2.
WHY RE-READ THE BIBLE?
Mary Magdalene
Lk. 8:1-3, Mk. 15:40-47
Lalnghak Thuami
Introduction:
What is the Bible? Who has written it?
What does it mean for us today? How do we interpret and who has
the authority to interpret the Bible? Is it possible for the
interpreters to claim their interpretation as absolute and others as
irrelevant? These questions and so many others may come to our
minds when we look at the WHY of bible study and the WHY of re-reading
the Bible.
The Bible is the inspired word of God. It is
understood as one of the most important foundations of faith for the
Christian Church. Its authority is based on the belief that it is
the revealed word of God. However, we have to remember that the
Bible is still a written document, actually a library of many books -
employing the language of mortals, as affirmed by the Reader's Digest
Bible.
At the same time, it is the product of the
patriarchal (male dominant society) world, with their values, norms and
ideas. If so why do we need to re-read the Bible from
women's eyes? It is clear that the consequences for women's lives
was not the primary concern of the biblical authors. Even if we
have deep study of the Bible we rarely see the author raising women's
questions. Women are thus absent from the Bible as persons
working out their own religious journey; yet contemporary women do want
to relate the stories of invisible women in the Bible to our own.
It is a fact that the Bible, as a product of the
ancient patriarchal world, validates and enforces the domination of
males, as a result that women's stories are unrecognized, unnoticed and
under-recognized or under-estimated. The Bible is written,
canonized and interpreted by men in the patriarchal church and society
with patriarchal bias and androcentric nature. It has been used
and quoted by men for their justification in their arguments against
women. Hence, it is necessary for us to open up the text itself,
to make the invisible women visible, and bring out its values and
assumptions for today's world. The task of "unmasking" the
dominant culture in the Bible will help us to move forward in our
search for a true and human liberation.
It is widely accepted that the women whose stories
appear in biblical texts cannot function unambiguously as role models
for women seeking empowerment today, because biblical women are
enmeshed in patriarchy and are presented from an androcentric
perspective. In order to recover knowledge about the actual
conditions of women's lives in the biblical period we have to try to
reach behind the text and read the Bible with the eyes of women.
Why can't women in the Bible function as role models for us
today? It is our task to find out the answer, by re-reading the
Bible from women's point of view. It is also our hope to hear
Good News through the words and the lives of women, hoping to release
female leaders from the anonymity of the past to serve as role models
for the present.
To read the Bible self-consciously as a woman is not
to search for proof of support for female superiority. Rather it
would be for illumination of the struggle of women and men for
partnership in community. The text can offer more help in the
search for inclusive community than has been generally recognized and
calls for the liberation of all humanity. The Bible has to be
re-read not as a book of rules but as a living testimony of God's
concrete activity in history.
When we read the Bible we find very few women's
stories. Miriam Therese Winter strongly asserts that, "women are
seldom named by the biblical writers. Their experience is
distorted, their contributions deleted, their status so diminished that
one may well conclude that their lives are irretrievably lost."
In our reflections on the Bible, we need to imaginatively reconstruct
the lost lives of invisible women and proclaim a healing word and
message for all God's wounded daughters in our community.
Even though we accept that the Bible is the product
of male transmission, it is essential that we should bring out the
liberative message especially for women. For example, the New
Testament refers to groups of women, indicating that women were
involved in the life and ministry of Jesus, and some of them were
leaders in the post resurrection Church. Not only that, but women
were at the heart of decisive events foundational to the Christian
faith- at the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus and in the upper
room and Pentecost. This is Good News indeed for women!
The points mentioned above may give us some clues
for re-reading the Bible. They may also help us to interpret the
Bible in inclusive ways. There is no single way of understanding or
re-reading the Bible which is absolute, it is open to us.
Re-reading the Bible with women's eyes will create a new
woman-consciousness which will help us to work for a radical change in
the male-dominated interpretation of the Bible.
Approaches to Feminist Biblical Interpretation:
Several attempts have been made by feminist scholars
in classifying different approaches to feminist biblical
interpretation:
1. Loyalist Approach:
This approach respects the Bible and affirms that
the Bible is the source of inspiration and has authority as the word of
God. The foundational premise is the essential validity and
goodness of the biblical tradition as Word of God, which cannot be
dismissed under any circumstance. The biblical witness as revelation
has an independent status which need not be vindicated by human
authority: The Bible is the ultimate expression of God’s
authority, not only descriptive, but also prescriptive, to which all
human inquiry must submit. Yet, the Bible, precisely as Word of
God, cannot by nature be oppressive, and therefore must be read
carefully in order to show how the literal sense of the text can be
liberating for women and other marginalized people. This approach
taken by evangelical feminists has its limitations.
2. Revisionist Approach:
According to New Testament scholar Elisabeth
Schussler Fiorenza, this approach not only seeks to recover forgotten
traditions about women, but also to remove the layers of centuries of
androcentric interpretation that cover up the supposed original meaning
of the biblical text.
Revisionist approach asserts that the biblical texts
themselves are not misogynist (women hater). Rather, they have
been patriarchalized by interpreters who have projected their
androcentric cultural bias onto biblical texts. Thus, the Bible
must be liberated from its patriarchal interpretation in order to
foster the liberation of women.
3. Liberationist Approach:
The liberationist looks for that which is liberating
for women and for all oppressed groups in the Bible. The question
of liberation for women and other marginalised groups in the society
becomes the central paradigm or organizing principle in their
interpretation of the Bible. It suggests that women are fully
human and are to be valued as such. This could be formulated as
the underlying principle for feminist interpretation of scripture, or
‘hermeneutics,’ as it is called. This must be understood to
include with it at least two closely related principles of equality and
mutuality.
Feminists have found the ‘hermeneutics of
suspicion,’ first developed by Latin American liberation theologians,
an appropriate and useful approach to re-reading the Bible. In
it, questions are continually raised of the text itself and of the
interpreters of the text, in order to understand what biases are
implicit in the point of view of the writer and/or interpreter.
Using the hermeneutics of suspicion, we ask questions not to undermine
the Bible, but to uncover and clarify the Bible’s liberative message
for all the oppressed, including women.
Through these several approaches we can look at the
Bible using our own women's glasses. In India the scriptures have
shaped and conditioned the status of women to a secondary status which
handicaps us in many aspects. Re-reading the Bible with women's
eyes will help us to discover the power within each of our lives and
also discover the truth that God has made us, men and women, with the
same status and dignity and given us the same responsibilities.
The character study on Mary Magdalene will help us
see the need for and importance of re-reading the Bible from women's
perspectives.
Mary Magdalene: First Witness to the Resurrection:
(Lk. 8:1-3; Mk. 15:40-47; Jn. 19:25; 20:1-18)
Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, "I have seen the
Lord," and she told them that Jesus had said these things to her. (Jn.
20:18)
Biography:
We do not know much about Mary Magdalene. Her
surname refers to her home town of Magdala, a bustling port city on the
Sea of Galilee. Luke has told us that she had been previously
liberated from some serious personal affliction. We are not told
what "demons" possessed her; whether this was physical or otherwise we
will never know. Perhaps she had a physical infirmity or suffered
from a form of mental illness. Or maybe her "demons" were the
resentment, anger and envy that took root in a gifted and charismatic
woman when society denied her an opportunity to give and lead.
She has also been labeled a prostitute, the greatest of sinners, who
washed the feet of Jesus with her tears and wiped them with her hair,
presumptions supported by Western spirituality and art.
Read Luke 7:36-50. Charging her with sexual immorality was the
easiest way for the biblical interpreters to discredit her. But
there is no warrant for this identification of Mary Magdalene with the
unnamed woman in the Lukan text. This interpretation of Mary
Magdalene may be a later development in the tradition because no
woman's name is given in Luke’s story.
The Close Companion of Jesus :
The Biblical narratives give us clear evidence
that some women actively participated in the Jesus movement. Mary
Magdalene seems to be one of the faithful women disciples who moved
around with Jesus, and the likely leader of the women’s group.
She was at Jesus' side as he preached and healed. She was at the
foot of the cross when he died, keeping watch even as his body was laid
in the tomb. She never let him out of her sight during those last
days of Jesus' life. She is a woman who clearly shared a deep
intimacy with Jesus and a passion for his teaching. She was the
paramount disciple and friend, faithful to the bitter end. She
had known love and mercy, experienced healing and empowerment through
Jesus' voice and touch. There was no choice for her but to stay
as close as she could, whatever the cost. No other disciple, male
or female, surpassed her in ardent devotion to Jesus and the way of
God.
How could Mary Magdalene and many other women who
loved Jesus and participated in his ministry simply disappear from the
scene after the resurrection?
The Leader of the Galilean Women:
Whenever the Bible speaks of the Galilean women's
movement or Galilean women who followed Jesus, Mary Magdalene's name
appears first in the list of women who surrounded Jesus. She was
their guide and example. She is named with several other women,
indicating an inner circle of prominence similar to the three male
disciples-Peter, James and John. Tradition supports her
leadership role both in the New Testament and in the early writings of
the first century. In these writings, she is portrayed as a
spiritual companion of Jesus, the only follower who truly understood
the mysteries of his message and who interpreted these to others,
including the male disciples, some of whom resented her status and the
special love Jesus had for her. This portrayal of Mary Magdalene
is found in The Gospel of Mary (Magdalene), written in the second
century, which did not make it into the biblical canon.
If that is the case, why did the Bible and the
tradition make her almost invisible so that she does not function as a
role model for women today?
First Witness to the Resurrection:
All the four Gospels agree on one vital detail about
Easter morning: when it was still dark, women went to Jesus'
tomb. The specifics of that early morning visit vary from Gospel
to Gospel, but the presence of women is constant. The tradition
does not speculate about this further display of faithfulness by
the women, it simply accepts it as an essential part of the story of
the resurrection.
The story of Mary Magdalene in John 20:1-18 is the
most detailed of the four stories about women at Jesus' tomb. It
divides into two scenes:
1. Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb (20:1-10):
Verses 1-10 establish Mary Magdalene as the first witness of the empty
tomb. When she arrives at the tomb, she sees that the stone has been
rolled away (20:1). On the basis of Mary's words, Peter and the
beloved disciple run to the tomb (20:3-4), the NRSV calls him "the
other disciple." The male disciples, like Mary, can find no words
out of their prior experiences to describe the empty tomb. Yet,
Mary bears witness to the tomb even in her confusion; Peter and the
beloved disciple keep silent.
2. Mary Magdalene and the risen Jesus
(20:11-18): The second scene begins with Mary alone again at the
tomb, weeping. She now looks into the tomb and is greeted by two
angels. The angels address her, "Woman, why are you weeping?"
(20:13) After she answers the angels, she turns around and sees
Jesus but does not recognize him. Jesus asks the question,"Whom
are you looking for?" (20:15). Jesus' questions to Mary do not
penetrate her grief and confusion. Her world is determined by the
seemingly harsh reality of the empty tomb and so she begs the
"gardener" for assistance. The risen Jesus then calls Mary by
name, When Mary listens to the voice of the risen Jesus, her
perspective on the events in the garden changes. She no longer
understands the empty tomb as a manifestation of death, but as
testimony to the power and possibilities of life.
Instead of holding on to Jesus and keeping him
static, Mary is exhorted to spread the news of the resurrection and of
the new life with God and one another that is now available to
all. Mary heeds Jesus' word and goes to the disciples with the
announcement, "I have seen the Lord" (20:18). Her announcement of
the presence of the risen Jesus is the core of the Easter gospel.
Mary is the first Easter witness in both senses of the word
"witness." She is the first disciple of the risen Jesus, and she
is the first to tell others what she has seen. She is the first
disciple of the risen Jesus and an apostle to the apostles.
Issues:
1. Listening to Women:
The risen Jesus revealed himself first to Mary
Magdalene. A woman was the first witness to the resurrection, a
truth made more astounding by the fact that the testimony of women was
not considered valid in a court of law at the time, women were deemed
unreliable witnesses. When these women went to tell the disciples
about the resurrection, the disciples considered it "an idle tale" (Lk.
24:11).
This doubt about women’s testimony is one of the
peculiar characteristics in the Bible. We have seen this type of
incident even in the Old Testament-suspecting women's words, for
instance, in Judges 13: 1-23, at the birth of Samson. The angel
appears to a certain woman, who is un-named, telling her that a son
will be born and giving instructions. After hearing this, she
tells her husband about her conversation with the angel. But her
husband, Manoah, insists that God appear to him, in spite of appearing
to his wife. This shows that women were expected just to listen
to their husbands, even though God shows no partiality in speaking to
men or women. Men find it difficult to listen to women even if
they have been spoken to by God.
Let us look at the situation in India - women's
words are not counted. The church and the social structure make
them to be silenced in such a way that women seem to be
invisible. If God does not command us to ignore women's word, as
we see in the case of Mary Magdalene, shall we stand up and raise our
voices in obedience to God? Whom are we going to listen to, God
or (hu)man's words?
2. Recognizing Women's Contributions:
Even though Jesus revealed himself first to Mary
Magdalene, the tradition denies Mary as the first witness to the
resurrected Christ. Rather, Paul claimed Peter as the first
witness, making Mary Magdalene invisible and forgotten (1 Cor. 15:
2-8). And this has become the authoritative tradition of the
church. The biblical authors just ignore the importance of women
in the community and their contributions and talents are denied.
Many women are un-named, even though they carry an important message to
God's people. For instance, Samson's mother's name is never
heard, Jephthah's daughter has no name, the woman who pours ointment on
Jesus' head, acting boldly, radically and prophetically, again has no
name.
This is how it happens to women in the Bible.
How is it today? Are we better off than women in the biblical
world or are we still in the same pattern - ignored, un-named, women's
potentiality unrecognized in the church activities? Re-reading
the Bible with women's eyes helps us to widen our perspective and
understand the importance of women for the proclamation of the Christ
event in our own time. This can lead to a spirit empowerment for
women today, by recovering the forgotten, invisible and unrecognized
women of the Bible and seeing how important their contributions were in
transforming the whole community.
Questions for Discussion:
1. How do you re-read the Bible in your own context,
in light of Mary Magdalene's story? Why is
there no mention of her in the New Testament church?
2. If Mary Magdalene was indeed "an apostle to the
apostles" and first eye-witness to the risen Christ,
how could the church have excluded her from a
leadership role?
3. Identify the invisible women in your church or
community.
Endnotes:
1. Bruce M. Metzger, The Reader's Digest Bible -
(Illustrated Edition), London: Reader's Digest,
1995,
p. 10.
2. Adela Yarbro Collins, ed., Feminist
Perspective on
Biblical Scholarship, California: Scholars Press,
1985, p. 5.
3. Janet Crawford & Michael Kinnamon, eds.,
In God’s
Image, Geneva: WCC, 1983, p. 93.
4. Miriam Therese Winter, WomanWord- A Feminist
Lectionary and Psalter, Women of the New
Testament, New York: Crossroad, 1990, p. x.
5. Carol Osiek, “The Feminist and the Bible:
Hermeneutical Alternatives,” in Feminist
Perspectives on Biblical Scholarship, ed. by Adela
Yarbro Collins, Chico, California: Scholars
Press, 1985, p. 99.
6. Ibid.
7. Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, But She Said,
Boston: Beacon Press, 1992, p. 23.
8. Anthony Ceresko, OSFS, The Old
Testament: A Liberation Perspective, Bombay: St.
Paul’s, 1992, pp. 15-17. See also Fiorenza,
But She Said, pp. 57 - 62.
9. Joyce Hollyday, Clothed With the Sun,
Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994, p.
232.
10. Winter, WomanWord, p. 156.
11. Hollyday, Clothed With the Sun, p.
232.
12. Ibid.
13. Winter, WomanWord, p. 156.
14. Karen King, “The Gospel of Mary Magdalene,”
in Searching the Scriptures, Vol. 2, edited by
Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, New York: Crossroad,
1994.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Antone, Hope S &Yong Ting Jin, Our Stories, our Faith,
Hongkong: WSCF, 1992.
Collins, Adela Yarbro (ed), Feminist Perspective on Biblical
Scholarship, Chico, California: Scholars
Press, 1985.
Crawford, Janet & Michael Kinnamon (eds), In God's
Image Geneva: WCC, 1983.
Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schussler, Bread Not Stone: The
Challenge of Feminist Interpretation, Boston:
Beacon, 1986.
Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schussler, But She Said, Boston:
Beacon Press, 1992.
Hollyday, Joyce, Clothed With the Sun, Louisville:
Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994.
Metzger, Bruce M., The Reader’s Digest Bible (Illustrated
Edition), London: Reader’s Digest, 1995.
Winter, Miriam Therese, WomanWord: A Feminist Lectionary
and Psalter, Women of the New Testament, New York:
Crossroad, 1990.