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Overview
Both sinner and saint, passionate and devoted, the figure of Mary Magdalene has fired imaginations throughout the ages. As arguably the closest of Jesus’s followers, Mary Magdalene offered a unique perspective on the most enigmatic of men. Drawing on detailed research and informed speculation, this is a vivid and compelling account of Mary’s life and the Jesus she knew, by the bestselling author of Trial.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781497663435 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 319 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
He has been a widely syndicated foreign correspondent and was a writer and producer for three flagship BBC programs: Man Alive, Tomorrow’s World, and Horizon. He contributes regularly to Facta, a respected monthly Japanese news magazine. Thomas was the lead expert for a twelve-part series on international intelligence for Ian Punnett’s Coast to Coast, the most listened-to overnight radio broadcast in North America, with three million weekly listeners. He has recently appeared on Euronews (available in ten languages and three hundred million households) and Russia Today.
He has received numerous awards for his reporting, including an International Television Award and two Mark Twain Society Awards. Shipwreck won an Edgar Award.
Four of Thomas’s books—Voyage of the Damned, Ruin from the Air, The Day the Bubble Burst, and The Day Their World Ended—have been made into feature films starring such A-listers as Paul Newman, Billy Crystal, Robert Vaughn, and Jacqueline Bisset. The Day Guernica Died is currently under option.
Thomas’s most recent bestseller is Gideon’s Spies: Mossad’s Secret Warriors. Published in sixteen languages and forty countries, Gideon’s Spies is known throughout the world as the leading resource on Israeli intelligence. It was made into a major documentary for Channel 4 in Britain, which Thomas wrote and narrated, called The Spy Machine. The Observer called The Spy Machine a “clear” picture of Israeli intelligence operations, and the Times called it “impressive” and ”chilling.”
A member of the London Speaker Bureau and Macmillan Speakers, Thomas continues to grow his already-impressive platform, lecturing widely on the secret world of intelligence. He also regularly provides expert analysis on intelligence for US and European television and radio programs.
Gordon Thomas is a political and investigative journalist and the author of fifty-three books, published in more than thirty countries and in dozens of languages. The total sales of his works exceed forty-five million copies.
He has been a widely syndicated foreign correspondent and was a writer and producer for three flagship BBC programs: Man Alive, Tomorrow’s World, and Horizon. He contributes regularly to Facta, a respected monthly Japanese news magazine. Thomas was the lead expert for a twelve-part series on international intelligence for Ian Punnett’s Coast to Coast, the most listened-to overnight radio broadcast in North America, with three million weekly listeners. He has recently appeared on Euronews (available in ten languages and three hundred million households) and Russia Today.
He has received numerous awards for his reporting, including an International Television Award and two Mark Twain Society Awards. Shipwreck won an Edgar Award.
Four of Thomas’s books—Voyage of the Damned, Ruin from the Air, The Day the Bubble Burst, and The Day Their World Ended—have been made into feature films starring such A-listers as Paul Newman, Billy Crystal, Robert Vaughn, and Jacqueline Bisset. The Day Guernica Died is currently under option.
Thomas’s most recent bestseller is Gideon’s Spies: Mossad’s Secret Warriors. Published in sixteen languages and forty countries, Gideon’s Spies is known throughout the world as the leading resource on Israeli intelligence. It was made into a major documentary for Channel 4 in Britain, which Thomas wrote and narrated, called The Spy Machine. The Observer called The Spy Machine a “clear” picture of Israeli intelligence operations, and the Times called it “impressive” and ”chilling.”
A member of the London Speaker Bureau and Macmillan Speakers, Thomas continues to grow his already-impressive platform, lecturing widely on the secret world of intelligence. He also regularly provides expert analysis on intelligence for US and European television and radio programs.
Read an Excerpt
Magdalene
Jesus and the Woman Who Loved Him
By Gordon Thomas
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1998 Gordon ThomasAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-6343-5
CHAPTER 1
No accurate image exists of Mary Magdalene's face. There is no true-life painting, stone carving, wood etching, or even the crudest drawing which can be consulted to show the colour of her hair, eyes and skin. Was she tall, short, thin, or running to fat, as women in her part of the world still often do as the bloom of youth fades? Her parents, whether she had brothers or sisters and, if so how many, are also all lost forever through the trapdoor of time.
Her devotees insist she was a beauty of great passion, imbued with an undeniable presence and a sense of high drama which no other woman subsequently in biblical history has ever possessed. Certainly no other woman could replicate her role in the story of Christianity. That is undoubtedly why she remains a figure of speculation and mystery.
Despite an absence of pictorial corroboration, certain deductions can be made. Her given name, Mary, was of Hebrew origin, Miriam. She had been raised in the strict Jewish tradition of her day which, among much else, pronounced her ready for marriage after her first menstruation. Her life expectancy would have been no more than forty years, the average span for her time.
The physical appearance of her lakeshore people around the Sea of Galilee was typically one of dark eyes and an olive skin, and they spoke in a broad accent often mocked by others. Given her professed way of life and her clients — local fishermen, passing caravan merchants and vendors — there could have been an earthiness about her language, a readiness to exchange one robust epithet with another.
Legend depicts her as the richest harlot in Magdala. Assuming that to be true, it is then also safe to suggest she would have been attractive; an ugly whore has little chance of amassing a fortune — therefore Mary Magdalene would also have been relatively young, perhaps still in her teens when she found her place in history. Prostitution is a profession which ages a person like no other, and an older woman would have been too corrupted, too raddled, to have even begun to show an interest in a life outside the bordello. Only someone young enough to still appreciate that there could be one would have taken the first step to explore a new world.
There is room for further assumptions. With her wealth she could have paid clients to bring her silks from the East, jewellery from Egypt and spices from India. Her hair would have been coloured with the finest of henna and her arms and fingers covered with bracelets and rings. These were the standard trappings of a wealthy wanton in her world. With her servants and finery, it would have been a life like any other successful, bejewelled and painted whore in the land of Judaea until that night it changed irrevocably for her.
Mary Magdalene gives flesh to the words of Paul who launched Christianity into a pagan world with the unchallengeable declaration: 'If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is useless, and your believing it is useless.'
By her very presence at the moment Jesus was risen, Mary Magdalene makes those words the centrepoint of belief for every Christian. She ensures that no amount of critical reassessment — demythologization, if you will — can diminish the core truth of Paul's words.
In her own words after her encounter with the risen Christ — 'I have seen the Lord', she clearly shows no difficulty in accepting the Messiah had to die in order to save his people.
For Mary Magdalene, Jesus' death was the ultimate reconciliation with God that he had preached about and which he foretold would end in his own self-sacrifice. She understood that, in Jesus' own death, he was reminding her of what he had said so many times: all human life is no more than an awareness of earthly limitations with its succession of anxieties and anguish: what made it bearable was the glorious truth of a better life beyond death. In her case this was manifested in Jesus choosing her to witness his resurrection.
Ultimately, it does not matter at what time on that first Easter Sunday Mary Magdalene witnessed the event. (In the Gospel of John it is still dark; in Matthew and Luke dawn is breaking; in Mark the sun is up); whether she actually was there at the moment the stone was rolled back (Matthew), or that had already happened (Mark, Luke and John); or if she saw one angel (Matthew, Mark) or two (Luke and John); none of these issues are of importance.
Mary Magdalene saw what she saw. Her timeless words, reported by John, 'I have seen the Lord', gives the resurrection a framework which is both tangible and measurable — confirming the event was a real one, not a figment of the imagination; that it took place in an objective world, not merely in her mind. Her words are an expression of faith. And faith, as it has been from that first moment outside the empty tomb, has been based always on a personal encounter with the risen Christ.
The evidence for that faith is there in every representation of her face. It reflects the supreme initiate into Christ's mysteries; the harlot reformed through her love of Jesus, the woman who believed even before his own mother in the totality of what he had come to do. That belief is there in every depiction of her and is formally celebrated on her feast day, 22 July.
Like all great icons of faith, Mary Magdalene has been a figure to which artists have been drawn down the centuries. They have inevitably portrayed her in the likeness of women they knew; the real woman of Magdala has escaped accurate depiction.
Yet, to write about her in any meaningful form does require both imagination and an act of faith. In these closing moments of the twentieth century, it is also important to place her in perspective for her own sex. For many women she remains an undimmed beacon for modern feminism. Both within and outside religious life, Mary Magdalene represents a commitment for change; with that goes a desire to remove injustice and introduce reforms.
She was a woman given parity with Jesus at a time when oppressive masculinity dominated the world. Yet, to present her purely as someone who exemplifies the demands of women for equality with men is too simplistic. The biblical scholar, Marina Warner, has succinctly observed:
Men are no longer the benchmark for anything desirable, rather an index of its opposite ... and equality with their sex simply entails surrender to an intolerable way of life.
More certain, Christian theology for the past two thousand years has instilled the attitude that women like Mary Magdalene represent little more than the power of male forgiveness — ignoring that such an act of forgiveness is one of the cornerstones of Christ's teaching.
Angela West in her compelling A Faith for Feminists evokes a powerful image:
The Messiah was handed over to the Romans and crucified for political subversion. This was ironic because he really hadn't made a very good job of political subversion. What he had done was to identify himself with the weak and powerless, and he had ended up where all such people end up — as a victim of patriarchy. For what else is patriarchy but the permanent defeat of all those who are materially identified with the powerless — the position of most women throughout history.
Emotive though the words are, they do not get to the root of what this book is all about: who was Mary Magdalene and what is her relevance today?
The status of women and their lifestyles have continued to change over the last century. It is just over a hundred years since married Englishwomen were given the right to control their own money and property; in 1918 they were finally given a vote; a year later the first woman was returned to the Westminster Parliament. Those milestones and those which followed are each in their way related to the unique role of Mary Magdalene. She represents the ultimate change in status: the wanton who became a saint.
Nevertheless, Mary Magdalene cannot be included among that stalwart band of Christian women whose perceived role in the church does not extend far beyond arranging the flowers for a feast day, polishing the altar rails and baking cakes for a church f$eCte. They remain good, decent, God-fearing women who still hold that only a man is suitable to bless and administer the sacrament of Holy Communion; those women do not wish, at least openly, to be part of the feminist rallying call that they too are made in God's image and that there is a powerful case for God to have feminine as well as masculine characteristics beyond those of gender and biological differences. Their more militant sisters say there is a need to strike a balance between the popular image of masculine attributes — controlling, achieving, rationality, ambition and decisiveness — and the qualities popularly associated with femininity; nurturing, comforting and gentleness. Feminists demand that all these attributes should be mingled to describe a God who is both male and female.
Opposition to such a phenomenon can be based on the account in the Book of Genesis in which Eve was formed from one of Adam's ribs. To male die-hards, Eve was created for the prime purpose of procreation. They further point out that it was Eve who first succumbed to the serpent, who bit into the forbidden fruit and finally encouraged Adam to give into temptation. It was only through her actions that both were cast out of the Garden of Eden.
For male traditionalists, the Genesis message is all too clear: a woman must remain subordinate to man, otherwise she can endanger him and herself. The entire Old Testament reflects this attitude; in its books a woman is generally meant to be compliant first to her father, then to her husband. Indeed, at times, a woman's social status appears little more than that of a slave. Women are subject to harsh penalties for any breach of the special laws of purity which apply only to her sex. The Book of Leviticus specifies that during menstruation, 'if any man lies with [a woman], he shall be unclean seven days'. Childbirth must similarly be followed by a period of 'purification': seven days for a male infant, fourteen days for a baby girl, followed by a further thirty-three days when the mother was barred from the synagogue.
Into this world came Mary Magdalene. As one of Jesus' followers she was a direct challenge to the patriarchal society into which Jesus had been born, though as a prostitute she had her appointed place. The mores of that society can explain why none of his chosen twelve apostles was a woman: but Mary Magdalene became as much a disciple as any one of the apostles. Her very presence is a vivid, vibrant reminder of Jesus' own attitude towards women. To him they were persons in their own right, to be treated as equals, to find a place at his side.
It is that which makes Mary Magdalene worthy of study.
In the early Church women, following her example, did play an active role, reflecting the words of the apostle Paul: 'There is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.'
That equality has steadily been eroded down the centuries. Tertullian, an early Christian theologian, condemned women as 'the devil's gateway'. St Jerome pronounced: 'woman is a temple built over a sewer'.
As a result of such bigotry, Mary Magdalene's early career as a prostitute has all too often been used as a means to exercise control over women: unless they obey the men in their life — father, brother, husband, lover — they are little better than the woman of Magdala.
That kind of rampant sexism ultimately contributed to my need to write this book.
The seeds for doing so had been planted on an autumn day in 1966. Israel, aided and abetted by Britain and France, had won a resounding victory in the Suez — Sinai war against Egypt. Having reported from the Egyptian side, I had then travelled to Israel to write a series of reports from the victor's standpoint. The assignment completed, I had stayed on for a short holiday in a country I knew well, having been to school there.
Driving towards Galilee, I was once again reminded of the psalmist's words: 'The earth is the Lord's.' Though the Promised Land is a narrow tract of stony hills and fertile valleys, a corridor between Asia and Africa, no place on earth has contributed more to human life. On that November morning it was easy for me to see in my mind's eye the dying Moses looking down on the land he had brought his people to but would himself never set foot in; to imagine the first settlements — no more than small towns really — which had later united to become a nation.
Here its people had worked gold from distant Ophir, silver and lead from Asia Minor, copper and iron from the mines of Edom, even tin from far-off Britain. Here too its inhabitants had fought and died to protect their land against the empires of antiquity: Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Greece and the greatest of them all, the imperial empire of Rome.
Heading north, I was struck again how the very names of these parts of Israel's central highlands — Judaea, Samaria and Galilee — conveyed so well the separate and distinctive qualities of each area. Judaea conjures an image of the rugged strength of its great mountains and the wilderness; Samaria rings of the broad and open plains; Galilee flows off the tongue with liquid, rhythmical ease, as pleasant a sound as the endless streams which flow into its own great inland sea.
There is something about Galilee which has drawn me back time and again, not least because in Jesus' day its people were dismissed by the religious leaders in Jerusalem. For the High Priest of the Second Temple, the very idea the Messiah could emerge out of Galilee was unthinkable. 'Is the Christ to come from there?'
The attitude that Galilee has little to offer except as Israel's prime food producer has persisted. Like many a rush to judgment, it is an unjust one. For instance, from Galilee came the system of vowel-pointing used in the consonantal Hebrew text of the Scriptures.
Each time I had previously visited the area was for a specific purpose: to learn more of the geographical background to Jesus' life, the setting for the Gospels. This was essential preparation for what eventually became my book, Trial, which deals with the events leading up to Jesus' passion.
On that November day in 1966 my quest was different. I had come in search of the historical Mary Magdalene.
Walking along the west shore of the lake around which Jesus had performed so many of his miraculous feats, I came to the ruinous tower standing a little apart from the Arab village of El Magdal.
Here once had stood Magdala, marked now by partly-excavated ruins and water conduits. In its heyday, Magdala had been one of the largest of ten towns around the lake at the time of Jesus.
Stepping among the ruins, I wondered if Mary Magdalene had walked this way, among these ruined gateways and broken walls. She had always fascinated me, exemplifying the greatest of all true love stories: her love for Jesus. She had helped me to understand the humanity of Jesus, and to discover more of his true divinity. Through her, I had come to know the other women of the Gospel story: Mary, Jesus' mother, Mary, Martha of Bethany, Salome and Joanna. Together, they were the women of the cross, steadfast in their faith, a lesson to us all.
In my mind's eye Mary Magdalene was, without doubt, also a woman of immense passion: wild, fiery and easily moved to temper and tears of joy.
In the sunshine of that November morning in 1966, there was both a beauty and a mysteriousness about Magdala as I tried to imagine what it had been like two millennia ago when a thriving community had lived here. Caravans had passed by on their way to and from Jerusalem and Damascus. There had been gardens, trees and bushes; crops planted in the fields; domed roofs beneath which men and women had loved; a burial place.
Now, only vague shapes of walls and doorways remained. Occasionally a stone staircase rose a few faltering steps, then stopped. Had Mary Magdalene once climbed them?
Buried beneath my feet were the bones of the long dead which could still provide answers as to how the people of Magdala had lived: not just what they ate, but perhaps how they lied and stole, even how they betrayed one to another. Beneath the ground could be the answers to how injustices were righted, wrongdoers punished. Was it my own imagination or was there a dankness in the air of a past that did not wish to be disinterred?
The tantalizing outline of buildings continued to absorb me. Were those stone stumps all that remained of columns marking the entrance to the town forum? And, over there, beyond where another piece of wall rose — had that once been part of the home of the local rabbi? Or a wealthy merchant she had numbered among her clients? Certainly the ground space between the walls suggested this had been a more imposing structure than the exposed foundations. A little further on, I reached yet another truncated staircase. Beneath was an opening, a storage place perhaps? Was this where she would have kept her precious ointment cool from the summer heat?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Magdalene by Gordon Thomas. Copyright © 1998 Gordon Thomas. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Understandings,Come, Follow Me,
Shadow of the Cross,
Rush to Judgment,
Beyond the Cross,