.’ (For not even his brothers believed in him.) Jesus said to them, ‘My time has not yet come, but your time is always here. The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify against it that its works are evil. Go to the festival yourselves. I am not going to this festival, for my time has not yet fully come.’ After saying this, he remained in Galilee.
But after his brothers had gone to the festival, then he also went, not publicly but as it were in secret. The Jews were looking for him at the festival and saying, ‘Where is he?’ And there was considerable complaining about him among the crowds. While some were saying, ‘He is a good man,’ others were saying, ‘No, he is deceiving the crowd.’ Yet no one would speak openly about him for fear of the Jews.
About the middle of the festival Jesus went up into the temple and began to teach. The Jews were astonished at it, saying, ‘How does this man have such learning, when he has never been taught?’ Then Jesus answered them, ‘My teaching is not mine but his who sent me…’
(John 7.1–16)
The line ‘For not even his brothers believed in him’ and the sentences that immediately follow have the look of an editorial insertion into what may have been an older source.
Overall, the story has parallels to Cana; once again, Jesus does what his family asks of him after appearing to resist. This occasion is later than Cana in the ministry; this is not Jesus’ first visit to Jerusalem, and he has already made a name for himself there. In John 2.13–25, he cleansed the temple (much earlier than in the synoptics) and in 5.1–43, his second visit includes the healing of a paralytic on the Sabbath and the controversies that ensued. The story in John 7 is difficult to explain on this basis: why do the brothers think that Jesus is keeping his acts a secret when he has already been very open in his confrontation with the authorities in Jerusalem on two previous occasions? Why are the ‘Jews’ so astonished when he has been there before and taught?
We cannot answer these questions, but these are clues as to the influence of the family on the ministry of Jesus. It was a family led by the mother as far as we can see in the gospel texts: the ‘mother and brothers’. Everything therefore points to Mary having a considerable influence on the ministry and mission of Jesus. Mary’s vision, whether she willed it or not, led to the cross, the brutal facts of history powerfully summed up in the legends of the early chapters of Luke, in which Simeon says to her, ‘This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed – and a sword will pierce your own soul too’ (Luke 2.34–35).
History and Mythology in the Story of Mary
The foundation for Christianity is both historical and mythological. We can relate the mythical Mary to the real woman who lived in Galilee all those centuries ago. Historical speculation is more likely to have some meaning for the Christian story if it relates in some demonstrable way to the metaphorical passages which present Mary as exemplar and archetype. The idea that legendary material is appropriate to the history, even if it does not describe how events actually occurred (which we can never reconstruct), is an important one in accepting the New Testament narratives as theological truth. Myth is truth.
The New Testament is truth about the Word of God, but it is also a truth shrouded in the cultural assumptions of the day in which the voices of women were largely absent from social, political, and religious discourse. Even with that consideration, the figures of the various Marys still come out larger than life, and we may suppose that the actual reality behind the texts will turn out to be an even greater female contribution than the gospels suggest.
Many of the passages that include Mary, most of which are in the Gospels of Luke and John, belong to myth rather than history. However, this is also true of many of Jesus’ miracles. Yet, while the sensational feats of walking on water, stilling the storm, or raising the dead did not happen in history, they were appropriate metaphors for what Jesus did achieve. He preached the reality of God’s Kingdom to people who felt oppressed by the religious, social, and political context of the time, and presented a theology in which God reached out to the humanity of the vulnerable. This led to a renewed sense of purpose and meaning which may well have led to healing, some of which may have been experienced as miraculous. The important point is that Christians through time can achieve these ends in their own ages and cultures using the equivalent means; they will not be able to walk on water, still storms, or raise the dead, but they can preach the Kingdom and the reality of God’s presence.
The same can be said of Mary. One cannot follow her by becoming a virgin mother! She was not a virgin in any physical sense except, like other Jewish women, during the brief liminal period which separated girlhood and the consummation of marriage. The narratives of the annunciation and virgin birth of Jesus locate Mary in a mythological space, describing conversations and actions that probably did not take place historically, but which are full of cosmic significance in the Christian tradition. Luke’s conception narrative overlaid with John’s prologue places Mary in a new garden of Eden, as the bearer and mother of the one through whom all things were created and by whom creation is to be restored (‘recapitulated’, according to Irenaeus). Mary heard God’s word and set the events of redemption in progress; in the Christian Eden, the new Eve preceded the new Adam. Mary the young woman was taken up into the liminal space that is the door through which the Incarnation takes place, the meeting place of heaven’s eternity and earth’s history. In Christian tradition, she has been described as the New Eve, Ark of the Covenant, Temple, Wisdom, Bride of the Holy Spirit, and Daughter of Zion. The New Testament does not actually say any of these things explicitly, although some are clearly implied by the setting of Luke’s conception and birth narratives.
Luke’s story of the annunciation, birth, and infancy of Jesus with Mary as its heroine is a symbolic theological story that speaks about the Jewish people waiting on God for deliverance. Mary’s counterparts in the story are Elizabeth, Zechariah, Simeon, and Anna; old in years, they recognized the arrival of their salvation in Jesus Christ. Mary is the one through whom this deliverance came; she represents the newness of God’s initiative in acting in a way that was unanticipated, his Son the Messiah being born among the poor (‘no place for them in the inn’) and destined for a painful death.
We will never know one way or the other whether the Mary of history met with an angel. It is possible that she did experience visions; on the other hand, the angelic encounter is a standard form of announcing a future miracle in the Hebrew Scriptures, and so it is a natural way for an evangelist to express the events in a theologically symbolic form. Luke is clear that, to face the challenges ahead of her, Mary needed God’s grace and favour. Yet Mary was not a passive recipient of this grace; theologians quite rightly have made much of the fact that she responded to the angel: ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word’ (Luke 1.38). Mary is therefore the archetypal believer who accepts the will of God and acts upon it, an exemplar for each and every Christian, female and male. While this statement reflects Church tradition as it has evolved through the centuries, it is not at all unreasonable to find its basis here in Luke, and to argue that something along these lines was the intended reading of the author of this gospel.
The table opposite relates theological symbolism to history. On the left, there is the portrayal of Mary as an exemplar in metaphorical narratives in the gospels. On the right, we have the facts that we can be reasonably confident about with respect to the history of the woman who was the mother of Jesus. These relate to one another.
Women’s Leadership in Early Christianity
Mary was therefore very influential in Jesus’ mission and ministry, but was she some kind of leader? After all, we have seen that she was an important person in the Jerusalem community that came into being after the events of the death and resurrection of Jesus, so much so that leading apostles were associated with her as mother, beginning with her son James but also those, like Clopas and possibly also John Mark, who were not her children. The New Testament only hints at this possibility and requires us to use speculative analysis to reconstruct the possible role of Mary.
However, there are also post-biblical sources. The absence of females explicitly referred to at important moments in the gospels provided a gap which later literature tried to fill. Christian apocryphal gospels and writings include accounts of the events of the lives of Jesus, Mary, and the apostles that were not received into the New Testament canon, either because they were not regarded as apostolic or because they appeared after the canon was established in the fourth century. They include descriptions of Jesus’ ministry which refer to a woman called Mary in a position of some authority or leadership and having recourse to a certain amount of knowledge. Because the exact identity of ‘Mary’ is not established, this is assumed to be Mary Magdalene, but Stephen Shoemaker’s research (in, for example, Mary in Early Christian Faith and Devotion) has led him to argue that to identify her as Mary the mother of Jesus is equally possible. He suggests that quite probably Christians in the early centuries did not always distinguish Mary and Mary Magdalene, so that there was an indefinite sense that a woman called Mary had been an important member of Jesus’ itinerant community. Another candidate is Mary of Bethany, who was also important in post-biblical Christian writings along with her sister Martha.2
Tony Burke says of Mary as she is depicted in the apocrypha, including the so-called ‘lives’ of Mary:
Together, all of these texts show that Mary of Nazareth is a much more nuanced figure in Christian literature than one might expect from reading the canonical gospels alone. She is wife and mother, yes, but also disciple, visionary, matriarch, heavenly sojourner [i.e., taken into heaven by assumption], and mediator.
(Oxford Handbook of Mary, p. 40)
Of course, the fact that a female figure was exalted in texts does not mean that women in general were always respected in the communities that produced and maintained them. Nevertheless, the apocryphal testimony to the importance of Mary in the first centuries of Christianity is compelling.
Ally Kateusz, in her book Mary and Early Christian Women: Hidden Leadership, explores Christian apocryphal writings and early Christian art to analyse how women may have had a role in Church leadership during the initial centuries of Christianity.3 In these sources, women including Mary are involved in evangelizing, preaching, teaching, baptizing, working miracles and cures, performing exorcisms, prophesying, leading prayer, wearing priestly garments, breaking the communion bread, making offering to God with incense and prayer, and using censers during liturgy. In summary, these are all activities traditionally ascribed to male apostles, bishops, and priests. These manuscripts go against the general trend of marginalization of women in texts, and consequently they are very interesting.
What adds to the mystery is that some of these texts have variants which show that the activities of the women were edited out by scribes in some cases; sometimes Mary was replaced by Peter. This process of what is known as ‘redaction’ (the editing of texts) shows that women’s leadership in the early Church was suppressed at an increasing rate as time went by. Yet, as Kateusz demonstrates, there is plenty of evidence for women leaders before this process intensified. This is substantiated by the condemnation of women’s leadership in the works of various theologians, including Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Epiphanius; of course, this denunciation of an active role for females has its origin in some of the epistles of Paul, as we noted earlier. One does not oppose something that is not occurring. It can be supposed that the leadership role of females in the pastoral practice and liturgy of Christian churches extends right back to the New Testament period. It is unlikely to have begun spontaneously.
Yet, it might be asked whether we should take any notice of the apocrypha. They are nowhere near as well attested in early Christian writers as the canonical texts. Surely, they were written so long after the New Testament witness that they comprise only speculation and fanciful, imaginative fiction?
There is some truth in this but it is not the whole story. The growing belief in Mary as a lifelong virgin will have encouraged some of the ideas that she had special spiritual powers. Mary’s supposed status as a lifelong virgin is not present in the New Testament; it is a metaphorical description without any basis in history and derived from Greco-Roman tradition, as we have seen. However, the possibility of Mary as a matriarch and leader is much more easily derivable from the gospel accounts: Mary was included both with women, the female followers of Jesus from Galilee, and men, the brothers of Jesus. We should remember that most writers of what we call apocryphal texts were reading the same gospels as we are. While they had devotional reasons for promoting Mary’s powers and attributes, they would have also been subject to the same requirement that these ideas did not flatly contradict the gospels and also reflected life in the churches that they knew. While specific details may not have satisfied these criteria in every case, the overall picture of Mary and other women, like Mary Magdalene, holding a leadership role in the community around Jesus nowhere runs contrary to the gospel witness.
Other evidence for women’s leadership in the early centuries of the Church can be found in inscriptions and documents. Ute E. Eisen, in Women Officeholders in Early Christianity, shows that women were referred to as prophets, teachers of theology, stewards, and even as being in ordained ministry: bishops, priests, and deacons. While these are scattered instances, they show that women’s leadership in the churches could exist. An order of widows was also very important in the pastoral ministry of the churches.
During the same period in Judaism (about the first six centuries CE), Bernadette J. Brooten’s research in Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue locates inscriptions to women as heads of the synagogue, ‘mothers of the synagogue’, elders, and priests. She concludes that the functions practised by such women included keeping the synagogue congregation faithful to the Torah, planning and organizing services, being representatives of the congregation, scholarship, teaching, and looking after the buildings. Those women with resources will have donated them to the work of the synagogue and its assets.
These testimonies to women’s participation in both Christian and Jewish communities in the centuries after Christ establish the principle that women’s leadership, while not equal to men’s in scale and frequency, was nevertheless neither unknown nor impossible in that age. We are not going beyond the evidence to imagine Mary, Mary Magdalene, and the other women in their circle baptizing new converts, organizing and leading worship, laying on healing hands, or exorcizing. Jesus’ community formed a means for the poor and marginalized to experience and access the blessings of the divine in a way that the Temple and priesthood in Jerusalem did not. Marginalized and unofficial communities are freer to move beyond the margins of what is ‘normal’.
While we might have expected Mary as a leader in the early Church to receive more of a mention in the New Testament than she does, we have already investigated the contextual factors leading to the gospel writers being cautious about conceding too much authority to, first, a prominent member of the family of Jesus, and second, a woman. Therefore, there is a strong case for women’s leadership in the churches before and during the period in which the New Testament was written. Male objections to women’s initiative in founding the Christian faith begin with the reactions in the story of the anointing and continue in the apocryphal gospels, where Peter, regarded as the male leader, is usually the one who raises the issue. These objections are to something real and tangible, the co-leadership and important contribution of women in the early Church.
Mary’s Initiative
Mary the mother of Jesus was one of those women who came with him from Galilee to Jerusalem, and we know that Jesus’ Galilean ministry was mainly based in rural contexts. It is not unreasonable to suggest that the movement of the non-violent servant Messiah originated with influential women from a rural environment. Might it not have been more likely to have been women who (a) believed in the absolute certainty of God’s presence and coming Kingdom; (b) sought to provide meaning and hope to those most affected by oppression and injustice; (c) found neither hope nor compassion in the violence of revolutionary movements; (d) did not wish to separate from the common people, unlike the Essenes; and (e) expressed their theology in terms of the pastoral folk culture in which the parables came to be formed? Among these women, Mary had a leading role as the mother of a family which had some claim to Davidic Messianic inheritance.
Mary had considerable influence in Jesus’ ministry and in the very earliest Church. The relating of the name Mary to mother figures occurs in all four gospels and in Acts 12.12. It is quite probable that all these references derive from the importance of Mary in early traditions. We know that she was associated with the Jerusalem Church; authority in that Church had a relationship to her, perhaps it even derived from her. However, the memory of the leadership of real women transmuted into symbols, familiar in the ancient world, of mythical females representing community cohesion. In time, Mary became the symbol of the Church itself. The female representation of communities has its origins in the New Testament period, as attested to by the descriptions of churches as female figures in the second epistle of John and the first epistle of Peter. Yet the attestation to female leadership in the Church did continue in some of the apocrypha.
The frequent but mysterious references to ‘Mary the mother of…’ in the New Testament represent a shadowy memory of a mother figure and matriarch from whom authority derived in early Christian Jerusalem. Like the queen mother of the ancient Israelite monarchy, she – the ‘mother of the Lord’ – had a special privilege. But her relationship to other women, and the testimony to their part in the Messianic mission, confirms that she did not reserve to herself the authority that came with being mother of the leader. As the gospels state, her motherhood of Jesus was not the only source of her important position. It was that, like other women in Jesus’ community, she ‘heard the word of God and obeyed it’ (Luke 11.28). It is not that ‘obedience’ is confined to women, either; Jesus in Gethsemane prayed, ‘not what I want, but what you want’ (Mark 14.36). Obedience to God, and not to corrupt human authority, means independence, creative thinking, and rebellion.
The theory that the mantle of leadership passed from Jesus to James his brother is now commonly held among scholars of the early Church, and we have followed that line here so far, but in actual fact it represents a patriarchal take on history based in traditional assumptions that men will be pastors, leaders, bishops. Perhaps we need to revise this. If Mary already held a position of authority before the crucifixion, then there would have been no need for anything to be passed on at the death of Jesus; Mary was still alive and retained her leadership role until her death. Perhaps she could be referred to as the ‘first bishop’ of Jerusalem, an anachronistic title but one that is given to her son James, who succeeded her. That is not to deny that she would have recognized Jesus her son as the risen Lord who had been taken up to God’s throne, and the coming Son of Man. She had already understood that he was to be the Messiah who would be the saviour of Israel. Yet, she is the one person who could claim to have conceived of his mission before he did, and to have shaped it.
When we read the New Testament with a critical eye in respect of its downplaying of women and the family of Jesus, it becomes clear that understanding Mary as the initiator of the Christian faith is fully justified. She was the first to realize the power of the Messianic vision that is the root from which Christian mission grew. She is the mustard seed of the parable. Yet she did not act alone; she is the prominent member of the women in the community that proclaimed Jesus as Messiah, but others were remembered too.
In Mary’s image, several other females are remembered in the New Testament: most prominently, Mary Magdalene. Mary may have regarded Mary Magdalene as a sister in some sense; they accompanied each other to the cross and tomb. Perhaps Mary Magdalene did find meaning and healing in the message that Mary the mother of Jesus and her family were proclaiming. Her possession by ‘seven demons’, as recorded by Luke, may have been due to her deep awareness of social disaster and the catastrophes awaiting in the future; this indicated that she had the spiritual sensitivity to become a major visionary of the Christian movement, and perhaps she – as three of the gospels suggest4 – emerged as the first witness of the resurrection. She was the first woman mentioned at the cross and tomb in each of the lists in Mark, Matthew, and Luke which suggests a leadership role.
Mary Magdalene is thought to be from Magdala by the Sea of Galilee but there is doubt as to whether this location would have been easily recognized in the mid-first century. She may just as easily have been Mary ‘of the Tower’, as magdala meant Tower in Aramaic.5 After all, Peter was nicknamed by Jesus ‘the Rock’ and the sons of Zebedee ‘Sons of Thunder’. If so, Mary Magdalene may have been associated with the Jerusalem Church just like Mary the mother of Jesus, as the most obvious reference to ‘tower’ in the Hebrew Scriptures derives from Micah 4.8:
And you, O tower of the flock, hill of daughter Zion,
to you it shall come, the former dominion shall come,
the sovereignty of daughter Jerusalem.
A second Mary emerged, Mary of Bethany, who may or may not have been a fictional ideal type created in the Gospels of Luke and John along with her sister Martha, another pair of sisters who embodied certain tendencies: the bold, active Martha who declared Jesus to be the Messiah, and the quieter, contemplative Mary, who understood that he had to die. In their own ways, they were images of the original Mary, the mother of Jesus, and they represented various other women in the movement.
Therefore, the ancient instinct in Christian traditions both East and West that Mary had an important participatory role in the events of salvation as a co-redeemer has a biblical basis and, we have argued, a historical one. She is revered as the New Eve, Jesus’ ‘helper’ as Eve was intended to be for Adam, but much more than a helper: an inspiration, a teacher, a mother. In short, she has an even greater claim than Jesus to be the founder of what we understand as Christianity, while accepting that the New Testament contains more than either Mary or Jesus could ever have envisaged on their own as individuals. She was the one who understood what Messianic leadership could represent: it served the poorer members of the Jewish community under oppression and occupation, and it gave people meaning and purpose because they were encouraged to believe that God was truly working among them, and that God’s perspective was the only one that mattered; obedience and conformity to human rulers were pragmatic and not absolute. It was a non-violent Messiahship, the way of life of the Suffering Servant, the key text in making sense of such a role. It was the only positive way forward in the circumstances in which the Jewish people found themselves. Mary, probably because the family claimed Davidic inheritance, understood that her son Jesus could fulfil this role of Messiah, and at some point came to realize that it would lead to a violent death because it was too radical for the authorities to tolerate when it came to their notice.
Notes
1 In Chapter 5, ‘Reconstructing “Real Women” from Gospel Literature: The Case of Mary Magdalene’, pp. 105–28.
2 For Mary of Bethany, see the work of Mary Ann Beavis, especially the volume edited with Ally Kateusz: Rediscovering the Marys: Maria, Mariamne, Miriam.
3 The apocrypha which Kateusz considers in particular are the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel (or Questions) of Bartholomew, the Six Books Dormition Apocryphon which describes the death of Mary the mother of Jesus (known as the ‘dormition’, i.e., the ‘falling asleep’), the Acts of Philip, and the Acts of Thecla.
4 Probably only two of the original gospels, as the longer ending of Mark (in which Mary Magdalene was the first witness to the resurrection) is thought to be a later addition and based on the other gospels.
5 See Joan E. Taylor’s article in the Palestine Exploration Quarterly 146.3.