I’ve recently completed a short online mini-course from Boston College’s School of Theology & Ministry on Mary Magdalene. The idea was to “Explore the imagery of St. Mary of Magdala, her role as Apostle to the Apostles and the impact of her life on the ministry of women in the Church”, according to the course description. Offered at a nominal fee, I thought it looked like a nice opportunity to focus on a small but important part of the gospel story over the last few weeks of summer, and maybe help get my head out of the incessant political morass that always seems to intrude upon my field of thought. If only.
I quickly discovered that there is established, prevailing feminist dogma concerning the saint and the history of her story’s interpretation. The course utilized several related resources from BC’s seminar archives, but I also obtained about a half dozen other book-length resources from my public library network, and googled several other presentations. The sameness of the framework story encountered in each of these writers/presenters was uncanny to the point of being somewhat creepy. Here was I, embarking on what I thought was going to be a gospel character study, and what I encountered was a studied recitation of “narrative” talking points that reminded me of nothing so much as the world of political “news” I was naively trying to find a mental haven from.
The gist of the Accepted Narrative (TM) is that Mary was an Uber-apostle whom Jesus loved more than any of the men, and to whom special knowledge had been personally conveyed (this latter idea in particular is taken from the fairly recently discovered fragments of the “Gospel of Mary Magdalene”, a gnostic religious text dating likely from the 2nd century). However, men being “the patriarchy”, her memory was diminished until Pope Gregory the Great committed the great crime of “conflation” in a homily he gave in Rome in 592, which allegedly launched a more or less systemic debasement of her memory which eventually saw her viewed popularly as a prostitute and floozy, until modern times when dramatic works like Jesus Christ Superstar and The DaVinci Code had turned her into Jesus’ lover and/or wife. The “conflation” of which Gregory is held guilty is his identification of Mary with both Mary the sister of Martha and Lazarus in Bethany, and (being the greater part of the crime) with the “sinful woman” in Luke 7:36ff who washed the feet of Jesus with her tears in the house of Simon the Pharisee.
It’s easy to be sympathetic to the feminists’ project of rehabilitating Mary Magdalene’s reputation. There’s no question that her persona has been appropriated as a vehicle to express the tawdry fantasies of many an artist since the Renaissance – and undoubtedly many preachers as well. It’s also realistic to assume that, had it not been associated with the literary characters the gospels depict as having anointed Jesus’ feet (or head), her name would not have been used to personify the sexual deviance inferred by the many interpreters in the character of Luke’s “woman of the city, who was a sinner”. However, the prescribed feminist critique of the religious history gets it wrong in almost every conceivable way, and then hypocritically proceeds to appropriate the persona of Mary Magdalene as a symbol of the modern project of self-importance, self-glorification, and tribalistic grievance husbandry. These criticisms warrant explication, but that will have to wait for another day.
The course itself presented its own challenges to my serenity. It involved a totally asynchronous, discussion-based forum, in which four pre-defined questions served as the basis for discussion in each of the course’s three weeks (plus a couple introductory questions). The questions themselves related to several videos or transcripts of presentations shared over the years at annual seminars on Mary Magdalene held at BC, which served as the course materials.
There were thirty students enrolled, plus a course facilitator: five men, and twenty-five + one women. Six of the women appear not to have participated, so the question responses and subsequent discussions were provided by nineteen women enrollees, five men, plus the female facilitator – who contributed close to 30% of the over eight hundred entries. As is typical, the conversation was dominated by a few voices. In this case, three women accounted for 42% (=250) of the enrollee entries. Combined with the facilitator, the four contributed almost 60% of the total entries. At twenty-two entries, I was the most frequently engaged from among the men, but in both confronting the questions and wading through the responses, I felt like a stranger in a strange land. The introductory question was: “Who is St. Mary of Magdala to you?”, a harbinger of the subjective, largely self-referential discussion topics to come.
The first thread spun off of that question soon elicited the reply: “Your prompt response is so affirming!” This would be followed soon by another, gushing: “Thank you so much for affirming my experience.” This is not the discourse of grown-ups. Children need their experiences and their attempts at socializing affirmed. Adulthood basically means reaching the point where you no longer depend on others for confirming your life decisions. But these examples were not anomalous. I can’t quite put my finger on a description of the conversational mode, but overall it gave me the same infantilizing feel. Coupled with the self-referential process and the dogmatically uptight constraints upon the content and direction of the course, I have to say it was thoroughly disappointing, even if it has given me some good grist for the study mill.