Mary Magdalene, through a brilliant methodology, has kept Jesus, and his somewhat forgiving approach followed by (not many) alive for 2000 years. Not a bad accomplishment for a woman that lived 2000 years ago in a highly Patriarchal society.
Mike The early Catholic Church transformed Mary Magdalene—who was extremely close to Jesus and, in the Gospels, discovered that his body was missing—into a prostitute within the first several hundred years. Not so good.
The whole story of how Mary Magdalene was turned into a prostitute by the early Christian church is horrible. This whole persona was created primarily to be the Yin to the Blessed Virgin Mary's Yang. She was portrayed as the opposite of the pure, unspotted virgin...she was a sinner who could repent. We don't actually know all that much about her, truth be told. I've always wondered if the early church made sure any other information about her was destroyed in order to foist their constructed version of her into doctrine. Those monks transcribing texts in scriptoria in the Dark and Middle Ages pulled did a lot of untold damage...
Bruce An interesting ying/yang story. I had the impression that the Virgin Mary was not highlighted by the Catholic Church until about the 11th century, when there was an image-forming campaign to highlight Mary as the Mother of God. I noticed this in the artifacts displayed in Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation. The image of Mary was intended to emphasize the ‘family news’ of Catholics while, of course, even today the Vatican considers women as second class.
I think the 10th, 11th centuries was when the real "cult" around the BVM got going...creating an "ideal" Mother of God, giving birth, but never having been defiled, and then becoming a model for women, which was of course totally impossible for them to emulate. If you've not read it, I highly recommend "Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary", by Marina Warner. It was published 40 years ago, but is still very relevant today. It gives the whole historical context of BVM and how the "cult" came to be. In my own experience of having sung so much Medieval and Renaissance vocal music dedicated to Mary, I always noted that as a body of music it represents some of the THE most beautiful music to come from this period. Quite simply, composers were essentially writing "love" music in the guise of religious music, some of it at times even verging on the erotic. Warner's book reinforces this and shows how it was possible. Also, music written for the plethora of other female saints and martyrs can be show to have similarities to secular love music. Anyway, the Warner book is a must read, now in paperback. Highly recommended.
Bruce Thanks. Always interesting to keep abreast of Catholic marketing initiatives. I have a video of the different images of Jesus—from Semitic-getting whiter and whiter—and now dark black in Africa, which is the largest growth area for Catholicism.
I wonder if they will hang modern portraits of Jesus in the Vatican.
I wouldn't hold my breath! Some Orthodox icons come awfully close to depicting Jesus in a more Semitic, darker complected light. The RCC is a bit stuck in a rut aesthetically, IMO.
Magdalene's main story was preserved for some reason and that's all that matters.
She went to a tomb of a dead man. Angels came and told her Jesus was arisen. Somehow, Magdalene came up with an arisen Jesus (that the disciples did not initially recognize).
It's the details of her earlier life before she showed up in the Gospels that are basically unknown and that's what I was talking about. Trying to infer she was a prostitute came about long after the Resurrection.
This happened even before the monks in the middle ages. The early church fathers are responsible for a lot of the damage. The far right zealots of today remind me of them....destroy anything that does not fit the patriarchal model.
I keep thinking about W saying something about "laser-like focus." And I thought he had a point. Whoever has laser-like focus, will win. My thinking is that the narcissists, the psychopaths, the dictators always have laser-like focus because they don't have a conscience to distract them. Liberals don't have laser-like focus because they care, they understand ramifications and downsides, unless they are a narcissistic liberal. I have to think about that but it might be an oxymoron.
Well, I've known narcissists who played at being seen as progressive liberals for as long as they could pull it off. And some progressive liberals who could be pretty short-sighted about things like unexpected ramifications. But, yeah, not the same thing.
He did, Steve. And she snapped back and changed him. She said, "Yes but even the dogs eat the crumbs from the master's table." Or words to that effect. She turned it back on him in a most clever way. She woke him up. How could he be so unable to imagine a Syrophoenician woman to be someone he ought to care about? Think about the fact that for Christians, Jesus is both human and divine. If we ponder what that means (and its impossible paradox is worth contemplating for a lifetime), we have to leave open a door to thinking of him as, in fact, human. We humans are shaped by the prejudices of our cultures and it can take a woman dismissed from the dominant culture to change minds and hearts. Sojourner Truth, Rosa Parks, Fanny Lou Hamar. . .
Oh, Melinda. This is certainly where the story turns for there is much more than what our eyes can read. In this, Jesus knew the culture in which he lived and as a human, he embraced what he came to do, to fulfill the law. The law forbid him to never associate with the "other", the Gentiles. And yet he drove the Pharisees nuts by dining with sinners and prostitutes and in those moments radical inclusivity was introduced. His 1st response was so those he was with wouldn't be offended by what he actually did-acknowledged her faith, granted her request and healed her daughter. I would offer to you to try seeing this story through the lens of Jesus caring for both, those he came for, the Jews, and the Gentiles in that very same human/divine moment. And that the fact that she was a women isn't lost on me.
This is specifically why the bible is easily used to justify whatever one wishes it to justify as it can be interpreted in countless diverging ways. The bible is a handpicked collection of stories (leaving out many that don’t align with a chosen narrative), includes anonymous authors that contradict each other, and without generous reinterpretation promotes a host of immoral and unethical behaviors and beliefs. The right consists of christians who can be controlled by dishonest leaders because they use the bible to justify the horrors they accept as necessary.
“Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
All that said, we probably do need a 2-prong approach to pushing back this rapidly growing wave of anti-democracy: continuing dueling christian interpretations as well as highlighting the consequences of destroying democracy’s guardrails that will result in all Americans losing freedoms and rights we count on. This needs to be focused directly at middle and lower income families who will suffer the most.
Johanna, I appreciate you mentioning narrative in your response. The democratic guardrails also referenced lean into on what this country is founded upon- the narrative of a Judeo-Christian ethic as well as the constitution. All that does is package up all the "otherness" and transport it century after century, millennia after millennia up into today. The racism, the sexism, the white supremacy is all one big fat sandwich being served daily.
As so much in the Bible, likely apocryphal. But for a reason: it is an excellent example of the use of metaphor to teach that change is possible, that even Jesus as messiah was capable both of being wrong, and of learning from the least among us. And changing as a result. Thank you, Melinda, for reminding us of this important lesson.
Anne When I was in Sunday School I was not taught the difference between the Old and the New Testament. Later I learned that the New focused on Jesus Christ, love, and forgiveness, while the god of the Old Testament could Vicious and vengeful.
Mmm, yes. As a child I was taught that the Old Testament was history, and that the New Testament was about God sending his only child to live among people and teach them the way to salvation, that being "Do unto others...."
I was taught that in Jewish tradition, many stories were not meant to be taken literally: they were metaphors for things that needed to be remembered but dangerous to speak aloud literally. I cannot say anything about the truth of this, not being Jewish, but this is what Jewish friends explained to me, and I've read something about it in some of my explorations. So I came to understand that the Old Testament has to be read in a different way than the New Testament.
I learned the new teachings were taught orally for a long time before being written down by people who did not know Jesus and whose stories varied. Jesus spoke Aramaic, while the writers spoke and wrote Greek that was later translated into various other languages. That many versions of stories existed and there was not agreement about which were valid representations of what Jesus taught and did. That some of the tellers and writers were women who were ignored until copies of their stories were found among other spiritual writings. That the stories existed independently from each other until followers began to gather stories they believed were about Jesus together, with different groups often gathering different stories. That the time came when it became politically expedient to choose some stories to be printed together as dogma, and so there came to be a number of different books of scripture (scripture=writing; bible=book) that scholars are still trying to sort out.
A friend who was a pastor and biblical scholar (PhD), as well as a social activist, told me it is likely that the person represented as Jesus was probably a compendium of a number of different people whose stories came to be connected through oral transmission. Recently someone published a book claiming that Jesus had been a Buddhist monk. This is actually a belief I've held for a long time: Buddhist teaching had been spreading in all directions from India for centuries, and in the area we call the middle east, there had been a number of teachers going back at least 200 years before Jesus whose teachings reflected buddhist philosophy- as did Jesus.
I don't claim to be any kind of authority on the history of Christianity, but that is a kind of brief map of part of my journey, based on scholarly and spiritual study. What the Old Testament is and what it means depends on how it is defined. The Torah is five books, and as the old sayings goes "all the is commentary- that is, interpretation. What books are included in the Christian version of "Old Testament" depends on the sect. Ditto the New Testament. And the meaning of both depends on what kind of assumptions one brings to reading.
Anne The Old Testament is a collection of stories assembled by diverse writers over many centuries. The Torah, purportedly the Books of Moses, were actually written 400-500 years after the death of Moses. One might assume that there was some variation as this oral history was passed from generation to generation.
The ‘god’ in the Old Testament evolved until, by about 700 BCE, there was a single Jewish god. He (she?) could be vengeful.
After Jesus, born and died a Jew, there was a concerted effort to create a ‘Jesus religion.’ Paul was important in gentrifying this new religion. Within about 80 years four Gospels were written that provided diverse insights into the man called Jesus. Except for the book of Acts, there is virtually no mention of Jesus or ‘Christianity’ in Roman records for the following century.
There was a strong insistence that the New Testament was the world of God. Those who objected often were burned. In the 19th century German scholars commenced an analysis of the New Testament. This has subsequently evolved. By favorite source is Bart Erhman of the University of North Carolina.
Though many books have been written about Jesus (Christ), they all rely on interpreting the stories of the Gospels, which were written at different times for different reasons.
I consider Jesus as the living symbol of love, inclusion, and forgiveness. Singing “Onward Christian Soldiers’ would seem blasphemy of what Jesus represents. Martin Luther split from the Catholic Church and was the basis for the spread of Protestantism, while promoted wars and divisions throughout Europe.
Today the ‘evangelical Christians’ seem the antithesis of what Jesus represents. Some pastors, in their palatial settings, claim that the New Testament is the literal word of God. Moreover, the hatred that they project is the antithesis of Jesus’s teachings.
And the reason this is important is because these writings and the way they are interpreted have had an immense influence in what people in western societies believe are appropriate (or, perhaps, want others to believe what they want it to mean for their own purposes that have nothing to do with the teachings).
That was just an allegory like the parables to show the point of God's mercy and love for anyone who has faith in God. The Israelites were the 1st people to have a covenant with El Shaddai, living God on high, thanks to father Abraham who is the founder for not only those of the Jewish faith, but also the Christian and Muslim faithful.
The SyroPhoenician woman was only asking for God's blessing to be part of Jesus's Kingdom of Heaven. Our Lord just chided her gently with the promise of God's covenant fulfilled 1st to the Jewish people as God Almighty had always promised. She was showing her true faith in the son of God by saying that even the dogs live off the scraps of the children, which shows that God loves and accepts everyone who has faith in Him. That's also why the blessings of Christianity passed also unto the Gentiles thru the ministry of St Paul, but that's a further development of why we're all God's children if we want to believe in His everloving salvation.
Jesus was pretty liberal, especially for his era. And very effective liberals tend to be targets.
Good news though:
Mary Magdalene, through a brilliant methodology, has kept Jesus, and his somewhat forgiving approach followed by (not many) alive for 2000 years. Not a bad accomplishment for a woman that lived 2000 years ago in a highly Patriarchal society.
Not bad at all.
Mike The early Catholic Church transformed Mary Magdalene—who was extremely close to Jesus and, in the Gospels, discovered that his body was missing—into a prostitute within the first several hundred years. Not so good.
The whole story of how Mary Magdalene was turned into a prostitute by the early Christian church is horrible. This whole persona was created primarily to be the Yin to the Blessed Virgin Mary's Yang. She was portrayed as the opposite of the pure, unspotted virgin...she was a sinner who could repent. We don't actually know all that much about her, truth be told. I've always wondered if the early church made sure any other information about her was destroyed in order to foist their constructed version of her into doctrine. Those monks transcribing texts in scriptoria in the Dark and Middle Ages pulled did a lot of untold damage...
Bruce An interesting ying/yang story. I had the impression that the Virgin Mary was not highlighted by the Catholic Church until about the 11th century, when there was an image-forming campaign to highlight Mary as the Mother of God. I noticed this in the artifacts displayed in Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation. The image of Mary was intended to emphasize the ‘family news’ of Catholics while, of course, even today the Vatican considers women as second class.
I think the 10th, 11th centuries was when the real "cult" around the BVM got going...creating an "ideal" Mother of God, giving birth, but never having been defiled, and then becoming a model for women, which was of course totally impossible for them to emulate. If you've not read it, I highly recommend "Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary", by Marina Warner. It was published 40 years ago, but is still very relevant today. It gives the whole historical context of BVM and how the "cult" came to be. In my own experience of having sung so much Medieval and Renaissance vocal music dedicated to Mary, I always noted that as a body of music it represents some of the THE most beautiful music to come from this period. Quite simply, composers were essentially writing "love" music in the guise of religious music, some of it at times even verging on the erotic. Warner's book reinforces this and shows how it was possible. Also, music written for the plethora of other female saints and martyrs can be show to have similarities to secular love music. Anyway, the Warner book is a must read, now in paperback. Highly recommended.
Bruce Thanks. Always interesting to keep abreast of Catholic marketing initiatives. I have a video of the different images of Jesus—from Semitic-getting whiter and whiter—and now dark black in Africa, which is the largest growth area for Catholicism.
I wonder if they will hang modern portraits of Jesus in the Vatican.
I wouldn't hold my breath! Some Orthodox icons come awfully close to depicting Jesus in a more Semitic, darker complected light. The RCC is a bit stuck in a rut aesthetically, IMO.
Bruce,
Magdalene's main story was preserved for some reason and that's all that matters.
She went to a tomb of a dead man. Angels came and told her Jesus was arisen. Somehow, Magdalene came up with an arisen Jesus (that the disciples did not initially recognize).
And so it began.
It's the details of her earlier life before she showed up in the Gospels that are basically unknown and that's what I was talking about. Trying to infer she was a prostitute came about long after the Resurrection.
This happened even before the monks in the middle ages. The early church fathers are responsible for a lot of the damage. The far right zealots of today remind me of them....destroy anything that does not fit the patriarchal model.
Keith,
I don't really have much to offer or add. The Catholic Church is so far out in the weeds of Christianity we can effectively write it off.
Love Mary Magdalene. Excellent in fact.
I keep thinking about W saying something about "laser-like focus." And I thought he had a point. Whoever has laser-like focus, will win. My thinking is that the narcissists, the psychopaths, the dictators always have laser-like focus because they don't have a conscience to distract them. Liberals don't have laser-like focus because they care, they understand ramifications and downsides, unless they are a narcissistic liberal. I have to think about that but it might be an oxymoron.
❗️ ❗️ ❗️
Well, I've known narcissists who played at being seen as progressive liberals for as long as they could pull it off. And some progressive liberals who could be pretty short-sighted about things like unexpected ramifications. But, yeah, not the same thing.
Yup. The Xian Nationalists have strayed far from love thy neighbor
Jesus also practiced and participated in the ethno-centric views of his time, calling the Syrophoenician woman a "dog", no?
He did, Steve. And she snapped back and changed him. She said, "Yes but even the dogs eat the crumbs from the master's table." Or words to that effect. She turned it back on him in a most clever way. She woke him up. How could he be so unable to imagine a Syrophoenician woman to be someone he ought to care about? Think about the fact that for Christians, Jesus is both human and divine. If we ponder what that means (and its impossible paradox is worth contemplating for a lifetime), we have to leave open a door to thinking of him as, in fact, human. We humans are shaped by the prejudices of our cultures and it can take a woman dismissed from the dominant culture to change minds and hearts. Sojourner Truth, Rosa Parks, Fanny Lou Hamar. . .
Oh, Melinda. This is certainly where the story turns for there is much more than what our eyes can read. In this, Jesus knew the culture in which he lived and as a human, he embraced what he came to do, to fulfill the law. The law forbid him to never associate with the "other", the Gentiles. And yet he drove the Pharisees nuts by dining with sinners and prostitutes and in those moments radical inclusivity was introduced. His 1st response was so those he was with wouldn't be offended by what he actually did-acknowledged her faith, granted her request and healed her daughter. I would offer to you to try seeing this story through the lens of Jesus caring for both, those he came for, the Jews, and the Gentiles in that very same human/divine moment. And that the fact that she was a women isn't lost on me.
This is specifically why the bible is easily used to justify whatever one wishes it to justify as it can be interpreted in countless diverging ways. The bible is a handpicked collection of stories (leaving out many that don’t align with a chosen narrative), includes anonymous authors that contradict each other, and without generous reinterpretation promotes a host of immoral and unethical behaviors and beliefs. The right consists of christians who can be controlled by dishonest leaders because they use the bible to justify the horrors they accept as necessary.
“Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
All that said, we probably do need a 2-prong approach to pushing back this rapidly growing wave of anti-democracy: continuing dueling christian interpretations as well as highlighting the consequences of destroying democracy’s guardrails that will result in all Americans losing freedoms and rights we count on. This needs to be focused directly at middle and lower income families who will suffer the most.
Johanna, I appreciate you mentioning narrative in your response. The democratic guardrails also referenced lean into on what this country is founded upon- the narrative of a Judeo-Christian ethic as well as the constitution. All that does is package up all the "otherness" and transport it century after century, millennia after millennia up into today. The racism, the sexism, the white supremacy is all one big fat sandwich being served daily.
SPOT ON ! STEVE! MANKIND, NEEDS to Follow JESUS ! as OUR Example !
I would like to recommend a book for your consideration. After Jesus Before Christianity
As so much in the Bible, likely apocryphal. But for a reason: it is an excellent example of the use of metaphor to teach that change is possible, that even Jesus as messiah was capable both of being wrong, and of learning from the least among us. And changing as a result. Thank you, Melinda, for reminding us of this important lesson.
Anne When I was in Sunday School I was not taught the difference between the Old and the New Testament. Later I learned that the New focused on Jesus Christ, love, and forgiveness, while the god of the Old Testament could Vicious and vengeful.
Mmm, yes. As a child I was taught that the Old Testament was history, and that the New Testament was about God sending his only child to live among people and teach them the way to salvation, that being "Do unto others...."
I was taught that in Jewish tradition, many stories were not meant to be taken literally: they were metaphors for things that needed to be remembered but dangerous to speak aloud literally. I cannot say anything about the truth of this, not being Jewish, but this is what Jewish friends explained to me, and I've read something about it in some of my explorations. So I came to understand that the Old Testament has to be read in a different way than the New Testament.
I learned the new teachings were taught orally for a long time before being written down by people who did not know Jesus and whose stories varied. Jesus spoke Aramaic, while the writers spoke and wrote Greek that was later translated into various other languages. That many versions of stories existed and there was not agreement about which were valid representations of what Jesus taught and did. That some of the tellers and writers were women who were ignored until copies of their stories were found among other spiritual writings. That the stories existed independently from each other until followers began to gather stories they believed were about Jesus together, with different groups often gathering different stories. That the time came when it became politically expedient to choose some stories to be printed together as dogma, and so there came to be a number of different books of scripture (scripture=writing; bible=book) that scholars are still trying to sort out.
A friend who was a pastor and biblical scholar (PhD), as well as a social activist, told me it is likely that the person represented as Jesus was probably a compendium of a number of different people whose stories came to be connected through oral transmission. Recently someone published a book claiming that Jesus had been a Buddhist monk. This is actually a belief I've held for a long time: Buddhist teaching had been spreading in all directions from India for centuries, and in the area we call the middle east, there had been a number of teachers going back at least 200 years before Jesus whose teachings reflected buddhist philosophy- as did Jesus.
I don't claim to be any kind of authority on the history of Christianity, but that is a kind of brief map of part of my journey, based on scholarly and spiritual study. What the Old Testament is and what it means depends on how it is defined. The Torah is five books, and as the old sayings goes "all the is commentary- that is, interpretation. What books are included in the Christian version of "Old Testament" depends on the sect. Ditto the New Testament. And the meaning of both depends on what kind of assumptions one brings to reading.
So, Keith, there is something to think about.
Anne The Old Testament is a collection of stories assembled by diverse writers over many centuries. The Torah, purportedly the Books of Moses, were actually written 400-500 years after the death of Moses. One might assume that there was some variation as this oral history was passed from generation to generation.
The ‘god’ in the Old Testament evolved until, by about 700 BCE, there was a single Jewish god. He (she?) could be vengeful.
After Jesus, born and died a Jew, there was a concerted effort to create a ‘Jesus religion.’ Paul was important in gentrifying this new religion. Within about 80 years four Gospels were written that provided diverse insights into the man called Jesus. Except for the book of Acts, there is virtually no mention of Jesus or ‘Christianity’ in Roman records for the following century.
There was a strong insistence that the New Testament was the world of God. Those who objected often were burned. In the 19th century German scholars commenced an analysis of the New Testament. This has subsequently evolved. By favorite source is Bart Erhman of the University of North Carolina.
Though many books have been written about Jesus (Christ), they all rely on interpreting the stories of the Gospels, which were written at different times for different reasons.
I consider Jesus as the living symbol of love, inclusion, and forgiveness. Singing “Onward Christian Soldiers’ would seem blasphemy of what Jesus represents. Martin Luther split from the Catholic Church and was the basis for the spread of Protestantism, while promoted wars and divisions throughout Europe.
Today the ‘evangelical Christians’ seem the antithesis of what Jesus represents. Some pastors, in their palatial settings, claim that the New Testament is the literal word of God. Moreover, the hatred that they project is the antithesis of Jesus’s teachings.
Lots more, but now it’s dinner time.
And the reason this is important is because these writings and the way they are interpreted have had an immense influence in what people in western societies believe are appropriate (or, perhaps, want others to believe what they want it to mean for their own purposes that have nothing to do with the teachings).
And calling women dogs hasn't disappeared. They only need to be unattractive.
Unattractive according to them/their standards.
Yes, or women viewed as lesser like prostitutes. It's one of those things that really fries me.
That was just an allegory like the parables to show the point of God's mercy and love for anyone who has faith in God. The Israelites were the 1st people to have a covenant with El Shaddai, living God on high, thanks to father Abraham who is the founder for not only those of the Jewish faith, but also the Christian and Muslim faithful.
The SyroPhoenician woman was only asking for God's blessing to be part of Jesus's Kingdom of Heaven. Our Lord just chided her gently with the promise of God's covenant fulfilled 1st to the Jewish people as God Almighty had always promised. She was showing her true faith in the son of God by saying that even the dogs live off the scraps of the children, which shows that God loves and accepts everyone who has faith in Him. That's also why the blessings of Christianity passed also unto the Gentiles thru the ministry of St Paul, but that's a further development of why we're all God's children if we want to believe in His everloving salvation.