In my last post I talked a bit about the relationship of / competition between Peter and Mary in early Christian traditions. Peter, of course, has traditionally been seen as the “rock” on which Christ built his church, the very foundation of Christianity (Matt. 16:18 – “You are Peter (Greek: petros) and upon this rock (Greek: petra) I will build my church.”). And indeed, according to 1 Cor. 15: 3-5, Peter was the first to see the resurrected Jesus (and realize he had been raised from the dead), and that is the very beginning of Christianity.
But what if the Gospels are right, that Mary actually was the first. Wouldn’t it make better sense, then, to say that Mary started Christianity?
Here is how I talk about the matter in my book Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene:
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There is no doubt that Peter became dominant as the leader of the church early in the Christian movement, and Mary receded into the background. We have scores of passages that talk about Peter, his involvement with Jesus during his life, and his leadership of the church after his death. And
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Prof. Is it not likely Mary M was tapped to first see the risen Jesus because (it must have been known that) the male disciples had turned tail and run back to the Galilee. Since it may have been known only the women stayed, one of them had to be the first to see him in order to go to Galilee and tell Peter. I think this fits despite the likelihood Jesus hung on the cross until mutilated and dumped in a mass grave.
Prof. Is it not likely Mary M was tapped to first see the risen Jesus because (it must have been known that) the male disciples had turned tail and run back to the Galilee. Since it may have been known only the women stayed, one of them had to be the first to see him in order to go to Galilee and tell Peter. I think this fits despite the likelihood Jesus hung on the cross until mutilated and dumped in a mass grave.
Yes, in Matthew that makes sense, since the Gospel indicates they fled town. In Mark, the earlier Gospel, it seems to be assume they were still around for the women to tell.
“And after Jesus’ death he became the head of the church in Jerusalem…”
Wasn’t James the head of the Jerusalem church?
It started with Peter (at least in Acts), and James came on later, possibly after Peter hit the mission field.
I’m okay with Barbara Hershey being the Founder of Christianity.
Best Mary Magdalene on the big screen, by a wide margin. And LOVE those tatoos…
Or was it Mary Magdelene who was first to have a vision of seeing the resurrected Jesus? She planted this idea and eventually some of the apostles like Peter also claimed they had a vision too..the vision was later misinterpreted as seeing the bodily Jesus and with that came the empty tomb. In this scenario, it was Mary Magdelene who “invented” the concept of Christianity…just throwing out some thoughts.
Yes, I think that’s entirely possible. But Peter may have been first. hard to say.
I was thinking the same thing. Maybe Mary Magdelene was the first to have a vision of Jesus. Jesus’ disciples would have rejected her claim because they were Jesus’ closest disciples duh of course Jesus would have appeared to them first. Due to the subordinate position of women, the Mary Magdelene vision story went dormant which is why Paul didn’t report it (1 Corinthians 15:3-8). It was then resurrected by the gospel writers who later came across it. I have heard the argument that women being the first to show up at Jesus’ tomb was the most plausible scenario. But that scenario could have involved Mary not finding the body and reporting this back to the disciples who then were the first to see Jesus thus maintaining the male disciples’ primacy. But that wasn’t the story which supports the idea that Mary Magdelene had the first vision of Jesus.
Thanks, mr. Ehrman!
I have come to think that the role of the women after the crucifixion of Jesus was very small. The death of Jesus must have been a chock to all the disciples, but especially hard for the women, given that they were so vulnerable.
So my guess is, that the women just disappeared from the scene, to save themselves. When the remaining men gathered, and later tried to make up stories of the death and resurrection of Jesus, there was nothing to tell. No one could give any accounts of what had happened, so the first oral history and the earliest writers (Mark and Matthew) made up stories wherein the (non-present) women (and Joseph of Arimathea, who no one had heard of anyway) played significant parts. In this way, the (male) followers of Jesus didn’t have to lie about their whereabouts, and the eye-witness testimonies were handed over to people who weren’t there to defend themselves.
Later, the male disciples were added to the resurrection story by Luke and John.
” if storytellers were to make up, or at least to modify, the stories of Christianity’s beginnings, would they invent the story that it was a woman who started it?
Maybe it actually was Mary who found the tomb empty on the third day and who proclaimed that Jesus was raised from the dead.”
If Jesus was not given a burial and therefore not placed in a tomb, then this entire story is made up and invented, correct?
It is interesting that an invented story has a woman being the first one to proclaimed that Jesus was raised from the dead.
Hi Bart,
Gospel passages that once confused me, now seem to make sense through separationist Christology. In John 21:12, the disciples hesitate to ask Jesus who he is. Mary mistakes him for a gardener, and the Emmaus disciples fail to recognize him.
Could these passages preserve traces of early separationist Christology, or am I reading later theology into the texts?
I’d say that John clearly pushes an incarnation Christology; but I’d also say that an adoptionist view is very much possible with Mark.
Interesting, what would you say is the most likely explanation for John 21:12 ?
Looks like tradition of doubt is in John ( touch my hands) ,almost like a reassurance of some kind, which is odd if he physically resurrected and was standing in front of them.
It appears to be a story meant to show that Jesus was not appearing to the disciples as a ghost, and that it was not a case of mistaken identity. It was really Jesus and his body itself had been raised from the dead. Why they thought otherwise, I agree, is a bit curious, but I suppose many people who see a loved one appear to them after they died assume that the body itself is still in its grave.
But if there was no tomb burial for Jesus (the Romans threw his body into a common pit) then how is it that anybody found an empty tomb, including Mary Magdalene? If Mary Magdalene found an empty tomb, then perhaps she stole the body. In 1Cor15 Paul seems to be teaching what the Jerusalem church was teaching: none of the women in the caravan of Jesus followers had a resurrection appearance.
The first mention of Mary Magdalene seeing the resurrected Jesus is in Matthew’s gospel ( 85CE = 55 years later ) and it’s just a quick encounter to reinforce the message Mary received from the man in the tomb. It looks like Matthew, using Mark, just made that up to have a second witness for the message from the man in the tomb. So, the idea of Mary Magdalene seeing the resurrected Jesus seems to be a late development within Christian storytelling. And, perhaps, Matthew started that late development.
That leaves only the very late and unreliable John’s gospel. In light of all this, the idea that Mary Magdalene had seen the risen Jesus is very poorly attested. She’s near the tomb in Mark, that’s what started it.
The idea is that they didn’t find an empty tomb. My view is that Jesus was crucified. Left on the cross for days. His remains were disposed of somehow. Soon after some of the disciples believed they saw him alive again. They assumed he had been physically raised (since they were apocalypticists who did not believe the spirit lived on after the body. Life after death is in the body). There emerged stories then that helped establish this “truth” — the tomb was discovered empty. That story itself would have been early — before Mark at least. You’re right, the detailed resurrection appearance stories would have been later.
Bart,
I think I recall that I read somewhere in one of your books or blog entries that you believed it is most likely that the corpse of Jesus was never buried and instead remained on the cross. The disciples and others who had traveled with the entourage to Jerusalem headed back to Galilee, probably early the next morning. The authors of the Gospels had zero information concerning what happened at the crucifixion and the week-plus afterwards, but there early written accounts of about the disciples and others reporting seeing the spiritual body of Jesus looking very similar to his pre-crucifixion appearance. The Gospel authors each wrote what they thought had happened during these appearances. There also were accidental and deliberate editing during the unknown number of copies produced individually, one at a time, over the next few centuries. Finally, after a few centuries, Christianity was the official Roman Church, which decided on the words that were to appear in the version that was declared to be the Official Scripture of the Christian Church.
Note: I have come to believe what I wrote above, and that the evolving church had created the differing imaginary burial scenes in the four Gospels.
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I wonder whether Mark deliberately draws a literary connection between Peter and Mary Magdalene through their introductions, potentially hinting at a deeper tension between their respective prominence in the early Christianity.
In Mark 1:16, Simon and Andrew are introduced as “Simon and Andrew, the brother of Simon.” Simon is the primary figure, and secondary figure Andrew is identified through familial relationship. Yet just two verses later, Mark introduces James and John more straightforwardly: “James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother.” Why the difference? Mark could’ve written “Simon and Andrew his brother.”
Intriguingly, Mark 15:40–41 introduces Mary Magdalene and another Mary through the same pattern: Mary Magdalene followed by a secondary figure (Mary), identified through familial relations with James and Joses.
Layer 1 (primary figure): Simon/Mary Magdalene
Layer 2 (secondary figure): Andrew/Mary
Layer 3 (familial identifier): the brother of Simon/ the mother of James and Joses.
The structural parallel between these introductions may be coincidental, but perhaps these literary choices preserve traces of competing traditions about authority and the relative prominence of Peter and Mary Magdalene in the early Christian movement. Is this conjecture conspiratorial or do you think there may be something here worth investigating?
I wouldn’t say it’s conspiritorial, no. I would say that any conjecture is worth pursuing. In this case doing so would entail looking in detail at how persons are introduced and differentiated generally in ancient Greek literature, in the New Testament particularly, and in Mark especially. It’s normally thought that since Peter James and John were equally members of the “inner three” the different ways of mentioning them makes good sense.
How do you know as a fact that Mary Magdalene was a Jewish woman? She was a wealthy woman in a town full of eligible Jewish bachelors; not being Jewish could explain her unmarried status. True, she did become a devoted follower of Jesus, but a Gentile woman would not be immune to his message of liberation. And maybe, just maybe, there was also some physical attraction between the two. All of which could well have led to her conversion to Judaism. Often the more radical a change in one’s life, the more fierce the devotion to the new cause. Her Gentile origins can also help explain the hostility of some disciples.
I’m sure all of this is mere speculation. But then again, so is stating as a fact that she was a Jewish woman.
I don’t think it’s speculation to say that a woman who came from a Jewish town, inhabited, so far as we know, by Jewish people who is following a Jewish rabbi was almost certaily Jewish.
“almost certainly”. There you go, you don’t know it as a fact but as a probability.
We also know almost certainly that non-Jews were not prohibited from inhabiting a Jewish town or from following a Jewish rabbi. (Or from falling in love with him, analogous to Netflix series Nobody Wants This.) Your arguments don’t falsify the possibility that she was of gentile origin. Whereas my arguments enhance the chance that she may have been.
I would agree that in the absence of more definitive proof this idea is speculative, but I also think one cannot state “as a fact” that she was Jewish. I guess it’s the age-old conundrum in historiography: when do probabilities morph into unquestionable facts.
All of ancient history is probability. That means that what is more probable is more likely than what is speculated.
I don’t expect anyone to agree with me, but former members of the Essene community started a version of Christianity before the Day of Pentecost when the Galilean contingent (including the Twelve Apostles) arrived in Jerusalem 50 days after Passover. This version of Christianity was the germ nucleus of the ancient Gnostic Christians. They wrote the Gospel of Matthew after being interviewed by Luke for the Gospel of Luke. “John of Patmos” was one of them, and he wrote Revelation. Forgers from this community wrote 2nd Timothy, 1st & 2nd Thessalonians, 2nd Peter and Jude. They fabricated the Bethlehem Nativity, the Immaculate Conception, the Virgin Birth, the Wrath of Herod, the Slaughter of the Innocents, the Flight into the Egypt, the Magi, the Shepherds in the Hills, walking on the water, and the teaching of the Return of Jesus. They reported on the midday darkness and the empty tomb. They witnessed the midday darkness. The midday darkness, the miracle at Lazarus’ tomb, the crippled beggar who was healed, the empty tomb: they were convinced that Jesus of Nazareth was sent from Heaven. Whose Heaven? Zoroaster’s Heaven. The heaven of the Essenes and the Therapeutae. Hence, the presence of the Magi.
Is it not true that the Romans used crucifixion as a brief punishment as well as lethal one? That some people were taken down after a few hours? I find this really interesting, as it would be a terrible experience and somebody might have needed to look after Jesus’ recovery before he sensibly got out of Dodge. There is a great play by Howard Brenton called Paul, worth reading.
No, that’s not true. Their normal procedure was to leave the bodies hanging for days after death.