The Gospel According to Mary Magdalene

About a year ago I read a movie review of Mary Magdalene, directed by Garth Davis (Lion). I was busy that weekend but thought I’d check it out the following weekend. After a one-week run at theaters in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, the closest theater still showing it was in San Antonio. A five-hour road trip was not in cards, so I resolved to catch it on cable and finally had that opportunity when it recently appeared on Showtime.

My impressions were that it is an amazingly quiet movie, hushed tones, very understated. As would be expected of a movie focused on a female character, it is a feminist movie in that Mary defies cultural rules imposed on women and is treated as an equal to the male disciples. The movie is a little revisionist because Mary is not presented as a reformed prostitute (how she is typically portrayed in popular media) or the wife of Jesus (a major theme of Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code). But mostly the movie is a re-envisioning of the gospel story as seen through the eyes of one of Jesus’ female disciples.

What do we know about Mary Magdalene?

The NT sources don’t tell us a whole lot about Mary Magdalene:

• Had seven demons driven from her (Lk 8:2)
• Among the women who travelled with Jesus and financially supported his ministry (Lk 8:1-3)
• Among the women who witnessed the crucifixion (Mt 27:55f; Mk 15:40f; Jn 19:25)
• Went to the tomb to anoint Jesus’ body and found the tomb empty (Mt 28:1-8; Mk 16:1-8; Lk 24:1-11; Jn 20:1-3)
• Witnessed the risen Jesus and told the apostles about it (Mt 28:9-10; Jn 20:14-18) 

Obviously, filling out a 2-hour movie will require some creative license.

While implied in her name, the NT does not explicitly state Mary comes from the city of Magdala in Galilee. This was a fairly large city of some 40,000 people, most of them Gentile, and was a main fishing and export center in the region.

Also, you will note that nowhere in the gospels is Mary referred to as a prostitute. That was a later invention of Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604), conflating stories of the sinful woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears (Lk 7:36-50) and Mary of Bethany who anointed his feet with perfume (Jn 12:1-8).

Outside the NT, Mary appears prominently in some Gnostic gospels. In these, she symbolizes the Gnostic church and is opposed by Peter who represents the apostolic church. As one whom Jesus loved more than any other, she was given secret knowledge directly by Jesus that was not handed down through the apostles.

Poster from the 2018 UK release of Mary Magdalene

The portrait of Mary in Mary Magdalene

The movie begins with Mary (Rooney Mara) working hard in the family’s fishing business and unhappy with the idea of an arranged marriage to a local widower. Her strong opposition to the union convinces her family she has a demon. After traditional exorcisms almost kill her, one of her brothers calls in Jesus (Joaquin Phoenix), who happens to be passing through town, to heal her. After a brief chat with Mary, Jesus declares, “There are no demons here.”

Mary is captivated by Jesus’ preaching and healings. She abandons her family to be baptized by him and becomes his first female disciple. When she tells Jesus that the women of Magdala were too afraid to be baptized by the male disciples, Jesus begins to preach to women as well and Mary baptizes the women who come forward to follow Jesus.

When Mary hears Jesus speak of the kingdom of God, she instinctively understands it is something we bring about through our actions while the male disciples believe that Jesus will overthrow Roman domination in order to bring about a new world. Jesus pairs up Mary with Simon Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and sends them out to preach. They arrive in a village in Samaria where the Romans have massacred most of the populace. Peter is ready to leave the starving survivors to their fate but Mary cares for them in their dying moments and Peter realizes the power of mercy.

After Jesus initiates a riot in the Temple, all the male disciples expect Jesus will inaugurate a revolt against the Romans. But when Jesus fails to carry forward the expected revolution, Judas (Tahar Rahm) tries to force his hand with disastrous consequences.

Mary holds a lonely vigil outside Jesus’ tomb and, in the morning speaks to the risen Jesus. She tells the male disciples that Jesus appeared to her and told her the kingdom they all worked for is here already, within us. While Peter believes she had an experience of the risen Lord, he sees it as a sign that Jesus will return some day, bringing the true kingdom. Peter cannot accept that Jesus chose her as the recipient of a “special message” when all the men were chosen to build the one church, with one message. Rejected by the men, Mary will not remain and stay silent, so she goes off on her own.

How does the movie compare to what we know about Mary?

Portrayed as a poor fisher woman, Mary is not a woman of means capable of providing for Jesus and his disciples out of her own resources. Wealthy women did exist in that time. For an example of this, I think of Paul’s first known Christian convert in Europe, Lydia of Thyatira (Acts 16:11-15), a financially independent woman with a business, house, servants, and so on. A large cosmopolitan city like Magdala would have provided more opportunities for a Jewish businesswoman than the small village depicted in the film.

The movie gives short shrift to Mary’s role in Jesus’ crucifixion and burial. Knocked out at Jesus’ arrest, she arrives in time to see him carrying his cross, but is too overwhelmed with grief to follow. She eventually makes it to the foot of the cross as Jesus breathes his last and helps with the burial. Given these are the moments when Mary first appears in the gospels, this choice of the writers or director here is rather surprising. Perhaps they felt this was well-trod ground quite sufficiently covered in other movies about Jesus?

There is a Gnostic flavor to Mary’s claim to the male disciples that she received a special revelation from the risen Jesus, but the message she presents in the movie is a completely orthodox one. We, the audience, should know that in time Peter and the others will receive their own vision of the risen Lord and will eventually come around to understand the gospel as Mary presents it to them. But for the less biblically literate among us, the movie’s presentation could be seen as elevating Mary at the expense of the male disciples.

The movie ends with a postscript stating that in 2016, the Vatican formally identified Mary of Magdala as “apostle of the apostles”. This is a reference to a proclamation that elevated her July 22 memorial day to that of feast day, the same as the other apostles in the Church calendar.

In closing, I offer the opening prayer for the Feast Day of St. Mary Magdalene:

In the garden He appeared to Mary Magdalene, who loved him in life, who witnessed his death on the cross, who sought him as he lay in the tomb, who was the first to adore him when he rose from the dead, and whose apostolic duty was honored by the apostles so that the good news of life might reach the ends of the earth.