Tea at Trianon: The Traditional View of Mary Magdalene

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, July 22, 2023

The Traditional View of Mary Magdalene

From Church Life Journal:

It is in the face of this knotty problem that the Western tradition offers us a percipient solution. In the words of Fr. Davidson, following Henri Lacordaire, there were “two different anointings indeed but one heart conceived them both . . . . Only this conclusion allows us to hold the differences and similarities in perfect balance.”[4] Here the integrity of the Gospel texts is maintained, but without relying on the extreme unlikelihood of two different women performing such an unconventional deed. Rather, as Fr. Davidson observes, it is the same woman in both anointings, yet these represent two very different stages in her relationship with Jesus.

On the traditional hypothesis, this woman—identified in John’s account as Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus—grew up in Bethany in a devout Jewish home but later fell away from her childhood faith, moving up north to Galilee and there becoming embroiled in a life of sin. At some point, she encountered the preaching of Jesus; Luke 7 recalls the moment of her coming to the Savior in tearful repentance. Overwhelmed by the grace of conversion, she gratefully places the shame of her former life at his feet.

From there, this notorious Mary becomes an avid follower of Jesus and one of his closest friends. Now fast forward a couple of years. Mary is back home in Bethany. Sensing that her master’s time on this earth is drawing to a close, she once again steps forward to anoint his feet—a gesture captured by Matthew, Mark, and John. This time tears are absent, but the mood is no less solemn as she silently reenacts the intimate gesture which marked the beginning of her walk with Christ.

In addition to the explanatory power it possesses, this traditional reading enjoys explicit textual support in John’s Gospel. In John 11 we find a cryptic verse: “Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill” (v. 2). Here John tells his reader that Mary “anointed” (aleipsasa) the feet of Jesus, and he employs the aorist tense in Greek to denote a past action. What makes the verse anachronistic, however, is the fact that Mary’s anointing has not yet taken place in John’s Gospel. In fact, the Johannine anointing will not take place until chapter 12, several weeks after the events of chapter 11. Taken at face value, therefore, John 11:2 clearly appears to identify Mary as the woman responsible for the earlier anointing recorded in Luke 7.

Faced with this conundrum, scholars who reject the traditional view will often try to read John 11:2 as a kind of foreshadowing. There are, however, two major flaws in this interpretation. First, it would be inconsistent with John’s grammatical usage of the aorist tense elsewhere in his Gospel. The figure of Judas, for example, was notorious to John’s readers as the one who betrayed Jesus. Yet when John introduces Judas, he does not describe him as “the one who betrayed Jesus,” but instead as the one who “was to betray him” (John 6:71).

Secondly, the skeptical approach fails to account for the fact that there were two anointing stories in circulation, not just one. If we are to infer, as modern scholarship increasingly does, that John’s first-century readers were familiar with the stories found in the synoptic Gospels, then we must assume they knew about the earlier Galilee anointing described by Luke. But if this is the case, then John’s decision to speak of Mary as “the” woman who performed the anointing only makes sense if there was clarity in his mind that of the two anointing stories circulating at the time, a single woman was behind them both. (Read more.)