The Gospel of Mary Magdalene
San Francisco Opera Performance
June 22, 2013
There are 13 mentions of Mary Magdalene by name in the canonical gospels. I will list them here without quoting them.
Mark 15:40
Mark 15:47
Mark 16:1
Mark 16:9
Luke 8:2
Luke 24:10
Matthew 27:56
Matthew 27:61
Matthew 28:1
John 19:25
John 20:1, 2
John 20:11
John 20: 16
The woman in Luke 7:36-50 who washes and kisses his feet is sometimes assumed to be Mary Magdalene, but I don’t count this because she is not named in the passage.
There is no other mention of Mary Magdalene in the New Testament and of these few references all but one of them is related to the stories Jesus’ death and resurrection. Luke is the only gospel that mentions Mary Magdalene outside the context of the final events of his life. About a third of the gospel accounts are taken up with the dramatic last week of Jesus’ life. They are not particularly interested in recounting the details of his life or who he was as a person. So it is curious that Mary Magdalene would appear to play such an important role in this crucial part of his life, which the gospels are supremely interested in, yet otherwise the gospel writers seem at pains to minimize her importance and even discredit her. I can only conclude that Mary Magdalene must have played such an important role during the week of Jesus’ death and the immediate aftermath, and this was so well known among the early Christian groups that the gospel writers could not ignore or omit her, however much they would have liked to. That immediately leads to the question of what role she might have played in Jesus’ life apart from the week of his death. The gospels have almost nothing to say about this. Luke mentions that Jesus cast seven devils out of her and that she was part of a group of women who supported Jesus and his (male) followers “with their own means.” (Luke 8:3) This must be the source of the opera’s portrayal of Mary Magdalene as a woman of some significant means. I found this a rather incredible stretch and I do not think that Mary Magdalene was in any way or shape affluent.
In the gospel accounts Mary Magdalene was the first one to discover the empty tomb and to “see” the resurrected Jesus. The opera is ambivalent about the resurrection, but seems to come down on the side of skepticism. As Mary is hunched over the body of Jesus he rises up from below the stage behind her as a kind of apparition. They carry on a conversation wherein he exhorts her to go out and tell others what he has imparted to her, but she never faces him or interacts with him as in the gospel accounts. He then disappears beneath the stage leaving Mary alone with the dead body of Jesus. J. D. Crossan comments
The women’s discovery of the empty tomb was created by Mark to avoid a risen-apparition to the disciples, and the women’s vision of the risen Jesus was created by Matthew to prepare for a risen apparition to the disciples. There is no evidence of historical tradition about those two details prior to Mark in the 70s. Furthermore, the women, rather than being there early and being steadily removed, are not there early but are steadily included. They are included, of course, to receive only message-visions, never mandate-visions. They are told to go tell the disciples, while the disciples are told to go teach the nations. (Crossan, p. 561)
The Gospel of Mary is a text from the second century, composed at least a hundred years after the relevant events. It is fragmentary and there are only two manuscripts in existence, one, a Greek text from the second century, and a Coptic text from the fifth century ( Ehrman, p. 35) This text indicates that some early Christian groups held Mary Magdalene in much higher regard than the writers of the canonical gospels did. It also indicates some rivalry between the followers of Peter and those who held Mary in higher esteem. This rivalry probably had to do with the basic direction and message of the movement. I am skeptical of the opera’s depiction of this as a personal rivalry between Peter and Mary for the attention of Jesus and of clashes between Jesus and Peter over the basic direction and objectives of the movement. I am equally skeptical of Peter’s opposition of Jesus marriage to Mary Magdalene, never mind the very idea of the marriage itself.
This opera is a fanciful rewrite of the gospel stories and message. It takes considerable liberties with the traditional texts, and even with the Gnostic texts that it loosely draws upon. I see it as an attempt by a disgruntled Roman Catholic to recast the basic message of Christianity into something a little more palatable for a modern audience. If you are a lapsed Catholic, or a nominal Catholic, or a disgruntled, alienated Catholic, but unwilling to break entirely with the Church and your past, you might see something sympathetic in this.
I didn’t care for it and found it frankly rather dull. I debated with myself about leaving at intermission, but I sat there so long thinking about it that I ended up staying for the whole performance. The reason that it is dull is that there is not much action. The characters share agonized ventilation of their inner lives and their relationships in a soap-operatic style, but nothing much happens. There is no drama. You have to be interested in these philosophical speeches or the whole thing drops dead. The set is visually uninteresting. It looks like a construction site or a rock quarry and it doesn’t change throughout the entire performance. Usually operas are visually interesting and imaginative if nothing else. Even if you can’t stand the music, the spectacle is worth the admission price. But this one has little to offer in the way of visual spectacle, so an important element of audience engagement is removed. It would have helped if the music was better, but I did not find anything memorable or interesting in the music score, the singing, and especially in the lyrics. It was preachy, and the messages it was trying to impart I did not find particularly insightful or thought provoking. Some of it was rather trite, in fact. If you are Catholic or a traditional Christian, you might take umbrage at some of the departures from the traditional conception of Jesus, his life, and his message. But this does not bother me at all. I thought the conception was a little far-fetched in some respects, but the way I look at it, any reconstruction of Jesus, any artistic representation of any aspect of his life, is by definition an interpretation, and thus will be highly personal and idiosyncratic in nature. This is fine with me. It is the nature of art and it is what is interesting about art. I welcome artists’ reinventions of stories, incidents, personalities, and images from the past in new and interesting characterizations. My distaste for this performance has nothing to do with stodginess or conservatism. I just didn’t think it came across.
An opera about Mary Magdalene raises issues for the contemporary church that have a history going back to the beginning of the Christian movement: the role of women, not only within the church, but relations generally between men and women. Asceticism was major social and philosophical trend both within early Christianity and in the many Gnostic sects that soon followed and competed with budding Christianity. Many of these writers despised women and especially warned men against sexual connection to women. These people became the orthodoxy within Christianity. But Mary Magdalene remained a thorny challenge to their authority. If Mary had a special intimacy with Jesus (whether sexual or not), it would set a bad precedent and a bad role model for women and men within a church that exalted a de-sexualized existence, especially for men. Women would have to be included in the leadership, their views would have to be taken seriously, sexual relations with women would be a legitimate concern and activity. This was anathema to these early ascetics, as it is to ascetics today. Necessarily, the role and significance of Mary Magdalene in the life of Jesus would have to be minimized and her authority on the teachings and mission of Jesus would have to be discredited. And that is exactly what happened. This opera brings these ancient controversies back to life. It may resonate with you, if you are struggling with any sort of ascetic proscriptions weighing down your life, making you miserable, and destroying your personal relationships. But if you have somehow managed to avoid all of that or freed yourself from it, then this opera will likely not have much to offer you, and you’ll find it rather tedious, as I did. There were plenty of empty seats. You can probably get tickets quite easily.
Notes
Crossan, J. D. (1998) The Birth of Christianity. New York: Harper Collins.
Ehrman, Bart D. (2003) Lost Scriptures: Books that did not make it into the New Testament. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
