The Secret Teachings of Jesus in the Gospel of Mary
The Gospel of Mary is preserved in two Greek fragments of the 3rd century and a fuller, but still incomplete, Coptic manuscript of the 5th. The book itself was composed sometime during the (late?) 2nd century.
Even though we do not have the complete text, it was clearly an intriguing Gospel, for here, among other things, Mary (Magdalene) is accorded a high status among the apostles of Jesus. In fact, at the end of the text, the apostle Levi acknowledges to his comrades that Jesus “loved her more than us.” Mary’s special relationship with Jesus is seen above all in the circumstance that he reveals to her alone, in a vision, an explanation of the nature of things hidden from the apostles.
The Gospel divides itself into two parts. In the first, Jesus, after his resurrection, gives a revelation to all his apostles concerning the nature of sin, speaks a final blessing and exhortation, commissions them to preach the gospel, and then leaves. They are saddened by his departure, but Mary consoles them and urges them to reflect on what he has said. She is then asked by Peter to tell them what Jesus had told her directly. In the second part, she proceeds to describe the vision that she had been granted. Unfortunately, four pages are lost from the manuscript, and so we know only the beginning and end of her description. But it appears that the vision involved a conversation she had with Jesus, who described how the human soul could ascend past the four ruling powers of the world in order to find it eternal rest. This description of the fate of the soul is related to salvation narratives found in other Gnostic texts.
The Gospel continues with two of the apostles – Andrew and Peter – challenging Mary’s vision and her claim to have experienced it; it ends, though, with Levi pointing out that she was Jesus’ favorite, and urging them to go forth and preach the gospel as he commanded. They are said to do so, and there the Gospel ends.
-Lost Scriptures, Bart D. Ehrman, p 35
When Mary had said this, she fell silent, since it was to this point that the Savior had spoken with her. But Andrew answered and said to the brethren, “Say what you (wish to) say about what she has said. I at least do not believe that the Savior said this. For certainly these teachings are strange ideas.” Peter answered and spoke concerning these same things. He questioned them about the Savior: “Did he really speak with a woman without our knowledge (and) not openly? Are we to turn about and all listen to her? Did he prefer her to us?”
Then Mary wept and said to Peter, “My brother, Peter, what do you think? Do you think that I thought this up myself in my heart, or that I am lying about the Savior?” Levi answered and said to Peter, “Peter, you have always been hot-tempered. Now I see you contending against the woman like the adversaries. But if the Savior made her worthy, who are you indeed to reject her? Surely the Savior knows her very well. This is why he loved her more than us. Rather let us be ashamed and put on the perfect man and acquire him for ourselves as he commanded us, and preach the gospel, not laying down any other rule or other law beyond what the Savior said” … [And] they began to go forth [to] proclaim and to preach.
… the discoveries at Nag Hammadi show how widespread was the attempt “to seek God” – not only among those who wrote such “secret writings” but among the many more who read, copied, and revered them, including the Egyptian monks who treasured them in their monastery library even two hundred years after Irenaeus [a second century French bishop] had denounced them. But in 367 CE, Athanasius, the zealous bishop of Alexandria – an admirer of Irenaeus – issued an Easter letter in which he demanded that Egyptian monks destroy all such writings, except for those he specifically listed as “acceptable” … But someone – perhaps monks at the monastery of ST. Pachomius – gathered dozens of the books Athanasius wanted to burn, removed them from the monastery library, sealed them in a heavy, six-foot jar, and intending to hide them, buried them on a nearby hillside near Nag Hammadi. There an Egyptian villager named Muhammad ‘Ali stumbled upon them 1600 years later.
And with that preface, this is offered as a paraphrase of First Thessalonians 5:21, “Search all things and hold fast to that which is good.”
Truth is an uncontrollable heresy. Truth is a scandal that resists conforming to our standards and measures.
A hawk can tell you a lot about history and human nature. We have hawks that nest in the woods in our backyard. They’re back again this year. One can barely discern them hidden and perched on a tree limb surveying the landscape for food. We have a birdfeeder on our back deck that usually is swarming with small birds vying for food. But when the hawks are perched the air is silent. There is no life to be readily seen by human eyes, and no birds at the feeder or birdsongs filling the stillness.
It is a lesson about history and human nature. If you come over to the Smiths when the hawks are perched, and you don’t know anything about hawks, you can easily misread the evidence and claim there are no other birds in our backyard, or any other life for that matter because none but the hawks can be seen. So it is with history. It is human nature to take the record of previous times as it is written and handed to us, and claim there is nothing other or more because nothing additional to it can be seen! Unless, of course, one knows how hawks tell a lesson about history and human nature.
The New Testament, like the entire Bible, the Hebrew Scriptures, and the Koran, is an historical document. There was a time before it was composed, when it did not exist. It was edited into the volume we possess at a particular time in history, in a particular part of the world, as the yield of a particular process with particular goals. The process of putting together various books into a scripture with a unique kind of religious authority and perspective, is called canonization, from the Latin meaning the “rule” or the “model” or the “standard.”
The New Testament as we know it was canonized in the late 4th century and early 5th, a full 350 years after Jesus’ death. Before canonization, before there was a rule as to what limited texts were the “Word of God” and what texts weren’t, there were at least 17 other Gospels in addition to the four that are in the New Testament. In addition, there were scores of non-Gospel books - at least 25 others we know of - considered as authoritative to early Christians as the New Testament is to Christians today. What we call “secret Gospels” were not secret or made to be secret for 200 years after most were composed, and for nearly the first 400 years of Christianity! The story of how we came to understand this is as revolutionary as any in Western religious history.
If I were speaking a mere 60 years ago, the sermon you are about to hear would be impossible because we did not have this kind and extent of knowledge then. The change in our understanding of the development of Christianity has been swift and mighty. We know now there were at least 21 Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection floating around the 2nd century world. We know now that none of these Gospel accounts, including the ones in the New Testament, were written by witnesses to the events of Jesus’ life. We know now that for at least 120 years after Jesus’ death, the communities that grew up following the example of his life were a mixture of Jewish and Gentile, being predominantly Jewish. We know now that the three times the word “Christian” appears in the New Testament, it does not mean someone who believes Jesus is God and part of the Trinity, since the books were authored by Jews, written for predominantly Jewish communities, and composed 300 years before there was a doctrine of the Trinity that declared Jesus God. We know now that for 3-400 years following Jesus’ death, when a man or woman claimed to be a Christian there was not one theological definition as to what that meant. We know now that some communities called themselves Christian to denote that they followed Jesus’ example of loving God and neighbor as self. We know now that other Christians saw Jesus as the Jewish Messiah. We know now that still others thought he was announcing literally the end of time and the end of life on earth, while, others believed he was the presence of God amongst men and women. There was not one rule of belief necessary for one to call oneself a Christian. There was not a collection of authoritative books called the New Testament, the “Word of God.” And these different, diverse Christian communities, reading different, diverse scriptures, made up of Jew and Gentile, male and female, slave and free, stretched from northern Africa, around the modern Middle East, through Turkey, Greece, Italy, France, and all the way up to England! There could not be one “rule” or “standard” of faith and belief given this enormous cultural divide, unless it was forced upon people by the demands of an emperor’s fiat. There was little commonality among these Christians, except that they shared a common meal and told the story of Jesus’ crucifixion. Although in some places the common meal was ritualized into communion while in others it was a daily potluck feast. In some communities the death and resurrection of Jesus was told as a literal thing and in others it was a spiritualized metaphor for the spirit that never dies. There was one other commonality. When in these communities these Christians had life-affirming, transformative, religious experiences that led them to believe they had been redeemed from a Roman culture of brutality, shame, and death.
All of this could not have been preached 60 years ago simply because we didn’t know it! That is how dramatically our understanding of emerging Christianity has changed. It changed through anthropology, through the discovery in 1945 of Gospels and holy books that were hidden away at Nag Hammadi in Egypt. They were hidden away because those books were going to be destroyed by authorities of the Christian Church in the late 4th century when the New Testament was being canonized and all other scriptures were being destroyed. Our view has changed through the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Essence Community at Qumran where that discovery took place. Our view has changed through a deeper understanding of literary writings and the characteristics of oral storytelling, the form of communication for the 40 years between Jesus’ death and the first written Gospel (Mark). Our view has changed by virtue of a feminist interpretive sensitivity that teaches us to consider the voices of history that have been silenced. Our view has change by realizing and accepting that the texts we have as the New Testament and the history that makes up Christianity in the centuries since its canonization, is not the whole or anywhere near the complete story. Our view of Christianity has changed when we understand the hawks in the Smiths backyard!
So what happened to all those men and women who for centuries lived authentic and powerfully transformative religious lives, in ways that history only now can speak for them? Why was it that their voices were silenced for so long? What of these birds that hide when the hawks perch, and by current onlookers are mistakenly thought not to exist?
The Gospel of Mary, like all Gospels in the New Testament and outside of it, can be read as a commentary on the religious issues of its time of composition. It was the middle to late 100’s. Christianity had started out as a Jewish cult, a version of Judaism that declared the Messiah had come. Communities of followers formed around this pronouncement, but made up of Jews and Gentiles. Their religious ethic was antithetical to the Roman culture in that within Christian communities men and women were equal, as were slaves and free persons. Christians celebrated love and life, not revenge, shame, and death. Their religious ethic was antithetical to the Judaism out of which it came because it welcomed Gentiles into fellowship without requiring them to adopt characteristics of the Hebrew faith. Jesus had said it was not necessary to abide by all Jewish Laws and regulations, but instead abide by two: Love God and neighbor as self, which even Gentiles could do. But by the mid-100’s, as the Jesus movement was becoming increasingly dominated by Gentiles, there arose a need to distinguish it from its Jewish roots and a desire to determine what was proper Christian expression and belief.
The Gospel of Mary tells us of this. After Jesus appears to Mary and the apostles and then leaves, as the apostles are grieving his absence as surely as was the church of the Gospel’s author, they ask, “How shall we go to the Gentiles and preach the gospel of the kingdom of the Son of Man? If they did not spare him, how will they spare us?” Clearly, then, these are Jews trying to discern how to speak to Gentiles and what message to bring them. Mary consoles them by telling them of her vision of being visited and taught by the Savior.
That would have caused no alarm or dismay a hundred years before. But, by the late 100’s, a woman teaching men within Christianity has become a problem. It occasions the question as to whether she is to be believed? Can a woman have a profound experience that does not conform to what church leaders maintain is proper? Can any individual? Clearly, by the late 100’s the inequality of the sexes, characteristic of Roman society, has begun to creep into Christian communities. And, her experience is extraordinary, and when pressed, she claims her experience as possessing an authority over her. But, the leaders of the apostles, like some leaders of the church during the author’s time, declare an individual’s experience to be invalid and illegitimate.
What the author has Mary recount as the Savior’s teaching, is the power of individual religious experience. Perhaps, this is what the author has Mary reiterate because that older understanding of Christianity has eroded amidst the dogged, strident cries of some for the conformity of “rule,” “standard,” and “model.” “I saw the Lord… and He answered and said to me, ‘Blessed are you, that you did not waver at the sight of me. For where the mind is, there is the treasure.’ I said to him, ‘Lord, now does he who sees the vision see it through the soul or through the spirit?’ The Savior answered and said, ‘He does not see through the soul nor through the spirit, but the mind which is between the two.’”
In other words, it is the individual mind that is the source and authority of religious experience. It is a 2nd century version of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s proclamation seventeen centuries later: “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” In the Gospel of Mary the apostle leadership dismisses that, as did a portion of Christianity during the author’s day, because it cannot be regulated and controlled. Religious experiences vary with individuals. Religious beliefs vary with individuals. But Christianity during this time was beginning a drive towards a conformity of belief, practice, and experience, which would hide the depth and breadth of the religious impulse as surely as perching hawks hide life! And it has become the “only form of Christianity, to those who forget that hawks are birds of prey, and so other creatures, other creations hide in their presence.
But history is an incomplete story. It presents an interpretation of events. A television reporter tells what happened, and the cameraman captures what happened, except for what is beyond the view of the lens or beyond the knowledge or understanding of the reporter. History is always a story with a point of view, even though we may read it as a complete record of all the events. History is an incomplete narrative.
And so, when history becomes more complete the narrative, its meanings and interpretation, need change. It has to. What has been called Christianity from the 400’s until 1945 has to change. What has been called Christianity for all those years can now be more rightfully understood as one interpretation and version of Christianity, and not necessarily the most popular or important or inspirational or spiritual. But, only a version driven by a need and desire for one kind of faith, one kind of experience, one kind of expression.
In other words, we now have at hand a chance to expand our understandings and appreciation of the breadth of the human religious enterprise, as it has always been and always will be. The human religious impulse is wider and deeper than we think or know. Human religious experience is always wider and deeper. And that is because human being is a seeker and a searcher. And sometimes, to dispel our forgetfulness of that part of human nature, we have to double back on a path to find the wider and deeper way.
Then Mary wept and said to Peter, “My brother, Peter, what do you think? Do you think that I thought this up myself in my heart, or that I am lying about the Savior?” Levi answered and said to Peter, “Peter, you have always been hot-tempered. Now I see you contending against the woman like the adversaries. But if the Savior made her worthy, who are you indeed to reject her? Surely the Savior knows her very well. This is why he loved her more than us. Rather let us be ashamed and put on the perfect man and acquire him for ourselves as he commanded us [loving God and our neighbor as self as he commanded we do], and preach the gospel, not laying down any other rule or other law beyond what the Savior said” … [And] they began to go forth [to] proclaim and to preach.
AMEN.