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Mary Magdalene_ The Most Defamed Woman in the Bible · truthunedited

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Speaker 1: It is still dark when she reaches the tomb. The
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Speaker 1: Sabbath has ended. The sun has not yet cleared the
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Speaker 1: ridgeline east of Jerusalem, and the garden is grey and
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Speaker 1: cold and quiet. She has come to finish a task
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Speaker 1: that was interrupted by the clock, to anoint a body
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Speaker 1: wrapped in haste two days earlier. She expects to find
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Speaker 1: a sealed stone and a corpse. She finds neither. The
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Speaker 1: stone is rolled back. The tomb is open. and the
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Speaker 1: linen that had held him lies collapsed and empty. In
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Speaker 1: that half-light, a woman named Mary of Magdala becomes the
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Speaker 1: first human being to stand at the threshold of the
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Speaker 1: most consequential claim in the history of the Western world.
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Speaker 1: Not a priest, not a Roman official, not one of
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Speaker 1: the twelve men who had followed him for three years.
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Speaker 1: A woman, and within a few centuries... The church that
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Speaker 1: was built on her testimony would remember her not as
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Speaker 1: that first witness, but as a reformed prostitute, a woman
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Speaker 1: defined by sins the Bible never once assigns to her.
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Speaker 1: How that happened, and who she actually was before the
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Speaker 1: legend swallowed her, is the story we are going to tell.
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Speaker 1: But to tell it, we have to leave that garden
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Speaker 1: and travel north, back in time, to a town on
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Speaker 1: the edge of a lake. where a woman with no
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Speaker 1: husband named beside her, and no city of origin except
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Speaker 1: her own, first appears in the record. The Gospels almost
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Speaker 1: never tell us where a woman is from. They tell
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Speaker 1: us whose wife she is, whose mother, whose daughter. A
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Speaker 1: woman's identity in the first century Mediterranean world was borrowed
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Speaker 1: from the men around her, and this is the first
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Speaker 1: strange telling detail about Mary Magdalene. She carries no man's name.
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Speaker 1: She is not Mary the wife of someone, not Mary
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Speaker 1: the mother of someone. She is Mary of Magdala, identified
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Speaker 1: by a place, the way a man of standing might be.
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Speaker 1: The town was called Magdala, from the Aramaic Migdal, meaning tower.
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Speaker 1: It sat on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee,
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Speaker 1: a few miles north of Tiberias, at the point where
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Speaker 1: the fertile plain of Gennesaret meets the water. In Greek,
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Speaker 1: the town was known as Tarikea, and that name is
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Speaker 1: the more revealing of the two, because it comes from
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Speaker 1: the word for salting and preserving fish. Magdala was a
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Speaker 1: fish town. Its wealth came out of the lake and
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Speaker 1: was packed in salt and shipped across the empire. We
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Speaker 1: are not guessing at this. For most of Christian history,
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Speaker 1: Magdala was a name without a place, a village assumed
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Speaker 1: to lie somewhere under the fields near modern Migdal. Then,
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Speaker 1: in 2009, construction began on a religious retreat centre on
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Speaker 1: the lakeshore, and as required by Israeli law, archaeologists surveyed
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Speaker 1: the ground before the foundations went in. What they found
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Speaker 1: stopped the construction entirely. Beneath the soil lay a first-century town,
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Speaker 1: sealed and preserved, that had been occupied in exactly the
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Speaker 1: decades when Mary lived there. They uncovered a marketplace, ritual
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Speaker 1: baths fed by groundwater, and a network of pools and
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Speaker 1: channels that had been used to process the day's catch.
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Speaker 1: And at the center of the site they found a synagogue,
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Speaker 1: one of only a handful of synagogues anywhere in the
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Speaker 1: world that can be securely dated to before the destruction
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Speaker 1: of the Jerusalem Temple in the year 70. This was
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Speaker 1: a building that stood while Jesus was alive. In a
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Speaker 1: town he is recorded as having visited, a short walk
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Speaker 1: from Capernaum, where he based his Galilean ministry. Inside that synagogue,
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Speaker 1: the excavators found something without parallel, a carved stone block,
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Speaker 1: roughly the size of a small chest, standing on short
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Speaker 1: legs in the middle of the assembly hall. On its
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Speaker 1: faces were reliefs, a seven-branched menorah flanked by vessels, columns, arches,
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Speaker 1: a rosette. The menorah relief is the earliest known image
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Speaker 1: of the temple lampstand, perhaps carved by an eyewitness, actual
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Speaker 1: object in Jerusalem before it was carried off to Rome.
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Speaker 1: Scholars still argue about what the Magdala Stone was for,
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Speaker 1: a base for reading the Torah scroll, a symbolic representation
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Speaker 1: of the temple itself brought into a provincial synagogue, but
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Speaker 1: its mere existence rewrites the picture. This was not a
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Speaker 1: backwater of illiterate fishermen. Magdala was a prosperous observant, a
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Speaker 1: connected Jewish town with a great synagogue and salted fish
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Speaker 1: trade reaching across the Mediterranean. This is the world that
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Speaker 1: produced Mary, a woman from a town wealthy enough and
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Speaker 1: independent enough that she could be known by it. And
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Speaker 1: that independence is written into the one passage that formally
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Speaker 1: introduces her. In the Gospel of Luke, chapter 8, verses
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Speaker 1: 1 to 3, we are given the roster of the
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Speaker 1: people who traveled with Jesus, and it is not the
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Speaker 1: list most people expect. The text reads, After this, Jesus
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Speaker 1: traveled about from one town and village to another, proclaiming
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Speaker 1: the good news of the kingdom of God. The twelve
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Speaker 1: were with him, and also some women who had been
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Speaker 1: cured of evil spirits and diseases. Mary, called Magdalene, from
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Speaker 1: whom seven demons had gone, Joanna, the wife of Chusa,
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Speaker 1: and Susanna, and many others. These women were helping to
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Speaker 1: support them out of their own means. Read that slowly,
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Speaker 1: because almost everything the later legend would erase is already
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Speaker 1: here in the founding text. Mary is named first among
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Speaker 1: the women. The position of prominence? The way Peter is
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Speaker 1: named first among the men. She is defined by a place,
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Speaker 1: not a husband. while Joanna in the very next line
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Speaker 1: is defined precisely by her husband, Chusa, a man of
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Speaker 1: the court of Herod Antipas. Mary needs no such anchor,
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Speaker 1: and the women are not passengers. The Greek phrase behind
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Speaker 1: helping to support them out of their own means describes patronage.
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Speaker 1: The women were financing the movement from their own resources.
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Speaker 1: In the economy of the first century, that meant they
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Speaker 1: had resources of their own to give. which points to
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Speaker 1: women of some means and standing. The mission that would
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Speaker 1: reshape the world was, in its earliest traveling phase, underwritten
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Speaker 1: in part by a woman from a fishing town on
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Speaker 1: the Sea of Galilee. There is one more phrase in
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Speaker 1: that introduction, and it is the phrase that the centuries
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Speaker 1: would seize on and distort more than any other, from
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Speaker 1: whom seven demons had come out. we will look closely
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Speaker 1: at what that line actually meant to a first century audience,
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Speaker 1: because it is nothing like what it came to mean later.
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Speaker 1: For now, notice only what the text does not say.
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Speaker 1: It does not say she was a prostitute. It does
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Speaker 1: not say she was a great sinner, or an adulteress,
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Speaker 1: or a fallen woman rescued from the street. It says
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Speaker 1: she was sick, in the language of her time for sickness,
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Speaker 1: and that she was healed. That is the entire biblical
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Speaker 1: foundation for her past. Everything else, the loose hair, the perfume,
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Speaker 1: the tears, was added later, by other hands, in other centuries,
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Speaker 1: and grafted onto her against the plain sense of the record.
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Speaker 1: This is the woman we are going to follow, not
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Speaker 1: the penitent of the paintings, but a woman from Magdala
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Speaker 1: who appears in the sources abruptly, without a husband to
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Speaker 1: explain her, wealthy enough to fund a movement, healed of
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Speaker 1: something serious, and placed by the earliest writers at the
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Speaker 1: head of the women who followed Jesus. She will stay
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Speaker 1: in the story where nearly everyone else has fled. She
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Speaker 1: will be standing at the cross. She will be watching
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Speaker 1: at the tomb. And she will be the first to
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Speaker 1: carry the news that turned a Galilean execution into a
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Speaker 1: global faith. To understand how remarkable that is, and how
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Speaker 1: completely it was later buried. We have to go back
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Speaker 1: to that strange phrase, the seven demons, and to the
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Speaker 1: band of women who travelled the roads of Galilee with
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Speaker 1: a rabbi, doing something that respectable society was not supposed
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Speaker 1: to allow. Seven demons. Of all the phrases attached to
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Speaker 1: Mary Magdalene, this is the one that did the most damage,
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Speaker 1: because a modern ear hears it and imagines something lurid,
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Speaker 1: some dark, wild, sexual past out of which she had
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Speaker 1: to be dragged. That is not what a first-century Jewish
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Speaker 1: listener would have heard at all. To them, the phrase
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Speaker 1: meant something closer to a medical chart than a confession.
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Speaker 1: In the world Mary lived in, demons were not primarily
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Speaker 1: figures of moral corruption. They were the assumed cause of affliction.
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Speaker 1: When a person suffered from what we would now call epilepsy,
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Speaker 1: or recurring fevers, or convulsions, or the crushing states of
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Speaker 1: mind we would name depression and psychosis. The explanatory framework
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Speaker 1: available to them did not speak of neurons or pathogens.
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Speaker 1: It spoke of unclean spirits. Illness was invasion. To say
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Speaker 1: that seven demons had come out of Mary was to say,
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Speaker 1: in the only vocabulary her culture had, that she had
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Speaker 1: been gravely and chronically sick, and that she had been
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Speaker 1: made well. The number matters too, and it does not
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Speaker 1: point where people assume. In the Hebrew Scriptures, seven is
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Speaker 1: the number of completeness, of fullness, of a thing at
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Speaker 1: its full measure. seven days of creation, sevenfold vengeance, seven
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Speaker 1: times bowing to the ground. To be afflicted by seven
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Speaker 1: spirits was not to have committed seven particular sins. It
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Speaker 1: was to have been wholly, completely overwhelmed, sickness at its
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Speaker 1: fullest and most total extent. The phrase is a measure
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Speaker 1: of how far gone she had been, and therefore of
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Speaker 1: how complete her healing was. It is a statement about
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Speaker 1: the depth of her sufferings, and the totality of her rescue,
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Speaker 1: and it carries, if anything, a note of awe. This
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Speaker 1: was a woman who had been at the very bottom
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Speaker 1: of what a human being can endure, and who had
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Speaker 1: been lifted entirely out of it. We can reconstruct this
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Speaker 1: framework because the literature of Second Temple Judaism is saturated
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Speaker 1: with it. The book of Tobit, written a couple of
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Speaker 1: centuries before Mary's lifetime, and widely read, turns on a
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Speaker 1: demon named Asmodeus, who afflicts a young woman and is
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Speaker 1: driven off by ritual means. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls,
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Speaker 1: the community at Qumran preserved texts of exorcism and incantation,
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Speaker 1: prayers and formulas for the expelling of harmful spirits, alongside
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Speaker 1: a fragment in which the patriarch Abraham prays over a
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Speaker 1: stricken king to lift a plaguing spirit. The historian Josephus,
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Speaker 1: writing for a Roman audience later in the same century,
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Speaker 1: describes in earnest a Jewish exorcist, Eleazar, drawing a demon
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Speaker 1: from a man's nostrils before the emperor Vespasian and insists
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Speaker 1: the practice went back to Solomon. This was not fringe belief.
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Speaker 1: It was the ordinary medicine of the age, the shared
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Speaker 1: assumption of how the invisible world pressed on the body.
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Speaker 1: When the gospel writers say Mary had seven demons cast out,
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Speaker 1: they are locating her inside that world as a person
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Speaker 1: who had been desperately ill and was restored, and they
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Speaker 1: are saying nothing whatsoever about her virtue. So the healed
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Speaker 1: woman does what healed people in these stories do. She
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Speaker 1: follows the one who healed her. But here the Gospels
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Speaker 1: record something that broke the ordinary rules, and they record
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Speaker 1: it almost without comment, as though daring the reader to
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Speaker 1: notice how strange it was. Mary did not go home.
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Speaker 1: She joined a traveling band. and that band included women,
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Speaker 1: a group of them, moving from town to town in
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Speaker 1: the company of a male teacher and his male disciples.
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Speaker 1: In the Gospel of Mark, chapter 15, verses 40 and 41,
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Speaker 1: the writer pauses at the most dramatic moment of the
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Speaker 1: story to name them and to tell us what they
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Speaker 1: had been doing all along. The text reads, Some women
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Speaker 1: were watching from a distance. Among them were Mary Magdalene,
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Speaker 1: Mary the mother of James the younger, and of Joseph,
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Speaker 1: and Salome. In Galilee these women had followed him and
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Speaker 1: cared for his needs. Many other women who had come
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Speaker 1: up with him to Jerusalem were also there. Notice the
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Speaker 1: two verbs the writer chooses. They had followed him and
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Speaker 1: they had cared for his needs. The first verb, followed,
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Speaker 1: is the technical language of discipleship. It is the same
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Speaker 1: word used of the men who left their nets. Mark
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Speaker 1: is telling us these women were not hangers-on. They were
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Speaker 1: followers in the full sense, disciples who had attached themselves
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Speaker 1: to a teacher. The second verb describes provision, service, the
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Speaker 1: meeting of material needs, and it connects directly to that
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Speaker 1: earlier line about the women supporting the mission out of
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Speaker 1: their own resources. put the two passages side by side,
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Speaker 1: and a picture emerges that the later tradition would work
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Speaker 1: hard to forget. There was, around Jesus, a circle of
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Speaker 1: women who were both his students and his patrons, who
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Speaker 1: followed him as disciples and funded him as benefactors. And
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Speaker 1: at the front of that circle, named first again, stands
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Speaker 1: Mary of Magdala. To understand why this was scandalous, you
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Speaker 1: have to understand the honor system of the ancient Mediterranean.
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Speaker 1: A woman's respectability was bound to the household. Her proper
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Speaker 1: place was within its walls, under the authority and the
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Speaker 1: protection of a father or a husband, and her honor,
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Speaker 1: which was really the honor of her family, was maintained
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Speaker 1: by keeping her movements and her associations tightly controlled. A
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Speaker 1: woman who traveled the roads, who ate with men not
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Speaker 1: related to her, who attached herself to an itinerant teacher,
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Speaker 1: was doing something that the surrounding culture read as, at best,
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Speaker 1: deeply irregular and, at worst, a public disgrace to the
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Speaker 1: men responsible for her. Later rabbinic sources preserve the instinct sharply,
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Speaker 1: warning a man against speaking too much with a woman.
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Speaker 1: The assumption that a woman's learning belonged to the domestic sphere,
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Speaker 1: the suspicion that fell on women who moved outside it,
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Speaker 1: for a group of women to travel openly with a rabbi,
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Speaker 1: and his followers was to court exactly the kind of
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Speaker 1: gossip that could destroy a reputation. And that, quietly, is
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Speaker 1: the significance of the patronage. Female patrons were not unknown
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Speaker 1: in the wider Greco-Roman world. Wealthy women funded synagogues and
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Speaker 1: civic buildings and religious associations. Inscriptions across the empire record
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Speaker 1: their gifts and honor them as benefactors. The role of
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Speaker 1: the patron gave a woman a recognized, respectable way to
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Speaker 1: exercise power with her money. When the Gospels present Mary
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Speaker 1: and Joanna and Susanna as supporting the movement from their
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Speaker 1: own means, they are drawing on this recognizable category, but
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Speaker 1: they are stretching it, because these women were not distant
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Speaker 1: donors writing checks from within their households. They were on
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Speaker 1: the road. they had folded the respectable role of patron
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Speaker 1: into the irregular role of travelling disciple, and in doing so,
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Speaker 1: they had stepped outside the protection that the household was
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Speaker 1: supposed to provide. Mary, with no husband named to shield her,
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Speaker 1: had stepped furthest of all. This is worth holding on to,
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Speaker 1: because it cuts directly against the legend that would later form.
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Speaker 1: The Mary of the medieval imagination is a passive figure,
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Speaker 1: A woman defined by what was done to her sins. Rescued, weeping, subordinate.
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Speaker 1: The Mary of the earliest sources is nothing of the kind.
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Speaker 1: She is a woman of independent means who had survived
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Speaker 1: a devastating illness, chosen to follow a teacher against every
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Speaker 1: social pressure that told her to stay home and put
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Speaker 1: her own resources behind him. She is active, resourced, and self-directed.
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Speaker 1: The scandal of her was never sexual. The scandal of
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Speaker 1: her was freedom. A woman moving through public space on
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Speaker 1: her own authority, funding and following a movement that respectable
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Speaker 1: society had every reason to distrust, that freedom would be tested.
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Speaker 1: The band of women who followed him through the villages
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Speaker 1: of Galilee, caring for his needs and paying his way,
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Speaker 1: would follow him one last time out of the north
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Speaker 1: and up the long climb to Jerusalem. into a city
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Speaker 1: crowded for Passover, and watched by a Roman governor with
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Speaker 1: a reputation for cruelty. What waited there would scatter the
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Speaker 1: men who had walked with him for three years. The
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Speaker 1: women would not scatter. To understand why that mattered, we
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Speaker 1: have to follow them onto that road. Every spring the
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Speaker 1: roads of Judea filled with people walking toward a single city.
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Speaker 1: Passover was one of the three pilgrimage festivals that the
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Speaker 1: law of Moses required. the feast that called Israel's families
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Speaker 1: up to Jerusalem to remember the night their ancestors were
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Speaker 1: brought out of Egypt from every direction they came, down
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Speaker 1: the Mediterranean coast, up from the villages of the south,
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Speaker 1: and out of Galilee in the north, where Mary and
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Speaker 1: the women who traveled with Jesus had spent their lives.
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Speaker 1: From the Galilean lakeshore to Jerusalem was roughly a hundred
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Speaker 1: miles on foot, a journey of several days, and there
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Speaker 1: were two ways to make it. The shorter road ran
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Speaker 1: south through Samaria, hostile ground many Galilean Jews preferred to avoid.
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Speaker 1: The longer road dropped east into the Jordan Valley, followed
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Speaker 1: the river down through the heat, and then turned up
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Speaker 1: the steep climb from Jericho to Jerusalem, nearly a thousand
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Speaker 1: meters of ascent in a single grueling day. Either way,
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Speaker 1: it was a hard walk, made in a crowd, toward
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Speaker 1: a city that at festival time swelled to many times
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Speaker 1: its ordinary size. The historian Josephus gives figures for the
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Speaker 1: Passover crowds, so large that scholars debate them still. But
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Speaker 1: even the cautious estimates put hundreds of thousands of pilgrims
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Speaker 1: inside and around the walls. Jerusalem at Passover was a
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Speaker 1: pressure vessel. The women were in that crowd. We know
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Speaker 1: it because when the Gospel of Matthew reaches the end
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Speaker 1: of the story and looks back to identify who had
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Speaker 1: been present, it tells us plainly where they had come
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Speaker 1: from and why they were there. In Matthew chapter 27
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Speaker 1: verses 55 and 56 it The writer states, Many women
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Speaker 1: were there, watching from a distance. They had followed Jesus
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Speaker 1: from Galilee to care for his needs. Among them were
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Speaker 1: Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and
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Speaker 1: the mother of Zebedee's sons. They had followed Jesus from Galilee.
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Speaker 1: That short clause carries the whole weight of the journey.
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Speaker 1: These were not women of Jerusalem who happened to be
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Speaker 1: nearby when the events unfolded. They had made the pilgrimage themselves,
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Speaker 1: walked the same hard road down the valley and up
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Speaker 1: from Jericho, and they had done it as they had
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Speaker 1: done everything else in this story, as followers, to care
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Speaker 1: for his needs. Matthew names three of them, and once
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Speaker 1: again Mary Magdalene stands at the head of the list,
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Speaker 1: but a new figure appears here beside her, the mother
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Speaker 1: of Zebedee's sons. Zebedee's sons were James and John, two
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Speaker 1: of the closest disciples, and their mother had made the
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Speaker 1: same journey, which tells us the traveling company that came
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Speaker 1: up from Galilee was larger and more bound together than
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Speaker 1: a simple band of a dozen men. It was a
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Speaker 1: movement with families in it, with mothers and patrons and
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Speaker 1: disciples of both sexes, and the women in it were
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Speaker 1: not incidental. Matthew stops at the darkest hour to record
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Speaker 1: that they were there, that they had come. All that way,
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Speaker 1: they were walking into a city held down by a
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Speaker 1: hard hand. Judea at this moment was not a kingdom,
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Speaker 1: but a Roman province, governed by a prefect named Pontius Pilate,
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Speaker 1: who had held the office since around the year 26
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Speaker 1: and would hold it for a decade. For most of
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Speaker 1: Christian history, Pilate was known only from the Gospels and
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Speaker 1: a few literary references. and there were even scholars who
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Speaker 1: wondered whether the gospel writers had gotten his title right. Then,
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Speaker 1: in 1961, an Italian archaeological team excavating the Roman theatre
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Speaker 1: at Caesarea Maritima, the coastal city that served as the
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Speaker 1: seat of Roman government in the province, turned over a
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Speaker 1: reused block of limestone and found an inscription carved into
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Speaker 1: its face. Though damaged, the surviving letters named Pontius Pilatus,
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Speaker 1: and give his office Prefect of Judea. It was the
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Speaker 1: first and remains the only physical, contemporary evidence of the man,
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Speaker 1: a stone cut during his own administration, and it confirmed
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Speaker 1: both his name and his exact title. The Pilate Stone
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Speaker 1: anchors the Gospel account to hard archaeology. The governor in
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Speaker 1: the story was a real Roman official, whose name we
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Speaker 1: can still read on stone he commissioned. and the portrait
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Speaker 1: we have of that official, from sources outside the Gospels,
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Speaker 1: is not flattering. The Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, writing
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Speaker 1: within living memory of Pilate's tenure, describes him as a
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Speaker 1: man of inflexible, merciless temper, and lists his corruption, his violence,
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Speaker 1: and his executions of the untried. Josephus records specific incidents.
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Speaker 1: Early on, Pilate had his soldiers carry the emperor's image
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Speaker 1: on their standards into Jerusalem by night, an act his
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Speaker 1: Jewish subjects regarded as a deliberate desecration of the holy city.
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Speaker 1: And when they protested, he ringed them with troops and
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Speaker 1: threatened death before finally backing down. Once he took temple
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Speaker 1: treasury funds to build an aqueduct, and when crowds gathered
23:54
Speaker 1: to object, he had soldiers in plain clothes mingle with them.
23:59
Speaker 1: and at a signal, beat and kill a great many.
24:03
Speaker 1: This was the man who governed the city as Mary,
24:06
Speaker 1: and the women came up the road. He was known
24:09
Speaker 1: for provoking his subjects, and then answering their protests with force,
24:14
Speaker 1: and he was in Jerusalem during Passover, precisely because the
24:18
Speaker 1: festival was the most dangerous time of the year. That
24:22
Speaker 1: danger was not accidental. Passover celebrated liberation. the story of
24:28
Speaker 1: a god who broke the grip of an empire and
24:30
Speaker 1: led a captive people out to freedom. To keep that
24:34
Speaker 1: feast under Roman occupation, inside a city ringed with Roman soldiers,
24:39
Speaker 1: was to rehearse a memory of deliverance in the very
24:42
Speaker 1: presence of the power that now held the nation down.
24:47
Speaker 1: The Roman authorities understood the charge in it perfectly. They
24:51
Speaker 1: knew that a festival about the overthrow of oppressors drawing
24:55
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of pilgrims into a single-walled city, was
25:00
Speaker 1: exactly the kind of gathering out of which a revolt
25:03
Speaker 1: could ignite. So at Passover, the governor came up from
25:07
Speaker 1: his coastal capital to Jerusalem, and the garrison was reinforced,
25:12
Speaker 1: and troops were posted above the temple courts, so any
25:15
Speaker 1: disturbance could be crushed before it spread. The city that
25:19
Speaker 1: Mary walked into was crowded, exalted, and watched. a place
25:25
Speaker 1: where religious fervor and political menace pressed against each other
25:29
Speaker 1: in the narrow streets, and where a teacher who drew
25:33
Speaker 1: crowds and spoke of a kingdom was precisely the sort
25:37
Speaker 1: of figure the authorities had learned to fear. Into that
25:41
Speaker 1: pressure the Galilean company arrived, and within days the tension broke.
25:46
Speaker 1: The events of that final week are told at length
25:49
Speaker 1: in all four Gospels. The entry into the city, The
25:54
Speaker 1: confrontation in the temple courts. The growing hostility of the authorities.
25:59
Speaker 1: The last meal. The arrest in the dark of an
26:02
Speaker 1: olive grove. The rushed and irregular trials. Through most of
26:07
Speaker 1: that sequence, the women recede from the narrative. The spotlight
26:12
Speaker 1: falls on the men. On the disciple who betrayed him.
26:16
Speaker 1: On the one who denied him three times before the
26:19
Speaker 1: crowing of a cock. On the eleven who scattered when
26:22
Speaker 1: the soldiers came. The Gospels are unsparing about that scattering.
26:27
Speaker 1: The men who had walked a hundred miles with him,
26:29
Speaker 1: who had promised to stand by him to the death,
26:33
Speaker 1: fled into the night when the danger became real, and
26:36
Speaker 1: the record does not soften it. But the women did
26:39
Speaker 1: not flee. When the narrative reaches its worst hour, and
26:43
Speaker 1: the writers lift their eyes to see who is still present,
26:47
Speaker 1: it is the women they find, standing where they had
26:50
Speaker 1: always stood. Having followed him this far, and refusing to go,
26:55
Speaker 1: Matthew placed them there watching, Mark placed them there watching.
27:00
Speaker 1: The men were gone, the patrons and disciples who had
27:03
Speaker 1: come up from Galilee remained, and the place where they
27:06
Speaker 1: remained was the worst place a human being could be
27:09
Speaker 1: asked to stand, at the foot of a Roman cross,
27:13
Speaker 1: within sight and sound of an execution designed to be
27:17
Speaker 1: the most agonizing, humiliating death the empire could inflict. To
27:23
Speaker 1: understand what it cost Mary to stay there, we have
27:26
Speaker 1: to look directly at what was happening on that hill.
27:29
Speaker 1: The Romans did not invent crucifixion, but they perfected it
27:33
Speaker 1: into an instrument of terror, and they were precise about
27:37
Speaker 1: what it was for. It was not simply a method
27:39
Speaker 1: of killing. A condemned man could be killed a dozen
27:42
Speaker 1: quicker ways. Crucifixion was designed to kill slowly and in public,
27:48
Speaker 1: to turn a human body into a message posted along
27:51
Speaker 1: a road or above a city, and the message was
27:54
Speaker 1: addressed to everyone who passed. This is what happens to
27:58
Speaker 1: those who defy Rome. For that reason the penalty was reserved,
28:02
Speaker 1: by custom and often by law, for the people the
28:06
Speaker 1: empire most wanted to frighten into obedience, rebellious slaves, bandits, insurrectionists,
28:14
Speaker 1: the conquered peoples of the provinces. A Roman citizen was,
28:18
Speaker 1: except in the rarest cases, exempt from it. because the
28:22
Speaker 1: whole point of the cross was degradation, and a citizen's
28:26
Speaker 1: dignity was protected by law. The Roman orator Cicero called
28:31
Speaker 1: it the most cruel and hideous of punishments, and said
28:35
Speaker 1: that the very word cross should be kept far not
28:39
Speaker 1: only from the body of a Roman citizen, but from
28:42
Speaker 1: his thoughts, his eyes, his ears. It was the deliberate
28:46
Speaker 1: erasure of a person's humanity. staged where the maximum number
28:50
Speaker 1: of witnesses would see it and remember. The process began
28:55
Speaker 1: before the cross itself. The condemned was first scourged with
28:59
Speaker 1: a whip, whose leather thongs were often weighted with bone
29:03
Speaker 1: or metal, a beating severe enough that victims sometimes died
29:07
Speaker 1: under it. Then the prisoner was made to carry the crossbeam.
29:11
Speaker 1: Not the whole cross, which was far too heavy, but
29:15
Speaker 1: the horizontal timber, the patibulum, laid across the shoulders and
29:20
Speaker 1: lashed to the outstretched arms, through the streets to the
29:24
Speaker 1: place of execution, where the upright posts already stood. At
29:28
Speaker 1: the sight, the crossbeam was raised and fixed to the upright,
29:33
Speaker 1: and the victim was fastened to it, sometimes tied with ropes,
29:37
Speaker 1: sometimes nailed, frequently both. Then the waiting began. Death on
29:43
Speaker 1: a cross came slowly, over hours and sometimes over more
29:47
Speaker 1: than a day, through a compounding collapse of the body.
29:51
Speaker 1: Suspended by the arms, the victim could not breathe without
29:55
Speaker 1: pushing up against whatever supported the feet, and every breath
29:59
Speaker 1: became a labor against exhaustion, blood loss, shock, and eventually
30:04
Speaker 1: the failure of the body to draw air at all.
30:07
Speaker 1: It was engineered to be long and to be watched.
30:10
Speaker 1: For most of history, there was a strange gap in
30:13
Speaker 1: the evidence for all this. The Romans crucified tens of
30:17
Speaker 1: thousands of people over the centuries. After the revolt of Spartacus,
30:22
Speaker 1: they are said to have lined the road from Capua
30:25
Speaker 1: to Rome with 6,000 crosses, and yet not a single
30:30
Speaker 1: physical trace of a crucifixion victim had ever been found.
30:35
Speaker 1: The reason is part of the cruelty. Crucifixion usually denied
30:39
Speaker 1: its victims a grave. Bodies were left on the cross
30:42
Speaker 1: to decompose and be scavenged, and what remained was thrown
30:47
Speaker 1: into common pits and precisely to deny the dead the
30:51
Speaker 1: honor of burial. Then, in 1968, during construction in a
30:56
Speaker 1: neighborhood northeast of Jerusalem called Givat HaMiftah, workers uncovered a
31:02
Speaker 1: set of first-century tombs, and inside one of them, in
31:06
Speaker 1: a stone ossuary inscribed with the name Yehohanan, an archaeologist
31:11
Speaker 1: found a heel bone with an iron nail still driven
31:14
Speaker 1: through it. The nail had struck a knot in the
31:17
Speaker 1: olive wood upright and bent, so that it could not
31:20
Speaker 1: be pulled free, and the foot had been buried with
31:23
Speaker 1: the iron still in the bone. Here at last was
31:27
Speaker 1: the physical proof, a man from Jerusalem, from exactly the
31:32
Speaker 1: era of the Gospels, who had been nailed to a
31:35
Speaker 1: cross through his heels, and, unusually, had been given a burial,
31:40
Speaker 1: so that the evidence survived. Yehohanan remains the most complete
31:45
Speaker 1: archaeological witness to the reality of the punishment, and he
31:49
Speaker 1: confirms in bone and iron what the texts describe. This
31:54
Speaker 1: was done to real people, in this city, in these
31:58
Speaker 1: years with nails through the living body. This is what
32:02
Speaker 1: Mary Magdalene stood and watched. The Gospel of John, alone
32:06
Speaker 1: among the four, brings the women in close, and its
32:10
Speaker 1: wording is deliberate. where Matthew and Mark had placed the
32:13
Speaker 1: women watching from a distance, John sets them at the
32:17
Speaker 1: very foot of the cross. In John 19.25, near the
32:21
Speaker 1: cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother's sister, Mary
32:26
Speaker 1: the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene near the cross,
32:30
Speaker 1: not at the edge of the crowd, not on the
32:32
Speaker 1: far ridge, but close enough to see everything the punishment
32:36
Speaker 1: was designed to inflict, close enough to be seen in return.
32:41
Speaker 1: close enough to hear. And once again, at the end
32:45
Speaker 1: of that short list of the faithful, stands Mary of Magdala.
32:49
Speaker 1: She had followed him out of Galilee, up the long road,
32:53
Speaker 1: into the watched and dangerous city. And now she had
32:57
Speaker 1: followed him to the one place from which everyone was
33:01
Speaker 1: expected to look away. It is worth sitting with how
33:04
Speaker 1: exposed that was. To stand near the cross of a
33:07
Speaker 1: man executed by Rome, as a threat to public order,
33:12
Speaker 1: was to associate yourself, openly and in front of soldiers,
33:17
Speaker 1: with a condemned enemy of the state. The men had
33:20
Speaker 1: understood the risk and calculated it, and they had gone.
33:24
Speaker 1: To be publicly known as a follower of a crucified
33:27
Speaker 1: insurrectionist was to invite suspicion onto yourself. And the safe thing,
33:33
Speaker 1: the sensible thing, was distance. The women did not take
33:37
Speaker 1: the safe thing. They stood where their association was undeniable,
33:42
Speaker 1: and Mary, who had no husband to answer for her
33:45
Speaker 1: and no household to retreat into, stood there in full view,
33:50
Speaker 1: refusing the protection that flight would have offered. The freedom
33:54
Speaker 1: that had made her scandalous, a woman moving through public
33:57
Speaker 1: space on her own authority, was now the freedom to
34:01
Speaker 1: remain when remaining was dangerous. She used it to stay.
34:05
Speaker 1: There is no speech recorded from her here. No dramatized grief.
34:10
Speaker 1: And it is important not to invent any. The texts
34:14
Speaker 1: do not tell us what she said or what passed
34:17
Speaker 1: through her mind. And the discipline of this story is
34:20
Speaker 1: to refuse the embroidery that later ages could not resist adding.
34:25
Speaker 1: What the texts give us is simpler and harder. Presence.
34:30
Speaker 1: She was there. Through the hours it took. Through the
34:33
Speaker 1: slow public dying. that the empire had refined to break
34:38
Speaker 1: both the body on the cross, and the spirit of
34:42
Speaker 1: everyone made to watch it. She was there. The one
34:45
Speaker 1: thing a witness can do is not look away, and
34:49
Speaker 1: she did not. And then it was over. The Gospels
34:52
Speaker 1: record that Jesus died in the afternoon, before the others
34:57
Speaker 1: crucified with him, and that his death was verified by
35:00
Speaker 1: the soldiers. For the Romans, that was the end of
35:03
Speaker 1: the matter. and the ordinary Roman procedure would have followed.
35:08
Speaker 1: The body left hanging, the final indignity of no grave.
35:12
Speaker 1: That this did not happen, that the body was taken
35:16
Speaker 1: down and buried at all, was itself unusual, a departure
35:20
Speaker 1: from the standard cruelty of the cross. And it happened
35:24
Speaker 1: because of the intervention of men, who until that moment
35:28
Speaker 1: had kept their allegiance hidden. But the women who had
35:31
Speaker 1: watched the death, also watched what came next. They did
35:35
Speaker 1: not leave when the crowd dispersed. They followed the body.
35:40
Speaker 1: They needed to know exactly where it was laid, because
35:43
Speaker 1: the hurried burial forced by Roman timing and the coming
35:47
Speaker 1: Sabbath would leave a task unfinished, a task that would
35:51
Speaker 1: bring Mary back to that place in the dark two
35:54
Speaker 1: mornings later and put her at the center of everything
35:58
Speaker 1: that followed. To understand why she came back, We have
36:02
Speaker 1: to follow the body to the tomb. The clock was
36:05
Speaker 1: against them. Jesus died in the afternoon, and in the
36:09
Speaker 1: Jewish reckoning of time, the Sabbath began at sundown, when
36:13
Speaker 1: the first stars appeared. Once that line was crossed, the
36:18
Speaker 1: work of burial could not be done. No digging, no carrying,
36:23
Speaker 1: no preparation of a body was permitted on the day
36:25
Speaker 1: of rest, and there was a further pressure written into
36:29
Speaker 1: the law itself. The book of Deuteronomy commanded that the
36:33
Speaker 1: body of an executed person must not be left hanging overnight,
36:38
Speaker 1: but had to be buried the same day, so that
36:41
Speaker 1: the land would not be defiled. Between the Roman indifference
36:46
Speaker 1: that would have left the body on the cross and
36:48
Speaker 1: the Jewish law that demanded it be taken down and
36:52
Speaker 1: buried before dark, there was only a narrow window of
36:55
Speaker 1: a few hours. Whatever was going to be done had
36:59
Speaker 1: to be done fast. and it had to be done
37:01
Speaker 1: before the sun touched the western hills. Into that window
37:05
Speaker 1: stepped a man the story has not mentioned until now.
37:09
Speaker 1: The Gospels call him Joseph of Arimathea, a member of
37:13
Speaker 1: the ruling council, the Sanhedrin, a man of wealth and
37:17
Speaker 1: standing who had become quietly, and at some personal risk,
37:23
Speaker 1: a follower of Jesus. It was Joseph who went to
37:26
Speaker 1: Pilate and asked for the body. itself a bold act.
37:30
Speaker 1: A councilman publicly requesting the corpse of a man Rome
37:34
Speaker 1: had just executed as a threat. Pilate granted it, and
37:38
Speaker 1: Joseph took the body down. And because there was no
37:41
Speaker 1: time to prepare a grave, and no time to carry
37:44
Speaker 1: the body far, Joseph gave up his own. The tomb
37:48
Speaker 1: was new, cut into the rock, never used. and it
37:52
Speaker 1: was close at hand. The body was wrapped in linen,
37:56
Speaker 1: and with the light failing and the Sabbath pressing in,
37:59
Speaker 1: it was laid inside, and a heavy stone was rolled
38:02
Speaker 1: across the entrance. It was a burial performed at speed,
38:06
Speaker 1: under the pressure of the setting sun, and it left
38:10
Speaker 1: the proper rites unfinished. To understand what kind of place
38:14
Speaker 1: that tomb was, we can turn to a wealth of
38:17
Speaker 1: archaeological evidence. because the burial customs of first-century Jerusalem were
38:23
Speaker 1: among the best documented in the ancient world. The people
38:27
Speaker 1: of Judea did not, as a rule, bury their dead
38:30
Speaker 1: in the ground. Those who could afford it were laid
38:33
Speaker 1: in tombs cut into the soft limestone of the hills
38:37
Speaker 1: that ring the city. A typical rock-cut tomb of this
38:41
Speaker 1: period had a low entrance, often deliberately small, so that
38:46
Speaker 1: a person had to stoop to enter. and inside a
38:49
Speaker 1: central chamber with a standing pit dug into the floor,
38:53
Speaker 1: so that mourners could stand upright around. The walls. Into
38:57
Speaker 1: those walls, stonecutters carved long narrow shafts, each wide enough
39:03
Speaker 1: for a single body. Archaeologists call them by the Hebrew
39:06
Speaker 1: name Kokim, or by the Latin, Loculi. A body would
39:11
Speaker 1: be placed in one of these shafts, wrapped in linen
39:15
Speaker 1: and laid with aromatic spices, to manage the process of decay,
39:20
Speaker 1: and the tomb would be sealed. The seal itself was
39:24
Speaker 1: ordinarily a stone, and most were simple square blocks wedged
39:29
Speaker 1: against the opening. But the wealthiest tombs used something more elaborate,
39:34
Speaker 1: a great disk of stone set in a carved channel,
39:37
Speaker 1: a rolling stone that could be moved across the entrance
39:40
Speaker 1: and back. These were rare and expensive, and only a
39:45
Speaker 1: handful survive around Jerusalem. at sites like the so-called Tomb
39:49
Speaker 1: of the Kings and the tomb complex associated with the
39:54
Speaker 1: family of Herod. The Gospels describe exactly such a rolling
39:58
Speaker 1: stone at the tomb of Jesus, which fits the picture
40:01
Speaker 1: of a new and costly tomb belonging to a man
40:05
Speaker 1: of Joseph's means. And there is one more custom that
40:08
Speaker 1: illuminates the world of these graves. After about a year,
40:13
Speaker 1: when the flesh had decayed and only the bones remained,
40:17
Speaker 1: the family would return, gather the bones, and place them
40:21
Speaker 1: in a stone box called an ossuary, often inscribed with
40:25
Speaker 1: the name of the dead, to make room in the
40:28
Speaker 1: shafts for the next generation. Thousands of these ossuaries survived
40:33
Speaker 1: from the hills around Jerusalem, bearing the ordinary names of
40:37
Speaker 1: the age, including many times over the names Mary, Joseph, Jesus, James.
40:43
Speaker 1: This was the culture of death around the burial. Rock-cut chambers, shafts,
40:49
Speaker 1: sealing stones, linen and spices, and the patient practice of return.
40:55
Speaker 1: And it is return that the women were preparing for,
40:59
Speaker 1: because the burial had been rushed. The full anointing that
41:02
Speaker 1: custom required had not been completed, and the women intended
41:07
Speaker 1: to come back and finish it once the Sabbath had passed.
41:10
Speaker 1: But to come back, they had to know exactly where
41:13
Speaker 1: the body lay. and the Gospels are insistent on recording
41:17
Speaker 1: that they made sure of it. At the end of
41:20
Speaker 1: the burial account in the Gospel of Mark, chapter 15,
41:23
Speaker 1: verse 47, the writer notes precisely who was watching. Mary
41:28
Speaker 1: Magdalene and Mary, the mother of Joseph, saw where he
41:32
Speaker 1: was laid. And the Gospel of Matthew, in chapter 27,
41:36
Speaker 1: verse 61, closes the same scene with the same two
41:39
Speaker 1: women in the same posture of vigilance. Mary Magdalene and
41:43
Speaker 1: the other Mary were sitting there opposite the tomb. These
41:47
Speaker 1: are quiet verses, easy to read past, but they are
41:51
Speaker 1: doing something structurally essential, and the early church would come
41:56
Speaker 1: to lean on them heavily. The same Mary who had
41:59
Speaker 1: stood near the cross and watched the death was now
42:03
Speaker 1: sitting opposite the tomb watching the burial. She saw the
42:07
Speaker 1: body placed inside. She saw the stone rolled across. She
42:12
Speaker 1: fixed the location in her memory. The Gospels are building
42:15
Speaker 1: an unbroken chain of eyewitness custody, and Mary Magdalene is
42:20
Speaker 1: the single link that runs through every part of it.
42:24
Speaker 1: She is at the cross, she is at the burial,
42:27
Speaker 1: and she will be at the tomb on the third morning.
42:30
Speaker 1: No other named follower appears at all three moments. The
42:34
Speaker 1: men are absent from the death and the burial entirely.
42:38
Speaker 1: It is the women, and Mary above all, who maintain
42:42
Speaker 1: continuous sight of the body from the last breath to
42:45
Speaker 1: the sealed grave, and it is that continuity that gives
42:49
Speaker 1: their later testimony its force. They could not have been
42:52
Speaker 1: mistaken about which tomb. They had watched it filled and
42:56
Speaker 1: sealed with their own eyes. There is a further weight
42:59
Speaker 1: in these small verses that the ancient world would have
43:02
Speaker 1: felt more sharply than we do. The Gospels are, in effect,
43:08
Speaker 1: entering the women into the record as witnesses. And in
43:11
Speaker 1: doing so, they are staking the most important claim of
43:15
Speaker 1: the entire narrative on the reliability of female observers. In
43:21
Speaker 1: the legal culture of the time, that was not an
43:24
Speaker 1: obvious or a comfortable choice, and it is one the
43:27
Speaker 1: later tradition would find ways to minimize. But the texts
43:31
Speaker 1: themselves make it without apology. When everything depended on knowing
43:35
Speaker 1: where the body was, it was the women who knew.
43:39
Speaker 1: because it was the women who had stayed to watch.
43:42
Speaker 1: Mary sat opposite the tomb as the Sabbath came down
43:45
Speaker 1: over the city, and the world went still, and she
43:49
Speaker 1: waited for the day of rest to pass, so that
43:52
Speaker 1: she could go back and do the last thing that
43:54
Speaker 1: love and custom required. To anoint a body she believed
43:58
Speaker 1: she would find exactly where she had seen it laid.
44:01
Speaker 1: She was wrong about what she would find. When the
44:04
Speaker 1: Sabbath ended and the first day of the week began—
44:07
Speaker 1: She rose in the dark and went back to the tomb,
44:10
Speaker 1: carrying spices for a corpse, and walked into the morning
44:14
Speaker 1: that would divide history, and in time make her the
44:18
Speaker 1: most misremembered woman in it. What happened in that garden
44:22
Speaker 1: is where the whole story has been leading. She went
44:26
Speaker 1: out while it was still dark. The Gospel of John,
44:29
Speaker 1: chapter 20, verse 1, records the moment with almost no ornament.
44:34
Speaker 1: Early on the first day of the week, While it
44:37
Speaker 1: was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and
44:41
Speaker 1: saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance.
44:45
Speaker 1: That is all. A woman walking alone through the last
44:48
Speaker 1: of the night toward a grave, carrying the intention of
44:52
Speaker 1: finishing a burial and finding the seal broken and the
44:56
Speaker 1: entrance open. Her first thought was not resurrection. No one's
45:00
Speaker 1: first thought was resurrection. Her first thought was theft. The
45:05
Speaker 1: body was gone and someone had taken it, and the
45:08
Speaker 1: careful work of watching where it was laid had come
45:10
Speaker 1: to nothing, because now she did not know where it
45:14
Speaker 1: was at all. That is the fear the text gives her,
45:18
Speaker 1: and it is worth holding on to, because it is
45:21
Speaker 1: the reaction of a real person confronting an empty grave,
45:25
Speaker 1: not the serene expectation of someone who had understood in
45:28
Speaker 1: advance what was coming. She had come to tend a corpse.
45:32
Speaker 1: She found an absence, and it frightened her. What follows
45:36
Speaker 1: is one of the most carefully written scenes in all
45:39
Speaker 1: the Gospels, and it belongs to Mary alone. In the
45:43
Speaker 1: Gospel of John, chapter 20, verses 11 through 18, the
45:47
Speaker 1: encounter unfolds slowly. The text reads, Now Mary stood outside
45:53
Speaker 1: the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to
45:57
Speaker 1: look into the tomb. and saw two angels in white,
46:01
Speaker 1: seated where Jesus' body had been, one at the head
46:04
Speaker 1: and the other at the foot. They asked her, Woman,
46:07
Speaker 1: why are you crying? They have taken my Lord away,
46:11
Speaker 1: she said, and I don't know where they have put him.
46:14
Speaker 1: At this she turned around and saw Jesus standing there,
46:19
Speaker 1: but she did not realize that it was Jesus. He
46:22
Speaker 1: asked her, Woman, why are you crying? Who is it
46:26
Speaker 1: you are looking for? Thinking he was the gardener, she said, Sir,
46:30
Speaker 1: if you have carried him away, tell me where you
46:33
Speaker 1: have put him, and I will get him. Jesus said
46:36
Speaker 1: to her, Mary. She turned toward him and cried out
46:39
Speaker 1: in Aramaic, Rabboni, which means teacher. Jesus said, Do not
46:44
Speaker 1: hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended
46:47
Speaker 1: to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them,
46:51
Speaker 1: I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to
46:54
Speaker 1: my God and your God. Mary Magdalene went to the
46:58
Speaker 1: disciples with the news, I have seen the Lord, and
47:02
Speaker 1: she told them that he had said these things to her.
47:05
Speaker 1: The scene turns on a single word. She does not
47:08
Speaker 1: recognize him. She takes him for the gardener, which in
47:12
Speaker 1: the setting is entirely natural. It was a garden. The
47:16
Speaker 1: light was thin. Her eyes were full of tears. and
47:20
Speaker 1: the last thing she expected to see was the man
47:23
Speaker 1: she had watched die. She is still inside the logic
47:27
Speaker 1: of the missing body, still trying to locate a corpse,
47:31
Speaker 1: still offering to carry him away herself, if only this
47:35
Speaker 1: stranger will tell her where he has been put. And
47:38
Speaker 1: then he says her name, Mary, and in the saying
47:42
Speaker 1: of it everything reverses. Recognition comes not through sight, but
47:47
Speaker 1: through being named. hearing the voice she knew, and she
47:52
Speaker 1: answers in her own language, the everyday Aramaic of Galilee,
47:57
Speaker 1: with a single word, Rabboni. The gospel writer, working in
48:01
Speaker 1: Greek for a wider audience, stops to translate it, because
48:05
Speaker 1: he wants us to hear the actual sound that came
48:08
Speaker 1: out of her, the raw, unpolished word she reached for
48:13
Speaker 1: in the shock of recognition. It means my teacher, my master,
48:18
Speaker 1: and it is a heightened, intimate form. She reaches back,
48:22
Speaker 1: in that instant, for the relationship she had always had
48:25
Speaker 1: with him, the relationship of a disciple to the rabbi
48:29
Speaker 1: she followed, and it is precisely that reaching back that
48:32
Speaker 1: he checks. The next words are among the most discussed,
48:36
Speaker 1: because the traditional rendering, Do not touch me, has misled
48:41
Speaker 1: generations of readers. The Greek does not say that. The
48:45
Speaker 1: verb is a present imperative. and it carries the sense
48:49
Speaker 1: of an action already in progress that is now to stop.
48:53
Speaker 1: She is not being told not to touch him. She
48:56
Speaker 1: is already holding on to him, and she is being
48:59
Speaker 1: told to let go. A more exact rendering would be
49:03
Speaker 1: stop clinging to me, or do not keep holding on
49:06
Speaker 1: to me. And the reason he gives is not that
49:09
Speaker 1: contact is forbidden, but that the situation has changed. Because
49:14
Speaker 1: I have not yet ascended to the Father, The bond
49:17
Speaker 1: Mary is trying to resume. of following a living teacher
49:22
Speaker 1: along the roads of Galilee, cannot simply be picked up
49:26
Speaker 1: where it broke off. Something has shifted that she does
49:29
Speaker 1: not yet grasp. She cannot hold him in place, cannot
49:32
Speaker 1: keep him, cannot return to what was. Instead, she is
49:37
Speaker 1: given a task, and the task is to go. Go
49:40
Speaker 1: to the others and tell them. She is not to
49:43
Speaker 1: cling to the moment. She is to carry it. This
49:46
Speaker 1: is the hinge of the entire narrative, and here we
49:49
Speaker 1: must notice something the ancient world would have found truly
49:53
Speaker 1: hard to accept, because it is the strongest reason historians
49:57
Speaker 1: have for taking the account seriously. In the legal and
50:01
Speaker 1: social culture of the first century, the testimony of a
50:05
Speaker 1: woman carried little weight. The historian Josephus, laying out the
50:09
Speaker 1: laws of his people for a Roman readership, states the
50:12
Speaker 1: principle bluntly, that the testimony of women should not be
50:16
Speaker 1: admitted on account of the levity and boldness of their sex.
50:21
Speaker 1: Rabbinic tradition in the Mishnah lists those whose testimony was
50:25
Speaker 1: not to be relied upon, and women were commonly grouped
50:28
Speaker 1: among them. Roman law, too, restricted the circumstances under which
50:33
Speaker 1: a woman could testify. This was not a marginal prejudice.
50:38
Speaker 1: It was the settled assumption of the courts on every side.
50:42
Speaker 1: A woman was not considered a credible witness to a
50:45
Speaker 1: fact of consequence. Now set that against what the Gospels do.
50:49
Speaker 1: At the single most important moment in the story they
50:53
Speaker 1: are telling, the discovery that would become the foundation of
50:57
Speaker 1: the entire faith, they place a woman as the first
51:00
Speaker 1: and primary witness. Not merely present, but first. The first
51:05
Speaker 1: to reach the tomb. The first to see it empty.
51:09
Speaker 1: The first to encounter the risen Jesus. The first to
51:13
Speaker 1: be sent with the news. And they do this in
51:16
Speaker 1: a culture where a woman's testimony would have been the
51:20
Speaker 1: easiest thing in the world. To dismiss. Scholars call this
51:25
Speaker 1: the criterion of embarrassment. If you were inventing a story
51:29
Speaker 1: and wanted it believed, you would never, in that world,
51:33
Speaker 1: build its central claim on the word of women. You
51:36
Speaker 1: would put men at the tomb. You would make the
51:39
Speaker 1: credible witnesses the ones who discovered it. The fact that
51:43
Speaker 1: all four Gospels instead make women the first witnesses, and
51:47
Speaker 1: that they preserve this, even as it would have handed
51:51
Speaker 1: their opponents an easy line of attack, is one of
51:54
Speaker 1: the reasons many historians conclude the detail was not invented
51:59
Speaker 1: but remembered. It was too awkward to have been made up.
52:03
Speaker 1: The story kept the women at the center, because that
52:07
Speaker 1: is where the women had been. And at the center
52:10
Speaker 1: of the center was Mary of Magdala. She had followed
52:13
Speaker 1: him out of Galilee. She had funded his mission. She
52:17
Speaker 1: had stood near the cross when the men fled. She
52:20
Speaker 1: had watched the burial and marked the place. And now,
52:23
Speaker 1: alone in a garden in the last of the dark,
52:26
Speaker 1: she had been the first human being to see him
52:29
Speaker 1: alive again, and the first to be given the message.
52:33
Speaker 1: She turned and went, exactly as she was told, carrying
52:37
Speaker 1: to the eleven the sentence that the whole of Christianity
52:41
Speaker 1: would be built upon. I have seen the Lord. She
52:44
Speaker 1: was in that moment the apostle to the apostles, the
52:48
Speaker 1: one sent to those who would later be called the
52:50
Speaker 1: sent ones. What happened when she reached them, and how
52:54
Speaker 1: a title of extraordinary honor was placed on her. And then,
52:59
Speaker 1: centuries later, stripped away, is the turn the story takes next.
53:04
Speaker 1: She delivered the message, and they did not believe her.
53:08
Speaker 1: This is the detail that tradition would later find most inconvenient,
53:13
Speaker 1: and it is preserved without flinching. In the Gospel of Luke,
53:17
Speaker 1: chapter 24, verses 10 and 11, the writer names the
53:20
Speaker 1: women and records how it landed. It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna,
53:26
Speaker 1: Mary the mother of James, and the others with them
53:29
Speaker 1: who told this to the apostles. But they did not
53:32
Speaker 1: believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense.
53:37
Speaker 1: The word translated nonsense is a strong one in the
53:41
Speaker 1: original Greek, leros, a term used in medical writing for
53:45
Speaker 1: the wild, empty talk of the delirious, the raving of
53:50
Speaker 1: a fevered mind. The men did not merely doubt the report.
53:54
Speaker 1: They dismissed it as the babbling of overwrought women. the
53:58
Speaker 1: very reflex that made a woman's testimony inadmissible in court,
54:02
Speaker 1: was now at work inside the circle of the disciples themselves.
54:07
Speaker 1: The women had seen. The men decided the women were
54:10
Speaker 1: talking delirium. There is something almost unbearably honest in the
54:16
Speaker 1: Gospels preserving this. Not only were the first witnesses women
54:20
Speaker 1: in a culture that discounted women's testimony, the texts go further.
54:25
Speaker 1: and show the men embodying exactly that prejudice, refusing the
54:30
Speaker 1: truth precisely because it came through female mouths. If the
54:34
Speaker 1: story were being polished to persuade, this is a line
54:37
Speaker 1: you would cut. It makes the founding apostles look foolish
54:41
Speaker 1: and slow, and it stakes the central claim on witnesses
54:45
Speaker 1: their own colleagues initially rejected. The fact that it survives
54:50
Speaker 1: in Luke and echoed elsewhere is another mark of a
54:53
Speaker 1: tradition reporting what happened rather than what would have been convenient.
54:58
Speaker 1: The strand of tradition that would become known as the
55:01
Speaker 1: longer ending of Mark drives the same point home, and
55:06
Speaker 1: it carries a small lesson in how the Gospels themselves
55:09
Speaker 1: were transmitted. In the Gospel of Mark, chapter 16, verse 9,
55:14
Speaker 1: the text states, When Jesus rose early on the first
55:18
Speaker 1: day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene.
55:22
Speaker 1: out of whom he had driven seven demons, appeared first
55:25
Speaker 1: to Mary Magdalene. The primacy is explicit, but scholars have
55:30
Speaker 1: long recognized that this verse belongs to a passage, the
55:35
Speaker 1: last twelve verses of Mark, that is absent from the
55:39
Speaker 1: earliest and most reliable Greek manuscripts, which end several verses earlier.
55:45
Speaker 1: The longer ending appears to be a later addition, composed
55:48
Speaker 1: to round off a gospel that in its oldest form
55:52
Speaker 1: stopped abruptly. And yet even this later hand, writing perhaps
55:56
Speaker 1: in the early second century, took it for granted that
56:00
Speaker 1: the risen Jesus appeared first to Mary Magdalene. Her primacy
56:04
Speaker 1: was so established that when a later editor set out
56:07
Speaker 1: to supplement the gospel, he anchored his summary on her.
56:11
Speaker 1: Her role was not a detail that faded. It was
56:15
Speaker 1: fixed in the memory of the church from the beginning.
56:18
Speaker 1: affirmed even by those who came to smooth the story's edges.
56:23
Speaker 1: Out of this bedrock the early church drew a title
56:26
Speaker 1: for her, and it is a remarkable one. By the
56:29
Speaker 1: early third century, the Roman writer Hippolytus, composing a commentary
56:34
Speaker 1: on the Song of Songs, reflected on the women who
56:38
Speaker 1: came to the tomb, and reversed the shame that Genesis
56:42
Speaker 1: had laid on Eve. Where the first woman had carried
56:45
Speaker 1: the message of death, these women, he wrote, carried the
56:49
Speaker 1: message of life, and he called them apostles, apostles sent
56:53
Speaker 1: to the apostles. That phrase, apostle to the apostles, in
56:57
Speaker 1: its Latin form apostola apostolorum, would attach itself to Mary
57:02
Speaker 1: Magdalene above all the others and travel through the centuries.
57:07
Speaker 1: It is a title of extraordinary weight. The word apostle
57:11
Speaker 1: means one who is sent. and it was the highest
57:15
Speaker 1: designation the early church had, reserved for those commissioned to
57:19
Speaker 1: carry the founding message. To call Mary the Apostle to
57:23
Speaker 1: the apostles was to say that the ones who were
57:26
Speaker 1: sent to the world had themselves first been sent by her,
57:30
Speaker 1: that she stood, in the sequence of the resurrection, ahead
57:34
Speaker 1: of Peter and the rest, the first commissioned bearer of
57:38
Speaker 1: the news on which their whole mission rested. Medieval theologians
57:42
Speaker 1: would repeat the title. Even Thomas Aquinas, in his commentary
57:46
Speaker 1: on John, would use it of her without hesitation. And
57:50
Speaker 1: in the Christian East, this honor never wavered. The Eastern
57:54
Speaker 1: churches gave Mary Magdalene the title Myrrh Bearer, remembering the
57:59
Speaker 1: women who came to the tomb with spices to anoint
58:02
Speaker 1: the body, and they ranked her among a select group
58:06
Speaker 1: honored as equal to the apostles, is apostolos in the Greek,
58:11
Speaker 1: a title given only to a handful across church history,
58:15
Speaker 1: whose work was judged comparable to that of the original apostles.
58:20
Speaker 1: In the Byzantine tradition, a legend grew that Mary, after
58:25
Speaker 1: the resurrection, travelled to Rome and stood before the emperor
58:28
Speaker 1: Tiberius himself, and that the red egg exchanged at Easter
58:33
Speaker 1: in the eastern churches descends from an egg she is
58:37
Speaker 1: said to have presented to him as a sign of
58:40
Speaker 1: the resurrection. Whatever lies behind that legend, its meaning is clear.
58:46
Speaker 1: In the East, Mary was a bold proclaimer, a woman
58:49
Speaker 1: who carried the message to the highest powers of the age.
58:53
Speaker 1: She was a preacher, a witness, an apostle. She was never,
58:57
Speaker 1: in that tradition, a prostitute. The idea would have been
59:01
Speaker 1: foreign to them, because it had never been said. This
59:05
Speaker 1: is the crucial fact to hold as we approach the
59:09
Speaker 1: final turnover. the story. For centuries across the Christian world,
59:14
Speaker 1: Mary was remembered for what the Gospels record. The healed
59:18
Speaker 1: woman who followed and funded the mission, who stood at
59:22
Speaker 1: the cross, who watched the burial, who was first to
59:26
Speaker 1: the tomb, first to see the risen Lord. and first
59:30
Speaker 1: to be sent with the news. The honours flowed from
59:34
Speaker 1: that record. Apostle to the Apostles, equal to the Apostles, mer-bearer,
59:40
Speaker 1: first witness. There is not, in any of these early titles,
59:45
Speaker 1: the faintest trace of the woman she would later be
59:47
Speaker 1: made into. The prostitute, the penitent weeping over her past,
59:52
Speaker 1: none of it exists in the first centuries, because none
59:56
Speaker 1: of it exists in the text. The Mary of the
59:59
Speaker 1: early church is a figure of authority and honor. And then,
1:00:03
Speaker 1: at the end of the sixth century, in a single
1:00:06
Speaker 1: sermon preached in Rome, three separate women in the Gospels
1:00:10
Speaker 1: would be fused into one. A sinful woman's tears would
1:00:15
Speaker 1: be poured over Mary Magdalene's name, and the apostle to
1:00:19
Speaker 1: the apostles would be quietly demoted into the most famous
1:00:23
Speaker 1: fallen woman in history. It was not a malicious act.
1:00:27
Speaker 1: and it was not the work of an enemy. It
1:00:30
Speaker 1: was a preacher trying to make a moral point, reaching
1:00:34
Speaker 1: for a vivid example, collapsing distinctions that the text had
1:00:38
Speaker 1: kept separate. But its effect would last nearly fourteen hundred years,
1:00:43
Speaker 1: burying the real woman so completely that most who know
1:00:47
Speaker 1: her name today know only the version that a homily invented,
1:00:52
Speaker 1: how that fusion happened, who made it, what it drew on,
1:00:57
Speaker 1: and how it was finally undone, is the last movement
1:01:01
Speaker 1: of the story. The woman who would be fused into
1:01:04
Speaker 1: Mary Magdalene appears, unnamed, in a completely separate episode. In
1:01:11
Speaker 1: the Gospel of Luke, chapter 7, verses 37 to 39,
1:01:13
Speaker 1: there is a scene at a Pharisee's dinner table. and
1:01:18
Speaker 1: it introduces a figure the text never connects to Mary
1:01:21
Speaker 1: at all. It reads, A woman in that town, who
1:01:25
Speaker 1: lived a sinful life, learned that Jesus was eating at
1:01:29
Speaker 1: the Pharisee's house. So she came there with an alabaster
1:01:33
Speaker 1: jar of perfume. As she stood behind him at his
1:01:36
Speaker 1: feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears.
1:01:41
Speaker 1: Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them, and
1:01:44
Speaker 1: poured perfume on them. When the Pharisee who had invited
1:01:48
Speaker 1: him saw this, he said to himself, If this man
1:01:52
Speaker 1: were a prophet, he would know who is touching him
1:01:55
Speaker 1: and what kind of woman she is, that she is
1:01:58
Speaker 1: a sinner. Read it carefully, because this is the seed
1:02:02
Speaker 1: of the entire defamation. The woman has no name. The
1:02:06
Speaker 1: scene takes place in the previous chapter, before Mary Magdalene
1:02:10
Speaker 1: is even introduced. The text calls the woman a sinner.
1:02:14
Speaker 1: but never specifies her sin, and it never once links
1:02:18
Speaker 1: her to Mary of Magdala. These are two different women
1:02:22
Speaker 1: in two different chapters. There is a third woman as well,
1:02:26
Speaker 1: Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, who
1:02:30
Speaker 1: in the Gospel of John also anoints Jesus, this time
1:02:34
Speaker 1: in a scene of devotion at her home. Three women,
1:02:38
Speaker 1: a healed disciple from Magdala, an unnamed sinner with a jar,
1:02:43
Speaker 1: a devoted sister from Bethany. In the Gospels they are distinct.
1:02:48
Speaker 1: Nothing in the text merges them. They were merged by
1:02:52
Speaker 1: one man in one sermon at the end of the
1:02:55
Speaker 1: sixth century. In the year 591, Pope Gregory I, later
1:03:00
Speaker 1: called Gregory the Great, preached a homily in Rome, his
1:03:04
Speaker 1: thirty-third on the Gospels, and in it he made a
1:03:08
Speaker 1: claim that would echo for fourteen centuries. She whom Luke
1:03:13
Speaker 1: calls the sinful woman, he declared, and whom John calls
1:03:18
Speaker 1: Mary of Bethany, we believe to be the Mary out
1:03:21
Speaker 1: of whom seven demons were cast. In a single sentence
1:03:25
Speaker 1: he collapsed three women into one, and then he went further.
1:03:29
Speaker 1: Those seven demons, he asked, what were they if not
1:03:33
Speaker 1: the sum of all the vices? He read the seven
1:03:36
Speaker 1: spirits not as an illness. The way the first century
1:03:40
Speaker 1: had understood them, But as the seven deadly sins and
1:03:44
Speaker 1: the perfume the sinful woman had poured on Jesus' feet,
1:03:48
Speaker 1: Gregory speculated that she had once used that same perfume
1:03:52
Speaker 1: to scent her flesh in forbidden acts. In a few sentences,
1:03:57
Speaker 1: the healed disciple became the repentant harlot. Her sickness rewritten
1:04:02
Speaker 1: as sin, her jar of ointment turned into a relic
1:04:06
Speaker 1: of a shameful past. Gregory was not a cynical man,
1:04:10
Speaker 1: and this was not an attack. He was preaching repentance,
1:04:14
Speaker 1: the sinner transformed by grace. And Mary made a powerful example.
1:04:20
Speaker 1: But the cost of that sermon was the woman herself.
1:04:23
Speaker 1: The apostle to the apostles was quietly overwritten by a
1:04:28
Speaker 1: figure the Gospels never described. The image took hold in
1:04:32
Speaker 1: the West with astonishing force, in part because rival memories
1:04:36
Speaker 1: of Mary also cast her as a figure of contested significance.
1:04:41
Speaker 1: Among texts that the Church did not accept as Scripture,
1:04:45
Speaker 1: there survived writings from Gnostic communities that placed her at
1:04:49
Speaker 1: the very center. A document known as the Gospel of Mary,
1:04:53
Speaker 1: preserved in a Coptic manuscript bought in Cairo in the
1:04:57
Speaker 1: late 19th century, and pieced from fragments, depicts her as
1:05:02
Speaker 1: the disciple who understood Jesus best. who comforts the frightened
1:05:06
Speaker 1: others after his death and relays teaching he had given
1:05:10
Speaker 1: her privately, and it shows Peter bristling at the idea
1:05:14
Speaker 1: that the Saviour would favour a woman over the men.
1:05:18
Speaker 1: Another text found in 1945, among the buried codices of
1:05:22
Speaker 1: Nag Hammadi in Egypt, the Gospel of Philip, calls her
1:05:26
Speaker 1: the companion of the Saviour and says he loved her
1:05:29
Speaker 1: more than the other disciples, in a passage broken by
1:05:33
Speaker 1: a gap in the fragile page. These are not records
1:05:37
Speaker 1: of Mary's life. They are the theology of communities writing
1:05:41
Speaker 1: generations later, and they tell us about those communities' debates,
1:05:46
Speaker 1: not about the woman from Magdala. But they reveal something important.
1:05:51
Speaker 1: Mary was a figure whose authority was worth fighting over.
1:05:55
Speaker 1: She was significant enough that both her champions and those
1:05:59
Speaker 1: who would diminish her reached for her name. And in
1:06:03
Speaker 1: the modern imaginations, Those Gnostic fragments, sensationalized in popular fiction,
1:06:09
Speaker 1: would fuse with Gregory's harlot to produce yet another invented Mary.
1:06:14
Speaker 1: The secret wife, the hidden bride, as far from the
1:06:18
Speaker 1: text as the penitent prostitute had ever been. In medieval Europe,
1:06:23
Speaker 1: the penitent Mary grew a whole biography. A legend took
1:06:27
Speaker 1: root that after the resurrection... She had sailed to the
1:06:30
Speaker 1: south of France, preached the gospel in Provence, and then
1:06:35
Speaker 1: withdrawn into the wilderness to spend the last thirty years
1:06:38
Speaker 1: of her life as a hermit, weeping in a cave
1:06:41
Speaker 1: in penance for her sins. Her supposed relics were venerated
1:06:45
Speaker 1: at the Abbey of Vézelay, and later at Saint-Maximin, and
1:06:49
Speaker 1: the story was gathered in the thirteenth century, in the
1:06:53
Speaker 1: hugely influential collection of saints' lives known as the Golden Legend.
1:06:58
Speaker 1: From there the image poured into art. For centuries European
1:07:02
Speaker 1: painters and sculptors returned again and again to the same figure,
1:07:07
Speaker 1: a beautiful woman with long loose hair, an alabaster jar
1:07:11
Speaker 1: at her side, half clothed in the wilderness, gazing upward
1:07:16
Speaker 1: through tears. Her weeping grew so proverbial that her name
1:07:20
Speaker 1: became an ordinary word, Maudlin, meaning tearfully sentimental. is simply
1:07:26
Speaker 1: Magdalene worn down by centuries of pronunciation, and her supposed
1:07:31
Speaker 1: fall gave her name to institutions built to discipline other
1:07:35
Speaker 1: women deemed fallen, the Magdalene asylums and laundries that would
1:07:40
Speaker 1: operate into the twentieth century. The defamation was not an abstraction.
1:07:45
Speaker 1: It shaped art, language, and the treatment of real women
1:07:50
Speaker 1: for a very long time. Two things are worth setting
1:07:53
Speaker 1: against this. The first is that the Christian East never
1:07:57
Speaker 1: accepted the fusion at all. The Greek and Byzantine churches
1:08:01
Speaker 1: kept the three women distinct, exactly as the Gospels present them,
1:08:07
Speaker 1: and went on honouring Mary Magdalene as the myrrh-bearer and
1:08:11
Speaker 1: the equal of the apostles, the bold witness who proclaimed
1:08:15
Speaker 1: the resurrection. The prostitute of the Western imagination simply never
1:08:20
Speaker 1: existed in the Eastern memory. This alone shows that Gregory's
1:08:25
Speaker 1: reading was a choice, not a necessity. Half of Christendom
1:08:29
Speaker 1: read the same texts and never made the merger. The
1:08:32
Speaker 1: second is that the West in time corrected itself. In 1969,
1:08:37
Speaker 1: in the reform of the Roman calendar carried out under
1:08:41
Speaker 1: Pope Paul VI, the Catholic Church formally separated the three figures.
1:08:46
Speaker 1: Scholarship had long shown they were different women, and the
1:08:50
Speaker 1: revised calendar quietly acknowledged it. The July 22nd feast would
1:08:55
Speaker 1: now honour Mary Magdalene alone, the disciple and witness of
1:08:59
Speaker 1: the Gospel. no longer the composite penitent. The change drew
1:09:04
Speaker 1: little public notice, and the popular image, embedded in a
1:09:08
Speaker 1: thousand paintings and the very shape of the word Maudlin,
1:09:13
Speaker 1: proved far harder to dislodge than an official decree. The
1:09:16
Speaker 1: restoration was completed in our own time. In 2016, Pope
1:09:22
Speaker 1: Francis raised her July the 22nd commemoration from a memorial
1:09:27
Speaker 1: to a full feast, giving it the same rank in
1:09:30
Speaker 1: the calendar that the Church gives to the Apostles, and
1:09:33
Speaker 1: the decree that announced it carried as its title the
1:09:37
Speaker 1: ancient words that the first centuries had used and the
1:09:41
Speaker 1: sixth century had buried, Apostolorum Apostola, Apostle to the Apostles.
1:09:47
Speaker 1: The title Hippolytus had given her eighteen hundred years earlier,
1:09:52
Speaker 1: the honour that flowed directly from the plain record of
1:09:55
Speaker 1: the Gospels, was formally restored to the woman a sermon
1:09:59
Speaker 1: had turned into a harlot. And so the story closes
1:10:03
Speaker 1: where the text always stood. Strip away the homily, the legend,
1:10:08
Speaker 1: the paintings, the words that her tears left in the dictionary,
1:10:12
Speaker 1: and what remains is what was there from the beginning.
1:10:16
Speaker 1: a woman from a fishing town on the Sea of Galilee,
1:10:19
Speaker 1: healed of a grave affliction, wealthy and independent enough to
1:10:23
Speaker 1: follow and fund a movement against every social pressure of
1:10:27
Speaker 1: her time, who stood at the cross when the men
1:10:30
Speaker 1: had fled, who watched where the body was laid, who
1:10:34
Speaker 1: came to the tomb in the dark and became the
1:10:37
Speaker 1: first witness to the resurrection, and the first person sent
1:10:42
Speaker 1: to proclaim it. The Bible never called her a sinner,
1:10:46
Speaker 1: in the way the tradition did. It never called her
1:10:49
Speaker 1: a prostitute. It called her first. The most defamed woman
1:10:53
Speaker 1: in the Bible was defamed by everything except the Bible,
1:10:58
Speaker 1: which recorded, plainly and from the start, that she was
1:11:02
Speaker 1: the one who saw and the one who was sent.