Justified True Belief

(●) A woman healed in a Galilean fishing town became the first person on record to say she had seen Jesus alive after his execution. + Somebody has to be first. When a piece of news is going to change everything, the person who happens to be standing there when it breaks is rarely the person anyone would have chosen, and that is roughly the situation the four Gospels describe on a Sunday morning outside Jerusalem. The eleven men who had been with Jesus for three years were in hiding, and by that evening they had the doors locked. The one standing in the graveyard was a woman from Magdala whom he had healed, and who had come with burial spices because she assumed there was a body to attend to. That awkwardness is exactly what makes her life bear on the question of whether Christianity is true, and ancient readers noticed it immediately. A second-century critic named Celsus threw it back at the church as a joke, and Christians have been explaining ever since why the joke is actually evidence: a movement inventing a founding story does not hand the crucial testimony to a witness its own culture would discount. Two facts about her are worth holding on to before the story starts. The four Gospels name her twelve times, and in every list of the women but one she stands first, which is how ancient writers signalled who mattered. And nothing in any of them says she was a prostitute. That picture, the loose woman with the long hair and the jar of ointment, comes from a sermon preached in Rome about five and a half centuries later, and the record of her own life is silent about everything before the day Jesus healed her. Her dates are a different kind of silence. No birth year, no death year, and no age at any point is recorded anywhere, which is why her years come with fl. in front of them rather than the usual pair of dates. The abbreviation is short for floruit, Latin for "flourished," and historians reach for it when the birth and death years are simply gone and all that can honestly be given is the span in which a person is known to have been active. Hers runs from the Galilean preaching tour to the resurrection, and the second figure carries the uncertainty of the crucifixion itself, which historians place in either AD 30 or AD 33.

(●) c. 29 AD: Jesus drove seven demons out of her, and she joined the company that travelled with him. + Magdala sat on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, a working town about five miles down the lakeside road from Capernaum, where Jesus had made his base. Its trade was fish: caught in the lake at night, salted and packed on shore, and sold across the region. Excavators working there in 2009 uncovered a synagogue from the first century, so the town Jesus walked into is no longer only a name in a text. That town is also where the second half of her name comes from, because the name is really an address. "Magdalene" is not a family name in our sense but a label meaning "the one from Magdala," and it is how the Gospels tell her apart from the other three or four women called Mary in their pages. Luke introduces her in a single clause: "Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out" (Luke 8:2). That is the whole account of how they met. The Gospels never describe what the affliction looked like from the outside, and a reader who wants a diagnosis will not get one. What the number signals in Israel’s Scriptures is completeness, seven being the full count, so the phrase means something closer to "as bad as that kind of torment gets" than to a tally of separate episodes. Now notice what is missing from her introduction. No father is named, no husband, no children, no age. That blank is easier to see when you set her beside the women listed with her, because each of them is placed either by a man or by nothing at all: Joanna is identified as the wife of Chuza, and Susanna is given no identifier whatsoever. Mary is placed by her town instead. Commentators often take the silence about a husband to mean she was widowed or unmarried and had her own household, and that is a reasonable inference from how she is described rather than something any text states.

(●) c. 29 to 30 AD: She travelled with the mission through Galilee and paid for it out of her own pocket. + An itinerant preacher and a dozen men who have left their work still have to eat. Luke answers the practical question most readers never think to ask, and the answer is that a group of women who had been healed bankrolled the operation: they "provided for them out of their means" (Luke 8:3). Mark says the same thing in fewer words, noting that these women had followed Jesus in Galilee and "ministered to him," and that many other women came up with him to Jerusalem at the end (Mark 15:41). The company she kept on that road is worth a moment. Joanna, listed right after her, was married to Chuza, the man who ran Herod Antipas’ household. Antipas was tetrarch of Galilee and of Perea across the Jordan, a title that literally means ruler of a quarter, since Rome had broken his father’s kingdom into pieces and handed him one of them. So the ruler’s own court was helping to keep on the road a movement whose leader would one day stand in front of that same ruler and be questioned by him (Luke 23:8–11). Whatever Mary’s circumstances had been before Jesus found her, she now had money enough to give away, and she gave it to an unsalaried teacher with no fixed address. This is also the quiet reason she is standing where she is standing three chapters later. She was not a pilgrim who had come to Jerusalem for the festival and stumbled into a public execution the way a stranger stumbles into a traffic accident. She had been with the group since the Galilean tour, and when they travelled down to the city, she travelled with them.

(●) c. 30/33 AD, a Friday: She stayed at the execution after the men had scattered, and then watched where the body was put. + Mark tells us that when Jesus was arrested, "they all left him and fled" (Mark 14:50), and he does not soften it. What he reports next is that a group of women were at the cross, watching from a distance, and he names three of them with Mary Magdalene at the head of the list (Mark 15:40). Matthew gives the same scene with her again at the head of the women he names (Matthew 27:55–56). John, who puts the mother of Jesus first because of what happens between her and her son, still has her there, standing by the cross (John 19:25). Roman crucifixions were public by design and being visibly attached to the condemned was not a safe thing to be, which is part of why the detail is in all four. Then comes a line that looks like housekeeping and is not. Mark records that Mary Magdalene and another Mary "saw where he was laid" (Mark 15:47). Luke says the women who had come from Galilee followed the burial party and "saw the tomb and how his body was laid" (Luke 23:55). The tomb they watched belonged to Joseph of Arimathea. He was a member of the council that had condemned Jesus, though Luke says he had not consented to its decision (Luke 23:51), and he had gone to Pilate, asked for the body, and laid it in a new grave of his own cut into the rock. There were many such graves in that area, cut into the same hillsides and looking much alike, and the Gospels take the trouble to say, twice, that the women watched the door close on this particular one. The reason the writers bother is obvious once you have heard the objection they are answering. If the women went to the wrong grave on Sunday morning, the empty tomb collapses into an honest mistake. The texts had their answer in place before anyone thought to ask: the person who found it empty was the person who had watched it being filled.

(●) c. 30/33 AD, before dawn on Sunday: She came back with spices to finish a burial and found the stone moved. + The burial on Friday had been done at speed, because the Sabbath was starting and the law allowed no work once it did. Luke says the women went home and prepared spices and ointments and then rested (Luke 23:56), and Mark says that when the Sabbath was past they bought spices so that they might go and anoint him (Mark 16:1). Think about what that shopping trip means. Somebody spent money on Saturday evening on a job she expected to do on Sunday morning, and the job was to make a body dead since Friday afternoon bearable to be near. She arrived while it was still dark and saw the stone taken away from the entrance (John 20:1). Her conclusion was the ordinary one. She ran to Peter and to John, the disciple who never names himself in his own Gospel and appears there as the one whom Jesus loved, and said: "They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him" (John 20:2). Not risen. Moved, and by somebody with no right to move him. There is a small snag in that sentence, and it is the kind of thing careful readers have made a great deal of. Read John on his own and Mary is at the tomb by herself, and then out of her mouth comes a "we." He never explains it, and he shows no sign of having noticed. Matthew, Mark and Luke each put other women there with her, which explains it perfectly, and none of them is quoting John. Writers building a story in concert tidy up seams like that. Writers each telling what they know from their own angle leave them lying around.

(●) c. 30/33 AD, that same morning: She stayed by the empty tomb crying, and was the first to see him alive. + Peter and John ran to the tomb, looked in, saw the grave clothes, and went home. Mary stayed. John’s account has her standing outside crying, and then stooping to look into a tomb she already knew was empty, which is exactly what grief does: it keeps checking. Two angels in white asked her why she was weeping and she told them, still working on the theft, that somebody had taken her Lord away. Then she turned around and there was a man, and she did not know him. She took him for the gardener, which is a reasonable guess about a man standing in a burial garden at first light, and she made him an offer that is one of the most human sentences in the New Testament: if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will take him away myself (John 20:15). She had no plan for how a woman on her own would carry a body. She just wanted him back. He said her name, and the whole thing turned over. She answered in Aramaic, the everyday language of Galilee, with a word John stops to translate for his Greek readers: "Rabboni," Teacher. And then, before she had had a minute with him, she was sent off with a message for the men who had run: go to my brothers. What happened when she delivered it is the last thing anyone would invent. They did not believe her. Luke, reporting the women’s news to the apostles, writes that "these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them" (Luke 24:11). "Idle tale" is doing polite work for a blunt Greek word. It is the word for nonsense talk, the kind of raving a man does when the fever is high and nobody in the room writes down a syllable of it. They thought she was out of her mind.

(●) After that Sunday: The New Testament says nothing more about her, and the rest is tradition of various ages. + She is never named again. Acts describes the upper room as holding the eleven, "the women," Mary the mother of Jesus, and his brothers (Acts 1:14), and it is a fair guess that she is among the women, but a guess is all it is. No letter mentions her. No death is recorded. For a figure who became one of the most painted women in European history, the documentary record closes on the morning she is told to go and tell. Everything after that is tradition, and the traditions are of very different ages and very different weight. The oldest is eastern: that she went with the apostle John to Ephesus on the coast of Asia Minor and died there. Its earliest written form is late and very short. Writing in Gaul, the Roman name for what is now France and the lands along its borders, around the 580s, and never having gone east himself, Gregory of Tours gives it one sentence inside his chapter on the apostle John’s tomb at Ephesus: Mary Magdalene rests in that city, with no building over her. He names no source for the notice, and the likeliest way a report about the shrines of Asia Minor reached a bishop in Gaul is the travellers who came home from them. Greek tradition then has her relics carried from Ephesus to Constantinople in the reign of Leo VI, emperor there from 886 to 912, a move the sources date to 886 or to 890. The western story is later still and much more colourful: that she was put out to sea in a boat without oars or sail, landed in Provence in southern France, preached there and spent her last thirty years in a cave. It surfaces in the eleventh century, attached to the abbey of Vézelay in Burgundy and later to Saint-Maximin in Provence, both of which claimed her body, and it is told at full length in the Golden Legend, a collection of saints’ stories compiled around 1260. Later again, and resting on no early source whatever, is the eastern tale that has her standing in front of the emperor Tiberius in Rome with an egg in her hand, announcing that Christ is risen, and the egg turning red as she says it. It is a lovely story and it is not evidence of anything. The honest summary is short. Nobody knows when she died, or where.

What Her Witness Teaches

(T1) She went to the tomb to finish a burial, which means a rising was the last thing she was expecting. + Picture somebody buying flowers on a Saturday evening for a grave they mean to visit in the morning. Whatever else that person is doing, they are not expecting to meet anyone. They are doing the last service you can do for someone who is not coming back, and the purchase itself is the proof of what they believe. That is what the spices are in this story. Mark says the women bought them once the Sabbath was over, and Luke says they had prepared them before it began, and both are describing a plan for a corpse. When Mary found the tomb open, her first thought was grave robbery. When she met the man himself she took him for the groundskeeper. Three separate chances to jump to the conclusion the church would later be accused of inventing, and she took none of them. That matters for one specific reason. The most common natural explanation of the resurrection appearances is that grieving people saw what they longed to see, and an explanation of that shape needs expectation to do the work: a mind already primed for a return is a mind that can supply one. What the texts hand us is the opposite, and they hand it to us in the one witness whose inner state they describe at any length. Her devotion was real, and what it produced on that Saturday evening was a shopping list rather than a vision. Her story does not settle the question by itself, and it was never going to. What it supplies is the raw material, a woman carrying the wrong supplies to the right grave.

(Q) "They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him." + Source: John 20:13 (ESV). Her answer to the two angels sitting where the body had been, and the second time in the chapter she says it: she had already told Peter the same thing in almost the same words (John 20:2). She is standing three feet from the evidence and reading it as a theft.

(T2) She did not recognise him until he said her name. + You can look straight at a face you know and not see it, if you are certain the person is somewhere else. Anyone who has walked past a friend in an unexpected city knows the feeling, and the correction always arrives the same way, by voice. John describes precisely that. She saw Jesus standing there and did not know that it was Jesus. He spoke one word, her own name, and she knew him. Her reply is preserved in the language she actually spoke. Galilean Jews of the first century spoke Aramaic, a Semitic language related to Hebrew, and she answered "Rabboni," an Aramaic form of address for a teacher. John translates it for readers who did not have the language, which is a habit of his: he does the same with Rabbi, with Messiah, with Cephas (the nickname he pauses to tell us means Peter), and with Siloam (John 1:38, 1:41–42, 9:7). A writer at several removes from the events has no reason to keep the foreign word and then explain it. A writer reporting what was said does. Christian readers have always heard something else in the moment, and it is in the same Gospel a few chapters earlier, where the shepherd "calls his own sheep by name and leads them out" (John 10:3). The recognition did not come from the empty tomb, which she had already seen and misread, or from the angels, whom she had already answered. It came when the risen Christ addressed one grieving woman personally.

(Q) "She turned and said to him in Aramaic, 'Rabboni!' (which means Teacher)." + Source: John 20:16 (ESV). The second half of the verse. The first half is one word from him: "Mary." The exchange is four words long in total, and it is the hinge of the chapter (T2).

(T3) The first errand the risen Christ gave to anyone was to carry the news to the men who had run away. + She reached for him and was told not to hold on. It reads harshly in English until you notice what replaces the embrace: not a rebuke but a job, and the job is the first one handed out on the other side of the resurrection. Go to my brothers. Sit with that word for a second. The last time these men appear in John’s narrative as a group, they are running from an arrest in a garden, and Peter, their spokesman, has told three separate people he never knew the man. The risen Christ’s first recorded description of them is "my brothers." Nothing is said about their performance, then or later. The relationship is simply assumed to be intact, and the announcement of it is entrusted to a woman who is told to walk into that room and say so. What he sends is careful, and worth reading slowly. He does not say "our Father" and "our God." He says "my Father and your Father," and "my God and your God," pairing them and distinguishing them in the same breath. His Father is now genuinely their Father, and the two relations are still not the same relation: the disciples are brought into a sonship, a place in the family, that belongs to him by nature and comes to them as a gift. That is the plain sense of the line, and it is the same chapter that will close with Thomas saying "My Lord and my God" to the man standing in front of him.

(Q) "Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brothers and say to them, 'I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.'" + Source: John 20:17 (ESV). His first recorded words to any witness after the resurrection, spoken to a woman who had just recognised him and taken hold of him. The commission is the whole of it: there is no other instruction (T3).

(T4) The church’s first witness was the one witness its own world would have discounted. + Picture the glossy campaign biography a party puts out in an election year, and picture finding in chapter four a frank account of the candidate’s arrest. Nobody put that in to help. It is in there because it happened, because enough people already knew about it, and because leaving it out would have cost the party more than printing it. Historians who work on ancient texts have a name for reasoning of that kind, the criterion of embarrassment, and the idea fits in a sentence: when a document keeps a detail its own authors would plainly have preferred to lose, the easiest explanation is that the detail was true and too well known to drop. By that measure the women at the tomb are a problem the Gospels did not have to give themselves. Testimony from women was held in low regard in the surrounding world, and the first-century Jewish historian Josephus states the rule bluntly when he summarises the law of Moses, writing that the testimony of women should not be admitted, on account of the levity and boldness of their sex (Antiquities 4.219). The picture needs care rather than overstatement: the practice was not uniform, women did give evidence in some matters, and Josephus is generalising in his own way. The argument does not need the strong form. It needs only this, that nobody building a persuasive case from scratch in that world would have chosen these witnesses. And we know they would not have, because we can watch a critic reach for exactly that objection as soon as there is a critic to watch. Around AD 175 the pagan philosopher Celsus attacked the resurrection by asking who had actually seen the risen man, and answering his own question with contempt: "A half-frantic woman, as you state, and some other one, perhaps, of those who were engaged in the same system of delusion" (Against Celsus 2.55, Crombie’s translation). He put the jeer into the mouth of an imaginary Jewish objector, which tells you he expected it to land with Jewish and pagan readers alike. It is the oldest surviving attack on her, and it concedes the fact it is attacking.

(Q) "I have seen the Lord" + Source: John 20:18 (ESV). Four words, reported as her announcement to the disciples. They are the first words the Gospels attribute to any witness of the risen Christ, and they are the sentence the church has been repeating in one form or another ever since (T4).

What the Church Made of Her

(†) The church kept her at the head of the resurrection story and called the women at the tomb apostles to the apostles. + The phrase is older than most people expect. Early in the third century a Christian writer named Hippolytus produced the earliest surviving Christian commentary on the Song of Songs, and reading the bride who searches the city for her beloved as the women searching for Christ, he calls them apostles to the apostles: sent ones, sent to the sent ones. He applies it to the group rather than to Mary alone, and the Latin form, apostolorum apostola, later attached itself to her in particular. Medieval writers used it freely, and in 2016 Rome moved her day in July up a step in its calendar, from a memorial to a feast, which is the higher of the two ranks and the one the apostles have, naming that title in the decree. The Greek East arrived at the same judgement by its own road. Its liturgy calls her a Myrrhbearer, after the burial spices, and gives her the rare title Equal to the Apostles, a designation reserved for a short list that also includes the emperor Constantine. None of this makes her one of the Twelve, and none of the ancient writers thought it did. The Twelve were a fixed group chosen during the ministry, and when a vacancy opened in Acts 1 the qualification for filling it was to have been with them the whole way, from the days when John the Baptist was still baptising onward. The title says something narrower and harder to argue with: whatever the apostles knew on Easter morning, they knew because she told them.

(†) Her testimony became a standing argument for the resurrection, and it has been argued over ever since. + Origen of Alexandria, the most formidable scholar of the early church, answered Celsus at book length around AD 248, roughly seventy years after the attack was written. He does not deny that a woman was the first witness or move her out of the way, which he could easily have done by leading with Peter. His answer is that she was not the only one who saw the risen Christ, and that a waking vision, seen by people in their right minds, is not a thing to be waved away as a dream. He takes the accounts as they stand and argues about what they show. That reflex, defending the record rather than tidying it, is why we still have Celsus at all: nearly everything known of his book survives inside the reply. Modern historians have picked the same thread up. Richard Bauckham devoted a study to the named women of the Gospels, arguing that they are named because they were known witnesses whose accounts could be checked. N. T. Wright, in his long study of the resurrection, treats the women’s priority as one of the hardest features of the tradition to explain on any theory of legend, since legends grow toward respectability rather than away from it. Honesty requires the other half of the ledger. The earliest written summary of the resurrection we possess is a formula Paul says he received and passed on, and it lists Cephas, which is Peter under his Aramaic name, then the Twelve, then five hundred at once, then James, then all the apostles, then Paul himself (1 Corinthians 15:3–8). The women are not in it. Christians have explained that in different ways: that Paul is citing a list of witnesses formally acceptable in a dispute, or that the list runs through the church’s official representatives rather than through everyone who saw him. What nobody can say is that the church invented the women later to fill a gap, because the Gospel accounts that name them are the ones a later church would have found least convenient.

(†) In the Latin West she was merged with two other women, and the composite picture lasted fourteen centuries. + Three different women in the Gospels do things that look, at a glance, like the same thing. An unnamed woman "of the city, who was a sinner" weeps over Jesus’ feet at a Pharisee’s dinner and wipes them with her hair (Luke 7:36–50). Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, anoints his feet with costly ointment shortly before the crucifixion (John 12:1–8). Mary Magdalene comes with spices to a tomb. Luke, who tells the first story, introduces the Magdalene as a new character in the very next scene (Luke 8:2), which is a strange thing to do if he thinks they are the same person. Around AD 591, Gregory the Great, bishop of Rome, preached a sermon that treated all three as one woman, and read the seven demons as the full range of the vices she had renounced (Homily 33 on the Gospels). He was not inventing the idea out of nothing; the identification was already circulating in the West. What his authority did was settle it, and for the next fourteen hundred years western art, drama and devotion had a single character: the penitent Magdalene with the ointment jar and the loose hair. The Greek East never made the merger and kept the three women on separate days of its calendar. There was a true thing inside the composite, which is why it lasted. The gospel does receive the worst of us, and Luke 7 says so magnificently. It was simply attached to the wrong woman, and the attachment quietly replaced what her own record actually says, which is that she was healed, that she funded the work, that she stayed at the cross, and that she was sent. Rome separated the three in its calendar revision of 1969, and modern Catholic and Protestant scholarship agrees, with few dissenters, that the Gospels present three different women.

(†) Her own record gives nothing to argue with, and what the Gospels leave in is unflattering in a different way. + Most people whose lives are worth telling at this length have said or done something a Christian has to disagree with, and the honest thing is to say what it is. With her there is nothing to say. She wrote nothing, founded nothing, and taught nothing the church has ever had to correct. That is not the same as saying the Gospels flatter her, and they do not. They report that she had been in the grip of something they call seven demons, a description no admirer would volunteer. They report that she stood in front of an empty tomb and concluded that somebody had stolen the body. They report that angels told her the news and it did not take, that she mistook the risen Christ for a gardener, and that the men she was sent to treated her account as the raving of a woman who had lost her grip (Luke 24:11). If you set out to build a heroine, you build her out of better material than this. One thing does need saying, because her name has been borrowed so often. Several ancient texts carry her name and are not hers: the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Philip were written a century or more after she died, by people with a very different account of the world, and what they say belongs to the ledgers of their own authors rather than to hers. The record of her own life is the twelve verses in which the four Gospels name her, and it is the record of a witness rather than a teacher.