Mary Magdalene in the Twenty-First Century
By Matt Dillon, Lead Research Associate, Transcendence and Transformation Database. Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey.
The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions.
In the early 2000s, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (Doubleday, 2003) became an unprecedented cultural sensation. The book was the number one New York Times best seller for 55 weeks, selling over 80 million copies. A film adaptation grossed $750 million worldwide. The story follows Harvard professor Robert Langdon puzzling through a series of grisly murders that seem to trace back to a secret society.
At the core of this thriller is Brown’s counter-history of Christianity in which Mary Magdalene had been Jesus’ wife and was pregnant at the time of his crucifixion. The Roman Catholic church painted Mary as a prostitute to discredit her importance in the Jesus movement and erased her marriage from the New Testament. Professor Langdon realizes that Catholic zealots are committing murders to keep hidden this secret.
The Da Vinci Code illustrates a very real religious development that has occurred since the 1977 translation of rediscovered ancient scriptures, such as The Gospel of Mary and The Gospel of Philip. Scholars, religious leaders, and laypersons have reimagined Mary Magdalene’s place in early Christianity based on these publications. The concerns of Dan Brown’s counter-history—women’s leadership in the Catholic church, the divine feminine in Christianity, the sex life of Jesus—are echoed in recent Christian belief and practice.
The Gospel of Mary and The Gospel of Philip claim that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ most beloved disciple. In The Gospel of Mary (175 CE), Jesus teaches her, and her alone, his secret wisdom, and not to Peter. This portrayal has led feminist theologians like Jane Schaeberg to reconstruct the role of women in the early Jesus movement. In The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene (Continuum, 2002), Schaeberg imagines the Jesus movement as a mystical community where women and men alike served as inspired prophets. Schaeberg wonders, and she is not alone, why there are no female priests in the Catholic Church if Jesus’ closest disciple was a woman. Gender equality in the early church, she argues, was erased from history by the patriarchal priesthood, and that erasure impacted women in the church for millennia.
Today, female priests can be found in the Independent Sacramental Movement, comprising churches whose leaders trace their baptismal lineage back to the apostles through the Catholic Church, but these churches and their female priests do not answer to the Vatican. As Julie Byrne observes in The Other Catholics (Columbia University Press, 2016), such churches are a hotbed of theological creativity and progressive reform. The churches reimagine gender in theology and leadership through the example of Mary Magdalene.
Rosamonde Miller is a striking contemporary example of a woman in Christian leadership. Miller first joined the Holy Order of Mary Magdalene in 1960. She then became the first woman on American soil to be consecrated a Catholic priest in 1973, and she was consecrated a bishop in 1981. Miller led the Ecclesia Gnostica Mysteriorum (est. 1978) in Palo Alto, California, for over 40 years until her death in 2021. Miller reimagined the sacrament of the Eucharist to celebrate the divine feminine. In this rite, bread and wine embody feminine and masculine principles of the divine: Sophia and the Logos. The ingestion of the eucharist is likened to a hieros gamos, a sacred marriage, within the congregant.
The Eucharistic language of the hieros gamos evokes the most famous depiction of Mary Magdalene in The Gospel of Philip. She is the companion of Jesus, and “he kisses her often on her mouth.” This passage has led to widespread speculation about an erotic relationship between Mary and Jesus in documentaries, novels, and new religions. Functionally, these speculative reimaginings legitimize sex as a mystical, even divine, act.
Therapist and medium Mercedes Kirkel advocates for this type of mystical sex. In 2010, Kirkel found herself channeling a voice that identified itself as Mary Magdalene. In the book Sublime Union: A Woman’s Sexual Odyssey Guided by Mary Magdalene (Into the Heart Creations, 2014), Kirkel offers a striking retelling of Mary Magdalene’s relationship with Jesus, and the two fall in love while training as esoteric magicians. The two practice sex magic, raising their psychic powers to perform miracles like those in the canonical gospels. Kirkel’s Magdalene presents instructions for readers to transform their own sexual relationships in order to wed the divine feminine and masculine in sacramental coitus.
There is no historical evidence that Jesus or Mary Magdalene were married, let alone that they practiced sex magic. Nor do The Gospel of Mary or The Gospel of Philip tell us much about the historical Jesus. The gospels do, however, show that early Christians remembered Jesus and Mary Magdalene in unexpected ways. Through these “lost” gospels—along with The Da Vinci Code and figures such as Schaeberg, Miller, and Kirkel—readers can reimagine the historical Mary Magdalene in ways that transform twenty-first-century Christian belief and practice.