Last
year, adventure novelist, Dan Brown, rejuvenated public
interest in several
shadowy characters of history, especially Mary Magdalene.
This to be sure has been a boon for the scholars who have
been writing about and discussing Mary Magdalene for the
last generation. One such scholar is Karen King of Harvard.
King’s latest book, The Gospel of Mary
of Magdala, offers wonderful insights into the nature
and culture of early Christianity. (She does, however, stop
short of
offering theories about the sex life of the Messiah.) King’s
work, with all the attention it’s deservedly getting,
could have a transformative effect on the adventure we call
church.
One reason
the Indiana Jones movies are so popular is because each
of them deals with the excitement and intrigue of finding
a priceless treasure. In The Gospel of Mary of Magdala, King
shares with her readers the thrill that comes from finding
a real-life buried treasure. For the last twenty-five years,
King has been studying a fragment of a Gospel that had been
lost since the fifth century. Called the “The Gospel
of Mary,” it is the first known Gospel attributed to
a woman author. Moreover, this Gospel advocates that leaders
be chosen without regard to gender. The existence of such
unconventional ideas in Gospel writings has the potential
to change the nature of the Church’s gender debate,
and even enlarge our notion of what it means to be a Christian.
Certainly, The
Gospel of Mary of Magdala is not your typical
beach read. Like most scholarly books, it has voluminous
end notes, follows closely argued points, and sometimes looses
sight of its main character. Patient readers, however, will
be rewarded with new understanding of how scholars are able
to deduce facts about ancient texts, and as a sidelight,
overhear some of the current controversies among biblical
scholars.
One issue
that stirs King’s passion is the misuse
of the term “Gnostic.” While the word is simply
the Greek term for knowledge or knowing, its use becomes
pejorative when describing writings that are seen as deliberately
unorthodox. King argues convincingly that in the early church
there was a continuum stretching from those who held a strictly
Judaic understanding of a believer’s obligations and
a worldview that was more based on Greek thought. The position
that emerged as orthodox lies somewhere between these two
extremes. King shows that “The Gospel of Mary” was
probably written for a Greek audience. Rather than being deliberately
unorthodox, the author was fulfilling the mandate of Jesus
to preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth. In other words,
it would
be anachronistic to think of such a book as unorthodox because
such distinctions did not exist in those days.
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