Adelphiasophism
Christianity and the Women in the Gospels: Mary Magdalene and the Virgin
Abstract
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Sunday, March 07, 1999
Women and Christianity
Upon the altar of every faith, woman has been the sacrifice.
Men have always run Christianity while women have been their congregations. Patriarchal religion was invented to catch women. The priest is the spider and woman the fly. The Christian religion is a religion for women. Its songs were written for women to sing. Its angels are all masculine, yet, if people go to heaven in proportion to going to church, most of the people there must be women.
The God of Christianity is a father, its saviour is a son, a young man cruelly tortured, an image, like Tammuz, fashioned for women to grieve over and worship. The emotional appeal of a son hung on a cross is aimed purely at the caring maternal aspect of women. It is the perfect male scam to get women as their slaves. It also enslaves men with its empty promise of eternal life but women are doubly captured. Christian bishops call, “Hosannah”, meaning “Save Us” or “Free Us,” but enslave us all.
The Christian church of today, as it was at the beginning, is a church of women. The foundation of every Christian church is women, the cleaners of the church vestry are women, and the fundraisers of every Christian minister are women. It is the woman who is caught in the religious toils, the woman who is the slave of God. She is rarely the priest or the bishop. She is their victim. But she is a better Christian.
The Anglicans have, of course, recently admitted women as priests, much to the annoyance of the world’s Catholic priests and the disappearance over the horizon of the Christian ecumenical dream.
The response of Cardinal Basil Hume, until his death the leader of Britain’s Catholics, was to ask progressives in the Christian Churches to consider whether God would want to empower women to transubstantiate bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. The worthy Cardinal plainly believed that, in the Catholic Mass, the bread and wine really do change when a male priest calls upon God to make it, but doubted that they will at the call of a women. Women do not have whatever it takes to act as a priest in a Christian church. Women are self-evidently created below and inferior to men—at least when it comes to bogus miracles in front of altars to patriarchal gods.
Essene Prudery
Christianity was disastrous for women. After being subjected by the patriarchs for a couple of millennia, women were just beginning to retrieve some semblance of respect and independence in post-Republican Rome. The Romans had not trusted powerful women like Cleopatra in the last century BC but Livia, wife of Augustus, set a precedent of a powerful and influential woman and for the next three hundred years the position of women in Roman society gradually improved.
Then the Christians took control. Christianity was based on the monastic rules of the Essene sect of Judaism. The Essenes at core were monks who despised women as unclean and detractors of men from holy things. We read in the gospels:
If thy hand offend thee, cut it off; if thy foot offend thee, cut it off; if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, (Mk 9:43-49).
It is purely Essenic, referring to sins of sexuality (masturbation, coitus [a foot is a euphemism for a penis] and merely looking lustfully) and exactly illustrates the anti-sexuality on which Christianity was built.
Essenes saw themselves as holy warriors who would be less pure and therefore less worthy of the coming battle on the side of the heavenly hosts, if they participated in sexuality. The Jewish religion was, in any case, prudish—they abhorred nakedness and hated the Greeks for introducing gymnasia where youthful Jews could become Hellenised by exercising naked like Greek youth and listening to Greek philosophy explained. Essenes were more extreme than the Pharisees and took their prudishness further. Of course, some Essenes did marry but they too had their relationships carefully regulated.
Paul, the Apostle, took the Essenic outlook away from Judaism into the Roman Empire as Christianity and took the negative view of sexuality with him. He preached to the gentiles that their women should remain chaste and infuriated the men who had planned to marry, and whose woman then refused marriage on the grounds of sin, having heard Paul. This was perhaps the main reason why Paul was hounded according to the New Testament. There are always troubled and impressionable young people, just as there still are, and they will follow some charismatic leader. The leaders of Christian sects have behaved thus ever since with awful results for some.
So, the result of the growth of Christianity was the curtailment of women’s freedom and the turning of the most natural and pleasurable of all behaviours into a crime. In 415 AD, a mob of Christian louts, monks of Alexandria, dragged Hypatia from her coach, stripped her, murdered her, tore her limb from limb and even stripped the flesh from her bones with sharp tiles or seashells. She was a famous philosopher and the only well-known female mathematician of antiquity but she was a Pagan and, of course, a woman. The bishop of Alexandria liked neither, especially as she was a lot more popular than he and the Christian church was. This murderer was canonised for his zeal!
We know what has happened since. It took about 1500 more years before women started to move back to where they had been when Hypatia was murdered. No one can claim that Christianity has been of any benefit to women unless they have the Christian view that women are merely cleaners and procreating machines.
What of the women who appear in the gospels? All are put there simply as sops to the first gentile members of the Christian faith—Roman housewives. Many women had been happy to join the Jewish religion, some as full converts but many as Godfearers, people close to Judaism in the synagogues without actually converting. Men were not inclined to have anything to do with Judaism except as Godfearers. To be a Jew, the men had to be circumcised and most were not willing. It seemed a pointless, barbaric and dangerous operation. So, when Paul and the first gentile missionaries went out into the Empire to get converts, these Godfearers were the first to join. Mostly they were women who, not having anything to fear from circumcision, had associated themselves with Judaism.
Yet, the story of Jesus was entirely a male story. So, the gentile bishops introduced Mary, his mother, and the curious figure of Mary Magdalene to represent the poles of femininity—the mother and the harlot. Luke added many more women but all were of incidental interest, though intended to flatter women that they understood, when the male apostles were still stupid.
The Virgin Mary
Even Christian bishop, John Shelby Spong, rejects the virgin birth, and throws out the whole of Luke’s birth stories from the barrenness of Elizabeth to the rude little monster staying behind in the temple. Jesus was simply born at Nazareth. Even that is not true!
Bishop Spong is far more honest a Christian than most—more honest than fundamentalist Christians who he habitually scourges with disdain as literal believers in the bible. He boldly declares that those who elevate a book to the height of a god are idolaters. Spong is also a vigorous defender of those castigated in the Christian bible—women and gay men—and considered fair game by the godliest Christians.
He puzzles about the expression in Luke’s genealogy, “as was supposed” when it identifies Joseph as the father of Jesus. Christians naturally say that this is because Jesus was really God’s son. Spong thinks it hints at a prosaic truth quite unacceptable to literal Christians—Jesus was illegitimate. Joseph was not his father, whence the “as was supposed".
The Jewish followers of Jesus knew this and from them the rumour spread to the gentile converts of the new religion who invented the virgin birth to disguise it. Greeks were familiar from their old legends with gods taking a fancy to mortals and they used the idea as a way of accounting for remarkably gifted men and women. Gentile converts therefore accepted what his Jewish followers would never have condoned.
Was Mary also then doing what comes naturally? That is going too far even for the liberal Spong. He has to acquit Mary of any suggestion of rumpy-pumpy. She was raped. She was an innocent virgin who was cruelly raped and so was remembered as Mary, the virgin. Spong rejects the virgin birth story, then re-admits it in a rationalised form.
Jesus could indeed have been illegitimate. The balance of the evidence favours the idea. But Jospeph is an invention. Mary had no such kind husband or guardian. She put her illegitimate baby immediately under the care of God. She consecrated the child to God as a Nazirite from birth and placed him in the care of the Essenes. Since she too was an outcast, whether a victim of rape or not (the Jewish attitude to rape victims at that time was not kind, as Spong supposes) she too will have put herself at the disposal of the sect. Mary will have beome an Essene. It is well known that the Essenes did precisely this, as the classic writers tell us. That is how they primarily kept up their numbers, since the senior men were all celibate holy men.
Despite demolishing the myth of the virgin birth, Spong asures us he would not remove from the creeds…
…he was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary…
even though it is not historically true. His explanation is that we cannot rewrite history. Since he claims the virgin birth was not history, the history he means is that Christians have believed the fiction. Because they have, the creed has to be kept as it is! Surely this is having your cake and eating it. Even liberal Christians are dishonest. They would rather be liars than freely declare these myths as simply “myths”.
Mary Magdalene
The whole Christian legend of the Magdalene arose after the gospel of Mark was written. It is a patriarchal view of the dark side of female nature, to contrast with the honourable side of motherhood represented by the other Mary.
The virtuous woman had to be a virgin because women induced men to the evil of lust through their sexual power, their dark side, in multiplying the seed of Adam. Woman had inherited the sins of Eve but a god’s mother had to be the perpetual virgin to be free of them. Sexual intercourse was necessary for procreation but the evil that it represented was the woman’s fault. Every woman was to feel guilty for behaving naturally and indeed doing what this same God in the Jewish scriptures had ordered—to multiply.
That gruesome monster the Catholic Church wanted it all ways. It wanted as many Catholic children as it could get while making women feel perpetually guilty about it. As Spong puts it “marriage was a compromise with sin". From the time of Paul on it was considered holier to desist from sexuality.
Mother Mary became the model of holiness to which all women should aspire and the Magdalene was depicted as one who could be saved even from the beastliest of sexual depravity. Yet, a virgin mother is an absurdity which rational people would reject. Only Christians can twist reality sufficiently for them to accept it.
Spong puzzles over the roles of the Marys, saying that only wives, mothers and prostitutes would follow a band of men around at that time. Perhaps so, but Spong knows nothing about how the Essenes treated or regarded the women in their ranks. Many, perhaps most Essenes, were village Essenes, people who lived a normal life in many ways though held to stricter doctrines and codes even than most Jews of their time. They must have seemed like the Amish of modern day America, and indeed the Amish are trying to do exactly what the Essenes were trying to do—remain righteous in a world full of temptations.
Village Essenes had wives and mothers. If most of Jesus’s followers, the Nazarenes, were converts to the religion of the village Essenes, then the band accompanying Jesus would have been just as the gospels describe. Jesus was unlikely to have been a village Essene himself. He was an Essene leader, brought up as a celibate monk so as not to taint his holiness before God in advance of the miracle that would start God’s kingdom. The Essenes were extreme patriarchs who regarded women as seductresses intent on deflecting men from the path of holiness. They were necessary for the reproduction of the human race and little more.
Spong says Mary Magdalene was given “the most prominent position ”when she appears in the gospels. Yet, a Mary qualified as “Magdalene” appears in only six independent passages in the four gospels. In the earliest and least edited gospel, Mark’s, she does not explicitly appear until verse 15:40 and then she appears at 15:47, 16:1 and 16:9. Verse 16:9 is a spurious addition as all scholars agree and 15:40 and 15:47 look like insertions based on 16:1 to explain how the women knew where the tomb was.
In 15:40, 15:47 and 16:1, both Marys are mentioned but, oddly, the Mary presumed to be Jesus’s mother is named as the mother of James and Joses. And even this James is apparently not the brother of Jesus but is James the Less, another James because James, the brother of Jesus was called James the Just. Why is this Mary not described as the mother of Jesus, the main man in the drama? The inference has to be that this Mary is “not” the mother of Jesus.
In Mark, Mary Magdalene has no special role, contrary to Spong’s assertion, because, in the places she appears, she appears alongside this other Mary. Spong says she is special because she is named first of the two, showing she was the more important. Spong takes this to show that she was the wife of Jesus, who was not a celibate.
In fact, if the other Mary is not the mother of Jesus, what the order of precedence must signify is that “Mary Magdalene” was the mother of Jesus herself. So the passages say that Jesus’s mother was there and also the mother of James the less and Joses, who begin to sound like two other prominent Nazarenes who were crucified at the same time.
Mary Magdalene is so called, according to Christian commentators, because she came from Magdala, supposedly a town in Galilee. But the name Magdala appears only in the “Authorised Version” of Matthew. In the “Revised Version” it is rendered Magadan and in Mark it is Dalmanutha.
The truth is that Magdalene was not a reference to a place but it was an Essene title. The Essenes were known as “Watchers” because they watched for the kingdom of God, and Magdal refers to a “watchtower.” The Essene settlement at Qumran excavated in the 1950s has a watchtower. Why Mary had this title, we do not know. It seems an honorific title and we can speculate that she had some special relationship with the Nazarene leader—in this case Jesus—perhaps as his real mother, or more likely some ceremonial position as a ritual mother related to his rebirth at the age of 30. So, the only woman in the gospels likely to be significant is probably some sort of priestess, or a woman in a ritual role.
A Wedding at Cana
If the position were a ritual one, we also have an explanation of the role of Mary, the mother, at the wedding at Cana.
Spong speculates that Jesus was married and that the marriage at Cana, which appears in John’s gospel only, is Jesus’s own. There is not much in the bible to uphold such an idea, so it is more speculative than most.
Spong claims that only the mother of the bridegroom, the hostess of the wedding, would be featured as being concerned that the wine had run out at the reception. He and others never explain why the wedding should have been so badly planned that there was insufficient wine in the first place. Were the guests all drunkards? If so what is God doing facilitating drunkenness with a miracle? If there were a lot of gatecrashers, can we believe it any more likely that God would gratuitously provide excess wine for these people? The quantity of wine produced in the miracle is vast, as any commentator will admit.
Now, Spong claims to study the bible every morning from 5.00 am when he rises to 7.30 am. Despite all this studying, he still cannot seem to understand some quite evident truths. The reason is that Spong does not see Jesus as an Essene. Christians cannot concede this because it would show that Christianity was not revealed but evolved from an earlier sect.
Jesus, like any leading Essene, did not relate to women and women hardly appear in the first gospel written, that of Mark. What then was the marriage at Cana? The truth is that the wedding at Cana was a ritual wedding completed by a messianic meal for which water was blessed and ritually turned into new wine for the ritual feast—the precursor of the Eucharist. The occasion will have been one like the feeding of the 4000 or 5000, when most able-bodied converts to the Essenian branch of Judaism would have been present.
The evidence from the gospels is that the Essenes celebrated a ritual marriage of God and Israel. This is not hard to realise once the Christian lie is discarded that the bridegroom is Jesus and the bride his virginal followers, the Christians. Like the purloining of the Jewish scriptures the Christians have here pinched the Essene original and twisted it their own way. The Jewish scriptures are clear that God is the bridegroom and that his wedding is to the Chosen People and their land. It is quite explicit in Hosea.
For the Essenes, and indeed any nationalistic Jew at the time, this ritual wedding was an important assertion of their independence from their conquerors, the Romans. Indeed, the Romans were personified as the ravager of Israel, God’s betrothed. Raped maidens were condemned to die. This is the meaning of the raising of Jair’s daughter. Israel is saved from death so that she can complete her marriage to her groom, God, a vivid assertion of defiance of the Romans. The marriage at Cana, then was the ritual completion of the ceremony.
What of the wine? The Essenes also had a ritual meal, the precursor of the Christian Eucharist. It purported to be a rehearsal of the messianic meal that the saints would enjoy with the Messiah in the kingdom of God. All solemn occasions ended with this meal which was, like the Eucharist, a token rather than a gusty meal. The idea was spiritual fulfilment just as it is for Christians today, not for them to fill their bellies.
Now Essenes were also Nazirites and according to scripture were not allowed to drink alcoholic drinks, including anything from the vine. Even grapes were strictly not allowed, but the same scriptures describe the messianic meal and the saints are drinking… wine! The Essenes rationalised this by bending the law to allow them to drink “new wine"—unfermented grape juice. However, unfermented grape juice could not be kept long without fermenting, so new wine could only be drunk at special times soon after the grape harvest.
What then was new wine during the rest of the year? Water! Effectively, “new wine” was an Essene euphemism for water except immediately after the grape harvest. And by the time of Jesus, even that might have been dropped, so that new wine “was” water! This explains the miracle at Cana. The Essenes wanted new wine for solemn occasions like a ritual wedding—followed as it naturally was by a ritual feast, the messianic meal. To convert amphoræ of ordinary water to ritual water alias “new wine” required a blessing ceremony. That was the miracle carried out by Jesus. He ritually converted water into ceremonial water called “new wine” for use in the messianic banquet to follow. If Mother Mary’s part in this was not a Christian invention, she had some ceremonial role in the ritual.
Thumb through your bible a few more times, Christians, and you will see that this all makes more sense than Jesus going around wine bibbing and surreptitiously marrying all over the place. And it gets rid of a few more miracles in a way attuned with those times and the later ways of Christianity.
The Last Supper
Spong expresses his scepticism about much of the bible, by saying the only literal truth in it is that stated in the creed:
He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried.
If these are the criteria by which a Christ is known, there must have been hundreds or thousands of Christs around at the time. Pilate crucified many Jews. Even in the gospels, two others are mentioned. Is Spong sure he has the right man that died under Pontius Pilate? Perhaps Christianity has been such an abject failure in terms of providing its followers with peace on earth and joy because they are following the wrong crucified man.
Jesus and his sect, the Essenes, apparently celebrated some sort of Eucharist before Christians invented the romance of the Last Supper. Jesus was a Jew and his own beliefs and teaching were undilutedly Jewish. He cannot have said: “This is my body and this is my blood”, then expected Jews to consume his offering, echoing cannibalism.
Human sacrifice was a feature of certain primitive societies. The victim who represented the god was ritually eaten so that his divine powers would enter his worshippers who would then achieve communion with the god and become divine themselves—immortal. The social move from human sacrifice to animal sacrifice appears in the bible as the story of Abraham and Isaac where the sacrifice, Isaac, is replaced by a lamb. In other societies bread and wine sufficed and eventually it did everywhere—and was adopted by the Essenes and ultimately Christianity.
The idea of eating the body and drinking the blood of a god was common in the Roman Empire and the Middle East at the time of the birth of Christianity. Mithraism involved the sacrifice of a bull, identified with the god himself, and it seems that the initiates would have eaten the animal. They evidently bathed in its blood at some stage, as did the initiates of the Great Mother, Cybele. Initiates into the religion of Dionysos ate raw flesh in the ritual of omophagia, but the Orphists thereafter became lifetime vegetarians.
Symbolically eating a god, god procreating with humans to yield a human son of God, a dying and resurrected god and a virgin birth are quite non-Jewish ideas. The Last Supper was originally the messianic meal of the Essenes, but the Pagan converts to the new religion soon saw it as a Pagan communion and called it that. Christianity took Pagan ideas in its formative years then claimed they were its own. Christians coyly speak of cultural “borrowing,” and even then strenuously deny it, but they mean cultural stealing. When are they going to return what they have “borrowed?”
In the rituals of Dionysos who was associated with the Mother Goddess, Demeter, the initiates drank wine, the nectar that requires the death of the fruit for its harvest and fermentation. A bull or a goat kid represented the body of the god. The description of Jesus as the true vine in John 15:1 is aimed at showing Jesus as superior to Dionysos—only Jesus is “true.”
In the rituals of Dionysos, a phallus might have been required to resurrect the god each year, an echo of the false phallus used by Isis to give birth to Horus, the son of the God, Osiris. Christians like to point this out as a major difference between Dionysos worship and Christianity. Yet use of a phallus is not certain and second, the cross in Christianity is a phallic symbol, as the Pagans of the Roman Empire will have known. Today Christians have deliberately forgotten it because it is too crude for them.
