Not one woman was to be seen or heard on the papal platform. Week beginning Saturday, November 6th, Week beginning Saturday, October 23rd, Saturday, October 16th, Please update your payment details to keep enjoying your Irish Times subscription. Soline Humbert.
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You should receive instructions for resetting your password. The misery of self-accusation, known in one way or another to every human being, finds release in a figure whose abject penitence is the condition of recovery.
That she is sorry for having led the willful life of a sex object makes her only more compelling as what might be called a repentance object. So the invention of the character of Mary Magdalene as repentant prostitute can be seen as having come about because of pressures inhering in the narrative form and in the primordial urge to give expression to the inevitable tensions of sexual restlessness.
The main factor in that transformation was, in fact, the manipulation of her image by those very men. The mutation took a long time to accomplish—fully the first years of the Christian era. Again, it helps to have a chronology in mind, with a focus on the place of women in the Jesus movement. Phase one is the time of Jesus himself, and there is every reason to believe that, according to his teaching and in his circle, women were uniquely empowered as fully equal. In phase two, when the norms and assumptions of the Jesus community were being written down, the equality of women is reflected in the letters of St.
Paul c. But in the books of the New Testament, the argument among Christians over the place of women in the community is implicit; it becomes quite explicit in other sacred texts of that early period. Here, it is useful to recall not only how the New Testament texts were composed, but also how they were selected as a sacred literature.
The popular assumption is that the Epistles of Paul and James and the four Gospels, together with the Acts of the Apostles and the Book of Revelation, were pretty much what the early Christian community had by way of foundational writings.
The explosive spread of the Good News of Jesus around the Mediterranean world meant that distinct Christian communities were springing up all over the place. There was a lively diversity of belief and practice, which was reflected in the oral traditions and, later, texts those communities drew on. It was not until the fourth century that the list of canonized books we now know as the New Testament was established. At the same time, and more subtly, the church was on the way toward understanding itself in opposition to women.
This was a matter partly of theological dispute—If Jesus was divine, in what way? But there was also an expressly philosophical inquiry at work, as Christians, like their pagan contemporaries, sought to define the relationship between spirit and matter. Among Christians, that argument would soon enough focus on sexuality—and its battleground would be the existential tension between male and female.
As the sacred books were canonized, which texts were excluded, and why? It reappeared in , when a well-preserved, if incomplete, fifth-century copy of a document dating to the second century showed up for sale in Cairo; eventually, other fragments of this text were found. Only slowly through the 20th century did scholars appreciate what the rediscovered Gospel revealed, a process that culminated with the publication in of The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle by Karen L.
Although Jesus rejected male dominance, as symbolized in his commissioning of Mary Magdalene to spread word of the Resurrection, male dominance gradually made a powerful comeback within the Jesus movement.
But for that to happen, the commissioning of Mary Magdalene had to be reinvented. One sees that very thing under way in the Gospel of Mary. Here, he defers to her:.
Mary recalls her vision, a kind of esoteric description of the ascent of the soul. The disciples Peter and Andrew are disturbed—not by what she says, but by how she knows it. That was the question not only about Mary Magdalene, but about women generally. Simultaneously, the emphasis on sexuality as the root of all evil served to subordinate all women.
This was most efficiently done by reducing them to their sexuality, even as sexuality itself was reduced to the realm of temptation, the source of human unworthiness. All of this—from the sexualizing of Mary Magdalene, to the emphatic veneration of the virginity of Mary, the mother of Jesus, to the embrace of celibacy as a clerical ideal, to the marginalizing of female devotion, to the recasting of piety as self-denial, particularly through penitential cults—came to a kind of defining climax at the end of the sixth century.
It was then that all the philosophical, theological and ecclesiastical impulses curved back to Scripture, seeking an ultimate imprimatur for what by then was a firm cultural prejudice.
It was then that the rails along which the church—and the Western imagination—would run were set. Pope Gregory I c. It was a time of plague, and indeed the previous pope, Pelagius II, had died of it. When the saintly Gregory was elected to succeed him, he at once emphasized penitential forms of worship as a way of warding off the disease.
His pontificate marked a solidifying of discipline and thought, a time of reform and invention both. The movie, which came out in the U. The significance of her seat lies instead in Mary Magdalene taking the prized position above any of the twelve male apostles, as Peter Chiwetel Ejiofor looks on in jealousy.
Mary describes to the other apostles a vision she has had of Jesus following his death. Peter grows hostile, asking why Jesus would especially grant Mary — a woman — a vision.
The disciples are waiting for Jesus to overthrow the Romans and create a new kingdom, one without death or suffering. Who are the Nicolaitans in Revelation? Who Was Deborah in the Bible? Who Was Moses in the Bible? Who Was Jezebel in the Bible? Who Was the Prodigal Son? Share this. Who Was Mary Magdalene? And she likely awaited the descent of the Holy Spirit after Jesus ascended Acts False Stereotypes about Mary Magdalene Western Christianity has assigned roles to Mary Magdalene which the historical person did not seem to fulfill.
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